True, kids can't write a game in a few hundred lines of code and impress their mates with it anymore.
However the web is the place to be seen. Almost anyone could do some scripting on the web in PHP or Perl or whatever, and come up with something quite cool in a few hundred lines of code. OK, it's not half life 2, but it's easy to get into and it seems kind of magic the first time you make a webpage do something interactive with a database - just like the profesionals over at ebay or amazon do.
Maybe the kids today won't learn BASIC. But I never learnt assembly, and that would horrify an earlier generation.
I wouldn't say that clinical trials are fantastically dangerous. In fact I would say they are fantastically important.
I don't know how many thousands of these types of tests have been conducted in the UK over the decades, but this is the only one I've ever heard of that has gone spectacularly wrong. Just the fact that this was front page news should tell you this is unusual. Researchers don't just synthesise some random chemical then find someone to jab it into... at the very least there are lab mice involved...
So you are saying the US Navy, Army and Department of Defense are analogous to an overly trusting small town?
Yes, he's done bad and should probably be punished. But should he really spend the rest of his life in a foreign prison when the real scandal is how lame the security was at these military facilities?
For the most part, religion is certainly useful for keeping people on the straight and narrow. Don't do bad stuff - God is looking over your shoulder.
However, most people I know don't seem to have any of those particular beliefs and yet still stick pretty closely to the law (or a close approximation of it)
Humans have clearly evolved to work together with other humans and be concerned for eachothers interests. It's certainly not as rigid as, for example, the first law of robotics... But then perhaps it wasn't designed:-)
Re:Uhm... given that both major terrorist attacks.
on
Back to the Bunker
·
· Score: 1
I'm not sure I wouldn't describe the London bombs as one of only 2 major recent attacks. You know, there was that bombing in Bali that killed hundreds. And I'm sure some other terrible events I've forgotten (probably in Iraq)
I've always found this argument to be a bit weak. I understand that if a virus or cracker 'only' has access to run as my user, they can't root the whole box and take charge of everything.... that's great for a mainframe or other shared server, but most computers running word aren't going to be servers, they are desktop machines.
Imagine: I'm logged in as a mere luser and I catch a virus. Phew, I'm not the administrator... Erm, well actually the virus can read and steal all my files, it can delete all my files, it can perform actions and make it appear that I did them. As far as I am concerned this is the worst possible scenario. Of course it could be worse if I'd been root, but in many situations it couldn't be much worse!
Slashdot moderators are slashdot readers. Yes, OK - Slashdot readers are possibly a bit of a freak-show, but it just seems a bit wierd to say "This group of people (which anyone is free to join and of which I am an equal member) is biased"
Re:Staying Relevant
on
On The BBC 2.0
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
When you think a randomly selected cross-section of people is showing a political bias.... you might want to re-align your political spectrum or something
I don't have time to read whatever small print is involved. But come - you really think royalties are charged by the Gigabyte? Apparently they will sell me "Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley for 6 pence! Last time I looked this was the number 1 single in the UK!
Looking around the site, there are quite a few artists that are with non-RIAA labels. If it was purely the RIAA labels, maybe I could believe that those greedy scumbags would sign anything for a few extra dollars... but I just don't believe these other artists are also signed up to this scheme. Or is it the case that in Russia anyone can sell any music they like without neededing the artists permission? I'm staying well away from it.
Emusic doesn't use DRM - I don't buy "DRM encumbered crap" either. However I buy my music legally whereas you pay a Russian company to steal it for you. How about you just cut out the middle man and use P2P or rip it from a mates CD?
Again this crap is being modded up! AllOfMP3.com don't pay the appropriate royalties to their artists. I very much doubt whether music downloaded from their site is appropriately licenced if you are buying it from outside Russia.
Like Stew77 said, emusic is the way to go if you don't want to support the big 'evil' labels. Give your money to independant labels, not dubious "too good to be true" Russian imports!
Yes, but you can't make the page 'lightweight' can you? You still have to download the whole HTML page even if the CSS rules tell your browser to throw most of it away.
So does this mean you aren't really making conscious decisions? You are just an automaton following a path pre-determined by the initial configuration of atoms in your head?
