That takes care of software players for HDDVD and there
will definitely be no software players for Blu-Ray.
Naive view, at best.
Though a strange turn on our normal bashing, think about this
from Microsoft's POV... They sold their souls to the MPAA by
including DRM from the kernel on up. If the MPAA then backstabs
Microsoft by not letting Windows machines play HD content...
I think it would run something like, "In response to overwhelming
consumer outcry, we've decided to strip all DRM (except WGA, of
course) from Vista. We sincerely apologize to our users, and hope
you'll forgive us for erronously trusting the content industry."
Microsoft doesn't give a damn about us, but it doesn't care about
Hollywood, either. It only plays nicely with the MPAA so long as
the MPAA provides the ball.
this wouldn't be an issue. There are ways to determine (using system
logs, install logs, and the vast information available in the system
registry) when content arrived and by what method.
No. You can't.
The "system" logs on XP barely contain enough information to
track down serious errors in the hardware or OS (and often, not even
enough for that. The install logs only log programs that go
through the Windows Installer, which virtually no spyware or virus
does. The registry only contains what apps themselves put there - Again,
spyware and virii try to keep a low profile, in general. And file
timestamps only tell you as much as the last program to touch them
wants you to know.
As a forensic computer examiner
...It scares the hell out of me that you would trust the logs
on a compromised system.
When it was determined that the system was being remote-controlled,
the boy was spared a lifetime of embarrassment.
And the asshole prosecutor still felt a need to "punish"
the kid for doing what all 16 year old boys do - Steal their
dads' playboys and share them with friends.
I didn't consider my previous post a "judgement". Just a statement to the
effect that the radio station at least took some care in how they
conducted the contest. As you correctly point out, however, they apparently
grew impatient as time wore on and they still had more than one contestant.
My error. However...
If I had "judged" this situation, I'd say they should all die... Every
contestant and the DJs. Contests like this exist solely to prove that
you can buy anything - In this case, many peoples' dignity and one woman's
life cost $500, the price of a Nintendo Wii. Neither side should feel proud of
participating in such a sad, sad commentary on American life. And we don't even
get the bonus of "Darwin wins - Fatality!", because everyone but this
woman will continue competing with the rest of us for oxygen.
So it goes. Moral of the story, people should take the time to learn how to
properly operate the single most important (to them) machine on the planet - Their own
bodies. And she worked in the medical field? Sorry, just can't feel the
sympathy welling up, here. Perhaps if you played some sad violin music...
(FTA): obligated to implement "reasonably available and economically reasonable" copy-protection technology
So far, no one has mentioned the glaringly obvious flaw here... No such thing exists!
We currently have states arguing over the legality of "means" tests for voting over showing a $30 drivers' license
or state ID. How much does it cost to license any of the existing DRM implementations, if even an option?
Fine. Y'know what? If this passes, I'll write a GPL'd "copy-protection technology". Certainly, no one
would ever think to read the source code to find the secret key I'll use, "password".
This is not some mysterious malady. The radio station is off the scale negligent for putting
contestants in the position of potential serious harm:
Actually, given the schedule over which they administered the water, NO ONE should have gotten
enough to die before their bladders burst (or for those without brahe-ian resolve, peed themselves).
They gave contestants an 8oz bottle every 15 minutes.
Now, although I pee once every hour or two (side note - not peeing doesn't cause death from water
poisoning; you die from either osmotic hydrocephalus or electrolyte-imbalance-induced cardiac arrythmia),
I normally drink almost that much every morning. Between 7am and 10am every (work) day, I consume
a full two liters (== 68oz == 8.5 cups) of fluid (whether diet soda or just plain water), and have yet to
drop dead from it or even feel woozy.
Now, I have no doubt the lawyers will drag three orphans into the courtroom, who will proceed to
extract enormous sums of money from this radio station. But actual negligence? Sorry, this woman
must have had some other condition that made her overly sensitive to too much water.
As described, this contest shouldn't have killed anyone.
it would be better to get the work done immediately just in case some bizarre
misfortune should befall you on or before the last night (before the work is due).
Although I'd rather not normally think of it in those terms, if some bizarre misfortune
befalls me (great turn of phrase, BTW, Kudos!), the project still goes to "irrelevant"
status - But not because the project itself changed.
However, planning on that happening would indeed seem unwise, since it only really
works once. But that one time - Wow! Would you want to face the afterlife knowing
that, in your last three weeks of life, you completed the annual report on paperclip vs
staple use in the third floor secretary pool?;-)
But yes, I do take personal illness into consideration - I figure, if something serious enough
comes up, I'll have bigger problems than worrying about work. And as I mentioned, I do
get projects finished, when still relevant at the due date. Few managers will complain about a
rare one-week schedule slip, given suitable extenuating circumstances.
Essentially, procrastinators have less confidence in themselves, less expectancy
that they can actually complete a task... Perfectionism is not the culprit. In fact,
perfectionists actually procrastinate less, but they worry about it more.
I procrastinate. Hard-core. I'll put off week-long tasks until the night before.
I don't do this because I expect to fail and can blame starting too late - I do it
because I know perfecly well that I can do that and still finish the task
on time.
