You're missing the fundamental point that the price of something is not necessarily related to the cost of production. The price is related to the value of the product. A CD is more valuable than a cassette, and thus is priced higher.
Pricing is only a "ripoff" if you get less value than the price you pay for the item. If you don't think that the added value of the CD is worth the extra $3 or so, then don't buy it. You can let the record company know that you consider CDs to be overpriced, but whining about it on Slashdot accomplishes nothing. (Except for getting extra karma, I suppose.)
What the GP mentioned wasn't the shape of the planet, but rather of its orbit.
Er... "If it's a sphere, it's a planet" is obviously referring to the shape of the planet. (You can't have a spherical orbit.) There have been a couple of posts suggesting using orbital eccentricity as a standard, but not the grandparent.
So, if I distribute PDFs of new books for free, with thanks to the original publisher, I'm not "seriously" infringing on copyright?
Yep. Same as when you distribute MP3s of new songs for free, while leaving the artist name intact, you're not "seriously" infringing on copyright.
(That was a "you" in the sense of the "average slashdotter," by the way; I have no idea if the OP engages in or condones infringement of copyrighted music.)
No, Taco's "I can't mirror because of copyright" is an excuse, not a reason. There is no good reason why they could not e-mail the webmaster and request permission to put up a temporary mirror. They don't do it because of laziness and because they like the notoriety of the slashdot effect.
It's sort of an interesting idea, but I don't really think that it's appropriate for DNS. (In particular, browsers aren't the only programs to use DNS.) This would probably be better served by a seperate search engine.
Not only that, this guy has posted quite a few posts today -- all plagiarized. (Google turned up a match for every single one I looked at.) Since I happened to have mod points, and I usually don't use them, I went and moderated a bunch of his posts as troll. Anybody else want to get in on the action?
I attempted to learn it for a little while, and my impression was that the language is pretty good, but the compiler is rather poor. It doesn't help any that the compiler is not open source, and the linux binary required a different version of the c++ libraries than I had installed -- no way was I going to go to that much trouble. There are a couple open source D projects around, but they seem to be unfinished and stagnant.
It's unfortunate, because I've been looking for a language that is similar to C, but a little higher level. Of C++, Objective C, and D, I thought that D was by far the best.
The more complex answer to the question posed above is you cannot post a song on the internet in any manner, but you can make a private copy of any songs you find on the net.
Wow. A sane copyright law...
You call that sane? It looks more like a compromise that satisfies nobody to me.
Out of curiousity, what caused the project to go "wrong?" Although it was evident from the news we saw about it that they had the wrong focus -- more worried about the name and logo than the game -- the general idea of the project seemed like a good idea to me.
Even better, how about we start using the Hubble in order to help us better invade other countries? We could turn the thing around and use it to spy on them. And when the thing finally stops working, we drop it on some oil-rich country. (Or on Paris, if they don't come around to our way of thinking.)
I'm told Tenku no Shiro Rapyuta has the same flaws. So did Mononoke Hime,...
You were told incorrectly. There are two sets of subtitles on the DVDs; one is for hearing impaired (literal transcription of the English) and one is a translation of the Japanese, which often differs from the English dialogue quite a bit -- Especially in the case of Laputa, the only Ghibli movie so far which I think that the dub was poorly done.
The poorly learned English in Japan is due to the fact that they learn it in school, without conversing with native English speakers. The poor English of many spanish speakers is because, again, most of them never associate with english speakers or have to use English. (For instance, so-called "bilingual" education, in most places, amounts to giving all the instruction in Spanish.) When young children are exposed to multiple languages on a regular basis, they usually become fluent in both.
Not really. Do a little reading about it and you'll find that accidents aren't any big deal. The storage containers are designed such that breaking them is nearly impossible, and even if you did, the waste itself is quite manageable. Terrorists are a little more worrysome, because they could use the waste to create a dirty bomb, but given relatively tight security, it would make a rather poor target -- high risk, little benefit -- for a terrorist group. (If they had the resources to attack a nuclear waste shipment, they could use them much more effectively.)
We'll see how 'narrow' it is the first time an accident on the way to your nuke haven happens. And you know what? To HELL with accidents - what if a whacko terrorist group decides to self-detonate a shipment of spent fuel in downtown Omaha?
When an accident happens, we'll observe that nobody gets hurt. "Green goo that leaks everywhere" and "jostling nuclear waste makes it explode" are both from Hollywood, not the real world. Same for terrorists -- you don't just "detonate a shipment of fuel" -- that's not possible.
Re:Nuclear technology has always been a nightmare
on
Chernobyl...18 Years Later
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
But what do we do with the waste produced by nuclear fission plants?
Block off a few square miles and store it. That's all it takes. The amount of nuclear waste generated is miniscule compared to the amount of other types of waste that we don't think about twice. The whole "what do we do with nuclear waste" thing is way overblown.
DRM is not effective against those who really want to get at the information.
