Re:I think you jumped the gun a little.
on
Watchmen Watched
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Well, I must admit that I'm cheap though. Not that I can't spare the few dimes to see this in the theater, but I'd rather download this one and see it in the comfort of my own home.
No insanely marked up drinks and popcorn, no talking chicks behind you. No, just you and the movie. And you can go pee if you want to. Just hit 'pause' on VLC.
Yeah, I'm cheap. Or, rather, I don't like to fill the coffers of the local theaters for a sub-par performance (crap focus and crap sound) compared to the flawless experience at home.
I believe in rewarding the makers of stuff. I don't believe in rewarding brokers of stuff.
I never could get the hang of downloading from Usenet. It's hard to find stuff I like, even with the specialized search engines. The file naming is atrocious, and more than half the things I tried weren't complete. Perhaps I should get a pay server, I'm sure retention is much better with those.
I never have these problems with torrents. The Pirate Bay has an excellent search engine, fake torrents are easily spotted (just check the comments) and stuff Just Works.
I always hear about the States being a free market. Free enterprise and capitalism are always brought up in conversation as the essential liberties they enjoy, by Americans.
And now you tell me that they are living in communism where state sponsored monopolists get all the action?
At night your color vision isn't all that great anyway. The color photoreceptors aren't as sensitive as the "black and white" receptors.
But, as an experiment you can do at home: find something that has a lot of different colors, but it must not be printed (as the print proces only uses 4 inks to make up all the colors). Perhaps a box of crayons, or paint samples. During daylight (or incandescent light) sort them into a gradual rainbow. Wait until dark, and shine your LED headlight on them. See the difference? Some colors appear way darker / lighter this way. That is the effect of gaps in the spectrum.
Normal incancesdents are NOT full spectrum. That's why they produce such a nasty yellow light (color temp around 2700K).
Ok, let me rephrase that. Incandescents have a spectrum without gaps, but are (as all black body radiators) limited in upper frequency. Normal bulbs emit a yellow light (stronger in the red part, not so much towards the blue part of the spectrum), halogen bulbs go somewhat further up the spectrum and thus appear more white. Compared to daylight, even halogen is yellow. The point being made is that the spectrum has no gaps, it is just gradually attenuated at the upper part.
Fluorescents, including CFLs, are widely available in full spectrum.
I have sought high and wide, but I can't get CFL's with good color rendition. Even the ones marketed as "full spectrum" aren't very good! It appears the term "full spectrum" is used to denote "whiter" light, not "gapless" light. I can find excellent fluorescent tubes, but not CFL's. They do get better, but they have a lot of catch-up to do compared to the tube variety. I don't know why, both technologies look the same to me. Apparently they aren't.
LEDs aren't suitable for general lighting. Not bright enough and terrible color rendition. Doesn't matter for some uses, but matters a lot for general use.
It is as if the frequencies in its spectrum just miss the the ones my photoreceptors are tuned into...
Well, that's because the LEDs actually are missing (large) components of the spectrum!:-)
Even when your eyes are tricked into believing the light is white (by equally stimuling the three kinds of color-sensitive cells), the light reflected off of objects isn't "correct".
Imagine two green objects. One has true green pigment, the other has a mixture of yellow and blue pigment. Both look the same under incandescent light, because the light from a glowing filament emits a full spectrum .
When an LED doesn't emit a full spectrum the two objects don't like alike. The "true" green objects only reflects "true" green, not yellow + blue. The "yellow + blue" object doesn't reflect "true" green.
That's why it's hard to see in such light.
Your eyes (or brain) can adapt very well to changes in color temperature (yellowy incandescent light, or the blueish halogen light), but it can't cope with holes in the spectrum.
This goes for compact fluorescent lights as well, even as they keep getting better. The cheap ones are really crappy in this respect.
For fluorescent tubes there is a rating for color temperate and color rendition. It isn't used (as far as I know) for compact fluorescents as they score way to low on this scale. That would make the public relations department of the manufacturers unhappy.
Or you could, you know, just have everyone in one room and record the result of that. It's called music.
The only thing this "digital revolution" has brought to music is sterile, over-compressed, lifeless, lowest common denominator elevator muzak.
Listen to a band playing live (and even then larger band have all sorts of electronic wizardry involved). Compare that to the CD. World of difference. No punch to the drummer, no life in the lead guitar.
And don't even get me started about the vocal processing these days. I'm pretty sure young people haven't heard straight-up singing in their lifes.
Most wall-warts use a switch-mode power supply. You can tell these apart from the old fashioned ones by weight and size. Lumpy, heavy: old transformer type. Light and small: new SMPS.
Also, if your wall-wart says it auto ranges from 70V to 240V AC, there is a pretty good chance they run on DC as well.
Not that I would like the grid to switch to DC, for a myriad of reasons.
Say I have a really neat device. I point it at your car, push a button and suddenly I have a copy of your car. Yours isn't harmed in any way. And everytime I push the button, I get another car, just like you still have. Tens, hundreds, thousands even.
Have I just stolen your car? Have I stolen from the car company? Nope, I didn't.
