How would you do it? steam engine? minto wheel? thermo-electric generator? a generic steam turbine, maybe? Some nuclear power plants generating ~800 megawatts of power use steam turbines. Wouldn't that be something... a homebrewed steam turbine powered by the sun.
Space is interesting. The solar constant is about 1367 W/m^2. The solar constant is the amount of incoming solar radiation from the sun, sometimes called "insolation."
There's quite a bit of power to be had in space, and the closer you get to the sun, the more power you can conceivably get. How much? I'm not sure.
Problem is, telling people you've got giant lenses orbiting the earth that can beam down high intensity beams of light which can conceivably be hijacked by any spacefaring folk. As the X-prize is showing us, this can potentially be (in a very james-bondish way, at that) the territory of anyone with a good quantity of both brains and money, and motivation to get into space, of course.
That kind of thing just makes people nervous, I think. You'd have to keep the focused energy in space. Which is really, in and of itself, a reason to go to space, but that's kind of chicken-and-eggish. sorry.
Better question: What would you do with zero gravity and a 1000 m^2 (about 10,760 ft^2) array of lenses providing you with ~1.36 megawatts of solar radiation? I mean, there is the obvious goal of vandalizing the moon to further any desired political agenda, but other than that? Mine the moon with lasers and build a space station, or something?
If there's an open mind between your ears, www.hempcar.org is a good place to start. In 2001 they did a tour of the USA and Canada on a car powered solely on hemp oil-derived biodiesel fuel. It's been estimated that if about 6% of the land in the USA were converted to hemp farmland, that we could remove our dependance upon foreign oil completely.
The only problem being that in the eyes of the US Government, hemp = marijuana and marijuana = illegal. However, hemp doesn't get people high and other than physical appearance, there are few true similarities. Although ironically, for the purpose of fuel production, it's been found that drug type cannabis (cannabis indica/cannabis sativa) produces higher percentages of hempseed oil per seed than do cannabis hemp plants.
If you envision the matrix as a 3D virtual world, you see the feasibility of neo's actions rather easily. I mean, you can move bits around in memory in any direction, back and forth, etc, as fast as the architecture allows, without making any big pink splashes. And I imagine the Matrix's architecture is rather sophisticated, allowing for this kind of vector manipulation.
It's clean in the sense that the plants the animal ate which contained carbon is not "old carbon" from millions of years ago that hasn't been in the environment or ecosystem for millions of years; it was out in the atmosphere probably just last year.
It isn't adding any pollution to the system, just recycling what's there. That's pretty clean as far as I'm concerned.
Kind of like the ethical conundrum of letting humans continue to live despite being a breeding ground for virus mutations? heh. It's really not an ethical conundrum if you think about it, because in the long term, everything is an unknown.
You got modded funny but I bet that was the reason; either he didn't finish his homework or he didn't study for the test. Or he was hungover from the party last night and couldn't -take- the test. heh.
It doesn't stop at the school officials; everyone in a position of leadership has their head up their ass these days. That's why they're so self-centered; all they can see is themselves....
There's a difference between inviting and allowing. By installing file sharing software and sharing your directories, you are allowing people to download from you--but you don't send out a flyer saying "everyone is invited to come download my stuff please kkthx."
Somebody may very well install the software under the belief that only good people will download from them what they have actual legal rights to. In a court of law, there is a large distinction made between allowance and invitation, and highlighting that difference is the trump card in this case.
Are all of the stores with all of the items just sitting there on the shelves inviting shoplifters to shoplift? By your reasoning, all allowances are implied invitations, so aren't the supermarkets just inviting shoplifters by making the items as accessible as files shared online?
Your files shared online are like the candy bars at the store. They're free for the taking for those that desire to take, but there's no direct invitation to do any taking. The supermarket certainly doesn't invite people to or encourage people to shoplift, but they certainly do ALLOW it to happen--even if they don't want to--as is evidenced by, well, people shoplifting! (much the same as people downloading!)
