You have advocated ideas in the past that kill jobs.
Translation: "I agree with you this time, and I hate myself for it."
That is a stupid meme. Please stop doing it.
Translation: I'm cool enough to know what internet memes are, but too hipster to use them myself.
All these actions are voluntary. If you don't like such a contract, then don't agree to it.
Translation: I have never just clicked 'Accept' when an EULA pops up because I live in a fairy-tale world where my idiosyncratic notions of fairness are never questioned.
Go for it. However, you'll reap what you sow.
Translation: I'm too old and jaded to be optimistic about anything anymore, and you should be too.
I found the problem: They haven't updated their viru--er, law enforcement definition files. That's why the average user should always have auto-update enabled. In other news... McAfee is clearly suffering from some kind of mental disorder beyond simply having homocidal issues, and it's probably due to drugs, maybe even bath salts. He's showing clear evidence of paranoid delusions and his blog posts seem increasingly detached from reality. The only reason he's been able to hold out this long is because he has a lot of money -- way more than the government trying to catch him. Money covers up a lot of intellectual deficits, but he can't stay ahead of them forever because he's a wounded animal; He doesn't have a full deck of cards anymore.
in other words, you don't know how good you got it.
We have the fewest number of holidays of any industrialized country on the planet. Our incarceration rate is higher than any country and is increasing year over year faster than any other as well. Life expectancy started falling about five years ago and continues to drop yearly, in contrast with most industrialized countries. If you shave off the top 5% of wage earners, our average income ranks dead last amongst the top 20 economies of the world. Our educational system is falling apart as student debt loads skyrocket, making higher education all but unobtainable for the majority, or locking them into debt they cannot possibly discharge without severe financial hardship. The leading cause of death amongst 16-25 year olds is suicide, and we are the only industrialized country that has that honor. Our top ten causes of death are mostly preventable causes due to obesity and smoking. Our civil rights track record continues to erode year over year -- whereas gay marriage isn't even a talking point in most of Europe, having been legalized long ago, it's a contentious point here in this country. Muslims are spit on by everyday people, arrested, profiled, and harassed by law enforcement, kept under surveillance by the government, and their plight ignored by the "free" media, who because of their silence has made our bill of rights a bill of privileges -- they may exist on paper, but not in real life anymore. We withdrew from the Geneva diplomatic conventions and we routinely take unilateral military action against other sovereign powers, abduct their citizens, deprive them of not just basic human freedoms but their dignity as well. We torture prisoners of war and our government, corporations, and other wealthy interests lie to our face about what's actually going on, and have been caught so many times they have no credibility internationally and only have credibility domestically because extensive media manipulation ensures few people know the truth.
And I'm not afraid of being targetted for "speaking out against the West", because I'm behind ten proxies. Good luck, assholes. But if I signed my real name to this, I'd be on a terror watchlist by the end of the week and you and I both know it. So don't talk to me about "intellectual honesty" while you turn a blind eye to the sufferings of over a hundred million americans living paycheck to paycheck, wage slaves kept calm with second-rate internet, cheap entertainment, and a television that tells them everything is fine here and it's just the rest of the world that's going to shit. I know they'd all rise up in a moment if there was someone in particular to take this all out on, but this country has become an expert in making people rich by being only a little bit evil. There aren't any Big Bads anymore, just a lot of Sorta Bads, and that's the only reason there isn't a pitch fork in the collective ass of the rich.
But please, tell me how great it is here. I have material comfort, perhaps, but spiritually I'm dying, as is everyone else here. We're thirsting for freedom, yearning for choices in a country that has fewer and fewer to offer each generation. Tell me it's a lie. Go on. Say it, if you've got the guts to keep defending the very people shoving your face in the mud and saying "We're all happy here! Happy, happy, happy!"
Development of a product (giving ownership of your creative work for purposes of resale) should come with expectations of greater compensation, because you are handing over not just your hours of work -- but an opportunity to profit as well, from the resale of the work.
You're killing american jobs, you know that, right? If we don't approve this, they'll be forced to take the jobs overseas, where such protections will be easier to obtain. Every attempt to restrict the profits of employers means less jobs for us, and jobs are what matter here, not letting some esoteric hippy non-sense about who owns what get in the way. And we all know that rich americans are the best kind of americans. Don't you want more rich americans? Employers already pay too much in taxes and health care and even have to pay for medical care if you do something stupid and get hurt at work. With such onerous restrictions on free trade, it's a surprise jobs haven't left our economy more quickly. For us to compete in the global marketplace, we need these kinds of legal restrictions lifted, so we can focus on the important business of generating profit and jobs, and not having to worry that some guy that wrote some code years ago when he worked as an intern might have rights to the code the business runs on.
