Now imagine doing this stopwatch test four times a week for the rest of your life. $25 doesn't sound quite so expensive anymore, does it?
That was merely the first one I found. Besides, your arguement is beyond ridiculous. Who honestly generates unique bingo cards every single day, year after year? What's more, who has this list of words for each of them, already written down for them in an accessible format?
People took $10 literally out of my pocket,
If you put $10 out there, expect someone to take it, with no guarantee you'll get anything back on it. That's advertising for you.
You could complain that ANY publicity would have cost you the same ammount of money, even if warez wasn't involved. Are you going to sue http://www.cornyschoolstuff.com/ for linking to your program, just because the hundreds of people that follow the link don't actually buy it?
ganked something I made for their own use,
Somehow, I doubt any single one of them has ever actually used it. Besides, what is the cosmic obsession of yours, that you are harmed by someone who is using your software without the nag screen?
and made it difficult for legitimate users to find me for about a week because they kept draining my daily ad budget dry.
The problem is with your business model, not with the warez sites. The thing which put you over an arbitrary edge, just happened to be pirates in this case. It's completely irrelevent, and YET, you're complaining about the Pirate Party here.
I knew you were talking about the Sniper story. However, these unnamed forces of yours, which act in unnamed ways, on unnamed objects, in unnamed directions, preventing unnamed conclusion from possibly happening... remain elusive.
And, more importantly, the story (of Carlos Hathcock) remains true, whether you have any knowledge of physics or not.
'There must be a thousand reasons why you might want to be completely anonymous, but right now I can't think of one...'
They explained, in no uncertain terms, that Democracy and Freedom of Speech inherently requires anonymity.
What good is freedom of speech, if defacto sensorship is imposed on anyone who says anything unpopular? If you get identified, and can no longer find a job, any place to live, any stores open to you, etc., do you really have freedom of speech?
Exactly what I hate about "Based on a True Story". Disney is the worst of them all (See: )
Anything "Based on a True Story" is 99% fiction, and 1% facts, and that 1% is usually just details like names of individuals and places, even though they probably don't match the appearance of the people/places whos names they have used.
Speilberg openly admits the sniper scene in Saving Private Ryan is based on the (anachronistic) Vietnam-era story of Carlos Hathcock, which I relayed (who knew it would get modded up?).
Well, I suppose a lot of slashdotters might say that. Then again, 10 elementary school teachers (who, you know, are actually in the market for this) paid money for it, and I'm inclined to trust opinions which come backed with checks.
Tiny checks from 10 people don't prove much of anything to me. I've seen too many sales of $10 "Instructions" on getting/doing something free.
It's an very long jump to say that those hordes of people who downloaded your software would have done so if not for the crack...
Since it took me about 2 seconds to find a free and perfectly adequate Bingo Card Creator, I'm at a loss to who you think your market is. Teachers who can use the internet well enough to find your site, but poorly enough they won't find any others?
My best guess is that the spike was caused by that whole being on the front page of a major warez site thing, which I learned about from my referrer logs.
You're not exactly helping yourself here... If they went to your site because of the crack, it's not really a lost sale to you, then, is it? Sure, the added cost of bandwidth is unfortunate, but very minor.
It seems clear you've got a lot of people who wanted to try out a crack, not a bunch of people who were on the verge of buying your software.
So what's the harm you're complaining about, here? Just because you paid for ad (which MAY have gotten a few more clicks because of the crack) and didn't make the money you were expecting you would make, on software anyone competent can easily find elsewhere for free? It that it?
I have absolutely, positively, no idea what you are trying to say, here. I can only assume you misunderstood what I said, and are responding to something entirely different.
Well, to anyone with any basic physics knowledge that is not true,
WHAT is not true?
and the chance that they would have a similar affect on the bullet going either way are almost impossbile.
I get a surge of search results from Google for things legitimate customers never search for (e.g. Name of the Program V 1.0 download).
I am a legitimate customer, and often search for older versions of a specific program. Bugs are introduced, features are remove or "fixed" in ways that make it useless, important buttons get moved around, the CPU or memory footprint increases, etc. etc.