When somebody downloads a song from you that they don't have rights to download, it's like walking into a supermarket and stealing a candy bar. By making my files available for sharing, I'm allowing people to stroll down the aisles in my virtual supermarket and peruse my selection. The responsibility lies on their end, where they must make the choice to not reach out and snatch a free virtual candybar that they don't have the rights to.
Unfortunately, you are wrong about one tiny little thing. You're wrong in that they're suing music downloaders; this is not the case. They are suing people who share their music online--regardless of the source of the music. I'll say that again: they are suing those who share files, not those who download them.
There's a fallacy in their logic, however. Let's say you have a legitimately acquired television in your house, behind your front door. Let's say you leave the front door open to cool the house down while you do gardening out back. Let's say somebody comes into your house and steals your television. Who gets arrested: you for leaving the door open, or them for coming in and taking your teevee?
In a file sharing scenario, (assuming the shared file was created legitimately; ie, mp3 from a CD you own) the file sharer breaks no laws by making his files available--it's the actual act of downloading when you have no "fair use" right to the file which is an act of copyright violation.
The RIAA is indiscriminately suing anybody who is sharing MP3s, regardless of the legitimacy of their having those MP3s. The people they are suing are, in some cases, not even breaking the law. Of course these people don't know that because they don't know the details of the situation, they just wanted to listen to some music. But the RIAA knows what's going on and they're using the ignorance of the people to their advantage; not one case has actually gone to trial yet because of the intimidating front put on by the RIAA.
So your question about "false accusations" is a noteworthy one. The RIAA is suing people for doing something that they don't like, granted, but it isn't implicitly illegal because the RIAA doesn't like it. This flaw will, eventually, be noticed by a decent lawyer who will join with some of the RIAA's prior victims and hopefully win back the money the RIAA illegally received in out of court settlements. (out of court settlements over lawsuits which are invalid strikes me as illegal out of court settlements)
They scare people into thinking that they've got something to lose if the case goes to court. It's really almost enough to make me rip my entire cd collection and put it online in the most obvious way possible just so the RIAA can point their dirty little finger at me and I can bite it off.
You need cash, OR dedication. You don't have the time for it, I don't have the time for it, but eventually the requisite time, willpower, and know-how will come together for one person or a small team of people who will produce something great.
Remember the demoscene? Although no epic games arose from the demoscene (pun intended; Epic Megagames got many musicians from the demoscene), the demo compositions themselves speak volumes about what a few coders, musicians, and artists can accomplish if they put their minds to it. Check out Omniscent by Sanction for an example of what a good group of people can do. (It's an enemy-less flythrough of the first level of Descent in 4k. With MIDI soundtrack.) It's not a well-known example, but it is one that definitely speaks about the skill of a good coder.
I'm totally confused by those numbers. Are they assuming that if piracy comes to an end that people will start to buy the products they've been pirating? Are they oblivious to the concept of "poor" and how it affects one's spending? Does it even occur to the powers that be, that pirates are too damn poor to buy software, and they therefore pirate it?
Ending piracy will likely do nothing positive for anyone.
the amount of funds gaming companies will be able to recover
What makes you think they'll recover anything? Did it ever occur to you (or them) that the reason people pirate software is because they can't afford to buy it? Stopping piracy doesn't mean that people will start to buy software, stopping piracy just means you'll have fewer people out there using the software in general. period.
Now I don't know about you, but there have been a few times when, after playing a warezed copy of a game, I went out and bought it, or the expansion pack, or the sequel. That won't happen anymore if piracy comes to an end--even further hurting the profit margins of the game companies, contrary to their beliefs.
But come on, surely you see the solution: freeware open source games that don't suck. If the game companies don't like piracy because it hurts their bottom line, how about we flood the market with games that cost nothing? If suddenly everyone is playing free games instead of expensive ones, the game "industry" will get what they want: no more piracy--because nobody will any longer be interested in circumventing their bullshit policies of charging an arm and a leg for something that's only worth a fingertip, as they can have better games for free, legally.
