No one wants every ROM (unless they are doing some sort of statistical analysis
on them...), but someone wants every ROM
You, sir, have made the single most cogent argument of any response to me so far. I don't normally reply to
AC posts, but seriously - Kudos!
While the rest got bogged down in whether or not legal == moral (and more amusingly, that I of all people
consider them such), you addressed the actual point, that sharing the whole collection serves the greater
good regardless of whether or not any one possessor thereof can ever use the whole thing.
Thus, you have answered both the rationality and morality issues... Such a collection can count as
rational, because sharing the whole thing takes less collective effort than sharing subsets; and it even counts
as "moral" in that, while you or I or Joe Average may only have arguable-fair-use-rights to a few dozen ROMs,
as a whole, our collections serve the greater good.
And supporting that, I can honestly say that, of games I didn't actually own, I've only really played translated
Japanese import RPGs, something I never had "legal" access to in the first place.
Actually, what makes a psychopath kill (sociopath is the more politically correct
term now) is their inability to truly tell right from wrong.
Okay, how about somewhat less of a moral extreme (and what I expected TFA to discuss before I read it) - Collecting copyright
violations (or any other illegal materials with the condition that the illegality itself not give rise to the motivation to collect)?
Most relevant to the topic at hand, how about game ROMs? No one can defend their collection of 6000 SNES ROMs
as even remotely legal or within the bounds of "fair use", yet I know a good number of reasonably law-abiding people who
completely ignore the "rightness" of it for the sake of having a "complete" collection (at least, until the next unreleased
beta gets dumped).
So would you consider that a lesser extreme of "can't tell right from wrong", or a willful disregard for it, or a
side-effect of the underlying compulsion to collect?
100Mb/s bandwidth for a 40Mb/s signal. What is the problem?
Well, for starters, 1080p (keep in mind this involves "raw" devices, not sending an
MPEG4 down the line) uses just shy of 1.5 Gbps.
We can follow that up with "anyone not using wireless already upgraded to gig-E switches
about five years ago".
We can then finish it off with one of my favorites (actually not, but in this case it
really does serve the described need) - Any attached devices needing bidirectional
communication can use plain ol' ubiquitous USB. And really, do my speakers actually need
to talk back to my receiver under any even remotely plausible scenario that doesn't scream "DRM, mother
fucker, do you speak it?"
Apple next year will introduce its own take on the market in the form of a tablet-based
device that will sell for $700 or less.
Put simple - Tablets suck except for a very few niche uses... And even for those few uses,
netbooks do the job cheaper and more conveniently.
So put simply, I'll consider this a completely bogus rumor, since Apple has better sense than to
revive a dying-for-a-good-reason technology. They may have a few failures in trying to predict
the next cool toy, but haven't made the mistake of recreating retro hardware since the Lisa.
Now, I mentioned netbooks above - It wouldn't surprise me at all to see Apple try to jump into
that market (though they will no doubt ignore the "sub $500" as a defining characteristic of
that class of device). Perhaps (though by no means certain) even with a flippable screen,
giving users the option of using it in notebook-style or tablet-style mode. But an outright
straight-up tablet, not going to happen.
Looking at the current Fortune 15, a whole lotta those companies have been in the news.
You can narrow it down more than that - No one describes themselves as a "fortune 15" company unless they failed
to make the top ten... So that leaves:
#11, Bank of America
#12, Citigroup
#13, Berkshire Hathaway
#14, IBM
#15, McKesson
On top of that, I'd rule out IBM and BRK, just as a gut feeling that they
have a bit more sense than to reduce morale with such a useless policy.
Pssst - Read my post. I do write FOSS. For free, and Free. No one pays me to do it, and I ask no pay
from anyone to use it.
You are not asking for free lunch, you are actually demanding free lunch.
No, I demand that you tell me the cost up-front, and truly "free" makes me more likely
to try your food than make my own. If, however, you offer me a free lunch and then try to give
me a bill, expect me to laugh in your face.
You are totally ignorant of the fact that most Free software developers are actually
paid by someone to do the work.
Well, clearly one of us remains ignorant of the details here. As one of those "Free
software developers", perhaps you can tell me when to expect the checks to start rolling in?
Of course, they won't, nor do I expect it. I code because I love doing it. Something that all
the naysayers to my orignal post apparently can't grasp - People not doing things to make a buck,
but simply because they love doing it.
