It seems like the government needs to take a more active approach and promote more building underground so there isn't such a shortage of living space.
How on earth is someone renting out their condo a danger in regards to building code? It's not like they built the condo themselves without following buildling codes. The condo was built by builders who got the proper permits and followed building codes. Then someone bought the condo, and decided to rent it out. So what exactly is the regulation needed for?
Touring is hard work. Maybe the performance itself isn't that hard, but traveling around that much is very tiring. And the performance itself isn't exactly easy: professional musicians aren't like us amateurs who miss some notes and it doesn't matter: the good ones can deliver virtually flawless performances over and over, and that's their real skill (and being able to do it on-location, not in some comfy and familiar office).
Recording music is easy by comparison. Miss some notes? No problem, just record that section (or the whole song) over again. A recording musician doesn't have to worry about playing 2 hours of music straight through flawlessly, he can take bathroom breaks whenever he wants, he can take breaks between every song, etc. And now with today's tools, you don't even have to get the sound exactly right on the first pass, as you can digitally edit it afterwards.
If you're not willing to spend your time going from place to place ("on the road") to make good money playing music, then maybe you should get a different job. The rest of us have to go "on the road" every single weekday to go to our jobs that we don't even enjoy that much so we can earn a decent living.
If this lady can upload a few songs to a single website and make ~$3k in a year from that, that's a pretty good deal IMO for so little work. I don't get paid recurring royalties for the code I write for work; I have to keep showing up every day and doing more work.
hell, some rappers make their money just walking up to people in public, meeting them, to sell them their CD for 5$. They have their hustle on, where is yours Ms Keating? I find it ironic that some thug ass gansta rapper politely asks me if I would like buy his CD to support him... signed at no extra charge
Holy crap, I suddenly have a lot more respect for gangsta rappers, at least the small-time ones like this. Doing this on a daily basis to support yourself takes some serious guts and tenacity.
Wow that's weird. I like the typical PF stuff as much as anyone (Dark Side of the Moon, The Wall, A Momentary Lapse of Reason), but I listed to that album once and it was the most boring thing I'd ever heard, and really didn't sound anything like those others. Roger Waters did great when he worked together with Gilmour and the rest, but on his own his music seems to be entirely different.
While I agree she's lucky to be making any money at all, the idea that no one would pay to listen to a cellist at a concert is just asinine.
No, she's not going to be selling out any arenas or stadiums, obviously. However, for instance, small artists like this can get slots at small community theaters to play, and make some money and get exposure that way. When I lived in Arizona, three such venues were the Chandler Center for the Arts, Mesa Arts Center, and Tempe Center for the Arts. They all catered to people like this and various other smaller artsy acts, and frequently had concerts by jazz pianists and the like. They're small venues with good acoustics, and afterwards you can meet the artist(s) and buy their CDs. Again, you probably won't get rich doing concerts at places like this, and you probably will still need either a day job or a spouse with a real job, but you can probably make a decent side income if you tour places like this enough.
Exactly. Playing a cello is one of those "careers" that's really a "hobby career", just like being a pilot. It's not something you go into expecting to make any money at. If you can manage to eke a living out of it, more power to you, but expecting to earn a good living doing that kind of job is expecting way too much. It's one of those jobs you do on the side, as a hobby, either with a spouse supporting you, or supporting yourself with another "day job" like waiting tables, until you can hopefully build it up to the point where you're making enough money at it to do it full-time without starving.
Most people don't get to do their dream jobs. Most people do jobs they don't like. That's why it's called "work". It's a minority of the population that gets to do something they like some of the time and get paid decent money for it. A lot of people here are in IT or engineering, and these jobs aren't exactly all fun and games either: some of the technical aspects of these jobs may be fun to us, but sitting through boring meetings and dealing with moronic or asshole managers isn't, but those are part of the job. Dealing with a daily commute isn't fun either, but most of us have to deal with that too. Why someone would think that they can record themselves playing an instrument, upload it to the internet, and then expect to sit back and collect massive royalty checks and live a luxurious middle-class lifestyle without lifting another finger is beyond me, and this woman frankly sounds like a spoiled brat.
If you're a musician and want to make a living at it, you need to work. That means you need to do less-fun jobs, such as getting out and touring, meeting your fans, selling CDs in person, etc. Expecting to earn a nice income off of internet sales alone is just asinine.