If you accuse me of any confidence-related shortfall, you'd have to call me over-
confident. Perfectionist, though? In some things, yes. But I don't procrastinate for
that reason either. Where do these absurd theories come from?
You want to know why I procrastinate, knowing full-well that, while I may not produce
my best results, I also have no doubt that I will succeed in producing an acceptible
finished product? Simple - Because I've found that at least half the time, the
task's nature changes significantly or the task outright goes away. No joke.
In school, teachers/professors would always extend deadlines because most people whined
too loudly that they considered the (perfectly easy and reasonable) assignment too hard
or unfair. Professors would scale back the requirements, excuse subpar work, and often
never even bother looking at what people turned in.
In the working world, most "urgent problems" that come up, go away without any intervention
by the next day. Long term projects have their budgets slashed at the end of the quarter.
reports never get read anyway.
So, by putting everything off until the last minute, I find myself with a hell of a lot
more time to spend on meaningful (aka "self directed") activities.
That doesn't, however, translate to "lazy". When I say "self-directed", I mean
self-directed. I have always impressed my professors or managers not with the quality of
my assigned work, but with the quality of what I do for its own sake. But then, I enjoy
what I do, so my "personal" projects tend to have value to any endeavor I take on.
And all this because I procrastinate, a habit looked down on by most people.
Not every use of a copyrighted work is fair. BackupHDDVD is just as useful to pirates.
While true, irrelevant.
It matters that you can hunt and overthrow the government with the gun, not that you can
use the gun to rob a liquor store.
Well, no. Bad analogy, because knowledge of a gun doesn't equal posession. In the case of
DRM, knowledge of the keys means "ding, dong, the witch is dead".
Funny, that. You'd almost think the empirical method didn't work for deciding historical questions.
Sure it does. It provides data points from which we can then calculate levels of significance.
From that, you can comfortably say things like "probably true" and "almost certainly false".
Strict creationists get caught up on two points...
First,tThat when the bible says seven days, 6k years ago, god made man, it literally means
Earth days and years and that we have no prehuman ancestors. Drop those idiotic concepts,
and most scientists have no strong objection to conceding that sure, god could have
created the universe and put our laws of phsysics in motion, eventually resulting in humans.
We really don't know anything about what existed before the big bang (and very well
might never know), so religion can still have all the fun it wants with speculating on that.
If you want to claim the Divine Iguana sniffed the Lotus blossoming from the navel of allah's
favorite whore, and the resulting sneeze created our universe, hey, no one can say anything
more than "so, nice weather in California these days?". But if you want to make claims for
which we do have an abundance of contradictory evidence, you'd better have more than
"this really old book with no references and by an unknown authorsays so, so it must
ave happened like that", well, best prepare for some well-deserved ridicule.
Second, this idea of "proof" vs "theory" about which you apparently have some
confusion as well. I think most people, but especially journalists and politicians,
should take a basic stats class. Until they can answer the question, "What does it mean to fail
to reject the null hypothesis", they should never, ever have a public voice with which to
spread their own ignorance.
Yes, actually - Did you make it there, that you can prove me wrong? Great
party, BTW, too bad you missed it. Oh, man, when Artemis took her top(s) off...
Wow! And that thing Marduk did when JHVH1 passed out drunk - "Burning Bush"
indeed! Even the local primates remember that one, even if they got it
all wrong...
Get the idea? The line of reasoning you suggest doesn't really go very far,
as the speaker necessarily suffers from the same lack of information of which
he accuses his opposition.
Well that's not very falsifiable, is it?
That depends on your criteria... If you mean a rigorous mathematical "FALSE!", then
no, you can't really prove much of anything false. If you mean the more
common "all empirical evidence says no", then sure, we can call it false, for all
practical purposes.
And perhape more relevantly to the topic under discussion, if
the creator did make the Earth 6k(see below) years ago and then plant
an abundance of fake evidence demonstrating otherwise, well, do you want to
trust an obnoxious practical jokester with your afterlife (if it actually gave you
one, rather than planting the idea in our collective unconscious just to sweeten the
joke when each of us ceases to exist)?
As an aside, which no one else seems to have pointed out - 14k years? Where the
hell did that come from? Strict interpretation of Abrahamic religious writings
support a figure somewhere around 6k years (whether you believe March or October 4004BCE,
or 6am or 12:27pm or what-have-you, you can only really get +/- a few hundred years).
NO major religious sect that I know of (and I wasted far too much of my early adulthood
making it a point to know of such things) uses 14k years ago as the date of creation.
I therefore suspect that either TFA has it wrong, or the mentioned parent has pulled one of the best
real-world trolls of all time, by starting an entirely new twist to the creation-vs-evolution
BS, while not really taking any of it seriously himself.
A $300 phone which can't function as an mp3
player? That's pretty much standard in even cheap
phones...
Oh, sure, it will play them - And despite my
normal dislike of the horrible encoding artifacts
of MP3, I can honestly say that even a low-bitrate
MP3 does just fine for most phones.
I'd rather listen to broadcast radio, static and all.
I have no interest in a PDA phone and neither do the vast
majority of people.
Why do you think Apple came out with the iPhone in the first place?
Two words: Gadget overload. My "man-purse" currently contains
a cellphone, a PDA, a handheld GPS, and an MP3 player (I also carry around
a cute little geiger counter, but I doubt that would matter to most people).
