This is just treating a symptom of the problem that people don't feel like they need to vote. We (I live in Canada) should really be doing more to make people feel that their vote counts, and that it is a person's duty to vote. Sure, voting through the internet may be easier, but it won't make people want to vote more.
Why don't people vote anymore? My guess is our decentralized culture these days. In the past people got their news, entertainment, information, etc. from the same general sources -- usually local. Now everyone seeks everywhere for these things. When an election comes about, people don't even know who the candidates are let alone what are the issues at hand.
We need to treat the source of the problem. We need to get people rallied (in a word) to vote. We need a centralized place where people, especially young people, can get information on the candidates, their parties, and the issues they plan to attend to. Honestly, most of this information gets lost in today's culture.
A lot of time the rules are non-deterministic though. My guess is that someone complained about you and that's how you got kicked off of Facebook. If nobody complained then probably nothing would have happened.
Yes it is non-deterministic, but if you do stuff that gets people pissed off enough then the authorities are going to notice.
This is the best piece of advice I've heard on this thread, and I completely agree. I had a couple of gfs who dumped me after about the same period of time dating. Finally, I decided to change my ways with my next gf.
I acted liked I had better things to do than be with her. I'd say that I'd call her and then "forget" or call an hour later. I'd let her know I had something to do so had to leave soon.
Honestly, women seem to love this. I'm not really sure what it is, but essentially all the advice came from askmen.com.
Anyway, 5 years going strong with said gf. Couldn't be happier.
You can have a great relationship with non-geek girls too. There are a lot of women who aren't nerds, but are still interested and knowledgable in technology. Take visual arts chicks who are in graphic design, for example. They often like games, too.
This is one of those things that a nerd can't ask normal people and get an answer worth two cents.
Ask a normal person how to be social and they'll list a million things that the nerd can't do/doesn't understand/won't get the nerve to go through with. Ask a slashdotter, and while the advice may not be so great, at least the nerd should be capable of doing it.
no statutory damages could be awarded as to any work whose copyright registration effective date was subsequent to the date of defendant's commencement of use of Kazaa
I'm sorry but this logic is laughable. Say I started using Kazaa in 2005. In 2006 I take a newly produced and copywritten album and share it, no problem! The effective date of the copyright (2006) is subsequent to when I started using Kazaa (2005), so I'm in the clear. The earlier you start file sharing, the better!
...the idea that ANY song is worth 80,000$ for being stolen in ANY form is pretty ludicrous and now widely acknowledged as such.
Well that's exactly right. The $80K per song is not for just stealing, but for distribution -- a whole different ball game.
Taking one song and using it on my own is entirely different from taking that song and giving it to everyone else for free. There's no telling how many (potential) sales the woman destroyed when she chose to take part in "file sharing" the way she did.
The phone techs you talk to when you call AT&T have access to a lot of tools and information you may not have access to, but ultimately, they are limited to handling the kinds of issues they have been trained to handle. Getting new material to these techs takes a long time and a lot of work. Chances are, they didn't help you because they don't know how to respond.
I worked in a Bell Canada call center before, and from what you're saying, it sounds like you've worked in some sort of call center in your life. While I sympathize with employees, it in no way makes it right.
The customer service is organized in a non-customer-service way these days -- anything to get them off of the phone. Calls can only last an average of 4 minutes. Any longer than that and you get penalized in some way (unnecessary coaching, failing to get that new position or a raise). The customers have no control over it because every single company does it the same way, through outsourcing.
I know I'm opening up a new can of worms here, but if the customer service was better then they would have been able to help.
Roland Ennos designed a machine which enabled him to measure the amount of friction generated by a fingerprint when it was in contact with an acrylic glass at varying levels of pressure.
Acrylic glass. Now that sounds like something primates would be gripping thousands of years ago!
The results showed that friction levels increased by a much smaller amount than had been anticipated, debunking the hypothesis that fingerprints provide an improved grip. Ennos believes that fingerprints may have evolved to grip onto rough surfaces...
This proves that fingerprints do not improve grip... instead we hypothesize that they might be evolved to improve grip. Really? *shakes head*
It's ironic that you mentioned the DVD player. Really, it was one of the reasons that the PS2 was so successful. I remember people were buying the things for watching movies alone.
Years later, PS3 comes out with Bluray and it nearly kills Sony. They had huge losses last year. People aren't flocking to Bluray like they did with DVDs.
More interesting though is: what will happen next generation? Will there be another disc format beyond Bluray, or is it all digital from here on out? Sony has used their consoles as a means of promoting their formats (DVD, Bluray, UMD) for a couple of consoles now. Now the PSP Go goes digital. Will PS4 be digital as well?
