Re:How To Tweak GNOME 3
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GNOME 3 Released
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I would much rather have a desktop that only allowed the most efficient ways to do things than one that gave me a bunch of configuration options and told me to "figure it out for myself", in a sense. *cough cough*.
"Most efficient" is highly dependent on the user. For example: 1) Do you have a strong spatial memory of where things are in menus, on the desktop or the taskbar? If so you'll hate all auto-intelligence that keeps adjusting your favorite functions. You'd rather have an ordered alt-tab list than an unordered expose function like OS X. 2) Are you a person who remembers a great number of shortcuts and prefer the interface doesn't use much screen real estate to show you the buttons and toolbars? Or do you prefer most functionality to be visible to you? 3) Do you prefer arranging windows or do you like maximized windows and easy switching? Is it important for you to group windows into virtual desktops? 4) Can you recognize software by its icon? If not you'll hate Windows 7.
The "One True Way" is an illusion which may be true for things like kernel benchmarks. But when it comes to what is best for the user that depends on his mental skills, familiarity with the interface and the software and sometimes simply preference. Sane defaults are important, but if you've built the "perfect desktop" the chances are very high you've built YOUR perfect desktop.
It's one issue but not the only one - and could be well explained by mono not being very popular, it doesn't matter how much time has passed if there's not enough in the trap to be worth springing it. Another issue is that almost everyone writes for Microsoft's CLR. No matter if it's spec ambiguities, bugs in Microsoft's implementation or bugs in Mono's implementation the most common answer you'll get if it works on their version and not mono will be "dunno, use Windows" as if mono is something akin to WINE. Just like if Linux were to ditch OpenGL for DirectX, or at least some "almost-but-not-quite" standard similar to it.
Recent versions of Ubuntu are fine, as are most other recent distros. You should try them.
Hmm where did I hear that before? Oh, right here in 2010... and 2009... and 2008... and 2007... and so on. For someone that claims to be different from proprietary software, the claim that the newest release fixes everything under the sun and you should upgrade right now seems remarkably similar. And best taken with the same pinch of salt. Also I can't count how many times I've heard people accuse problems of being upgrade cruft, please reinstall from a clean version. Well, I guess that makes it even with Windows reinstalling every 6 months. Except it seems only unskilled Windows users need to do that.
I guess it's a great shield against criticism, the only people "qualified" to comment are those that use it daily, while all the people who tried and ditched it well their comments are always out of date. Oh but that was the release two months ago, this new beta is great. No problem you had could possibly still apply, it's now all smiles and sunshine. I stayed with it through gutsy and hardy and intrepid and jaunty and karmic and lucid and maverick, but enough was enough and I ditched Linux. What you're saying just isn't credible. But I'm sure someone will very soon tell me natty is the greatest thing since sliced bread...
Actually sounds quite doable, essentially something like the Mars rovers except stationary with seeds to grow. If you land with just seeds you can take the same landing approach they did - COMPLETELY unfeasible with humans.
I'm skeptical if they can keep it warm enough though, the rovers only produce a few watts - far too little to be used as a space heater. You will need a very good heat trap/isolator.
Seriously, you can't have a conversation that starts with, "Hey, haven't seen you for a while, what've you been up to?" Because you ALREADY KNOW. And if you don't know, you're an insensitive clod who's not reading their facebook posts.
Since Facebook is "news for you and your 300 closest friends" you should either be a better friend with more to talk about than that, or it at least gives you some topics to talk about with people who'd otherwise be almost strangers. Unless they're the kind who has to put every fart they do up on Facebook, if they both do that and get annoyed you haven't read it maybe you should revise who your friends are.
Dying from smoking tends to be very expensive. It is not like dying from a car accident or bungee jumping, where you either die or cost a fortunate in medical expenses due to long rehabilitation, but you die and it costs a fortunate to keep you hospitalised while you cough your lungs out or wither away to chemo/radiation therapy. I was in a lung ward for two weeks and saw enough of that stuff to be permanently immunized to the idea of taking up smoking for whatever reason.
The thing about deaths is that everyone has one, it's only a matter of when and how. The health freak that is in and out of hospital from 80 to 90 as his health finally fails may not be cheaper than the smoker that was in and out of hospital from 60 to 70 before kicking the bucket.