It's a fundamental flaw with bulding add-ons to a closed, proprietary platform. You're trying to make a business based on the fact that some, much bigger software company has overlooked something important in their own product, something which their customers really want and are willing to pay for (this is true whether their customers/potential customers are users or advertisers). At some point, the bigger company you're piggybacking on is going to notice you, and evaluate whether it's profitable enough for them to steal your business away by copying your "added value". If you don't mind staying small, you can focus on a small niche market that the bigger company doesn't want to bother with and doesn't see much profit in. An example of this might be people who want RPN calculators on their Windows machine: the market for people demanding RPN calculators on Windows, who aren't satisfied with Windows's built-in calculator program, is vanishingly small (esp. ones willing to pay for it), and Microsoft isn't going to make any additional sales by adding an RPN calculator to the base Windows install, so there's probably some company out there that makes such a thing. However, there's plenty of examples of small companies making highly popular add-ons, only to have the larger company like MS ruin them by adding equivalent functionality into their own product or offering it as an add-on themselves. The lucky ones, instead of getting copied, get bought out by the larger company.
Of course, the other major flaw is that the larger company will change the API to their closed platform, deprecating any 3rd-party add-ons made for it. Since the platform is closed and proprietary, the 3rd-party developers have no control over the API, and are at the mercy of the larger company which controls the platform. Open-source stuff has a small advantage here in that the API isn't usually under the control of one for-profit company, but usually operates in more of a committee fashion generally with several different (and sometimes competing) players sitting on that committee, and no one (of those players, who each have their own version of the platform) being forced to adopt any new API if they don't want to.
But it is the meeting place of 1 billion people, and we should have a say on what affects us.
Only if the company providing the meeting place agrees. If they don't, then if you don't like the terms of service, I suggest you leave. It's not like there aren't other "meeting places" on the internet.
Also, civil is worse in some ways: the bar is much, much lower. They don't have to prove "beyond a reasonable doubt" that you're guilty, all they have to show is "a preponderance of the evidence". Basically, if it looks like you're guilty, that's good enough. And remember, in most cases they're not looking to go to trial (they just want to threaten you with that, and only do it to a few people like Jammie Thomas to use to scare everyone else into submisison); their real motivation is to get lots of people to cough up $3K to settle the case. Defending yourself in court generally isn't free, so most people just pay the $3K. Do you want to be the test case to see how well it really holds up in court? Jammie tried that, and look what happened to her.
Millions of people aren't going to use it. How many people use BitTorrent now inside the USA? A bunch, sure, but not millions. And what's happening to them? The MAFIAA is happily suing them en masse, and making a bunch of money getting them to agree to $3k settlements.
This proxy service isn't going to change anything. Instead of a bunch of people getting sued because they were seeding copyrighted material, you'll have two groups of people getting sued: people relaying copyrighted material, and people seeding copyrighted material (because, after all, the MAFIAA is going to set up operations to act as both downloader and proxy).
The only way to be really safe is to use a VPN service that routes all your BT traffic through a country where the MAFIAA is totally unable to legally force the VPN provider to reveal your identity.
The USPS handles millions of packages a day. The drug-carrying courier handles a few, most with contraband. Law enforcement is not going to give him much of a break because he supposedly "didn't know" what was in the sealed envelopes.
Go ahead and try it for yourself: set up a new courier business delivering drugs from a dealer to customers, and then just make up some legalese that you don't examine the packages, and getting the dealer to "agree" that none of the packages contain anything illegal (wink, wink). Then see what happens when you get busted for transporting controlled substances. Hint: you are not the USPS or Fedex, and you won't be treated the way they are.
But you're not Fedex, you're just some guy at home with a residential ISP connection. Fedex has tons of money and can afford lots of lawyers. You probably can't. The "legitimate traffic" and "plausable deniability" thing has been tried by the people hosting Tor exit nodes too, and it hasn't kept them safe, has it?
Maybe, but some guy acting as D3 isn't like a bus driver, he's acting more like a private courier service. A private courier that does nothing but distribute drugs isn't going to get off easily, even if he shows that he "didn't know" what was in the sealed envelopes he was delivering for some drug distributor.
I haven't read the books, but I thought the walls were 1000 miles high to keep the atmosphere from escaping. Even with artificial gravity, it seems you'd need high walls to keep an atmosphere from leaking off into space at the edges. But those high walls aren't going to help with gravity; you need gravity at the bottom, and mass in the walls will counteract any gravitational force at the bottom of the structure (where the humans walk around). To have natural gravity, you'd need mass equivalent to the thickness of Earth at any point under the human's feet, and I don't remember Ringworld being that thick, and I don't remember "scrith" being a synonym for collapsed matter.
