There's an ipod game, I think it's called Song Summoner or something. Basically, you take a song from your ipod and make a monster out of it, then you battle evil with it. The evil is a bunch of robots that want to destroy all music and enslave humans.
Short story even shorter: It's a beautiful metaphor for the major labels. They want to destroy music by filling the market with generic crap, and they want to enslave us by forcing us to pay them for it.
They're stupid, they want to die. If this goes through, and you know it will, the entire population should give the major labels the finger and refuse to use anything that gives them money, and refuse to pay for anything they sell. If they make it so that we pay them no matter what we do, we should just cut them the fuck off. I'm sick of them, and I haven't given them a penny in 6 months. God willing, I won't give them a penny for the rest of my life. If it makes me miss out on some music, I'll deal. I have a nice enough library of music, so I'll hold out for their violent death when I can get the songs from the artists, without middlemen riding their backs and raping them.
In most "free" MMOs, the process is roughly similar: release something, screw something up, patch it and screw people over. I'll list an example from Goonzu (they call it Luminary sometimes). There was a glitch where if you claimed a hunting ground for your guild, your guild would gain roughly 30-40 levels. So, some guilds went from level 30-70 overnight. They patched it swiftly but did nothing to undo the guild level ups. So there was a huge gap between the 20 or so guilds that did it, and the hundreds that couldn't. And that's just one example: glitches, bugs, hacks, cheats...just spend about a week on any MMO and you'll see it. Another example: Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine recently had an FC (Fortune Card) snafu where they forgot to code in the rare item you could get from it. To fix it, they changed it into a raffle: the more rl cash you spent on the FC's, the more rare items you would get. This didn't count prior purchases, though, so anyone who spent money trying to get it before the patch was shit out of luck.
Just some examples; I'm sure I could find more. And somehow, MMO free-to-players are fine with the constant bludgeoning they get...
I forgot to add in that the bridge and strings also contribute to the sound: I know someone who put back together a violin from the 1860's. They hand carved the bridge, fine tuners, and so on from bone. They used a nice set of strings, and the sound was phenomenal.
It'd be worth it to have little workshops showing off the differences in violins; it's really quite a fascinating thing to look at.
The reason why people claim to not hear a difference is very simple: they don't want to hear a difference because they don't care. As you go up the line of higher end violins, the differences become so nuanced that an amateur probably wouldn't notice. A $500 violin against a $50,000 violin, well that's easy to tell apart. But a $50,000 violin against a $55,000 violin?
This is part of the massive conspiracy to eventually make all citizens criminals by default. To alleviate the problem, all citizens will have to go to some form of re-education at a young age to receive a certificate that deems them non-criminals. Or something. Really, I think it's just a way for them to say we're all law-breakers, then not let us see what law it is. Our Kangaroo Courts will throw more people into jail faster if you remove the "why" part of "Guilty!".
Mass produced violins will tend to sound tinny due to their mass-production. Placing immense care into an instrument that'll be in the hands of a 6th grader who really wants to skip school to smoke pot would be a waste of time, so they churn out low quality instruments.
Individually built violins have a warmer tone, as more care is put into them. But that's just on the outer rim of effort put in. The type of wood, the location of the tree it was cut from, how it was cut, weather it withstood, and so on...those all contribute to the sound.
Unlike say, a synthesizer, which can improve its sound exponentially with every additional advancement in computer technology.
You could no doubt improve a violin with digital enhancement, but only for digital distribution. For a live performance, while your digital diva would be setting up hundreds of wires, a simple bow is the only tool a violinist needs to play just as good.
Or, in simpler terms: when you get something right, you don't need to tack on a computer to make it better. Violins are very much so physical, and there is currently no known method to mechanically produce timber that is better than the Strad's timber. Nor is there a particular need to; with people like you saying that all violins sound the same, it seems a damn waste of time to even try.
One of the signs of paranoia is a tendency to spin fanciful tales off the slimmest of evidence...it's not to look up what these things are if you're not familiar.
Also one of the signs of a damn "good" US lawyer...you laugh, but give it ten years and it'll be illegal to give a heart rate monitor to a child.
Neither was I; but if you really don't think that they would go to such measures, just go to your local school and check out their cafeteria. First they took our plastic knives, for they could be used as weapons. Then our forks, for they could also be used in such a way. Finally, we were left with just sporks. Meanwhile, we used scissors and other, far sharper instruments in our classes. Were they expecting kids to hide the plastic cutlery in their pockets and then stab people with it? There are also laws (in Maryland at least) stating that a kid does not need to go to the bathroom during class, so a teacher can go ahead and refuse them this basic function (it went to court because some kid pissed herself when her teacher refused to let her go).
