"... although they might mediate the potential harmful effects of violent games... Several... authors have concluded that there is a causal relationship between violent video game play and aggressive behavior, cognitions, and affect... Violent games may elicit not only self-reported aggressive affect (i.e., feelings of anger or hostility) but also anxiety"
I wonder how much of these effects would be evident if, say, sport (e.g. football or ice hockey) were studied in the same way. Or even any other games, like chess (many people can get angry from just about any type of game). Are so-called "violent" video games really "violent" in any sense other than being a simulation of what would in reality be violence? There is nothing violent about using a mouse/keyboard while looking at a screen. "Dying" in a video game is no more like "dying" than time-out on a bench in sport, should that be called "dying" too and studied as if it was something drastic? Surely running on a field where you physically bash into and tackle other people is far more of a "violent game" than any computer game. It seems to me that people are irrationally scared of computer games and anything 'computer-y' or even technological, if you ask me as an emerging 'tech society' we'd be better off doing studies to uncover the reasons for these irrational fears, than wasting money on silly studies of all the "harm" computer games are causing (seemingly not, since millions of people play them now and there hasn't exactly been a sudden spike in violent crime - in fact, the rise of computer games has generally coincided with a steady drop in violent crime).
Perfect! Then a company with lousy procedures that result in glass in their food (and who knows what else) that injures customers can continue operating that way 'business as usual'. Sounds like a great system.
What? Nonsense, I stated clearly that I believe drug companies have motive to be biased (OBVIOUSLY they do). I don't doubt for a minute that they would do exactly as you state. But that doesn't mean every study is tainted or that the drugs have no effect; just because drug companies might be "evil" doesn't mean everything that casts them in poor light is automatically to be taken as gospel, we keep the same scientific mindset regardless. The depression quackery business is HUGE, I wouldn't be surprised if it's measured in the billions, from depression "herbs" to homeotherapy to stones to every other bit of nonsense you can think of - every one of these snake oils salesmen are salivating right now ready to jump on this study as "proof" that you should buy their products rather. Then there are also many churches who don't believe in depression as an illness to be cured with pills (it's a "spiritual problem", you see), plus all those who simply believe that there is no such thing as an illness of the mind (it's all pyschological, you see), or even the common view that people are just feeling sorry for themselves. Depression must be one of the most contested diseases in existence.
Talk about over-reacting. I specifically even said it might not have been the same thing I read about, you respond with "do you work for Ely Lilly" - how ridiculous. Yet in the same breath you automatically assume everything in this study must be the absolute truth even if it contradicts so much existing literature. A wee bit biased, methinks.
I may have been mistaken about the Prozac, as mentioned above.
You're crazy if you believe something just because it comes from a university, many biased studies are done 'through' universities *specifically* to lend credence and hide the sources of funding (it's so easy to almost completely hide the source of funding through one or two layers of university bureaucracy, but *someone* always funds *every* study), and even big-name ones aren't immune.
Sorry, if so, then my mistake - I saw a similar article only about a week ago where it was claimed Prozac was not covered and it seemed like too much of a coincidence that these would not be related, so I assumed they must be referring to the same study.
I don't know what Vista you're using, but my Vista is noticably slower than XP for everything I do (on the same computer I had XP on before) even after turning off all fancy graphics and many unused services and background apps. Maybe SuperFetch is helping and it would be even slower without it, I can't really say, all I know as a user is that the system is much slower, and it's beefy hardware I'm talking about too.
Anyway, I would rather OS developers focus on making the system faster, optimising existing code etc., than introducing bloat, and then adding layers upon layer of additional bloat on top of that to meagerly try mitigate the effects of the original bloat.