For normal (proprietary) licenses it's already been established that a copyright owner can revoke the license at any time simply by giving notice to the licensee. (Wood v Leadbitter).
Your quotes are wildly misleading. A proprietary licence is a permission to enter land and may be express, implied or contractual. Like say, I can invite you into my home and if I ask you to leave you must leave. Implied permission is much the same, it ends the moment you end it.
Contractual obligations are different, they're binding agreements to both sides. You have no right to terminate a land lease just by saying it, that's breach of contract. I can take you to court, and one of the things I can do is demand fulfillment - that I'm can continue to use the land as per the contract. The GPL is a form of contract, you can't terminate my right to use the software. Since that fundamental assumption is wrong, the rest of your post makes no sense.
A market optimal model collects exactly as much from each person as he is willing to pay. So if there's an American willing to pay 10$, a Greek willing to pay 5$ and a Chinese willing to pay 1$, you find a way to collect all 16$. Obviously a single global price is a restriction on that, either you lose some customers or you lose some profit. What this study shows that not only do you lose customers, you turn them into pirates. No real surprise there.
What I don't like is the idea where it's going, this is where region codes comes from. Split the market, tailor the price and maximize the profit. It's the one way globalism again, they can shop anywhere for cheap labor but I can't do the same for their products. I have to get the expensive European version, now with the added excuse that it's to combat piracy. And maximize their profits, but they don't like to mention that loud.
And probably just as much that there isn't an obvious difference in the parties - least not the big two. The democrats have their list of what they are that the republicans aren't and vice versa. Even if voters do care, you'd still need a choice.
I find it astounding that some consultants charge for lunch, and even charge for taking a crap. If I stop and have a 10 minute discussion, non-work related, with someone at a firm I'm working for... I *take that time off the bill*. I don't charge for research, unless the topic is utterly obscure. You're paying for expertise, so why would you pay for research time?!
I guess it depends on the work, but I never metered my time with a stopwatch nor was I this all knowing oracle. I'm a specialist in a narrow field that they like to hire in for a limited time, If you hire me for two weeks I'll be pretty much like a highly skilled employee in that time. No more, no less - you saw my CV when you hired me and if you ask me about things too obscure for me to know, I'm still the person on the team most likely to work it out. Plus the border between when I'm solving a general problem and when I'm doing specific work for you is quite fluid, as long as I'm working on the specifics of your problem I feel that is very billable. I never billed for lunch though, but reality is that most people just look at the cost per normal day and the 7,5 hour rate is higher so if we have to work overtime it is better for us.
Sometimes there are good governments and bad people. Sometimes there are bad governments and good people. Who is good or bad is in the eye of the beholder.
Let's hope they don't simply find it easier to degrade the quality of competing services. I get nervous (and cynical) when my ISP wants to sell me anything other than a pipe for bits.
I don't think they'd dare. An ISP is a lot more dependent on having content than the content providers are on that ISP and lockout is a very powerful tool. The day you visit facebook.com and get a page saying "Your ISP is a retard. Change ISP to get Facebook." is the day they lose half their customers. There was a few attempts at this in Norway around 2006-2007 as online video was taking off, the content providers gave them the finger, the customers complained and as far as I know the idea died there.
If I buy a sandwich from you and find that it tastes great, there's nothing stopping me from picking it apart and seeing what you put in it. Then I can make my own sandwich which is exactly like yours, share that recipe with my friends, make my own sandwich stand or whatever. It doesn't matter if you say "hey, I made that sandwich first I want 1$ for every such sandwich anyone makes" you're not getting it. It doesn't matter how many hours you spent in the kitchen coming up with the idea, maybe you can try keeping your secret sauce a trade secret but that's it. If I download a song off P2P then you had zero costs with that copy, we paid for our own bandwidth and I bought my own hard drive not you. You're trying to get compensation for creating the "master sandwich" that everyone copied. I guess it's a matter of perspective, is that right inherent or something we created so we'd have people coming up with new sandwiches?
I think the idea that this is inherent is complete bunk. If copyright was Jack Valenti's "infinity minus a day" we'd still be paying the caveman who invented the wheel. For the better part of civilization if we're seen someone do something better and simpler, we've copied it without further ado and the world moved forward. If someone told a better tale or played a better tune storytellers and bards copied it quickly. Particularly during the industrialization where we took what master craftsmen had perfected over generations and put them in cheap mass production in factories. Tough shit for the Luddites and saboteurs. Except for some things we found this was a bit overkill, it became so easy to copy it hampered progress and innovation because there was too little value in creating original work. We granted copyright to create artificial scarcity and value, we can take it away.