"I'll go ahead and boycott (insert service provider) because I don't believe in their terms. I'll just go with (insert other service provider) because I like their terms. Oh wait, all service providers have equally horrible terms. I only have one other option left -- not get a phone! Oh joy!"
You have to realize that while customers have choices, all choices are awful.
If you want to just lay there and take it, that's your prerogative, but kindly have the decency to shut the fuck up about how you're not receiving a perceived fair bargain from the entity you willfully signed your custom away to.
Thank you, but I won't "shut the fuck up" until I have a choice that's reasonable. Customers have a right to complain and your bitching won't take that away from them.
The problem is that customers have to pay full price for the new phone, yet they still remain on contract. Some correct options are possible:
Renew contract for 2 years, pay subsidized cost, and trade in the iPhone 3G for the 3GS.
Pay unsubsidized cost for a 3GS. Thus the customer keeps the 3G (still on contract) and gets a 3GS (contractless).
I can understand not just letting customers pay the subsidized cost for the 3GS and remain on the same contract. But not letting customers renew their contracts for another 2 years in order to pay the subsidized cost for the 3GS is a bastard move no matter how you look at it.
I'm sure the notion of being payed for doing schoolwork has occurred to everyone in their elementary days. Then I got older and realized that I was getting an education for free. (Really through taxes, but essentially free.)
Despite your sarcasm, the music industry will choose one way or the other. This will be the best (highest capital gaining) method for them. Meaning, streaming will become standard. This is because they get to charge you for it continuously because you never "own" it. It's simple economics, really.
I know quite a few people I had to drag, kicking and screaming, to play a game on the Wii with me. They almost ALWAYS enjoy themselves. But more often than not, they flat out REFUSE to admit they enjoyed themselves and start bitching about the controller shape or the shell color or just about anything to convince themselves that they hate the system.
Same thing happens with Flash games
Yes, people playing the Wii for the first time always enjoy the experience. It's the "wow" factor.
But, like the hate for Flash games, the hate for Wii and its games is much for the same reason. The games are (usually) hollow with little replay value. The Wii games in particular are mostly designed to entertain the new "motion-control" crowd and leave the seasoned veterans bored out of their minds.
Most people who buy the Wii play it for about four months, then it collects dust until they sell it.
Thing is that not all sauropods held their necks in this way. Diplodocus held their necks pretty much horizontally, using their long tails as a counterbalance. Brachiosaurus/Brontosaurus held their necks more vertically, and did not have as long of a tail as the diplodocus. As the spines of humans has shown, we don't exactly line up the way we were meant to. Perhaps this is the same for the dinosaurs.
Instead, society directs much of its energy toward stopping progress by trying to keep as many people as possible as busy as possible whether that has a purpose or not.
I'm pretty sure that people used to work in factories for 18 hours a day. The move to 8 hours of labour, 8 hours of relaxation, 8 hours of rest was a huge one and has generally continued into our society.
The invention of the tractor could have meant much more leisure time for a society that had a large agricultural base, but instead, due to unequal wealth distribution, it just meant one person working even longer hours and a lot of people desperately trying to find something else to do. That pattern has been seen again and again, resulting in increasingly pointless jobs as surplus labour attempts to justify an income.
What do you think was going to happen? The owner lets everyone work less hours and pay them the same amount? People seem to think that technologies working for us should correlate with more leisure time. This is naive. Technologies would not be implemented unless they were cheaper, which is what always happens. This causes jobs to be cut because the tech is more favorable than people.
Industries change. In this case, there was a movement from rural to urban areas and a greater focus on technology. Because we don't have as many people in agricultural employment, we have greater technology which helps health, entertainment, and life in general.
I can't see why you don't see these progressive changes as good.
Did the study even consider that more popular games might get pirated more, despite their DRM? And it just so happens that the more popular games usually have DRM while others are more likely to not.
You can't just look at the number of pirated copies and correlate with DRM. That is jumping to a conclusion. After all, did you see (insert shitty game with DRM) pirated more than (insert good game without DRM)? There are plenty of examples of the contrary. We don't usually see this, because the better games are more expensive to make and therefore have DRM protection. So in fact, it makes sense that games with DRM would get pirated more, but only in coincidence due to the games popularity.
Slashdot Mirror
This is just treating a symptom of the problem that people don't feel like they need to vote. We (I live in Canada) should really be doing more to make people feel that their vote counts, and that it is a person's duty to vote. Sure, voting through the internet may be easier, but it won't make people want to vote more.
Why don't people vote anymore? My guess is our decentralized culture these days. In the past people got their news, entertainment, information, etc. from the same general sources -- usually local. Now everyone seeks everywhere for these things. When an election comes about, people don't even know who the candidates are let alone what are the issues at hand.
