Not to dispute you (although I presently don't believe you)... do you think you could provide references that back your claims?
being user-friendly didn't stop Windows from actually being faster than X in a lot of tasks
E.g., MS Visual C still optimizes a LOT better than GCC.
it has committed more sins in the name of speed, than for all other reasons combined
that's the reason why MSVC++ was always slightly deviating from the ANSI standard: they could optimize code better that way
that's the reason it let drivers run in kernel mode
etc, etc. It seems to me that the simpler explanation (hasty, poor design decisions) better fits the facts regarding Microsoft's "reasoning", and my experiences with Linux have apparently been the complete opposite of yours (I've found Linux systems to be significantly faster and more capable on the same hardware).
There however IS a difference between dumping your own ROMs and downloading them from the net, even if you own the board. The latter is not legal.
Downloading things from the net is legal. Distributing (that is, sharing, or uploading) content in violation of copyright is a civil (and potentially criminal) offense.
Public denouncement of blatant stupidity, removal of useless mental hurdles to simple concepts, and the beginnings of expecting logic and reason from *everyone* ?
Just think of the jobs that the transition would create in the short term! All the new textbook editions, new signs, new scales... just think of the money that would change hands! Transactions, my friend, make the world go 'round...
No, dumbass. It either IS or IS NOT infringement. The defending lawyer would argue that the defendant's use of the work falls under the fair use exemption in copyright law and thus IS NOT infringement.
I'm personally looking forward to being gouged for price-hiked solar filters, just like I was gouged for a price-hiked barlow lens during the last close encounter with Mars.:o)
Does anyone have more specific info on how long it'll take for the full transit? Are we talking just a few hours, like an eclipse?
I think the issue is with investment portfolios. If Bill Gates suddenly said "Microsoft is hereby disbanded! Good bye!" then economies everywhere would TANK like no other.
Remember Enron? Imagine if Microsoft suddenly was the next Enron - yikes.
The really sad part is that even when you explain it over and over and OVER again to these people, they still don't get it, and spout off about how it's the other way and companies can do whatever they want yada yada and it's COMPLETE nonsense.
Mr. Just_Some_Guy knows what he's talking about, folks. If you didn't see the contract or license before purchase and indicate your agreement with a signature or other legally binding method, then there is NO agreement whatsoever.
If you read through the other posts in this forum, you should be able to see why some of us get so upset that things like this camcorder law get put in place - there are too many idiots out there that think that companies can just do whatever they want and we have to suck it up. Feel free to be a slave to some company yourself, but you MUST stop spouting this bullshit, because it's making things worse for folks like me... folks who want to continue to enjoy the benefits of adhering to true and sensible copyright laws.
It is theft in the same way that riding a bus without paying for a ticket is theft.
So that would be not at all the same, then.
"Copies of a film sold or rented to the public are for home use only and intended solely for the enjoyment of a person, his/her family and guests in a home setting. "
Where did you get this quote? Just curious... it doesn't seem to be a quote from an actual law. Perhaps this was someone's understanding of that law?
Damn it, man, nobody's stolen anything here! Stop undermining your own statements with this mis-conception.
What if, one day in the near future, I get a cybernetic eye implant, that *also* happens to records everything I see... and I go see a movie? Will I be persecuted for a *crime* just for trying to watch a movie? Before a crime has actually even been committed? (ie, before I illegally distributed a copy of somebody else's work?)
A no-camcorder "law" is absurd, and should be stricken.
Also - lay off the editors, and the readers. While I'm sure there's the leech or two or 100 on slashdot, I would expect that most people respect copyrights on principle. What we object to is *criminal* prosecution for what should be civil offenses, ever-expanding restrictions on fair-use, and idiots who say "theft" when they mean "copyright infringement"
There *definitely* is a mismatch between what should be a criminal offense and what should be a civil offense. Clearly copyright violations should be civil offenses, as should anything dealing with intellectual property, because it's all make-believe anyway (no humans were harmed in the violation of this copyright!)
