but then, what do you do when filing CDs by the pop group The The ?
I have no problem with them, since in context it doesn't count as an article.
Thus, they have the only spot in my home music archive to start with the
(whole) word "The".
Having the word repeated just makes it clear that that directory
really contains what it says, rather than resulting from an accident
of syntax such as "mkdir the who".
If that's the case, I think you're contributing very little to Sony.
True, but irrelevant to the desire to remain on the right side of the law.
You could make the same argument about any second-hand good... Buying a
used Prius doesn't benefit Toyota, either.
Only the fact that they want us to "license" rather than "buy" music makes this
issue any different. And sadly, this line will blur more and more as people
stop buying CDs and start downloading from iTunes or Amazon. But for now, as
long as I have a physical disc containing the music, I (and everyone except
the RIAA members) consider it a purchase will all the attendant rights.
I believe there had been attempts to prevent re-sale of Music/Software/Books/etc
Indeed there have! And they still happen - We heard about a lawsuit filed against
AutoDesk for DMCA'ing 100% legit EBay sales, just a week or two ago. But EBay's
complete lack of balls aside, the "right of first sale" still exists in the US.
It simply doesn't matter what the RIAA, or AutoDesk, or Toyota, think about
second-hand goods; You can legally sell them, I can legally buy them, and the
manufacturers/publishers can go pound sand.
When you buy used CDs, you're only compensating the original purchaser that
presumably already paid a full price.
Try looking at it a tiny bit differently - Would the original purchaser have
paid full price if they didn't know they could resell it if they lost interest
in that artist in a few years? Instead of considering it a full-price purchase
then an effectively free second buying (aka a "lost customer" from the POV of Sony),
look at the situation as the purchase of a good with a residual value. You buy a
CD, enjoy it for a year, then pass it along to reclaim that residual. If I buy
it from you at half price, then we've both effectively paid (to Sony) half of
the price of the product.
When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I
suppose we can say he stole a song. Making a copy of a purchased
song is just a nice way of saying 'steals just one copy'.
I generally pay for my music. I won't claim that I own a CD for every
song in my collection, but easily over 99% of them. I buy most of them
used for a pittance, and rip them to my file server. I do not use P2P
programs, or download from any of the massive music archives, or USE the
NET to easily find anything I might ever what to listen to, or even
copy (and keep) tracks from friends. I do this because I, as do most
people, prefer to stay legal. I consider myself reasonable on that...
Sony provides something I want, I provide them with the only thing
they want.
So when Sony comes out and makes statements like this, calling
me a thief for using the music I buy in the way I prefer, it makes
me unhappy. This leads to a certain level of cognitive dissonance
on my part - I want to engage in a fair trade of goods for money,
but the other party considers my terms a form of robbery.
As I will not change my current behavior for the sake of making
Sony feel better, nor will I give up the pleasure of listening
to music that happens to fall under their control, they have
effectively removed my mental barrier to "stealing" their entire
catalog.
Congrats, Sony, you have made it clear you consider the two
actions - Buying and stealing - equivalent. Thus, I feel no
moral dilemma in seeking out and downloading every song you've
ever published. You consider that the same as my buying them,
so why would I actually pay for them? By simply
downloading them all, you view me the same, yet I save thousands
of dollars. Thank you, Sony, for making this so much easier!
The problem with "choice overload" in the software context is that with so many platforms
to choose from, no one platform builds the critical mass to be useful for a broad range of problems
In this context, you don't really need "critical mass" or even "interoperability" (yet). You just
need to pick a platform you like and work with it.
I would also point out that at least two entries on the FP list (MPI and HPF) most definitely have
"critical mass", in the sense that if you look at any arbitrary parallel processing project, you
can lay good odds it will use one of those.
The bigger problem here involves the skill involved in doing parallel code. As with my past
rants against unnecessary multithreading, the same (and a few more) applies to parallelization - It
takes both skill and brains, rather than just letting the app wizard set everthing up for you
and you just fill-in-the-hooks. Any hack (in the derogatory sense) can write cute little
VB or Java snippets. Only "real" programmers can pull off the careful planning it takes
to distribute a load across several physically distinct execution contexts.
So is this some type of hybrid/dual laser device? Or is it a blu ray
that uses the blue laser to record on conventional DVDs? Or what exactly?
It almost certainly has dual lasers, as do most recorders, but that
has nothing to do with what it does...
Until they release more specs I can only speculate, but the
press release makes it obvious enough - This simply contains
a perfectly ordinary DVD burner, to which it writes MPEG-4
data on a normal DVD using the FS layout expected by BR drives.
Just as you can burn a DVD filesystem to a CD, you can just as
easily burn a BR or HD filesystem to a DVD. They simply don't hold
as much, requiring either loss of quality or limited duration (or
both).
Now, why anyone would want to buy a recorder that costs more than the
difference in price of recordable discs over the practical lifetime
of that player while burning only ultra-low quality content, ya got
me. The coolness factor, I guess? Personally, I plan to wait for
dual-format next-gen burners and for one or the other's writeable
discs to drop a tolerable price.