If you doubt the most absurd sounding censorship, ask a kid what they can't do at school.
Not far enough. Ban metals because they can be melted down into guns and knives, ban fire because it can be used for arson, ban soil because you can grow pot in it, ban oxygen because criminals breathe!
In 4,000 years, I can see it being an entirely plastic world, where metals are reserved for the military. Fire is only used by the government, soil is only used by tightly regulated food producers, and everybody has specially assigned air tanks: if you aren't wearing your air tank, it clearly means that you are trying to hide what you're doing.
So, give it a few generations and we'll finally be censored completely; by then it'll be illegal to even attempt to question the government./stopsfreakingout
'Cause when they first start doing it, it makes no damn sense at all. Give 'em another twenty years or so and all the little holes will be patched up and we'll all be criminals.
So what you're saying is that every OS ever released needs to have absolutely 0 lines of exploitable code; if it doesn't, then the OS maker needs to repair bug ever to appear on it. If you believe that, you should be foaming at the mouth just as much over Apple.
Okay, so if I coded some software that had some sort of medical use on my computer, would everyone also get all up in arms if insurance companies wouldn't cover my PC that I use almost entirely for entertainment purposes?
The ONLY way that an insurance company should be able to insure a phone is if the phone has everything stripped of it except for the ability to dial 911 and use the medical software. Why the hell is anyone assuming that slapping an iBandaid program on something means that if your dumb ass drops the iPhone in the toilet someone else should pay to replace it?
Microsoft XP is not hardware. This would be like if your 1998 Chevy's....air conditioner broke down and you threw a fit that they wouldn't fix it. Buy a new A/C. Now, if Microsoft XP was the actual computer and IT had a safety defect, yes, your car analogy would make sense. Right now you're claiming that software is just as deadly and impossible to replace as hardware. In the case of replacing a computer, unless you buy the same thing it'll probably cost several hundred dollars, thousands if you buy it premade and snappy. If you need to replace software because it's no longer supported...it's not like it's particularly expensive (some options are free).
Or, uh, this would be like saying "Catz 3 doesn't work on my Vista computer, the makers of Catz 3 MUST fix this problem even though Catz 5 is out and works with Vista".
When you release something and then release something else, you should stop supporting the previous thing so that everyone is forced to buy the new one, even if it isn't necessarily better. You know, kind of like if Sony told you to take your PS2 and stuff it if something went wrong with it because the PS3 is out now.
MS hate aside, they're just doing what they've always done. We don't get our panties in a knot when they don't release a Win 98 patch, do we? With Win 7 on our doorstep, there is no reason for MS to be supporting three separate OS. Well, aside from customer service. I just sort of shrug my shoulders and deal with it. Anyone running XP knows they're doing it because Vista/7 don't appeal to them; deal with the consequences.
1. Cut funding on school sports, apply to science.
2. Make more science related shows that don't make it sound too hard, but don't make it sound stupid either.
3. Tell the politicians to shut up and leave science alone.
4. Tell the religious to shut up and leave science alone.
Only after the money is there for cool lab experiments, only after the TV shows are there and remain untouched (Bill Nye should have never gone away, the fools), only after the extremist Christians stop hurling their book at evolution as hard as they can, and only after the politicians stop performing fellatio on said extremist Christians so they can keep their Fat Cat jobs will we see a return in science. Until then, we can expect evolution to still be "false", we can expect science to be "lame, gay, retarded", and we can expect all scientific advancements to be met with extreme resistance from an uneducated public watching Fox News.
We should probably be less concerned with his data on netbook usage in his classes, then, and more concerned with an intelligent campus. Think about it: several buildings under his control, several dozen super powerful computers all obeying him...Howl's Moving Castle mixed with HAL intelligence, methinks.
And yet I have at least two or three students in each of my classes carrying a netbook and treating it like a notebook. Anecdotal stories work both ways because what is true for your university is not true for every university. For all you or I know, we are minorities. Your university could be the only one that has no netbooks, or mine could be the only one using them.
So, don't take it with a grain of salt. Just understand that an article saying they are used in college != every single college in the world will have netbooks exploding out of the chalkboards en mass.