You can do all the name-calling you like, you have already lost the word "piracy" and "pirate" and people will never equate sharing with taking. I share a song I have with my friends, I don't take anything from anyone. Trying to redefine the basic meaning of words is doomed to failure. This whole thing reminds me of a scene from the Gandhi movie, not that I'm comparing causes or anything:
GENERAL: And how do you propose to make them yours? You don't think we're just going to walk out of India. GANDHI: Yes . . . in the end you will walk out. Because one hundred thousand Englishmen simply cannot control three hundred fifty million Indians if the Indians refuse to co-operate. And that is what we intend to achieve -- peaceful, non-violent, non-co-operation.
I think this variety goes like:
MAFIAA: And how do you propose to make them yours? You don't think we're just going to walk away from our profits. PEOPLE: Yes . . . in the end you will change or disappear. Because one hundred thousand copyright holders simply cannot control three hundred fifty million consumers if the consumers refuse to co-operate. And that is what we intend to achieve -- peaceful, non-violent, non-co-operation.
Since for some algorithms the computational power is exponential in the amount of quantum memory, you can do "significant" stuff without a lot of memory.
Compared to the gigabytes of memory on your average computer, sure. 1 kilobyte = 8192 bits would be huge. But 14 bits? At most 2^14 = 16384 "classic" operations at once. I've never heard how many IOPS you'll get from a quantum computer but my impression is that you need many more qubits to beat a supercomputer.
It's called medical ethics. If for $X you can either save 1,000 kids, or drag out the death of a 95-year-old for one painful week, yes, that should be a consideration in making end-of-life decisions.
Not that they dare speak loud of very often, neither for end-of-life decisions nor what treatments they will give in general. The truth is that they have more treatments than they have money, they can't afford to give everyone the best possible care. If they had a treatment that'd cost ten million dollars and give you ten more good years you wouldn't get it. Bill Gates would get it because he'd pay out of his own pocket, but you wouldn't on pure economical grounds.
People have tried estimating this based on what treatments people get and what people don't, the ballpark estimate people agree on is that your life is worth around the GDP/year. Every year you'll live justifies around 50,000$ in cost. Anything more expensive is better spent on making someone else's life better, or so it seems. But it rather sucks that they're cutting your life short, even though they know how to do better. You'll have to push a doctor pretty hard to make him admit that.
just like when the military there use "klicks", unable to use that nasty FRENCH measurement openly, right? They mean kilometres.
Yeah, because computer scientists never say megs or gigs for short. If I said kilometers more than three times a day I'd also go with something easier.
This push towards automating driving is yet another attempt to nerf the entire world. Doomed to failure, but that won't stop the "visionaries." They should instead of focusing on having much better driving schools, much more stringent driving exams and recurring examinations. (...) Granted, some people will fail more difficult driving exams, and I'm ok with that even if I fail myself. They lack the hand-eye coordination required to be in control of a multi tonne vehicle, and should not be on the road. They can ride the bus, take a cab or walk. I'm not being facetious, I truly mean it.
Bus? Not available. Cab? Too expensive. Walk? Too far.
Let's face it, many people are completely dependent on having a car. Even if you tell them to rewrite their lives to be car free - possibly abandoning childhood homes, neighbors and local communities - there are many things that are completely dependent on having a car. There'll never be any public transport to take you up to your mountain cabin for the weekend and the taxi driver would charge you a small fortune for it. You can of course say "don't do those things" but that's a really crappy solution to the people you want to take it away from. Particularly for many elderly the car is a lifeline for getting around, losing their license and being "stuck" in their apartment is one of the saddest day in their sunset years. Given the alternatives, I can understand the "You can pry it from my cold, dead fingers" attitude many have to their driver's license.