Quantum mechanics and all its randomness seems pretty messed up, it is somehow preferable to alternative theories
Just because you've learnt how to use vi doesn't mean it is OK to use these powers to perform a complete non sequitur by randomly changing the topic at hand!
Bear in mind these are averages, so of course include all the people that never drink a drop. It depends where you live and what constitutes '1 beer', but you probably fall within the bounds of normality and well short of doing yourself any serious damage:-) I'm assuming you drink sociably, I've never really seen the attraction of drinking by myself.
People who leach off P2P services are probably breaking less laws than people who upload while downloading. Who is the scum of the earth? I think that depends who you ask. I don't share RIAA music anymore - as far as I'm concerned the RIAA have 'won' that battle. But I'm fully expecting them to lose the war when good artists stop signing up to RIAA labels. They are redundant in the digital age. I buy most of my music from eMusic. Lots of non-RIAA goodness.
True. But haven't the RIAA, etc only attempt to sue uploaders so far? It's certainly a lot easier to allege kilo-dollars in lost sales are being caused by pesky kids if they are evil uploaders. If you don't have any RIAA files shared you could be a P2P leech without falling foul of any of the current lawsuits.
allofmp3.com has them un-DRMed and at very reasonable prices
Yeah, and if you open up Kazaa or the latest P2P system, you'll find them at even more reasonable prices!
Maybe for you the convenience somehow justifies giving money to allofmp3 - but don't expect them to pass any of it on to the artists or labels. I could be wrong, but last I heard they were still exploiting a legal 'loophole' to charge money for warez.
I take it you have something against people that think differently then you and dont agree with globalization at all?
Of course not. People are entitled to their opinions, and I wouldn't try to deny them that right. But I do tend to disregard their arguments when they are based on assumptions that I consider meaningless e.g. "The Bible says so!". Just a wild guess - it was late I was tired.
And while you may have been joking. I wasnt.
Maybe I just don't quite 'get' this anti-globalisation thing. Sure, it would be nice if all the stuff I bought was still made in my country. And sure I don't want huge multinationals to own absolutely everything. But that's the free market economy for you. Most Americans are rabidly in favour of capitalism, so how dare you suggest there should be artifical barriers to stop them buying cheap products!
And being in favour of voluntarily segregating the internet - that's just the strangest thing I've heard so far this year. What would be the benefit of introducting this barrier to free communication? What bad words are people saying that you don't want to be able to hear?
Wars stop beacuse we see other people? Heh, thats funny.. that is what STARTS more wars ' gee, they have something cool that we dont, lets go take it'.
Yeah, there will always be tyrants and aggressors starting wars. But people are people. 1 Chinaman = 1 Indian = 1 Brit = 1 American. It's amazing what proportion of the world just doesn't seem to get that yet. When another British soldier is killed in a terror attack in Iraq it makes the BBC news, even after hundreds have died. When the same thing happens to dozens of Iraqi police or civilians (as it does almost every day)... nothing! The fact that it keeps happening should make it more news worthy, not less.
I suspect it's a lot easier to bomb people if you convince yourself none of them are proper people - not people like us anyway. It's certainly a lot easier to glorify war when the media needn't bother to mention enemy casualties.
Actually, I'll concede I was wrong about most of the worlds spam coming from the US... but there are numerousstudies indicating that the USA is responsible for more of it than any other single country.
i dont have a problem with us being cut off from the rest of the world. It woud be a good start in the right direction for the US.
You think the USA would benefit from being more isolationist?! I'm not even going to ask - you're probably a fundamental religionist or something. By the way I was *joking* before - I think the best thing about the internet is its global nature. The sooner we start to see other people from all over the world as our peers and equals, the sooner retarded things like wars will stop happening.
I also think this is a neat idea. Most of the worlds spam comes from the USA, and I don't live in the USA so go ahead and cut the cable! Although on second thoughts, do I also have to be cut off from every other country or is it just a USA vs Rest of the World divide?:-)
Slashdot Mirror
True, kids can't write a game in a few hundred lines of code and impress their mates with it anymore.
However the web is the place to be seen. Almost anyone could do some scripting on the web in PHP or Perl or whatever, and come up with something quite cool in a few hundred lines of code. OK, it's not half life 2, but it's easy to get into and it seems kind of magic the first time you make a webpage do something interactive with a database - just like the profesionals over at ebay or amazon do.