Won't the game companies be happy once free gaming takes off and piracy of their products drops to zero? No, because they want things THEIR WAY and they want THEIR INDUSTRY TO SURVIVE FOREVER so that they can make an infinite amount of MONEY. It's all about greed. They don't want to stop piracy because people are breaking the law, or because people are being unfair; no, they want to stop piracy because they feel it's affecting their bottom line.
But the thing they don't realise is that they're hurting more than helping. If there were ever a major gaming company (say Blizzard, Id, Activision, EA, etc) named in the news stories about the raids on pirates, that company would become the black sheep as far as a lot of gamers are concerned--even FURTHER hurting that precious bottom line.
Tangentially; people have the ultimate control over the powers that they perceive to control them, because it is the individual person--and not those perceived controllers--who reigns supreme over their own wallet. Want to make a statement? Make it where it counts: the bottom line.
That's right: living in your mother's basement for one year scraping things together with a pizza delivery boy's wages while you scrape together your application. Come on, if you really expect to cut it as a software dev, you've got to be able to write one chunk of code that makes you and makes it onto your resume. Then you sell it and do it again.
That's self-employment as a contract programmer, and there's money to be made there.
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How would you do it? steam engine? minto wheel? thermo-electric generator? a generic steam turbine, maybe? Some nuclear power plants generating ~800 megawatts of power use steam turbines. Wouldn't that be something... a homebrewed steam turbine powered by the sun.
Space is interesting. The solar constant is about 1367 W/m^2. The solar constant is the amount of incoming solar radiation from the sun, sometimes called "insolation."
There's quite a bit of power to be had in space, and the closer you get to the sun, the more power you can conceivably get. How much? I'm not sure.
Problem is, telling people you've got giant lenses orbiting the earth that can beam down high intensity beams of light which can conceivably be hijacked by any spacefaring folk. As the X-prize is showing us, this can potentially be (in a very james-bondish way, at that) the territory of anyone with a good quantity of both brains and money, and motivation to get into space, of course.
That kind of thing just makes people nervous, I think. You'd have to keep the focused energy in space. Which is really, in and of itself, a reason to go to space, but that's kind of chicken-and-eggish. sorry.
Better question: What would you do with zero gravity and a 1000 m^2 (about 10,760 ft^2) array of lenses providing you with ~1.36 megawatts of solar radiation? I mean, there is the obvious goal of vandalizing the moon to further any desired political agenda, but other than that? Mine the moon with lasers and build a space station, or something?
ever tried to type a diagram? I doubt most typists are up to par wrt ASCII art. Or for that matter, ever tried to type up a mathematical formula?
If there's an open mind between your ears, www.hempcar.org is a good place to start. In 2001 they did a tour of the USA and Canada on a car powered solely on hemp oil-derived biodiesel fuel. It's been estimated that if about 6% of the land in the USA were converted to hemp farmland, that we could remove our dependance upon foreign oil completely.
The only problem being that in the eyes of the US Government, hemp = marijuana and marijuana = illegal. However, hemp doesn't get people high and other than physical appearance, there are few true similarities. Although ironically, for the purpose of fuel production, it's been found that drug type cannabis (cannabis indica/cannabis sativa) produces higher percentages of hempseed oil per seed than do cannabis hemp plants.
If you envision the matrix as a 3D virtual world, you see the feasibility of neo's actions rather easily. I mean, you can move bits around in memory in any direction, back and forth, etc, as fast as the architecture allows, without making any big pink splashes. And I imagine the Matrix's architecture is rather sophisticated, allowing for this kind of vector manipulation.
How much did your solar setup cost, what latitude do you live at, and how much power does it produce per day vs how much you consume?
