Probably because video games are a virtual reality meaning that different laws apply there. I have learned never to use the same strategy when different rules are in effect. That's been pretty useful.
Chess taught me that it's very, very important to kill the women. Do you mean to say this rule doesn't apply to real life?
Damn. I guess that would explain the way things have turned out for me.
Conclusion - region codes are there so that studios can have different prices in different countries. Pure profit, with the customers losing out.
Bingo!
DVDs are not priced by what they need to make a reasonable profit. They are priced by what the market will bear. In rich countries people will pay $20-$30 for a DVD. In poor countries they cannot so the price of a legitimate DVD is set significantly lower.
Only region coding allows them to do this, because without it any sharp cookie could just start importing boatloads of $5 DVDs from India and selling them on the US/European market for $10 and make a nice profit by undercutting the standard distribution chain.
The $15 dollar difference in price per disc is essentially free money to the studios and far more than offsets the occasional lost sale made at a low profit margin.
For instance, holidaymakers and businessmen not being able to purchase DVDs in the countries they visit due to zoning?
Yes, they've researched this.I think perhaps you misunderstand. It is this sort of behavior that region coding is overtly supposed to cause. It's very raison d'etre.
They aren't interested in maximizing sales, they're intested in maximizing profits. Region coding allows them to artificially manipulate markets. A lost sale here and there is nothing compared to this.
This is like being sued by a museum because you remember what a painting looks without having bought another ticket.
Well no, as per the actual complaint, rather than the Slashdot blurb, it is like being sued by a private museum because someone went into the museum, made a perfect copy of the painting while they were there, displaying the copy elsewhere so people don't have to buy a ticket to the museum, being paid for each person who visits the display and giving Google a cut of the procedes for managing the money.
Perfect 10 is a subscription porn site.If clicking on the thumbnail simply sent people to Perfect 10 there would be no complaint.
'technology', as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is 'stuff that doesn't work yet.'
This simply demonstrates that Bran Ferren has not thought well or deeply about the issue. Familiarity with a tool is not what defines whether it is a tool or not. A tool that doesn't work yet is worthless. All tools are technology.
The whole idea of "introducing" kids to technology today is a bit braindead in and of itself. They first encounter it at birth. They are then driven home in a car, quite likely through a modern city. They're held and nursed while watching TV in a centrally heated home.
They are immersed in technology at the latest from the moment they leave the womb.
To introduce them to technology as a technologist I would first teach them to ride a bike and then how to maintain and repair it themselves, so that they always understand that technology isn't a "force" beyond their comprehension, but just "stuff" under their control.
In theory it's easy to start a fire by rubbing two sticks together. In reality it's really, really hard.
And yet anyone can learn to do it. It helps a lot if you add a piece of cordage though, available anyplace sticks are.
In theory it is easy for a man on the ground to kill a lion with a pointy stick. In reality I don't buy it for a second.
In reality real live lions, who are now scarce, are scared stiff of anyone wearing red, who are still plentiful. 20 to 1. Not thoertical odds. Empirical. 19 actual dead lions for every actual dead prospective lion killer.
The fact is no more wonderous than that people learn to drive without dying in droves; and yet they manage. You are simply familiar with driving and thus take it for granted, disregarding the danger because to you driving is "normal."
By inducing the lion to actually charge you. A charging lion is ridiculously easy to kill with a pointy stick. They do almost all of the work themselves.
You don't wrestle the lion. You'd have to be an idiot to even try that. You poke a hole in it. From at least 8 feet away. That's the whole, ummmmmmmm, point, of a spear over a knife.
A man with a pointy stick is armed with a pointy stick and a brain. Work smarter, not harder.
There is a big difference between a steel-tipped spear and a pointy stick.
A steel tipped spear is just a somewhat sophisticated point stick. The plain wooden pointy stick will do if you know how to make one properly. I could certainly kill you with one and you wouldn't know the difference between the wooden stake through your heart and and steel one.
People were killing lions, tigers and bears, especially bears, many millenia before the advent of steel, or even stone spear heads.
I hold to my original positition that a lone man with a pointy stick will almost always be killed when going mano-a-pussy with an adult lion.
Well, you're simply wrong then. If the man is well trained the odds are about 20 to 1 against the lion and the man may never come closer to the lion than about 6 feet before it is dead or running away mortally wounded. The lion is even likely to supply all the energy to impale itself.