Maybe the kids today won't learn BASIC. But I never learnt assembly, and that would horrify an earlier generation.
I wouldn't say that clinical trials are fantastically dangerous. In fact I would say they are fantastically important.
I don't know how many thousands of these types of tests have been conducted in the UK over the decades, but this is the only one I've ever heard of that has gone spectacularly wrong. Just the fact that this was front page news should tell you this is unusual. Researchers don't just synthesise some random chemical then find someone to jab it into... at the very least there are lab mice involved...
So you are saying the US Navy, Army and Department of Defense are analogous to an overly trusting small town?
Yes, he's done bad and should probably be punished. But should he really spend the rest of his life in a foreign prison when the real scandal is how lame the security was at these military facilities?
For the most part, religion is certainly useful for keeping people on the straight and narrow. Don't do bad stuff - God is looking over your shoulder.
:-)
However, most people I know don't seem to have any of those particular beliefs and yet still stick pretty closely to the law (or a close approximation of it)
Humans have clearly evolved to work together with other humans and be concerned for eachothers interests. It's certainly not as rigid as, for example, the first law of robotics... But then perhaps it wasn't designed
I'm not sure I wouldn't describe the London bombs as one of only 2 major recent attacks. You know, there was that bombing in Bali that killed hundreds. And I'm sure some other terrible events I've forgotten (probably in Iraq)
I've always found this argument to be a bit weak. I understand that if a virus or cracker 'only' has access to run as my user, they can't root the whole box and take charge of everything.... that's great for a mainframe or other shared server, but most computers running word aren't going to be servers, they are desktop machines.
Imagine: I'm logged in as a mere luser and I catch a virus. Phew, I'm not the administrator... Erm, well actually the virus can read and steal all my files, it can delete all my files, it can perform actions and make it appear that I did them. As far as I am concerned this is the worst possible scenario. Of course it could be worse if I'd been root, but in many situations it couldn't be much worse!
Slashdot moderators are slashdot readers. Yes, OK - Slashdot readers are possibly a bit of a freak-show, but it just seems a bit wierd to say "This group of people (which anyone is free to join and of which I am an equal member) is biased"
When you think a randomly selected cross-section of people is showing a political bias.... you might want to re-align your political spectrum or something
And by the way who are you quoting? You are replying to me as if I wronte it but I didn't. Not in these exact words anyway:
"unlike AllofMp3--REAL pirates who infringe on copyrights for commercial gain (from the dupes who actually give them money)."
Some clever trolling tactic perhaps?
I don't have time to read whatever small print is involved. But come - you really think royalties are charged by the Gigabyte? Apparently they will sell me "Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley for 6 pence! Last time I looked this was the number 1 single in the UK!
Looking around the site, there are quite a few artists that are with non-RIAA labels. If it was purely the RIAA labels, maybe I could believe that those greedy scumbags would sign anything for a few extra dollars... but I just don't believe these other artists are also signed up to this scheme. Or is it the case that in Russia anyone can sell any music they like without neededing the artists permission? I'm staying well away from it.
Emusic doesn't use DRM - I don't buy "DRM encumbered crap" either. However I buy my music legally whereas you pay a Russian company to steal it for you. How about you just cut out the middle man and use P2P or rip it from a mates CD?
Again this crap is being modded up! AllOfMP3.com don't pay the appropriate royalties to their artists. I very much doubt whether music downloaded from their site is appropriately licenced if you are buying it from outside Russia.
Like Stew77 said, emusic is the way to go if you don't want to support the big 'evil' labels. Give your money to independant labels, not dubious "too good to be true" Russian imports!
Yes, but you can't make the page 'lightweight' can you? You still have to download the whole HTML page even if the CSS rules tell your browser to throw most of it away.
http://toolbar.netcraft.com/stats/topsites
Google is #1
Yahoo is #2
MySpace is #83
And you are an anonymous idiot
So does this mean you aren't really making conscious decisions? You are just an automaton following a path pre-determined by the initial configuration of atoms in your head?
Quantum mechanics and all its randomness seems pretty messed up, it is somehow preferable to alternative theories
Just because you've learnt how to use vi doesn't mean it is OK to use these powers to perform a complete non sequitur by randomly changing the topic at hand!