It's clean in the sense that the plants the animal ate which contained carbon is not "old carbon" from millions of years ago that hasn't been in the environment or ecosystem for millions of years; it was out in the atmosphere probably just last year.
It isn't adding any pollution to the system, just recycling what's there. That's pretty clean as far as I'm concerned.
I think there are poop bylaws, unfortunately. =\
Kind of like the ethical conundrum of letting humans continue to live despite being a breeding ground for virus mutations? heh. It's really not an ethical conundrum if you think about it, because in the long term, everything is an unknown.
reputation tracking, not file rating. The parent poster is talking about the reputation of the user in the network, not the reputation of the files.
If a user has a surplus of bad files, he gets a bad rep and nobody downloads from him. simple as that, really.
I like this idea. if I still had mod points today you'd get +1 insightful.
You got modded funny but I bet that was the reason; either he didn't finish his homework or he didn't study for the test. Or he was hungover from the party last night and couldn't -take- the test. heh.
It doesn't stop at the school officials; everyone in a position of leadership has their head up their ass these days. That's why they're so self-centered; all they can see is themselves....
The school cannot legally punish the kids for crimes not under their jurisdiction.
Cannot legally, but it can and does happen. (and it happened to me, in Washington state and not Texas. Junior High was t3h sux0r.)
So, it begs the question: can you trust anyone?
Indeed. I got to the picture labeled as "great" by the submitter before the server melted, though.
The original was 1600x1200 weighing in at 769kb. I reduced it to 800x600 and 128kb.
Click here to view it.
There's a difference between inviting and allowing. By installing file sharing software and sharing your directories, you are allowing people to download from you--but you don't send out a flyer saying "everyone is invited to come download my stuff please kkthx."
Somebody may very well install the software under the belief that only good people will download from them what they have actual legal rights to. In a court of law, there is a large distinction made between allowance and invitation, and highlighting that difference is the trump card in this case.
Are all of the stores with all of the items just sitting there on the shelves inviting shoplifters to shoplift? By your reasoning, all allowances are implied invitations, so aren't the supermarkets just inviting shoplifters by making the items as accessible as files shared online?
Your files shared online are like the candy bars at the store. They're free for the taking for those that desire to take, but there's no direct invitation to do any taking. The supermarket certainly doesn't invite people to or encourage people to shoplift, but they certainly do ALLOW it to happen--even if they don't want to--as is evidenced by, well, people shoplifting! (much the same as people downloading!)
When somebody downloads a song from you that they don't have rights to download, it's like walking into a supermarket and stealing a candy bar. By making my files available for sharing, I'm allowing people to stroll down the aisles in my virtual supermarket and peruse my selection. The responsibility lies on their end, where they must make the choice to not reach out and snatch a free virtual candybar that they don't have the rights to.
Unfortunately, you are wrong about one tiny little thing. You're wrong in that they're suing music downloaders; this is not the case. They are suing people who share their music online--regardless of the source of the music. I'll say that again: they are suing those who share files, not those who download them.
There's a fallacy in their logic, however. Let's say you have a legitimately acquired television in your house, behind your front door. Let's say you leave the front door open to cool the house down while you do gardening out back. Let's say somebody comes into your house and steals your television. Who gets arrested: you for leaving the door open, or them for coming in and taking your teevee?
In a file sharing scenario, (assuming the shared file was created legitimately; ie, mp3 from a CD you own) the file sharer breaks no laws by making his files available--it's the actual act of downloading when you have no "fair use" right to the file which is an act of copyright violation.
The RIAA is indiscriminately suing anybody who is sharing MP3s, regardless of the legitimacy of their having those MP3s. The people they are suing are, in some cases, not even breaking the law. Of course these people don't know that because they don't know the details of the situation, they just wanted to listen to some music. But the RIAA knows what's going on and they're using the ignorance of the people to their advantage; not one case has actually gone to trial yet because of the intimidating front put on by the RIAA.
