I'd like to see more high speed trains in the US. It's a lot more economical than air travel, can be just as fast (with aiport wait times and all
(1) Economical? Amtrak charges about the same as any major airline. This might get cheaper if there were more trains and more people took trains, but that's never going to happen because:
(2) Trains aren't just as fast for any significant trip, even taking airport wait times into account. A flight from LA to Chicago takes, oh, five hours or so. Airport time, let's be really generous and call it 2 hours at each end. That's 9 hours total. You know how long it takes to go from LA to Chicago by train? 3 days. Trains (~75mph) simply aren't anywhere near as fast as airplanes (>500mph). For really short trips a train is better than an airplane, but if the trip is that short, you might as well drive, as driving is cheaper than the train, gets you there as fast as the train, and when you get there you have transportation (unlike the train).
But for some reason the fringe selects Tesla as their hero, despite the fact that there are people who've done more important work in science and technology and gotten less credit.
I think it's because he came up with so many things, but ended up dying broke and insane. You see, he's just like the rest of us: an unappreciated genius whose ideas were stolen without him even getting any credit, much less money. Why, who among us can say that no one has ever "stolen" a great idea from us and built a world-girdling empire from the proceeds thereof? Why, I personally came up with the idea of monkeys re-enacting the battle of Gettysburg, as seen at the end of the "Stonecutters" episode of the Simpsons*. Did I see even a dime for that? Of course not. As a result I shall die penniless and insane.
*True story. A friend of mine worked at Film Roman and asked where it came from: "some nut in a coffee shop talking about monkeys". That nut was me.
You don't get tons of stuff just because you act in movies or struggle to make ends meet just because you work in a factory. Everyone is treated fairly and equally, and everyone works for the greater good.
Another thing communism fails to account for is the fact that people don't want to do unpleasant jobs. When you look at society from Marx's peculiar industrial revolution-era perspective and manage to divide society into (a) factory workers, and (b) leeches, communism seems like a simple solution. Kill the leeches and the workers get their stuff. It doesn't, however, allow for a reasonable way to fill jobs like "garbage collector" when jobs like "TV actor" exist. If fifty people's abilities make them good actors, but there's only work for the three best actors, how do you get the other 47 people to take out the trash? Free market-type systems have the advantage there by not paying lower tier actors enough to live, thus forcing them to take out garbage to earn money...
The act defiones it as theft. the title is an indication of what the act includes. Read it and you may learn something.
Man, you really are a piece of work, aren't you. Why don't you read the act yourself. Take note of 17USC506 wherein you will find a list of Criminal Offenses as defined by this act. Note that nothing therein defines any sort of "theft". "Criminal infringement", yes, but not "theft". Theft has a specific legal definition-- essentially, depriving another of property-- and copyright infringement ain't theft.
I point out that US law calls the act theft. It is not an opinion it is a fact. How can fact be flamebait. If anything it should have the mods calling the above poster just plain wrong as he is sprreading disinformation.
The title a law was passed uder has no legal standing. They could call a law outlawing spitting across state lines the "Artificial Insemination Control Act" and that wouldn't make spitting == artificial insemination any more than the title "No Electronic Theft" makes copyright infringement a property crime. Arguing based on titles of bills is as dumb as arguing based on movies about political campaigns: neither has any requirement to be based in reality. You got modded "flamebait" because you made a snide retort based on an inane premise.
Downloading music withot paying for it is morally equivalent to using the GPL in closed source products.
Not morally equivalent, legally equivalent. One could be morally opposed to paying for either music or software and obey the GPL while violating music copyright. This would not be an inconsistent moral position. Saying one must respect music copyrights if one respects the GPL is like saying I can't smoke pot if I'm in favor of prescription drugs remaining prescription-only.
Link/URL?
You know, I have been looking for that independant, unbiased, non-RIAA supported research study that proves that there is a link between P2P and shrinking record sales but no luck so far.
I can point to many "industry supported" (companies that work for the RIAA-companies) studies but not one research study from a reputable university or scientist.
So please link to those studies, or shut the fuck up AC.
