and in the end you may still end up owning the RIAA
I think 0wN1ng the RIAA would be a pretty big incentive to fight for the 1337 h4x0r kiddies being sued...after all, who on/. hasn't wanted to own the RIAA at one time or another?:)
Finally, someone who can correct the historical accident that nickels are larger than dimes!!
That isn't historical accident. It was intentional. Silver got pretty expensive in the late 1860s, and by 1873, the "half-dime," which had been an integral part of US coinage since 1794, would have had to shrink yet again to prevent its intrinsic value from growing greater than its face value.
The nickel five-cent piece, introduced in 1866, was the solution to this problem: a coin that didn't fall through tiny holes in one's pocket, had some substantial weight to it, and was far easier to deal with in general. It took another 91 years for the price of silver to get high enough to make dimes, quarters, and half-dollars impractically expensive. (This was at least in part due to the fact that many world governments were still on the silver standard as late as the mid-1960s, which kept silver prices artificially low.)
Ever seen a half-dime? They're pretty literally a half of a dime, maybe 2/3 as thick and 2/3 the diameter (don't have exact dimensions in front of me) of a modern US 10-cent piece.
BTW, it isn't historical accident that a US one-cent piece is larger than a dime, either, although the solution to rising copper prices in the 1970s was (starting in 1982) simply to copper-plate zinc cent planchets instead of making them from solid copper.
Uhm, wait, but collecting IP addys is data. And you also collect what file they were trying to download, and where/who they got it from? I'd say building a track list of a 'social' network of where a file goes and by how/whom is plenty of data.
This argument would make sense...if you hadn't completely ignored the latter half of the original sentence. Let's look at that one more time:
1. No data is collected by our software that isn't already collected when our software is downloaded.
When someone downloads something from my computer, THEY are accessing MY machine. I have EVERY RIGHT to log, publish, or do whatever else I want with ANY data THEY WILLINGLY GIVE ME when THEY connect to MY computer.
This includes you, buddy, so if YOU connect to MY machine(s), YOUR activities on MY PROPERTY will be logged.
Microsofts impression seems to be that the average consumer (in a comical fashion) would say "I think i'd rather the shitty McShitShit Windows CE based CrashMaster 2004 just so I can have the same reliability or lack thereof as my home based winbox".
The sad part of that is WE know you were trying to be funny, but that's really how a lot of computer-illiterate people think. "Gee, if it's from Apple, it must not work with my Dell. I'd better buy the Microsoft version."
Check out MS's hardware department sometime, specifically their mice.
I'll give you that M$ did a good job bringing that scroll wheel to the masses, but have you actually USED their multi-button mice? I can't think of a single one that isn't an ergonomic nightmare of epic proportions. Those extra buttons (besides the R, L, and scroll wheel) are always very poorly placed. And their trackballs are absolutely AWFUL.
Logitech's mice aren't much better.
If you want good input devices, Kensington or other, smaller companies are the way to go. M$ and Logitech make cheap, uncomfortable crap, for the most part.
Pet ferret? Try 'em yourself. Go out at night so you can get 'em before they get hard and too crunchy. They taste like buttery cashews, but with a texture like a fried cherry tomato.
Actually not all that bad, considering they're insects.
Fun Cicada Story #2: I was in Malaysia a few years back, and they have cicadas there, too.
Really BIG cicadas.
Sparrow-sized cicadas.
These things looked like flying toilet paper tubes, except heavier. The first time I saw one at night, I thought it was either a bat or a bird, until one landed on the back of the girl in front of me and scared the living bejeezus out of her. Being the amateur entomologist that I am, I had to check it out, and I was amazed at how much WEIGHT the thing had. It was unreal.
My biggest regret was not finding a suitable shipping container and mailing it back home. I gotta find a Malaysian friend!
And sad, because most of the time, the site doesn't magically resurrect itself five minutes after giving massive MySQL timeouts, and the people who browse at anything above 0 never see the truly informative article text.
I don't like it any more than you do, but there's a reason I keep a copy around -- once in a blue moon I run across a site that simply refuses to work properly on anything else, no matter what. For that brief (and fellow Web designers, listen up: if I an FORCED to use IE to view your site, my visit WILL be extremely brief) time, I can tolerate IE's suckiness.