Whoopdie Shit.
Nothing quite beats apologizing for leading someone to suicide because they didn't love what your government decreed everyone should love...long after their death. Maybe next time the government will, I dunno, apologize in their lifetime! Better still, how about not doing something grossly inhumane to someone? Hell, Turing did good things for these assholes and all he got was shame and suffering from them. Any "deeply sorry" just comes off as "Well I guess I better do this before someone throws a rock through my window" in my eyes.
And the parts to build the nuclear facilities? And the repairs? These would still no doubt be oil-run, as would transportation to the facility. Solar parts are currently built using oil at some point or the other, and biomass requires huge amounts of resources in order to do what oil does. We chose oil not because it's easy to obtain, but because it gives us the most bang for our buck.
While/.ers tend to have the knowledge not to post everything about themselves on Facebook. Sadly,/.ers do not make up the majority of Facebookers. In fact, the typical Facebooker plasters fifty different photos of them, some of which are incriminating (people getting expelled from school for pictures of them with booze, naughty pics, etc) for either the whole world or their friends to see.
Some Facebookers accept any friend requests they get, no matter who it is or if they know them.
Some Facebookers talk about smoking pot, about stealing something, about patrolling for chicks to screw, anything and everything from petty crime to just plain idiocy is announced on Facebook.
So, these casual Facebookers see a way to 'protect' themselves and use it, feeling falsely secure. One of their "friends" who is really just someone digging dirt outs it to people offline. Casual Facebooker sees this and turns on Facebook, suing them for their stupidity. What can Facebook do? Society would easily blame Facebook, and they'd pay out some gratuitous fee to the little moron, and then Facebook would lose its popularity.
But wait! Facebooker had signed up for this protection service! It was Facebooker's fault for befriending the wrong person! Facebook is without sin, Facebooker gets screwed, everybody knows the secret Facebooker couldn't shut up about, and we're all happy (except for Facebooker, but Facebooker was so stupid that it was bound to happen eventually anyway).
This ignores that pretty much all of the oil companies have over-exaggerated how much oil they are actually getting from their fields. It's already estimated that we discovered all of the large oil fields by the 50's, and that we've already tapped all of the easy to drill fields.
If that's true, it will cost more to drill the new fields in Alaska, both in energy and money, then they would actually get from drilling.
We need to think up a plan that can generate more energy without needing oil to start it. If we can't figure it out soon, we'll see oil rationed off strictly to research. I don't think the common people will enjoy not being able to drive to work and having to farm/hunt/forage until the collective governments of the world agree to stop fighting and work together to save us.
So, in order for us to succeed, we would need the following:
-No more war
-Everyone working together, damning the expenses and not cheating anyone out of anything, 100% transparency
-Rationing of oil to work on necessities like new fuel and space colonies, thus taking it apart as a business: no profit, no set costs
-Cutting spending on weapons, ocean exploration, bridges, roads, and everything else to focus on getting this done quickly
If those things happen, I can see it all working out. Otherwise, we'll have delays, government hoop jumping, wars, profiteers, and long UN meetings ironing out who gets what chunk of space so that everyone can prepare for space wars. Unless the entire world agrees to cooperate, we will waste a -lot- of time and energy figuring out useless and pointless things. If they don't cooperate and do things quickly, we'll end up with a shoddily built space station, space wars, space pirates, and very limited resources. Our current ways, political and consumption, will only serve to destroy us in this Utopian space future we all desire.
Yup, but as of right now the plan is to drill just to keep living as we do, and not to expand into space. If we don't start working on the future now, we're gonna be screwed when the future arrives at our doorstep. You can certainly kiss the space station dream goodbye if we run out of oil before we figure out how to harvest from space.
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Man, this makes SOOOOOOOO angry.
Saxons Of Otherwise Ordinary Occupations Originate Over On Ontario is angry about this? I hear it's rare to make them mad...
Short story even shorter: It's a beautiful metaphor for the major labels. They want to destroy music by filling the market with generic crap, and they want to enslave us by forcing us to pay them for it.
So sick of them.