Of those, they all have nearly identical processor requirements, two
of them use SDR (and the cell phone has a GPS received the goddamned
manufacturer won't let me actually use), the GPS and MP3 player
both have an obscene amount of storage capacity, three of them have
fairly high-resolution screens (and MP3 players could benfit from
one), they all require comparable-capacity batteries... Why not
combine them into one device?
Now, you could fairly argue that most people don't need a PDA,
which I apologize if you meant nothing more rigorous than that. But
for those who want even a bit more than the crude address book in the
cellphone, you basically need to go with a full PDA.
Also, add up the price of those individual devices. $300 for a phone,
$200 for a basic PDA, $400 for a decent GPS, $150 for a decent flash MP3
player... $1050 just for those four devices, which have nearly 100%
duplication of hardware resources across at least two of the four.
If you could do the same - without an awkward interface or physical
form (the key point that has doomed most such multi-use devices) - And
sell it for $600-$700, I think some clever company could dominate the
market for three of those four types of device (though not the pure
cellphone market, but anyone needing at least one of the others would
also need a cellphone and probably have an interest in the rest).
But as I said, the biggest problem comes from the form factor and
user interface. Cellphones tend to have god-awful interfaces for
anything other than numbers; PDAs tend to have wide flat bodies that
feel awkward to hold to one's ear; GPS units tend to have waterproof
bodies (a feature that cellphones DIRELY need) and thick, heavyish
bodies. Find a way around those seeming incompatibilities, and you'd
"win" the gadget wars.
This proves that, overall, nuclear energy is probably
not the best solution to Peak Oil and Global Warming.
It proves no such thing. It only demonstrates that burying it in
the back yard doesn't count as the best way to deal with nuclear
waste. The Best solution, the French have used for decades...
Turn it back into more useable fuel, since most commercial reactors
use less than one percent of the U235 present in their
fuel.
Would it be possible to counter the effects of Plutonium
radiation by inserting lead rods around the plutonium core?
Don't think of thes as some type of containers encasing whole spent
fuel rods (which consist of approximately 95% U238 - Only tiny amounts
of plutonium appear after use) in glass... They basically powder the
rods and add the powder to a ceramic mixture, which after baking,
turns into what amounts to a nice solid rock (think somewhere between
glass and pottery).
The problem discussed in TFA, alpha particles act like tiny little
hammers slowly reducing that rock to dust from the inside out.
You can't shield the matrix from the radiation because the radiation
comes from the matrix (or more accurately, from the bits of
powdered fuel rod embedded therein).
Now, I do have to wonder if that really presents so much of a danger...
Although it certainly increases the risk of contamination if
someone stumbles on one of these in 10k years, I had the understanding
that we embed the waste in these ceramic blocks mostly for the
convenience of transporting them. Rather than one-touch-and-you-die
levels of radiation, you can move these around with standard construction
equipment and even survive direct contact with them. Once we have them
in their final resting place, it shouldn't matter if they break down,
because we don't intend to go playing with them ever again.
It probably sucks for the people who raised this money, but it also sucks
for paypal that too many people set up these kinds of things with intent to defraud.
A problem, I think we all agree, but not PayPal's place to fix it.
PayPal doesn't handle the taxation aspects of charity. They don't guarantee
legitimacy. They balk at giving the very refunds they claim they've held the
money to cover.
So what exactly does "charity" status mean, other than a flag on an account
that effectively translates into "Thanks for the 180 day interest-free loan"
(or "less than going MM rate" if they used a PayPal MM account)?
Nice try, but PayPal should not have done this. I know their terms give
them basically the right to tell you to take a hike and keep your money
for any reason, but this will hurt them. Their long history of ripping
people off traditionally hasn't received enough press to harm them. Ripping
off a charity for a dead soldier's family? This could (and hopefully will)
make the cover of the NYT (on a slow news day), and dozens of other major
newspapers.
Time for PayPal to go under. They've played games long enough.
Then went on to state "Candidates with 7 years or more of commercial IT experience
are unlikely to be considered by this particular organisation".
Depending on how sweet the job sounded - Just whittle your experience down to the
upper end of their range (some might call that "lying", but I've heard (IANAL)
that employers can sue for everything they've paid you if you outright lie about your
qualifications, so you might want to avoid outright lies; You can say a lot
without actually lying, though).
Do they want six years of Java? Well, if you worked a decade in "general IT" doing
mostly Java, just "conservatively" pro-rate your actual time spent coding to get
somewhere around 5.5 years experience. In the example you give, what exactly counts
as "commercial?" Plenty of room for interpretation.
That works the other way as well, BTW, but I'll warn all those hoping to get a "better"
job by "overestimating" - Even if you make it through the interview, you can fake
stupidity; you can't fake competence.
Most likely, you won't want to stay there anyway. Companies that post upper limits
usually have serious problems (either they don't want to pay for more experience, or management
has so little clue they fear for their own jobs). But if you need to put food on the table
next week and you can either "underestimate" or starve - Screw 'em. You can put up with a
lot, short-term, for a paycheck.
Minors don't need to be playing excessively violent or otherwise offensive games.
Neither do adults, but that has no bearing on the fact that some of us want to. Your point?