The parent poster only called it "rather effective," implying that he knows perfectly well that it's not 100% effective. That doesn't mean that it's not useful. In a corporate environment, it could dissuade casual copying that could lead to leaks.
Your theory appears incorrect in Google. If a bunch of porn sites added XFree86 to their pages, wouldn't they also show up in the Holy One?
No, actually; that's what Google's pagerank was primarily designed to combat. Porn and similar sites had just about made most search engines worthless before google came along, because they would include long lists of words completely unrelated to the topic.
Although recently google has been showing some flaws -- some webmasters have become adept at creating hundreds of dummy sites in order to boost something's pagerank -- Google still cuts through the crap rather better than most search engines.
Although for the record, I don't think that's what happened here. It looks more like the term was caught by a blacklist. (I don't think the conspiracy nuts are right, though -- this seems much more likely to be an accident than intentional.)
I suspect it's probably a bug instead of malicious intent...
Actually, rather than a bug, I suspect that it's probably human error. Because the search engine only seems to match certain words as likely to return "adult" material, there's probably a human-generated list of terms. My guess is that they took a list of the top 1000 (or something) search terms, and assigned somebody to classify them as adult or not-adult. If the person was unfamiliar with XFree86, they may very well have guessed that it was related to porn (X and Free together).
In other words, the only thing I think Microsoft is guilty of here is creating a remarkably poor filter.
This doesn't allow you to copyright facts. It even says so in the linked slashdot blurb. It bears some similarities to copyright, but it's a completely different class of law.
The last thing we need is for slashdot to misinform everyone on something that fundamental about the bill.
Of what importance is knowing media's name for the day? The name "super tuesday" has no bearing on real politics. In fact, I will happily taunt the Europeans who fill their heads with such mindless trivia.
They store that fuel down at the coal/nuclear/hydro/methane/solar plant.
Fuel is by definition a consumable. (OK, you could argue that all means of energy production use the hydrogen of the sun as fuel, but that would be a pretty silly argument.)
It needs power to compress the helium -- so no, no "perpetual motion." (However, as described, it would have the ability to convert some of its speed to stored energy via turbines.) Michael just doesn't understand that something can be fuelless and still have a source of power. (How often do you refuel your PC?)
I don't think this is a valid argument. If 999,999 people download the latest Britney song, and 1 person downloads the new [insert favorite artist here], then Britney gets 999999*5 = $4999995, and your favorite artist gets $5. Sure, it might not be your money that ends up in the hands of that artist, but that shouldn't really matter.
I really can't think of a better way than popularity to distribute the money.
For the record, however, I do think that the scheme is a stupid idea.
Slashdot Mirror
You're missing the fundamental point that the price of something is not necessarily related to the cost of production. The price is related to the value of the product. A CD is more valuable than a cassette, and thus is priced higher.
Pricing is only a "ripoff" if you get less value than the price you pay for the item. If you don't think that the added value of the CD is worth the extra $3 or so, then don't buy it. You can let the record company know that you consider CDs to be overpriced, but whining about it on Slashdot accomplishes nothing. (Except for getting extra karma, I suppose.)
What the GP mentioned wasn't the shape of the planet, but rather of its orbit.
... "If it's a sphere, it's a planet" is obviously referring to the shape of the planet. (You can't have a spherical orbit.) There have been a couple of posts suggesting using orbital eccentricity as a standard, but not the grandparent.
Er
So, if I distribute PDFs of new books for free, with thanks to the original publisher, I'm not "seriously" infringing on copyright?
Yep. Same as when you distribute MP3s of new songs for free, while leaving the artist name intact, you're not "seriously" infringing on copyright.
(That was a "you" in the sense of the "average slashdotter," by the way; I have no idea if the OP engages in or condones infringement of copyrighted music.)
Oh, yeah? Then what's this?
No, Taco's "I can't mirror because of copyright" is an excuse, not a reason. There is no good reason why they could not e-mail the webmaster and request permission to put up a temporary mirror. They don't do it because of laziness and because they like the notoriety of the slashdot effect.
It's sort of an interesting idea, but I don't really think that it's appropriate for DNS. (In particular, browsers aren't the only programs to use DNS.) This would probably be better served by a seperate search engine.
Not only that, this guy has posted quite a few posts today -- all plagiarized. (Google turned up a match for every single one I looked at.) Since I happened to have mod points, and I usually don't use them, I went and moderated a bunch of his posts as troll. Anybody else want to get in on the action?
I attempted to learn it for a little while, and my impression was that the language is pretty good, but the compiler is rather poor. It doesn't help any that the compiler is not open source, and the linux binary required a different version of the c++ libraries than I had installed -- no way was I going to go to that much trouble. There are a couple open source D projects around, but they seem to be unfinished and stagnant.
It's unfortunate, because I've been looking for a language that is similar to C, but a little higher level. Of C++, Objective C, and D, I thought that D was by far the best.
Wow. A sane copyright law...
You call that sane? It looks more like a compromise that satisfies nobody to me.