So fine the dude a thousand or a million or whatever, ban him from theatres, whatever. But jail time? Get real. Completely inappropriate.
Spraying water on a fire robs the fire of thermal energy.
Dude, the water doesn't magically swipe heat out of the fire. When you dump a bunch of water on a fire, you are covering all the burning surfaces and preventing them from getting oxygen, dousing the flame. The heat already in the doused surfaces will steam the water off, sure, but by then it's too late for the fire.
There are certain types of fires you aren't supposed to put out with water because the mechanical action of spraying them causes them to get worse (only in rare cases, like perhaps your magnesium example, is the fire wicked enough to actually eat water). For example, a grease fire: take a pan of pooled grease or oil on the stove, heat it up enough to burn. If you're an idiot and spray it with water, you blow the pooled grease out of the pan, and suddenly there's a LOT more surface area of hot oil to react with the air and FWOOOHM.
It's so funny, how many folks chime in with their completely bogus knowledge. The peppering with 'big' science words like 'endothermic' on top of factually incorrect information and mis-understood theories must fool too many people around here. One would think geeks would know a little fire safety...
Industries need to realize that more and more folks already have PDAs and MP3 players...hopefully we'll see a growing number of 'appliance' level devices start to interface rather than attempt to do everything themselves.
As long as designers are focused on making their products the *complete* experience for the user, and don't design them to work well with anything else a user might already have, then they are going to miss out on providing the benefits that geeks desire (like, as you mentioned, walking up to the car and having useful stats and functions offered up to your PDA).
In-dash iPod docks are one thing... but built-in personal-area networking is quite another. Let's get some of THAT on the slashdot front page!
Seems to me that downloading is legal - sharing is not. Any information I can find that's publicly displayed is fair game for me to make a copy of for my own use, be it a 'lost dog' flyer, a DVD ISO or an obsolete arcade ROM. Whether or not it should have been publicly displayed in the first place is not my problem.
Dude, if you are talking about the mouse behavior in KDE, then go to the Peripherals/Mouse control panel and select "double-click to open files and folders".
This is the sort of thing that just can't be made any simpler... the option is in a logical place in a central configuration app. Did you even look?
Go back to KDE... sit down at a default system, and check it out. Then, open up the Control Center, and look through IT to see what you can customize. THEN, make your decisions about KDE. Same for Gnome, or any window manager / OS / app.
Or instead of little red flags, you should have a little light bulb light up that says "What a deal!".
Downloading from the net is not illegal. Putting stuff on the net you don't have rights to is - but the downloaders aren't doing that. They are just accessing publicly available information.
Your "case in point" has nothing to do with what you said in the first half of your post. You were fairly interesting up until that point, but then your anectodal "I was a stubborn ass because I hate God!" story just completely undermines you.
Everybody knows that "acts of god" means "events out of human control." Wasting people's time and money to have such a pointless term changed in an employment contract shows that you're likely to waste time and money on similar trivialities in the future - and are likely to be shown the door.
If you want to advertise your atheism, you have the Freedom of Speech at your disposal. Unfortunately, common sense and rationality seem to have left you. Negotiations of employment contract provisions are no place to preach your atheism.
Well aren't YOU just the smartest person in the whole fucking world! Sitting there in your chair telling people they're 'asshats' for not reading the fine-print when you KNOW it makes no difference, EVERY company has bullshit terms in their fine-print (ie, I'll take your money and will give you nothing or at most X).
The root of the problem here is that Comcast (and many service providers) has a real numerical limit on data transfer that they do not publish but expect everyone to abide by. They can make this bad PR go away by simply publishing the limits - but instead they play games that piss off their more savvy customers (who just try and get their money's worth out of the connection).
Maybe companies should be required to get their TOS / fine-print contracts reviewed legally / federally before they are able to offer them to the public.
Back to my ad-hominem: since you've shopped around and found a provider with golden TOS and stellar service, why don't you post the details? Oh wait, you were just talking out of your ass.
You would think... but, since they don't publish their terms regarding the cap and when they'll cut you off, who can say? That's the whole point.