It would seem to me things like SuperFetch/preload would have an interesting "side effect" in terms of how people evaluate new software. For example, if I use Word every day, and then install something like OpenOffice and try compare the two, Word will in effect gain an "unfair advantage" - I'm going to perceive OpenOffice as being much slower than Word. (OK, that's a bad example, since OpenOffice really is pretty slow to load, but this would distort the situation to be even worse.) Same story for Internet Explorer for example (most of which loads with Windows, so it'll always be 'super-prefetched') and, say, FireFox or Opera. Most people have little patience, so they'll try the new software for a day or two, get annoyed because it takes so long to load, and go back to whatever they were using.
Regardless, preloading always has a resource cost, and that cost must at some point be carried by other applications. It's a case of trying to make the system 'faster most of the time but slower some of the time'.
What I think you'll find with systems like this is that some application developers will realise that as such a system inherently does not "fairly" allocate resources, some will start trying to "game the system" - e.g. for no other reason than this their application will install resident (e.g. via a tray icon or even some kind of service), thereby ensuring the application is "used" "every day" and prioritised.
I also suspect MS give their own apps priority in SuperFetch, but can't prove that (that's the nature of proprietary software). Hard to say though, since Word and Excel 2007 often do take ages to load on Vista, so maybe not.
This summary doesn't mention it, but I saw another summary of this recently, and as I recall Prozac was not one of the drugs covered under this study (assuming it's the same one I read about).
While the results are interesting and worth keeping an eye on as a basis for further research, we should retain heavy skepticism here. It would be absurd and incredibly stupid to draw major conclusions already from this one small study (like the slashdot headline does). In ANY given field you'll find studies that disagree with most other studies. And for all we know this study could've been funded by a company whose main competition is anti-depressants, for example (e.g. many of the quack "cures") or some other group that ideologically disagrees with anti-depressants, and/or there could've been problems with the methodology --- I mean, we may know the drug companies have a financial reason to be biased, but that doesn't mean no drugs have value and doesn't mean that nobody other than drug companies have reasons to be biased.
so if someone takes (pardon me, "duplicates") our stuff, it's not longer "copyright is not theft!" but rather "get a goddamn rope!"
I realise it's popular to try point out double standards on slashdot, but this isn't one: Saying "copyright infringement is not theft" does not equate to saying "copyright infringement is right". YOU made that incorrect leap all on your own. Saying, rightfully, that it's not theft, is in almost all cases not an attempt to justify the act, just to try keep the debate rational and sensible to ward off the "zomg it's steeealing!!!11!" crowd.
Copyright infringement is not theft. You can argue until you're blue in the face, but by definition copyright infringement is not theft. Is it right? No, very few are claiming that.
Apart from the 'badger in the cockpit' scenario, yes, I can think of many other ways for planes to theoretically potentially crash, some of which are quite obvious: sabotage or bomb on board, being shot down, deliberately (e.g. kamikaze/suicide/treason etc. of pilot), in-air accident/collision, hit by meteorite, etc. etc.
Then I got a new PC with XP installed and realized it was pretty decent
Out of interest, do you know if that was XP SP1 or SP2 already? The first version of XP was an absolute bomb (not as bad as Vista, but apart from the usual driver and sometimes software problems, from a security perspective I'm of the opinion pre-SP XP must honestly have been the world's biggest security disaster. Ever. It practically launched the botnet era, and was also hit by several waves of horribly crippling widespread viruses, as I recall.)
Anyway the the best way to go is to get rid of your ntfs partitions if you make the switch to Linux;)
Having recently migrated a server to Debian, I second that - I was faced with the same choice for an existing NTFS drive (keep as NTFS or convert), and eventually decided to go with properly backing up the contents, reformatting as ext3, and unbacking up. I also noticed little problems here and there with the ntfs-3g support, like directories that didn't show up (I didn't investigate why in depth, but think it may have had to with permissions), possible odd Windows interactions (e.g. Windows complaining about a removable NTFS drive not having been unmounted properly). It's also a bit more of a hassle to mount/unmount (and install the software in the first place), but the second clincher for me (next to 'missing' directories) was that the CPU usage seemed very much higher than any native ext3 accessing - it would actually bottleneck on CPU during copies.
Sorry but this is slashdot. Sticking it to Microsoft NEVER gets old.