This goes all against the need of the accuser to prove you are
wrong. Remember "innocent until proven guilty"? The fact that you
refuse to obey to a law is not proof that you are breaking other laws.
In most US states, drunk driving laws work exactly that way.
Refusal to take a breathalyzer test amounts to a confession of guilt.
Not that I consider that at all "right", but face it, if you actually
believe we count as innocent until proven guilty, I hope for your sake
you never come across a cop with something to prove without a rock-solid
alibi.
Well, instead of requiring a dual-core CPU and 2+GB to run tolerably,
you could use that second core and second gig to actually run things you
want, rather than nothing but OS-related eye-candy and DRM crapware.
Now, if you have a nostalgic desire for a machine that "feels" just like XP on
a PII-300 with 256MB, by all means run Vista. If, however, you consider the
OS "just a way to get to the real programs", you may want to consider
upgrading from Vista to XP.
If you run XP, set the power scheme to "Minimal Power Management".
Unless, as a twitch-gamer, you (think you) can't afford to lose even a single CPU cycle,
then by all means continue trying to heat your house in "Always On" mode (or the default
of "Home/Office Desk", which means the same thing to AC-powered non-laptops).
As an interesting aside, TFA's author recommends "Portable/Laptop" mode; However, he writes that
coming from the Intel world. Users of AMD chips (myself included) have noticed problems with CnQ
(AMD's version of SpeedStep) not working correctly unless you set it to "Minimal Power Management",
which according to the charts in the linked article, should work the same as "Portable/Laptop".
to determine the location and timing of security checkpoints and patrols.
Great, another brilliant idea from the Department of Homeland Terror.
So now, instead of only annoying us, these checks will annoy us and
leave other areas vulnerable...
"Yeah, the 4th floor bathroom checked out okay 27 times
before breakfast, but a group of heavily-armed guys went unchallenged as they climbed the
perimiter fence and boarded a transatlantic flight. Oops, our bad."
C'mon, quit trolling. You almost made me spit my coffee on the keyboard! An
MBA has value in the same way that a pre-1982 US penny has value - Society may
view it as worth something, but you'd get a lot more out of it if you melt it
down and recycle it for its base.
Okay, anti-beancounter comments aside, I can answer the FP. Why don't more Americans
get higher degrees? Because not only don't they don't pay off, they often
harm your job prospects in a weak market. We have an amazingly
anti-intellectual attitude here in the US, compounded with a pro-cog view
that all drones must have interchangeable skill-sets. If you can do more
than your replacement, your corporate masters will view you as a liability
rather than an asset.
After the tech crash, I spent some time unemployed. Of all the jobs I applied
for, I can't even count the number that rejected me for overqualification
(I had a BS (two, actually) and about 10 years (if you include interning) experience
in software engineering at that point). Now, obviously, companies don't really
object to hiring someone "too good" for the position. They care about having to
pay for that experience (or education). And even if you would gladly accept
a low-paying tech position out of desperation to make your next car payment, they
would still rather pay an idiot-cog to do the job, since no one wants an
underling capable of eating their way up the food chain.
So, if you want to find yourself unemployable, by all means get a higher engineering
degree. If you just want to put in your 40 and retire (the American Dream - Give a
company your best years, then go home and die when you have no more to give), stick
with a BS in a practical field, perhaps go for the fluff MBA halfway through if you
feel inclined to go over to the dark side.
As for why people in other countries want them - Some cultures value
education for its own sake. In India or China, whether employed or not, people
will treat you with deference simply for having a PhD. In the US, it will more
likely get you spit on as an academic elitist than treated deferentially.
Luckily you have to pay anyway, no matter how offensive
you find it.
Luckily, I do a lot of contracting work.
Why should we tolerate your offensive egoism?
Well, when you sell your soul on the dole, you take your
place with your head shamefully down where it belongs.
And when you earn your keep, you also earn the right to bitch
about all the parasites tagging along for the ride - Or if you
prefer, you can view your taxes as some sort of noblesse
oblige.
Personally, I prefer bitching, as I consider "the working man's
burden" view as demeaning to both sides of the equasion.
But, "to each their own" - Oh, waitasec, I guess not or we wouldn't
have this discussion.
I suppose an education system is also a pet cause?
If by "education" you mean funding a massively disfunctional
system that rewards obedience over performance, then yeah,
I'd call that a pet cause. Now, come up with a way to
educate rather than babysit/indoctrinate, and I'll reconsider
my stance on that one.
What about road repairs paid for by tax dollars? Is that
a pet cause too?
When local governments start selling toll-rights to the highest
bidder, and have no shortage of takers - Yes, I would say so.
Look buddy, not everyone who gets sick does so out of
their own ignorance.
True. But the people who have a bit of bad luck don't rack up the
vast majority of healthcare-related expenses. The ones who've lived
a life of smoking and eating like crap, who choose to take
six meds daily rather than lose some weight, who destroy their livers
with a life of heavy drinking then expect a new one - they
rack up the vast majority of the bill. So yeah, damn straight I
object to paying for them. If you want to destroy your own body,
have fun, just don't try to stick me with the bill.
Get of your high horse there and stop assuming bullshit.
