Inherent in the question of sharing music was that it was the popular, protected music the kids listened to, not public domain music. And yes, a distinction was made there too.
So no, I was not lying to students.
I should also note that I tell students that "U" is not an acceptable replacement for "you", unless you want to look like an idiot.
Seriously - what if you have no meaningful fingerprints - you have no hands, or your fingers had been burned and thus have no meaningful prints, etc. ?
The library will spend another $700,000 to make every PC ADA compliant by giving the user the option of finger-print scan or retinal scan.
Then a patron with two glass eyes and no hands tries to use the computer, files suit, and someone on the library's board of directors realizes it was a stupid idea in the first place and gets rid of it all.
Sure, the whole thing will cost the library so much money in the long run that no new books will be purchased for the next 10 years, but hey, we're talking 'bout safety here!
It occurred to me that this country is spending an awful lot of money on security measures. Be it library finger-print scanners or expensive new security measures at airports, we seem to have a "spare no expense" approach to making everyone and everything safe.
The problem is whenever a new security measure is implemented, it almost always seems to be a gross inconvenience--be it time, dignity or a loss of privacy--to the 99% of the people who have done nothing and do not intend to do anything wrong. What's worse, the real criminals eventually discover ways to get around those security measures, making their presence little more then an expensive pain in the butt for the average law abiding citizen.
And yet, despite the billions of dollars America is pumping into security measures that put out the honest citizens, when it comes down to doing real law enforcement resources are always being stretched. Get scammed on eBay for $500? Sorry, our department really doesn't have the manpower to investigate the crime and bring it to prosecution.
It seems to me that a dollar spent on investigating crimes, catching criminals and putting them behind bars would ultimately be a better deterrent to crime then spending a dollar that does little more then put up a road block that criminals eventually find a way around but manages to piss off honest folks.
I gave an impromptu lecture last week--to a group of high school students--about the recording industry. It went something like this:
"Mr. Highgate, is sharing music files on the Internet wrong?"
"Well, students, it's illegal. And, according to the recording industry of America, it takes money away from recording artists."
"Yes, but is it wrong?"
"Let me tell you about the business practices of the recording industry . .." Then I went into a good 40 minute description of the business practices of that industry. The exploitation, the loophole payola, the underhanded deals. I went to show them on the board how if a major record label signed their band, how they could sell a million records and still not make any money themselves. To be fair, I also pointed out that most bands don't sell many recordings, and how the industry loses money on them.
"Is it wrong?" I concluded. "Well, student's, that's a moral decision you'll have to make on your own. This is a civics class. All I'm going to tell you is that it's not legal, and you'd be insanely stupid to do it using the school's computers."
Though if anyone in the administration told me not to discuss this topic, I would probably comply. Just because I don't like the RIAA doesn't mean I'd be willing to martyr myself for it.
Actually, didn't they just order 3P0's memory erased?
I figure R2 can only identify people via facial reconignition software, so when he runs into Vadar at a later point, the droid has no idea who he is . . . what with the mask and all.
No. They wouldn't. At least I wouldn't. A movie like that needs to be seen in a theatre. And I'll probably go see it again in the theatre. And I'll buy it on DVD because my home computer can't recreate the experience of my home theatre.
But I'll probably download it. I mean, hey, after the $40 or so I'll be spending in the theatre to see it, and the $20+ I'll spend for the DVD when it's released, I don't really feel guilty.
Well, there are no local theatres around me that are digital. However, I think I'll follow your advice. The only digital medium I can watch it on would be my computer.
perhaps the government and corporate organizations of America shouldn't have that much access to our private lives.
Companies certainly have the right to use whatever means they want to keep tabs on their customers, and that information can always be gained--either willingly handed over by the company or demanded by court order--by the government.
When you enter a shop you are not in public space, you are in a private space that happens to belong to someone else. They let you enter their property, but they have the right to set reasonable conditions for it.
There's a scary word you used there: reasonable. In California, I can own a bar, own the building it resides in, be the only employee in that bar. I can be a heavy smoker, and the bulk of my clientele are heavy smokers, and yet the government tells me I'm breaking the law if I allow my customers to smoke inside of my building because it's a "public" space.
To many people, this seems "reasonable". Yet it begs the question: why is it when determining when a space is "public" and when it is "private", the law almost always makes that distinction when it limits the average person's rights?
