We seem to be approaching a time when it would at least be possible to have an app on your phone that would allow you to transfer money (in the form of bitcoins or other blockchain-based currency) directly to your phone. There it would serve as a wallet, allowing you to make direct purchases. I wonder if such a plan is being considered?
That's a very of odd definition of fluency. I could be unfamiliar with the concept of intransitive verbs or genitive case and still be considered fluent in my native language. Not knowing whether to use 'there', 'their' or 'they're' in a given sentence has little to do with your knowledge of grammar and basic linguistics. If you have to analyze a sentence grammatically to correctly use 'their' in "She went to their house", you almost certainly are not a native speaker of English.
I suspect that many people develop a greater understanding of their own language, and languages in general, by studying a second language. I still remember the "Ah ha!" moment I had in junior high school when it dawned upon me the doing word for word translation of English to French was almost never going to produce the correct result. My world grew much larger that day.
I buy tech books often to teach myself about things I think will be useful at work. I do not read them cover to cover - I study the portions I'm interested in, those that may solve a perticular problem. I may return to them later to study another aspect that I need to know. I consider the money well spent if I'm able to learn what I need when I need to learn it. That's what I consider a valuable resource.
I've used several MOOCs in the same way. I've worked my way through the bulk of them without difficulty. But I never bothered to complete them. I learned what I needed to know and moved on. I consider these courses to be tremendously valuable resources. I just don't use them the way the designers expected me to.
That doesn't make them a failure. It just means that if you provide a great source of information for free to the net, people are going to use them in ways that make sense to them.
The nice thing about a person's actual fingerprints is that they don't change over time. As one poster pointed out, oscillators do drift over time. I can't help but think that the components they're trying to measure also will change in the tested characteristics as they age. If a digital fingerprint doesn't stay constant over the life of the device, is it really of any value?
NOAA uses manned airplanes now. So do a lot of people. The advantage of drones is that they are significantly cheaper than manned aircraft. So Texas is basically killing innovation and new business models before they ever get started.
In most states, it's already illegal to take pictures that invade privacy. It doesn't matter if the picture of you and your wife making love in your bedroom is taken by a drone or by the guy next door sitting on his roof using his camera and telephoto lens. Both are already illegal.
Of course, if you care more about convenience than you do about their censorship and not standing up for what's right if it might cost them a buck, go ahead.
Of course that goes against the default view that Apple is evil, but I was thinking the same thing. Maybe Steve is actually a defender of people's rights - he patents a technology that Apple never implements on their own products, and makes it prohibitively expensive for others to license, guaranteeing that the technology is never used. If it is, Apple can sue.
I'm not saying that's what went down, just that it's possible. It's easily as likely as some of the shoot-themselves-in-the-head scenarios others have suggested, particularly when you're talking about Apple. Love them, hate them, but you have to admit they know how to market stuff.
What it means is that if you have songs that iTunes carries, they won't have to be copied to the Cloud. The others you mention just get copied up. For most people, it means a much shorter transfer time.
Ironically, the video of the boot process requires Flash, which Apple in their wisdom has chosen not to support. The devs surely knew this, and probably decided not to use YouTube to tweak the noses of those of us who occasionally use our iPhones to read/. (and even post!). Their motivation for doing so escapes me, however, since presumably we are their most interested target audience. Curious.
Agreed. The piracy claim is a ruse. I was about to post this, but decided to see if anyone else had already made this point. Surprisingly, you were the first.
Don't you guys get it? EA doesn't care about piracy. EA is going after GameStop and EB Games - the used game market. It pisses them off that they don't somehow get a cut of that revenue.
I don't see how that affects their decisions. Spore has reportedly been pirated half a million times - how has the DRM changed that? All it's done is piss off the paying customers, who are being treated like criminals.
DRM doesn't work against pirates. It only works against the honest people. When will companies learn that?
There must be something wrong with your installation. Chrome is significantly faster the FF3 for me, and I have no trouble whatsoever watching YouTube videos.
I guess I see people in far more shades of grey than the black and white in which you seem to view them. I suspect the filtering into "redneck" and "Metropolitan" groups would be imperfect at best, and an utter disaster at worst.
People are not really cartoons. There is much more variation, even in people of different parties, than you give credit for.
You are assuming those in the military would think with one mind during an assault on US citizens. If the worse were to come, I suspect there would be plenty of weapons available to both sides, courtesy of members of our own military who disagree with the action.
I've noticed that, with few exceptions (such as a new release), games with good gameplay, high popularity, and rare technical issues have long free trials (WoW has two weeks last time I checked.) Tabula Rasa just gave me a 3 day free trial. Vanguard has no free trial whatsoever.