*vomits a little in her mouth* I can't believe I actually wrote all that... but it had to be done, because that'll be the arguments raised against this. Now for a nice piping hot cup of reality: Those jobs will be shipped overseas regardless of what laws are (or aren't) passed. Rich people have no loyalty to their country, or their workforce, and neither should you. Fuck them over for every penny they're worth. Leave with zero days notice if you get a better job. Let them drink the free market koolaid too. And when it comes to copyright law... patent law... all of that, business exists in parts of the world where this doesn't, and in fact a lot of those jobs going overseas are going there precisely because they don't have the very laws they're lobbying for here.
Those laws are there to extract money from you, and make it all but impossible to be anything but a wage slave, with almost all of the money you earn going right back into their pockets... and it'll keep being this way until they figure out a way to do without you entirely through outsourcing and whatnot. Don't listen to the siren song of "profit and jobs", it's just a lie they tell you to keep you in line. The truth is; We don't need any corporations. We don't need money either. It's possible, though not likely right now, to live without them and to have a brilliant society. But it'll take courage, and a willingness to endure tensions and hardship, to move past our restrictive legal, economic, and military superstructure and towards a world where everyone's contributions are recognized and rewarded, and where we all share in the fruits of our labor, instead of giving most of it to middlemen that create nothing.
That world starts by saying: I own what I create with my own hands, what I think with my own mind, and nobody can ever take it away. Anyone who does, is immoral, and it's my duty to resist.
just Russia sniffing out that they can use this issue as a political football
Yeah. And Total Information Awareness, those airport scanners, equipping our police with surplus military gear (including combat-ready heavy assault tanks), and reading about government agencies like the Social Security administration purchasing hollow point bullets by the ton is totally safe and nobody should worry about it. Is saying their media is biased a bit like the pot calling the kettle black? While people died by the thousand in Myanmar every day, our national media aired celebrity news as the major headlines of the week. When the UN overwhelmingly welcomed the state of Palestine, granting it nation status, our news outlets applauded Israel launching rockets and planning new settlements in the newly-recognized state... and there was very little analysis done on the situation as a whole. When even Israel's equivalent to the President came out in the international media and said (paraphrasing) "I know we're bullies, but we're trying to be benevolent bullies!" every major international news site covered it... and every domestic news site talked about, umm... Oprah using a new Surface tablet?
Bias is everywhere, and if you want the truth, you need to look at all the sources, not just the ones close to you, or the ones politically fashionable. I read the BBC, Al Jezerra, the state-run chinese news sites, several sites in Germany, and yes, Russia Today. I also watch CNN... and let me tell you, of all of them our own media is the most lacking on international events. Our "international" sections usually consist of stories like "Why Don't People Like Us? New Study Reveals It's Because We're Bombing Them." Or put another way -- even in our international news, we're really just looking at our own reflection and asking, "What does the world think about us?" Russia Today and many others are right to point out how self-centered our media is, and by reflection, our culture. Conversely, their constant attack of "the west" (tm)(r)(c)(patent pending) is strained at best, and patently absurd on its bad days. We do get a lot of things right... it'd do them well to occasionally acknowledge that.
What are the odds they'll let something that can heat up that much on an airplane, once they read this article?:\ More seriously, I assume this is over a very, very small area, and the chip dissipates that heat within a few minutes, and that it would only be warm to the touch for a few moments... but I still gotta ask: Is there the possibility of catastrophic failure? Like if the chip was maliciously reprogrammed to trigger all the heating elements simultaniously?
The problem isn't the drive speed, but the amount of manual labor involved in placing hundreds of drives, sorting out the ones that have failed to be retried, and then restocking them. There are multiple optical disk loaders out there, but they aren't intended for transient use and usually require a painful data entry step at the beginning before the drive can locate them.
I have a similar problem, but for a collection of over a thousand mixed-media items. What I've settled on is building a three-spindle set and using a robotic arm with a vaccum sucker to life each item off the spindle and set it into the drive. The spindles are incoming, complete, and failed. The arm is controlled by a simple microcontroller and a couple of sensors to track position and success of each pickup, and connected by USB to custom software. The software alarms if there's a failure, and stepper motors for precise location. The arm "free-falls" from the top of the platter (on a gas piston to reduce contact shock) and a pressure sensor to detect when contact with the next item has been made. It also controls the drive eject/load and the ripping software is triggered using auto-it scripts. Any failure is detected the same way, by watching window titles, and then signalling pickup of the optical media after. There is also a webcam placed directly over the optical drive insert with a bright LED, and a picture is taken of the 'top' of each inserted media at high quality (in case the title is only printed on the inner track). The picture is placed in the same directory as the ripped ISO, and each directory labelled sequentially.
All of this makes post-processing a lot easier; The system can be loaded once a day (before I go to work), and when I get home, it will have ripped about 13 bluray discs. It only takes me a few minutes to rename each ISO to match the disk title from the image, after which it's placed in the pending folder which the ripper autoloads periodically.