This last weekend, I was robbed at gunpoint. The assailant took my wallet and my cell phone. The first thing I did after calling the police (at a land line) was call my banks to turn off my various cards. As the police officer was writing down his report, my sister on the phone with the bank discovered that someone had tried to use one of my cards 5 minutes after the robbery at a 7-11 down the street from the hold up.
The 7-11 had a video camera recording everything, and now that the cops had my description and a video surveillance image to go off of, their chances of catching the criminal are pretty high (though I was told that it was highly unlikely that I'd ever see my phone, wallet, or the IDs in the wallet ever again).
Because of modern anti-theft measures, the man who stuck a gun in my stomach is most likely going to end up in jail. The fast-acting real-time monitoring of credit card usage, the ever present video surveillance, and the fast response time of the police from my initial 911 call all are aiding to the apprehension of this guy who, all told, ended up with about $30 in cash and a phone that can never be activated again.
And yet, the more I think about it, the more I'm deeply disturbed. Yes, it was nice to know that because of our modern world, the guy didn't end up running up thousand dollar bills on my credit card. And yes, I do take comfort knowing that it's highly likely the guy will go to jail.
But at what cost? Every day we are giving up more and more privacy under the auspicious of safety, yet nobody in any position of power seems to consider that perhaps the government and corporate organizations of America shouldn't have that much access to our private lives.
I asked myself the question: What if I was on the other side of that technological dragnet? What if the government was after me because I said something that the government didn't agree with, or saw as a "threat", despite my benign intentions? What if, say, I made a remark publicly that I didn't think the current presidential administration was pursuing policies that have America's best interests in mind? What if I was in a position where people respected what I had to say, and would take it to heart? What if the administration decided to find me and silence me?
Granted, these "what ifs" are generally the bread and butter of the tin foil hat crowd, but it does make me uneasy. When I was a kid, my parents had a chip put in my dog. Now they're putting them on wrist bands of prisoners. It doesn't take a genius to come to the conclusion that eventually all prisoners will have these, then all prisoners will have these implanted, then the citizenry will have them.
I can hear someone saying "Look, if you had a chip implanted in you with your ID and bank account information on it, you would have never been mugged, and you wouldn't have to be going through the hassle of getting your IDs and life back in order right now". Then again, the guy could have just shot me and dug out my chip with a dull knife. I'm not sure.
What I am sure of is this: We still live in a pretty good country. As misguided as I think their policies are, I still think most of the current government's activities are still in the best interests of the American people. But what is the otherwise respectable "done nothing wrong" citizen supposed to do if America's power is seized from them by people who don't mind trampling on personal liberties one bit to serve their own purpose? Things like RFID tags just adds to our impotency if the time comes when decent Americans have to raise up against our own government and set things right again.
I for one am willing to lose a little more money in a robbery, or have the knowledge that the chances that the guy who robbed me gets caught is lower in exchange for the safety in knowing that if things ever get really bad, I have some options in standing up to the government.
Marketing person #1: You know, we have a real problem with piracy in developing nations.
Marketing person #2: Why is that?
Marketing person #1: I'm not sure. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that our OS costs more then most families make in a month.
Marketing person #2: If they're poor, why do we even want them as customers?
Marketing person #1: Because they're probably not going to be poor forever. Plus, there's like a billion people in India alone.
Marketing person #2: A billion? Please, we're professionals here. Stop making up numbers like "billion" or "gazillion".
Marketing person #1: Sorry about that. But there *are* lots and lots of people there. I think most of them do tech support for Dell computers for like a dollar a day.
Marketing person #2: Wow. That is a lot. Well, we have to figure out a way to make money off them.
Marketing person #1: I just got a great idea! Let's strip out some of the functions of our operating system and sell it really, really cheap over there.
Marketing person #2: Awesome idea, dude. We can call it "Windows Jr."
Marketing person #1: I don't know about that name... it sounds too much like IBM's PC Jr. and nobody liked that product. I mean, wireless keyboards? What kind of crazy person would want that?
Marketing person #2: The PC jr? That was released like a gazillion years ago. What are you, 30 or something?
Marketing person #1: Shhhh!!! I'm 31, but the boss thinks I'm 23.
Marketing person #2: I'll keep my mouth shut if you buy us drinks after work, old man. How about we call it "Windows XP: The Revenge of the Sith". Wait, no, even better, "Windows XP: The Starter Edition"
Marketing person #1: That's way better! I would have never thought of that on my own. I guess it's because I'm so old.
Marketing person #2: I see a problem though. How can we strip down a product when 95% of our users never use the extras we bundle with Windows to begin with?
Marketing person #1: We could pull out Internet Expolorer
Both: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!