I'm about as anti-MS as they come, but even I'll stop sticking it to Microsoft the day they start making good products and start using quality as their primary market differentiator instead of strategy, deception and lock-in. It is as simple as that and the bashing will stop.
To Eddy: Vista may be a joke but it's huge and is selling by the million because most people get it with their new computers and don't know better, and crap as it is, it's the platform of the future that will run the majority of computers sold for quite some time to come... also, ISVs (of which many of us develop for) HAVE TO use it to make sure our apps run on Vista for our customers --- so yes, here in the real world, all these Vista messes ARE news on a tech site where many of us will have to deal with the fall-out in one way or another (whether it's on the corporate side or just helping grandma with her computer etc.).
So just reconfigure the name lookups to use DNS and/or use LLMNR, it hardly sounds like the end of the world to me, although I admit I'm no expert on this.
Surely the interesting bit is not the existence of a health records database (yawn), but the data mining possibilities thereof, and I suspect that Google has the potential/skills/software/vision to do far more interesting things with such a database than Microsoft are ever likely to even consider. This idea is a personal interest of mine - if you could have detailed medical records of a large number of people, and even (think bigger) the ability to later tie in information about e.g. their sleeping/eating/working/exercising habits, environment / geographic location, or even their DNA (e.g. think www.23andme.com - funded by Google), as well as all sorts of other data (e.g. it won't be long before things like heart rate monitors or stomach acid/reflux monitors could be hooked to the Internet and the data uploaded automatically, the possibilities are unprecedented, you could sit and run various 'brute force' algorithms all day to search for new correlations and patterns that nobody has ever looked for (or been able to) before, possibly making hundreds of new medical discoveries very quickly. I'm quite excited by these developments, and hope that people take these ideas to their full potential soon.
IP theft is theft. Just because it is easy to do or everyone does it does not make it right.
There's the source of your confusion right there - you are getting uppety and making irrational claims because you assume that claiming IP infringement to NOT be theft is inherently an argument that it is "right". Who made that claim? IP infringement is NOT theft AND it is not right. That is not a contradiction (strange as that might seem to you), because theft isn't the only 'wrong' activity in the world.
"Theft" and "stealing" are at best metaphors for IP infringement, i.e. "similar to stealing in some respects", but by legal definition IP infringement is not theft and it is not stealing. Is it still wrong, certainly, but stop calling it what it by definition is not just to keep the explicit value judgement.
That analogy makes sense for the pumpkin market, but *by definition* it doesn't really apply to Intellectual Property. IP by definition states that by law only the original pumpkin grower would be allowed to sell those pumpkins - and while that sounds bad for pumpkins, it's not for IP - because in the analogy, he spent ten years of his life and all his savings *inventing* pumpkins, they literally DID NOT EXIST before he invented them, and it cost him a lot to invent them.
A great novel is nothing like a pumpkin, neither is a movie, these things weren't provided by nature and left in a field somewhere and someone just found them and declared a sole right to sell.
Also, Jack O'Lanterns are not a basic need; if $30 was truly "outrageous", everyone could simply choose not to buy them and go without. If people are voluntarily paying $30 for a Jack O'Lantern, it means that the Jack O'Lantern is worth MORE to them than $30, so why is it "outrageous" to charge what the market will bear? Nobody "needs" the latest Britney album or whatever.
Every time you pirate a CD, you are undermining the copyright. You have created another source from which copyrighted works can come, which eats into the value of the copyright itself.
Does this really make sense? If so, it would also imply that every new legitimate copy of a copyrighted work decreases the value of the copyright itself. For example, every time MS sells another copy of Vista, the value would decrease? It also implies that the value of more popular music that sells millions of copies would be far less than music that only sell a few thousand copies. That doesn't make sense. I think, rather, what you're getting at, is that when you make illegal copies of IP, what you are diluting is not the value per se, but you are *removing the artificial scarcity* that the seller has attempted to put in place (distorting the market by forcing the producer to compete with free versions of their own product - making it harder to sell).