But this setup requires knowledge of basic programming and some basic understanding of how robotic tasks are performed; And a significant understanding of electronics and assembly. Any of the homebrew microprocessor kits out there can perform the interface tasks as long as they have GPIO pins. Arduino, for example, has pre-built shields for controlling stepper motors to further simplify this process. The hardest part for me was building the actual robot arm; For that, I looked to how 3D printers are assembled as they've largely solved the problem of using stepper motors and precise placement within a 3D space without significant feedback.
Just make sure your robot's "sucker" can reliably release the optical media and not drag it; it only takes a little bit of moisture or stickiness to lift the optical media slightly and misposition it in the tray, and once the LOAD command is sent, your drive will eat the disc, permanently damaging it. It's also difficult to detect this in software -- the only indication of fault will be an unreadable disk and drive being unresponsive to load/eject commands. Make sure your apparatus fails safe, and I suggest testing all possible failure modes with throw-away media before using on production material.
"Don't believe everything Steve Jobs and Tim Cook tell you, advises The Verge's Sean Hollister.
Interviewer: "Hey Steve, what do you think about Touchscreen laptops?"
Steve:
Interviewer: "That's amazing Steve. How long do you think before they go on sale?"
Steve:
Interviewer: "Steve, a lot of people seem to think you're wrong. Care to comment?"
Steve:
Interviewer: "Well, that's it for today! Tune in again tomorrow when we ask Abraham Lincoln what he thought about the play he went to!"
... when elevators can move in more than one plane: 10 PRINT CHR$ (205.5 + RND (1)); : GOTO 10
I tried using an elevator based on that once. It took me all over the place, and gave the appearance of doing so intelligently, but I never actually managed to arrive where I wanted to be. I eventually caved and shelled out the money for a proper Wonkavator; Haven't had a problem since, except for the occasional child disappearing while using it.
Wait, they're saying we can save potentially billions of dollars, by simply changing our expectations and habits in a very slight and non-destructive fashion? Unless we can declare war on it as some kind of abstract ideological concept, nobody's going to go for that. This is America, dude, where we turn off the lights when we leave the bathroom to save the environment while we let petroleum producers dump thousands of tonnes of oil into the water because they half-assed the construction and bypassed most of the safety procedures. We come in peace, ignore the Predator drones.
The only sensible way to do this is to shove it down the average person's throat with them screaming bloody murder... only to find out a few years later that they actually like it better the new way. It's how things have always been done here. Don't ask me why, I don't know whether it's human nature, or there's something in the water that makes people this resistant to beneficial change, but will happily make useless changes to everything...
My room is a disaster. My bed isn't made, nobody can find anything in here but me, and I have a couple bras right now hanging on the lamp to dry because there's nowhere else to put them. According to this article, I should be a major, successful retail vendor. So if that's true, instead of expecting me to be a billionaire or the President, my mom keeps telling me that at this point, she'd be happy if I'd just breed?
I thought the real announcement was NASA found water and organic matter on venus
Dude, you realize that if you took a pizza out of your freezer and held it up in the air on the surface of Venus, it would cook in about 8 seconds, right? Which is 7.98 seconds longer than it would take for the atmosphere to turn you (and the pizza) into a pancake and then spray your liquified remains about a half-kilometer downwind. I'd be very interested to hear about the technology NASA invented that would be capable of landing anything in such an inhospitable environment... or for that matter, simply making it to the surface still intact and somehow managing to communicate this fact to us.
Free AV software included with operating system scores significantly lower than competitor products that cost money. Shocking!
I remember back in the day, Netscape ruled the web, and internet explorer was a piece of crap that, while bundled with the operating system, nobody ever used. I remember when Microsoft first released mplayer, its first video player; Which looked sad and pathetic next to QuickTime. I remember how under Windows NT, the only method of defragmenting the filesystem was to reformat and start over, unless you bought Norton. I remember when Word Perfect was the only word processor anyone in the industry would recommend for professionals, and Microsoft Office was little more than notepad with a bag on the side. And I remember the first software firewalls by ZoneAlarm and others, compared to the pathetic XP firewall.
Yes, I'm probably older than you. Yes, you can laugh: But I have a lot of memory to draw on, and all you have is sarcasm. In every case, Microsoft steadily improved their own offerings, and the market for those products imploded. Today, anti-virus built-in to windows sucks but if history is anything to judge by, it won't stay that way for long. Now get the f*ck off my lawn, and take your iPhones with you. Some of us work for a living.
Whenever I hear these types of arguments I always think there must be some psychological term for this. That is, whenever someone has been deprived of some benefit, it is all too easy to get him to rally behind depriving others of the same.