Marketing person #2: That's rich old man. But seriously, how can we do it?
Marketing person #1: We can make sure it only runs on obsolete computers.
Marketing person #2: Of course!! Celerons, Durons... poor people use those, right?
Marketing person #1: Heck if I know. I'm not poor.
Marketing person #2: Then it's settled. We'll make a version of Windows XP, remove the "calculator" and "MS paint" applications, and sell it to poor people. We can even market it as an upgrade to Windows ME.
Marketing person #1: Didn't you get the memo? We want people to use ME. That was one of the clauses with Gates' contract with the devil.
Marketing person #2: Whatever. Let's go to the bar.
They'll find errors, but they'll usually give kudos to a show/movie that gets it close.
My father, who was a retired district attorney used to tell me that Law and Order (the early episodes) was the closest to the real thing ever put on a screen. He would watch it every week, only every so often getting a little irked that they totally messed something up.
My uncle used to be a Captain in the Air Force whose job was to be a "key turner" in one of those ICBM silos. A few years ago I asked him about the opening scene in "War Games". His response: "Well, it didn't look as cool in real life, and it wasn't as high tech looking, but otherwise, that's exactly how it was".
So occasionally Hollywood does get it almost right, even if they do take a few liberties. Though I'll have to admit ever since joining the Army, most films about the subject really piss me off.
I'm glad this professor stepped forward. I'm no fan of the RIAA, and hope more people in positions of authority step up to this. We need two things to keep happening:
1. Keep reminding people that file sharers are doing nothing more then sharing. They are not making a profit off of what they are doing, are obtaining nothing physical from the recording industry, and receive nothing of value other then knowledge they helped others out. 2. Keep reminding people that the music industry is corrupt, and if we want to start seeing fairness and equity in the music business, going after the loop-hole payola, the monopolistic control of the distribution mediums, and the exploitation of artists would do a lot more for musicians and music fans then going after peer to peer participators.
Yes, what both do is immoral (questionably) and illegal, but to put it into perspective, file sharers are casual jaywalkers, while the music industry is a habitual drunk driver. When I hear RIAA folk talking about how peer to peer sharing is killing the music industry, it's as absurd as a drunk saying jay walkers impede his drive home from the bar.
I know this has been said before, but perhaps not in this way. Pi is a number that represents a (ideal) physical phenomenon. Yes, it's complex and (probably) infinite, but it still is a numeric representation of an exact property. To me, that automatically presupposes that by its nature it's ordered.
The only reason anyone could think it would be a good indicator of randomness is because its complexity goes beyond the comprehension of man or machine. I'm not a professional mathematician, so there's not a lot about the nature of pi I can comment on, but it seems to me that in being an ordered number that describes a physical phenomenon, pi has about as much chance to produce randomness as counting the number of leafs on clovers.
The real creepy part was when Marvin, the depressed robot said "Mr. Takagi, I could talk about men's fashion and industrialization all day but I'm afraid work must intrude, and my associate Theo has some questions for you, sort of fill in the blanks questions... "
Now that I actually have seen the movie, the Hollywood version of Hitchhiker's Guide is nothing like Hollywood's treatment of Mr. Bean.
It's not fantastic, but it's certainly not bad.
Mostly not bad.
I took my mother (a woman in her late 60s who had never read, listened or seen any iteration of the Hitchhiker's franchise), and her opinion was about the same.
I do like the fact that they didn't try to dumb it down too much. They just made Zaphod dumb, and repeatedly reminded us that fact. If memory serves me, which typically it doesn't, I always thought of Beeblebrox to be more self absorbed and egotistical then being an idiot.
Overall, I was pleased to see that special effects and sight gags didn't dwarf the story, though I thought with a little more thought into the story and better casting decisions the story could have been a lot better. I'd give it a solid 6.5 out of 10.
Reading some of the reviews, I can't help but to think of "Bean", the very American big screen treatment of the very funny British television program "Mr. Bean". Mr. Bean was hilarious as a TV show. It took a while to get used to, but once you did, you couldn't help to laugh out loud at Rowan Atkinson's delightful antics.
Yes, one could argue the prat-fall humor was done in a way that was uniquely British, but even as an American, I thought it was dang funny. So when I saw that a motion picture had been done, with Atkinson playing the title character, I ran out to the local megaplex to watch it.
It was terrible.
We Americans do have a sense of humor, and we can be very funny if we try. But it seems that when Americans try to translate British humor into our own language we fail miserably, and that's what I fear The Hitchhiker's Guide is: An Americanized, Hollywood translation of an English classic.