The "value" of a copyrighted work is basically the value it imparts to the end-user. A good piece of music that I like, is *exactly* as good, to me, *regardless* of how many other people on the planet have a copy. I get the same "value" out of a software product regardless if I've pirated it or paid for it. Scarcity != value, scarcity = price. Maybe by "value" you really were referring to the *ability* of the IP owner to sell an IP product at a given *price* in the market (it's a bit ambiguous as you stated it). Piracy weakens the seller's ability to determine a selling price.
I still say copyright infringement is NOT stealing: If I make a copy of an album for, say, 100,000,000 or so of my closest friends, I can still get just as much enjoyment out of the album as I could before - the enjoyment is not diluted (except in cases where elitism is part of the experience).
The difference is crucial, there are THREE parties involved not two: When you steal a car from your friend, your friend no longer has a car - but the CAR MANUFACTURER is not affected at all (in fact, he might be MORE likely to sell another car, since your friend now needs a new one, and you were too poor to buy one anyway). When you make a copy of some IP from your friend, your friend STILL has their IP - but the "MANUFACTURER"'s market position is weakened. (It's still not theft, theft is only an anology.)
A related anecdote, yesterday I wondered into a music store (near a big university) I used to sometimes buy CDs from over a decade ago when I was a student, and asked if they still bought and sold used CDs. 'No --- we're closing down'. I asked why, and they said, with a shrug and a sigh, 'people don't buy CDs anymore - they don't want to pay for music'.
That seems kind of sad on one hand. But OTOH maybe music just isn't all as valuable to us as the price tags have led us to usually think. Firstly music competes not only with pirated versions of itself, but also other forms of mainstream entertainment that were unusual ten years ago. Secondly most of the music being pushed by the major labels now really is just crap, and of course people are less likely to buy crap (duh).
XP has 1990s networking support (read that pdf if you don't believe me)
Christ, you made me read the whole PDF: Wouldn't it have been easier to just state the reason mentioned is "Windows XP doesn't have IPv6 DNS lookup support"? Oh, right, because then you couldn't have vastly exaggerated the problem with hyperbolic vague and sweeping statements like "XP has 1990s networking support" (that people would be unlikely to refute because that PDF is so long)... if DNS is the only thing that doesn't work, that's a friggin TINY issue, and could be resolved with a small patch.
caused by a combination of my own stupidity and medical bills beyond my control
Yup, that's one good reason to save money and live within your means - the possibility of medical issues raising their head, which can become very expensive.
Ya know what bothers me? We spend hundreds of millions of dollars on "special education" for students with disabilities but nowhere near that amount of money on gifted students. IMHO, the gifted student deserves at least as much individual attention and praise as the disabled one. I'm not knocking special education by any means -- just saying we should have a similar focus on the best and the brightest students and a desire to see that they maximize their potential in this World.
Yes, very, very good point there. Nowadays we're almost reaching a point where we're embarrassed to say out loud that some kid is much smarter than some other kid for fear of offending the dumb kids or something - I don't know. This is so wrong on so many levels - e.g. apart from terrible allocation of resources, there's also a psychological aspect, i.e. the smart kid gets no 'reward' for doing good, intelligent things, so they will lose motivation (while the dumb kids almost get "taught" that being dumb is to be rewarded). Gifted kids are *precisely* the kids you should be pouring tonnes of extra money into, and praising the loudest, they should be primed into becoming the future leaders of society/industry/innovation etc., they are the valuable ones who are most likely to take society forward in the best way possible. Yeah it's not nice to have to admit that not everyone is equally smart, but that's tough luck, because it's a fact, some people are dumb and some are smart, nature works that way. The brightest kids are light years ahead of the dumbest kids and have infinitely more potential. Bright kids have a hard enough time as it is in life as they're usually looked down upon socially, who still values intelligence? Where I'm from there used to be a 'gifted school' program where they would identify the brightest kids from each school in the area, and give them an opportunity to have extra classes whereby they would receive more advanced e.g. university-level instruction. That school has been shut down sometime in the last decade or so, not sure what happened to that, but nobody seems to care.