Really, fuck you.
If you don't want to make me a sammich, bitch, don't. But if you do, end of your
role in the matter, no whining allowed because you couldn't make giving things away work
as a "business" model.
The music companies will not benefit from this, instead it will cost them money to handle and process all the money.
Come again? Anyone who wants to "punish" me by sending me 13 cents, by all means feel free.
a plan involving sending money to Danowsky's law firm, but not to pay the fine of course which they say will never be
payed
If 30 million people each pay one Sek, how does that not pay the fine? And does Sweden not have some
sort of teeth to their court-imposed penalties whereby simply not paying means people go to jail?
Finally, I don't know about Sweden, but US courts have a pretty dim view of people playing games like this,
and generally allow certain reasonable limits on how people can pay fines and taxes. If you walk into your county seat
hoping to pay a speeding ticket in pennies, you can expect (at best) security to show you the door and tell you
to come back with a check. They just don't play along, and not a damned thing you can do to "make" them, no matter
how much you whine about the meaning of "legal tender for all debts".
Take for example Schindler's List. People lined up and happily paid ~$10 for a 3 hour cry fest that
delved into the human condition and tragedy. And even the most callis people walked out an emotional train
wreck (for the most part).
No, some of us walked out an hour into it and tried like hell to get a refund.
But I certainly don't fault anyone who prefers preachy feelgood BS over entertainment... I simply prefer the
latter. Life has enough real drama, in the present, without needing to make us all feel guilty
about the crimes of our race.
No, no, no... Did I mention "No"?
on
The "Dangers" of Free
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Free, by itself, is meaningless. Free, with a bad business model, isn't helpful either. The real trick
is figuring out how to properly combine free with a good business model, and then you can succeed.
No. The author of TFA fails to grasp one major point - Sometimes no "trick" exists, period.
I get so sick of hearing business oriented people bitching about how "free" does or doesn't work, or
how to make "free" work for them. They don't need to learn the tricks to making "free" work, they
just need to learn that "free" means free, and none of us give the least bit of damn if they can
make a profit or not.
I use (and create, though can't claim credit for any well-known projects) Free-with-a-capital-"F" software because
I believe in it. I use free (lower-case) software because in my experience, it works just as well as non-free
software, without all the artificial restrictions imposed to convince me to pay for "value added" BS ("Oh, you can't use
critical-widget-X unless you buy the All-Things-X add on pack!"). I read free
news because I don't care to pay for the opinionated rantings of various journalists (hint - Your job description
involves reporting, not "change", quit pretending you can or should make a difference); when a tenth of the human
population can reach the whole world with coverage of local events, reporters have very little role left to play. I
even eat free fruits and berries while out hiking, because they taste a hell of a lot better than giant-but-tasteless
garbage the industrial-ag market has tried to pass off as "food".
Put simply, I, and most people, like "free" precisely because of its standard definition - It doesn't cost us anything! As soon
as you try to twist that, you haven't added a "trick", you've pissed us off.
So the "trick" to free? Don't call your product that unless you expect nothing in return. If you come crying
with your hand out after-the-fact, don't worry, I won't laugh with you, I'll laugh at you.
I've taken machines from boxes-o'-shrinkwrapped-parts to running XP in under an hour or actual work (I wouldn't count the two
"click once then go away for half an hour" steps as billable work unless they failed for some reason on the first try and I
needed to babysit it). I'd feel bad about trying to charge a full hour for just that part...
And as for the file recovery, you generally have two situations - Either the old HDD works just fine (except for a broken Windows
install) and you just need to copy it over to the new one, or no one has any shot of recovering it. So another hour, tops.
Do you see all children running after their balls or whatever as Darwin-award candidates as well?
Yes, actually, I do - Though in that case, I would call the event more of a blameless one, since kids at
least have the defense of possibly not knowing better (and as for the driver, I still refuse
to attribute "blame" to an unavoidable event, however unfortunate).
But really... I knew fully well, long before I ever had the opportunity to go outside alone - If a ball goes
in the road, don't chase after it, ask a parent to get it for you.
it may take juries a bit to warm up to the idea of placing blame where it really belongs
You mean the dumbass who walked into moving traffic???
Situations certainly exist where the driver bears responsibility for hitting a pedestrian (running a red light,
taking a blind corner as fast as the car can handle), but let's not turn this into one of those joke arguments
about poor defenseless pedestrians vs the nasty aggressive drivers.