The term you're looking for is the Just-world hypothesis. Basically, it's the idea that good behaviors are rewarded and bad behaviors punished as a universal law of nature. So when someone is successful, it's not because of luck or chance, but because they deserved it. Likewise, if someone is suffering, they also deserve it. But it doesn't take modern psychology to figure this one out -- the greeks made a latin proverb out of it, which translated says "every misfortune is to be believed when directed against the unfortunate."
This belief enables and extends into other things, such as a blame the victim mentality, and things that follow from the phrase "I was just following orders." Similar studies have been done on personal responsibility and it was found that the more people that could help, the lower the likelihood is of anyone helping -- that is, a person's sense of guilt is divided by the number of people present. Beyond a certain threshold, nobody does anything. That's why you hear stories about how someone was murdered in the middle of rush hour, in the middle of the street, and nobody helped the victim or even called 911.
The asshat you were replying to simply has a larger than average dose of self-importance... a logical consequence of buying into the belief a bit, uhh, more than average. At least amongst the educated.
TFA says that the statutory limit for damages for non-commercial infringement is $5000
Per infringement. How many different people did you upload that bittorrent to? 1,700? Um... uh oh.
and that they're going to go after habitual downloaders.
And I'm sure they'll be satisfied stopping there.
they will have to take it to small claims court where "expert witnesses" won't be allowed. Just their lawyer, your lawyer, and
Even assuming you were right, what makes you think there's going to be a "your lawyer" for everyone? Maybe you have the kind of money to slap down on a $1,500 retainer and $250 an hour to fight the good fight. The other guys won't.
There's well over $5000 worth of DVD's in my collection.
Congratulations on your purchase! They have a shelf life of about 10-15 years before the acids intentionally added to the die cause enough surface damage to render it unusable. Planned obsolesence, my friend. But I digress...
If those idiots decide to try to sue me because I downloaded a copy of True Lies (disc was scratched and
... And what? Downloading is downloading. You only paid to make a copy of the media you purchased. If it was damaged, you should have returned it to the store for a refund or exchange. Book 'em Danno.
I'll be quite amused to see what the courts say about it.
"Guilty."
The reason there's nothing new in the collection isn't that I'm downloading movies, it's because the movies that they're making these days are crap.
Is that the story you're going to be telling the judge? Sounds like you don't like the entertainment industry. That goes to motive...
The age bias is because kids are young and stupid and will happily waste 40, 60, even 80 hours a week slaving away for peanuts on the Next Big Thing in computers. There's something to be said though for people with a few years under their belt. For one, they know what failure looks like. For two, they don't go with the shiny things because they're shiny -- they understand business needs and can design things that'll last and can be scaled up. The dot com bubble happened precisely because everybody thought the dumb fresh-out-of-college kids had all the answers and we threw money at them like girls throw wet panties at singers on stage.
And we paid for it. Apparently though, we didn't learn anything from the experience. Like say, a modicum of business sense.
People don't keep using things that are broken, says latest scientific study from the Romero Institute. Professor Obvious, chair of the Three Kinds of Lies committee, said today that it was a shocking discovery. Many businesses have for years been selling things that are intentionally broken and assuming that people would simply keep buying them despite alternatives being available. Obvious has been nominated for an igNobel prize for his work, and says future studies may even uncover the precise mechanics behind why people continue to not use things that don't work.
Not to mention, they stick your heirs with the electric bill.
That assumes there's anything left I can put in my will. "To my beloved, one cracker, dry, slightly used. To my three children, whom I put up for adoption after being convicted, 12 scratch-off lottery tickets, pre-scratched, not winning. And to the recording industry, I bequeath my massive 3,000 ton collection of pig poop, collected over many years because it was the only thing that the bankrupcy judge let me keep, thinking it had now value... which is currently being sprayed on everything in the parking lot and the entrances and emergency escapes of the building you are reading this in. Lovingly yours, Me. P.S. You left your windows down."
Know what bothers me the most, is that there are democratic countries with "kill lists" , they even go public with it, and is fine, completely fine no one seems to bother !!
Every country has a list somewhere of people that they want dead. Every. Last. One. And what's wrong with them being public? Would it be more ethical and moral if they were private? What's really going on here is your idea of democracy is this utopian society where everyone is nice to each other and because it's so wonderful nobody would ever want to kill another person. The only place like that is North Korea. Everywhere else strives for balance between freedom and security. And even if a perfect utopia were to emerge in the world, it would be standing shoulder to shoulder with dystopias wanting nothing more than to pull it down to their level.
Non-violence is a virtue; It's something to strive for. It's not something that has ever, or likely will ever be, obtainable. Not by large groups of people. Not by governments.
Slashdot Mirror
You have advocated ideas in the past that kill jobs.
Translation: "I agree with you this time, and I hate myself for it."
That is a stupid meme. Please stop doing it.
Translation: I'm cool enough to know what internet memes are, but too hipster to use them myself.
All these actions are voluntary. If you don't like such a contract, then don't agree to it.