Who modded this flamebait? The snide comment from the nameless fool grandparent poster insinuating that the only reason this report is considered legit here is "slashdot reader bias" is the flamebait. "Biased" doesn't mean "wrong", and unsupported arguments from ACs deserve a good "STFU".
Do you realize how close this sounds to 1998-esque dot-com business plans? "Let's give away free pies so that, we, umm, can see which pies people like so that we can, umm, sell pies!"
Heh. Yeah, as it turns out people liked FREE pies, and didn't like pies they had to pay for. I suspect music is different, though. A lot of people don't see downloaded MP3s as "real". The perception seems to be that purchased CDs are the actual songs, while MP3s are "just copies". This is true, to some degree, what with MP3 being a lossy format.
Heh. I could even hear the original poster's voice going up in pitch as he spoke, and his eyes spinning faster and faster. I wish there was a combination "+1 Funny/Insightful" for this. Then again, the funniest things ARE insightful...
In a computer media player, it would be all about the first ad because if the viewer isn't interested by the first one, they're going to drag he slider 2-3 minutes into the future until the show is back. Commercials in the middle would be skipped over the vast majority of the time.
Then again, the same could be said not only of a show watched via any recording device, but live TV watching as well. You only see the first couple seconds of the first commercial before you get up and use the bathroom, get a snack, or flip the channel. The first commercial has always been the prime position and advertisers already pay more for it.
... but visual design? You can only do so much by aranging controls on forms with drag and drop.
Yep. There's a reason that, over thousands of years, mankind has developed alternatives to cave paintings. Saying "in the future all software will be visually designed" is like saying "in the future all books will be comic books".
Even if software development becomes putting lego blocks together, it's not going to make specifying algorithms, keeping track of data structures and debugging any easier.
Billy should know better.
Yeah, totally visual program design is unlikely to happen for the same reason that great novels aren't written using only pictures. At some point you have to design complex data relationships, and that's going to have to be done in an algebraic fashion. Ol' Bill is probably envisioning a time when there'll be pre-built libraries for all your algorithmic needs, but that won't make software development "visual", it'll just split the job field into two parts: visual object assemblers (monkeys), and library builders (real programmers). What makes the "visula development" notion even sillier is that for complex projects you'll need custom-built libraries for very specific, complex functions, and those will have to be written by somebody.
The idea of "totally visual development" is ignorant. We developed complex written (human) languages for a reason: cave paintings only carry so much info. Computer languages are no different.
Actually the Soviet Union did use nukes for mining and creating canals...
Man, those russkies were CRAZY! 42 nukes used to create underground natural gas storage cavities? That's reasonable. 39 nukes for deep seismic sounding? Sure, why not. But 5 times they used nukes to put out oil well fires? Is it me, or does that sound like putting out birthday candles with a fire hose? "The only way we could save the wells was to NUKE THEM."
"Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter.
The question of TANSTAAFL aside, it's hard to be freer (cost-wise) than to not be directly charged for it.
I think the implication of "too cheap to meter" is that everyone would pay a nominal monthly bill based on a rough estimate of how much power they'd use and it'd be so ridiculously cheap that no one would mind. I wish...
I wasn't suggesting asbestos was produced. I was pointing out that hundreds of other probably toxic chemicals were present in the inhaled in the smoke.
They don't, but pyrolosys of complex materials is a fairly undpredictable process...You know that the products are going to consist of the same elements as the reactants, but that's about it.
There are many, many toxic chemicals that are produced from burning synthetic materials.
Asbestos isn't manufactured, it's mined: it's a fibrous mineral and totally combustion-proof. It's wholly impossible for asbestos to result from burning wire jacket unless the asbestos was there to begin with. Unless the building has very old, very illegal electrical wiring, there was no asbestos. Now, it is possible that there was some asbestos insulation in the cable ducting that went unnoticed and he meant "we inhaled unknown quantities of: (asbestos) and (crap from burning wire insulation)".
TiVo can't always switch channels on it. It worked much of the time with the remote IR thing, but not always.
This is what pushed me over ther edge with digital cable. One out of ten times the TiVo tried to record something, the stupid Motorola cable box would miss one digit from the IR sender. So instead of that pay-per-view movie I paid for and told it to record on channel 102, I got two hours of infomercial from channel 12.