I'll skip the stories of idiot bimbos on cellphones randomly walking out from between two parked SUVs to cross
four-lane roads, and skip right to a real gem that blew me away. Two winters ago, coming home from work, the
roads had a nasty layer of ice on them. I crested a hill doing easily 10mph under, and saw a guy talking to
his neighbor across the road, from the MIDDLE of my lane. Now, I had a good 600-800ft to him, and he had
perhaps a full 30 seconds to get out of the way. I applied the breaks, no effect. So I honked (three
brief taps, not blaring the horn at him) to warn him, and the stupid bastard flipped me off and kept
standing there chatting!
I kept honking and eventually nudged my car into the other lane (thank god for no oncoming traffic) to avoid
hitting him, and succeeded. But seriously - I swear if I could have stopped, I would have gotten out to beat
the shit out of him.
And yet, had my car hit him, any court in the country would have called it "my" fault for failure to control my
car.
So yeah, not a lot of sympathy when you tell me we where the blame "belongs" for these Darwin-award candidates.
in 2007 the Debian Project Leader sent an email criticizing Drepper for refusing to fix a bug on glibc on the ARM
architecture because in Drepper's words it was 'for the sole benefit of this embedded crap.'
And the developer has every right to make that call, just as eglibc has every right to make a fork that cares
more about the embedded world, and Debian's maintainers have a right to switch.
That said, I have two main thoughts on this issue.
First, only a complete idiot would ignore the fact that one of Linux's primary strengths lies in the embedded
market. Refusing to fix a relatively easy bug because it "only" affects that market sounds like something Microsoft
would force on us "for your own good", such as DRM or the UAC.
Second, Debian (as a stock install, I don't include remastered lightweight Knoppix variants in that category) does
not have a significant presence in the embedded device market. Such uses either involve a platform-specific
lightweight distro where available, or the devs take a roll-your-own approach. Getting in a pissing match over
support for an irrelevant feature doesn't inspire me with confidence in Debian's leaders.
The main thing wrong with having a low end device is that you end up needing two devices.
One for use in the camless environment, and one for your normal work--when the latter would
function just fine for everything if it didn't have the camera.
Or, you could just buy... A camera!
I don't (deliberately) buy toys with built-in cameras for the simple reason that they almost wholly suck,
and hard. Don't get me wrong, it has perfect focus (as long as you can place it on a flat stable surface - Even the
slightest movement results in nothing but blurry streaks), and arguably better low-light performance than my "real"
dSLR... But the few times I've tried to snap pics with my phone, I've ended up with a grainy ultra-low quality
picture that, with a good bit of cleanup and reducing the size to 25% of the original, might pass as a
decent quality thumbnail.
Webcams and camera phones have their uses. But "photography", amateur or otherwise, does not count
as one of them. At best, they "document", by producing recognizable likenesses of people and places
(at close-but-not-too-close range).
This would be followed by brownouts -- a combination of temporary
freezing and computers being reduced to a slow speed.
I consider it bad enough that I have to explain, every time I helps someone clean
up their machine, that MSN loading slowly does not mean they have a slow computer.
And now we have so-called experts warning us that network lag will cause slow computers?
What next, a warning about how Windows 7 requires 16 GB of storage, causing a wave of
panic among those who don't understand the difference between RAM and HDD space?
The secret is in the directional indicator. That's where the magic happens.
Holy crap... I knew the "audiophile" crowd counted as a bunch of loonies with more dollars than
sense, but I wouldn't have believed that price if you hadn't linked to the page.
hey idiot, read the effing posts before you reply to something. weapons are illegal on merchant ships.
Because, y'know, pirates follow international and local law to the letter, right?
And at what point does a 1700GPM "water canon" go from a fire suppression device to an outright weapon?
How about if they freeze the water first into 50mm cylinders, that cool too (no pun intended)?
okay. but only one of us will be able to enter many international ports. know which one?
The one who threatens to stop delivering cargo to country-X if it can't defend itself against piracy.
The other will never make it to any ports.