If this was all in writing from the get go, this issue would disappear. So why are these companies refusing disclosure of terms? False advertising.
If I pay for X Mbps up / Y Mbps down, and then I magically program my PC to automatically transfer X and Y Mbps... then I'd better not ever get cut off for unspecified 'abuse'.
I am wondering, though, if "cosmic rays" would mess with a digital watch
Not likely, on Mars. Radiation can have adverse effects on digital circuits by (a) depleting internally stored charge so that what should be read as a '1' might read '0' or (b) if the circuit is small enough, shorting parallel traces or frying a gate.
The occasional cosmic ray to reach the Martian surface, while more likely than on Earth due to less protective atmosphere, is unlikely to break the simple circuits in a digital watch. A P4 may have problems...
That's how it's defined now but not originally
Yeah, I didn't mean to argue that point - the history of the definition of the second is important and answers the question of "why 9,192,631,770 periods of cesium?" but now that it's been DEFINED, you just use the definition! Maybe I'm just annoyed by all this "Ooh, it's Mars! It's different!" hype.
I'd LOVE to go to Mars - but I'd expect that the second would be the same here or there, and not to have to measure frequencies in "Martian Hertz" or have a "Martian Heart Rate" or EVER say "Sol" instead of "Day", and I just wish that NASA would not needlessly confuse issues just for PR.
technically, the second is defined in terms of planetary rotation
Nope, the definition of a second is:
second (s): In the International System of Units (SI), the time interval equal to 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom.
(from http://www.atis.org/tg2k/_second.html)
This happens to nicely match up to around 1/86400 th of an Earth Solar Day. All sorts of other useful constants and such are based on this definition, so changing EVERYTHING simply because you happen to be on Mars is needlessly complicated. Is it so inconceivable that a day on Mars might have more minutes / seconds in it? Why would you suddenly make 24hrs/60mins/60secs the definition and base everything else off that?
You simply use all your existing SI definitions (second / kg / meter) and you don't have to do any extra work. Earth's day has 86400 seconds in it... Mars' day has more - NO BIG DEAL.
As for the watch... I was imagining a dual analog/digital device - something that, if we were ever to colonize Mars, would actually be useful. While there's no reason not to go all digital (even with dual analog and digital displays), you can do the same thing with all analog. The clockworks just stop at midnight, pause for the extra 39 minutes (perhaps an extra face with a little hand that ticks off 39 extra minutes!) then resume.
The minute hand should do nothing in the extra time. The pie slice should light up and perhaps blink every second for the 39 minutes of extra time. Adding an additional digital readout that, whenever you're in the 'extra time', would run a countdown back to 'normal time' would be ideal.
This idiocy of the longer 'Martian second' has got to stop.
if you're going to invent a Chronology system, make it universal and metric
I agree. This system is typical of the backward thinking NASA has unfortunately become known for. What if we colonize Mars someday? Are scientists on Mars supposed to use some special "Martian metric" SECOND? No, it's idiocy. A second on Earth is a second anywhere else.
And please PLEASE stop this stupidity of calling a solar day a "Sol"! It's a fucking DAY, everybody knows what a DAY is! Just because it's Mars doesn't make it (or anything else!) special. Tell folks "A DAY on Mars is longer than a Day on Earth" and they'll know what you're talking about.
Its very unfortunate such a harmless and useful drug is illegal.
Totally offtopic... but, I am VERY glad that marijuana is illegal. I don't want my kids to be constantly bombarded with peer pressure at school and through the media that these filthy, unregulated, unhealthy, pschyo-retardant drugs and their irresponsible use is completely ok.
It is not ok to waste yourself away in a stupor, believing to have expanded your mind when in reality you've done the opposite.
I know there's lots of loud proponents of legalized marijuana use here on Slashdot, just as there's a similarly large portion of all society that's thicker than pigshit and would like nothing better to just wallow around their whole life in some drug-induced euphoric surreality. Thankfully there are SOME out there who recognize the dangers posed by apathetically accepting that "everything's ok!", and who will fight to maintain a structured, responsible society that we all can flourish in.
