Its value as a deterrant and as an intelligence tool against people who are not in it is big, and could compete against your civic objections to it.
Where are my mod points when I need them...
That's exactly it. I'm no huge fan of Guanto, but the fact that our enemies fear it put us on a more even playing field. We're scared that they're gonna napalm us, and they're scared that we're gonna make them personally pay for crimes they may or may not have committed. It sucks as a philosophical system, but unfortunately the best weapon we've got against terrorists is mutually assured destruction...and Jack Bauer.
"No, the funny part is that the users who torrented and installed pirated copies of iWork 09 and Photoshop CS4 got exactly what they deserved. Instant karma."
So if I steal (OK, "bit-for-bit copy") a car and it steers into a pedestrian through a deliberate alteration in the vehicle that I copied, that's Instant Karma.
No, if you bit-for-bit-copy a car, and that car had some kind of mechanical defect that caused you to run into a building, THAT would be instant karma.
I'm sure the building where the item was made used light bulbs to provide lighting (while making the item being sold) or at the very least the vehicle used to transport it had headlights - does that mean that New Jersey sales tax should be paid (Edison invented the light bulb and he lived in New Jersey)? How is that NOT New Jersey providing a service?
...I hope nobody from the New Jersey legislature reads this.
I don't know how we get out of this. Raising taxes will not reverse the spending habits. If anything, our gov will just spend even more.
Someone mod this guy up! That's exactly the problem. Being as this is slashdot, it's time for a car analogy: if my car needs repair, I don't get to increase my salary in order to pay for it. I either have to take out a loan, or i have to cut my spending elsewhere. That doesn't mean that I skimp out on groceries, but I'm probably not buying myself an HDTV this month.
My cellular bill has a tax on it that was instated to pay for the Spanish-American war. Why are we still paying it 110 years later? because there really isn't such a thing as a 'temporary tax'.
at some point in the near future, I'm upgrading to FIOS from DSL, just waiting for them to run the fiber on my block. But in my area, FIOS is still running third place to DSL and cable. Cable specifically is quite oversubscribed.
That just made me mad that I used up my last mod point a few minutes ago, 'cuz that def deserves an 'informative' or 'insightful'. Every utility does oversubscribe, even cell companies (I can't be the only person to get an "all circuits are busy" message around 5:20PM).
I think there are a few differences though. First, if a significant amount of people start using additional power, my limited understanding is that it is possible to ramp up power production to meet a peak demand. Summer electric usage > winter electric usage, and I don't believe for a second that my local power plant is needlessly burning oil. Bandwidth is more difficult to 'generate', as can be seen on any site that gets/.ed.
What's also a different case with bandwidth is that it's a whole lot easier for people to sustain a very high usage. Leave limewire on in one room while you're Netflixing in another and set a third computer to Windows Update, the fourth uploading photos to Photobucket, and an Xbox playing online. situations like this aren't horrifically uncommon, and can last for several hours. sure, people can use alot of power, but I think that it affects the neighbors on a more limited scale than bandwidth does (unless you're blasting the stereo or something similar).
I gotta tell you, from those experiences...I know and still consider that about 95% of the general public out there are completely fucked in the head. They are idiots, and you have to wonder how they know enough not to wander blindly in traffic. It amazes you what people out there are really like.
I often think and wish we had some compulsory program that forced kids growing up to work a year in retail and food service. Just at the very least, to let them know how to treat people. I cannot believe how rude some people are to service people...if you've been on the serving end, you aren't likely to be that way when you 'grow up'. And don't get me started on people not knowing how to tip. But, that's another rant.
Anyway, yes....if you work and deal with the public for any length of time, you start to understand how 'people can be that stupid' when you see something stupid on tv. You start to wonder how the world actually functions with so many dullards wandering around. It gets kinda scary.
...
I guess it is just this day in age....common decency is gone.
This has got to be the most insightful post I have EVER read on Slashdot. I too have said that in order to graduate high school, one should spend 30 days in foodservice, 30 days in retail, and 30 days as a janitor scrubbing toilets. I can't wrap my head around the kind of mentality that deems it acceptable to treat your customers like utter crap and still complain about them.
I just bought Counterstrike:Source there three weeks ago. the discs and serial number were kept in an envelope behind the counter. When I brought the empty box up to purchase it, they put the discs and serial card back in, then put a plastic seal on it once I'd been rung up.
I also bought a copy of Mass Effect for the Xbox there at the same time. There were several used-game boxes on the shelf (presumably corresponding with their inventory-on-hand). Since it was a gift, I asked if they had any new copies. The new copies, along with the used discs, were also stored behind the counter and given to me at POS.