The other thing that pissed me off was their claims of "digital quality picture". The digital signal is only as good as the initial feed, and apparently Adelphia's feeds were all spliced into the head-end multiplexer with old 300ohm antenna wires, 'cause the quality was CRAP. I got to watch perfectly rendered MPEG2 streams of static, ghosting, and (on some channels) zig-zaggy lines like you used to get from running the blender with the TV on.
No, they use Mach because it does mean something, and different things happen at different Mach numbers.
Sure, some of the big ones are in the transonic zone (~0.95-1.0 Mach), but other things, like "Compression lift", happen at ~Mach 3 if the plane is configured correctly, etc.
Well, you learn something every day if you just pay attention.
"Canadian Content" requirements? I'm not familiar with Canadian TV, but that sounds like programming providers are required to air Canadian TV shows...?
It's sad to think that Canadian TV isn't able to stand on it's own and compete with Americans. It's twice as sad that the government recognizes this, and would require that Canadian TV shows must air, even though the populace might not want them.
The whole idea is kinda demented... I'm just not sure how much "Red/Green" and "O Canada" I could take.
I remember an interview with Eugene Levy (I think it was him) where he talked about the Canadian Content rules. They had been running SCTV for a while and a man from the government came to them and said "you don't have enough canadian content in your show". He rplied "SCTV is filmed in canada, with canadian actors, working from scripts written entirely by canadians. What do you want, a couple guys wearing tooks and parkas sitting on a couch drinking beer and eating back bacon?" The government man said "yeah, something like that I guess." Thus was spawned The Great White North with Bob and Doug McKenzie was spawned.
joke -- (joek) n.
1. Something said or done to evoke laughter or amusement, especially an amusing story with a punch line.
re-read the original post. He said he was going to make a humorous comparison, but then realized that "the parent wasn't all that fallacious". Therefore, he was stating, in a roundabout way, that a comparison between current times and Nazi times is something to be taken seriously, i.e. not a joke.
Not at 95000 feet (the altitude the article claims). Assuming a standard atmosphere, the speed of sound is 315 m/s. So Mach 10 is 3150 m/s.
Calculating the Mach number from one's velocity in a vaccuum would yield a "divide by 0 error" then. But I guess they only use Mach numbers for aircraft, so that's unlikely to be a problem. You'd think they'd use the more concrete km/s scale rather than the Mach scale, but I guess people's eyes tend to glaze over when faced with large numbers.
You'd have to ditch the radwaste casks in the ocean, where they might be prone to leaking in a harsh, high pressure ocean environment. I suppose if the radwaste is significantly heavier than the water so it won't float, and it can be dropped into a trench so any leaking has no chance of washing up, it would be a viable idea.
Isn't radiation in the ocean just the sort of foolish plan that results in disatrous consequences? I seem to recall seeing a documentary with Raymond Burr about nuclear tests in the pacific fifty years ago waking up a giant radiation-breathing bipedal lizard-thing that went on to stomp Japan. They eventually got the lizard to be their friend, but the damage was pretty bad. I don't think we can risk waking any more monsters.
Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Your sig is so very funny because it's TRUE! "I'm running down to the ATF for some beer and a rifle-- you need smokes or anything?" heh
Slashdot Mirror
(1) Economical? Amtrak charges about the same as any major airline. This might get cheaper if there were more trains and more people took trains, but that's never going to happen because:
(2) Trains aren't just as fast for any significant trip, even taking airport wait times into account. A flight from LA to Chicago takes, oh, five hours or so. Airport time, let's be really generous and call it 2 hours at each end. That's 9 hours total. You know how long it takes to go from LA to Chicago by train? 3 days. Trains (~75mph) simply aren't anywhere near as fast as airplanes (>500mph). For really short trips a train is better than an airplane, but if the trip is that short, you might as well drive, as driving is cheaper than the train, gets you there as fast as the train, and when you get there you have transportation (unlike the train).