I lost $10 last time I got the hacker surge because I bid on my own program name as an AdWords keyword
That's just entirely your own fault. You got the click-throughs you paid for, your product just didn't warrant any sales. Perhaps the price was too high, or the software wasn't very good. But like the RIAA, you desperately want to blame someone else for all your problems. And you've gone out of your way to avoid mentioning the product name so we all have to trust you that this actually happened, and that your reasoning (as to WHAT is to blame for your problem) is correct.
According to wikipedia it's a network where "users only connect to people they trust".
Whaaa? Wikipedia is incorrect, and you have to be stupid to blindly trust what it says? I'm SHOCKED! Shocked I say! Sadly, About.com gets closer to the mark than Wikipedia.
A darknet is really just about any VPN for elicit purposes. Some maintain privacy/secrecy between subscribing nodes, while (most) others do not.
This article seems like BS.
Or maybe you have no idea what you're talking about, which is why you had to look-up the definition of a key term in the first place.
But for five bucks a month maybe it's worth backing purely from the standpoint that the Pirate Party is the only organisation taking a public stand like this
Donate your money to the EFF instead.
They will offer you a 6 or 12-month subscription to Anonymizer as a gift, and have already done far more to counter the RIAA and MPAA than the Pirate Party could dream of.
Ok, you are either copying me (your post id is one larger) or that is plain SCARY.
In other words...
DUPE! DUPE! DUPE!
Okay, everyone can mod him down (-1 Redundant) now, for being a fraction of a second slower than you to submit.
You should be happy that this is nothing major. I heard an American sniper tell a story of when he was assigned to kill a Vietnamese sniper. The American's bullet went straight down the scope of the Vietnamese sniper's riffle, and killed him. If the American had pulled the trigger just a bit slower, it would have been the other guy telling the exact same story.
There are numerous companies already providing anonymizing services, very similar to this. What's special about this one, other than it's affiliation with the Pirate Party?
In a handheld saw, any mechanism which quickly stops the blade would probably twist the saw out of your other hand,
Many circular saws already START the blade spinning nearly as quickly, and have a brake that stops it rather quickly... There's a noticable jerking motion when you first pull/release the trigger, but it's not all that difficult to control. The blade and spindle of the motor aren't very massive, after all.
aside from not getting the blade out of the way like it can in a table saw.
If it can just be stopped-dead before it goes 1/4th of an inch into my flesh, I'd be immensely happy. Getting the blade out of the way really isn't a benefit at all.
In fact, you'd quickly realize what a real mis-feature it is, as you watch your circular saw go flying out of your hand, through the air, with all the force you were previously using to oppose the force of the (now absent) spinning blade...
You can't cut green wood (wood that hasn't sat around long enough to get down to 10% water). I've gotten construction grade lumber that would easily have tripped this.
That's why you put a "disable" switch on it.
it's from them either slipping (in which case they are essentially slapping the blade, and will still get a very serious cut),
2-3 very minor punctures from a stationary blade are NOTHING next to the possibility of having limbs violently ripped off by a spinning 3HP blade.
Also, many people take the blade guard that is included with their saw off becuase they think it gets in the way (which I've never really understood).
It certainly DOES get in the way, in any number of sitations. If the piece you're trying to cut doesn't have a perfectly flat side to the guard (say a triangle piece), the guard will not open without EXTREME force. And, in those cases, using one hand to hold the guard open, while manuvering the wood with your other hand, is much more dangerous. It's absolutely ridiculous that they don't allow you to easily (temporarily) lock the guard open.
I make it a point to keep the guard on as much as humanly possible, despite the time it takes, because I recognize how dangerous it is.
I would be willing to bet that most accidents involve a TS without a blade guard.
A blade guard isn't the end-all. It won't protect you while you're actively cutting, and you push your hand right into the blade.
Most damning though, is that when this unit does go off, your saw blade (that you pay $100 a pop for) is rotated down into a block of aluminum
Yes, that is my most significant concern as well, but I can think of several alternative ways of stopping the blade as quickly... Maybe I should file a few patents on electronic braking, or disc brakes for table saws, and start hassling this guy about why he doesn't want to license my patents...
I also think this tech might be of greater use in hand-held circular saws, rather than table saws. With a table saw, you can always see exactly where the blade is, and exactly where you fingers are relative to it...
If they're from film source (e.g. movies), the film is sped up to 25 FPS at encoding time - we don't dick around with telecine and other kludges.