Realistically, I don't think you quite appreciate the sheer importance of the companies involved here... If Maersk
refused to pull into a country's ports, that country would grind to a halt in under a week. Stopping service to somewhere like
Los Angeles would leave it a ghost-town within a few months. Very few players would dare say "uhh, gee guys, we'd really like
to get some food delivered, but could ya leave the guns behind?". More likely, you'd see emergency legislation in even the
worst of the nanny-states to allow "reasonably" armed container ships passed almost overnight.
i find it really interesting that you can't come up with a single good reason why a traditional firearm might not be
the best plan other than some straw man hippie love.
C'mon, not talking about petty local corruption fleecing a few tourists - This involves real live heavily-armed paramilitary
groups out there acting like they live in 1680 and they have the Spanish Main ripe for the picking.
If the movie Aliens taught us anything, it's that sheer rough-n-ready manpower is not always the answer.
Remind us of the lessons from a work of FICTION next time you get taken hostage and half your traveling
companions (including friends and possibly family) get killed.
Lever back on the testosterone, pal.
You carry a squirt gun, I'll take a fully-armed crew carrying M-16s.
I have to second the GP, I really can't believe anyone even wants to consider non-lethal means ("Anything
but guns?" What sort of bleeding heart came up with that line of feelgood BS?) to deal with armed killers on the
high seas. These people board mostly-defenseless ships and kill people, loot the cargo, and take the "important" people
for ransom. Just fucking kill them. No "alternatives" necessary.
When container barges start carrying half a dozen 150mm guns, you'll watch this crap vanish overnight. Somehow I
don't think various Three-Stooges-esque slapstick "solutions" will accomplish more than pissing the pirates off.
As an aside, these clowns only get away with this because they attack highly-multinational ships, crews, and cargos,
so no particular country feels a need to respond. When they do go after, say, a mostly-American (or even mostly-French,
recently) ship, we end up with living crew and a few less pirates. Good riddance.
No, I expect that ISP's placing caps on the volume of transfers will do more
to limit filesharing than the legal system is able to accomplish.
Absolutely 100% unquestionably true - Which I write from personal experience.
I recently moved, and now have an ISP that caps me at a mere half-gig per day. Nevermind piracy, I have to
carefully consider what legitimate media I want to download every day to avoid hitting my cap (merely watching
crappy YouTube videos for an hour will hit my cap, for all those astonished folks who keep asking me "How on Earth do
you use that much bandwidth???" - Not even remotely difficult).
Previously, when the new Rolling Stone came out (For some inexplicable reason, they keep sending it to me even
though I've only ever paid $1 for a "trial" six month subscription about four years ago) every month, I'd grab
whatever new talent they mentioned to give it a listen, and actually buy what didn't suck.
And now? Well, congrats RIAA, my "piracy" has plummetted to nearly zero - As have my actual purchases as a consequence.
Try taking a photograph of the Hollywood Sign - it's protected by trademark
or copyright law and the folks in Hollywood do go after people.
And yet, you still have every right to take a picture of it. I have several, from my
last trip to Griffith Park, and no minigun-armed trademark gestapo ordered me to delete them (or pay
royalties). You can't, however, use it without permission in a purely for-profit work - But
before you take even that as an absolute, some uses, even profitable ones, may get a pass
on the grounds of their documentary nature. I would personally (IANAL) say if anyone would
qualify for such a fair use exemption, Google would due to the nature of their collection.
And apparently, Google's lawyers agree with me, since they have quite a few pictures (I see at least
40 without even working at it) of exactly that sign.
Personally, I fail to see the big deal here... A lot of people have freaked out about
Google driving through, all just pissing in the wind. Street-view just fills the gap for another
10 years until we have sub-centimeter resolution satellite images available to the public. What
then? Erect a giant tent over your whole town, similar to what the Soviets did during the cold war
to hide their missile movements?
I have a problem with the privacy implications of having my every move in public (potentially)
tracked by security cameras. Google driving by my house? Not so much.
I was surprised by that, too. I'm trying to decide how far back
they went in the database to come up with the numbers.
It looks like they searched the DB by some random criteria... For example, I have 2^8 "Score:5",
but no "Days metamoderated in a row", which for a while (a year or two ago) I did on
a daily basis. It also has some errors - I've never tagged an article with a "!" tag, but have
the "Contradictor" award.
Especially the 'read slashdot for [x] consecutive days' part. This is an encroachment of my privacy
So just do like everyone else, and don't log in unless you want to post. Then it won't know when "you" have visited
unless you actually write something.
And if you do write something (not as AC), you've violated your own privacy, no not much right to whine there.
