He has special alternate versions of his videos so that Firefox and Apple users can access them... that is enough to get a mention on Slashdot if you ask me.
The RIAA has just given me one more reason not to buy anything that they are involved in. Here I was thinking that they couldn't make buying content from them any less desirable that it already is.
I saw this in November in Heathrow airport in London, England - an ad hoc wireless network called "Free Wi-Fi". Obviously I wasn't stupid enough to connect to it.
I use my plasma TV for two things: Watching DVDs and watching sport. It is while watching sport that the faster response time comes into play. Although I love the higher res of LCD I've yet to see an LCD TV where you can watch cricket on without the ball becoming streak.
I'm sure there are some US Slashdotters who have the same experience with sports like baseball.
Did anyone else notice that you don't really see the kids blowing bubbles themselves (one kid manages to blow one I think). You only see them playing in the multitude of (probably machine made) bubbles. Methinks the bubbles are more difficult to blow that they are letting on.
Re:It's Just Business
on
Pixar For Sale?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Since when should employee happiness be the basis of whether or not to sell a company?
Since you get companies (and Pixar is one) who's biggest asset is their employees. If all the employees quit right after Pixar is sold, then there's not much else of value left.
I was employed by a software company that went through this. Many developers were "made redundant" soon after the sale and the remaining ones eventually quit. Six months down the line there were no developers left. All the company had left was seven(!) directors, numerous managers and salesmen, zero new products some "intelectual property" they could do nothing with. How long do you think they lasted?
How long do you think Pixar will last if all the people who do the actual work all quit?
Disney has been in a creative slump for a number of years. They did not catch on to the technological changes very quickly, and their stories have been lacking, feeling like new cookie-cutter versions of tropes that ceased to be fresh a long time ago.
At least they can keep on making money on Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck etc. since it's clear that those copyrights will never expire.
Do you know that today foreign aid is mostly used as a tool to force poorer nations to implement the policies (e.g on energy) that the rich nations want, and that more money flows from the poor nations to the rich than the other way around?
Everybody knows the old saying, "give a man fish and you feed him for a day, teach him to fish and you feed for life". Well, I always think of U.S. aid to Africa being, "give a man fish and take away his fishing rod"
The foreign aid policies are designed to:
Create opportunities for U.S. companies
Keep Africa dependent on the U.S.
That way there's lots of money to be made from Africa without the possibility arising that Africa will become economically independent and start posing a threat to the U.S. economy.
In many cases, what they need is food, clean drinking water, and shelter. Let's get those bases covered before we start doling out the software, shall we?
Yes, that's right, and you don't need computers at all to deliver food drinking water and shelter. Oh wait...
Not to be trolling, but Eclipse is terribly slow (at least for me)
That is Eclipse's main problem, but if you throw enough hardware at it the problem disappears. I recently got a brand new Athlon 64 with 2GB dual channel memory at work, and Eclipse flies.
Eclipse's best feature: there are keyboard short cuts to do just about anything. There are in fact many features that are only accessible via short cuts.
It's just a pity that it is almost impossible to find out what all the short cuts are.
PrologFanBoy: "Prolog is the superset of all programming languages. Everything that you don't do in Prolog will be obsolete in 2 years. Procedural programming is dead. Now, for this 'Hello, World!' project: First we need to create a greeting ontology... Hey, where are you guys going".
I had this colleague who was obsessed with Prolog. You would give him a small bug to fix in a C++ or a Delphi program, he would go on for a few weeks about how horrible and primitive the program is and how we should completely rewrite all our software in Prolog. He never actually completed a single job that was assigned to him.
I would call the terrorist a freedom fighter if those he was trying to wipe out were witholding his freedom.
So you're saying that the US is not withholding anyone's freedom. The "freedom fighters" would disagree: USA's support of Israel has a big effect on many people's freedom. Same for USA's military presence in the middle east and USA's occupation of Iraq.
By your logic someone who accidently kills several people in an auto accident would be morally worse that a murderer who kills but one person.
As the reply by the AC pointed out your analogy sucks.
Can you really not separate "Trying to kill civilians" from "Trying to kill people who intentionally kill civilians"?
It's actually trying to kill civilians because that is the only target you can successfully hit because you have no real military power Vs. Trying to kill terrorists and in the process killing 20 times more civilians than the terrorists ever did.
or
Trying to kill a few civilians out of desperation Vs. launching a systematic billion dollar campaign to destroy a country and to kill tens of thousands of people.
They are called different names because they ARE different. The terrorist has committed a crime in fact (murder) while the infidel has committed a crime only in the mind of the terrorist (different belief).