I'm still going to see it, probably sometime this morning. I'll see it mainly because to date, there has been no media where a telling of the Hitchhiker's story hasn't been good. But my expectations are very, very low.
Perhaps I should look into a different reader before I criticise the format.
I can see why people or orginizations would want to distribute certian documents, though I'm still a little upset over the bulk of the use of PDF. There are lots of times when documents are released in pdf format that don't need to be, and it's neccescary to have the data in a more portable format. Government agencies love to release everything in pdf, even when the information in those documents has to be moved to another format (taking raw data and plugging it into a spreadsheet, for example).
I also hate using formflows to put together those documents. Since it's obivious my knowledge of PDF is not up to speed, are there better tools out there?
Though it is kind of funny that mods are so eager to lable me a troll, but six replies that essentially say the same thing aren't considered redundant. Such is life.
As an end user, I look forward to any replacement to PDFs. Adobe is one of the most bloated, terrible peices of garbage installed on my computer, and if it wasn't for the fact that so many government agencies were duped into using it, I'd throw it out.
I honestly don't see why it's needed in the first place. But if people and orginizations think they need something like that, hopefully Microsoft's offering won't be so crummy.
Because it's a logical step in the advancement of computers.
I can remember a good 17 years ago debating with a "computer expert" about hard drives. He said that nobody would ever need anything bigger then a one megabyte HDD. I still think about that and smile.
Back then, nobody could predict the way computers would shape our lives. Now, of course, we know.
Small steps in the advancement of hardware and software typically don't revolutionize our use of computers, but putting them all together has a dramatic effect. So we've started a shift towards 64 bit. We've got the hardware, and now we're getting the software. Yes, at first it won't be a big deal to the end users, but that leap will ultimately give us more power and flexibility to do more advanced things.
We've got a lot more we can do with computers, and not just with games. Parsing human speech into text, for example, is currently pretty bad. Being able to recognize features in an image is rudimentary at best. No, a 64 bit OS won't change that, but it will lead to a better hardware and software base to make it easier for developers to approach those goals.
Moving to 64 bit is not being done "just because", it's being done as a step in the continued evolution of computing technology, which leads to better advances down the road.
There's something very dangerous about what you're talking about. If we were to allow victims of crimes to set a police department's priority based on how much they could afford to pay them, then we would eventually turn into a society where only the wealthy would be protected by the police.
I could steal a poor person's life savings, knowing full well that the police wouldn't give her the time of day because with all of her limited money gone she couldn't pay them anything.
It would be nice if law enforcement would spend more time investigating all crimes, and personally I think currently their priorities are a little skewed (let's spend thousands of man hours busting teenagers smoking pot in the park, but do nothing to prevent car stereo theft). However, a per-per-investigation plan simply moves the focus of the police force from addressing political pressures to addressing the needs of the privileged.
You're going to ruin my plans to roll out a $59.99 cooling solution for the system speaker.
From the literature:
When your computer won't post, often times the system speaker beeping is the only diagnostic tool you will have to troubleshoot the problem. Speaker overheating essentially circumvents this important line of defense against total system failure. Enter the Acousti-Ice 9000: The only system speaker cooling system which guarantees your system speaker will not fail, or they will replace it for free!
If people figure out that most parts of their system don't actually need expensive and exotic cooling, how am I supposed to make any money?
This bothers me quite a bit. Not because of the gay rights issue (at this point, I don't really care one way or another), but because people are getting upset that Microsoft, a privately held corporation, is not acting out on a support of a law.
Microsoft is a company. It makes software and some hardware. What does Microsoft have in any way, shape or form to do with social politics? The only error Microsoft made was to get involved with this in the first place.
What's next, a story on Slashdot about how Cisco systems doesn't contribute money to cancer research? Should we see hundreds of posts about how Cisco is a heartless corporation and that it must hate cancer victims?
And I'd wish all those religion bashers would realize that most religious people are more or less nice, decent people who care about all of mankind. To lump your average Christian in with outspoken zealots and shout off insane statements like "religion is ruining our country" is stupid.
Get your head out of your asses, you closed minded bigots. You're just as bad as the fundies.
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Inherent in the question of sharing music was that it was the popular, protected music the kids listened to, not public domain music. And yes, a distinction was made there too.
So no, I was not lying to students.
I should also note that I tell students that "U" is not an acceptable replacement for "you", unless you want to look like an idiot.