"Assuming bullshit?" Quick question for you - Why do you think
so many private insurers have "preexisting condition" clauses?
Hint - Not to save them from the overwhelming expense of covering
accidental injuries and surprise bouts of pneumonia during a bad
winter.
Ahhhh, out comes the massive superiority complex.
I know, right? I actually take care of myself, don't smoke,
don't take third helpings even of my favorite meals, exercise
regularly... And all just to piss other people off!
What a prick, eh? I certainly don't do it because I
actually value my health... Goodness no!
Want chicken for dinner? RAISE IT YOURSELF. See?
There's absolutely NO BENEFIT to society if people act
together in their common interests!
Or, I could ply my trade to make money to pay someone
else to raise a chicken for me. Note that I didn't say
"pay the government to make sure that, as a vegetarian,
I have a chicken in my pot every night". Subtle difference,
I know, but Capitalism just works better the first way.
If you want to support public healthcare, education, etc etc,
you better be prepared to pay up.
Many of us don't want to support those things, though.
I dislike how most people equate taxes to Bad Thing(tm)
I dislike paying them to support your favorite pet causes.
Whether paying for a war of aggression far far away, or for
healthcare for people too lazy to take care of their own bodies,
or for drug law enforcement, or bailing out failing obsolete
industries... I don't just "not want to", I find it outright
offensive that the bulk of my tax dollars go to causes
that I absolutely oppose on both moral and practical grounds.
If you want to support a failing school system, you
pay for it. If you want healthcare, buy insurance for
yourself. If you want to help bail out Buggy-Whips-R-Us,
you can send them a donation. See the pattern there?
what's the point of paying for mp3's you wont legally own? You might as well just pirate them for free.
1) Recent changes in Russian law (solely to appease the **AA via the WIPO) aside, AllOfMP3 complied with
Russian law. Period. The rest of the world using it might have broken their own country's laws - Or they
might not have. I honestly don't know international and US customs laws well enough to answer that. But the
site itself originally lived in a sweet little loophole in Russian copyright law.
2) I rip my own CDs to FLAC. The crap you get from P2P varies from "low bitrate" to "transcoded 27 times" to
"just plain wrong song" - If the download ever finishes. Why would I want that, when for a pittance I
could download a known-good DRM-free lossless encoding?
3) You don't "legally own" what you download from iTMS or Amazon, either (or, if you believe the RIAA, what you
buy on CD as well). You have purchased a license to listen to it under certain conditions. That would
reduce your query to "Why would you bother paying for music".
A team that works well together will always outperform a cowboy
coder hacking away exclusively.
I have yet to see what you suggest in 15 years working in the field.
In theory, I have to concede that more than one person can get more
done than one person. And for truly huge projects, obviously one person
can't do it all. But I stand by my stance that, for any project a single
person can complete in a reasonable time, they will produce a better
final product than even the best of teams (with one exception - The "let's
make management think we work as a team" group of individual gurus. N of
them can successfully "work together", wink-wink-nudge-nudge, to complete
N distinct projects at the same time).
they can always do it better with support from others.
No. I can't put it any more tactfully - You have bought into
the same line of BS that leads companies to treat IT people as
interchangeable cogs, leading to this very FP article. More people
can do more work in the same time, not better work
given their total man-hours.
Consider the possibility... That you are one of the problem people.
When my employer expresses that sentiment, I will consider it.
When my performance reviews stop glowing, I will consider it.
In the meantime, perhaps you should consider that just because
you depend on the support of others to complete a sizeable
project, doesn't mean no one can do it alone as well or better.
That sounds more caustic than I intend it, so I apologize in advance,
but so it goes.
cooperation is a word that doesn't enter their vocabulary. Frankly, you're
better off hiring a couple of less egotistical, less demanding, and far more
pleasant and constructive journeyman types anyway than you would be getting
stuck with one of these guys, who seem to be known as "rock star programmers"
in trendy blogs.
Despite the feel-good BS, "cooperation" does not usually result
in an optimal solution. If a single person can handle the task, you'll get a
much better final product than giving it to a team.
Even the old fallback excuse of "more eyes catch more bugs" doesn't
hold true... Yes, you need to have someone other than the programmer
doing your testing, but serious bugs don't usually occur within
a routine; They occur in the interfaces, when one person's code calls
another's. No amount of detail in a spec will ever make up for simply
"knowing" the exact behavior of the called code because you wrote it
yourself.
Even your use of "rock star", or the more negative "prima donna", betrays
the reality of ths situation... A dozen decent studio musicians/singers don't
replace one Jimi Hendrix or Sarah Brightman.
police departments are usually broken down into divisions that
each deal with their respective speciality.
I have no problem with that - I even approve, if it means the
police involved in any given specialty might know the difference
between, say, art and a bomb.
I have to disagree, however, that it doesn't mean some
crimes get ignored in favor of what they choose to go after.
As long as I can look forward to seeing a single spam email
in my inbox every morning, they most assuredly have "better"
things to do than go after modders, whitehats who should have
kept their mouths shut, and foreign nationals protecting our
freedom to use what we buy as we want.
Until I can watch Alan Ralsky eaten alive by lions on PPV, they
can better use any "computer crime" related resources.