If there is to be a change of tune, I think it will come from these people. People that know that maaaaaaaybe they shouldn't actually be driving, but they don't feel they have a choice. People that could say "hey, this is enough for me to let me get my groceries and visit my grandkids", who don't give a crap about any loss of manual control - they never really asked for it in the first place. Like a cab, without the cost of a cab and that is your personal space. And commuters, honestly who thinks that is fun driving? Just get in, tell it to go to the office and spend the time doing something else while the computer limps after the tail lights ahead of you. Or just people that don't care, it's a tool to get from A to B and as long as the computer gets you there in roughly the same time that's fine.
Not to mention, driverless cars also enable passengerless cars. The implications of that could be great, like I get off and the car parks itself. I call it and it comes to pick me up - perhaps not even in the same place, I don't need to return to where I parked it. I could drive myself to the airport and it'll go park itself. Or even drive home and wait for me to schedule a pickup. Also things like people that aren't old enough to drive. Deliver your kid to soccer practice? Put him/her in the car, tell it to go drop him off. If they're old enough, maybe even pick them up on their own. Or when you're drunk and can't drive yourself, no more need for "designated drivers" - which nobody wants to be in my experience.
Seriously, driverless cars would be the solution to so many problems that only skilled drivers would never solve and which is pretty much a pipe dream anyway. Most people are just average and the great majority is not going to "throw out" themselves.
OTOH most of those problems happen because you either a) are connected to a network or b) is running some random shit code you installed. Cars have lots of code in them today, but I don't see an ABS/antispin system bluescreen very often.
The problem is that there will always be accidents that couldn't reasonably have been avoided because some kid was playing and decided to run and hide on the other side of the road instead. Humans would hit the kid, computers would hit the kid. Of course everything is preventable if we drive at a snail's pace, but if it couldn't be avoided the way 99.9%+ of people drive then we have in practice said this is an acceptable risk. Except we pretend that risk doesn't exist...
Dude, I saw some of the roads in the area. Putting up more roadblocks would be the least of your worries, trouble was more like there was no road. There's a reason it took them that many days just to get a cable from the nearest electricity plant there.
That's correct Russia did not exist when Chernobyl happened. The U.S.S.R. existed.
Not the point, Chernobyl is in Ukraine. You wouldn't say that something that happened in London while it was part of the Roman empire happened in Italy, would you? They're not even originally a part of Russia, Ukraine was one of the states in the Soviet Union.
Fair enough that there are no good guys but if we're going to count every feud back to the dawn of civilization then most of the world would be at war. For example, France and Germany did not just one but two world wars last century, and yet now they're both EU members with open borders, common currency and whatnot. At some point you need to leave the past behind you and accept that it happened, but that you don't need to get even anymore. Particularly if that "getting even" is dealing twice as much as you got, then it'll never end. Somebody have to be less bad than the one before them, then maybe hopefully over time things can heal. Yet every time there's a period of relative peace and stability, someone is ready to deal new, fresh scars...
Personally I decided not long after both Israel accused Norway of being anti-semitic because of some writings and the Arab countries accused us of being anti-muslim because of the Muhammad caricatures. They're both anti-freedom of speech and anti-freedom of press. As far as I am concerned, I wouldn't mind at all if the entire Middle East disappeared off the face of the earth. Or at least got their head out of the dark ages.
Furthermore, they say they require all the data to reconstitute the episodes, so every time they needed the episodes, they would download all those 300GB of 6000+ files from FTP and rebuild their episodes? What kind of idiocy is this.
If it is the work of a company doing effects that is missing, it's not unreasonable that there are scenes missing from all episodes. If this is a work in production, the other companies could have simple placeholders or simply worked on their own scenes. I don't know how they split the work, but it's not unreasonable that nobody has the latest work of everyone as they work in parallel.
Well yes, but it's also under a heading with "Examples of copyright infringement" and clearly the implication is that "if you do as in one of the bullet points here, you're violating copyright law". In no way is it an offense for you to run an open router, even if others do as described in the example. The advice also doesn't actually say open or unprotected or anything like that either, it just says don't use wireless at all. So it's both flawed and misplaced, but I agree it looks more like sloppy handiwork rather than a misunderstanding of copyright law.
If they moved it out of that section and said "We strongly recommend securing your wireless or using a wired network; others may share illegal material through your router, giving the appearance that you are the guilty party." that would be good advice, this wasn't.
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I would much rather have a desktop that only allowed the most efficient ways to do things than one that gave me a bunch of configuration options and told me to "figure it out for myself", in a sense. *cough cough*.