I'd ask what games with short or nonexistent trials have to hide, but I think the answer is obvious. If Vanguard's producers really believe in their product, they should have no problem with letting folks play for free for a couple of weeks - get them involved, attached and hooked. If, on the other hand, they're afraid people will see the game in a bad light after playing that long, I guess a short trial (or none) makes sense.
When the iPod first came out, there were two models. One was $399 and the other was $499. All the arguments you make about your laptop were valid for the iPod as well. Yet it has been very successful, to say the least. To my knowledge, $50 iPods aren't yet available. Songs are mostly $.99.
The iPod has also come down in cost substantially. If the Kindle is successful, I'd expect the same thing to happen. First generation is always expensive.
As for book prices, the market will likely decide. I think $10 for new NYT bestsellers is a step in the right direction. Perhaps that will get cheaper as well.
The publishing industry is facing many of the same hard digital transition issues that the music industry is. It needs to change to survive. While I'm not at all sure that this is the answer, they'll have to consider it as an option, or face the same kinds of problems that the music industry is struggling with.
When you download a copy of Photoshop, it's a copy. The site you download it from still has it.
Um, this is crap. It's the same crap old argument being ponied around on/. about massing file sharing.
Let's break it down like this.
I'm Adobe. I hire programmers to design a product.
I sell that product to make a living and pay the costs of my business.
When someone does not buy my product and makes a copy of it they are
stealing the compensation (ie. denying me money I would have received from that product).
Let's not sugar coat this and not call it stealing. Just because the law hasn't caught up to this
doesn't mean it isn't wrong.
Sigh. No, it is not crap. I was pointing out the difference between copying something and taking the original. Nowhere in my post did I state whether or not copying licensed copyrighted software is stealing. Nor did I make any judgements about whether it was right or wrong.
I was just establishing the difference between taking something that belongs to someone else (and therefore depriving them of it) and copying it (even if you have no right to do so).
These guys didn't "take" anything: they fraudulently misrepresented themselves as someone else in order to gain access to a server. That's the only part they're actually guilty of, although they would, of course, be liable for any costs resulting from this fraud.
If I fraudulently gain access to your bank account, yes, that's fraud. And that's indeed what these folks did. So far neither of us have committed theft. If I then remove money from your account, that's theft. Similarly, after gaining access to the account, they moved items from the original room to their own room. That's theft. That's why I said the phishing/fraud was irrelevant - it was what they did after they gained access to the account that mattered.
Slashdot Mirror
Great cover story.
“Sometimes, the contributor himself discovers the flaw.” Sometimes, there is no flaw. Which do you think this is?
We seem to be approaching a time when it would at least be possible to have an app on your phone that would allow you to transfer money (in the form of bitcoins or other blockchain-based currency) directly to your phone. There it would serve as a wallet, allowing you to make direct purchases. I wonder if such a plan is being considered?
Just out of curiousity, where did you find an APM 2.6 flight controller with GPS module for $50?
That's a very of odd definition of fluency. I could be unfamiliar with the concept of intransitive verbs or genitive case and still be considered fluent in my native language. Not knowing whether to use 'there', 'their' or 'they're' in a given sentence has little to do with your knowledge of grammar and basic linguistics. If you have to analyze a sentence grammatically to correctly use 'their' in "She went to their house", you almost certainly are not a native speaker of English.
I suspect that many people develop a greater understanding of their own language, and languages in general, by studying a second language. I still remember the "Ah ha!" moment I had in junior high school when it dawned upon me the doing word for word translation of English to French was almost never going to produce the correct result. My world grew much larger that day.
But my fluency in English was unchanged.
I buy tech books often to teach myself about things I think will be useful at work. I do not read them cover to cover - I study the portions I'm interested in, those that may solve a perticular problem. I may return to them later to study another aspect that I need to know. I consider the money well spent if I'm able to learn what I need when I need to learn it. That's what I consider a valuable resource.
I've used several MOOCs in the same way. I've worked my way through the bulk of them without difficulty. But I never bothered to complete them. I learned what I needed to know and moved on. I consider these courses to be tremendously valuable resources. I just don't use them the way the designers expected me to.
That doesn't make them a failure. It just means that if you provide a great source of information for free to the net, people are going to use them in ways that make sense to them.
The nice thing about a person's actual fingerprints is that they don't change over time. As one poster pointed out, oscillators do drift over time. I can't help but think that the components they're trying to measure also will change in the tested characteristics as they age. If a digital fingerprint doesn't stay constant over the life of the device, is it really of any value?
NOAA uses manned airplanes now. So do a lot of people. The advantage of drones is that they are significantly cheaper than manned aircraft. So Texas is basically killing innovation and new business models before they ever get started.