The "freedom fighters" would once again disagree. They hate infidels because they have murdered many innocent people. They hate the infidels because they invaded a country without provocation. They hate the infidels because of the US's military power in their countries. Just think how happy you would be if another country (say France) sets up military bases all over the US to look after their economic interests in the US?
Bottom line: I am NOT saying that the US is wrong and the al-Qaeda right, I am just saying that it is far from the black & white case you make it out to be.
That is the point that the original post tried to make: Who you see as the "good guys" and the "bad guys" has got a lot more to do with your perception and political beliefs than any rational reason.
I have personal experience of this: I grew up in South Africa. From as far back as I can remember we were taught to hate the terrorists and to support "our guys". The terrorists did horrible things (e.g. planting bombs in shopping centres). "Our guys" also did horrible things, but it was justified because they were fighting the "bad guys".
Guess what? The "terrorists" turned out to be right, and they're now running the country and everyone's better off.
Horrific crimes were committed by both sides during the fight, but at the end of the day, getting a peaceful solutions to everyone's problems was more important than punishing people for their crimes during the struggle. Go read up on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
This statement tends to fall apart when you realise that the freedom the terrorist is fighting for is freedom from your existence.
Are you referring to Islamic extremists or neocons here, because it applies nicely to both groups, which is the point that the grandparent post was trying to make.
That's cruel hard. Even President Chirac would concede that the USA is less bad than al-Qaeda.
Are you sure? In a 2003 TIMEeurope poll they asked "Who really poses the greatest danger to world peace? Iraq, North Korea or The United States". Almost 87% of people voted for the USA.
In what way was the actions of al-Qaeda more evil than the actions of US army in the past few years? By all the criteria that I can think of, the US Army is way ahead, e.g. number of attacks, number of innocent people killed, damage done to infrastructure etc.
The Terrorists seem a bit more forward to me; The Neocons hardly ever kill you for not converting.
How do you reckon? Compare body counts - USA is a few orders of magnitude ahead of al-Qaeda.
I checked the minutes of our Neocon meeting and we definitely had it down as "indiscriminantly killing *terrorists*".
At their meetings they call it "indiscriminately killing *infidels*". What does what you call the people want to kill have to do with anything?
Looking at recent events, such as the Tsunami and New Orleans flooding, it's an eye-catching number... but do the math. The Tsunami triggered by an 9.6-ish-on-the-richter-scale earthquake only managed to snuff out 0.0025% of the earth's population.
Another way to see it: World population grows by about 77 million people per year, or about 211000 people per day. That means that the earth's population number took less that two days to recover from the Asian tsunami.
The Nobel Prize is not awarded for a single act or document, but for a collection thereof. Books do not win Nobel Prizes, for example. Authors do.
Not really. In the Nobel prize for physics is almost always given for something specific that a person did. In Einstein's case it was awarded for "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect".
Most of the other physics prizes are just given "for his discovery/demonstration/development of X"
Danny Hillis of the Long Now Foundation has been pointing out these kinds of problems for years.
Most types of digital storage is not good for conserving data in the long run. Hardware changes. File formats change. Most digital media have a very limited lifetime.
As an example: We have a very good record of the letters that Greek philosophers wrote to each other 2000 years ago. On the other had there's loads of important research data from the early days of computing that's already lost forever.
Think that they'll be adjusting any of that due to the recent bombings in London?
I actually also wondered about that.
In the graphic novel the hero, V, is a terrorist and a psycho. He blows things up, killing the guilty and the innocent. He not the leader of a popular uprising, he's a loner. The closest thing he has to an ally is Evey - a girl he keeps imprisoned and tortures until she comes around to his way of thinking. The brilliance of the graphic novel stems from the fact that the reader identifies with the main character, even though he's cruel and clearly totally out of his mind.
Then again, the Wachowskis wrote the script, so it was probably nicely sanatised to remove all the controversial content. I fully expect to find that they changed the main character to be some sort of populist freedom fighter and Evey to be his willing side-kick.
Also, the only mention that I could find to something similar to what you discuss in your post is Equatorial Guinea, which is part of West Africa or Central Africa, depending on who you listen to. Either way, you're off by a few thousand miles. Oh, and they have a president, not a king.
Slashdot Mirror
...or does every single DRM related story of the past few weeks deserve a big fat OBVIOUS tag a la fark.
He has special alternate versions of his videos so that Firefox and Apple users can access them ... that is enough to get a mention on Slashdot if you ask me.