"Most efficient" is highly dependent on the user. For example:
1) Do you have a strong spatial memory of where things are in menus, on the desktop or the taskbar? If so you'll hate all auto-intelligence that keeps adjusting your favorite functions. You'd rather have an ordered alt-tab list than an unordered expose function like OS X.
2) Are you a person who remembers a great number of shortcuts and prefer the interface doesn't use much screen real estate to show you the buttons and toolbars? Or do you prefer most functionality to be visible to you?
3) Do you prefer arranging windows or do you like maximized windows and easy switching? Is it important for you to group windows into virtual desktops?
4) Can you recognize software by its icon? If not you'll hate Windows 7.
The "One True Way" is an illusion which may be true for things like kernel benchmarks. But when it comes to what is best for the user that depends on his mental skills, familiarity with the interface and the software and sometimes simply preference. Sane defaults are important, but if you've built the "perfect desktop" the chances are very high you've built YOUR perfect desktop.
It's one issue but not the only one - and could be well explained by mono not being very popular, it doesn't matter how much time has passed if there's not enough in the trap to be worth springing it. Another issue is that almost everyone writes for Microsoft's CLR. No matter if it's spec ambiguities, bugs in Microsoft's implementation or bugs in Mono's implementation the most common answer you'll get if it works on their version and not mono will be "dunno, use Windows" as if mono is something akin to WINE. Just like if Linux were to ditch OpenGL for DirectX, or at least some "almost-but-not-quite" standard similar to it.
Recent versions of Ubuntu are fine, as are most other recent distros. You should try them.
Hmm where did I hear that before? Oh, right here in 2010... and 2009... and 2008... and 2007... and so on. For someone that claims to be different from proprietary software, the claim that the newest release fixes everything under the sun and you should upgrade right now seems remarkably similar. And best taken with the same pinch of salt. Also I can't count how many times I've heard people accuse problems of being upgrade cruft, please reinstall from a clean version. Well, I guess that makes it even with Windows reinstalling every 6 months. Except it seems only unskilled Windows users need to do that.
I guess it's a great shield against criticism, the only people "qualified" to comment are those that use it daily, while all the people who tried and ditched it well their comments are always out of date. Oh but that was the release two months ago, this new beta is great. No problem you had could possibly still apply, it's now all smiles and sunshine. I stayed with it through gutsy and hardy and intrepid and jaunty and karmic and lucid and maverick, but enough was enough and I ditched Linux. What you're saying just isn't credible. But I'm sure someone will very soon tell me natty is the greatest thing since sliced bread...
Actually sounds quite doable, essentially something like the Mars rovers except stationary with seeds to grow. If you land with just seeds you can take the same landing approach they did - COMPLETELY unfeasible with humans.
I'm skeptical if they can keep it warm enough though, the rovers only produce a few watts - far too little to be used as a space heater. You will need a very good heat trap/isolator.
Seriously, you can't have a conversation that starts with, "Hey, haven't seen you for a while, what've you been up to?" Because you ALREADY KNOW. And if you don't know, you're an insensitive clod who's not reading their facebook posts.
Since Facebook is "news for you and your 300 closest friends" you should either be a better friend with more to talk about than that, or it at least gives you some topics to talk about with people who'd otherwise be almost strangers. Unless they're the kind who has to put every fart they do up on Facebook, if they both do that and get annoyed you haven't read it maybe you should revise who your friends are.
Dying from smoking tends to be very expensive. It is not like dying from a car accident or bungee jumping, where you either die or cost a fortunate in medical expenses due to long rehabilitation, but you die and it costs a fortunate to keep you hospitalised while you cough your lungs out or wither away to chemo/radiation therapy. I was in a lung ward for two weeks and saw enough of that stuff to be permanently immunized to the idea of taking up smoking for whatever reason.
The thing about deaths is that everyone has one, it's only a matter of when and how. The health freak that is in and out of hospital from 80 to 90 as his health finally fails may not be cheaper than the smoker that was in and out of hospital from 60 to 70 before kicking the bucket.
For normal (proprietary) licenses it's already been established that a copyright owner can revoke the license at any time simply by giving notice to the licensee. (Wood v Leadbitter).
Your quotes are wildly misleading. A proprietary licence is a permission to enter land and may be express, implied or contractual. Like say, I can invite you into my home and if I ask you to leave you must leave. Implied permission is much the same, it ends the moment you end it.