We need to treat the source of the problem. We need to get people rallied (in a word) to vote. We need a centralized place where people, especially young people, can get information on the candidates, their parties, and the issues they plan to attend to. Honestly, most of this information gets lost in today's culture.
The latest example showing the real Obama is this attempt by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to censor opposing opinions.
This shows the real Obama... how? Your explanation is so bad I can't tell if you're trolling or serious.
A lot of time the rules are non-deterministic though. My guess is that someone complained about you and that's how you got kicked off of Facebook. If nobody complained then probably nothing would have happened.
Yes it is non-deterministic, but if you do stuff that gets people pissed off enough then the authorities are going to notice.
If anything, concentrate on not falling for them.
This is the best piece of advice I've heard on this thread, and I completely agree. I had a couple of gfs who dumped me after about the same period of time dating. Finally, I decided to change my ways with my next gf.
I acted liked I had better things to do than be with her. I'd say that I'd call her and then "forget" or call an hour later. I'd let her know I had something to do so had to leave soon.
Honestly, women seem to love this. I'm not really sure what it is, but essentially all the advice came from askmen.com.
Anyway, 5 years going strong with said gf. Couldn't be happier.
You can have a great relationship with non-geek girls too. There are a lot of women who aren't nerds, but are still interested and knowledgable in technology. Take visual arts chicks who are in graphic design, for example. They often like games, too.
Aim high, hit high.
This is one of those things that a nerd can't ask normal people and get an answer worth two cents.
Ask a normal person how to be social and they'll list a million things that the nerd can't do/doesn't understand/won't get the nerve to go through with. Ask a slashdotter, and while the advice may not be so great, at least the nerd should be capable of doing it.
no statutory damages could be awarded as to any work whose copyright registration effective date was subsequent to the date of defendant's commencement of use of Kazaa
I'm sorry but this logic is laughable. Say I started using Kazaa in 2005. In 2006 I take a newly produced and copywritten album and share it, no problem! The effective date of the copyright (2006) is subsequent to when I started using Kazaa (2005), so I'm in the clear. The earlier you start file sharing, the better!
It's not pointless. There's a message here: Don't be a deadbeat dad or you'll have yourself charred and sold on Ebay.
...the idea that ANY song is worth 80,000$ for being stolen in ANY form is pretty ludicrous and now widely acknowledged as such.
Well that's exactly right. The $80K per song is not for just stealing, but for distribution -- a whole different ball game.
Taking one song and using it on my own is entirely different from taking that song and giving it to everyone else for free. There's no telling how many (potential) sales the woman destroyed when she chose to take part in "file sharing" the way she did.
The phone techs you talk to when you call AT&T have access to a lot of tools and information you may not have access to, but ultimately, they are limited to handling the kinds of issues they have been trained to handle. Getting new material to these techs takes a long time and a lot of work. Chances are, they didn't help you because they don't know how to respond.
I worked in a Bell Canada call center before, and from what you're saying, it sounds like you've worked in some sort of call center in your life. While I sympathize with employees, it in no way makes it right.
The customer service is organized in a non-customer-service way these days -- anything to get them off of the phone. Calls can only last an average of 4 minutes. Any longer than that and you get penalized in some way (unnecessary coaching, failing to get that new position or a raise). The customers have no control over it because every single company does it the same way, through outsourcing.
I know I'm opening up a new can of worms here, but if the customer service was better then they would have been able to help.
Roland Ennos designed a machine which enabled him to measure the amount of friction generated by a fingerprint when it was in contact with an acrylic glass at varying levels of pressure.
Acrylic glass. Now that sounds like something primates would be gripping thousands of years ago!
The results showed that friction levels increased by a much smaller amount than had been anticipated, debunking the hypothesis that fingerprints provide an improved grip. Ennos believes that fingerprints may have evolved to grip onto rough surfaces...
This proves that fingerprints do not improve grip... instead we hypothesize that they might be evolved to improve grip. Really? *shakes head*
So they basically just patented low power mode... and associated it with emergency calls.
Watch out Windows Vista! Your days of low-power mode are over!
It's ironic that you mentioned the DVD player. Really, it was one of the reasons that the PS2 was so successful. I remember people were buying the things for watching movies alone.
Years later, PS3 comes out with Bluray and it nearly kills Sony. They had huge losses last year. People aren't flocking to Bluray like they did with DVDs.
More interesting though is: what will happen next generation? Will there be another disc format beyond Bluray, or is it all digital from here on out? Sony has used their consoles as a means of promoting their formats (DVD, Bluray, UMD) for a couple of consoles now. Now the PSP Go goes digital. Will PS4 be digital as well?