Seriously - what if you have no meaningful fingerprints - you have no hands, or your fingers had been burned and thus have no meaningful prints, etc. ?
The library will spend another $700,000 to make every PC ADA compliant by giving the user the option of finger-print scan or retinal scan.
Then a patron with two glass eyes and no hands tries to use the computer, files suit, and someone on the library's board of directors realizes it was a stupid idea in the first place and gets rid of it all.
Sure, the whole thing will cost the library so much money in the long run that no new books will be purchased for the next 10 years, but hey, we're talking 'bout safety here!
It occurred to me that this country is spending an awful lot of money on security measures. Be it library finger-print scanners or expensive new security measures at airports, we seem to have a "spare no expense" approach to making everyone and everything safe.
The problem is whenever a new security measure is implemented, it almost always seems to be a gross inconvenience--be it time, dignity or a loss of privacy--to the 99% of the people who have done nothing and do not intend to do anything wrong. What's worse, the real criminals eventually discover ways to get around those security measures, making their presence little more then an expensive pain in the butt for the average law abiding citizen.
And yet, despite the billions of dollars America is pumping into security measures that put out the honest citizens, when it comes down to doing real law enforcement resources are always being stretched. Get scammed on eBay for $500? Sorry, our department really doesn't have the manpower to investigate the crime and bring it to prosecution.
It seems to me that a dollar spent on investigating crimes, catching criminals and putting them behind bars would ultimately be a better deterrent to crime then spending a dollar that does little more then put up a road block that criminals eventually find a way around but manages to piss off honest folks.
I gave an impromptu lecture last week--to a group of high school students--about the recording industry. It went something like this:
." Then I went into a good 40 minute description of the business practices of that industry. The exploitation, the loophole payola, the underhanded deals. I went to show them on the board how if a major record label signed their band, how they could sell a million records and still not make any money themselves. To be fair, I also pointed out that most bands don't sell many recordings, and how the industry loses money on them.
"Mr. Highgate, is sharing music files on the Internet wrong?"
"Well, students, it's illegal. And, according to the recording industry of America, it takes money away from recording artists."
"Yes, but is it wrong?"
"Let me tell you about the business practices of the recording industry . .
"Is it wrong?" I concluded. "Well, student's, that's a moral decision you'll have to make on your own. This is a civics class. All I'm going to tell you is that it's not legal, and you'd be insanely stupid to do it using the school's computers."
Though if anyone in the administration told me not to discuss this topic, I would probably comply. Just because I don't like the RIAA doesn't mean I'd be willing to martyr myself for it.
Actually, didn't they just order 3P0's memory erased?
I figure R2 can only identify people via facial reconignition software, so when he runs into Vadar at a later point, the droid has no idea who he is . . . what with the mask and all.
No. They wouldn't. At least I wouldn't. A movie like that needs to be seen in a theatre. And I'll probably go see it again in the theatre. And I'll buy it on DVD because my home computer can't recreate the experience of my home theatre.
But I'll probably download it. I mean, hey, after the $40 or so I'll be spending in the theatre to see it, and the $20+ I'll spend for the DVD when it's released, I don't really feel guilty.
Well, there are no local theatres around me that are digital. However, I think I'll follow your advice. The only digital medium I can watch it on would be my computer.
I mean, you told me to do it.
Reread the quote:
perhaps the government and corporate organizations of America shouldn't have that much access to our private lives.
Companies certainly have the right to use whatever means they want to keep tabs on their customers, and that information can always be gained--either willingly handed over by the company or demanded by court order--by the government.
When you enter a shop you are not in public space, you are in a private space that happens to belong to someone else. They let you enter their property, but they have the right to set reasonable conditions for it.
There's a scary word you used there: reasonable. In California, I can own a bar, own the building it resides in, be the only employee in that bar. I can be a heavy smoker, and the bulk of my clientele are heavy smokers, and yet the government tells me I'm breaking the law if I allow my customers to smoke inside of my building because it's a "public" space.
To many people, this seems "reasonable". Yet it begs the question: why is it when determining when a space is "public" and when it is "private", the law almost always makes that distinction when it limits the average person's rights?
This last weekend, I was robbed at gunpoint. The assailant took my wallet and my cell phone. The first thing I did after calling the police (at a land line) was call my banks to turn off my various cards. As the police officer was writing down his report, my sister on the phone with the bank discovered that someone had tried to use one of my cards 5 minutes after the robbery at a 7-11 down the street from the hold up.