Contractual obligations are different, they're binding agreements to both sides. You have no right to terminate a land lease just by saying it, that's breach of contract. I can take you to court, and one of the things I can do is demand fulfillment - that I'm can continue to use the land as per the contract. The GPL is a form of contract, you can't terminate my right to use the software. Since that fundamental assumption is wrong, the rest of your post makes no sense.
A market optimal model collects exactly as much from each person as he is willing to pay. So if there's an American willing to pay 10$, a Greek willing to pay 5$ and a Chinese willing to pay 1$, you find a way to collect all 16$. Obviously a single global price is a restriction on that, either you lose some customers or you lose some profit. What this study shows that not only do you lose customers, you turn them into pirates. No real surprise there.
What I don't like is the idea where it's going, this is where region codes comes from. Split the market, tailor the price and maximize the profit. It's the one way globalism again, they can shop anywhere for cheap labor but I can't do the same for their products. I have to get the expensive European version, now with the added excuse that it's to combat piracy. And maximize their profits, but they don't like to mention that loud.
And probably just as much that there isn't an obvious difference in the parties - least not the big two. The democrats have their list of what they are that the republicans aren't and vice versa. Even if voters do care, you'd still need a choice.
I find it astounding that some consultants charge for lunch, and even charge for taking a crap. If I stop and have a 10 minute discussion, non-work related, with someone at a firm I'm working for... I *take that time off the bill*. I don't charge for research, unless the topic is utterly obscure. You're paying for expertise, so why would you pay for research time?!
I guess it depends on the work, but I never metered my time with a stopwatch nor was I this all knowing oracle. I'm a specialist in a narrow field that they like to hire in for a limited time, If you hire me for two weeks I'll be pretty much like a highly skilled employee in that time. No more, no less - you saw my CV when you hired me and if you ask me about things too obscure for me to know, I'm still the person on the team most likely to work it out. Plus the border between when I'm solving a general problem and when I'm doing specific work for you is quite fluid, as long as I'm working on the specifics of your problem I feel that is very billable. I never billed for lunch though, but reality is that most people just look at the cost per normal day and the 7,5 hour rate is higher so if we have to work overtime it is better for us.
Sometimes there are good governments and bad people.
Sometimes there are bad governments and good people.
Who is good or bad is in the eye of the beholder.
Let's hope they don't simply find it easier to degrade the quality of competing services. I get nervous (and cynical) when my ISP wants to sell me anything other than a pipe for bits.
I don't think they'd dare. An ISP is a lot more dependent on having content than the content providers are on that ISP and lockout is a very powerful tool. The day you visit facebook.com and get a page saying "Your ISP is a retard. Change ISP to get Facebook." is the day they lose half their customers. There was a few attempts at this in Norway around 2006-2007 as online video was taking off, the content providers gave them the finger, the customers complained and as far as I know the idea died there.
If I buy a sandwich from you and find that it tastes great, there's nothing stopping me from picking it apart and seeing what you put in it. Then I can make my own sandwich which is exactly like yours, share that recipe with my friends, make my own sandwich stand or whatever. It doesn't matter if you say "hey, I made that sandwich first I want 1$ for every such sandwich anyone makes" you're not getting it. It doesn't matter how many hours you spent in the kitchen coming up with the idea, maybe you can try keeping your secret sauce a trade secret but that's it. If I download a song off P2P then you had zero costs with that copy, we paid for our own bandwidth and I bought my own hard drive not you. You're trying to get compensation for creating the "master sandwich" that everyone copied. I guess it's a matter of perspective, is that right inherent or something we created so we'd have people coming up with new sandwiches?
I think the idea that this is inherent is complete bunk. If copyright was Jack Valenti's "infinity minus a day" we'd still be paying the caveman who invented the wheel. For the better part of civilization if we're seen someone do something better and simpler, we've copied it without further ado and the world moved forward. If someone told a better tale or played a better tune storytellers and bards copied it quickly. Particularly during the industrialization where we took what master craftsmen had perfected over generations and put them in cheap mass production in factories. Tough shit for the Luddites and saboteurs. Except for some things we found this was a bit overkill, it became so easy to copy it hampered progress and innovation because there was too little value in creating original work. We granted copyright to create artificial scarcity and value, we can take it away.