You need to quote your source(s), because your information doesn't
match the article and thus severely undermines your argument.
Er, no. The burden of proof here rests on the "scientists" making
the claims of arsnic-and-meteorites. Science just works that way.
"Peruvian scientists seemed to unanimously agree that it was
a meteorite that had struck their territory"
First, "meteor"s hit ground; "meteorite"s get vaporized in the atmosphere.
Second, "Seemed to unanimously agree"? What does that mean?
You either agree or you don't. Either everyone does it (unanimous)
or they don't. And have all "Peruvian scientists" had a chance to
examine the alleged meteor that they can make such a claim on any
factual basis, or do they just make data up as they see fit?
"The samples she reviewed had smooth, eroded edges, Macedo added. "As
the rock enters the atmosphere, it gets smoothed out," she said."
...Or it could have just come from the beach or a river.
"Preliminary analysis by Macedo's institute revealed no metal
fragments, indicating a rare rock meteorite" ...
"The samples also had a significant amount of magnetic material
"characteristic of meteorites," she said."
So it contained a significant amount of nonmetallic magnetic material?
While such things do indeed exist, they do not occur naturally.
Either one of those statements contradicts the other, or they've
found something far more interesting than any ol' meteor.
You (and these "scientists") also ignored the GP's more important
point - METEORS DON'T LAND HOT! The glowy bits you see as they
streak through the atmosphere actually burn off, and anything making
it to the ground has roughly the same temperature as outer space, in
the four to twenty Kelvin range. The localized vitrification you
see at impact craters (which this one conspicuously lacks, making it
look more like someone dug a hole with a backhoe than an impact crater)
results from the rapid transferrance of kinetic energy to the
ground. Thus, it wouldn't have boiled off any groundwater; And even if
we accept that, somehow, a very very cold object caused a miraculously
huge volume of water to boil, modern technology uses a similar process
called "distillation" to remove dissolved salts and metals (such
as arsenic) from water.
I harbour no delusions that some sort of UFO or secret military satellite
crashed here - I don't think anything from off-planet caused this.
More likely, some poor bastard stumbled across Dow's latest PR nightmare
while trying to dig a pit for his outhouse.
It won't be long until we know if Larry Niven was right about brain stimulation.
If the current makes you feel better, will you be less likely to switch it off?
Niven didn't pull that idea out of nowhere - He based in on experiments on rats and chimps
contemporary with his writing that found they would rather zap their brains than eat,
sleep, have sex, or take favored drugs such as cocaine and heroin.
So yes, it would almost certainly have the exact same effect on people. Imagine
the best orgasm you've ever had, while eating your favorite meal, while high on
your favorite intoxicant, then quadruple that. The most restrained willful human
alive would turn into a drooling zap-junkie, no question at all.
and some other restrictions having to do with airports and flight visibility
Don't forget "Within five miles of the boundary of any airport". On first reading, you
might take that to mean "I don't hear 747s taking off 100 times a day, no problem". But
do how many noncommercial airstrips exist in the US? Helipads? And I don't know
if farmers' runways for their crop-dusters and lakes large enough to land a sea-plane in
count, but the FAA doesn't exactly have the best reputation for reasonable enforcement of
absurd rules.
And it is entirely legitimate for the FAA to be concerened about things in the airspace
where planes are allowed to fly
That sounds great, in theory, until you consider that it means your property effectively
ends 150 feet above the ground (or the top of the highest structure) - And even that only
if you don't live too close to various places over which you have no control. Seriously, think
about that for a minute - If you live in the middle of nowhere and sitting on your porch flying
a kite counts as your greatest joy in the world, a firehouse 4.9 miles away painting off a section
of their parking lot as a helipad could deprive you of that forever.
If I want to launch myself into orbital demise from my own private property then I will, fascists.
1) That philosophy, which I truly and unsarcastically applaud, works well - as long as you don't plan to come back. Though
you did say "demise".
2) You can't even fly a kite in your own backyard except at the
whim of the FAA.
3) You really think that our nonfunctioning "missile defense" system, which has proven itself totally inadequate
of hitting actual missiles broadcasting their location, exists to protect us from "enemies"? It would do
a great job of hitting nice slow private launch-vehicles, however...
they were all detonated WITH AN ELECTRONIC DEVICE.
OMG! You posted that message WITH AN ELECTRONIC DEVICE! Quick,
take him out, alpha team!
Sorry, I honestly don't mean to sound like a jerk here - But should we
really treat anyone in posession of an unidentified electronic device
as though they have a bomb?
In the modern world, even the typical
stuffed animal contains sufficient electronics to detonate a bomb.
If it smiles after hearing its name, you just wire the relay
to the lip-servo and name it "Excuse me, Sir". The fact that someone
would bother wearing a protoboard on the outside of their clothing
pretty much makes it a dead giveaway that they pose no threat to anything
except their own social life.
You ask if I count as an expert in dead dogs. No,
I can't say that I do. Should I therefore start reporting every
instance of roadkill I see to the FBI?
Slashdot Mirror
but then, what do you do when filing CDs by the pop group The The ?