Yes, that's encoding. We're talking about PAL DVD players, playing NTSC discs.
Which means, yes, their run-time is slightly shorter (by 4%), and the pitch is slightly higher (less than a quarter-tone, IIRC).
The telecine judder should be unnoticable in most situations, on decent TV sets, and is going away as PCs and HDTVs become popular.
The 4% speed-up, however, is absolutely infuriating. They actually use LESS of a speed-up than that in horror films, when they want the viewer to feel uncomfortable.
Both the pitch and the compressed time are extremely obviously wrong, and trivially easy to spot. Thank god for computers, where I can easily convert PAL content back to normal.
partly because the NTSC system is so piss-poor at keeping correct colour rendition compared to PAL
When was the last time you saw an NTSC TV? The 1970s perhaps?
and partly because those few extra lines of resolution (our 576 vs your 480) do make a noticeable difference...
It's funny that people like to say how great the 20% higher resolution of PAL is when the discussion is NTSC vs PAL... Yet when the subject is HDTV, PAL supporters always dismiss the 500% higher resolution and 20% higher frame-rate as insignificant.
there are some cool videos, like this one where a 500KV switch generates a free-air Jacob's Ladder, or this one showing some cool effects of high-power acoustics on a semiliquid cornstarch mix.
All of which have long been available elsewhere, in MUCH higher quality, in non-propritary formats you can play on any system, and with decent performance.
If Google Video would just improve their interface, so it's as easy to find (free) videos as YouTube, I suspect they'd die quickly.
When presented with the choice between her and the competing Republican religious whackjob who would probably also support DRM, what am I supposed to do?
Well (as galling as it sounds--to me as well) the answer is to vote for the Republican.
Feinstein has a significant ammount of power, because she has been a senator for years. She's on very important comittees, that decide on what future legislation will be proposed to the full congress, on subjects like copyright.
The endorsement of a Democrat (in name), on otherwise Republican-only bills, lends credability to what would otherwise be looked upon negatively, as a partisan base issue.
So, she weilds much more power than just 1 vote in 100.
If a Republican took her place, he would be far less capable of pushing that same agenda forward, than Feinstein has been. He would be on NO comittees, would not be a Democrat in name, and his support on an issue would mean nothing.
What's more, it would send a very clear message to politicians across this country, that copyright is actually a significant issue to the voters. Once they know supporting the wrong side of an issue can get them defeated, they'll all put a lot more thought into it, and listen to public opinion far more than they have been. If nothing else, I can guarantee that a senator being defeated on issues of copyright would stall or entirely stop future bills on the subject, as they would be less willing to stick their necks out.
And California has a balanced enough electorate that neither party has a firm grasp on power. It's really only going to be a question of getting perhaps 1% of people to change their votes, and she can be defeated.
It could be encoded at 14FPS if you include the proper soft-telecine flags for that. There's nothing special about 23.976fps. That was my point. The framerate (header) of soft-telecined material is still 29.97fps (though it only contains 23.976fps typically). A DVD can't handle 23.976fps video any better than it can handle 17fps.
A PAL player might choose instead to simply speed up playback by 4% to get the required 25fps there (although I don't think most do this, it is certainly a possibility).
I dare say none do that. If you speed-up the video, you also have to resample the sound, and hopefully pitch-shift it as well.
There's your problem. You're using up a huge chunk of your space for uncompressed 2-channel PCM audio. Encode it to 192K AC3, and you'll have far more room for video. You can use MP2 if you want to avoid patent licensing, but you should know it's only standard for PAL DVD players, not NTSC ones (ridiculous, I know).
And though you haven't mentioned it, since you're encoding audio to PCM, I suspect you're encoding video to MPEG-1 as well (to avoid patents) which gives poorer results than MPEG-2. The difference will be particularly huge if your input video is interlaced, and your encoding software isn't deinterlacing it before reencoding.
The best program for encoding is mencoder, if you aren't afraid of the command-line. And it has an entire section of it's documentation dedicated to creating proper VCD/SVCD/DVDs: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/menc-feat-vcd -dvd.html
. If you aren't willing to use different audio and video codecs for some reason, the only solution to stay fully within spec is to use half-D1 resolution (352x480) so that your video bitrate won't be spread so thin.