In most states, it's already illegal to take pictures that invade privacy. It doesn't matter if the picture of you and your wife making love in your bedroom is taken by a drone or by the guy next door sitting on his roof using his camera and telephoto lens. Both are already illegal.
This isn't about privacy.
Both are irrational.
Why? They've shown their true colors long ago.
Of course, if you care more about convenience than you do about their censorship and not standing up for what's right if it might cost them a buck, go ahead.
It's your choice. It always was.
I've worked with many wonderful managers, male and female. I've also worked with a few awful managers, male and female.
Hmmm - actually most of the bad managers were male. But let's move on - nothing to see here.
Of course that goes against the default view that Apple is evil, but I was thinking the same thing. Maybe Steve is actually a defender of people's rights - he patents a technology that Apple never implements on their own products, and makes it prohibitively expensive for others to license, guaranteeing that the technology is never used. If it is, Apple can sue.
I'm not saying that's what went down, just that it's possible. It's easily as likely as some of the shoot-themselves-in-the-head scenarios others have suggested, particularly when you're talking about Apple. Love them, hate them, but you have to admit they know how to market stuff.
What it means is that if you have songs that iTunes carries, they won't have to be copied to the Cloud. The others you mention just get copied up. For most people, it means a much shorter transfer time.
Ironically, the video of the boot process requires Flash, which Apple in their wisdom has chosen not to support. The devs surely knew this, and probably decided not to use YouTube to tweak the noses of those of us who occasionally use our iPhones to read /. (and even post!). Their motivation for doing so escapes me, however, since presumably we are their most interested target audience. Curious.
Agreed. The piracy claim is a ruse. I was about to post this, but decided to see if anyone else had already made this point. Surprisingly, you were the first.
Don't you guys get it? EA doesn't care about piracy. EA is going after GameStop and EB Games - the used game market. It pisses them off that they don't somehow get a cut of that revenue.
I don't see how that affects their decisions. Spore has reportedly been pirated half a million times - how has the DRM changed that? All it's done is piss off the paying customers, who are being treated like criminals.
DRM doesn't work against pirates. It only works against the honest people. When will companies learn that?
There must be something wrong with your installation. Chrome is significantly faster the FF3 for me, and I have no trouble whatsoever watching YouTube videos.
I guess I see people in far more shades of grey than the black and white in which you seem to view them. I suspect the filtering into "redneck" and "Metropolitan" groups would be imperfect at best, and an utter disaster at worst.
People are not really cartoons. There is much more variation, even in people of different parties, than you give credit for.
You are assuming those in the military would think with one mind during an assault on US citizens. If the worse were to come, I suspect there would be plenty of weapons available to both sides, courtesy of members of our own military who disagree with the action.
Oh, come now - more than half the readers of /. look at pictures and videos of stuff they couldn't get in real life if their lives depended on it...
I've noticed that, with few exceptions (such as a new release), games with good gameplay, high popularity, and rare technical issues have long free trials (WoW has two weeks last time I checked.) Tabula Rasa just gave me a 3 day free trial. Vanguard has no free trial whatsoever.
I'd ask what games with short or nonexistent trials have to hide, but I think the answer is obvious. If Vanguard's producers really believe in their product, they should have no problem with letting folks play for free for a couple of weeks - get them involved, attached and hooked. If, on the other hand, they're afraid people will see the game in a bad light after playing that long, I guess a short trial (or none) makes sense.
If cell phones weren't important to them, they would discard them and find other means to communicate. So we can safely assume they depend on them.
They are threatening to blow up towers if their demands aren't met, which would eliminate the cell service they depend upon.
Clearly, they will either be cutting of their own noses to spite their faces, or the threat is without substance.
Wagers anyone?
When the iPod first came out, there were two models. One was $399 and the other was $499. All the arguments you make about your laptop were valid for the iPod as well. Yet it has been very successful, to say the least. To my knowledge, $50 iPods aren't yet available. Songs are mostly $.99.
The iPod has also come down in cost substantially. If the Kindle is successful, I'd expect the same thing to happen. First generation is always expensive.
As for book prices, the market will likely decide. I think $10 for new NYT bestsellers is a step in the right direction. Perhaps that will get cheaper as well.
The publishing industry is facing many of the same hard digital transition issues that the music industry is. It needs to change to survive. While I'm not at all sure that this is the answer, they'll have to consider it as an option, or face the same kinds of problems that the music industry is struggling with.
I was just establishing the difference between taking something that belongs to someone else (and therefore depriving them of it) and copying it (even if you have no right to do so).
Clear?