Slashdot Mirror
No one wants every ROM (unless they are doing some sort of statistical analysis on them...), but someone wants every ROM
You, sir, have made the single most cogent argument of any response to me so far. I don't normally reply to AC posts, but seriously - Kudos!
While the rest got bogged down in whether or not legal == moral (and more amusingly, that I of all people consider them such), you addressed the actual point, that sharing the whole collection serves the greater good regardless of whether or not any one possessor thereof can ever use the whole thing.
Thus, you have answered both the rationality and morality issues... Such a collection can count as rational, because sharing the whole thing takes less collective effort than sharing subsets; and it even counts as "moral" in that, while you or I or Joe Average may only have arguable-fair-use-rights to a few dozen ROMs, as a whole, our collections serve the greater good.
And supporting that, I can honestly say that, of games I didn't actually own, I've only really played translated Japanese import RPGs, something I never had "legal" access to in the first place.
Actually, what makes a psychopath kill (sociopath is the more politically correct term now) is their inability to truly tell right from wrong.
Okay, how about somewhat less of a moral extreme (and what I expected TFA to discuss before I read it) - Collecting copyright violations (or any other illegal materials with the condition that the illegality itself not give rise to the motivation to collect)?
Most relevant to the topic at hand, how about game ROMs? No one can defend their collection of 6000 SNES ROMs as even remotely legal or within the bounds of "fair use", yet I know a good number of reasonably law-abiding people who completely ignore the "rightness" of it for the sake of having a "complete" collection (at least, until the next unreleased beta gets dumped).
So would you consider that a lesser extreme of "can't tell right from wrong", or a willful disregard for it, or a side-effect of the underlying compulsion to collect?
100Mb/s bandwidth for a 40Mb/s signal. What is the problem?
Well, for starters, 1080p (keep in mind this involves "raw" devices, not sending an MPEG4 down the line) uses just shy of 1.5 Gbps.
We can follow that up with "anyone not using wireless already upgraded to gig-E switches about five years ago".
We can then finish it off with one of my favorites (actually not, but in this case it really does serve the described need) - Any attached devices needing bidirectional communication can use plain ol' ubiquitous USB. And really, do my speakers actually need to talk back to my receiver under any even remotely plausible scenario that doesn't scream "DRM, mother fucker, do you speak it?"
Apple next year will introduce its own take on the market in the form of a tablet-based device that will sell for $700 or less.
Put simple - Tablets suck except for a very few niche uses... And even for those few uses, netbooks do the job cheaper and more conveniently.
So put simply, I'll consider this a completely bogus rumor, since Apple has better sense than to revive a dying-for-a-good-reason technology. They may have a few failures in trying to predict the next cool toy, but haven't made the mistake of recreating retro hardware since the Lisa.
Now, I mentioned netbooks above - It wouldn't surprise me at all to see Apple try to jump into that market (though they will no doubt ignore the "sub $500" as a defining characteristic of that class of device). Perhaps (though by no means certain) even with a flippable screen, giving users the option of using it in notebook-style or tablet-style mode. But an outright straight-up tablet, not going to happen.
You can narrow it down more than that - No one describes themselves as a "fortune 15" company unless they failed to make the top ten... So that leaves:
On top of that, I'd rule out IBM and BRK, just as a gut feeling that they have a bit more sense than to reduce morale with such a useless policy.
Try joining the other side.
Pssst - Read my post. I do write FOSS. For free, and Free. No one pays me to do it, and I ask no pay from anyone to use it.
You are not asking for free lunch, you are actually demanding free lunch.
No, I demand that you tell me the cost up-front, and truly "free" makes me more likely to try your food than make my own. If, however, you offer me a free lunch and then try to give me a bill, expect me to laugh in your face.
You are totally ignorant of the fact that most Free software developers are actually paid by someone to do the work.
Well, clearly one of us remains ignorant of the details here. As one of those "Free software developers", perhaps you can tell me when to expect the checks to start rolling in?
Of course, they won't, nor do I expect it. I code because I love doing it. Something that all the naysayers to my orignal post apparently can't grasp - People not doing things to make a buck, but simply because they love doing it.
Really, fuck you.
If you don't want to make me a sammich, bitch, don't. But if you do, end of your role in the matter, no whining allowed because you couldn't make giving things away work as a "business" model.
The music companies will not benefit from this, instead it will cost them money to handle and process all the money.