I guess you need to ask your ISP about their routers that are passing data in an encrypted form between an SSL server and a customer. Are they liable?
If you're D3, you're not an ISP, you're just some dude using an ISP's connection to share files. Good luck dealing with the legal problems when the MAFIAA file suit. A large ISP like Comcast or Verizon can deal with these legal problems easily; for starters, they have a business dealing in data connections. You don't. You're just some guy trading files on the internet. You're not going to get the same legal protections.
2008 was still the Vista era for MS; things have changed a lot since then, both with MS and with Linux. Surely you don't think it's fair to keep on bashing MS for Vista, do you? Even 4 years is too far back to be fair. 2 year-old complaints I would tend to give some weight to.
Again, you do not need to add repos; if you're using a distro that doesn't keep up with newer software (and for some reason you really need to use this newer version of the software), then maybe you need a different distro. Debian really isn't a distro aimed at grandma-type users. And why are you even sticking with an older distro, and then trying to patch it with repos for newer software versions? Why not just upgrade your distro? With Ubuntu, Mint, etc., their release cycles are short, and they even do in-place upgrades (i.e., click on the "upgrade distro" button and it downloads everything and upgrades for you on-the-fly; it doesn't get any easier than this). You really should never be using a version that's more than 1 year old. This isn't Windows where you have to pay for your OS upgrades.
But to get there it can't sit back and go "yup, good enough". We have to look at its faults, and see what other systems do better. You have to be critical.
That's fine, but not when you're complaining about things that were problems 5+ years ago. Try installing the latest Mint or Ubuntu or openSuse release, and then see if you still have something to complain about.
If you want to list some valid complaints about modern-day Linux, they're probably going to be something about Nvidia and AMD/ATI video drivers, though most people I've read now say they don't have any real problems with the Nvidia proprietary drivers any more as long as they use a distro that supports them well (i.e. properly handles rebuilding the shim layer when doing a kernel upgrade; this was a problem on some distros years ago). Or maybe complaining about Gnome3 and how bad it is (however, no one's forcing you to use it and there's a ton of alternatives in different distros). Or complaining about the lack of a single, standard desktop environment (however, this can be seen as a strength, not a detriment: see Windows 8/Metro and all the complaints about how you can't turn it off). Or maybe some lingering problems with WiFi drivers for certain brands (Broadcom, I'm looking at you).
For me, the main problem I see remaining is with the video drivers. I don't see LibreOffice as a big problem, because you're never going to get 100% compatibility with MS Office documents: it's that way by design (MS's design). You can't have 100% compatibility when the organization publishing the "standard" doesn't publish any specifications (or worse, publishes some but it turns out they don't even follow them); it's a moving target. At some point, you have to decide if it's "good enough" or not. Some places have; go to H&R Block and see what office software they have installed on their computers (it's OpenOffice). The other problem I see is with some crappy consumer-level devices not being compatible with it, such as certain cheap inkjet printers.
What about the energy requirements of transporting jovian planets from other star systems?
Sounds like we better give up on that idea. Maybe we could be happy with a (relatively) small dish-shaped structure that has artificial gravity, and has the same mass as the Earth, lies in Earth's orbit, and has the concave portion facing the Sun? (The degree of concavity obviously would be very slight.)
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how our perceptions of other bodies in the Solar System can possibly be that far off-base. It's not like we think there's alien civilizations on Saturn or Mars (as many supposed back in the 1800s). We know very well how much mass these bodies have, what their surface temperatures are, what their surface gravities are, what their atmospheric composition and pressures are, etc. There's some stuff we're not so sure about, like how much water they have on them (we only recently found out that the Moon had lots of ice hidden in some craters; we also recently found some ice hidden on Mercury IIRC), and whether any microbial life exists on them or not, and what exactly these places were like millions of years ago (e.g., did life ever live on Mars, was it a totally different planet in the distant past, etc.). I do believe we have a very good handle on just how habitable these bodies are for humans (which is to say, not very). I'm sure we'll find some very interesting data about the geology of these worlds in years to come, and why that weird hexagonal pattern exists on Saturn's south pole, but it's doubtful we're going to uncover any monoliths or ruins of ancient civilizations or macro-sized lifeforms or anything like that anywhere in our Solar System.