Have a look at this world drinking 'league table' http://www.ritilan.com/archives/2004/08/16/13.35.5 0/
:-)
Bear in mind these are averages, so of course include all the people that never drink a drop. It depends where you live and what constitutes '1 beer', but you probably fall within the bounds of normality and well short of doing yourself any serious damage
I'm assuming you drink sociably, I've never really seen the attraction of drinking by myself.
People who leach off P2P services are probably breaking less laws than people who upload while downloading. Who is the scum of the earth? I think that depends who you ask. I don't share RIAA music anymore - as far as I'm concerned the RIAA have 'won' that battle. But I'm fully expecting them to lose the war when good artists stop signing up to RIAA labels. They are redundant in the digital age. I buy most of my music from eMusic. Lots of non-RIAA goodness.
I've seen The Matrix. I know how this ends.
Could you please tell me, because I've had to erase Matrix Revolutions from my memory
True. But haven't the RIAA, etc only attempt to sue uploaders so far? It's certainly a lot easier to allege kilo-dollars in lost sales are being caused by pesky kids if they are evil uploaders. If you don't have any RIAA files shared you could be a P2P leech without falling foul of any of the current lawsuits.
allofmp3.com has them un-DRMed and at very reasonable prices
Yeah, and if you open up Kazaa or the latest P2P system, you'll find them at even more reasonable prices!
Maybe for you the convenience somehow justifies giving money to allofmp3 - but don't expect them to pass any of it on to the artists or labels. I could be wrong, but last I heard they were still exploiting a legal 'loophole' to charge money for warez.
I'm looking at it in Firefox and it works fine, therefore it isn't ActiveX.
Maybe you are getting all flash content blocked as well?
I take it you have something against people that think differently then you and dont agree with globalization at all?
Of course not. People are entitled to their opinions, and I wouldn't try to deny them that right. But I do tend to disregard their arguments when they are based on assumptions that I consider meaningless e.g. "The Bible says so!". Just a wild guess - it was late I was tired.
And while you may have been joking. I wasnt.
Maybe I just don't quite 'get' this anti-globalisation thing. Sure, it would be nice if all the stuff I bought was still made in my country. And sure I don't want huge multinationals to own absolutely everything. But that's the free market economy for you. Most Americans are rabidly in favour of capitalism, so how dare you suggest there should be artifical barriers to stop them buying cheap products!
And being in favour of voluntarily segregating the internet - that's just the strangest thing I've heard so far this year. What would be the benefit of introducting this barrier to free communication? What bad words are people saying that you don't want to be able to hear?
Wars stop beacuse we see other people? Heh, thats funny.. that is what STARTS more wars ' gee, they have something cool that we dont, lets go take it'.
Yeah, there will always be tyrants and aggressors starting wars.
But people are people. 1 Chinaman = 1 Indian = 1 Brit = 1 American. It's amazing what proportion of the world just doesn't seem to get that yet. When another British soldier is killed in a terror attack in Iraq it makes the BBC news, even after hundreds have died. When the same thing happens to dozens of Iraqi police or civilians (as it does almost every day)... nothing! The fact that it keeps happening should make it more news worthy, not less.
I suspect it's a lot easier to bomb people if you convince yourself none of them are proper people - not people like us anyway. It's certainly a lot easier to glorify war when the media needn't bother to mention enemy casualties.
Anyway, end of rant. Have a nice day
Actually, I'll concede I was wrong about most of the worlds spam coming from the US... but there are numerous studies indicating that the USA is responsible for more of it than any other single country.
i dont have a problem with us being cut off from the rest of the world. It woud be a good start in the right direction for the US.
You think the USA would benefit from being more isolationist?! I'm not even going to ask - you're probably a fundamental religionist or something. By the way I was *joking* before - I think the best thing about the internet is its global nature. The sooner we start to see other people from all over the world as our peers and equals, the sooner retarded things like wars will stop happening.
I also think this is a neat idea. Most of the worlds spam comes from the USA, and I don't live in the USA so go ahead and cut the cable! Although on second thoughts, do I also have to be cut off from every other country or is it just a USA vs Rest of the World divide? :-)