Yup, like I said, "all of the above" worked perfectly back on XP even on the same computer. But no, I couldn't leave well enough alone, thought "oh how bad can it be" when Vista came out, and I 'wanted to try the latest':/... also needed a Vista machine so we could our own company's software working on it, so thought I'd use mine. In hindsight I should've just bought a separate system or maybe used Vista on VMWare only, just for testing and nothing else. Will definitely be trying harder to 'route around' Windows in future, probably either by buying more Mac systems for the office, or Linux (at least as an experiment, to see what extent we can live without Vista). The last time I've hated using Windows this much was in the days of crashy Windows 98, so it says a lot.
I don't doubt that others have had better experiences than me, in fact, I can't even imagine it can get much worse (I think anyone who had half as many problems would long ago have either thrown out the computer and bought a new different one, or upgraded to XP or something, thereby 'avoiding' further problems, instead of sticking it out for a year like I've done) - so I do think my case is probably one of the outliers. But even so, it remains a fact that it's been an absolute horror nightmare for me, and the nightmare continues (my digital camera, for example, which I only just got working a couple months ago after large amounts of hoop-jumping, just randomly stopped working again yesterday.. *sigh*.. and this is my story of *everything* with Vista). And I'm not stupid, I *really* do know what I'm doing. And it's a high-end laptop with 2GB RAM that worked 'perfectly' with XP beforehand.
I'm on the verge of putting XP back on the system now, I just need to set aside a couple of days out my schedule (which is about what it takes to reinstall the many various apps I need --- I'm happy that you could do it 4 hours but for me that's impossible, I need amongst others Visual Studio 6, Visual Studio 2005, Photoshop, Eraser, Apache/PHP/MySQL, PostgreSQL, TortoiseSVN, Firefox, Opera, my mail client, PuTTY, Total Commander, a proper text editor, doxygen, Private Disk Light, the cellphone software, the digital camera software, codecs, VLC, WinAmp, Skype, Pidgin, OpenOffice, MS Office 2007, VNC viewer, anti-virus and many more - that's a good two or three days of just straight installing:/). Then on top of that I also (like you) disable unused services and scheduled tasks etc. and do other streamlining, plus there are literally over a hundred updates with several reboots plus antivirus updates etc. --- how do you manage four hours, what kind of work do you do? I just started realised how much I'm doing, no wonder I feel over-extended.
I realise, yes, the system is quite loaded with apps, but then, like I said, the SAME setup was working very well with Windows XP on the very same computer.
In general I have a heterogenous setup whereby I use Mac, Linux and Windows, each for various different tasks. Each sucks at some things, but is better at other things. I 'dream' of the day that the software industry can provide me with one OS and I can just stick to that, but we're not there yet.
I don't think you can say it's the "exact same thing"; the person/company/country/whatever who performs an action provides a context that can and *does* often even dramatically affect the morality/ethics of that action, even if the action appears identical if viewed without context. There are numerous examples of this, e.g. a cop shooting someone in self-defence IS NOT even nearly morally equivalent to, say, a rapist/murderer shooting his victim for fun, even if the "act of shooting someone" is identical (taken out of context). The very act of procuring a weapon is another great example - the act is identical no matter who procures the weapon, but the intent may be very very different (e.g. one person for self-defence, another for shooting up a school).
Likewise a country's intentions make or break the moral validity of identical apparent actions. E.g. 'what do they want to use such technology for'. China is known for its unapologetic ongoing human rights violations (much worse than the US) and has known imperialist dreams.
If you believe actions should always be judged outside of context under the assumption that all acting agents are equal, I'm not sure how you manage to get by from day to day, because this general principle guides us in hundreds of everyday decisions.