I wonder if the Nigerian Prince who keeps e-mailing me would be able to use the information instead of me mailing him a $200,000 check. would you like me to forward the message to you?
If you want your work widely disseminated, you need to run a P2P app like LimeWire with a public share folder, and within that folder, you have a folder named 'Secret Plans', where you put your information into.
no...you share the folder with the name "Britney Spears Megan Fox Paris Hilton {your hottie here} naked nude porn pr0n". *THAT'S* how you make sure it's widely disseminated.
If you get an e-mail involving a troll raising his sword, DO NOT attack it with the nasty knife! You'll have a bunch of government secrets downloaded into your head, then a hot chiq will come and pretend to be your girlfriend...
That's my problem: while the musical content has improved somewhat, it's becoming less and less distinguishable from the non-Christian artists that the labels also own. I'm all for the sound improving, but the nature of Christian music leads it to require a fundamentally different approach to music making.
When I think back to the 80's and early 90's, while there was plenty of serve-God-elsewhere fodder to be had, there were those "classic" songs like "He is Exalted" by Twila Paris, Amy Grant's "El Shaddai", Rich Mullins' "Awesome God", pretty much anything by Phil Keaggy and Keith Green. All of the above artists had talent, and even if you weren't particularly fond of their style, you knew that they had a message that they believed in. Some Christian bands today have more of a conviction than others (as was the case back then), but when an artist has to be huge like Rebecca St. James (who IMO is one of the few CCM artists who still work with the concept of being a Christian first and an artist second) in order to get more than 2-3 albums produced, it smells too much like the rapid turnover model used by the secular labels that isn't a positive trend for them either.
On a similar note to yours, I am still irked that it's difficult to impossible to find good Christian trance music.
the band named themselves when a cup of Starbucks coffee was $1.45. People would hand them $1.50, and the result would be that the customer got a nickel back. That's the way I heard it, anyway.
Unfortunately, it often seems that Christian musicians put all of the time and effort into the message, and aren't particularly concerned about the musical wrapper, thereby creating music that is often, well, bland.
That is because most CCM that gets picked up only gets picked up because it sounds like whatever is being played on mainstream radio. You get an imitation of already bland music with
s/(girl|woman|baby)/Jesus/g
There's some good stuff out there. One of my favorite bands, even after ditching CCM and most of Christianity, is Burlap to Cashmere, a Mediterranean-flavored group with very poetic lyrics and great arrangements. Even DC Talk turned into something special, albeit very much a studio product, with the albums Jesus Freak and Supernatural.
The primary reason CCM sucks is precisely because it is mostly imitative: it's a microcosm where the barrier for entry is set low because if it were up to mainstream standards (which doesn't set the bar very high to begin with) there wouldn't be enough acts to sustain the industry. Christian artists (which really means "artists on Christian labels") are also subject to "The Jesus Quota," wherein an album won't be released unless it mentions Jesus at least five times or what have you. Additionally, since Christian music is viewed as a reversal of mainstream music, very few artists are willing to talk about the negative experiences that they have as Christians: being friendless at a church, feeling hopeless due to an external situation, doubting God or some aspect of God, etc. These are things that nearly every Christian has to deal with at one time or another but they are not often represented in music, hence the shallowness of the lyrical content.
"The Jesus Quota", as you call it, IMO is leaving the industry to a large degree. The new Superchic[k] album "Rock What You Got" doesn't mention Jesus specifically, although I give it credit for talking about the hard times more than other acts of late. the new Krystal Meyers album is significantly less spiritually challenging then the two before, and has the same blandness the GP laments of. It doesn't make monetary sense to convict people and tell them that they're wrong - people want to feel good about themselves, and actually confronting them about their belief in a God who is as just as He is loving doesn't appeal to one's human nature. It's sad, but when morals compete with profit, it is seldom that morality wins.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a saying about how you don't change Washington, it changes you.
So then in Soviet Russia, do you change Soviet Russia?
I LIVE in New York, you insensitive clod!
1.)the copied car had a defect, but another car in the same lot might not have been. There's a difference between that and running into a pedestrian.
2.)people aren't (necessarily) injured if the car were to crash into a building, vs. crashing into a pedestrian.
3.)the owner *is* affected. His/her computer is going to be processing all that information, and their solicited internet traffic will suffer.
4.)if the user lives in a place where they have metered and/or capped internet speed, they WILL pay for it.
Its value as a deterrant and as an intelligence tool against people who are not in it is big, and could compete against your civic objections to it.
Where are my mod points when I need them...