It needs to be crafted in such a way that it doesn't put unreasonable expectations on retailers,
and doesn't indirectly infringe on an adult's right to acquire these games.
And while we add requirements, how about adding a reason to prevent minors from playing
"violent" games? Guess what - We live in a violent world! We live in a world of life
and death competition, tamed only by the thinnest veil of fiction we call "laws". Put two
of the most pacifistic people you can find in a room with limited food, and see how long it
takes one of them to kill the other.
Games just give people an outlet for the very real, natural aggression we all have that
puts us at the top of the food chain.
Personally, I really don't see why the ESRB can't work like the voluntary movie rating system.
Put all the ratings you want on the boxes - I have no problem with that - It lets me rule
out the games targetted at 8YO girls. But when it comes to enforcement of that? How about showing
at least some sort of reason for enforcement. Because we don't all agree that kids
need protecting.
I present myself as an example - I drank, smoked (and not just tobacco), played Doom and Postal, and
although I won't brag about my sex life, didn't find myself wanting for companionship since turning 15
(and had more than adequate access to abundant porn before that, and the internet didn't gain popularity
until my college years) - all while still well under 18.
And now? I have a stable job that gives me a healthy disposeable income, with peers who respect me; I
don't smoke, don't drink to excess, don't do drugs (often); I have a healthy long-term relationship
(though we both consider marriage a bad joke) with a monogamous partner of the opposite gender. Either
I personally disprove ALL the paranoia about what we should do "for the kids", or you'd damned well
better include some exceptions in your world view about helpless innocent li'l kiddies, for people
like me who can "handle" it.
You are not the center of the universe. You are merely
an almost infinitesimal part of the big, grand, large,
larger than life universe.
Exactly - It doesn't matter how good or bad I've lived, how
rich or poor my finances, how powerful or insignificant my influence.
For most of us, only our closest friends and relatives will have
any memory of us at all a decade after we die, and we'll effectively
cease to have ever existed within a century. Even for rich and
powerful, a millenium will suffice to forget us. And for the most
famous of us, the greatest of the great? Well, other than myth,
humans have no reliable records (except anonymous corpses from peat
bogs) of individual people more than 5k or so years ago.
And we have another four billion years to go (and peat bogs
don't do well with global warming).
Children are naturally egoist. You are 22. What is your excuse?
Not having delusions about the meaninglessness of all our lives
does not count as egotistic. Thinking that my life will have
mattered a century from now does. Care to give your
excuse?
...Right up until you consider that only an idiot would have
bought something like that with his own credit card...
I strongly suspect this will end up with 322 people remembering
they lost their card a few months back - And I'd feel inclined
to believe most of them, though no doubt the courts will
put them through the ringer over this.
Critics have argued that the system has not worked
as consumers could be driven to illegal sites to download
music to the popular iPod instead
Who needs to illegally download? DRM'd "CDs" have a much
more serious flaw, from EMI's perspective - They don't
actually stop anyone from ripping them (and as a perk,
they don't play in some audio CD players, particularly
car CD players), meaning users need to rip and
reburn them just to use as intended.
Good to see them giving up, though, regardless of the
reason.
Re:"Why is it so hard to make a good Trek game"?
on
Star Trek Legacy Review
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You haven't been watching Trek since TNG have you?
Since none exists after TNG, I'd say you have that correct.;-)
Actually, in fairness, DS9 lasted another five years after TNG,
but started a year before TNG ended, so gets a pass.
But you make a good good point, if accidentally - Voyager and
Enterprise both threw away everything that made the franchise
great, and they managed to all but ruin Star Trek for a generation.
Analogously, most games try to make Trek into something more like
the style of Voyager and Enterprise, and almost ubiquitously fall
flat.
Mark my words, when a new Star Trek series eventually comes back in
a decade or three, they will pretend those two never happened (or at
best, give a not to Voyager for opening up the Delta quadrant, but
basically ignore most of the episode development).
Re:Guns are the assembly code of politics.
on
Sealand Put Up For Sale
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Willful ignorance of international law and diplomacy
is frighteningly abundant in the US these days.
You talk about "international law" as though it exists
beyond fictional agreements between the big boys with the
most guns.
As for the counterexample of neutral states, they just
happen to benefit from those "let's not kill each other"
agreements as a side effect; When wars spread across Europe,
they have a long history of making relatively safe corridors
through which to move troops to the real action.
As a simple example, tell Belgium how much better
international treaties protected it than guns, when Germany
invaded it in 1914 - Sure, the UK had an obligation to
respond, but had the UK lost, see the GGP's argument
about what actually defines "right" and "wrong" on the
international scale.
To me, Second Life is a 3D canvas that appeals to my inner geek as well as allows me to
create artwork in 3 dimensions that I can let other people view.
Good answer! That, I can respect - Creation of art for its own
sake... Perhaps the most noble of human endeavors.
However, I fear you fall into a VERY small minority, outnumbered by chatters
and those out to make a buck (hey, nothing wrong with preying on the
stupid, but don't make it out as some sort of high and glorious goal worthy
of legal protections). And Anshe definitely doesn't care about more
than how this affects her ability to extract profit from a fictional economy.
Slashdot Mirror
That takes care of software players for HDDVD and there will definitely be no software players for Blu-Ray.