We need to get back to a focus on science, technology and engineering if we want to remain competitive
I don't think those are the main dangers, I think the main dangers are economic and demographic - I'm going to be slightly hyperbolic, but we've arrived at a kind of culture whereby you try get as much as debt as possible to buy the biggest house and car possible and fill the house with as much meaningless mindless entertainment as possible all the while avoiding making babies as far as possible and avoiding thinking at all about the real world. Add to that the anti-intellectualism where thinking as little as possible has practically become a cultural imperative and ideal. Cut back on luxuries, spend more efficiently and carefully, actually save a bit of money, have a few more kids, raise them with discipline, and reward and focus on intelligence/science/technology/engingeering (real hard stuff, not just 'how do I launch Word' or 'how do I send an SMS').
Slashdot Mirror
"... although they might mediate the potential harmful effects of violent games ... Several ... authors have concluded that there is a causal relationship between violent video game play and aggressive behavior, cognitions, and affect ... Violent games may elicit not only self-reported aggressive affect (i.e., feelings of anger or hostility) but also anxiety"
I wonder how much of these effects would be evident if, say, sport (e.g. football or ice hockey) were studied in the same way. Or even any other games, like chess (many people can get angry from just about any type of game). Are so-called "violent" video games really "violent" in any sense other than being a simulation of what would in reality be violence? There is nothing violent about using a mouse/keyboard while looking at a screen. "Dying" in a video game is no more like "dying" than time-out on a bench in sport, should that be called "dying" too and studied as if it was something drastic? Surely running on a field where you physically bash into and tackle other people is far more of a "violent game" than any computer game. It seems to me that people are irrationally scared of computer games and anything 'computer-y' or even technological, if you ask me as an emerging 'tech society' we'd be better off doing studies to uncover the reasons for these irrational fears, than wasting money on silly studies of all the "harm" computer games are causing (seemingly not, since millions of people play them now and there hasn't exactly been a sudden spike in violent crime - in fact, the rise of computer games has generally coincided with a steady drop in violent crime).
Perfect! Then a company with lousy procedures that result in glass in their food (and who knows what else) that injures customers can continue operating that way 'business as usual'. Sounds like a great system.
My main concern, which you've not addressed
What? Nonsense, I stated clearly that I believe drug companies have motive to be biased (OBVIOUSLY they do). I don't doubt for a minute that they would do exactly as you state. But that doesn't mean every study is tainted or that the drugs have no effect; just because drug companies might be "evil" doesn't mean everything that casts them in poor light is automatically to be taken as gospel, we keep the same scientific mindset regardless. The depression quackery business is HUGE, I wouldn't be surprised if it's measured in the billions, from depression "herbs" to homeotherapy to stones to every other bit of nonsense you can think of - every one of these snake oils salesmen are salivating right now ready to jump on this study as "proof" that you should buy their products rather. Then there are also many churches who don't believe in depression as an illness to be cured with pills (it's a "spiritual problem", you see), plus all those who simply believe that there is no such thing as an illness of the mind (it's all pyschological, you see), or even the common view that people are just feeling sorry for themselves. Depression must be one of the most contested diseases in existence.
do you work for Ely Lilly
Talk about over-reacting. I specifically even said it might not have been the same thing I read about, you respond with "do you work for Ely Lilly" - how ridiculous. Yet in the same breath you automatically assume everything in this study must be the absolute truth even if it contradicts so much existing literature. A wee bit biased, methinks.
I may have been mistaken about the Prozac, as mentioned above.
You're crazy if you believe something just because it comes from a university, many biased studies are done 'through' universities *specifically* to lend credence and hide the sources of funding (it's so easy to almost completely hide the source of funding through one or two layers of university bureaucracy, but *someone* always funds *every* study), and even big-name ones aren't immune.
Sorry, if so, then my mistake - I saw a similar article only about a week ago where it was claimed Prozac was not covered and it seemed like too much of a coincidence that these would not be related, so I assumed they must be referring to the same study.