Slashdot Mirror
etc, etc. It seems to me that the simpler explanation (hasty, poor design decisions) better fits the facts regarding Microsoft's "reasoning", and my experiences with Linux have apparently been the complete opposite of yours (I've found Linux systems to be significantly faster and more capable on the same hardware).
Downloading things from the net is legal. Distributing (that is, sharing, or uploading) content in violation of copyright is a civil (and potentially criminal) offense.
So - download away!
Public denouncement of blatant stupidity, removal of useless mental hurdles to simple concepts, and the beginnings of expecting logic and reason from *everyone* ?
Just think of the jobs that the transition would create in the short term! All the new textbook editions, new signs, new scales... just think of the money that would change hands! Transactions, my friend, make the world go 'round...
No, dumbass. It either IS or IS NOT infringement. The defending lawyer would argue that the defendant's use of the work falls under the fair use exemption in copyright law and thus IS NOT infringement.
"basic freshman Business Law" indeed.
Oh really?
A: "You look at me funny..."
C: "I beat you senseless!"
A->C is not the same as ~C->~A.
A->C would be "If you look at me funny, I will beat you senseless!" taken as literal truth.
~C->~A would be "I will not beat you senseless if you do not look at me funny", and is not at all the same.
I might still beat you senseless for a variety of reasons.
I'm personally looking forward to being gouged for price-hiked solar filters, just like I was gouged for a price-hiked barlow lens during the last close encounter with Mars. :o)
Does anyone have more specific info on how long it'll take for the full transit? Are we talking just a few hours, like an eclipse?
I think the issue is with investment portfolios. If Bill Gates suddenly said "Microsoft is hereby disbanded! Good bye!" then economies everywhere would TANK like no other.
Remember Enron? Imagine if Microsoft suddenly was the next Enron - yikes.
The really sad part is that even when you explain it over and over and OVER again to these people, they still don't get it, and spout off about how it's the other way and companies can do whatever they want yada yada and it's COMPLETE nonsense.
Mr. Just_Some_Guy knows what he's talking about, folks. If you didn't see the contract or license before purchase and indicate your agreement with a signature or other legally binding method, then there is NO agreement whatsoever.
If you read through the other posts in this forum, you should be able to see why some of us get so upset that things like this camcorder law get put in place - there are too many idiots out there that think that companies can just do whatever they want and we have to suck it up. Feel free to be a slave to some company yourself, but you MUST stop spouting this bullshit, because it's making things worse for folks like me... folks who want to continue to enjoy the benefits of adhering to true and sensible copyright laws.
So that would be not at all the same, then.
"Copies of a film sold or rented to the public are for home use only and intended solely for the enjoyment of a person, his/her family and guests in a home setting. "
Where did you get this quote? Just curious... it doesn't seem to be a quote from an actual law. Perhaps this was someone's understanding of that law?
Damn it, man, nobody's stolen anything here! Stop undermining your own statements with this mis-conception.
What if, one day in the near future, I get a cybernetic eye implant, that *also* happens to records everything I see... and I go see a movie? Will I be persecuted for a *crime* just for trying to watch a movie? Before a crime has actually even been committed? (ie, before I illegally distributed a copy of somebody else's work?)
A no-camcorder "law" is absurd, and should be stricken.
Also - lay off the editors, and the readers. While I'm sure there's the leech or two or 100 on slashdot, I would expect that most people respect copyrights on principle. What we object to is *criminal* prosecution for what should be civil offenses, ever-expanding restrictions on fair-use, and idiots who say "theft" when they mean "copyright infringement"
There *definitely* is a mismatch between what should be a criminal offense and what should be a civil offense. Clearly copyright violations should be civil offenses, as should anything dealing with intellectual property, because it's all make-believe anyway (no humans were harmed in the violation of this copyright!)
So fine the dude a thousand or a million or whatever, ban him from theatres, whatever. But jail time? Get real. Completely inappropriate.