But you know as well as I that with electronic copies, the barriers are completely removed.
True, no barriers. Make a thousand copies in the blink of an eye. And still, every study that is not paid for by the industry itself says 'pirating' is actually beneficiary to the bottom-line.
Sure, a lot of people get your product without paying for it. But they wouldn't have bought it anyway! No lost sales there. And there are (a lot actually) also people that had never heard of your product and now, due to free exposure, are suddenly buying your contents. Extra sales!
Publishers want DRM for one thing, and one thing only: to be kept in the loop. They aren't needed anymore, obsolete, and they know it. But they don't want you to find out.
Why you are right: nobody cares about things a random user on the internet does.
Why you are wrong: when "blhack" gets interesting in a social, political or whatever function, then this old, stale information will still be there. And you'd better believe 'they' will drag it out of the noise here.
Remedy: don't have your online presence be linked back to real life. Change usernames often (I once had an four digit/. account). And it helps to have a common name in real life. Hard to filter for the right John Smith, twinty years after the fact.
Doesn't work. The voltage drop over those distances is too great. There's a reason power lines are at 400kV and up. Unless you propose a new Ethernet standard which could deal with those levels.
That's a really unbalanced wager. If you win, you give away a loaf of bread you can easily afford. When parent wins, he has to give up a loaf while starving.
I have a (very) small garden, I don't imagine the yield could sustain my family. However, the harvest could supplement our food, true enough.
I've already thought about ripping out the deck and planting some crops. I have to learn me a book or two, as I'm a total noob at gardening. Guess Darwin will sort us out in the end.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I must admit that I'm cheap though. Not that I can't spare the few dimes to see this in the theater, but I'd rather download this one and see it in the comfort of my own home.
No insanely marked up drinks and popcorn, no talking chicks behind you. No, just you and the movie. And you can go pee if you want to. Just hit 'pause' on VLC.
Yeah, I'm cheap. Or, rather, I don't like to fill the coffers of the local theaters for a sub-par performance (crap focus and crap sound) compared to the flawless experience at home. I believe in rewarding the makers of stuff. I
don't believe in rewarding brokers of stuff.
It was a Sun workstation which I got on loan from school. I believe it had an 68020 cpu, but my memory is hazy with respect to that era.
:-)
That machine was a giant step up from the Prime minicomputer I had to use in the school labs.
Thanks for the beer raising, I'll raise a McChouffe right back at you!
UNIX wasn't exactly one of those home-user targeted operating systems.
It was in my home. Using Unix (in one form or another) since 1986, baby, yeah!
Also, stealing is a criminal offence, while copyright infringement is a civil matter.
Also, Metallica sucks balls. Iron Maiden FTW!
There are ways to get a non-traceable one-time creditcard number. The server doesn't care about your name and address either.
Besides, get a pay server outside your jurisdiction and don't worry about it.
I never could get the hang of downloading from Usenet. It's hard to find stuff I like, even with the specialized search engines. The file naming is atrocious, and more than half the things I tried weren't complete. Perhaps I should get a pay server, I'm sure retention is much better with those.
I never have these problems with torrents. The Pirate Bay has an excellent search engine, fake torrents are easily spotted (just check the comments) and stuff Just Works.
Issues with tangible media:
- I don't have an optical drive. CD's, DVD's and/or BluRay are worthless for me, as I can't read the media.
- Disks can and will break. A scratch on the wrong spot and hey, instant coaster.
- Dependent on the DRM used, you have to keep the disk in the drive, happily spinning away, generating noise and heat while wearing out your drive.
Disks are so last decade...
I always hear about the States being a free market. Free enterprise and capitalism are always brought up in conversation as the essential liberties they enjoy, by Americans.
And now you tell me that they are living in communism where state sponsored monopolists get all the action?
Things change, I guess.
At night your color vision isn't all that great anyway. The color photoreceptors aren't as sensitive as the "black and white" receptors.
But, as an experiment you can do at home: find something that has a lot of different colors, but it must not be printed (as the print proces only uses 4 inks to make up all the colors). Perhaps a box of crayons, or paint samples. During daylight (or incandescent light) sort them into a gradual rainbow. Wait until dark, and shine your LED headlight on them. See the difference? Some colors appear way darker / lighter this way. That is the effect of gaps in the spectrum.
Normal incancesdents are NOT full spectrum. That's why they produce such a nasty yellow light (color temp around 2700K).
Ok, let me rephrase that. Incandescents have a spectrum without gaps, but are (as all black body radiators) limited in upper frequency. Normal bulbs emit a yellow light (stronger in the red part, not so much towards the blue part of the spectrum), halogen bulbs go somewhat further up the spectrum and thus appear more white. Compared to daylight, even halogen is yellow. The point being made is that the spectrum has no gaps, it is just gradually attenuated at the upper part.
Fluorescents, including CFLs, are widely available in full spectrum.
I have sought high and wide, but I can't get CFL's with good color rendition. Even the ones marketed as "full spectrum" aren't very good! It appears the term "full spectrum" is used to denote "whiter" light, not "gapless" light. I can find excellent fluorescent tubes, but not CFL's. They do get better, but they have a lot of catch-up to do compared to the tube variety. I don't know why, both technologies look the same to me. Apparently they aren't.