I have no problem with them, since in context it doesn't count as an article. Thus, they have the only spot in my home music archive to start with the (whole) word "The".
Having the word repeated just makes it clear that that directory really contains what it says, rather than resulting from an accident of syntax such as "mkdir the who".
If that's the case, I think you're contributing very little to Sony.
True, but irrelevant to the desire to remain on the right side of the law.
You could make the same argument about any second-hand good... Buying a used Prius doesn't benefit Toyota, either.
Only the fact that they want us to "license" rather than "buy" music makes this issue any different. And sadly, this line will blur more and more as people stop buying CDs and start downloading from iTunes or Amazon. But for now, as long as I have a physical disc containing the music, I (and everyone except the RIAA members) consider it a purchase will all the attendant rights.
I believe there had been attempts to prevent re-sale of Music/Software/Books/etc
Indeed there have! And they still happen - We heard about a lawsuit filed against AutoDesk for DMCA'ing 100% legit EBay sales, just a week or two ago. But EBay's complete lack of balls aside, the "right of first sale" still exists in the US. It simply doesn't matter what the RIAA, or AutoDesk, or Toyota, think about second-hand goods; You can legally sell them, I can legally buy them, and the manufacturers/publishers can go pound sand.
When you buy used CDs, you're only compensating the original purchaser that presumably already paid a full price.
Try looking at it a tiny bit differently - Would the original purchaser have paid full price if they didn't know they could resell it if they lost interest in that artist in a few years? Instead of considering it a full-price purchase then an effectively free second buying (aka a "lost customer" from the POV of Sony), look at the situation as the purchase of a good with a residual value. You buy a CD, enjoy it for a year, then pass it along to reclaim that residual. If I buy it from you at half price, then we've both effectively paid (to Sony) half of the price of the product.
When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song. Making a copy of a purchased song is just a nice way of saying 'steals just one copy'.
I generally pay for my music. I won't claim that I own a CD for every song in my collection, but easily over 99% of them. I buy most of them used for a pittance, and rip them to my file server. I do not use P2P programs, or download from any of the massive music archives, or USE the NET to easily find anything I might ever what to listen to, or even copy (and keep) tracks from friends. I do this because I, as do most people, prefer to stay legal. I consider myself reasonable on that... Sony provides something I want, I provide them with the only thing they want.
So when Sony comes out and makes statements like this, calling me a thief for using the music I buy in the way I prefer, it makes me unhappy. This leads to a certain level of cognitive dissonance on my part - I want to engage in a fair trade of goods for money, but the other party considers my terms a form of robbery.
As I will not change my current behavior for the sake of making Sony feel better, nor will I give up the pleasure of listening to music that happens to fall under their control, they have effectively removed my mental barrier to "stealing" their entire catalog.
Congrats, Sony, you have made it clear you consider the two actions - Buying and stealing - equivalent. Thus, I feel no moral dilemma in seeking out and downloading every song you've ever published. You consider that the same as my buying them, so why would I actually pay for them? By simply downloading them all, you view me the same, yet I save thousands of dollars. Thank you, Sony, for making this so much easier!
The problem with "choice overload" in the software context is that with so many platforms to choose from, no one platform builds the critical mass to be useful for a broad range of problems
In this context, you don't really need "critical mass" or even "interoperability" (yet). You just need to pick a platform you like and work with it.
I would also point out that at least two entries on the FP list (MPI and HPF) most definitely have "critical mass", in the sense that if you look at any arbitrary parallel processing project, you can lay good odds it will use one of those.
The bigger problem here involves the skill involved in doing parallel code. As with my past rants against unnecessary multithreading, the same (and a few more) applies to parallelization - It takes both skill and brains, rather than just letting the app wizard set everthing up for you and you just fill-in-the-hooks. Any hack (in the derogatory sense) can write cute little VB or Java snippets. Only "real" programmers can pull off the careful planning it takes to distribute a load across several physically distinct execution contexts.
So is this some type of hybrid/dual laser device? Or is it a blu ray that uses the blue laser to record on conventional DVDs? Or what exactly?
It almost certainly has dual lasers, as do most recorders, but that has nothing to do with what it does...
Until they release more specs I can only speculate, but the press release makes it obvious enough - This simply contains a perfectly ordinary DVD burner, to which it writes MPEG-4 data on a normal DVD using the FS layout expected by BR drives.
Just as you can burn a DVD filesystem to a CD, you can just as easily burn a BR or HD filesystem to a DVD. They simply don't hold as much, requiring either loss of quality or limited duration (or both).
Now, why anyone would want to buy a recorder that costs more than the difference in price of recordable discs over the practical lifetime of that player while burning only ultra-low quality content, ya got me. The coolness factor, I guess? Personally, I plan to wait for dual-format next-gen burners and for one or the other's writeable discs to drop a tolerable price.
This goes all against the need of the accuser to prove you are wrong. Remember "innocent until proven guilty"? The fact that you refuse to obey to a law is not proof that you are breaking other laws.
In most US states, drunk driving laws work exactly that way. Refusal to take a breathalyzer test amounts to a confession of guilt.