Translation: I have never just clicked 'Accept' when an EULA pops up because I live in a fairy-tale world where my idiosyncratic notions of fairness are never questioned.
Go for it. However, you'll reap what you sow.
Translation: I'm too old and jaded to be optimistic about anything anymore, and you should be too.
I found the problem: They haven't updated their viru--er, law enforcement definition files. That's why the average user should always have auto-update enabled. In other news... McAfee is clearly suffering from some kind of mental disorder beyond simply having homocidal issues, and it's probably due to drugs, maybe even bath salts. He's showing clear evidence of paranoid delusions and his blog posts seem increasingly detached from reality. The only reason he's been able to hold out this long is because he has a lot of money -- way more than the government trying to catch him. Money covers up a lot of intellectual deficits, but he can't stay ahead of them forever because he's a wounded animal; He doesn't have a full deck of cards anymore.
in other words, you don't know how good you got it.
We have the fewest number of holidays of any industrialized country on the planet. Our incarceration rate is higher than any country and is increasing year over year faster than any other as well. Life expectancy started falling about five years ago and continues to drop yearly, in contrast with most industrialized countries. If you shave off the top 5% of wage earners, our average income ranks dead last amongst the top 20 economies of the world. Our educational system is falling apart as student debt loads skyrocket, making higher education all but unobtainable for the majority, or locking them into debt they cannot possibly discharge without severe financial hardship. The leading cause of death amongst 16-25 year olds is suicide, and we are the only industrialized country that has that honor. Our top ten causes of death are mostly preventable causes due to obesity and smoking. Our civil rights track record continues to erode year over year -- whereas gay marriage isn't even a talking point in most of Europe, having been legalized long ago, it's a contentious point here in this country. Muslims are spit on by everyday people, arrested, profiled, and harassed by law enforcement, kept under surveillance by the government, and their plight ignored by the "free" media, who because of their silence has made our bill of rights a bill of privileges -- they may exist on paper, but not in real life anymore. We withdrew from the Geneva diplomatic conventions and we routinely take unilateral military action against other sovereign powers, abduct their citizens, deprive them of not just basic human freedoms but their dignity as well. We torture prisoners of war and our government, corporations, and other wealthy interests lie to our face about what's actually going on, and have been caught so many times they have no credibility internationally and only have credibility domestically because extensive media manipulation ensures few people know the truth.
And I'm not afraid of being targetted for "speaking out against the West", because I'm behind ten proxies. Good luck, assholes. But if I signed my real name to this, I'd be on a terror watchlist by the end of the week and you and I both know it. So don't talk to me about "intellectual honesty" while you turn a blind eye to the sufferings of over a hundred million americans living paycheck to paycheck, wage slaves kept calm with second-rate internet, cheap entertainment, and a television that tells them everything is fine here and it's just the rest of the world that's going to shit. I know they'd all rise up in a moment if there was someone in particular to take this all out on, but this country has become an expert in making people rich by being only a little bit evil. There aren't any Big Bads anymore, just a lot of Sorta Bads, and that's the only reason there isn't a pitch fork in the collective ass of the rich.
But please, tell me how great it is here. I have material comfort, perhaps, but spiritually I'm dying, as is everyone else here. We're thirsting for freedom, yearning for choices in a country that has fewer and fewer to offer each generation. Tell me it's a lie. Go on. Say it, if you've got the guts to keep defending the very people shoving your face in the mud and saying "We're all happy here! Happy, happy, happy!"
Development of a product (giving ownership of your creative work for purposes of resale) should come with expectations of greater compensation, because you are handing over not just your hours of work -- but an opportunity to profit as well, from the resale of the work.
You're killing american jobs, you know that, right? If we don't approve this, they'll be forced to take the jobs overseas, where such protections will be easier to obtain. Every attempt to restrict the profits of employers means less jobs for us, and jobs are what matter here, not letting some esoteric hippy non-sense about who owns what get in the way. And we all know that rich americans are the best kind of americans. Don't you want more rich americans? Employers already pay too much in taxes and health care and even have to pay for medical care if you do something stupid and get hurt at work. With such onerous restrictions on free trade, it's a surprise jobs haven't left our economy more quickly. For us to compete in the global marketplace, we need these kinds of legal restrictions lifted, so we can focus on the important business of generating profit and jobs, and not having to worry that some guy that wrote some code years ago when he worked as an intern might have rights to the code the business runs on.
*vomits a little in her mouth* I can't believe I actually wrote all that... but it had to be done, because that'll be the arguments raised against this. Now for a nice piping hot cup of reality: Those jobs will be shipped overseas regardless of what laws are (or aren't) passed. Rich people have no loyalty to their country, or their workforce, and neither should you. Fuck them over for every penny they're worth. Leave with zero days notice if you get a better job. Let them drink the free market koolaid too. And when it comes to copyright law... patent law... all of that, business exists in parts of the world where this doesn't, and in fact a lot of those jobs going overseas are going there precisely because they don't have the very laws they're lobbying for here.