Naive view, at best.
Though a strange turn on our normal bashing, think about this from Microsoft's POV... They sold their souls to the MPAA by including DRM from the kernel on up. If the MPAA then backstabs Microsoft by not letting Windows machines play HD content...
I think it would run something like, "In response to overwhelming consumer outcry, we've decided to strip all DRM (except WGA, of course) from Vista. We sincerely apologize to our users, and hope you'll forgive us for erronously trusting the content industry."
Microsoft doesn't give a damn about us, but it doesn't care about Hollywood, either. It only plays nicely with the MPAA so long as the MPAA provides the ball.
this wouldn't be an issue. There are ways to determine (using system logs, install logs, and the vast information available in the system registry) when content arrived and by what method.
...It scares the hell out of me that you would trust the logs
on a compromised system.
No. You can't.
The "system" logs on XP barely contain enough information to track down serious errors in the hardware or OS (and often, not even enough for that. The install logs only log programs that go through the Windows Installer, which virtually no spyware or virus does. The registry only contains what apps themselves put there - Again, spyware and virii try to keep a low profile, in general. And file timestamps only tell you as much as the last program to touch them wants you to know.
As a forensic computer examiner
When it was determined that the system was being remote-controlled, the boy was spared a lifetime of embarrassment.
And the asshole prosecutor still felt a need to "punish" the kid for doing what all 16 year old boys do - Steal their dads' playboys and share them with friends.
"Land of the free," indeed.
so why don't you stop judging until you find out?
I didn't consider my previous post a "judgement". Just a statement to the effect that the radio station at least took some care in how they conducted the contest. As you correctly point out, however, they apparently grew impatient as time wore on and they still had more than one contestant. My error. However...
If I had "judged" this situation, I'd say they should all die... Every contestant and the DJs. Contests like this exist solely to prove that you can buy anything - In this case, many peoples' dignity and one woman's life cost $500, the price of a Nintendo Wii. Neither side should feel proud of participating in such a sad, sad commentary on American life. And we don't even get the bonus of "Darwin wins - Fatality!", because everyone but this woman will continue competing with the rest of us for oxygen.
So it goes. Moral of the story, people should take the time to learn how to properly operate the single most important (to them) machine on the planet - Their own bodies. And she worked in the medical field? Sorry, just can't feel the sympathy welling up, here. Perhaps if you played some sad violin music...
Right quote, wrong conclusion...
(FTA): obligated to implement "reasonably available and economically reasonable" copy-protection technology
So far, no one has mentioned the glaringly obvious flaw here... No such thing exists!
We currently have states arguing over the legality of "means" tests for voting over showing a $30 drivers' license or state ID. How much does it cost to license any of the existing DRM implementations, if even an option?
Fine. Y'know what? If this passes, I'll write a GPL'd "copy-protection technology". Certainly, no one would ever think to read the source code to find the secret key I'll use, "password".
This is not some mysterious malady. The radio station is off the scale negligent for putting contestants in the position of potential serious harm:
Actually, given the schedule over which they administered the water, NO ONE should have gotten enough to die before their bladders burst (or for those without brahe-ian resolve, peed themselves). They gave contestants an 8oz bottle every 15 minutes.
Now, although I pee once every hour or two (side note - not peeing doesn't cause death from water poisoning; you die from either osmotic hydrocephalus or electrolyte-imbalance-induced cardiac arrythmia), I normally drink almost that much every morning. Between 7am and 10am every (work) day, I consume a full two liters (== 68oz == 8.5 cups) of fluid (whether diet soda or just plain water), and have yet to drop dead from it or even feel woozy.
Now, I have no doubt the lawyers will drag three orphans into the courtroom, who will proceed to extract enormous sums of money from this radio station. But actual negligence? Sorry, this woman must have had some other condition that made her overly sensitive to too much water.
As described, this contest shouldn't have killed anyone.
it would be better to get the work done immediately just in case some bizarre misfortune should befall you on or before the last night (before the work is due).
;-)
Although I'd rather not normally think of it in those terms, if some bizarre misfortune befalls me (great turn of phrase, BTW, Kudos!), the project still goes to "irrelevant" status - But not because the project itself changed.
However, planning on that happening would indeed seem unwise, since it only really works once. But that one time - Wow! Would you want to face the afterlife knowing that, in your last three weeks of life, you completed the annual report on paperclip vs staple use in the third floor secretary pool?
But yes, I do take personal illness into consideration - I figure, if something serious enough comes up, I'll have bigger problems than worrying about work. And as I mentioned, I do get projects finished, when still relevant at the due date. Few managers will complain about a rare one-week schedule slip, given suitable extenuating circumstances.
Essentially, procrastinators have less confidence in themselves, less expectancy that they can actually complete a task... Perfectionism is not the culprit. In fact, perfectionists actually procrastinate less, but they worry about it more.
I procrastinate. Hard-core. I'll put off week-long tasks until the night before. I don't do this because I expect to fail and can blame starting too late - I do it because I know perfecly well that I can do that and still finish the task on time.
If you accuse me of any confidence-related shortfall, you'd have to call me over- confident. Perfectionist, though? In some things, yes. But I don't procrastinate for that reason either. Where do these absurd theories come from?