Comparing our current knowledge of the Solar System to Columbus seems rather extreme and unfair to me. Columbus was so clueless he didn't even know there was a continent between Europe and Asia. We do have a pretty good handle on the major features of our solar system: what bodies exist, where exactly they are, etc. We can even launch probes and send them on journeys through the Solar System passing many planets of interest, using a minimum of fuel, by taking advantage of gravitation, since we know so well the characteristics of their orbits; we even did this way back in the 70s with the Voyager probes, despite computer technology being so poor back then. We've discovered some new stuff since then, namely some very far-flung dwarf planets plus a bunch of small asteroids, plus lots of new small moons around Saturn and Jupiter, and we've learned a lot about the various bodies in the system with our probes. But it's not like we're going to discover another Uranus-sized planet out there that we've somehow missed all this time and is only as far away as the asteroid belt.
My girlfriend needs them for school. She's working on her masters, so it is a pretty big deal. When I was in school I had the same problems with OpenOffice, which pretty much lead to me discarding my Linux box for a Mac. A lot of people actually need compatibility with de facto standards.
I've never seen a lot of problems with Open/LibreOffice having trouble with MS documents, unless they were extremely complicated ones. These days, I usually open such things in Google Docs, and again, I never see any trouble.
So you missed the time when Ubuntu started messing with them, and this messed up the sound on tons of people's computers, forcing them to use kludgy, unstable, workarounds?
Nope, never had a problem. However, you're complaining about something that was a problem year and years ago? So why shouldn't I bitch and complain about all the problems with Windows Me, or even XP? If I complain about those, the standard response is "get over it, those are long gone". So now you're going to complain about problems Linux had a decade ago?
Wow, I don't like your favorite OS as much as you, and thus I am a "shill".
No, you're a shill because you complain about things that were Linux problems a decade ago, not about things that are really problems today. That shows you have some sort of ulterior motive in painting Linux as hard-to-use, when these days it certainly isn't. Needing to find new repositories? Having to debug hardware driver problems? This isn't 1999, it's 2013. You obviously are either a troll or you haven't used Linux in a decade to complain about these things. This isn't about "picking sides", it's about being a fucking liar.
So what would be the thickness, using all the matter in the solar system (minus the Sun itself), of a Dyson sphere at Earth's radius? (I'm guessing rather thin.)
Maybe that's why Niven posited a Ringworld, so you wouldn't need so much material. How about if we build a ring, the width equaling Earth's diameter, with a 1AU radius? How thick would that be?
But are they simply "morons"? In this case, it's a long-time Slashdot user, with a 6-digit UID. Every time an article like this comes up on this site, there's tons of posts calling anyone who thinks asteroid mining or other space exploration is feasible, "space nutters". And this is supposed to be a site filled with "geeks" and "nerds", the so-called smart people in society. If our own technical talent can't comprehend any kind of space travel or mining, what does that say about everyone else?
From what I've seen of the law, courts do make allowances for the "you should have known" factor, or what they call "reasonableness". If someone gives you a sealed envelope full of cocaine and tells you to deliver it to some person, and you get caught by the cops, guess who's going to jail? This is called "aiding and abetting"; you might get less time if you were someone else's henchman, but you don't get off scot-free just because you didn't open the package to see what it was. You're not like Fedex, which delivers millions of packages a day and can't be reasonably expected to check every one of them for contraband; you're a single person, delivering a single package, and the whole thing is suspicious: why isn't that person just sending the package by Fedex instead of asking you to hand-deliver it?
Sorry, I don't think that's going to help you. If you transport and/or sell drugs, you can't put it in sealed envelopes and claim that you didn't know what you were selling or transporting. Even if you really didn't know, and you were just acting as a courier for someone else, you're going to prison for transporting contraband.
I'm fairly sure the reason using a VPN works is not because of any privacy laws; it's because your VPN makes your BitTorrent traffic go through a different country, usually a country where the MAFIAA has little or no legal power. When the MAFIAA agents find someone with a Russian IP address sharing copyrighted information, what are they going to do? Request the Russian ISP tell them who it is? And then go to the VPN company and demand they cough up logs showing which user in the USA was sharing that data at that time? (And this may not work either, if the VPN company doesn't keep any logs, and many users are aggregated though a small number of IP addresses in Russia.)