That's exactly it. I'm no huge fan of Guanto, but the fact that our enemies fear it put us on a more even playing field. We're scared that they're gonna napalm us, and they're scared that we're gonna make them personally pay for crimes they may or may not have committed. It sucks as a philosophical system, but unfortunately the best weapon we've got against terrorists is mutually assured destruction...and Jack Bauer.
Spam Different.
There's no guarantee that the attackers are running Macs.
"No, the funny part is that the users who torrented and installed pirated copies of iWork 09 and Photoshop CS4 got exactly what they deserved. Instant karma."
So if I steal (OK, "bit-for-bit copy") a car and it steers into a pedestrian through a deliberate alteration in the vehicle that I copied, that's Instant Karma.
No, if you bit-for-bit-copy a car, and that car had some kind of mechanical defect that caused you to run into a building, THAT would be instant karma.
I'm sure the building where the item was made used light bulbs to provide lighting (while making the item being sold) or at the very least the vehicle used to transport it had headlights - does that mean that New Jersey sales tax should be paid (Edison invented the light bulb and he lived in New Jersey)? How is that NOT New Jersey providing a service?
...I hope nobody from the New Jersey legislature reads this.
I don't know how we get out of this. Raising taxes will not reverse the spending habits. If anything, our gov will just spend even more.
Someone mod this guy up! That's exactly the problem. Being as this is slashdot, it's time for a car analogy: if my car needs repair, I don't get to increase my salary in order to pay for it. I either have to take out a loan, or i have to cut my spending elsewhere. That doesn't mean that I skimp out on groceries, but I'm probably not buying myself an HDTV this month.
My cellular bill has a tax on it that was instated to pay for the Spanish-American war. Why are we still paying it 110 years later? because there really isn't such a thing as a 'temporary tax'.
at some point in the near future, I'm upgrading to FIOS from DSL, just waiting for them to run the fiber on my block. But in my area, FIOS is still running third place to DSL and cable. Cable specifically is quite oversubscribed.
That just made me mad that I used up my last mod point a few minutes ago, 'cuz that def deserves an 'informative' or 'insightful'. Every utility does oversubscribe, even cell companies (I can't be the only person to get an "all circuits are busy" message around 5:20PM).
I think there are a few differences though. First, if a significant amount of people start using additional power, my limited understanding is that it is possible to ramp up power production to meet a peak demand. Summer electric usage > winter electric usage, and I don't believe for a second that my local power plant is needlessly burning oil. Bandwidth is more difficult to 'generate', as can be seen on any site that gets /.ed.
What's also a different case with bandwidth is that it's a whole lot easier for people to sustain a very high usage. Leave limewire on in one room while you're Netflixing in another and set a third computer to Windows Update, the fourth uploading photos to Photobucket, and an Xbox playing online. situations like this aren't horrifically uncommon, and can last for several hours. sure, people can use alot of power, but I think that it affects the neighbors on a more limited scale than bandwidth does (unless you're blasting the stereo or something similar).
But can it run crysis?
Perhaps, but you'd need a Beowulf cluster of them to run Crysis and Vista. Problem is, the Beowulf cluster is too easily Slashdotted.
I gotta tell you, from those experiences...I know and still consider that about 95% of the general public out there are completely fucked in the head. They are idiots, and you have to wonder how they know enough not to wander blindly in traffic. It amazes you what people out there are really like.
I often think and wish we had some compulsory program that forced kids growing up to work a year in retail and food service. Just at the very least, to let them know how to treat people. I cannot believe how rude some people are to service people...if you've been on the serving end, you aren't likely to be that way when you 'grow up'. And don't get me started on people not knowing how to tip. But, that's another rant.
Anyway, yes....if you work and deal with the public for any length of time, you start to understand how 'people can be that stupid' when you see something stupid on tv. You start to wonder how the world actually functions with so many dullards wandering around. It gets kinda scary.
...
I guess it is just this day in age....common decency is gone.
This has got to be the most insightful post I have EVER read on Slashdot. I too have said that in order to graduate high school, one should spend 30 days in foodservice, 30 days in retail, and 30 days as a janitor scrubbing toilets. I can't wrap my head around the kind of mentality that deems it acceptable to treat your customers like utter crap and still complain about them.
That was Excel 2000. Excel '97 had the Flight Simulator game.
I just bought Counterstrike:Source there three weeks ago. the discs and serial number were kept in an envelope behind the counter. When I brought the empty box up to purchase it, they put the discs and serial card back in, then put a plastic seal on it once I'd been rung up.