But I'm using the Mac version, which, well, doesn't suck nearly as much as the Windoze versions do.:-\
The "unknown entity" errors aren't bogus; the unescaped ampersand character has NEVER been "legal" in URIs. User-agents have simply auto-escaped them for so long that not escaping them became standard practise.
Changing all those to & is trivial, yes, but no less necessary for proper validation than an unclosed <b> tag.
So here's some cheap karma-whoring, a repost of the Astrobio.net article.
You Are Here
Earth as Viewed from the Martian Surface by Astrobiology Magazine staffwriter
Consistently highly rated among those memorable 'money-shots' from the current Mars' surface exploration is a view looking back towards the Earth. On Thursday, the Spirit rover team released the banner image showing the Earth as a tiny gray dot in the martian sky near the horizon.
The history of such views backwards towards the home planet, Terra Firma, have captivated the imagination for a generation of astronomers. This glimpse from the surface of another planet offers an unrivalled perspective that stretches beyond just seeing our home as one of many planets, or the only pale blue dot in our solar system.
As Carl Sagan's widow, Anne Druyan , described this perspective image to Astrobiology Magazine, such earth views make "us look at this tiny planet, at the pale blue dot, and to see it in its real context, in its actual circumstances, in its true tininess. I don't know anyone who's able to really see that one-pixel Earth and not feel like they want to protect the Earth; that we have much more in common with each other than we're likely to have with anyone anywhere else."
The evocative phrase describing the Earth as a 'pale blue dot' was coined by Carl Sagan after seeing our planet as a single pixel. The view was taken from the departing Voyager spacecraft. The entire earth could be encompassed as a flicker of light. The first image of Earth ever taken from another planet that actually shows our home as a planetary disk was captured by the Mars Orbital Camera on May 8th.
One question that might be answerable from such a world-view is could a scientist on Mars identify from such a perspective that the Earth harbored life. In 1993, a team of researchers inspired by Carl Sagan, used an Earth fly-by of the Galileo spacecraft on its way to Jupiter to catch a glimpse of how the Earth might appear from afar. For astrobiologists, Sagan's results were surprising.
Rather than seeing the Earth as an obvious candidate for life, the Galileo pictures gave surprisingly few clues of the biological potential of our own planet.
From afar, how Galileo missed the obvious signs of terrestrial life as we would have expected to see them, was at first disconcerting to the scientific community, because future missions aim to observe more distant extrasolar planets and detect what would be visible in the spectra--the 'pale blue dot' scenario.
One answer may lie in the fact that the spacecraft made its observations while still quite close to the Earth.
"The spectrograph was designed to look at small areas of Jupiter, so the field of view of the spectrograph was quite small," said Nick Woolf of Arizona, in earlier discussions with the Astrobiology Magazine.
"Also, since the surface brightness of Jupiter [the Gaileo's intended visual target] is far less than the Earth, the spectrograph detectors saturated except when the spectrograph was pointed at the darkest area of Earth - a cloud-free section of sea," Woolf noted. The cloud-free sea is considered very dark relative to the dominance of bright clouds in a global picture of Earth. Thus it should come as no surprise that Galileo was successful in only imaging a relatively dark and lifeless planet, mainly because its design was not intended to look at Earth, but to probe Jupiter instead.
A spectroscope that might detect infrared or visible light looking back on Earth or outwards to other planets might focus mainly on four gases that are found in Earth's atmosphere and linked to life:
Water vapor - A baseline sign, indicating the presence of liquid water, a requirement of known life.
Carbon dioxide - Can be created by biological and non-biological processes. Because it is necessary for photosynthesis, it would indicate the possible presence of green plants.
Nobody's suggesting "we" do it to all sites "we" find "not correct." (Who the hell is "we," anyway?)
Just this particular set of bastards who have VERY CLEARLY stolen content from at least two sources who DID NOT give them permission to do it -- RTFA.
And I say fire away. It's obvious these folks are intent on screwing legitimate sites. Why else would they take down their illegal mirror of CarEnthusiast and replace it IMMEDIATELY with an illegal mirror of the Finger Lakes Region SCCA chapter's site? If you or anyone else can think of a legitimate reason for that behaviour, I'm all ears...