The 7-11 had a video camera recording everything, and now that the cops had my description and a video surveillance image to go off of, their chances of catching the criminal are pretty high (though I was told that it was highly unlikely that I'd ever see my phone, wallet, or the IDs in the wallet ever again).
Because of modern anti-theft measures, the man who stuck a gun in my stomach is most likely going to end up in jail. The fast-acting real-time monitoring of credit card usage, the ever present video surveillance, and the fast response time of the police from my initial 911 call all are aiding to the apprehension of this guy who, all told, ended up with about $30 in cash and a phone that can never be activated again.
And yet, the more I think about it, the more I'm deeply disturbed. Yes, it was nice to know that because of our modern world, the guy didn't end up running up thousand dollar bills on my credit card. And yes, I do take comfort knowing that it's highly likely the guy will go to jail.
But at what cost? Every day we are giving up more and more privacy under the auspicious of safety, yet nobody in any position of power seems to consider that perhaps the government and corporate organizations of America shouldn't have that much access to our private lives.
I asked myself the question: What if I was on the other side of that technological dragnet? What if the government was after me because I said something that the government didn't agree with, or saw as a "threat", despite my benign intentions? What if, say, I made a remark publicly that I didn't think the current presidential administration was pursuing policies that have America's best interests in mind? What if I was in a position where people respected what I had to say, and would take it to heart? What if the administration decided to find me and silence me?
Granted, these "what ifs" are generally the bread and butter of the tin foil hat crowd, but it does make me uneasy. When I was a kid, my parents had a chip put in my dog. Now they're putting them on wrist bands of prisoners. It doesn't take a genius to come to the conclusion that eventually all prisoners will have these, then all prisoners will have these implanted, then the citizenry will have them.
I can hear someone saying "Look, if you had a chip implanted in you with your ID and bank account information on it, you would have never been mugged, and you wouldn't have to be going through the hassle of getting your IDs and life back in order right now". Then again, the guy could have just shot me and dug out my chip with a dull knife. I'm not sure.
What I am sure of is this: We still live in a pretty good country. As misguided as I think their policies are, I still think most of the current government's activities are still in the best interests of the American people. But what is the otherwise respectable "done nothing wrong" citizen supposed to do if America's power is seized from them by people who don't mind trampling on personal liberties one bit to serve their own purpose? Things like RFID tags just adds to our impotency if the time comes when decent Americans have to raise up against our own government and set things right again.
I for one am willing to lose a little more money in a robbery, or have the knowledge that the chances that the guy who robbed me gets caught is lower in exchange for the safety in knowing that if things ever get really bad, I have some options in standing up to the government.
Marketing person #1: You know, we have a real problem with piracy in developing nations.
Marketing person #2: Why is that?
Marketing person #1: I'm not sure. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that our OS costs more then most families make in a month.
Marketing person #2: If they're poor, why do we even want them as customers?
Marketing person #1: Because they're probably not going to be poor forever. Plus, there's like a billion people in India alone.
Marketing person #2: A billion? Please, we're professionals here. Stop making up numbers like "billion" or "gazillion".
Marketing person #1: Sorry about that. But there *are* lots and lots of people there. I think most of them do tech support for Dell computers for like a dollar a day.
Marketing person #2: Wow. That is a lot. Well, we have to figure out a way to make money off them.
Marketing person #1: I just got a great idea! Let's strip out some of the functions of our operating system and sell it really, really cheap over there.
Marketing person #2: Awesome idea, dude. We can call it "Windows Jr."
Marketing person #1: I don't know about that name... it sounds too much like IBM's PC Jr. and nobody liked that product. I mean, wireless keyboards? What kind of crazy person would want that?
Marketing person #2: The PC jr? That was released like a gazillion years ago. What are you, 30 or something?
Marketing person #1: Shhhh!!! I'm 31, but the boss thinks I'm 23.
Marketing person #2: I'll keep my mouth shut if you buy us drinks after work, old man. How about we call it "Windows XP: The Revenge of the Sith". Wait, no, even better, "Windows XP: The Starter Edition"
Marketing person #1: That's way better! I would have never thought of that on my own. I guess it's because I'm so old.
Marketing person #2: I see a problem though. How can we strip down a product when 95% of our users never use the extras we bundle with Windows to begin with?
Marketing person #1: We could pull out Internet Expolorer
Both: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!
Marketing person #2: That's rich old man. But seriously, how can we do it?
Marketing person #1: We can make sure it only runs on obsolete computers.