You can do all the name-calling you like, you have already lost the word "piracy" and "pirate" and people will never equate sharing with taking. I share a song I have with my friends, I don't take anything from anyone. Trying to redefine the basic meaning of words is doomed to failure. This whole thing reminds me of a scene from the Gandhi movie, not that I'm comparing causes or anything:
GENERAL: And how do you propose to make them yours? You don't think we're just going to walk out of India.
GANDHI: Yes . . . in the end you will walk out. Because one hundred thousand Englishmen simply cannot control three hundred fifty million Indians if the Indians refuse to co-operate. And that is what we intend to achieve -- peaceful, non-violent, non-co-operation.
I think this variety goes like:
MAFIAA: And how do you propose to make them yours? You don't think we're just going to walk away from our profits.
PEOPLE: Yes . . . in the end you will change or disappear. Because one hundred thousand copyright holders simply cannot control three hundred fifty million consumers if the consumers refuse to co-operate. And that is what we intend to achieve -- peaceful, non-violent, non-co-operation.
Since for some algorithms the computational power is exponential in the amount of quantum memory, you can do "significant" stuff without a lot of memory.
Compared to the gigabytes of memory on your average computer, sure. 1 kilobyte = 8192 bits would be huge. But 14 bits? At most 2^14 = 16384 "classic" operations at once. I've never heard how many IOPS you'll get from a quantum computer but my impression is that you need many more qubits to beat a supercomputer.
It's called medical ethics. If for $X you can either save 1,000 kids, or drag out the death of a 95-year-old for one painful week, yes, that should be a consideration in making end-of-life decisions.
Not that they dare speak loud of very often, neither for end-of-life decisions nor what treatments they will give in general. The truth is that they have more treatments than they have money, they can't afford to give everyone the best possible care. If they had a treatment that'd cost ten million dollars and give you ten more good years you wouldn't get it. Bill Gates would get it because he'd pay out of his own pocket, but you wouldn't on pure economical grounds.
People have tried estimating this based on what treatments people get and what people don't, the ballpark estimate people agree on is that your life is worth around the GDP/year. Every year you'll live justifies around 50,000$ in cost. Anything more expensive is better spent on making someone else's life better, or so it seems. But it rather sucks that they're cutting your life short, even though they know how to do better. You'll have to push a doctor pretty hard to make him admit that.
just like when the military there use "klicks", unable to use that nasty FRENCH measurement openly, right? They mean kilometres.
Yeah, because computer scientists never say megs or gigs for short. If I said kilometers more than three times a day I'd also go with something easier.
This push towards automating driving is yet another attempt to nerf the entire world. Doomed to failure, but that won't stop the "visionaries." They should instead of focusing on having much better driving schools, much more stringent driving exams and recurring examinations. (...) Granted, some people will fail more difficult driving exams, and I'm ok with that even if I fail myself. They lack the hand-eye coordination required to be in control of a multi tonne vehicle, and should not be on the road. They can ride the bus, take a cab or walk. I'm not being facetious, I truly mean it.
Bus? Not available.
Cab? Too expensive.
Walk? Too far.
Let's face it, many people are completely dependent on having a car. Even if you tell them to rewrite their lives to be car free - possibly abandoning childhood homes, neighbors and local communities - there are many things that are completely dependent on having a car. There'll never be any public transport to take you up to your mountain cabin for the weekend and the taxi driver would charge you a small fortune for it. You can of course say "don't do those things" but that's a really crappy solution to the people you want to take it away from. Particularly for many elderly the car is a lifeline for getting around, losing their license and being "stuck" in their apartment is one of the saddest day in their sunset years. Given the alternatives, I can understand the "You can pry it from my cold, dead fingers" attitude many have to their driver's license.
If there is to be a change of tune, I think it will come from these people. People that know that maaaaaaaybe they shouldn't actually be driving, but they don't feel they have a choice. People that could say "hey, this is enough for me to let me get my groceries and visit my grandkids", who don't give a crap about any loss of manual control - they never really asked for it in the first place. Like a cab, without the cost of a cab and that is your personal space. And commuters, honestly who thinks that is fun driving? Just get in, tell it to go to the office and spend the time doing something else while the computer limps after the tail lights ahead of you. Or just people that don't care, it's a tool to get from A to B and as long as the computer gets you there in roughly the same time that's fine.