Come again? Anyone who wants to "punish" me by sending me 13 cents, by all means feel free.
a plan involving sending money to Danowsky's law firm, but not to pay the fine of course which they say will never be payed
If 30 million people each pay one Sek, how does that not pay the fine? And does Sweden not have some sort of teeth to their court-imposed penalties whereby simply not paying means people go to jail?
Finally, I don't know about Sweden, but US courts have a pretty dim view of people playing games like this, and generally allow certain reasonable limits on how people can pay fines and taxes. If you walk into your county seat hoping to pay a speeding ticket in pennies, you can expect (at best) security to show you the door and tell you to come back with a check. They just don't play along, and not a damned thing you can do to "make" them, no matter how much you whine about the meaning of "legal tender for all debts".
Take for example Schindler's List. People lined up and happily paid ~$10 for a 3 hour cry fest that delved into the human condition and tragedy. And even the most callis people walked out an emotional train wreck (for the most part).
No, some of us walked out an hour into it and tried like hell to get a refund.
But I certainly don't fault anyone who prefers preachy feelgood BS over entertainment... I simply prefer the latter. Life has enough real drama, in the present, without needing to make us all feel guilty about the crimes of our race.
Free, by itself, is meaningless. Free, with a bad business model, isn't helpful either. The real trick is figuring out how to properly combine free with a good business model, and then you can succeed.
No. The author of TFA fails to grasp one major point - Sometimes no "trick" exists, period.
I get so sick of hearing business oriented people bitching about how "free" does or doesn't work, or how to make "free" work for them. They don't need to learn the tricks to making "free" work, they just need to learn that "free" means free, and none of us give the least bit of damn if they can make a profit or not.
I use (and create, though can't claim credit for any well-known projects) Free-with-a-capital-"F" software because I believe in it. I use free (lower-case) software because in my experience, it works just as well as non-free software, without all the artificial restrictions imposed to convince me to pay for "value added" BS ("Oh, you can't use critical-widget-X unless you buy the All-Things-X add on pack!"). I read free news because I don't care to pay for the opinionated rantings of various journalists (hint - Your job description involves reporting, not "change", quit pretending you can or should make a difference); when a tenth of the human population can reach the whole world with coverage of local events, reporters have very little role left to play. I even eat free fruits and berries while out hiking, because they taste a hell of a lot better than giant-but-tasteless garbage the industrial-ag market has tried to pass off as "food".
Put simply, I, and most people, like "free" precisely because of its standard definition - It doesn't cost us anything! As soon as you try to twist that, you haven't added a "trick", you've pissed us off.
So the "trick" to free? Don't call your product that unless you expect nothing in return. If you come crying with your hand out after-the-fact, don't worry, I won't laugh with you, I'll laugh at you.
seems like a lot of work for 50 bucks
I've taken machines from boxes-o'-shrinkwrapped-parts to running XP in under an hour or actual work (I wouldn't count the two "click once then go away for half an hour" steps as billable work unless they failed for some reason on the first try and I needed to babysit it). I'd feel bad about trying to charge a full hour for just that part...
And as for the file recovery, you generally have two situations - Either the old HDD works just fine (except for a broken Windows install) and you just need to copy it over to the new one, or no one has any shot of recovering it. So another hour, tops.
Do you see all children running after their balls or whatever as Darwin-award candidates as well?
Yes, actually, I do - Though in that case, I would call the event more of a blameless one, since kids at least have the defense of possibly not knowing better (and as for the driver, I still refuse to attribute "blame" to an unavoidable event, however unfortunate).
But really... I knew fully well, long before I ever had the opportunity to go outside alone - If a ball goes in the road, don't chase after it, ask a parent to get it for you.
it may take juries a bit to warm up to the idea of placing blame where it really belongs
You mean the dumbass who walked into moving traffic???
Situations certainly exist where the driver bears responsibility for hitting a pedestrian (running a red light, taking a blind corner as fast as the car can handle), but let's not turn this into one of those joke arguments about poor defenseless pedestrians vs the nasty aggressive drivers.
I'll skip the stories of idiot bimbos on cellphones randomly walking out from between two parked SUVs to cross four-lane roads, and skip right to a real gem that blew me away. Two winters ago, coming home from work, the roads had a nasty layer of ice on them. I crested a hill doing easily 10mph under, and saw a guy talking to his neighbor across the road, from the MIDDLE of my lane. Now, I had a good 600-800ft to him, and he had perhaps a full 30 seconds to get out of the way. I applied the breaks, no effect. So I honked (three brief taps, not blaring the horn at him) to warn him, and the stupid bastard flipped me off and kept standing there chatting!