It's not getting any better, the number of vulnerabilities [Microsoft discloses] continues to grow.
That's quite the underhanded comment there. Insulting Microsoft while showing that they are improving their software at the same time. Nice!
You people always make me laugh.
"I'll go ahead and boycott (insert service provider) because I don't believe in their terms. I'll just go with (insert other service provider) because I like their terms. Oh wait, all service providers have equally horrible terms. I only have one other option left -- not get a phone! Oh joy!"
You have to realize that while customers have choices, all choices are awful.
If you want to just lay there and take it, that's your prerogative, but kindly have the decency to shut the fuck up about how you're not receiving a perceived fair bargain from the entity you willfully signed your custom away to.
Thank you, but I won't "shut the fuck up" until I have a choice that's reasonable. Customers have a right to complain and your bitching won't take that away from them.
I'll have to side with the customers.
The problem is that customers have to pay full price for the new phone, yet they still remain on contract. Some correct options are possible:
I can understand not just letting customers pay the subsidized cost for the 3GS and remain on the same contract. But not letting customers renew their contracts for another 2 years in order to pay the subsidized cost for the 3GS is a bastard move no matter how you look at it.
I'm sure the notion of being payed for doing schoolwork has occurred to everyone in their elementary days. Then I got older and realized that I was getting an education for free. (Really through taxes, but essentially free.)
Despite your sarcasm, the music industry will choose one way or the other. This will be the best (highest capital gaining) method for them. Meaning, streaming will become standard. This is because they get to charge you for it continuously because you never "own" it. It's simple economics, really.
I know quite a few people I had to drag, kicking and screaming, to play a game on the Wii with me. They almost ALWAYS enjoy themselves. But more often than not, they flat out REFUSE to admit they enjoyed themselves and start bitching about the controller shape or the shell color or just about anything to convince themselves that they hate the system.
Same thing happens with Flash games
Yes, people playing the Wii for the first time always enjoy the experience. It's the "wow" factor.
But, like the hate for Flash games, the hate for Wii and its games is much for the same reason. The games are (usually) hollow with little replay value. The Wii games in particular are mostly designed to entertain the new "motion-control" crowd and leave the seasoned veterans bored out of their minds.
Most people who buy the Wii play it for about four months, then it collects dust until they sell it.
Thing is that not all sauropods held their necks in this way. Diplodocus held their necks pretty much horizontally, using their long tails as a counterbalance. Brachiosaurus/Brontosaurus held their necks more vertically, and did not have as long of a tail as the diplodocus. As the spines of humans has shown, we don't exactly line up the way we were meant to. Perhaps this is the same for the dinosaurs.
Instead, society directs much of its energy toward stopping progress by trying to keep as many people as possible as busy as possible whether that has a purpose or not.
I'm pretty sure that people used to work in factories for 18 hours a day. The move to 8 hours of labour, 8 hours of relaxation, 8 hours of rest was a huge one and has generally continued into our society.
The invention of the tractor could have meant much more leisure time for a society that had a large agricultural base, but instead, due to unequal wealth distribution, it just meant one person working even longer hours and a lot of people desperately trying to find something else to do. That pattern has been seen again and again, resulting in increasingly pointless jobs as surplus labour attempts to justify an income.
What do you think was going to happen? The owner lets everyone work less hours and pay them the same amount? People seem to think that technologies working for us should correlate with more leisure time. This is naive. Technologies would not be implemented unless they were cheaper, which is what always happens. This causes jobs to be cut because the tech is more favorable than people.
Industries change. In this case, there was a movement from rural to urban areas and a greater focus on technology. Because we don't have as many people in agricultural employment, we have greater technology which helps health, entertainment, and life in general.
I can't see why you don't see these progressive changes as good.
Did the study even consider that more popular games might get pirated more, despite their DRM? And it just so happens that the more popular games usually have DRM while others are more likely to not.
You can't just look at the number of pirated copies and correlate with DRM. That is jumping to a conclusion. After all, did you see (insert shitty game with DRM) pirated more than (insert good game without DRM)? There are plenty of examples of the contrary. We don't usually see this, because the better games are more expensive to make and therefore have DRM protection. So in fact, it makes sense that games with DRM would get pirated more, but only in coincidence due to the games popularity.
The error is that the Dr. David King equates changing monkeys to genetic engineering...
It IS genetic engineering. That is a proper equation.
'Slippery slope' is a quite inadequate description of the process, because it doesn't happen passively. People push it forward.
What? Slippery slope doesn't depend at all on how the changes are made or who makes them. Just the changes themselves cause the slippery slope!
I was just going to say, shoulda got VLC. My buddy had a DVD that wouldn't even play on DVD players or a PS2. Got VLC, no problem.