Dude, the water doesn't magically swipe heat out of the fire. When you dump a bunch of water on a fire, you are covering all the burning surfaces and preventing them from getting oxygen, dousing the flame. The heat already in the doused surfaces will steam the water off, sure, but by then it's too late for the fire.
There are certain types of fires you aren't supposed to put out with water because the mechanical action of spraying them causes them to get worse (only in rare cases, like perhaps your magnesium example, is the fire wicked enough to actually eat water). For example, a grease fire: take a pan of pooled grease or oil on the stove, heat it up enough to burn. If you're an idiot and spray it with water, you blow the pooled grease out of the pan, and suddenly there's a LOT more surface area of hot oil to react with the air and FWOOOHM.
It's so funny, how many folks chime in with their completely bogus knowledge. The peppering with 'big' science words like 'endothermic' on top of factually incorrect information and mis-understood theories must fool too many people around here. One would think geeks would know a little fire safety...
Very interesting points you've brought up...
Industries need to realize that more and more folks already have PDAs and MP3 players...hopefully we'll see a growing number of 'appliance' level devices start to interface rather than attempt to do everything themselves.
As long as designers are focused on making their products the *complete* experience for the user, and don't design them to work well with anything else a user might already have, then they are going to miss out on providing the benefits that geeks desire (like, as you mentioned, walking up to the car and having useful stats and functions offered up to your PDA).
In-dash iPod docks are one thing... but built-in personal-area networking is quite another. Let's get some of THAT on the slashdot front page!
Seems to me that downloading is legal - sharing is not. Any information I can find that's publicly displayed is fair game for me to make a copy of for my own use, be it a 'lost dog' flyer, a DVD ISO or an obsolete arcade ROM. Whether or not it should have been publicly displayed in the first place is not my problem.
Distribution - bad. Acquisition - good!
Just my 2 cents.
Dude, if you are talking about the mouse behavior in KDE, then go to the Peripherals/Mouse control panel and select "double-click to open files and folders".
This is the sort of thing that just can't be made any simpler... the option is in a logical place in a central configuration app. Did you even look?
Go back to KDE... sit down at a default system, and check it out. Then, open up the Control Center, and look through IT to see what you can customize. THEN, make your decisions about KDE. Same for Gnome, or any window manager / OS / app.
Or instead of little red flags, you should have a little light bulb light up that says "What a deal!".
Downloading from the net is not illegal. Putting stuff on the net you don't have rights to is - but the downloaders aren't doing that. They are just accessing publicly available information.
Your "case in point" has nothing to do with what you said in the first half of your post. You were fairly interesting up until that point, but then your anectodal "I was a stubborn ass because I hate God!" story just completely undermines you.
Everybody knows that "acts of god" means "events out of human control." Wasting people's time and money to have such a pointless term changed in an employment contract shows that you're likely to waste time and money on similar trivialities in the future - and are likely to be shown the door.
If you want to advertise your atheism, you have the Freedom of Speech at your disposal. Unfortunately, common sense and rationality seem to have left you. Negotiations of employment contract provisions are no place to preach your atheism.
Well aren't YOU just the smartest person in the whole fucking world! Sitting there in your chair telling people they're 'asshats' for not reading the fine-print when you KNOW it makes no difference, EVERY company has bullshit terms in their fine-print (ie, I'll take your money and will give you nothing or at most X).
The root of the problem here is that Comcast (and many service providers) has a real numerical limit on data transfer that they do not publish but expect everyone to abide by. They can make this bad PR go away by simply publishing the limits - but instead they play games that piss off their more savvy customers (who just try and get their money's worth out of the connection).
Maybe companies should be required to get their TOS / fine-print contracts reviewed legally / federally before they are able to offer them to the public.
Back to my ad-hominem: since you've shopped around and found a provider with golden TOS and stellar service, why don't you post the details? Oh wait, you were just talking out of your ass.
You would think... but, since they don't publish their terms regarding the cap and when they'll cut you off, who can say? That's the whole point.