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It seems like the government needs to take a more active approach and promote more building underground so there isn't such a shortage of living space.
How on earth is someone renting out their condo a danger in regards to building code? It's not like they built the condo themselves without following buildling codes. The condo was built by builders who got the proper permits and followed building codes. Then someone bought the condo, and decided to rent it out. So what exactly is the regulation needed for?
Touring is hard work. Maybe the performance itself isn't that hard, but traveling around that much is very tiring. And the performance itself isn't exactly easy: professional musicians aren't like us amateurs who miss some notes and it doesn't matter: the good ones can deliver virtually flawless performances over and over, and that's their real skill (and being able to do it on-location, not in some comfy and familiar office).
Recording music is easy by comparison. Miss some notes? No problem, just record that section (or the whole song) over again. A recording musician doesn't have to worry about playing 2 hours of music straight through flawlessly, he can take bathroom breaks whenever he wants, he can take breaks between every song, etc. And now with today's tools, you don't even have to get the sound exactly right on the first pass, as you can digitally edit it afterwards.
If you're not willing to spend your time going from place to place ("on the road") to make good money playing music, then maybe you should get a different job. The rest of us have to go "on the road" every single weekday to go to our jobs that we don't even enjoy that much so we can earn a decent living.
If this lady can upload a few songs to a single website and make ~$3k in a year from that, that's a pretty good deal IMO for so little work. I don't get paid recurring royalties for the code I write for work; I have to keep showing up every day and doing more work.
hell, some rappers make their money just walking up to people in public, meeting them, to sell them their CD for 5$. They have their hustle on, where is yours Ms Keating? I find it ironic that some thug ass gansta rapper politely asks me if I would like buy his CD to support him... signed at no extra charge
Holy crap, I suddenly have a lot more respect for gangsta rappers, at least the small-time ones like this. Doing this on a daily basis to support yourself takes some serious guts and tenacity.
Wow that's weird. I like the typical PF stuff as much as anyone (Dark Side of the Moon, The Wall, A Momentary Lapse of Reason), but I listed to that album once and it was the most boring thing I'd ever heard, and really didn't sound anything like those others. Roger Waters did great when he worked together with Gilmour and the rest, but on his own his music seems to be entirely different.
While I agree she's lucky to be making any money at all, the idea that no one would pay to listen to a cellist at a concert is just asinine.
No, she's not going to be selling out any arenas or stadiums, obviously. However, for instance, small artists like this can get slots at small community theaters to play, and make some money and get exposure that way. When I lived in Arizona, three such venues were the Chandler Center for the Arts, Mesa Arts Center, and Tempe Center for the Arts. They all catered to people like this and various other smaller artsy acts, and frequently had concerts by jazz pianists and the like. They're small venues with good acoustics, and afterwards you can meet the artist(s) and buy their CDs. Again, you probably won't get rich doing concerts at places like this, and you probably will still need either a day job or a spouse with a real job, but you can probably make a decent side income if you tour places like this enough.
Exactly. Playing a cello is one of those "careers" that's really a "hobby career", just like being a pilot. It's not something you go into expecting to make any money at. If you can manage to eke a living out of it, more power to you, but expecting to earn a good living doing that kind of job is expecting way too much. It's one of those jobs you do on the side, as a hobby, either with a spouse supporting you, or supporting yourself with another "day job" like waiting tables, until you can hopefully build it up to the point where you're making enough money at it to do it full-time without starving.
Most people don't get to do their dream jobs. Most people do jobs they don't like. That's why it's called "work". It's a minority of the population that gets to do something they like some of the time and get paid decent money for it. A lot of people here are in IT or engineering, and these jobs aren't exactly all fun and games either: some of the technical aspects of these jobs may be fun to us, but sitting through boring meetings and dealing with moronic or asshole managers isn't, but those are part of the job. Dealing with a daily commute isn't fun either, but most of us have to deal with that too. Why someone would think that they can record themselves playing an instrument, upload it to the internet, and then expect to sit back and collect massive royalty checks and live a luxurious middle-class lifestyle without lifting another finger is beyond me, and this woman frankly sounds like a spoiled brat.
If you're a musician and want to make a living at it, you need to work. That means you need to do less-fun jobs, such as getting out and touring, meeting your fans, selling CDs in person, etc. Expecting to earn a nice income off of internet sales alone is just asinine.