I kept honking and eventually nudged my car into the other lane (thank god for no oncoming traffic) to avoid hitting him, and succeeded. But seriously - I swear if I could have stopped, I would have gotten out to beat the shit out of him.
And yet, had my car hit him, any court in the country would have called it "my" fault for failure to control my car.
So yeah, not a lot of sympathy when you tell me we where the blame "belongs" for these Darwin-award candidates.
in 2007 the Debian Project Leader sent an email criticizing Drepper for refusing to fix a bug on glibc on the ARM architecture because in Drepper's words it was 'for the sole benefit of this embedded crap.'
And the developer has every right to make that call, just as eglibc has every right to make a fork that cares more about the embedded world, and Debian's maintainers have a right to switch.
That said, I have two main thoughts on this issue.
First, only a complete idiot would ignore the fact that one of Linux's primary strengths lies in the embedded market. Refusing to fix a relatively easy bug because it "only" affects that market sounds like something Microsoft would force on us "for your own good", such as DRM or the UAC.
Second, Debian (as a stock install, I don't include remastered lightweight Knoppix variants in that category) does not have a significant presence in the embedded device market. Such uses either involve a platform-specific lightweight distro where available, or the devs take a roll-your-own approach. Getting in a pissing match over support for an irrelevant feature doesn't inspire me with confidence in Debian's leaders.
The main thing wrong with having a low end device is that you end up needing two devices. One for use in the camless environment, and one for your normal work--when the latter would function just fine for everything if it didn't have the camera.
Or, you could just buy... A camera!
I don't (deliberately) buy toys with built-in cameras for the simple reason that they almost wholly suck, and hard. Don't get me wrong, it has perfect focus (as long as you can place it on a flat stable surface - Even the slightest movement results in nothing but blurry streaks), and arguably better low-light performance than my "real" dSLR... But the few times I've tried to snap pics with my phone, I've ended up with a grainy ultra-low quality picture that, with a good bit of cleanup and reducing the size to 25% of the original, might pass as a decent quality thumbnail.
Webcams and camera phones have their uses. But "photography", amateur or otherwise, does not count as one of them. At best, they "document", by producing recognizable likenesses of people and places (at close-but-not-too-close range).
This would be followed by brownouts -- a combination of temporary freezing and computers being reduced to a slow speed.
I consider it bad enough that I have to explain, every time I helps someone clean up their machine, that MSN loading slowly does not mean they have a slow computer.
And now we have so-called experts warning us that network lag will cause slow computers?
What next, a warning about how Windows 7 requires 16 GB of storage, causing a wave of panic among those who don't understand the difference between RAM and HDD space?
The secret is in the directional indicator. That's where the magic happens.
Holy crap... I knew the "audiophile" crowd counted as a bunch of loonies with more dollars than sense, but I wouldn't have believed that price if you hadn't linked to the page.
Wow. Just... Wow.
hey idiot, read the effing posts before you reply to something. weapons are illegal on merchant ships.
Because, y'know, pirates follow international and local law to the letter, right?
And at what point does a 1700GPM "water canon" go from a fire suppression device to an outright weapon? How about if they freeze the water first into 50mm cylinders, that cool too (no pun intended)?
okay. but only one of us will be able to enter many international ports. know which one?
The one who threatens to stop delivering cargo to country-X if it can't defend itself against piracy.
The other will never make it to any ports.
Realistically, I don't think you quite appreciate the sheer importance of the companies involved here... If Maersk refused to pull into a country's ports, that country would grind to a halt in under a week. Stopping service to somewhere like Los Angeles would leave it a ghost-town within a few months. Very few players would dare say "uhh, gee guys, we'd really like to get some food delivered, but could ya leave the guns behind?". More likely, you'd see emergency legislation in even the worst of the nanny-states to allow "reasonably" armed container ships passed almost overnight.
i find it really interesting that you can't come up with a single good reason why a traditional firearm might not be the best plan other than some straw man hippie love.
C'mon, not talking about petty local corruption fleecing a few tourists - This involves real live heavily-armed paramilitary groups out there acting like they live in 1680 and they have the Spanish Main ripe for the picking.