You want to know why I procrastinate, knowing full-well that, while I may not produce my best results, I also have no doubt that I will succeed in producing an acceptible finished product? Simple - Because I've found that at least half the time, the task's nature changes significantly or the task outright goes away. No joke.
In school, teachers/professors would always extend deadlines because most people whined too loudly that they considered the (perfectly easy and reasonable) assignment too hard or unfair. Professors would scale back the requirements, excuse subpar work, and often never even bother looking at what people turned in.
In the working world, most "urgent problems" that come up, go away without any intervention by the next day. Long term projects have their budgets slashed at the end of the quarter. reports never get read anyway.
So, by putting everything off until the last minute, I find myself with a hell of a lot more time to spend on meaningful (aka "self directed") activities.
That doesn't, however, translate to "lazy". When I say "self-directed", I mean self-directed. I have always impressed my professors or managers not with the quality of my assigned work, but with the quality of what I do for its own sake. But then, I enjoy what I do, so my "personal" projects tend to have value to any endeavor I take on.
And all this because I procrastinate, a habit looked down on by most people.
Not every use of a copyrighted work is fair. BackupHDDVD is just as useful to pirates.
While true, irrelevant.
It matters that you can hunt and overthrow the government with the gun, not that you can use the gun to rob a liquor store.
Well, no. Bad analogy, because knowledge of a gun doesn't equal posession. In the case of DRM, knowledge of the keys means "ding, dong, the witch is dead".
Funny, that. You'd almost think the empirical method didn't work for deciding historical questions.
Sure it does. It provides data points from which we can then calculate levels of significance. From that, you can comfortably say things like "probably true" and "almost certainly false".
Strict creationists get caught up on two points...
First,tThat when the bible says seven days, 6k years ago, god made man, it literally means Earth days and years and that we have no prehuman ancestors. Drop those idiotic concepts, and most scientists have no strong objection to conceding that sure, god could have created the universe and put our laws of phsysics in motion, eventually resulting in humans. We really don't know anything about what existed before the big bang (and very well might never know), so religion can still have all the fun it wants with speculating on that. If you want to claim the Divine Iguana sniffed the Lotus blossoming from the navel of allah's favorite whore, and the resulting sneeze created our universe, hey, no one can say anything more than "so, nice weather in California these days?". But if you want to make claims for which we do have an abundance of contradictory evidence, you'd better have more than "this really old book with no references and by an unknown authorsays so, so it must ave happened like that", well, best prepare for some well-deserved ridicule.
Second, this idea of "proof" vs "theory" about which you apparently have some confusion as well. I think most people, but especially journalists and politicians, should take a basic stats class. Until they can answer the question, "What does it mean to fail to reject the null hypothesis", they should never, ever have a public voice with which to spread their own ignorance.
Why, were you there when the earth formed? No?
Yes, actually - Did you make it there, that you can prove me wrong? Great party, BTW, too bad you missed it. Oh, man, when Artemis took her top(s) off... Wow! And that thing Marduk did when JHVH1 passed out drunk - "Burning Bush" indeed! Even the local primates remember that one, even if they got it all wrong...
Get the idea? The line of reasoning you suggest doesn't really go very far, as the speaker necessarily suffers from the same lack of information of which he accuses his opposition.
Well that's not very falsifiable, is it?
That depends on your criteria... If you mean a rigorous mathematical "FALSE!", then no, you can't really prove much of anything false. If you mean the more common "all empirical evidence says no", then sure, we can call it false, for all practical purposes.
And perhape more relevantly to the topic under discussion, if the creator did make the Earth 6k(see below) years ago and then plant an abundance of fake evidence demonstrating otherwise, well, do you want to trust an obnoxious practical jokester with your afterlife (if it actually gave you one, rather than planting the idea in our collective unconscious just to sweeten the joke when each of us ceases to exist)?
As an aside, which no one else seems to have pointed out - 14k years? Where the hell did that come from? Strict interpretation of Abrahamic religious writings support a figure somewhere around 6k years (whether you believe March or October 4004BCE, or 6am or 12:27pm or what-have-you, you can only really get +/- a few hundred years). NO major religious sect that I know of (and I wasted far too much of my early adulthood making it a point to know of such things) uses 14k years ago as the date of creation.
I therefore suspect that either TFA has it wrong, or the mentioned parent has pulled one of the best real-world trolls of all time, by starting an entirely new twist to the creation-vs-evolution BS, while not really taking any of it seriously himself.
A $300 phone which can't function as an mp3 player? That's pretty much standard in even cheap phones...
Oh, sure, it will play them - And despite my normal dislike of the horrible encoding artifacts of MP3, I can honestly say that even a low-bitrate MP3 does just fine for most phones.
I'd rather listen to broadcast radio, static and all.
I have no interest in a PDA phone and neither do the vast majority of people.
Why do you think Apple came out with the iPhone in the first place?
Two words: Gadget overload. My "man-purse" currently contains a cellphone, a PDA, a handheld GPS, and an MP3 player (I also carry around a cute little geiger counter, but I doubt that would matter to most people).