Marketing person #2: Of course!! Celerons, Durons... poor people use those, right?
Marketing person #1: Heck if I know. I'm not poor.
Marketing person #2: Then it's settled. We'll make a version of Windows XP, remove the "calculator" and "MS paint" applications, and sell it to poor people. We can even market it as an upgrade to Windows ME.
Marketing person #1: Didn't you get the memo? We want people to use ME. That was one of the clauses with Gates' contract with the devil.
Marketing person #2: Whatever. Let's go to the bar.
innocent animals?
Trust me, if deer had high speed Internet in the forrest and a valid credit card, they'd be hunting you online. I consider this self defense.
They'll find errors, but they'll usually give kudos to a show/movie that gets it close.
My father, who was a retired district attorney used to tell me that Law and Order (the early episodes) was the closest to the real thing ever put on a screen. He would watch it every week, only every so often getting a little irked that they totally messed something up.
My uncle used to be a Captain in the Air Force whose job was to be a "key turner" in one of those ICBM silos. A few years ago I asked him about the opening scene in "War Games". His response: "Well, it didn't look as cool in real life, and it wasn't as high tech looking, but otherwise, that's exactly how it was".
So occasionally Hollywood does get it almost right, even if they do take a few liberties. Though I'll have to admit ever since joining the Army, most films about the subject really piss me off.
I'm glad this professor stepped forward. I'm no fan of the RIAA, and hope more people in positions of authority step up to this. We need two things to keep happening:
1. Keep reminding people that file sharers are doing nothing more then sharing. They are not making a profit off of what they are doing, are obtaining nothing physical from the recording industry, and receive nothing of value other then knowledge they helped others out.
2. Keep reminding people that the music industry is corrupt, and if we want to start seeing fairness and equity in the music business, going after the loop-hole payola, the monopolistic control of the distribution mediums, and the exploitation of artists would do a lot more for musicians and music fans then going after peer to peer participators.
Yes, what both do is immoral (questionably) and illegal, but to put it into perspective, file sharers are casual jaywalkers, while the music industry is a habitual drunk driver. When I hear RIAA folk talking about how peer to peer sharing is killing the music industry, it's as absurd as a drunk saying jay walkers impede his drive home from the bar.
I know this has been said before, but perhaps not in this way. Pi is a number that represents a (ideal) physical phenomenon. Yes, it's complex and (probably) infinite, but it still is a numeric representation of an exact property. To me, that automatically presupposes that by its nature it's ordered.
The only reason anyone could think it would be a good indicator of randomness is because its complexity goes beyond the comprehension of man or machine. I'm not a professional mathematician, so there's not a lot about the nature of pi I can comment on, but it seems to me that in being an ordered number that describes a physical phenomenon, pi has about as much chance to produce randomness as counting the number of leafs on clovers.
The real creepy part was when Marvin, the depressed robot said "Mr. Takagi, I could talk about men's fashion and industrialization all day but I'm afraid work must intrude, and my associate Theo has some questions for you, sort of fill in the blanks questions... "
Now that I actually have seen the movie, the Hollywood version of Hitchhiker's Guide is nothing like Hollywood's treatment of Mr. Bean.
It's not fantastic, but it's certainly not bad.
Mostly not bad.
I took my mother (a woman in her late 60s who had never read, listened or seen any iteration of the Hitchhiker's franchise), and her opinion was about the same.
I do like the fact that they didn't try to dumb it down too much. They just made Zaphod dumb, and repeatedly reminded us that fact. If memory serves me, which typically it doesn't, I always thought of Beeblebrox to be more self absorbed and egotistical then being an idiot.
Overall, I was pleased to see that special effects and sight gags didn't dwarf the story, though I thought with a little more thought into the story and better casting decisions the story could have been a lot better. I'd give it a solid 6.5 out of 10.
Planet Starbucks?
Is that in the Microsoft Galaxy, near the IBM Stellar Sphere?
Reading some of the reviews, I can't help but to think of "Bean", the very American big screen treatment of the very funny British television program "Mr. Bean". Mr. Bean was hilarious as a TV show. It took a while to get used to, but once you did, you couldn't help to laugh out loud at Rowan Atkinson's delightful antics.
Yes, one could argue the prat-fall humor was done in a way that was uniquely British, but even as an American, I thought it was dang funny. So when I saw that a motion picture had been done, with Atkinson playing the title character, I ran out to the local megaplex to watch it.
It was terrible.