If this was all in writing from the get go, this issue would disappear. So why are these companies refusing disclosure of terms? False advertising.
If I pay for X Mbps up / Y Mbps down, and then I magically program my PC to automatically transfer X and Y Mbps... then I'd better not ever get cut off for unspecified 'abuse'.
Not likely, on Mars. Radiation can have adverse effects on digital circuits by (a) depleting internally stored charge so that what should be read as a '1' might read '0' or (b) if the circuit is small enough, shorting parallel traces or frying a gate.
The occasional cosmic ray to reach the Martian surface, while more likely than on Earth due to less protective atmosphere, is unlikely to break the simple circuits in a digital watch. A P4 may have problems... That's how it's defined now but not originally
Yeah, I didn't mean to argue that point - the history of the definition of the second is important and answers the question of "why 9,192,631,770 periods of cesium?" but now that it's been DEFINED, you just use the definition! Maybe I'm just annoyed by all this "Ooh, it's Mars! It's different!" hype.
I'd LOVE to go to Mars - but I'd expect that the second would be the same here or there, and not to have to measure frequencies in "Martian Hertz" or have a "Martian Heart Rate" or EVER say "Sol" instead of "Day", and I just wish that NASA would not needlessly confuse issues just for PR.
Nope, the definition of a second is:
second (s): In the International System of Units (SI), the time interval equal to 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom. (from http://www.atis.org/tg2k/_second.html)
This happens to nicely match up to around 1/86400 th of an Earth Solar Day. All sorts of other useful constants and such are based on this definition, so changing EVERYTHING simply because you happen to be on Mars is needlessly complicated. Is it so inconceivable that a day on Mars might have more minutes / seconds in it? Why would you suddenly make 24hrs/60mins/60secs the definition and base everything else off that?
You simply use all your existing SI definitions (second / kg / meter) and you don't have to do any extra work. Earth's day has 86400 seconds in it... Mars' day has more - NO BIG DEAL.
As for the watch... I was imagining a dual analog/digital device - something that, if we were ever to colonize Mars, would actually be useful. While there's no reason not to go all digital (even with dual analog and digital displays), you can do the same thing with all analog. The clockworks just stop at midnight, pause for the extra 39 minutes (perhaps an extra face with a little hand that ticks off 39 extra minutes!) then resume.
Anyway, just my vision of a Mars watch.
The minute hand should do nothing in the extra time. The pie slice should light up and perhaps blink every second for the 39 minutes of extra time. Adding an additional digital readout that, whenever you're in the 'extra time', would run a countdown back to 'normal time' would be ideal.
This idiocy of the longer 'Martian second' has got to stop.
I agree. This system is typical of the backward thinking NASA has unfortunately become known for. What if we colonize Mars someday? Are scientists on Mars supposed to use some special "Martian metric" SECOND? No, it's idiocy. A second on Earth is a second anywhere else.
And please PLEASE stop this stupidity of calling a solar day a "Sol"! It's a fucking DAY, everybody knows what a DAY is! Just because it's Mars doesn't make it (or anything else!) special. Tell folks "A DAY on Mars is longer than a Day on Earth" and they'll know what you're talking about.
I doubt you'd know how to "instantiate" a baby if a pregnant woman fell on your penis.
Totally offtopic... but, I am VERY glad that marijuana is illegal. I don't want my kids to be constantly bombarded with peer pressure at school and through the media that these filthy, unregulated, unhealthy, pschyo-retardant drugs and their irresponsible use is completely ok.
It is not ok to waste yourself away in a stupor, believing to have expanded your mind when in reality you've done the opposite.
I know there's lots of loud proponents of legalized marijuana use here on Slashdot, just as there's a similarly large portion of all society that's thicker than pigshit and would like nothing better to just wallow around their whole life in some drug-induced euphoric surreality. Thankfully there are SOME out there who recognize the dangers posed by apathetically accepting that "everything's ok!", and who will fight to maintain a structured, responsible society that we all can flourish in.