If the movie Aliens taught us anything, it's that sheer rough-n-ready manpower is not always the answer.
Remind us of the lessons from a work of FICTION next time you get taken hostage and half your traveling companions (including friends and possibly family) get killed.
Lever back on the testosterone, pal.
You carry a squirt gun, I'll take a fully-armed crew carrying M-16s.
I have to second the GP, I really can't believe anyone even wants to consider non-lethal means ("Anything but guns?" What sort of bleeding heart came up with that line of feelgood BS?) to deal with armed killers on the high seas. These people board mostly-defenseless ships and kill people, loot the cargo, and take the "important" people for ransom. Just fucking kill them. No "alternatives" necessary.
When container barges start carrying half a dozen 150mm guns, you'll watch this crap vanish overnight. Somehow I don't think various Three-Stooges-esque slapstick "solutions" will accomplish more than pissing the pirates off.
As an aside, these clowns only get away with this because they attack highly-multinational ships, crews, and cargos, so no particular country feels a need to respond. When they do go after, say, a mostly-American (or even mostly-French, recently) ship, we end up with living crew and a few less pirates. Good riddance.
No, I expect that ISP's placing caps on the volume of transfers will do more to limit filesharing than the legal system is able to accomplish.
Absolutely 100% unquestionably true - Which I write from personal experience.
I recently moved, and now have an ISP that caps me at a mere half-gig per day. Nevermind piracy, I have to carefully consider what legitimate media I want to download every day to avoid hitting my cap (merely watching crappy YouTube videos for an hour will hit my cap, for all those astonished folks who keep asking me "How on Earth do you use that much bandwidth???" - Not even remotely difficult).
Previously, when the new Rolling Stone came out (For some inexplicable reason, they keep sending it to me even though I've only ever paid $1 for a "trial" six month subscription about four years ago) every month, I'd grab whatever new talent they mentioned to give it a listen, and actually buy what didn't suck.
And now? Well, congrats RIAA, my "piracy" has plummetted to nearly zero - As have my actual purchases as a consequence.
Try taking a photograph of the Hollywood Sign - it's protected by trademark or copyright law and the folks in Hollywood do go after people.
And yet, you still have every right to take a picture of it. I have several, from my last trip to Griffith Park, and no minigun-armed trademark gestapo ordered me to delete them (or pay royalties). You can't, however, use it without permission in a purely for-profit work - But before you take even that as an absolute, some uses, even profitable ones, may get a pass on the grounds of their documentary nature. I would personally (IANAL) say if anyone would qualify for such a fair use exemption, Google would due to the nature of their collection.
And apparently, Google's lawyers agree with me, since they have quite a few pictures (I see at least 40 without even working at it) of exactly that sign.
Personally, I fail to see the big deal here... A lot of people have freaked out about Google driving through, all just pissing in the wind. Street-view just fills the gap for another 10 years until we have sub-centimeter resolution satellite images available to the public. What then? Erect a giant tent over your whole town, similar to what the Soviets did during the cold war to hide their missile movements?
I have a problem with the privacy implications of having my every move in public (potentially) tracked by security cameras. Google driving by my house? Not so much.
I was surprised by that, too. I'm trying to decide how far back they went in the database to come up with the numbers.
It looks like they searched the DB by some random criteria... For example, I have 2^8 "Score:5", but no "Days metamoderated in a row", which for a while (a year or two ago) I did on a daily basis. It also has some errors - I've never tagged an article with a "!" tag, but have the "Contradictor" award.
I mean, like, when is the last time you heard about a website melting down because it was WoWed?
No no, you have it backward...
People melt down websites mentioned on the FP of Slashdot.
WoW melts down the people sadly addicted to it.
Slashdot just wants to combine the best of both worlds.
Especially the 'read slashdot for [x] consecutive days' part. This is an encroachment of my privacy
So just do like everyone else, and don't log in unless you want to post. Then it won't know when "you" have visited unless you actually write something.
And if you do write something (not as AC), you've violated your own privacy, no not much right to whine there.
Since slashdot is about 14 hours late with the april fools, will we expect this for another 24 hours, well into April 2nd?
Except, they didn't just throw a static "haha, gotcha" page up... Slashdot really has implemented this system.
They might not leave it up after today, but I don't know if you can call an actual, working system of award-tallying a proper "April Fools" hoax...