Of those, they all have nearly identical processor requirements, two of them use SDR (and the cell phone has a GPS received the goddamned manufacturer won't let me actually use), the GPS and MP3 player both have an obscene amount of storage capacity, three of them have fairly high-resolution screens (and MP3 players could benfit from one), they all require comparable-capacity batteries... Why not combine them into one device?
Now, you could fairly argue that most people don't need a PDA, which I apologize if you meant nothing more rigorous than that. But for those who want even a bit more than the crude address book in the cellphone, you basically need to go with a full PDA.
Also, add up the price of those individual devices. $300 for a phone, $200 for a basic PDA, $400 for a decent GPS, $150 for a decent flash MP3 player... $1050 just for those four devices, which have nearly 100% duplication of hardware resources across at least two of the four. If you could do the same - without an awkward interface or physical form (the key point that has doomed most such multi-use devices) - And sell it for $600-$700, I think some clever company could dominate the market for three of those four types of device (though not the pure cellphone market, but anyone needing at least one of the others would also need a cellphone and probably have an interest in the rest).
But as I said, the biggest problem comes from the form factor and user interface. Cellphones tend to have god-awful interfaces for anything other than numbers; PDAs tend to have wide flat bodies that feel awkward to hold to one's ear; GPS units tend to have waterproof bodies (a feature that cellphones DIRELY need) and thick, heavyish bodies. Find a way around those seeming incompatibilities, and you'd "win" the gadget wars.
This proves that, overall, nuclear energy is probably not the best solution to Peak Oil and Global Warming.
It proves no such thing. It only demonstrates that burying it in the back yard doesn't count as the best way to deal with nuclear waste. The Best solution, the French have used for decades... Turn it back into more useable fuel, since most commercial reactors use less than one percent of the U235 present in their fuel.
Would it be possible to counter the effects of Plutonium radiation by inserting lead rods around the plutonium core?
Don't think of thes as some type of containers encasing whole spent fuel rods (which consist of approximately 95% U238 - Only tiny amounts of plutonium appear after use) in glass... They basically powder the rods and add the powder to a ceramic mixture, which after baking, turns into what amounts to a nice solid rock (think somewhere between glass and pottery).
The problem discussed in TFA, alpha particles act like tiny little hammers slowly reducing that rock to dust from the inside out. You can't shield the matrix from the radiation because the radiation comes from the matrix (or more accurately, from the bits of powdered fuel rod embedded therein).
Now, I do have to wonder if that really presents so much of a danger... Although it certainly increases the risk of contamination if someone stumbles on one of these in 10k years, I had the understanding that we embed the waste in these ceramic blocks mostly for the convenience of transporting them. Rather than one-touch-and-you-die levels of radiation, you can move these around with standard construction equipment and even survive direct contact with them. Once we have them in their final resting place, it shouldn't matter if they break down, because we don't intend to go playing with them ever again.
I loved that game! But now it's nearly unavailable, and hard to get running at all. Is there any PC remake or independent spinoff of it out there?
You can download the DOS version at HotU, which runs just fine in Bochs or DosBox.
It probably sucks for the people who raised this money, but it also sucks for paypal that too many people set up these kinds of things with intent to defraud.
A problem, I think we all agree, but not PayPal's place to fix it.
PayPal doesn't handle the taxation aspects of charity. They don't guarantee legitimacy. They balk at giving the very refunds they claim they've held the money to cover.
So what exactly does "charity" status mean, other than a flag on an account that effectively translates into "Thanks for the 180 day interest-free loan" (or "less than going MM rate" if they used a PayPal MM account)?
Nice try, but PayPal should not have done this. I know their terms give them basically the right to tell you to take a hike and keep your money for any reason, but this will hurt them. Their long history of ripping people off traditionally hasn't received enough press to harm them. Ripping off a charity for a dead soldier's family? This could (and hopefully will) make the cover of the NYT (on a slow news day), and dozens of other major newspapers.
Time for PayPal to go under. They've played games long enough.
Let's face it, if you found a coin in a random pocket, would you suspect that it's a bug?
If you had a pocket-full of US currency and suddently a twonie appeared mixed in? Yeah, I think that could raise some eyebrows...
Then went on to state "Candidates with 7 years or more of commercial IT experience are unlikely to be considered by this particular organisation".
Depending on how sweet the job sounded - Just whittle your experience down to the upper end of their range (some might call that "lying", but I've heard (IANAL) that employers can sue for everything they've paid you if you outright lie about your qualifications, so you might want to avoid outright lies; You can say a lot without actually lying, though).
Do they want six years of Java? Well, if you worked a decade in "general IT" doing mostly Java, just "conservatively" pro-rate your actual time spent coding to get somewhere around 5.5 years experience. In the example you give, what exactly counts as "commercial?" Plenty of room for interpretation.
That works the other way as well, BTW, but I'll warn all those hoping to get a "better" job by "overestimating" - Even if you make it through the interview, you can fake stupidity; you can't fake competence.
Most likely, you won't want to stay there anyway. Companies that post upper limits usually have serious problems (either they don't want to pay for more experience, or management has so little clue they fear for their own jobs). But if you need to put food on the table next week and you can either "underestimate" or starve - Screw 'em. You can put up with a lot, short-term, for a paycheck.
Minors don't need to be playing excessively violent or otherwise offensive games.
Neither do adults, but that has no bearing on the fact that some of us want to. Your point?