Bears are actually much more dangerous, being harder to kill, and best hunted in groups with projectile spear technique, but a lone man still stands a good chance; if he is trained; and back in the day how to handle a spear was just job training and home ec. Any kid of 13 knew how to use one, and use one well. Back in the day child rearing was thought to be the process of teaching kids how to be grown ups, not teaching them how to be kids even though they were already grown up.
"my documents are stored where?" and "what if I'm not connected to the Internet, as in on a plane?". These objections can all easily be overcome, but not without some hacking and patching.
The fact that your data resides on a foreign server cannot be easily overcome with hacking and patching. It simply declares a field day for the SEC and the FBI, even with encryption.
Why on earth should I "Pull a Tom Horn" and braid my own noose? Yes, online apps could prove a convenience, but Federal Pound me in the Ass Prison can prove a distinct inconvenience that overrides.
A lone human with a stick has zero chance of survival if attacked by a lion.
Just because you're a wuss who wouldn't know how to cope doesn't mean everyone is. Killing a lion alone, with nothing but a pointy stick, is a traditional rite of passage for mid teen Masai.
They nearly wiped out all the lions in their territory this way. There are still plenty of Masai. To this day lions in the Masai Mara run away from anyone wearing red. When guiding tourists Masai must dress western or their clients will never see a lion.
Perhaps I should amend my earlier statement:
A human being with a pointy stick, who knows how to use it, is about the most fearsome thing out there. So fearsome that they can literally scare the piss out of a lion just because he's seen one.
No, magical fairies terrorized prehistoric humans and ate their flesh.
Well no, there are no such things as fairies. It were leopards. We kinda got the chew marks on the bones to prove it.
A Homo Sapiens with a pointy stick is about the most fearsome thing in existence and when going up against a lion the lion had better be a pretty sharp cookie to come out of it alive.
But the technical term for an Australopithicine who has just had a leopard that outweighs him drop out of a tree onto his head is "lunch."
Watchmen by Alan Moore V for Vendetta by Alan Moore Scud: The Disposable Assassin by Rob Schrab R.U.R. by Anton Capek
I haven't read these. I'll have to correct that and get back to you. In the meantime you can have a go at the Thousand Nights and a Night, where the djinni play the same role as time machines and such to allow for the same sort of social questioning. In fact, the base story (that of Scherazade) of all the stories is one of socially educating a ruler into being not only a decent ruler, but a decent human being as well by showing him things like how small events now can have large results in the future.
Off the top of my head I think you would have been better off bringing up Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
. ..some things are constrained by human form factors (car, violin, piano), and others aren't as much (mp3 player, sheets of paper).
The single volume dead tree OED came with a magnifying glass. The magnifying glass becomes part of the size of the piece of paper, because the paper is useless without it.
If you find you need to use a tripod to achieve high quality scans with your digital camera, the tripod becomes part of the size of your scanner.
The size of the scanner is dependant on the size of the piece of paper, which is dependant on what size paper is useful to a human being, which also means the eventual display device becomes part of the size of the piece of paper.
Do you want a 3" monitor, or a 30" monitor?
The size of an mp3 player, as noted, is actually determined by the size of its interface, no matter how small the "guts" of the thing are.
It's all about the interface, because whatever the technology you still have to be able to use the bloody thing and even something as simple as a piece of paper has a minimum size beyond which reducing it makes it unusable, without introducing other large objects.
I've got a motorcycle that runs circles around most cars
I miss my RD400. Note that I didn't say "vehicle," I said "car." Yes, I constrained the technology, but to what it is. I didn't constrain other technologies to accomplish the same or similar ends.
Nowadays I just ride a bicycle, because even though it won't "run circles" around a car, let alone a motorcycle, I find it to be a superior technology. For minimalism I've got a skateboard, because even though I can make a fully functional, 4" long bicycle myself, it would be useless to me as transportation.
Who knows... a 4" mind-controlled violin could be a really cool instrument to play while jogging!
But wouldn't necessarily be a violin, although it might still be a fiddle.
Interesting you should bring up the idea of mind control though, because one of the other examples I had in mind was that it might well be possible to reduce the size of an mp3 player to fit entirely in an earbud, but. . . absent of mind control you would still need the iPod sized device to act as interface.
You are a human being. Your form factor is an irreducable. You need human being sized tools. When they can chip your head we'll talk, but I wouldn't hold my breath very long waiting for that. You'll only get a headache and then have to go buy a human sized mp3 player anyway.
Indeed, however, even though your older scanner is quite a bit larger I'll wager its form factor is still determined by the size of a piece of paper.