It's a fundamental flaw with bulding add-ons to a closed, proprietary platform. You're trying to make a business based on the fact that some, much bigger software company has overlooked something important in their own product, something which their customers really want and are willing to pay for (this is true whether their customers/potential customers are users or advertisers). At some point, the bigger company you're piggybacking on is going to notice you, and evaluate whether it's profitable enough for them to steal your business away by copying your "added value". If you don't mind staying small, you can focus on a small niche market that the bigger company doesn't want to bother with and doesn't see much profit in. An example of this might be people who want RPN calculators on their Windows machine: the market for people demanding RPN calculators on Windows, who aren't satisfied with Windows's built-in calculator program, is vanishingly small (esp. ones willing to pay for it), and Microsoft isn't going to make any additional sales by adding an RPN calculator to the base Windows install, so there's probably some company out there that makes such a thing. However, there's plenty of examples of small companies making highly popular add-ons, only to have the larger company like MS ruin them by adding equivalent functionality into their own product or offering it as an add-on themselves. The lucky ones, instead of getting copied, get bought out by the larger company.
Of course, the other major flaw is that the larger company will change the API to their closed platform, deprecating any 3rd-party add-ons made for it. Since the platform is closed and proprietary, the 3rd-party developers have no control over the API, and are at the mercy of the larger company which controls the platform. Open-source stuff has a small advantage here in that the API isn't usually under the control of one for-profit company, but usually operates in more of a committee fashion generally with several different (and sometimes competing) players sitting on that committee, and no one (of those players, who each have their own version of the platform) being forced to adopt any new API if they don't want to.
But it is the meeting place of 1 billion people, and we should have a say on what affects us.
Only if the company providing the meeting place agrees. If they don't, then if you don't like the terms of service, I suggest you leave. It's not like there aren't other "meeting places" on the internet.
Not exactly, not any more, thanks to the DMCA.
Also, civil is worse in some ways: the bar is much, much lower. They don't have to prove "beyond a reasonable doubt" that you're guilty, all they have to show is "a preponderance of the evidence". Basically, if it looks like you're guilty, that's good enough. And remember, in most cases they're not looking to go to trial (they just want to threaten you with that, and only do it to a few people like Jammie Thomas to use to scare everyone else into submisison); their real motivation is to get lots of people to cough up $3K to settle the case. Defending yourself in court generally isn't free, so most people just pay the $3K. Do you want to be the test case to see how well it really holds up in court? Jammie tried that, and look what happened to her.
Millions of people aren't going to use it. How many people use BitTorrent now inside the USA? A bunch, sure, but not millions. And what's happening to them? The MAFIAA is happily suing them en masse, and making a bunch of money getting them to agree to $3k settlements.
This proxy service isn't going to change anything. Instead of a bunch of people getting sued because they were seeding copyrighted material, you'll have two groups of people getting sued: people relaying copyrighted material, and people seeding copyrighted material (because, after all, the MAFIAA is going to set up operations to act as both downloader and proxy).
The only way to be really safe is to use a VPN service that routes all your BT traffic through a country where the MAFIAA is totally unable to legally force the VPN provider to reveal your identity.
The USPS handles millions of packages a day. The drug-carrying courier handles a few, most with contraband. Law enforcement is not going to give him much of a break because he supposedly "didn't know" what was in the sealed envelopes.
Go ahead and try it for yourself: set up a new courier business delivering drugs from a dealer to customers, and then just make up some legalese that you don't examine the packages, and getting the dealer to "agree" that none of the packages contain anything illegal (wink, wink). Then see what happens when you get busted for transporting controlled substances. Hint: you are not the USPS or Fedex, and you won't be treated the way they are.
But you're not Fedex, you're just some guy at home with a residential ISP connection. Fedex has tons of money and can afford lots of lawyers. You probably can't. The "legitimate traffic" and "plausable deniability" thing has been tried by the people hosting Tor exit nodes too, and it hasn't kept them safe, has it?
Maybe, but some guy acting as D3 isn't like a bus driver, he's acting more like a private courier service. A private courier that does nothing but distribute drugs isn't going to get off easily, even if he shows that he "didn't know" what was in the sealed envelopes he was delivering for some drug distributor.
I haven't read the books, but I thought the walls were 1000 miles high to keep the atmosphere from escaping. Even with artificial gravity, it seems you'd need high walls to keep an atmosphere from leaking off into space at the edges. But those high walls aren't going to help with gravity; you need gravity at the bottom, and mass in the walls will counteract any gravitational force at the bottom of the structure (where the humans walk around). To have natural gravity, you'd need mass equivalent to the thickness of Earth at any point under the human's feet, and I don't remember Ringworld being that thick, and I don't remember "scrith" being a synonym for collapsed matter.