The GPL has nothing to do with preventing commercial usage. The GPL has everything to do with preventing proprietary usage. Big difference.
No, it's a small difference.
Most people recognize that companies very often need to be able to stop/restrict/limit the distribution of their changes, or will be effectively unable to use the software in the first place.
Even RMS (the most opinionated guy I've ever talked with) will usually acknowledge that is an issue, and suggest less restrictive licenses in some cases. Though, it's still his eventual goal with the GPL is to change the world, and make all closed software illegal in the end.
You can expect FreeBSD to support 99% of the hardware that works under Linux. And actually, it will generally be more stable under FreeBSD than under Linux.
A "friendly" OS will just work with all your hardware without having to recompile the kernel.
The BSDs practically never even SUGGEST recompiling the kernel, even though it's quicker and easier than in Linux land. Everything is always compiled-in, and very much unlike Linux, the system is fully Plug-and-Play. Everything from hard drives to your soundcard and all necesarry setting are detected by the kernel on boot-up (not with something flaky like kudzu, after boot-up) and it will either automatically work, or just isn't supported. Almost never any manual twisting and tweaking of options, let alone hours of it, as Linux users are very accustomed to.
This is a bit over-simplistic, mind you, but basically true.
Slashdot Mirror
Who said anything about going down the gun barrel? You even quoted me correctly:
The American's bullet went straight down the scope of
Learn to read, then learn to write coherent sentences.
That was merely the first one I found. Besides, your arguement is beyond ridiculous. Who honestly generates unique bingo cards every single day, year after year? What's more, who has this list of words for each of them, already written down for them in an accessible format?
If you put $10 out there, expect someone to take it, with no guarantee you'll get anything back on it. That's advertising for you.
You could complain that ANY publicity would have cost you the same ammount of money, even if warez wasn't involved. Are you going to sue http://www.cornyschoolstuff.com/ for linking to your program, just because the hundreds of people that follow the link don't actually buy it?
Somehow, I doubt any single one of them has ever actually used it. Besides, what is the cosmic obsession of yours, that you are harmed by someone who is using your software without the nag screen?
The problem is with your business model, not with the warez sites. The thing which put you over an arbitrary edge, just happened to be pirates in this case. It's completely irrelevent, and YET, you're complaining about the Pirate Party here.
I knew you were talking about the Sniper story. However, these unnamed forces of yours, which act in unnamed ways, on unnamed objects, in unnamed directions, preventing unnamed conclusion from possibly happening... remain elusive.
And, more importantly, the story (of Carlos Hathcock) remains true, whether you have any knowledge of physics or not.
They explained, in no uncertain terms, that Democracy and Freedom of Speech inherently requires anonymity.
What good is freedom of speech, if defacto sensorship is imposed on anyone who says anything unpopular? If you get identified, and can no longer find a job, any place to live, any stores open to you, etc., do you really have freedom of speech?
Exactly what I hate about "Based on a True Story". Disney is the worst of them all (See: )
Anything "Based on a True Story" is 99% fiction, and 1% facts, and that 1% is usually just details like names of individuals and places, even though they probably don't match the appearance of the people/places whos names they have used.
Speilberg openly admits the sniper scene in Saving Private Ryan is based on the (anachronistic) Vietnam-era story of Carlos Hathcock, which I relayed (who knew it would get modded up?).
Tiny checks from 10 people don't prove much of anything to me. I've seen too many sales of $10 "Instructions" on getting/doing something free.
It's an very long jump to say that those hordes of people who downloaded your software would have done so if not for the crack...
Since it took me about 2 seconds to find a free and perfectly adequate Bingo Card Creator, I'm at a loss to who you think your market is. Teachers who can use the internet well enough to find your site, but poorly enough they won't find any others?
You're not exactly helping yourself here... If they went to your site because of the crack, it's not really a lost sale to you, then, is it? Sure, the added cost of bandwidth is unfortunate, but very minor.
It seems clear you've got a lot of people who wanted to try out a crack, not a bunch of people who were on the verge of buying your software.
So what's the harm you're complaining about, here? Just because you paid for ad (which MAY have gotten a few more clicks because of the crack) and didn't make the money you were expecting you would make, on software anyone competent can easily find elsewhere for free? It that it?
Why? So they can spend 3 weeks methologically "proving" that guns can't possibly work?