Out of curiousity, what caused the project to go "wrong?" Although it was evident from the news we saw about it that they had the wrong focus -- more worried about the name and logo than the game -- the general idea of the project seemed like a good idea to me.
Even better, how about we start using the Hubble in order to help us better invade other countries? We could turn the thing around and use it to spy on them. And when the thing finally stops working, we drop it on some oil-rich country. (Or on Paris, if they don't come around to our way of thinking.)
He says you're lying because we all know your root password.
I'm told Tenku no Shiro Rapyuta has the same flaws. So did Mononoke Hime, ...
You were told incorrectly. There are two sets of subtitles on the DVDs; one is for hearing impaired (literal transcription of the English) and one is a translation of the Japanese, which often differs from the English dialogue quite a bit -- Especially in the case of Laputa, the only Ghibli movie so far which I think that the dub was poorly done.
The poorly learned English in Japan is due to the fact that they learn it in school, without conversing with native English speakers. The poor English of many spanish speakers is because, again, most of them never associate with english speakers or have to use English. (For instance, so-called "bilingual" education, in most places, amounts to giving all the instruction in Spanish.) When young children are exposed to multiple languages on a regular basis, they usually become fluent in both.
Not really. Do a little reading about it and you'll find that accidents aren't any big deal. The storage containers are designed such that breaking them is nearly impossible, and even if you did, the waste itself is quite manageable. Terrorists are a little more worrysome, because they could use the waste to create a dirty bomb, but given relatively tight security, it would make a rather poor target -- high risk, little benefit -- for a terrorist group. (If they had the resources to attack a nuclear waste shipment, they could use them much more effectively.)
We'll see how 'narrow' it is the first time an accident on the way to your nuke haven happens. And you know what? To HELL with accidents - what if a whacko terrorist group decides to self-detonate a shipment of spent fuel in downtown Omaha?
When an accident happens, we'll observe that nobody gets hurt. "Green goo that leaks everywhere" and "jostling nuclear waste makes it explode" are both from Hollywood, not the real world. Same for terrorists -- you don't just "detonate a shipment of fuel" -- that's not possible.
But what do we do with the waste produced by nuclear fission plants?
Block off a few square miles and store it. That's all it takes. The amount of nuclear waste generated is miniscule compared to the amount of other types of waste that we don't think about twice. The whole "what do we do with nuclear waste" thing is way overblown.
DRM is not effective against those who really want to get at the information.
The parent poster only called it "rather effective," implying that he knows perfectly well that it's not 100% effective. That doesn't mean that it's not useful. In a corporate environment, it could dissuade casual copying that could lead to leaks.
Your theory appears incorrect in Google. If a bunch of porn sites added XFree86 to their pages, wouldn't they also show up in the Holy One?
No, actually; that's what Google's pagerank was primarily designed to combat. Porn and similar sites had just about made most search engines worthless before google came along, because they would include long lists of words completely unrelated to the topic.
Although recently google has been showing some flaws -- some webmasters have become adept at creating hundreds of dummy sites in order to boost something's pagerank -- Google still cuts through the crap rather better than most search engines.
Although for the record, I don't think that's what happened here. It looks more like the term was caught by a blacklist. (I don't think the conspiracy nuts are right, though -- this seems much more likely to be an accident than intentional.)
I suspect it's probably a bug instead of malicious intent...
Actually, rather than a bug, I suspect that it's probably human error. Because the search engine only seems to match certain words as likely to return "adult" material, there's probably a human-generated list of terms. My guess is that they took a list of the top 1000 (or something) search terms, and assigned somebody to classify them as adult or not-adult. If the person was unfamiliar with XFree86, they may very well have guessed that it was related to porn (X and Free together).
In other words, the only thing I think Microsoft is guilty of here is creating a remarkably poor filter.
This doesn't allow you to copyright facts. It even says so in the linked slashdot blurb. It bears some similarities to copyright, but it's a completely different class of law.
The last thing we need is for slashdot to misinform everyone on something that fundamental about the bill.
Of what importance is knowing media's name for the day? The name "super tuesday" has no bearing on real politics. In fact, I will happily taunt the Europeans who fill their heads with such mindless trivia.
They store that fuel down at the coal/nuclear/hydro/methane/solar plant.
Fuel is by definition a consumable. (OK, you could argue that all means of energy production use the hydrogen of the sun as fuel, but that would be a pretty silly argument.)
It needs power to compress the helium -- so no, no "perpetual motion." (However, as described, it would have the ability to convert some of its speed to stored energy via turbines.) Michael just doesn't understand that something can be fuelless and still have a source of power. (How often do you refuel your PC?)
I don't think this is a valid argument. If 999,999 people download the latest Britney song, and 1 person downloads the new [insert favorite artist here], then Britney gets 999999*5 = $4999995, and your favorite artist gets $5. Sure, it might not be your money that ends up in the hands of that artist, but that shouldn't really matter.
I really can't think of a better way than popularity to distribute the money.
For the record, however, I do think that the scheme is a stupid idea.