Not that I consider that at all "right", but face it, if you actually believe we count as innocent until proven guilty, I hope for your sake you never come across a cop with something to prove without a rock-solid alibi.
What is so wrong with Vista on modern hardware?
Well, instead of requiring a dual-core CPU and 2+GB to run tolerably, you could use that second core and second gig to actually run things you want, rather than nothing but OS-related eye-candy and DRM crapware.
Now, if you have a nostalgic desire for a machine that "feels" just like XP on a PII-300 with 256MB, by all means run Vista. If, however, you consider the OS "just a way to get to the real programs", you may want to consider upgrading from Vista to XP.
If you run XP, set the power scheme to "Minimal Power Management".
Unless, as a twitch-gamer, you (think you) can't afford to lose even a single CPU cycle, then by all means continue trying to heat your house in "Always On" mode (or the default of "Home/Office Desk", which means the same thing to AC-powered non-laptops).
As an interesting aside, TFA's author recommends "Portable/Laptop" mode; However, he writes that coming from the Intel world. Users of AMD chips (myself included) have noticed problems with CnQ (AMD's version of SpeedStep) not working correctly unless you set it to "Minimal Power Management", which according to the charts in the linked article, should work the same as "Portable/Laptop".
to determine the location and timing of security checkpoints and patrols.
Great, another brilliant idea from the Department of Homeland Terror.
So now, instead of only annoying us, these checks will annoy us and leave other areas vulnerable...
"Yeah, the 4th floor bathroom checked out okay 27 times before breakfast, but a group of heavily-armed guys went unchallenged as they climbed the perimiter fence and boarded a transatlantic flight. Oops, our bad."
Getting an MBA has actual value.
C'mon, quit trolling. You almost made me spit my coffee on the keyboard! An MBA has value in the same way that a pre-1982 US penny has value - Society may view it as worth something, but you'd get a lot more out of it if you melt it down and recycle it for its base.
Okay, anti-beancounter comments aside, I can answer the FP. Why don't more Americans get higher degrees? Because not only don't they don't pay off, they often harm your job prospects in a weak market. We have an amazingly anti-intellectual attitude here in the US, compounded with a pro-cog view that all drones must have interchangeable skill-sets. If you can do more than your replacement, your corporate masters will view you as a liability rather than an asset.
After the tech crash, I spent some time unemployed. Of all the jobs I applied for, I can't even count the number that rejected me for overqualification (I had a BS (two, actually) and about 10 years (if you include interning) experience in software engineering at that point). Now, obviously, companies don't really object to hiring someone "too good" for the position. They care about having to pay for that experience (or education). And even if you would gladly accept a low-paying tech position out of desperation to make your next car payment, they would still rather pay an idiot-cog to do the job, since no one wants an underling capable of eating their way up the food chain.
So, if you want to find yourself unemployable, by all means get a higher engineering degree. If you just want to put in your 40 and retire (the American Dream - Give a company your best years, then go home and die when you have no more to give), stick with a BS in a practical field, perhaps go for the fluff MBA halfway through if you feel inclined to go over to the dark side.
As for why people in other countries want them - Some cultures value education for its own sake. In India or China, whether employed or not, people will treat you with deference simply for having a PhD. In the US, it will more likely get you spit on as an academic elitist than treated deferentially.
Luckily you have to pay anyway, no matter how offensive you find it.
Luckily, I do a lot of contracting work.
Why should we tolerate your offensive egoism?
Well, when you sell your soul on the dole, you take your place with your head shamefully down where it belongs.
And when you earn your keep, you also earn the right to bitch about all the parasites tagging along for the ride - Or if you prefer, you can view your taxes as some sort of noblesse oblige.
Personally, I prefer bitching, as I consider "the working man's burden" view as demeaning to both sides of the equasion. But, "to each their own" - Oh, waitasec, I guess not or we wouldn't have this discussion.
I suppose an education system is also a pet cause?
If by "education" you mean funding a massively disfunctional system that rewards obedience over performance, then yeah, I'd call that a pet cause. Now, come up with a way to educate rather than babysit/indoctrinate, and I'll reconsider my stance on that one.
What about road repairs paid for by tax dollars? Is that a pet cause too?
When local governments start selling toll-rights to the highest bidder, and have no shortage of takers - Yes, I would say so.
Look buddy, not everyone who gets sick does so out of their own ignorance.
True. But the people who have a bit of bad luck don't rack up the vast majority of healthcare-related expenses. The ones who've lived a life of smoking and eating like crap, who choose to take six meds daily rather than lose some weight, who destroy their livers with a life of heavy drinking then expect a new one - they rack up the vast majority of the bill. So yeah, damn straight I object to paying for them. If you want to destroy your own body, have fun, just don't try to stick me with the bill.
Get of your high horse there and stop assuming bullshit.
"Assuming bullshit?" Quick question for you - Why do you think so many private insurers have "preexisting condition" clauses? Hint - Not to save them from the overwhelming expense of covering accidental injuries and surprise bouts of pneumonia during a bad winter.
Ahhhh, out comes the massive superiority complex.
I know, right? I actually take care of myself, don't smoke, don't take third helpings even of my favorite meals, exercise regularly... And all just to piss other people off! What a prick, eh? I certainly don't do it because I actually value my health... Goodness no!