In most "free" MMOs, the process is roughly similar: release something, screw something up, patch it and screw people over. I'll list an example from Goonzu (they call it Luminary sometimes). There was a glitch where if you claimed a hunting ground for your guild, your guild would gain roughly 30-40 levels. So, some guilds went from level 30-70 overnight. They patched it swiftly but did nothing to undo the guild level ups. So there was a huge gap between the 20 or so guilds that did it, and the hundreds that couldn't. And that's just one example: glitches, bugs, hacks, cheats...just spend about a week on any MMO and you'll see it. Another example: Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine recently had an FC (Fortune Card) snafu where they forgot to code in the rare item you could get from it. To fix it, they changed it into a raffle: the more rl cash you spent on the FC's, the more rare items you would get. This didn't count prior purchases, though, so anyone who spent money trying to get it before the patch was shit out of luck.
Just some examples; I'm sure I could find more. And somehow, MMO free-to-players are fine with the constant bludgeoning they get...
At least that'll appease our right-wingers that want the US to be a Christian Nation...
It'd be worth it to have little workshops showing off the differences in violins; it's really quite a fascinating thing to look at.
The reason why people claim to not hear a difference is very simple: they don't want to hear a difference because they don't care. As you go up the line of higher end violins, the differences become so nuanced that an amateur probably wouldn't notice. A $500 violin against a $50,000 violin, well that's easy to tell apart. But a $50,000 violin against a $55,000 violin?
This is part of the massive conspiracy to eventually make all citizens criminals by default. To alleviate the problem, all citizens will have to go to some form of re-education at a young age to receive a certificate that deems them non-criminals. Or something. Really, I think it's just a way for them to say we're all law-breakers, then not let us see what law it is. Our Kangaroo Courts will throw more people into jail faster if you remove the "why" part of "Guilty!".
Mass produced violins will tend to sound tinny due to their mass-production. Placing immense care into an instrument that'll be in the hands of a 6th grader who really wants to skip school to smoke pot would be a waste of time, so they churn out low quality instruments.
Individually built violins have a warmer tone, as more care is put into them. But that's just on the outer rim of effort put in. The type of wood, the location of the tree it was cut from, how it was cut, weather it withstood, and so on...those all contribute to the sound.
Unlike say, a synthesizer, which can improve its sound exponentially with every additional advancement in computer technology.
You could no doubt improve a violin with digital enhancement, but only for digital distribution. For a live performance, while your digital diva would be setting up hundreds of wires, a simple bow is the only tool a violinist needs to play just as good.
Or, in simpler terms: when you get something right, you don't need to tack on a computer to make it better. Violins are very much so physical, and there is currently no known method to mechanically produce timber that is better than the Strad's timber. Nor is there a particular need to; with people like you saying that all violins sound the same, it seems a damn waste of time to even try.
One of the signs of paranoia is a tendency to spin fanciful tales off the slimmest of evidence...it's not to look up what these things are if you're not familiar.
Also one of the signs of a damn "good" US lawyer...you laugh, but give it ten years and it'll be illegal to give a heart rate monitor to a child.
If you doubt the most absurd sounding censorship, ask a kid what they can't do at school.
In 4,000 years, I can see it being an entirely plastic world, where metals are reserved for the military. Fire is only used by the government, soil is only used by tightly regulated food producers, and everybody has specially assigned air tanks: if you aren't wearing your air tank, it clearly means that you are trying to hide what you're doing.
So, give it a few generations and we'll finally be censored completely; by then it'll be illegal to even attempt to question the government. /stopsfreakingout
'Cause when they first start doing it, it makes no damn sense at all. Give 'em another twenty years or so and all the little holes will be patched up and we'll all be criminals.
So what you're saying is that every OS ever released needs to have absolutely 0 lines of exploitable code; if it doesn't, then the OS maker needs to repair bug ever to appear on it. If you believe that, you should be foaming at the mouth just as much over Apple.
The ONLY way that an insurance company should be able to insure a phone is if the phone has everything stripped of it except for the ability to dial 911 and use the medical software. Why the hell is anyone assuming that slapping an iBandaid program on something means that if your dumb ass drops the iPhone in the toilet someone else should pay to replace it?
Or, uh, this would be like saying "Catz 3 doesn't work on my Vista computer, the makers of Catz 3 MUST fix this problem even though Catz 5 is out and works with Vista".
MS hate aside, they're just doing what they've always done. We don't get our panties in a knot when they don't release a Win 98 patch, do we? With Win 7 on our doorstep, there is no reason for MS to be supporting three separate OS. Well, aside from customer service. I just sort of shrug my shoulders and deal with it. Anyone running XP knows they're doing it because Vista/7 don't appeal to them; deal with the consequences.