LEDs aren't suitable for general lighting. Not bright enough and terrible color rendition. Doesn't matter for some uses, but matters a lot for general use.
It is as if the frequencies in its spectrum just miss the the ones my photoreceptors are tuned into...
:-)
Well, that's because the LEDs actually are missing (large) components of the spectrum!
Even when your eyes are tricked into believing the light is white (by equally stimuling the three kinds of color-sensitive cells), the light reflected off of objects isn't "correct".
Imagine two green objects. One has true green pigment, the other has a mixture of yellow and blue pigment. Both look the same under incandescent light, because the light from a glowing filament emits a full spectrum .
When an LED doesn't emit a full spectrum the two objects don't like alike. The "true" green objects only reflects "true" green, not yellow + blue. The "yellow + blue" object doesn't reflect "true" green.
That's why it's hard to see in such light.
Your eyes (or brain) can adapt very well to changes in color temperature (yellowy incandescent light, or the blueish halogen light), but it can't cope with holes in the spectrum.
This goes for compact fluorescent lights as well, even as they keep getting better. The cheap ones are really crappy in this respect.
For fluorescent tubes there is a rating for color temperate and color rendition. It isn't used (as far as I know) for compact fluorescents as they score way to low on this scale. That would make the public relations department of the manufacturers unhappy.
Or you could, you know, just have everyone in one room and record the result of that. It's called music.
The only thing this "digital revolution" has brought to music is sterile, over-compressed, lifeless, lowest common denominator elevator muzak.
Listen to a band playing live (and even then larger band have all sorts of electronic wizardry involved). Compare that to the CD. World of difference. No punch to the drummer, no life in the lead guitar.
And don't even get me started about the vocal processing these days. I'm pretty sure young people haven't heard straight-up singing in their lifes.
Or just plug it in and wait a minute. If it still works, it is an SMPS. When it starts to smell rather nasty, it was a traditional transformer.
Actually, don't do this. It might be dangerous. Fire! Destruction! Loss of well-being! Don't do this, ok?
Most wall-warts use a switch-mode power supply. You can tell these apart from the old fashioned ones by weight and size. Lumpy, heavy: old transformer type. Light and small: new SMPS.
Also, if your wall-wart says it auto ranges from 70V to 240V AC, there is a pretty good chance they run on DC as well.
Not that I would like the grid to switch to DC, for a myriad of reasons.
As parent said: their warranty covers loss of output power due to aging.
For warranty against other hazards, please consult your local insurance agent.
The difference might be that DVD's do not stop working when the publisher shuts off a license server.
Your period aint gonna impress anybody.
Well, I've known this girl in Tucson that would probably amaze you...
Car analogy time...
Say I have a really neat device. I point it at your car, push a button and suddenly I have a copy of your car. Yours isn't harmed in any way. And everytime I push the button, I get another car, just like you still have. Tens, hundreds, thousands even.
Have I just stolen your car? Have I stolen from the car company? Nope, I didn't.
But you know as well as I that with electronic copies, the barriers are completely removed.
True, no barriers. Make a thousand copies in the blink of an eye. And still, every study that is not paid for by the industry itself says 'pirating' is actually beneficiary to the bottom-line.
Sure, a lot of people get your product without paying for it. But they wouldn't have bought it anyway! No lost sales there. And there are (a lot actually) also people that had never heard of your product and now, due to free exposure, are suddenly buying your contents. Extra sales!
Publishers want DRM for one thing, and one thing only: to be kept in the loop. They aren't needed anymore, obsolete, and they know it. But they don't want you to find out.
Why you are right: nobody cares about things a random user on the internet does.
/. account). And it helps to have a common name in real life. Hard to filter for the right John Smith, twinty years after the fact.
Why you are wrong: when "blhack" gets interesting in a social, political or whatever function, then this old, stale information will still be there. And you'd better believe 'they' will drag it out of the noise here.
Remedy: don't have your online presence be linked back to real life. Change usernames often (I once had an four digit
Doesn't work. The voltage drop over those distances is too great. There's a reason power lines are at 400kV and up. Unless you propose a new Ethernet standard which could deal with those levels.
Your data should be backed up. If you lose data, it is your own damn fault.
And I'm not sure which decade you're from, but between chroot and jails we already have proper sandboxing.
Really, try to keep up, will ya?
That's a really unbalanced wager. If you win, you give away a loaf of bread you can easily afford. When parent wins, he has to give up a loaf while starving.
I wouldn't take that wager, no way.
I have a (very) small garden, I don't imagine the yield could sustain my family. However, the harvest could supplement our food, true enough.
I've already thought about ripping out the deck and planting some crops. I have to learn me a book or two, as I'm a total noob at gardening. Guess Darwin will sort us out in the end.
Perhaps the food can't be easily transported to the cities. Or the prices will rise so large groups can't afford it anymore.
Also, don't throw bricks at ducks. Seriously.