The RIAA has just given me one more reason not to buy anything that they are involved in. Here I was thinking that they couldn't make buying content from them any less desirable that it already is.
I saw this in November in Heathrow airport in London, England - an ad hoc wireless network called "Free Wi-Fi". Obviously I wasn't stupid enough to connect to it.
I wish I had some mod points
I use my plasma TV for two things: Watching DVDs and watching sport. It is while watching sport that the faster response time comes into play. Although I love the higher res of LCD I've yet to see an LCD TV where you can watch cricket on without the ball becoming streak.
I'm sure there are some US Slashdotters who have the same experience with sports like baseball.
...when you are caught with your foot in your mouth.
... oh, and your wallet.
Well it seems like Mark Cuban thinks the solution is to insert your other foot as well
He was way wrong on Google & youtube the first time and I'm sure that he is even more wrong now.
Blogs are a good source of business advice
He obviously spent too much time playing Maniac Mansion on that Commodore 64
Looking at the photo in the article, this seems like a perfect project to implement in Lego Mindstorms. Anyone up for it?
Did anyone else notice that you don't really see the kids blowing bubbles themselves (one kid manages to blow one I think). You only see them playing in the multitude of (probably machine made) bubbles. Methinks the bubbles are more difficult to blow that they are letting on.
Since when should employee happiness be the basis of whether or not to sell a company?
Since you get companies (and Pixar is one) who's biggest asset is their employees. If all the employees quit right after Pixar is sold, then there's not much else of value left.
I was employed by a software company that went through this. Many developers were "made redundant" soon after the sale and the remaining ones eventually quit. Six months down the line there were no developers left. All the company had left was seven(!) directors, numerous managers and salesmen, zero new products some "intelectual property" they could do nothing with. How long do you think they lasted?
How long do you think Pixar will last if all the people who do the actual work all quit?
Disney has been in a creative slump for a number of years. They did not catch on to the technological changes very quickly, and their stories have been lacking, feeling like new cookie-cutter versions of tropes that ceased to be fresh a long time ago.
At least they can keep on making money on Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck etc. since it's clear that those copyrights will never expire.
Everybody knows the old saying, "give a man fish and you feed him for a day, teach him to fish and you feed for life". Well, I always think of U.S. aid to Africa being, "give a man fish and take away his fishing rod"
The foreign aid policies are designed to:
That way there's lots of money to be made from Africa without the possibility arising that Africa will become economically independent and start posing a threat to the U.S. economy.
In many cases, what they need is food, clean drinking water, and shelter. Let's get those bases covered before we start doling out the software, shall we?
Yes, that's right, and you don't need computers at all to deliver food drinking water and shelter. Oh wait...
Not to be trolling, but Eclipse is terribly slow (at least for me)
That is Eclipse's main problem, but if you throw enough hardware at it the problem disappears. I recently got a brand new Athlon 64 with 2GB dual channel memory at work, and Eclipse flies.
Eclipse's best feature: there are keyboard short cuts to do just about anything. There are in fact many features that are only accessible via short cuts.
It's just a pity that it is almost impossible to find out what all the short cuts are.
PrologFanBoy: "Prolog is the superset of all programming languages. Everything that you don't do in Prolog will be obsolete in 2 years. Procedural programming is dead. Now, for this 'Hello, World!' project: First we need to create a greeting ontology ... Hey, where are you guys going".
I had this colleague who was obsessed with Prolog. You would give him a small bug to fix in a C++ or a Delphi program, he would go on for a few weeks about how horrible and primitive the program is and how we should completely rewrite all our software in Prolog. He never actually completed a single job that was assigned to him.
Needless to say, he was fired very quickly.
I would call the terrorist a freedom fighter if those he was trying to wipe out were witholding his freedom.
So you're saying that the US is not withholding anyone's freedom. The "freedom fighters" would disagree: USA's support of Israel has a big effect on many people's freedom. Same for USA's military presence in the middle east and USA's occupation of Iraq.
By your logic someone who accidently kills several people in an auto accident would be morally worse that a murderer who kills but one person.
As the reply by the AC pointed out your analogy sucks.
Can you really not separate "Trying to kill civilians" from "Trying to kill people who intentionally kill civilians"?
It's actually trying to kill civilians because that is the only target you can successfully hit because you have no real military power Vs. Trying to kill terrorists and in the process killing 20 times more civilians than the terrorists ever did.
or
Trying to kill a few civilians out of desperation Vs. launching a systematic billion dollar campaign to destroy a country and to kill tens of thousands of people.
They are called different names because they ARE different. The terrorist has committed a crime in fact (murder) while the infidel has committed a crime only in the mind of the terrorist (different belief).