The worlds smallest playable violin is only 4 inches long, but you're not likely to see people lining up to buy it. There is an international standard now for the "correct" size of a violin, because:
For every technology there is a right size. A working automobile the size of a peanut would be a remarkable bit of manufacturing technology; and useless.
Perhaps this review is a nudge to try and get the product moving?
I RTFA. What review? It's pure, unadulterated online ad, exactly the sort of copy I would expect to see at a place that asked me to add it to my cart just to see the sale price.
The "reviewer" needs to wear a Tshirt that says "I'm a ho" on it.
Well, there's T foam, currently being marketed as Tempur foam. Ironically it was never actually used as a cushioning material for astronauts because the outrageously high levels of toxic outgassing made it unsafe in a space capsule.
>Your co-op will not exist without those 51% approving it, which is where I came in to this movie.
>>A little research goes a lot further than a little rhetoric .
"The Coop has been a Tier 1 bandwidth aggregator with more connectivity to national "backbones" than any other Colorado-based ISP. "
You seem to have missed the point. This co-op is dependant on the national backbone, not to mention local cable on public and private property that does not belong to the co-op (like those telephone poles). It is not an independant infrastructure and relies on both the telcos that are the subject of the article and govermnent endorsement and funding, either direct or indirect.
There is no way to run cable without a social contract with The People acting through goverment, which was my original point. The telcos are claiming sole ownership of the backbone and local infrastructure, but that aquired that infrastructure in part through "corporate welfare."
They wish us to pay for it, give up our land rights for it. ..and then pay for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably because video games are a virtual reality meaning that different laws apply there. I have learned never to use the same strategy when different rules are in effect. That's been pretty useful.
Chess taught me that it's very, very important to kill the women. Do you mean to say this rule doesn't apply to real life?
Damn. I guess that would explain the way things have turned out for me.
KFG
Conclusion - region codes are there so that studios can have different prices in different countries. Pure profit, with the customers losing out.
Bingo!
DVDs are not priced by what they need to make a reasonable profit. They are priced by what the market will bear. In rich countries people will pay $20-$30 for a DVD. In poor countries they cannot so the price of a legitimate DVD is set significantly lower.
Only region coding allows them to do this, because without it any sharp cookie could just start importing boatloads of $5 DVDs from India and selling them on the US/European market for $10 and make a nice profit by undercutting the standard distribution chain.
The $15 dollar difference in price per disc is essentially free money to the studios and far more than offsets the occasional lost sale made at a low profit margin.
And the game is profits, not sales.
KFG
Have you ever even USED google image search?
Yes, I have.
Because that's pretty much what it does.
No, it isn't; and that's why they're pissed off.
KFG
For instance, holidaymakers and businessmen not being able to purchase DVDs in the countries they visit due to zoning?
Yes, they've researched this.I think perhaps you misunderstand. It is this sort of behavior that region coding is overtly supposed to cause. It's very raison d'etre.
They aren't interested in maximizing sales, they're intested in maximizing profits. Region coding allows them to artificially manipulate markets. A lost sale here and there is nothing compared to this.
KFG
This is like being sued by a museum because you remember what a painting looks without having bought another ticket.
Well no, as per the actual complaint, rather than the Slashdot blurb, it is like being sued by a private museum because someone went into the museum, made a perfect copy of the painting while they were there, displaying the copy elsewhere so people don't have to buy a ticket to the museum, being paid for each person who visits the display and giving Google a cut of the procedes for managing the money.
Perfect 10 is a subscription porn site.If clicking on the thumbnail simply sent people to Perfect 10 there would be no complaint.
KFG
'technology', as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is 'stuff that doesn't work yet.'
This simply demonstrates that Bran Ferren has not thought well or deeply about the issue. Familiarity with a tool is not what defines whether it is a tool or not. A tool that doesn't work yet is worthless. All tools are technology.
The whole idea of "introducing" kids to technology today is a bit braindead in and of itself. They first encounter it at birth. They are then driven home in a car, quite likely through a modern city. They're held and nursed while watching TV in a centrally heated home.
They are immersed in technology at the latest from the moment they leave the womb.
To introduce them to technology as a technologist I would first teach them to ride a bike and then how to maintain and repair it themselves, so that they always understand that technology isn't a "force" beyond their comprehension, but just "stuff" under their control.
KFG
In theory it's easy to start a fire by rubbing two sticks together. In reality it's really, really hard.
And yet anyone can learn to do it. It helps a lot if you add a piece of cordage though, available anyplace sticks are.