It needs to be crafted in such a way that it doesn't put unreasonable expectations on retailers, and doesn't indirectly infringe on an adult's right to acquire these games.
And while we add requirements, how about adding a reason to prevent minors from playing "violent" games? Guess what - We live in a violent world! We live in a world of life and death competition, tamed only by the thinnest veil of fiction we call "laws". Put two of the most pacifistic people you can find in a room with limited food, and see how long it takes one of them to kill the other.
Games just give people an outlet for the very real, natural aggression we all have that puts us at the top of the food chain.
Personally, I really don't see why the ESRB can't work like the voluntary movie rating system.
Put all the ratings you want on the boxes - I have no problem with that - It lets me rule out the games targetted at 8YO girls. But when it comes to enforcement of that? How about showing at least some sort of reason for enforcement. Because we don't all agree that kids need protecting.
I present myself as an example - I drank, smoked (and not just tobacco), played Doom and Postal, and although I won't brag about my sex life, didn't find myself wanting for companionship since turning 15 (and had more than adequate access to abundant porn before that, and the internet didn't gain popularity until my college years) - all while still well under 18.
And now? I have a stable job that gives me a healthy disposeable income, with peers who respect me; I don't smoke, don't drink to excess, don't do drugs (often); I have a healthy long-term relationship (though we both consider marriage a bad joke) with a monogamous partner of the opposite gender. Either I personally disprove ALL the paranoia about what we should do "for the kids", or you'd damned well better include some exceptions in your world view about helpless innocent li'l kiddies, for people like me who can "handle" it.
You are not the center of the universe. You are merely an almost infinitesimal part of the big, grand, large, larger than life universe.
Exactly - It doesn't matter how good or bad I've lived, how rich or poor my finances, how powerful or insignificant my influence. For most of us, only our closest friends and relatives will have any memory of us at all a decade after we die, and we'll effectively cease to have ever existed within a century. Even for rich and powerful, a millenium will suffice to forget us. And for the most famous of us, the greatest of the great? Well, other than myth, humans have no reliable records (except anonymous corpses from peat bogs) of individual people more than 5k or so years ago.
And we have another four billion years to go (and peat bogs don't do well with global warming).
Children are naturally egoist. You are 22. What is your excuse?
Not having delusions about the meaninglessness of all our lives does not count as egotistic. Thinking that my life will have mattered a century from now does. Care to give your excuse?
delete all the porn!
;-)
Hey, I worked hard to build up my well-organized archive of porn! Why the hell would I want to go and delete it???
Now, if not for the massive bandwidth involved, I'd want my deadman's script to send a copy to all my male relatives for their... um... amusement.
And unlike the vast majority of long-forgotten dead, I'd have a dozen or so people remember me greatfully at least a few times a week.
Sounds like responsible conduct
...Right up until you consider that only an idiot would have
bought something like that with his own credit card...
I strongly suspect this will end up with 322 people remembering they lost their card a few months back - And I'd feel inclined to believe most of them, though no doubt the courts will put them through the ringer over this.
Critics have argued that the system has not worked as consumers could be driven to illegal sites to download music to the popular iPod instead
Who needs to illegally download? DRM'd "CDs" have a much more serious flaw, from EMI's perspective - They don't actually stop anyone from ripping them (and as a perk, they don't play in some audio CD players, particularly car CD players), meaning users need to rip and reburn them just to use as intended.
Good to see them giving up, though, regardless of the reason.
You haven't been watching Trek since TNG have you?
;-)
Since none exists after TNG, I'd say you have that correct.
Actually, in fairness, DS9 lasted another five years after TNG, but started a year before TNG ended, so gets a pass.
But you make a good good point, if accidentally - Voyager and Enterprise both threw away everything that made the franchise great, and they managed to all but ruin Star Trek for a generation. Analogously, most games try to make Trek into something more like the style of Voyager and Enterprise, and almost ubiquitously fall flat.
Mark my words, when a new Star Trek series eventually comes back in a decade or three, they will pretend those two never happened (or at best, give a not to Voyager for opening up the Delta quadrant, but basically ignore most of the episode development).
Willful ignorance of international law and diplomacy is frighteningly abundant in the US these days.
You talk about "international law" as though it exists beyond fictional agreements between the big boys with the most guns.
As for the counterexample of neutral states, they just happen to benefit from those "let's not kill each other" agreements as a side effect; When wars spread across Europe, they have a long history of making relatively safe corridors through which to move troops to the real action.
As a simple example, tell Belgium how much better international treaties protected it than guns, when Germany invaded it in 1914 - Sure, the UK had an obligation to respond, but had the UK lost, see the GGP's argument about what actually defines "right" and "wrong" on the international scale.
To me, Second Life is a 3D canvas that appeals to my inner geek as well as allows me to create artwork in 3 dimensions that I can let other people view.
Good answer! That, I can respect - Creation of art for its own sake... Perhaps the most noble of human endeavors.
However, I fear you fall into a VERY small minority, outnumbered by chatters and those out to make a buck (hey, nothing wrong with preying on the stupid, but don't make it out as some sort of high and glorious goal worthy of legal protections). And Anshe definitely doesn't care about more than how this affects her ability to extract profit from a fictional economy.
Kudos.