Want chicken for dinner? RAISE IT YOURSELF. See? There's absolutely NO BENEFIT to society if people act together in their common interests!
Or, I could ply my trade to make money to pay someone else to raise a chicken for me. Note that I didn't say "pay the government to make sure that, as a vegetarian, I have a chicken in my pot every night". Subtle difference, I know, but Capitalism just works better the first way.
If you want to support public healthcare, education, etc etc, you better be prepared to pay up.
Many of us don't want to support those things, though.
I dislike how most people equate taxes to Bad Thing(tm)
I dislike paying them to support your favorite pet causes.
Whether paying for a war of aggression far far away, or for healthcare for people too lazy to take care of their own bodies, or for drug law enforcement, or bailing out failing obsolete industries... I don't just "not want to", I find it outright offensive that the bulk of my tax dollars go to causes that I absolutely oppose on both moral and practical grounds.
If you want to support a failing school system, you pay for it. If you want healthcare, buy insurance for yourself. If you want to help bail out Buggy-Whips-R-Us, you can send them a donation. See the pattern there?
what's the point of paying for mp3's you wont legally own? You might as well just pirate them for free.
1) Recent changes in Russian law (solely to appease the **AA via the WIPO) aside, AllOfMP3 complied with Russian law. Period. The rest of the world using it might have broken their own country's laws - Or they might not have. I honestly don't know international and US customs laws well enough to answer that. But the site itself originally lived in a sweet little loophole in Russian copyright law.
2) I rip my own CDs to FLAC. The crap you get from P2P varies from "low bitrate" to "transcoded 27 times" to "just plain wrong song" - If the download ever finishes. Why would I want that, when for a pittance I could download a known-good DRM-free lossless encoding?
3) You don't "legally own" what you download from iTMS or Amazon, either (or, if you believe the RIAA, what you buy on CD as well). You have purchased a license to listen to it under certain conditions. That would reduce your query to "Why would you bother paying for music".
I don't know of any other download service that could top the Amazon MP3 store.
AllOfMP3.
A team that works well together will always outperform a cowboy coder hacking away exclusively.
I have yet to see what you suggest in 15 years working in the field.
In theory, I have to concede that more than one person can get more done than one person. And for truly huge projects, obviously one person can't do it all. But I stand by my stance that, for any project a single person can complete in a reasonable time, they will produce a better final product than even the best of teams (with one exception - The "let's make management think we work as a team" group of individual gurus. N of them can successfully "work together", wink-wink-nudge-nudge, to complete N distinct projects at the same time).
they can always do it better with support from others.
No. I can't put it any more tactfully - You have bought into the same line of BS that leads companies to treat IT people as interchangeable cogs, leading to this very FP article. More people can do more work in the same time, not better work given their total man-hours.
Consider the possibility... That you are one of the problem people.
When my employer expresses that sentiment, I will consider it. When my performance reviews stop glowing, I will consider it.
In the meantime, perhaps you should consider that just because you depend on the support of others to complete a sizeable project, doesn't mean no one can do it alone as well or better. That sounds more caustic than I intend it, so I apologize in advance, but so it goes.
Overall, I agree with you. However...
cooperation is a word that doesn't enter their vocabulary. Frankly, you're better off hiring a couple of less egotistical, less demanding, and far more pleasant and constructive journeyman types anyway than you would be getting stuck with one of these guys, who seem to be known as "rock star programmers" in trendy blogs.
Despite the feel-good BS, "cooperation" does not usually result in an optimal solution. If a single person can handle the task, you'll get a much better final product than giving it to a team.
Even the old fallback excuse of "more eyes catch more bugs" doesn't hold true... Yes, you need to have someone other than the programmer doing your testing, but serious bugs don't usually occur within a routine; They occur in the interfaces, when one person's code calls another's. No amount of detail in a spec will ever make up for simply "knowing" the exact behavior of the called code because you wrote it yourself.
Even your use of "rock star", or the more negative "prima donna", betrays the reality of ths situation... A dozen decent studio musicians/singers don't replace one Jimi Hendrix or Sarah Brightman.
I mostly agree with you, however, one peeve:
police departments are usually broken down into divisions that each deal with their respective speciality.
I have no problem with that - I even approve, if it means the police involved in any given specialty might know the difference between, say, art and a bomb.
I have to disagree, however, that it doesn't mean some crimes get ignored in favor of what they choose to go after. As long as I can look forward to seeing a single spam email in my inbox every morning, they most assuredly have "better" things to do than go after modders, whitehats who should have kept their mouths shut, and foreign nationals protecting our freedom to use what we buy as we want.
Until I can watch Alan Ralsky eaten alive by lions on PPV, they can better use any "computer crime" related resources.
Nice try pla old boy, but you got it exactly backwards!!!
Yes, on fact-checking myself, I see that I did indeed get it exactly backward (no "s" in that word, BTW). Kudos on the catch, and mea culpa.
Dumbass!
And to think, you almost earned a teensy bit of respect there for showing me something I thought I knew but had wrong.
Care to refute the rest of what I wrote, rather than merely insulting me?