I also bought a copy of Mass Effect for the Xbox there at the same time. There were several used-game boxes on the shelf (presumably corresponding with their inventory-on-hand). Since it was a gift, I asked if they had any new copies. The new copies, along with the used discs, were also stored behind the counter and given to me at POS.
So change your Name from "PirateBay" to "FuzzyKittens" and it will all work itself out.
Because really, who wants to ban fuzzy kittens.
The Kitty Klux Klan?
I wonder if the Nigerian Prince who keeps e-mailing me would be able to use the information instead of me mailing him a $200,000 check. would you like me to forward the message to you?
If you want your work widely disseminated, you need to run a P2P app like LimeWire with a public share folder, and within that folder, you have a folder named 'Secret Plans', where you put your information into.
no...you share the folder with the name "Britney Spears Megan Fox Paris Hilton {your hottie here} naked nude porn pr0n". *THAT'S* how you make sure it's widely disseminated.
If you get an e-mail involving a troll raising his sword, DO NOT attack it with the nasty knife! You'll have a bunch of government secrets downloaded into your head, then a hot chiq will come and pretend to be your girlfriend...
So *this* is what all the hype I've been hearing about "Cloud Computing" is about?
This gives the term "Rick Rolling" a whole new meaning.
NBC is going to be true to their Big Three Network heritage and completely destroy something that doesn't need any drastic changes.
Sci-Fi definitely needs drastic changes, but making their name a thoroughly ridiculous wannabe colloquialism isn't it.
I, for one, welcome our new inconsiderate overlords.
That's my problem: while the musical content has improved somewhat, it's becoming less and less distinguishable from the non-Christian artists that the labels also own. I'm all for the sound improving, but the nature of Christian music leads it to require a fundamentally different approach to music making.
When I think back to the 80's and early 90's, while there was plenty of serve-God-elsewhere fodder to be had, there were those "classic" songs like "He is Exalted" by Twila Paris, Amy Grant's "El Shaddai", Rich Mullins' "Awesome God", pretty much anything by Phil Keaggy and Keith Green. All of the above artists had talent, and even if you weren't particularly fond of their style, you knew that they had a message that they believed in. Some Christian bands today have more of a conviction than others (as was the case back then), but when an artist has to be huge like Rebecca St. James (who IMO is one of the few CCM artists who still work with the concept of being a Christian first and an artist second) in order to get more than 2-3 albums produced, it smells too much like the rapid turnover model used by the secular labels that isn't a positive trend for them either.
On a similar note to yours, I am still irked that it's difficult to impossible to find good Christian trance music.
the band named themselves when a cup of Starbucks coffee was $1.45. People would hand them $1.50, and the result would be that the customer got a nickel back. That's the way I heard it, anyway.
Unfortunately, it often seems that Christian musicians put all of the time and effort into the message, and aren't particularly concerned about the musical wrapper, thereby creating music that is often, well, bland.
That is because most CCM that gets picked up only gets picked up because it sounds like whatever is being played on mainstream radio. You get an imitation of already bland music with s/(girl|woman|baby)/Jesus/g
There's some good stuff out there. One of my favorite bands, even after ditching CCM and most of Christianity, is Burlap to Cashmere, a Mediterranean-flavored group with very poetic lyrics and great arrangements. Even DC Talk turned into something special, albeit very much a studio product, with the albums Jesus Freak and Supernatural.
The primary reason CCM sucks is precisely because it is mostly imitative: it's a microcosm where the barrier for entry is set low because if it were up to mainstream standards (which doesn't set the bar very high to begin with) there wouldn't be enough acts to sustain the industry. Christian artists (which really means "artists on Christian labels") are also subject to "The Jesus Quota," wherein an album won't be released unless it mentions Jesus at least five times or what have you. Additionally, since Christian music is viewed as a reversal of mainstream music, very few artists are willing to talk about the negative experiences that they have as Christians: being friendless at a church, feeling hopeless due to an external situation, doubting God or some aspect of God, etc. These are things that nearly every Christian has to deal with at one time or another but they are not often represented in music, hence the shallowness of the lyrical content.
"The Jesus Quota", as you call it, IMO is leaving the industry to a large degree. The new Superchic[k] album "Rock What You Got" doesn't mention Jesus specifically, although I give it credit for talking about the hard times more than other acts of late. the new Krystal Meyers album is significantly less spiritually challenging then the two before, and has the same blandness the GP laments of. It doesn't make monetary sense to convict people and tell them that they're wrong - people want to feel good about themselves, and actually confronting them about their belief in a God who is as just as He is loving doesn't appeal to one's human nature. It's sad, but when morals compete with profit, it is seldom that morality wins.