Other posters have already noted that a useful report would compare these totals to the resources used in the production of other products: home appliances, automobiles, cotton. (The Aral Sea is drying up largely because of cotton growing in the area. It takes about 5000 kg of water to grow one kilogram of cotton. The environmental costs of the pesticides and bleaches used in cotton production I will leave for another post.)
And cotton production near the Aral Sea has what, exactly, to do with the obvious problem of computer manufacturers and software companies forcing obsolescence on computers that are still useful? C'mon, you can't tell me the secretaries at work need a 3 GHz P4 box with a 400-watt PSU to manage a schedule. The people who have pointed out that companies like M$ are to blame for this are spot-on, IMO. Not everyone needs the latest and greatest of everything in order to be productive.
If this report calls attention to the facts that
there are very few established computer recycling programs in the industrialised world
partly as a result of the above, there are millions of perfectly usable computers being thrown away in the US every year
there are millions of people around the world who can afford the energy to run a computer, but who cannot afford the "cost of entry" associated with the technology
then it's a good thing. Yes, there are other environmental problems in the world. But as a wise man once said, try removing the log from your own eye before pointing out the speck in your brother's. People living in industrialised nations have the luxury of being in a good position to actually do something about this problem, but we can't do that if no one admits it is a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
A surefire 5 words to get a +5 post: You're new here aren't you?
;)
Didn't quite work in the above case, did it?
p
Have you ever seen the average woman's handbag?
That's why it has to be tiny...so she can fit it in there with the approximately 85,000 other objects of approximately the same size.
You know, compacts, tampons, cell fone...
p
and in the end you may still end up owning the RIAA
/. hasn't wanted to own the RIAA at one time or another? :)
I think 0wN1ng the RIAA would be a pretty big incentive to fight for the 1337 h4x0r kiddies being sued...after all, who on
p
Will 15 more kids get their 30 seconds of Super Bowl fame next year?
Slashdot won't allow links to URLs containing the word "ads," so here's the text link:
http://www.apple.com/itunes/pepsi/ads/
p
None of the steroids ... would be planets
I don't think the parent was ever suggesting we define such molecules as cholesterol or testosterone as planets...
p
No, it was the Apple I, not an Apple ][, you brainiac.
p
I don't care if this gets modded off-topic, but any mods who think that my post is "redundant" need to start reading timestamps.
When 10 people post "don't use Windows" at the same time, none of them is being redundant. Get a clue.
p
Don't use Windows. That's how.
p
...computer gets mailed!
p
Finally, someone who can correct the historical accident that nickels are larger than dimes!!
That isn't historical accident. It was intentional. Silver got pretty expensive in the late 1860s, and by 1873, the "half-dime," which had been an integral part of US coinage since 1794, would have had to shrink yet again to prevent its intrinsic value from growing greater than its face value.
The nickel five-cent piece, introduced in 1866, was the solution to this problem: a coin that didn't fall through tiny holes in one's pocket, had some substantial weight to it, and was far easier to deal with in general. It took another 91 years for the price of silver to get high enough to make dimes, quarters, and half-dollars impractically expensive. (This was at least in part due to the fact that many world governments were still on the silver standard as late as the mid-1960s, which kept silver prices artificially low.)
Ever seen a half-dime? They're pretty literally a half of a dime, maybe 2/3 as thick and 2/3 the diameter (don't have exact dimensions in front of me) of a modern US 10-cent piece.
BTW, it isn't historical accident that a US one-cent piece is larger than a dime, either, although the solution to rising copper prices in the 1970s was (starting in 1982) simply to copper-plate zinc cent planchets instead of making them from solid copper.
p
Uhm, wait, but collecting IP addys is data. And you also collect what file they were trying to download, and where/who they got it from? I'd say building a track list of a 'social' network of where a file goes and by how/whom is plenty of data.
This argument would make sense...if you hadn't completely ignored the latter half of the original sentence. Let's look at that one more time:
1. No data is collected by our software that isn't already collected when our software is downloaded.
When someone downloads something from my computer, THEY are accessing MY machine. I have EVERY RIGHT to log, publish, or do whatever else I want with ANY data THEY WILLINGLY GIVE ME when THEY connect to MY computer.