We Americans do have a sense of humor, and we can be very funny if we try. But it seems that when Americans try to translate British humor into our own language we fail miserably, and that's what I fear The Hitchhiker's Guide is: An Americanized, Hollywood translation of an English classic.
I'm still going to see it, probably sometime this morning. I'll see it mainly because to date, there has been no media where a telling of the Hitchhiker's story hasn't been good. But my expectations are very, very low.
Alright people, I get the point.
Perhaps I should look into a different reader before I criticise the format.
I can see why people or orginizations would want to distribute certian documents, though I'm still a little upset over the bulk of the use of PDF. There are lots of times when documents are released in pdf format that don't need to be, and it's neccescary to have the data in a more portable format. Government agencies love to release everything in pdf, even when the information in those documents has to be moved to another format (taking raw data and plugging it into a spreadsheet, for example).
I also hate using formflows to put together those documents. Since it's obivious my knowledge of PDF is not up to speed, are there better tools out there?
Though it is kind of funny that mods are so eager to lable me a troll, but six replies that essentially say the same thing aren't considered redundant. Such is life.
As an end user, I look forward to any replacement to PDFs. Adobe is one of the most bloated, terrible peices of garbage installed on my computer, and if it wasn't for the fact that so many government agencies were duped into using it, I'd throw it out.
I honestly don't see why it's needed in the first place. But if people and orginizations think they need something like that, hopefully Microsoft's offering won't be so crummy.
Because 10 years ago, most people didn't have fast connections and most people didn't have the hard drive space to store it.
And because today, content providers often don't want you keeping a copy of their content on your hard drive.
Why?
Because it's a logical step in the advancement of computers.
I can remember a good 17 years ago debating with a "computer expert" about hard drives. He said that nobody would ever need anything bigger then a one megabyte HDD. I still think about that and smile.
Back then, nobody could predict the way computers would shape our lives. Now, of course, we know.
Small steps in the advancement of hardware and software typically don't revolutionize our use of computers, but putting them all together has a dramatic effect. So we've started a shift towards 64 bit. We've got the hardware, and now we're getting the software. Yes, at first it won't be a big deal to the end users, but that leap will ultimately give us more power and flexibility to do more advanced things.
We've got a lot more we can do with computers, and not just with games. Parsing human speech into text, for example, is currently pretty bad. Being able to recognize features in an image is rudimentary at best. No, a 64 bit OS won't change that, but it will lead to a better hardware and software base to make it easier for developers to approach those goals.
Moving to 64 bit is not being done "just because", it's being done as a step in the continued evolution of computing technology, which leads to better advances down the road.
There's something very dangerous about what you're talking about. If we were to allow victims of crimes to set a police department's priority based on how much they could afford to pay them, then we would eventually turn into a society where only the wealthy would be protected by the police.
I could steal a poor person's life savings, knowing full well that the police wouldn't give her the time of day because with all of her limited money gone she couldn't pay them anything.
It would be nice if law enforcement would spend more time investigating all crimes, and personally I think currently their priorities are a little skewed (let's spend thousands of man hours busting teenagers smoking pot in the park, but do nothing to prevent car stereo theft). However, a per-per-investigation plan simply moves the focus of the police force from addressing political pressures to addressing the needs of the privileged.
Shhh!!!
You're going to ruin my plans to roll out a $59.99 cooling solution for the system speaker.
From the literature:
When your computer won't post, often times the system speaker beeping is the only diagnostic tool you will have to troubleshoot the problem. Speaker overheating essentially circumvents this important line of defense against total system failure. Enter the Acousti-Ice 9000: The only system speaker cooling system which guarantees your system speaker will not fail, or they will replace it for free!
If people figure out that most parts of their system don't actually need expensive and exotic cooling, how am I supposed to make any money?
This bothers me quite a bit. Not because of the gay rights issue (at this point, I don't really care one way or another), but because people are getting upset that Microsoft, a privately held corporation, is not acting out on a support of a law.
Microsoft is a company. It makes software and some hardware. What does Microsoft have in any way, shape or form to do with social politics? The only error Microsoft made was to get involved with this in the first place.
What's next, a story on Slashdot about how Cisco systems doesn't contribute money to cancer research? Should we see hundreds of posts about how Cisco is a heartless corporation and that it must hate cancer victims?
And I'd wish all those religion bashers would realize that most religious people are more or less nice, decent people who care about all of mankind. To lump your average Christian in with outspoken zealots and shout off insane statements like "religion is ruining our country" is stupid.
Get your head out of your asses, you closed minded bigots. You're just as bad as the fundies.