I think it's because he came up with so many things, but ended up dying broke and insane. You see, he's just like the rest of us: an unappreciated genius whose ideas were stolen without him even getting any credit, much less money. Why, who among us can say that no one has ever "stolen" a great idea from us and built a world-girdling empire from the proceeds thereof? Why, I personally came up with the idea of monkeys re-enacting the battle of Gettysburg, as seen at the end of the "Stonecutters" episode of the Simpsons*. Did I see even a dime for that? Of course not. As a result I shall die penniless and insane.
*True story. A friend of mine worked at Film Roman and asked where it came from: "some nut in a coffee shop talking about monkeys". That nut was me.
I always win.
Just accept it.
I will continue to win.
Just because you feel the need to edit the NET act to suite you is no reason to get aggressive towards me.
You were wrong. It is not a crime and is understandable with all the disinformaiton that is spread on /.
Now you know the truth and can fight for the spread of truth regardless of your own opionion on the subject.
What-ever...
Another thing communism fails to account for is the fact that people don't want to do unpleasant jobs. When you look at society from Marx's peculiar industrial revolution-era perspective and manage to divide society into (a) factory workers, and (b) leeches, communism seems like a simple solution. Kill the leeches and the workers get their stuff. It doesn't, however, allow for a reasonable way to fill jobs like "garbage collector" when jobs like "TV actor" exist. If fifty people's abilities make them good actors, but there's only work for the three best actors, how do you get the other 47 people to take out the trash? Free market-type systems have the advantage there by not paying lower tier actors enough to live, thus forcing them to take out garbage to earn money...
THEIF!!!
18 U.S.C. 2319A
2319A. Unauthorized theft of and trafficking in sound recordings and music videos of live musical performances
Shut up, troll, the section reads:
If all you have to offer is USC text editted by you to include the word "theft", this argument is over. You loser...Man, you really are a piece of work, aren't you. Why don't you read the act yourself. Take note of 17USC506 wherein you will find a list of Criminal Offenses as defined by this act. Note that nothing therein defines any sort of "theft". "Criminal infringement", yes, but not "theft". Theft has a specific legal definition-- essentially, depriving another of property-- and copyright infringement ain't theft.
THIEF!!!
Dumbass.
The title a law was passed uder has no legal standing. They could call a law outlawing spitting across state lines the "Artificial Insemination Control Act" and that wouldn't make spitting == artificial insemination any more than the title "No Electronic Theft" makes copyright infringement a property crime. Arguing based on titles of bills is as dumb as arguing based on movies about political campaigns: neither has any requirement to be based in reality. You got modded "flamebait" because you made a snide retort based on an inane premise.
Not morally equivalent, legally equivalent. One could be morally opposed to paying for either music or software and obey the GPL while violating music copyright. This would not be an inconsistent moral position. Saying one must respect music copyrights if one respects the GPL is like saying I can't smoke pot if I'm in favor of prescription drugs remaining prescription-only.
Link/URL? You know, I have been looking for that independant, unbiased, non-RIAA supported research study that proves that there is a link between P2P and shrinking record sales but no luck so far.
I can point to many "industry supported" (companies that work for the RIAA-companies) studies but not one research study from a reputable university or scientist.
So please link to those studies, or shut the fuck up AC.
Who modded this flamebait? The snide comment from the nameless fool grandparent poster insinuating that the only reason this report is considered legit here is "slashdot reader bias" is the flamebait. "Biased" doesn't mean "wrong", and unsupported arguments from ACs deserve a good "STFU".
Heh. Yeah, as it turns out people liked FREE pies, and didn't like pies they had to pay for. I suspect music is different, though. A lot of people don't see downloaded MP3s as "real". The perception seems to be that purchased CDs are the actual songs, while MP3s are "just copies". This is true, to some degree, what with MP3 being a lossy format.
Heh. I could even hear the original poster's voice going up in pitch as he spoke, and his eyes spinning faster and faster. I wish there was a combination "+1 Funny/Insightful" for this. Then again, the funniest things ARE insightful...
Then again, the same could be said not only of a show watched via any recording device, but live TV watching as well. You only see the first couple seconds of the first commercial before you get up and use the bathroom, get a snack, or flip the channel. The first commercial has always been the prime position and advertisers already pay more for it.
Yep. There's a reason that, over thousands of years, mankind has developed alternatives to cave paintings. Saying "in the future all software will be visually designed" is like saying "in the future all books will be comic books".