This includes you, buddy, so if YOU connect to MY machine(s), YOUR activities on MY PROPERTY will be logged.
Is that clear?
p
For me, the only only time I boot windows is in VirtPC to play poker. Otherwise, I don't even give it a thought
Here, now you don't even need to do that:
Mac poker games
And tell your wife that Minesweeper is available for the Mac too. Might give some of those virus-laden Windroids the kick in the pants that they need.
p
God damn you and the parent poster both.
I now have an unshakeable mental image of Leonard Nimoy sitting in a bathroom stall beating off whilst singing about Bilbo Baggins.
I hate you.
p
Microsofts impression seems to be that the average consumer (in a comical fashion) would say "I think i'd rather the shitty McShitShit Windows CE based CrashMaster 2004 just so I can have the same reliability or lack thereof as my home based winbox".
The sad part of that is WE know you were trying to be funny, but that's really how a lot of computer-illiterate people think. "Gee, if it's from Apple, it must not work with my Dell. I'd better buy the Microsoft version."
p
Check out MS's hardware department sometime, specifically their mice.
I'll give you that M$ did a good job bringing that scroll wheel to the masses, but have you actually USED their multi-button mice? I can't think of a single one that isn't an ergonomic nightmare of epic proportions. Those extra buttons (besides the R, L, and scroll wheel) are always very poorly placed. And their trackballs are absolutely AWFUL.
Logitech's mice aren't much better.
If you want good input devices, Kensington or other, smaller companies are the way to go. M$ and Logitech make cheap, uncomfortable crap, for the most part.
p
Pet ferret? Try 'em yourself. Go out at night so you can get 'em before they get hard and too crunchy. They taste like buttery cashews, but with a texture like a fried cherry tomato.
Actually not all that bad, considering they're insects.
Fun Cicada Story #2: I was in Malaysia a few years back, and they have cicadas there, too.
Really BIG cicadas.
Sparrow-sized cicadas.
These things looked like flying toilet paper tubes, except heavier. The first time I saw one at night, I thought it was either a bat or a bird, until one landed on the back of the girl in front of me and scared the living bejeezus out of her. Being the amateur entomologist that I am, I had to check it out, and I was amazed at how much WEIGHT the thing had. It was unreal.
My biggest regret was not finding a suitable shipping container and mailing it back home. I gotta find a Malaysian friend!
p
Yes, that is rather amusing.
And sad, because most of the time, the site doesn't magically resurrect itself five minutes after giving massive MySQL timeouts, and the people who browse at anything above 0 never see the truly informative article text.
p
They already wrote a patch for that.
:-\
It's called (shudder) IE.
I don't like it any more than you do, but there's a reason I keep a copy around -- once in a blue moon I run across a site that simply refuses to work properly on anything else, no matter what. For that brief (and fellow Web designers, listen up: if I an FORCED to use IE to view your site, my visit WILL be extremely brief) time, I can tolerate IE's suckiness.
But I'm using the Mac version, which, well, doesn't suck nearly as much as the Windoze versions do.
p
The "unknown entity" errors aren't bogus; the unescaped ampersand character has NEVER been "legal" in URIs. User-agents have simply auto-escaped them for so long that not escaping them became standard practise.
Changing all those to & is trivial, yes, but no less necessary for proper validation than an unclosed <b> tag.
p
You Are Here
Earth as Viewed from the Martian Surface
by Astrobiology Magazine staffwriter
Consistently highly rated among those memorable 'money-shots' from the current Mars' surface exploration is a view looking back towards the Earth. On Thursday, the Spirit rover team released the banner image showing the Earth as a tiny gray dot in the martian sky near the horizon.
The history of such views backwards towards the home planet, Terra Firma, have captivated the imagination for a generation of astronomers. This glimpse from the surface of another planet offers an unrivalled perspective that stretches beyond just seeing our home as one of many planets, or the only pale blue dot in our solar system.