I guess you need to ask your ISP about their routers that are passing data in an encrypted form between an SSL server and a customer. Are they liable?
If you're D3, you're not an ISP, you're just some dude using an ISP's connection to share files. Good luck dealing with the legal problems when the MAFIAA file suit. A large ISP like Comcast or Verizon can deal with these legal problems easily; for starters, they have a business dealing in data connections. You don't. You're just some guy trading files on the internet. You're not going to get the same legal protections.
2008 was still the Vista era for MS; things have changed a lot since then, both with MS and with Linux. Surely you don't think it's fair to keep on bashing MS for Vista, do you? Even 4 years is too far back to be fair. 2 year-old complaints I would tend to give some weight to.
Again, you do not need to add repos; if you're using a distro that doesn't keep up with newer software (and for some reason you really need to use this newer version of the software), then maybe you need a different distro. Debian really isn't a distro aimed at grandma-type users. And why are you even sticking with an older distro, and then trying to patch it with repos for newer software versions? Why not just upgrade your distro? With Ubuntu, Mint, etc., their release cycles are short, and they even do in-place upgrades (i.e., click on the "upgrade distro" button and it downloads everything and upgrades for you on-the-fly; it doesn't get any easier than this). You really should never be using a version that's more than 1 year old. This isn't Windows where you have to pay for your OS upgrades.
But to get there it can't sit back and go "yup, good enough". We have to look at its faults, and see what other systems do better. You have to be critical.
That's fine, but not when you're complaining about things that were problems 5+ years ago. Try installing the latest Mint or Ubuntu or openSuse release, and then see if you still have something to complain about.
If you want to list some valid complaints about modern-day Linux, they're probably going to be something about Nvidia and AMD/ATI video drivers, though most people I've read now say they don't have any real problems with the Nvidia proprietary drivers any more as long as they use a distro that supports them well (i.e. properly handles rebuilding the shim layer when doing a kernel upgrade; this was a problem on some distros years ago). Or maybe complaining about Gnome3 and how bad it is (however, no one's forcing you to use it and there's a ton of alternatives in different distros). Or complaining about the lack of a single, standard desktop environment (however, this can be seen as a strength, not a detriment: see Windows 8/Metro and all the complaints about how you can't turn it off). Or maybe some lingering problems with WiFi drivers for certain brands (Broadcom, I'm looking at you).
For me, the main problem I see remaining is with the video drivers. I don't see LibreOffice as a big problem, because you're never going to get 100% compatibility with MS Office documents: it's that way by design (MS's design). You can't have 100% compatibility when the organization publishing the "standard" doesn't publish any specifications (or worse, publishes some but it turns out they don't even follow them); it's a moving target. At some point, you have to decide if it's "good enough" or not. Some places have; go to H&R Block and see what office software they have installed on their computers (it's OpenOffice). The other problem I see is with some crappy consumer-level devices not being compatible with it, such as certain cheap inkjet printers.
What about the energy requirements of transporting jovian planets from other star systems?
Sounds like we better give up on that idea. Maybe we could be happy with a (relatively) small dish-shaped structure that has artificial gravity, and has the same mass as the Earth, lies in Earth's orbit, and has the concave portion facing the Sun? (The degree of concavity obviously would be very slight.)
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how our perceptions of other bodies in the Solar System can possibly be that far off-base. It's not like we think there's alien civilizations on Saturn or Mars (as many supposed back in the 1800s). We know very well how much mass these bodies have, what their surface temperatures are, what their surface gravities are, what their atmospheric composition and pressures are, etc. There's some stuff we're not so sure about, like how much water they have on them (we only recently found out that the Moon had lots of ice hidden in some craters; we also recently found some ice hidden on Mercury IIRC), and whether any microbial life exists on them or not, and what exactly these places were like millions of years ago (e.g., did life ever live on Mars, was it a totally different planet in the distant past, etc.). I do believe we have a very good handle on just how habitable these bodies are for humans (which is to say, not very). I'm sure we'll find some very interesting data about the geology of these worlds in years to come, and why that weird hexagonal pattern exists on Saturn's south pole, but it's doubtful we're going to uncover any monoliths or ruins of ancient civilizations or macro-sized lifeforms or anything like that anywhere in our Solar System.