The "freedom fighters" would once again disagree. They hate infidels because they have murdered many innocent people. They hate the infidels because they invaded a country without provocation. They hate the infidels because of the US's military power in their countries. Just think how happy you would be if another country (say France) sets up military bases all over the US to look after their economic interests in the US?
Bottom line: I am NOT saying that the US is wrong and the al-Qaeda right, I am just saying that it is far from the black & white case you make it out to be.
That is the point that the original post tried to make: Who you see as the "good guys" and the "bad guys" has got a lot more to do with your perception and political beliefs than any rational reason.
I have personal experience of this: I grew up in South Africa. From as far back as I can remember we were taught to hate the terrorists and to support "our guys". The terrorists did horrible things (e.g. planting bombs in shopping centres). "Our guys" also did horrible things, but it was justified because they were fighting the "bad guys".
Guess what? The "terrorists" turned out to be right, and they're now running the country and everyone's better off.
Horrific crimes were committed by both sides during the fight, but at the end of the day, getting a peaceful solutions to everyone's problems was more important than punishing people for their crimes during the struggle. Go read up on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
This statement tends to fall apart when you realise that the freedom the terrorist is fighting for is freedom from your existence.
Are you referring to Islamic extremists or neocons here, because it applies nicely to both groups, which is the point that the grandparent post was trying to make.
That's cruel hard. Even President Chirac would concede that the USA is less bad than al-Qaeda.
Are you sure? In a 2003 TIMEeurope poll they asked "Who really poses the greatest danger to world peace? Iraq, North Korea or The United States". Almost 87% of people voted for the USA.
In what way was the actions of al-Qaeda more evil than the actions of US army in the past few years? By all the criteria that I can think of, the US Army is way ahead, e.g. number of attacks, number of innocent people killed, damage done to infrastructure etc.
The Terrorists seem a bit more forward to me; The Neocons hardly ever kill you for not converting.
How do you reckon? Compare body counts - USA is a few orders of magnitude ahead of al-Qaeda.
I checked the minutes of our Neocon meeting and we definitely had it down as "indiscriminantly killing *terrorists*".
At their meetings they call it "indiscriminately killing *infidels*". What does what you call the people want to kill have to do with anything?
Looking at recent events, such as the Tsunami and New Orleans flooding, it's an eye-catching number... but do the math. The Tsunami triggered by an 9.6-ish-on-the-richter-scale earthquake only managed to snuff out 0.0025% of the earth's population.
Another way to see it: World population grows by about 77 million people per year, or about 211000 people per day. That means that the earth's population number took less that two days to recover from the Asian tsunami.
The Nobel Prize is not awarded for a single act or document, but for a collection thereof. Books do not win Nobel Prizes, for example. Authors do.
Not really. In the Nobel prize for physics is almost always given for something specific that a person did. In Einstein's case it was awarded for "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect".
Most of the other physics prizes are just given "for his discovery/demonstration/development of X"
Rupert is the ONLY name that should be considered.
I bet that right now the invasion fleet is reading slashdot and waiting for the right time to make their move.
Danny Hillis of the Long Now Foundation has been pointing out these kinds of problems for years.
Most types of digital storage is not good for conserving data in the long run. Hardware changes. File formats change. Most digital media have a very limited lifetime.
As an example: We have a very good record of the letters that Greek philosophers wrote to each other 2000 years ago. On the other had there's loads of important research data from the early days of computing that's already lost forever.
Think that they'll be adjusting any of that due to the recent bombings in London?
I actually also wondered about that.
In the graphic novel the hero, V, is a terrorist and a psycho. He blows things up, killing the guilty and the innocent. He not the leader of a popular uprising, he's a loner. The closest thing he has to an ally is Evey - a girl he keeps imprisoned and tortures until she comes around to his way of thinking. The brilliance of the graphic novel stems from the fact that the reader identifies with the main character, even though he's cruel and clearly totally out of his mind.
Then again, the Wachowskis wrote the script, so it was probably nicely sanatised to remove all the controversial content. I fully expect to find that they changed the main character to be some sort of populist freedom fighter and Evey to be his willing side-kick.
There was a 60 Minutes peice on a country in South Africa, I think it was Mozambique, but I don't remember.
South Africa is a country. If you want to talk about the region it's Southern Africa.
Also, the only mention that I could find to something similar to what you discuss in your post is Equatorial Guinea, which is part of West Africa or Central Africa, depending on who you listen to. Either way, you're off by a few thousand miles. Oh, and they have a president, not a king.