2. Make more science related shows that don't make it sound too hard, but don't make it sound stupid either.
3. Tell the politicians to shut up and leave science alone.
4. Tell the religious to shut up and leave science alone.
Only after the money is there for cool lab experiments, only after the TV shows are there and remain untouched (Bill Nye should have never gone away, the fools), only after the extremist Christians stop hurling their book at evolution as hard as they can, and only after the politicians stop performing fellatio on said extremist Christians so they can keep their Fat Cat jobs will we see a return in science. Until then, we can expect evolution to still be "false", we can expect science to be "lame, gay, retarded", and we can expect all scientific advancements to be met with extreme resistance from an uneducated public watching Fox News.
We should probably be less concerned with his data on netbook usage in his classes, then, and more concerned with an intelligent campus. Think about it: several buildings under his control, several dozen super powerful computers all obeying him...Howl's Moving Castle mixed with HAL intelligence, methinks.
So, don't take it with a grain of salt. Just understand that an article saying they are used in college != every single college in the world will have netbooks exploding out of the chalkboards en mass.
Whoopdie Shit. Nothing quite beats apologizing for leading someone to suicide because they didn't love what your government decreed everyone should love...long after their death. Maybe next time the government will, I dunno, apologize in their lifetime! Better still, how about not doing something grossly inhumane to someone? Hell, Turing did good things for these assholes and all he got was shame and suffering from them. Any "deeply sorry" just comes off as "Well I guess I better do this before someone throws a rock through my window" in my eyes.
-Finally convince congressfolk to do something.
-Congressfolk feel that current system works.
-When oil finally runs out, they didn't plan a new way to fuel repairs, thus leaving us a very short period of time to try and find alternatives.
Or maybe I'm just so pessimistic that I can't see things working D:
And the parts to build the nuclear facilities? And the repairs? These would still no doubt be oil-run, as would transportation to the facility. Solar parts are currently built using oil at some point or the other, and biomass requires huge amounts of resources in order to do what oil does. We chose oil not because it's easy to obtain, but because it gives us the most bang for our buck.
Some Facebookers accept any friend requests they get, no matter who it is or if they know them.
Some Facebookers talk about smoking pot, about stealing something, about patrolling for chicks to screw, anything and everything from petty crime to just plain idiocy is announced on Facebook.
So, these casual Facebookers see a way to 'protect' themselves and use it, feeling falsely secure. One of their "friends" who is really just someone digging dirt outs it to people offline. Casual Facebooker sees this and turns on Facebook, suing them for their stupidity. What can Facebook do? Society would easily blame Facebook, and they'd pay out some gratuitous fee to the little moron, and then Facebook would lose its popularity.
But wait! Facebooker had signed up for this protection service! It was Facebooker's fault for befriending the wrong person! Facebook is without sin, Facebooker gets screwed, everybody knows the secret Facebooker couldn't shut up about, and we're all happy (except for Facebooker, but Facebooker was so stupid that it was bound to happen eventually anyway).
If that's true, it will cost more to drill the new fields in Alaska, both in energy and money, then they would actually get from drilling.
We need to think up a plan that can generate more energy without needing oil to start it. If we can't figure it out soon, we'll see oil rationed off strictly to research. I don't think the common people will enjoy not being able to drive to work and having to farm/hunt/forage until the collective governments of the world agree to stop fighting and work together to save us.
So, in order for us to succeed, we would need the following:
-No more war
-Everyone working together, damning the expenses and not cheating anyone out of anything, 100% transparency
-Rationing of oil to work on necessities like new fuel and space colonies, thus taking it apart as a business: no profit, no set costs
-Cutting spending on weapons, ocean exploration, bridges, roads, and everything else to focus on getting this done quickly
If those things happen, I can see it all working out. Otherwise, we'll have delays, government hoop jumping, wars, profiteers, and long UN meetings ironing out who gets what chunk of space so that everyone can prepare for space wars. Unless the entire world agrees to cooperate, we will waste a -lot- of time and energy figuring out useless and pointless things. If they don't cooperate and do things quickly, we'll end up with a shoddily built space station, space wars, space pirates, and very limited resources. Our current ways, political and consumption, will only serve to destroy us in this Utopian space future we all desire.
Yup, but as of right now the plan is to drill just to keep living as we do, and not to expand into space. If we don't start working on the future now, we're gonna be screwed when the future arrives at our doorstep. You can certainly kiss the space station dream goodbye if we run out of oil before we figure out how to harvest from space.