WHAT is not true?
What affect?
I am a legitimate customer, and often search for older versions of a specific program. Bugs are introduced, features are remove or "fixed" in ways that make it useless, important buttons get moved around, the CPU or memory footprint increases, etc. etc.
That's just entirely your own fault. You got the click-throughs you paid for, your product just didn't warrant any sales. Perhaps the price was too high, or the software wasn't very good. But like the RIAA, you desperately want to blame someone else for all your problems. And you've gone out of your way to avoid mentioning the product name so we all have to trust you that this actually happened, and that your reasoning (as to WHAT is to blame for your problem) is correct.
Whaaa? Wikipedia is incorrect, and you have to be stupid to blindly trust what it says? I'm SHOCKED! Shocked I say! Sadly, About.com gets closer to the mark than Wikipedia.
A darknet is really just about any VPN for elicit purposes. Some maintain privacy/secrecy between subscribing nodes, while (most) others do not.
Or maybe you have no idea what you're talking about, which is why you had to look-up the definition of a key term in the first place.
Donate your money to the EFF instead.
They will offer you a 6 or 12-month subscription to Anonymizer as a gift, and have already done far more to counter the RIAA and MPAA than the Pirate Party could dream of.
In other words...
DUPE! DUPE! DUPE!
Okay, everyone can mod him down (-1 Redundant) now, for being a fraction of a second slower than you to submit.
You should be happy that this is nothing major. I heard an American sniper tell a story of when he was assigned to kill a Vietnamese sniper. The American's bullet went straight down the scope of the Vietnamese sniper's riffle, and killed him. If the American had pulled the trigger just a bit slower, it would have been the other guy telling the exact same story.
I have to ask... "Why?"
There are numerous companies already providing anonymizing services, very similar to this. What's special about this one, other than it's affiliation with the Pirate Party?
Nice review.
Shame it wasn't posted early enough to get modded up, so few people will see it...
Many circular saws already START the blade spinning nearly as quickly, and have a brake that stops it rather quickly... There's a noticable jerking motion when you first pull/release the trigger, but it's not all that difficult to control. The blade and spindle of the motor aren't very massive, after all.
If it can just be stopped-dead before it goes 1/4th of an inch into my flesh, I'd be immensely happy. Getting the blade out of the way really isn't a benefit at all.
In fact, you'd quickly realize what a real mis-feature it is, as you watch your circular saw go flying out of your hand, through the air, with all the force you were previously using to oppose the force of the (now absent) spinning blade...
That's why you put a "disable" switch on it.
2-3 very minor punctures from a stationary blade are NOTHING next to the possibility of having limbs violently ripped off by a spinning 3HP blade.
It certainly DOES get in the way, in any number of sitations. If the piece you're trying to cut doesn't have a perfectly flat side to the guard (say a triangle piece), the guard will not open without EXTREME force. And, in those cases, using one hand to hold the guard open, while manuvering the wood with your other hand, is much more dangerous. It's absolutely ridiculous that they don't allow you to easily (temporarily) lock the guard open.
I make it a point to keep the guard on as much as humanly possible, despite the time it takes, because I recognize how dangerous it is.
A blade guard isn't the end-all. It won't protect you while you're actively cutting, and you push your hand right into the blade.
Yes, that is my most significant concern as well, but I can think of several alternative ways of stopping the blade as quickly... Maybe I should file a few patents on electronic braking, or disc brakes for table saws, and start hassling this guy about why he doesn't want to license my patents...
I also think this tech might be of greater use in hand-held circular saws, rather than table saws. With a table saw, you can always see exactly where the blade is, and exactly where you fingers are relative to it...
Yes, that's encoding. We're talking about PAL DVD players, playing NTSC discs.
The telecine judder should be unnoticable in most situations, on decent TV sets, and is going away as PCs and HDTVs become popular.
The 4% speed-up, however, is absolutely infuriating. They actually use LESS of a speed-up than that in horror films, when they want the viewer to feel uncomfortable.
Both the pitch and the compressed time are extremely obviously wrong, and trivially easy to spot. Thank god for computers, where I can easily convert PAL content back to normal.
When was the last time you saw an NTSC TV? The 1970s perhaps?