So your question about "false accusations" is a noteworthy one. The RIAA is suing people for doing something that they don't like, granted, but it isn't implicitly illegal because the RIAA doesn't like it. This flaw will, eventually, be noticed by a decent lawyer who will join with some of the RIAA's prior victims and hopefully win back the money the RIAA illegally received in out of court settlements. (out of court settlements over lawsuits which are invalid strikes me as illegal out of court settlements)
They scare people into thinking that they've got something to lose if the case goes to court. It's really almost enough to make me rip my entire cd collection and put it online in the most obvious way possible just so the RIAA can point their dirty little finger at me and I can bite it off.
This works especially well when your boss is an asshole.
You need cash, OR dedication. You don't have the time for it, I don't have the time for it, but eventually the requisite time, willpower, and know-how will come together for one person or a small team of people who will produce something great.
Remember the demoscene? Although no epic games arose from the demoscene (pun intended; Epic Megagames got many musicians from the demoscene), the demo compositions themselves speak volumes about what a few coders, musicians, and artists can accomplish if they put their minds to it. Check out Omniscent by Sanction for an example of what a good group of people can do. (It's an enemy-less flythrough of the first level of Descent in 4k. With MIDI soundtrack.) It's not a well-known example, but it is one that definitely speaks about the skill of a good coder.
I'm totally confused by those numbers. Are they assuming that if piracy comes to an end that people will start to buy the products they've been pirating? Are they oblivious to the concept of "poor" and how it affects one's spending? Does it even occur to the powers that be, that pirates are too damn poor to buy software, and they therefore pirate it?
Ending piracy will likely do nothing positive for anyone.
the amount of funds gaming companies will be able to recover
What makes you think they'll recover anything? Did it ever occur to you (or them) that the reason people pirate software is because they can't afford to buy it? Stopping piracy doesn't mean that people will start to buy software, stopping piracy just means you'll have fewer people out there using the software in general. period.
Now I don't know about you, but there have been a few times when, after playing a warezed copy of a game, I went out and bought it, or the expansion pack, or the sequel. That won't happen anymore if piracy comes to an end--even further hurting the profit margins of the game companies, contrary to their beliefs.
But come on, surely you see the solution: freeware open source games that don't suck. If the game companies don't like piracy because it hurts their bottom line, how about we flood the market with games that cost nothing? If suddenly everyone is playing free games instead of expensive ones, the game "industry" will get what they want: no more piracy--because nobody will any longer be interested in circumventing their bullshit policies of charging an arm and a leg for something that's only worth a fingertip, as they can have better games for free, legally.
Won't the game companies be happy once free gaming takes off and piracy of their products drops to zero? No, because they want things THEIR WAY and they want THEIR INDUSTRY TO SURVIVE FOREVER so that they can make an infinite amount of MONEY. It's all about greed. They don't want to stop piracy because people are breaking the law, or because people are being unfair; no, they want to stop piracy because they feel it's affecting their bottom line.
But the thing they don't realise is that they're hurting more than helping. If there were ever a major gaming company (say Blizzard, Id, Activision, EA, etc) named in the news stories about the raids on pirates, that company would become the black sheep as far as a lot of gamers are concerned--even FURTHER hurting that precious bottom line.
Tangentially; people have the ultimate control over the powers that they perceive to control them, because it is the individual person--and not those perceived controllers--who reigns supreme over their own wallet. Want to make a statement? Make it where it counts: the bottom line.
2cp? you play everquest, don't you?
It's known as: self-employment.
That's right: living in your mother's basement for one year scraping things together with a pizza delivery boy's wages while you scrape together your application. Come on, if you really expect to cut it as a software dev, you've got to be able to write one chunk of code that makes you and makes it onto your resume. Then you sell it and do it again.
That's self-employment as a contract programmer, and there's money to be made there.
ditto.
because of course everyone is going to spend several hundred dollars on a machine to play games with and not to enhance worker productivity.
Productivity? whassat?!