Yeah, totally visual program design is unlikely to happen for the same reason that great novels aren't written using only pictures. At some point you have to design complex data relationships, and that's going to have to be done in an algebraic fashion. Ol' Bill is probably envisioning a time when there'll be pre-built libraries for all your algorithmic needs, but that won't make software development "visual", it'll just split the job field into two parts: visual object assemblers (monkeys), and library builders (real programmers). What makes the "visula development" notion even sillier is that for complex projects you'll need custom-built libraries for very specific, complex functions, and those will have to be written by somebody.
The idea of "totally visual development" is ignorant. We developed complex written (human) languages for a reason: cave paintings only carry so much info. Computer languages are no different.
Man, those russkies were CRAZY! 42 nukes used to create underground natural gas storage cavities? That's reasonable. 39 nukes for deep seismic sounding? Sure, why not. But 5 times they used nukes to put out oil well fires? Is it me, or does that sound like putting out birthday candles with a fire hose? "The only way we could save the wells was to NUKE THEM."
The question of TANSTAAFL aside, it's hard to be freer (cost-wise) than to not be directly charged for it.
I think the implication of "too cheap to meter" is that everyone would pay a nominal monthly bill based on a rough estimate of how much power they'd use and it'd be so ridiculously cheap that no one would mind. I wish...
Ag, I see. I mis-parsed your sentence. Sorry! :)
Asbestos isn't manufactured, it's mined: it's a fibrous mineral and totally combustion-proof. It's wholly impossible for asbestos to result from burning wire jacket unless the asbestos was there to begin with. Unless the building has very old, very illegal electrical wiring, there was no asbestos. Now, it is possible that there was some asbestos insulation in the cable ducting that went unnoticed and he meant "we inhaled unknown quantities of: (asbestos) and (crap from burning wire insulation)".
This is what pushed me over ther edge with digital cable. One out of ten times the TiVo tried to record something, the stupid Motorola cable box would miss one digit from the IR sender. So instead of that pay-per-view movie I paid for and told it to record on channel 102, I got two hours of infomercial from channel 12.
The other thing that pissed me off was their claims of "digital quality picture". The digital signal is only as good as the initial feed, and apparently Adelphia's feeds were all spliced into the head-end multiplexer with old 300ohm antenna wires, 'cause the quality was CRAP. I got to watch perfectly rendered MPEG2 streams of static, ghosting, and (on some channels) zig-zaggy lines like you used to get from running the blender with the TV on.
Well, you learn something every day if you just pay attention.
I remember an interview with Eugene Levy (I think it was him) where he talked about the Canadian Content rules. They had been running SCTV for a while and a man from the government came to them and said "you don't have enough canadian content in your show". He rplied "SCTV is filmed in canada, with canadian actors, working from scripts written entirely by canadians. What do you want, a couple guys wearing tooks and parkas sitting on a couch drinking beer and eating back bacon?" The government man said "yeah, something like that I guess." Thus was spawned The Great White North with Bob and Doug McKenzie was spawned.
re-read the original post. He said he was going to make a humorous comparison, but then realized that "the parent wasn't all that fallacious". Therefore, he was stating, in a roundabout way, that a comparison between current times and Nazi times is something to be taken seriously, i.e. not a joke.
Calculating the Mach number from one's velocity in a vaccuum would yield a "divide by 0 error" then. But I guess they only use Mach numbers for aircraft, so that's unlikely to be a problem. You'd think they'd use the more concrete km/s scale rather than the Mach scale, but I guess people's eyes tend to glaze over when faced with large numbers.
Isn't radiation in the ocean just the sort of foolish plan that results in disatrous consequences? I seem to recall seeing a documentary with Raymond Burr about nuclear tests in the pacific fifty years ago waking up a giant radiation-breathing bipedal lizard-thing that went on to stomp Japan. They eventually got the lizard to be their friend, but the damage was pretty bad. I don't think we can risk waking any more monsters.
Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Your sig is so very funny because it's TRUE! "I'm running down to the ATF for some beer and a rifle-- you need smokes or anything?" heh
You take back what you said about egg nog! I'd drink it every day if it was available.