Comparing our current knowledge of the Solar System to Columbus seems rather extreme and unfair to me. Columbus was so clueless he didn't even know there was a continent between Europe and Asia. We do have a pretty good handle on the major features of our solar system: what bodies exist, where exactly they are, etc. We can even launch probes and send them on journeys through the Solar System passing many planets of interest, using a minimum of fuel, by taking advantage of gravitation, since we know so well the characteristics of their orbits; we even did this way back in the 70s with the Voyager probes, despite computer technology being so poor back then. We've discovered some new stuff since then, namely some very far-flung dwarf planets plus a bunch of small asteroids, plus lots of new small moons around Saturn and Jupiter, and we've learned a lot about the various bodies in the system with our probes. But it's not like we're going to discover another Uranus-sized planet out there that we've somehow missed all this time and is only as far away as the asteroid belt.
My girlfriend needs them for school. She's working on her masters, so it is a pretty big deal. When I was in school I had the same problems with OpenOffice, which pretty much lead to me discarding my Linux box for a Mac. A lot of people actually need compatibility with de facto standards.
I've never seen a lot of problems with Open/LibreOffice having trouble with MS documents, unless they were extremely complicated ones. These days, I usually open such things in Google Docs, and again, I never see any trouble.
So you missed the time when Ubuntu started messing with them, and this messed up the sound on tons of people's computers, forcing them to use kludgy, unstable, workarounds?
Nope, never had a problem. However, you're complaining about something that was a problem year and years ago? So why shouldn't I bitch and complain about all the problems with Windows Me, or even XP? If I complain about those, the standard response is "get over it, those are long gone". So now you're going to complain about problems Linux had a decade ago?
Wow, I don't like your favorite OS as much as you, and thus I am a "shill".
No, you're a shill because you complain about things that were Linux problems a decade ago, not about things that are really problems today. That shows you have some sort of ulterior motive in painting Linux as hard-to-use, when these days it certainly isn't. Needing to find new repositories? Having to debug hardware driver problems? This isn't 1999, it's 2013. You obviously are either a troll or you haven't used Linux in a decade to complain about these things. This isn't about "picking sides", it's about being a fucking liar.
So what would be the thickness, using all the matter in the solar system (minus the Sun itself), of a Dyson sphere at Earth's radius? (I'm guessing rather thin.)
Maybe that's why Niven posited a Ringworld, so you wouldn't need so much material. How about if we build a ring, the width equaling Earth's diameter, with a 1AU radius? How thick would that be?
But are they simply "morons"? In this case, it's a long-time Slashdot user, with a 6-digit UID. Every time an article like this comes up on this site, there's tons of posts calling anyone who thinks asteroid mining or other space exploration is feasible, "space nutters". And this is supposed to be a site filled with "geeks" and "nerds", the so-called smart people in society. If our own technical talent can't comprehend any kind of space travel or mining, what does that say about everyone else?
From what I've seen of the law, courts do make allowances for the "you should have known" factor, or what they call "reasonableness". If someone gives you a sealed envelope full of cocaine and tells you to deliver it to some person, and you get caught by the cops, guess who's going to jail? This is called "aiding and abetting"; you might get less time if you were someone else's henchman, but you don't get off scot-free just because you didn't open the package to see what it was. You're not like Fedex, which delivers millions of packages a day and can't be reasonably expected to check every one of them for contraband; you're a single person, delivering a single package, and the whole thing is suspicious: why isn't that person just sending the package by Fedex instead of asking you to hand-deliver it?
Sorry, I don't think that's going to help you. If you transport and/or sell drugs, you can't put it in sealed envelopes and claim that you didn't know what you were selling or transporting. Even if you really didn't know, and you were just acting as a courier for someone else, you're going to prison for transporting contraband.
I'm fairly sure the reason using a VPN works is not because of any privacy laws; it's because your VPN makes your BitTorrent traffic go through a different country, usually a country where the MAFIAA has little or no legal power. When the MAFIAA agents find someone with a Russian IP address sharing copyrighted information, what are they going to do? Request the Russian ISP tell them who it is? And then go to the VPN company and demand they cough up logs showing which user in the USA was sharing that data at that time? (And this may not work either, if the VPN company doesn't keep any logs, and many users are aggregated though a small number of IP addresses in Russia.)