In theory it is easy for a man on the ground to kill a lion with a pointy stick. In reality I don't buy it for a second.
In reality real live lions, who are now scarce, are scared stiff of anyone wearing red, who are still plentiful. 20 to 1. Not thoertical odds. Empirical. 19 actual dead lions for every actual dead prospective lion killer.
The fact is no more wonderous than that people learn to drive without dying in droves; and yet they manage. You are simply familiar with driving and thus take it for granted, disregarding the danger because to you driving is "normal."
Yet people die doing it every day.
KFG
And how is this done exactly?
By inducing the lion to actually charge you. A charging lion is ridiculously easy to kill with a pointy stick. They do almost all of the work themselves.
You don't wrestle the lion. You'd have to be an idiot to even try that. You poke a hole in it. From at least 8 feet away. That's the whole, ummmmmmmm, point, of a spear over a knife.
A man with a pointy stick is armed with a pointy stick and a brain. Work smarter, not harder.
KFG
There is a big difference between a steel-tipped spear and a pointy stick.
A steel tipped spear is just a somewhat sophisticated point stick. The plain wooden pointy stick will do if you know how to make one properly. I could certainly kill you with one and you wouldn't know the difference between the wooden stake through your heart and and steel one.
People were killing lions, tigers and bears, especially bears, many millenia before the advent of steel, or even stone spear heads.
I hold to my original positition that a lone man with a pointy stick will almost always be killed when going mano-a-pussy with an adult lion.
Well, you're simply wrong then. If the man is well trained the odds are about 20 to 1 against the lion and the man may never come closer to the lion than about 6 feet before it is dead or running away mortally wounded. The lion is even likely to supply all the energy to impale itself.
Bears are actually much more dangerous, being harder to kill, and best hunted in groups with projectile spear technique, but a lone man still stands a good chance; if he is trained; and back in the day how to handle a spear was just job training and home ec. Any kid of 13 knew how to use one, and use one well. Back in the day child rearing was thought to be the process of teaching kids how to be grown ups, not teaching them how to be kids even though they were already grown up.
KFG
"my documents are stored where?" and "what if I'm not connected to the Internet, as in on a plane?". These objections can all easily be overcome, but not without some hacking and patching.
The fact that your data resides on a foreign server cannot be easily overcome with hacking and patching. It simply declares a field day for the SEC and the FBI, even with encryption.
Why on earth should I "Pull a Tom Horn" and braid my own noose? Yes, online apps could prove a convenience, but Federal Pound me in the Ass Prison can prove a distinct inconvenience that overrides.
KFG
Have you ever even seen a lion up close?
Quite. 4 or 5 times the mass of a mere leopard.
A lone human with a stick has zero chance of survival if attacked by a lion.
Just because you're a wuss who wouldn't know how to cope doesn't mean everyone is. Killing a lion alone, with nothing but a pointy stick, is a traditional rite of passage for mid teen Masai.
They nearly wiped out all the lions in their territory this way. There are still plenty of Masai. To this day lions in the Masai Mara run away from anyone wearing red. When guiding tourists Masai must dress western or their clients will never see a lion.
Perhaps I should amend my earlier statement:
A human being with a pointy stick, who knows how to use it, is about the most fearsome thing out there. So fearsome that they can literally scare the piss out of a lion just because he's seen one.
KFG
No, magical fairies terrorized prehistoric humans and ate their flesh.
Well no, there are no such things as fairies. It were leopards. We kinda got the chew marks on the bones to prove it.
A Homo Sapiens with a pointy stick is about the most fearsome thing in existence and when going up against a lion the lion had better be a pretty sharp cookie to come out of it alive.
But the technical term for an Australopithicine who has just had a leopard that outweighs him drop out of a tree onto his head is "lunch."
KFG
Watchmen by Alan Moore
V for Vendetta by Alan Moore
Scud: The Disposable Assassin by Rob Schrab
R.U.R. by Anton Capek
I haven't read these. I'll have to correct that and get back to you. In the meantime you can have a go at the Thousand Nights and a Night, where the djinni play the same role as time machines and such to allow for the same sort of social questioning. In fact, the base story (that of Scherazade) of all the stories is one of socially educating a ruler into being not only a decent ruler, but a decent human being as well by showing him things like how small events now can have large results in the future.
Off the top of my head I think you would have been better off bringing up Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
KFG
In the Thousand Nights and a Night.