Not to mention, driverless cars also enable passengerless cars. The implications of that could be great, like I get off and the car parks itself. I call it and it comes to pick me up - perhaps not even in the same place, I don't need to return to where I parked it. I could drive myself to the airport and it'll go park itself. Or even drive home and wait for me to schedule a pickup. Also things like people that aren't old enough to drive. Deliver your kid to soccer practice? Put him/her in the car, tell it to go drop him off. If they're old enough, maybe even pick them up on their own. Or when you're drunk and can't drive yourself, no more need for "designated drivers" - which nobody wants to be in my experience.
Seriously, driverless cars would be the solution to so many problems that only skilled drivers would never solve and which is pretty much a pipe dream anyway. Most people are just average and the great majority is not going to "throw out" themselves.
OTOH most of those problems happen because you either a) are connected to a network or b) is running some random shit code you installed. Cars have lots of code in them today, but I don't see an ABS/antispin system bluescreen very often.
The problem is that there will always be accidents that couldn't reasonably have been avoided because some kid was playing and decided to run and hide on the other side of the road instead. Humans would hit the kid, computers would hit the kid. Of course everything is preventable if we drive at a snail's pace, but if it couldn't be avoided the way 99.9%+ of people drive then we have in practice said this is an acceptable risk. Except we pretend that risk doesn't exist...
by thisisauniqueid (825395) writes: Alter Relationship on 2011-04-02 12:44 (#35691800)
Local time. This is how the same comment looks for me:
by thisisauniqueid (825395) Alter Relationship on Friday April 01, @10:44PM (#35691800)
Dude, I saw some of the roads in the area. Putting up more roadblocks would be the least of your worries, trouble was more like there was no road. There's a reason it took them that many days just to get a cable from the nearest electricity plant there.
That's correct Russia did not exist when Chernobyl happened. The U.S.S.R. existed.
Not the point, Chernobyl is in Ukraine. You wouldn't say that something that happened in London while it was part of the Roman empire happened in Italy, would you? They're not even originally a part of Russia, Ukraine was one of the states in the Soviet Union.
Fair enough that there are no good guys but if we're going to count every feud back to the dawn of civilization then most of the world would be at war. For example, France and Germany did not just one but two world wars last century, and yet now they're both EU members with open borders, common currency and whatnot. At some point you need to leave the past behind you and accept that it happened, but that you don't need to get even anymore. Particularly if that "getting even" is dealing twice as much as you got, then it'll never end. Somebody have to be less bad than the one before them, then maybe hopefully over time things can heal. Yet every time there's a period of relative peace and stability, someone is ready to deal new, fresh scars...
Personally I decided not long after both Israel accused Norway of being anti-semitic because of some writings and the Arab countries accused us of being anti-muslim because of the Muhammad caricatures. They're both anti-freedom of speech and anti-freedom of press. As far as I am concerned, I wouldn't mind at all if the entire Middle East disappeared off the face of the earth. Or at least got their head out of the dark ages.
Stories will incorporate the highest rated goatse guaranteeing the best story possible.
Highest rated? What, are you going to do a hot or not with goatse?
Furthermore, they say they require all the data to reconstitute the episodes, so every time they needed the episodes, they would download all those 300GB of 6000+ files from FTP and rebuild their episodes? What kind of idiocy is this.
If it is the work of a company doing effects that is missing, it's not unreasonable that there are scenes missing from all episodes. If this is a work in production, the other companies could have simple placeholders or simply worked on their own scenes. I don't know how they split the work, but it's not unreasonable that nobody has the latest work of everyone as they work in parallel.
Well yes, but it's also under a heading with "Examples of copyright infringement" and clearly the implication is that "if you do as in one of the bullet points here, you're violating copyright law". In no way is it an offense for you to run an open router, even if others do as described in the example. The advice also doesn't actually say open or unprotected or anything like that either, it just says don't use wireless at all. So it's both flawed and misplaced, but I agree it looks more like sloppy handiwork rather than a misunderstanding of copyright law.
If they moved it out of that section and said "We strongly recommend securing your wireless or using a wired network; others may share illegal material through your router, giving the appearance that you are the guilty party." that would be good advice, this wasn't.