Those laws are there to extract money from you, and make it all but impossible to be anything but a wage slave, with almost all of the money you earn going right back into their pockets... and it'll keep being this way until they figure out a way to do without you entirely through outsourcing and whatnot. Don't listen to the siren song of "profit and jobs", it's just a lie they tell you to keep you in line. The truth is; We don't need any corporations. We don't need money either. It's possible, though not likely right now, to live without them and to have a brilliant society. But it'll take courage, and a willingness to endure tensions and hardship, to move past our restrictive legal, economic, and military superstructure and towards a world where everyone's contributions are recognized and rewarded, and where we all share in the fruits of our labor, instead of giving most of it to middlemen that create nothing.
That world starts by saying: I own what I create with my own hands, what I think with my own mind, and nobody can ever take it away. Anyone who does, is immoral, and it's my duty to resist.
just Russia sniffing out that they can use this issue as a political football
Yeah. And Total Information Awareness, those airport scanners, equipping our police with surplus military gear (including combat-ready heavy assault tanks), and reading about government agencies like the Social Security administration purchasing hollow point bullets by the ton is totally safe and nobody should worry about it. Is saying their media is biased a bit like the pot calling the kettle black? While people died by the thousand in Myanmar every day, our national media aired celebrity news as the major headlines of the week. When the UN overwhelmingly welcomed the state of Palestine, granting it nation status, our news outlets applauded Israel launching rockets and planning new settlements in the newly-recognized state... and there was very little analysis done on the situation as a whole. When even Israel's equivalent to the President came out in the international media and said (paraphrasing) "I know we're bullies, but we're trying to be benevolent bullies!" every major international news site covered it... and every domestic news site talked about, umm... Oprah using a new Surface tablet?
Bias is everywhere, and if you want the truth, you need to look at all the sources, not just the ones close to you, or the ones politically fashionable. I read the BBC, Al Jezerra, the state-run chinese news sites, several sites in Germany, and yes, Russia Today. I also watch CNN... and let me tell you, of all of them our own media is the most lacking on international events. Our "international" sections usually consist of stories like "Why Don't People Like Us? New Study Reveals It's Because We're Bombing Them." Or put another way -- even in our international news, we're really just looking at our own reflection and asking, "What does the world think about us?" Russia Today and many others are right to point out how self-centered our media is, and by reflection, our culture. Conversely, their constant attack of "the west" (tm)(r)(c)(patent pending) is strained at best, and patently absurd on its bad days. We do get a lot of things right... it'd do them well to occasionally acknowledge that.
What are the odds they'll let something that can heat up that much on an airplane, once they read this article? :\ More seriously, I assume this is over a very, very small area, and the chip dissipates that heat within a few minutes, and that it would only be warm to the touch for a few moments... but I still gotta ask: Is there the possibility of catastrophic failure? Like if the chip was maliciously reprogrammed to trigger all the heating elements simultaniously?
The problem isn't the drive speed, but the amount of manual labor involved in placing hundreds of drives, sorting out the ones that have failed to be retried, and then restocking them. There are multiple optical disk loaders out there, but they aren't intended for transient use and usually require a painful data entry step at the beginning before the drive can locate them.
I have a similar problem, but for a collection of over a thousand mixed-media items. What I've settled on is building a three-spindle set and using a robotic arm with a vaccum sucker to life each item off the spindle and set it into the drive. The spindles are incoming, complete, and failed. The arm is controlled by a simple microcontroller and a couple of sensors to track position and success of each pickup, and connected by USB to custom software. The software alarms if there's a failure, and stepper motors for precise location. The arm "free-falls" from the top of the platter (on a gas piston to reduce contact shock) and a pressure sensor to detect when contact with the next item has been made. It also controls the drive eject/load and the ripping software is triggered using auto-it scripts. Any failure is detected the same way, by watching window titles, and then signalling pickup of the optical media after. There is also a webcam placed directly over the optical drive insert with a bright LED, and a picture is taken of the 'top' of each inserted media at high quality (in case the title is only printed on the inner track). The picture is placed in the same directory as the ripped ISO, and each directory labelled sequentially.
All of this makes post-processing a lot easier; The system can be loaded once a day (before I go to work), and when I get home, it will have ripped about 13 bluray discs. It only takes me a few minutes to rename each ISO to match the disk title from the image, after which it's placed in the pending folder which the ripper autoloads periodically.
But this setup requires knowledge of basic programming and some basic understanding of how robotic tasks are performed; And a significant understanding of electronics and assembly. Any of the homebrew microprocessor kits out there can perform the interface tasks as long as they have GPIO pins. Arduino, for example, has pre-built shields for controlling stepper motors to further simplify this process. The hardest part for me was building the actual robot arm; For that, I looked to how 3D printers are assembled as they've largely solved the problem of using stepper motors and precise placement within a 3D space without significant feedback.