As Carl Sagan's widow, Anne Druyan , described this perspective image to Astrobiology Magazine, such earth views make "us look at this tiny planet, at the pale blue dot, and to see it in its real context, in its actual circumstances, in its true tininess. I don't know anyone who's able to really see that one-pixel Earth and not feel like they want to protect the Earth; that we have much more in common with each other than we're likely to have with anyone anywhere else."
The evocative phrase describing the Earth as a 'pale blue dot' was coined by Carl Sagan after seeing our planet as a single pixel. The view was taken from the departing Voyager spacecraft. The entire earth could be encompassed as a flicker of light. The first image of Earth ever taken from another planet that actually shows our home as a planetary disk was captured by the Mars Orbital Camera on May 8th.
One question that might be answerable from such a world-view is could a scientist on Mars identify from such a perspective that the Earth harbored life. In 1993, a team of researchers inspired by Carl Sagan, used an Earth fly-by of the Galileo spacecraft on its way to Jupiter to catch a glimpse of how the Earth might appear from afar. For astrobiologists, Sagan's results were surprising.
Rather than seeing the Earth as an obvious candidate for life, the Galileo pictures gave surprisingly few clues of the biological potential of our own planet.
From afar, how Galileo missed the obvious signs of terrestrial life as we would have expected to see them, was at first disconcerting to the scientific community, because future missions aim to observe more distant extrasolar planets and detect what would be visible in the spectra--the 'pale blue dot' scenario.
One answer may lie in the fact that the spacecraft made its observations while still quite close to the Earth.
"The spectrograph was designed to look at small areas of Jupiter, so the field of view of the spectrograph was quite small," said Nick Woolf of Arizona, in earlier discussions with the Astrobiology Magazine.
"Also, since the surface brightness of Jupiter [the Gaileo's intended visual target] is far less than the Earth, the spectrograph detectors saturated except when the spectrograph was pointed at the darkest area of Earth - a cloud-free section of sea," Woolf noted. The cloud-free sea is considered very dark relative to the dominance of bright clouds in a global picture of Earth. Thus it should come as no surprise that Galileo was successful in only imaging a relatively dark and lifeless planet, mainly because its design was not intended to look at Earth, but to probe Jupiter instead.
A spectroscope that might detect infrared or visible light looking back on Earth or outwards to other planets might focus mainly on four gases that are found in Earth's atmosphere and linked to life:
just imagine I report to /. that you had ripped my site.
Rots of ruck with that.
Someone, please: give us a scenario where these scum, well, aren't scum.
When you think one up, let us know.
p
Nobody's suggesting "we" do it to all sites "we" find "not correct." (Who the hell is "we," anyway?)
Just this particular set of bastards who have VERY CLEARLY stolen content from at least two sources who DID NOT give them permission to do it -- RTFA.
And I say fire away. It's obvious these folks are intent on screwing legitimate sites. Why else would they take down their illegal mirror of CarEnthusiast and replace it IMMEDIATELY with an illegal mirror of the Finger Lakes Region SCCA chapter's site? If you or anyone else can think of a legitimate reason for that behaviour, I'm all ears...
p
If the fires were confined to the present-day Chicago metroplex, I'd buy Occam's Razor.
Peshtigo, Wisconsin, is about 200 miles due north of Chicago. Manistee, Michigan, is about 200 miles away AND across a giant body of water.
Both towns experienced severe fires that night, at least if this post is accurate.
That's some fantastic coincidence if you ask me...
p
Because you're really good at committing the logical fallacy known as "affirming the consequent."
p
And cotton production near the Aral Sea has what, exactly, to do with the obvious problem of computer manufacturers and software companies forcing obsolescence on computers that are still useful? C'mon, you can't tell me the secretaries at work need a 3 GHz P4 box with a 400-watt PSU to manage a schedule. The people who have pointed out that companies like M$ are to blame for this are spot-on, IMO. Not everyone needs the latest and greatest of everything in order to be productive.
If this report calls attention to the facts that
then it's a good thing. Yes, there are other environmental problems in the world. But as a wise man once said, try removing the log from your own eye before pointing out the speck in your brother's. People living in industrialised nations have the luxury of being in a good position to actually do something about this problem, but we can't do that if no one admits it is a problem.
p