How pathetic to ONLY aspire to money.
.
Agreed! Do a GIS for "Melinda Gates" (in particular, the older pics of her - She hasn't aged all that well, but for a woman in her 40s...)
Not quite a Kucinich-class MILF, but as they say, "I'd hit it!"
You need to quote your source(s), because your information doesn't match the article and thus severely undermines your argument.
...Or it could have just come from the beach or a river.
...
Er, no. The burden of proof here rests on the "scientists" making the claims of arsnic-and-meteorites. Science just works that way.
"Peruvian scientists seemed to unanimously agree that it was a meteorite that had struck their territory"
First, "meteor"s hit ground; "meteorite"s get vaporized in the atmosphere. Second, "Seemed to unanimously agree"? What does that mean? You either agree or you don't. Either everyone does it (unanimous) or they don't. And have all "Peruvian scientists" had a chance to examine the alleged meteor that they can make such a claim on any factual basis, or do they just make data up as they see fit?
"The samples she reviewed had smooth, eroded edges, Macedo added. "As the rock enters the atmosphere, it gets smoothed out," she said."
"Preliminary analysis by Macedo's institute revealed no metal fragments, indicating a rare rock meteorite"
"The samples also had a significant amount of magnetic material "characteristic of meteorites," she said."
So it contained a significant amount of nonmetallic magnetic material? While such things do indeed exist, they do not occur naturally. Either one of those statements contradicts the other, or they've found something far more interesting than any ol' meteor.
You (and these "scientists") also ignored the GP's more important point - METEORS DON'T LAND HOT! The glowy bits you see as they streak through the atmosphere actually burn off, and anything making it to the ground has roughly the same temperature as outer space, in the four to twenty Kelvin range. The localized vitrification you see at impact craters (which this one conspicuously lacks, making it look more like someone dug a hole with a backhoe than an impact crater) results from the rapid transferrance of kinetic energy to the ground. Thus, it wouldn't have boiled off any groundwater; And even if we accept that, somehow, a very very cold object caused a miraculously huge volume of water to boil, modern technology uses a similar process called "distillation" to remove dissolved salts and metals (such as arsenic) from water.
I harbour no delusions that some sort of UFO or secret military satellite crashed here - I don't think anything from off-planet caused this. More likely, some poor bastard stumbled across Dow's latest PR nightmare while trying to dig a pit for his outhouse.
It won't be long until we know if Larry Niven was right about brain stimulation. If the current makes you feel better, will you be less likely to switch it off?
Niven didn't pull that idea out of nowhere - He based in on experiments on rats and chimps contemporary with his writing that found they would rather zap their brains than eat, sleep, have sex, or take favored drugs such as cocaine and heroin.
So yes, it would almost certainly have the exact same effect on people. Imagine the best orgasm you've ever had, while eating your favorite meal, while high on your favorite intoxicant, then quadruple that. The most restrained willful human alive would turn into a drooling zap-junkie, no question at all.
and some other restrictions having to do with airports and flight visibility
Don't forget "Within five miles of the boundary of any airport". On first reading, you might take that to mean "I don't hear 747s taking off 100 times a day, no problem". But do how many noncommercial airstrips exist in the US? Helipads? And I don't know if farmers' runways for their crop-dusters and lakes large enough to land a sea-plane in count, but the FAA doesn't exactly have the best reputation for reasonable enforcement of absurd rules.
And it is entirely legitimate for the FAA to be concerened about things in the airspace where planes are allowed to fly
That sounds great, in theory, until you consider that it means your property effectively ends 150 feet above the ground (or the top of the highest structure) - And even that only if you don't live too close to various places over which you have no control. Seriously, think about that for a minute - If you live in the middle of nowhere and sitting on your porch flying a kite counts as your greatest joy in the world, a firehouse 4.9 miles away painting off a section of their parking lot as a helipad could deprive you of that forever.
If I want to launch myself into orbital demise from my own private property then I will, fascists.
1) That philosophy, which I truly and unsarcastically applaud, works well - as long as you don't plan to come back. Though you did say "demise".
2) You can't even fly a kite in your own backyard except at the whim of the FAA.
3) You really think that our nonfunctioning "missile defense" system, which has proven itself totally inadequate of hitting actual missiles broadcasting their location, exists to protect us from "enemies"? It would do a great job of hitting nice slow private launch-vehicles, however...
they were all detonated WITH AN ELECTRONIC DEVICE.
OMG! You posted that message WITH AN ELECTRONIC DEVICE! Quick, take him out, alpha team!
Sorry, I honestly don't mean to sound like a jerk here - But should we really treat anyone in posession of an unidentified electronic device as though they have a bomb?
In the modern world, even the typical stuffed animal contains sufficient electronics to detonate a bomb. If it smiles after hearing its name, you just wire the relay to the lip-servo and name it "Excuse me, Sir". The fact that someone would bother wearing a protoboard on the outside of their clothing pretty much makes it a dead giveaway that they pose no threat to anything except their own social life.
You ask if I count as an expert in dead dogs. No, I can't say that I do. Should I therefore start reporting every instance of roadkill I see to the FBI?