Just make sure your robot's "sucker" can reliably release the optical media and not drag it; it only takes a little bit of moisture or stickiness to lift the optical media slightly and misposition it in the tray, and once the LOAD command is sent, your drive will eat the disc, permanently damaging it. It's also difficult to detect this in software -- the only indication of fault will be an unreadable disk and drive being unresponsive to load/eject commands. Make sure your apparatus fails safe, and I suggest testing all possible failure modes with throw-away media before using on production material.
"Don't believe everything Steve Jobs and Tim Cook tell you, advises The Verge's Sean Hollister.
Interviewer: "Hey Steve, what do you think about Touchscreen laptops?"
Steve:
Interviewer: "That's amazing Steve. How long do you think before they go on sale?"
Steve:
Interviewer: "Steve, a lot of people seem to think you're wrong. Care to comment?"
Steve:
Interviewer: "Well, that's it for today! Tune in again tomorrow when we ask Abraham Lincoln what he thought about the play he went to!"
... when elevators can move in more than one plane: 10 PRINT CHR$ (205.5 + RND (1)); : GOTO 10
I tried using an elevator based on that once. It took me all over the place, and gave the appearance of doing so intelligently, but I never actually managed to arrive where I wanted to be. I eventually caved and shelled out the money for a proper Wonkavator; Haven't had a problem since, except for the occasional child disappearing while using it.
What, do you regularly take out your wallet, open the change pouch, and shake it around while looking in the other direction?
Only to attract younger (and invariably broke) lesbians.
Wait, they're saying we can save potentially billions of dollars, by simply changing our expectations and habits in a very slight and non-destructive fashion? Unless we can declare war on it as some kind of abstract ideological concept, nobody's going to go for that. This is America, dude, where we turn off the lights when we leave the bathroom to save the environment while we let petroleum producers dump thousands of tonnes of oil into the water because they half-assed the construction and bypassed most of the safety procedures. We come in peace, ignore the Predator drones.
The only sensible way to do this is to shove it down the average person's throat with them screaming bloody murder... only to find out a few years later that they actually like it better the new way. It's how things have always been done here. Don't ask me why, I don't know whether it's human nature, or there's something in the water that makes people this resistant to beneficial change, but will happily make useless changes to everything...
Barcodes! You need barcodes!
To breed? Jeez... I knew I was missing something obvious.
A friend of mine has a small business selling specialized shoes...Has anyone dealt with such systems? Any recomendations? Many thanks.
Have you given Bundy a try?
My room is a disaster. My bed isn't made, nobody can find anything in here but me, and I have a couple bras right now hanging on the lamp to dry because there's nowhere else to put them. According to this article, I should be a major, successful retail vendor. So if that's true, instead of expecting me to be a billionaire or the President, my mom keeps telling me that at this point, she'd be happy if I'd just breed?
I thought the real announcement was NASA found water and organic matter on venus
Dude, you realize that if you took a pizza out of your freezer and held it up in the air on the surface of Venus, it would cook in about 8 seconds, right? Which is 7.98 seconds longer than it would take for the atmosphere to turn you (and the pizza) into a pancake and then spray your liquified remains about a half-kilometer downwind. I'd be very interested to hear about the technology NASA invented that would be capable of landing anything in such an inhospitable environment... or for that matter, simply making it to the surface still intact and somehow managing to communicate this fact to us.
Free AV software included with operating system scores significantly lower than competitor products that cost money. Shocking!
I remember back in the day, Netscape ruled the web, and internet explorer was a piece of crap that, while bundled with the operating system, nobody ever used. I remember when Microsoft first released mplayer, its first video player; Which looked sad and pathetic next to QuickTime. I remember how under Windows NT, the only method of defragmenting the filesystem was to reformat and start over, unless you bought Norton. I remember when Word Perfect was the only word processor anyone in the industry would recommend for professionals, and Microsoft Office was little more than notepad with a bag on the side. And I remember the first software firewalls by ZoneAlarm and others, compared to the pathetic XP firewall.
Yes, I'm probably older than you. Yes, you can laugh: But I have a lot of memory to draw on, and all you have is sarcasm. In every case, Microsoft steadily improved their own offerings, and the market for those products imploded. Today, anti-virus built-in to windows sucks but if history is anything to judge by, it won't stay that way for long. Now get the f*ck off my lawn, and take your iPhones with you. Some of us work for a living.
Well, at least now we know how RIAA calculates its damages; They must have hired the same developer...
Whenever I hear these types of arguments I always think there must be some psychological term for this. That is, whenever someone has been deprived of some benefit, it is all too easy to get him to rally behind depriving others of the same.