All seventeen volumes of Sir Richard Burton's translation available at Project Gutenberg.
KFG
The true legacy of Alexander was the Hellenization of the ancient world.
Yeah, he brought Hellehn to it and back again.
"I seem to be a verb." - Buckminster Fuller
Not anymore, I'm afraid.
KFG
. . .some things are constrained by human form factors (car, violin, piano), and others aren't as much (mp3 player, sheets of paper).
The single volume dead tree OED came with a magnifying glass. The magnifying glass becomes part of the size of the piece of paper, because the paper is useless without it.
If you find you need to use a tripod to achieve high quality scans with your digital camera, the tripod becomes part of the size of your scanner.
The size of the scanner is dependant on the size of the piece of paper, which is dependant on what size paper is useful to a human being, which also means the eventual display device becomes part of the size of the piece of paper.
Do you want a 3" monitor, or a 30" monitor?
The size of an mp3 player, as noted, is actually determined by the size of its interface, no matter how small the "guts" of the thing are.
It's all about the interface, because whatever the technology you still have to be able to use the bloody thing and even something as simple as a piece of paper has a minimum size beyond which reducing it makes it unusable, without introducing other large objects.
KFG
I've got a motorcycle that runs circles around most cars
I miss my RD400. Note that I didn't say "vehicle," I said "car." Yes, I constrained the technology, but to what it is. I didn't constrain other technologies to accomplish the same or similar ends.
Nowadays I just ride a bicycle, because even though it won't "run circles" around a car, let alone a motorcycle, I find it to be a superior technology. For minimalism I've got a skateboard, because even though I can make a fully functional, 4" long bicycle myself, it would be useless to me as transportation.
Who knows... a 4" mind-controlled violin could be a really cool instrument to play while jogging!
But wouldn't necessarily be a violin, although it might still be a fiddle.
Interesting you should bring up the idea of mind control though, because one of the other examples I had in mind was that it might well be possible to reduce the size of an mp3 player to fit entirely in an earbud, but. . . absent of mind control you would still need the iPod sized device to act as interface.
You are a human being. Your form factor is an irreducable. You need human being sized tools. When they can chip your head we'll talk, but I wouldn't hold my breath very long waiting for that. You'll only get a headache and then have to go buy a human sized mp3 player anyway.
KFG
Indeed, however, even though your older scanner is quite a bit larger I'll wager its form factor is still determined by the size of a piece of paper.
The worlds smallest playable violin is only 4 inches long, but you're not likely to see people lining up to buy it. There is an international standard now for the "correct" size of a violin, because:
For every technology there is a right size. A working automobile the size of a peanut would be a remarkable bit of manufacturing technology; and useless.
KFG
Apologise to the hoes now.
You're right and I'm sorry. The hoes are professionals.
KFG
Perhaps this review is a nudge to try and get the product moving?
I RTFA. What review? It's pure, unadulterated online ad, exactly the sort of copy I would expect to see at a place that asked me to add it to my cart just to see the sale price.
The "reviewer" needs to wear a Tshirt that says "I'm a ho" on it.
KFG
Well, there's T foam, currently being marketed as Tempur foam. Ironically it was never actually used as a cushioning material for astronauts because the outrageously high levels of toxic outgassing made it unsafe in a space capsule.
Sleep tight.
KFG
>Your co-op will not exist without those 51% approving it, which is where I came in to this movie.
.and then pay for it.
>>A little research goes a lot further than a little rhetoric .
"The Coop has been a Tier 1 bandwidth aggregator with more connectivity to national "backbones" than any other Colorado-based ISP. "
You seem to have missed the point. This co-op is dependant on the national backbone, not to mention local cable on public and private property that does not belong to the co-op (like those telephone poles). It is not an independant infrastructure and relies on both the telcos that are the subject of the article and govermnent endorsement and funding, either direct or indirect.
There is no way to run cable without a social contract with The People acting through goverment, which was my original point. The telcos are claiming sole ownership of the backbone and local infrastructure, but that aquired that infrastructure in part through "corporate welfare."
They wish us to pay for it, give up our land rights for it. .
KFG
KFG
Perhaps "Sonied" will be a term for companies that shoot themselves in the head with their marketing practices.
I come from a different era. To me these will always be companies with embaressing "ring around the collar."
KFG
Wouldn't it be ironic if the ban promotes graffiti opposing the ban?
KFG
I'm not so sure that we'll find a suitable replacement in time. . .
Sun, wind and, most especially, muscle have a long history of working just fine.
KFG