It's funny that people like to say how great the 20% higher resolution of PAL is when the discussion is NTSC vs PAL... Yet when the subject is HDTV, PAL supporters always dismiss the 500% higher resolution and 20% higher frame-rate as insignificant.
All of which have long been available elsewhere, in MUCH higher quality, in non-propritary formats you can play on any system, and with decent performance.
If Google Video would just improve their interface, so it's as easy to find (free) videos as YouTube, I suspect they'd die quickly.
Well (as galling as it sounds--to me as well) the answer is to vote for the Republican.
Feinstein has a significant ammount of power, because she has been a senator for years. She's on very important comittees, that decide on what future legislation will be proposed to the full congress, on subjects like copyright.
The endorsement of a Democrat (in name), on otherwise Republican-only bills, lends credability to what would otherwise be looked upon negatively, as a partisan base issue.
So, she weilds much more power than just 1 vote in 100.
If a Republican took her place, he would be far less capable of pushing that same agenda forward, than Feinstein has been. He would be on NO comittees, would not be a Democrat in name, and his support on an issue would mean nothing.
What's more, it would send a very clear message to politicians across this country, that copyright is actually a significant issue to the voters. Once they know supporting the wrong side of an issue can get them defeated, they'll all put a lot more thought into it, and listen to public opinion far more than they have been. If nothing else, I can guarantee that a senator being defeated on issues of copyright would stall or entirely stop future bills on the subject, as they would be less willing to stick their necks out.
And California has a balanced enough electorate that neither party has a firm grasp on power. It's really only going to be a question of getting perhaps 1% of people to change their votes, and she can be defeated.
It could be encoded at 14FPS if you include the proper soft-telecine flags for that. There's nothing special about 23.976fps. That was my point. The framerate (header) of soft-telecined material is still 29.97fps (though it only contains 23.976fps typically). A DVD can't handle 23.976fps video any better than it can handle 17fps.
I dare say none do that. If you speed-up the video, you also have to resample the sound, and hopefully pitch-shift it as well.
Dianne Feinstein has gotten $218,344 from "TV/Movies/Music" interests and $179,231 from "Computers/Internet" interests.
Even though the RIAA/MPAA aren't giving her significantly more than the tech industry, she's still the biggest supporter of DRM in congress.
There's your problem. You're using up a huge chunk of your space for uncompressed 2-channel PCM audio. Encode it to 192K AC3, and you'll have far more room for video. You can use MP2 if you want to avoid patent licensing, but you should know it's only standard for PAL DVD players, not NTSC ones (ridiculous, I know).
And though you haven't mentioned it, since you're encoding audio to PCM, I suspect you're encoding video to MPEG-1 as well (to avoid patents) which gives poorer results than MPEG-2. The difference will be particularly huge if your input video is interlaced, and your encoding software isn't deinterlacing it before reencoding.
The best program for encoding is mencoder, if you aren't afraid of the command-line. And it has an entire section of it's documentation dedicated to creating proper VCD/SVCD/DVDs:
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/menc-feat-vc
.
If you aren't willing to use different audio and video codecs for some reason, the only solution to stay fully within spec is to use half-D1 resolution (352x480) so that your video bitrate won't be spread so thin.
Still, you can telecine from any frame-rate, to any other frame-rate. NTSC DVD is still always 29.97fps.
No, it's a small difference.
Most people recognize that companies very often need to be able to stop/restrict/limit the distribution of their changes, or will be effectively unable to use the software in the first place.
Even RMS (the most opinionated guy I've ever talked with) will usually acknowledge that is an issue, and suggest less restrictive licenses in some cases. Though, it's still his eventual goal with the GPL is to change the world, and make all closed software illegal in the end.
You can expect FreeBSD to support 99% of the hardware that works under Linux. And actually, it will generally be more stable under FreeBSD than under Linux.
The BSDs practically never even SUGGEST recompiling the kernel, even though it's quicker and easier than in Linux land. Everything is always compiled-in, and very much unlike Linux, the system is fully Plug-and-Play. Everything from hard drives to your soundcard and all necesarry setting are detected by the kernel on boot-up (not with something flaky like kudzu, after boot-up) and it will either automatically work, or just isn't supported. Almost never any manual twisting and tweaking of options, let alone hours of it, as Linux users are very accustomed to.
This is a bit over-simplistic, mind you, but basically true.