The term you're looking for is the Just-world hypothesis. Basically, it's the idea that good behaviors are rewarded and bad behaviors punished as a universal law of nature. So when someone is successful, it's not because of luck or chance, but because they deserved it. Likewise, if someone is suffering, they also deserve it. But it doesn't take modern psychology to figure this one out -- the greeks made a latin proverb out of it, which translated says "every misfortune is to be believed when directed against the unfortunate."
This belief enables and extends into other things, such as a blame the victim mentality, and things that follow from the phrase "I was just following orders." Similar studies have been done on personal responsibility and it was found that the more people that could help, the lower the likelihood is of anyone helping -- that is, a person's sense of guilt is divided by the number of people present. Beyond a certain threshold, nobody does anything. That's why you hear stories about how someone was murdered in the middle of rush hour, in the middle of the street, and nobody helped the victim or even called 911.
The asshat you were replying to simply has a larger than average dose of self-importance... a logical consequence of buying into the belief a bit, uhh, more than average. At least amongst the educated.
I have no intention of doing so. I do not negotiate with terrorists. :)
TFA says that the statutory limit for damages for non-commercial infringement is $5000
Per infringement. How many different people did you upload that bittorrent to? 1,700? Um... uh oh.
and that they're going to go after habitual downloaders.
And I'm sure they'll be satisfied stopping there.
they will have to take it to small claims court where "expert witnesses" won't be allowed. Just their lawyer, your lawyer, and
Even assuming you were right, what makes you think there's going to be a "your lawyer" for everyone? Maybe you have the kind of money to slap down on a $1,500 retainer and $250 an hour to fight the good fight. The other guys won't.
There's well over $5000 worth of DVD's in my collection.
Congratulations on your purchase! They have a shelf life of about 10-15 years before the acids intentionally added to the die cause enough surface damage to render it unusable. Planned obsolesence, my friend. But I digress...
If those idiots decide to try to sue me because I downloaded a copy of True Lies (disc was scratched and
... And what? Downloading is downloading. You only paid to make a copy of the media you purchased. If it was damaged, you should have returned it to the store for a refund or exchange. Book 'em Danno.
I'll be quite amused to see what the courts say about it.
"Guilty."
The reason there's nothing new in the collection isn't that I'm downloading movies, it's because the movies that they're making these days are crap.
Is that the story you're going to be telling the judge? Sounds like you don't like the entertainment industry. That goes to motive...
The age bias is because kids are young and stupid and will happily waste 40, 60, even 80 hours a week slaving away for peanuts on the Next Big Thing in computers. There's something to be said though for people with a few years under their belt. For one, they know what failure looks like. For two, they don't go with the shiny things because they're shiny -- they understand business needs and can design things that'll last and can be scaled up. The dot com bubble happened precisely because everybody thought the dumb fresh-out-of-college kids had all the answers and we threw money at them like girls throw wet panties at singers on stage.
And we paid for it. Apparently though, we didn't learn anything from the experience. Like say, a modicum of business sense.
Think twice: a significant number of others may start thinking like me.
I weep for the future.
People don't keep using things that are broken, says latest scientific study from the Romero Institute. Professor Obvious, chair of the Three Kinds of Lies committee, said today that it was a shocking discovery. Many businesses have for years been selling things that are intentionally broken and assuming that people would simply keep buying them despite alternatives being available. Obvious has been nominated for an igNobel prize for his work, and says future studies may even uncover the precise mechanics behind why people continue to not use things that don't work.
Not to mention, they stick your heirs with the electric bill.
That assumes there's anything left I can put in my will. "To my beloved, one cracker, dry, slightly used. To my three children, whom I put up for adoption after being convicted, 12 scratch-off lottery tickets, pre-scratched, not winning. And to the recording industry, I bequeath my massive 3,000 ton collection of pig poop, collected over many years because it was the only thing that the bankrupcy judge let me keep, thinking it had now value... which is currently being sprayed on everything in the parking lot and the entrances and emergency escapes of the building you are reading this in. Lovingly yours, Me. P.S. You left your windows down."
Know what bothers me the most, is that there are democratic countries with "kill lists" , they even go public with it, and is fine, completely fine no one seems to bother !!
Every country has a list somewhere of people that they want dead. Every. Last. One. And what's wrong with them being public? Would it be more ethical and moral if they were private? What's really going on here is your idea of democracy is this utopian society where everyone is nice to each other and because it's so wonderful nobody would ever want to kill another person. The only place like that is North Korea. Everywhere else strives for balance between freedom and security. And even if a perfect utopia were to emerge in the world, it would be standing shoulder to shoulder with dystopias wanting nothing more than to pull it down to their level.
Non-violence is a virtue; It's something to strive for. It's not something that has ever, or likely will ever be, obtainable. Not by large groups of people. Not by governments.