I don't know what Vista you're using, but my Vista is noticably slower than XP for everything I do (on the same computer I had XP on before) even after turning off all fancy graphics and many unused services and background apps. Maybe SuperFetch is helping and it would be even slower without it, I can't really say, all I know as a user is that the system is much slower, and it's beefy hardware I'm talking about too.
Anyway, I would rather OS developers focus on making the system faster, optimising existing code etc., than introducing bloat, and then adding layers upon layer of additional bloat on top of that to meagerly try mitigate the effects of the original bloat.
It would seem to me things like SuperFetch/preload would have an interesting "side effect" in terms of how people evaluate new software. For example, if I use Word every day, and then install something like OpenOffice and try compare the two, Word will in effect gain an "unfair advantage" - I'm going to perceive OpenOffice as being much slower than Word. (OK, that's a bad example, since OpenOffice really is pretty slow to load, but this would distort the situation to be even worse.) Same story for Internet Explorer for example (most of which loads with Windows, so it'll always be 'super-prefetched') and, say, FireFox or Opera. Most people have little patience, so they'll try the new software for a day or two, get annoyed because it takes so long to load, and go back to whatever they were using.
Regardless, preloading always has a resource cost, and that cost must at some point be carried by other applications. It's a case of trying to make the system 'faster most of the time but slower some of the time'.
What I think you'll find with systems like this is that some application developers will realise that as such a system inherently does not "fairly" allocate resources, some will start trying to "game the system" - e.g. for no other reason than this their application will install resident (e.g. via a tray icon or even some kind of service), thereby ensuring the application is "used" "every day" and prioritised.
I also suspect MS give their own apps priority in SuperFetch, but can't prove that (that's the nature of proprietary software). Hard to say though, since Word and Excel 2007 often do take ages to load on Vista, so maybe not.
This summary doesn't mention it, but I saw another summary of this recently, and as I recall Prozac was not one of the drugs covered under this study (assuming it's the same one I read about).
While the results are interesting and worth keeping an eye on as a basis for further research, we should retain heavy skepticism here. It would be absurd and incredibly stupid to draw major conclusions already from this one small study (like the slashdot headline does). In ANY given field you'll find studies that disagree with most other studies. And for all we know this study could've been funded by a company whose main competition is anti-depressants, for example (e.g. many of the quack "cures") or some other group that ideologically disagrees with anti-depressants, and/or there could've been problems with the methodology --- I mean, we may know the drug companies have a financial reason to be biased, but that doesn't mean no drugs have value and doesn't mean that nobody other than drug companies have reasons to be biased.
so if someone takes (pardon me, "duplicates") our stuff, it's not longer "copyright is not theft!" but rather "get a goddamn rope!"
I realise it's popular to try point out double standards on slashdot, but this isn't one: Saying "copyright infringement is not theft" does not equate to saying "copyright infringement is right". YOU made that incorrect leap all on your own. Saying, rightfully, that it's not theft, is in almost all cases not an attempt to justify the act, just to try keep the debate rational and sensible to ward off the "zomg it's steeealing!!!11!" crowd.
Copyright infringement is not theft. You can argue until you're blue in the face, but by definition copyright infringement is not theft. Is it right? No, very few are claiming that.
Apart from the 'badger in the cockpit' scenario, yes, I can think of many other ways for planes to theoretically potentially crash, some of which are quite obvious: sabotage or bomb on board, being shot down, deliberately (e.g. kamikaze/suicide/treason etc. of pilot), in-air accident/collision, hit by meteorite, etc. etc.
Then I got a new PC with XP installed and realized it was pretty decent
Out of interest, do you know if that was XP SP1 or SP2 already? The first version of XP was an absolute bomb (not as bad as Vista, but apart from the usual driver and sometimes software problems, from a security perspective I'm of the opinion pre-SP XP must honestly have been the world's biggest security disaster. Ever. It practically launched the botnet era, and was also hit by several waves of horribly crippling widespread viruses, as I recall.)
Anyway the the best way to go is to get rid of your ntfs partitions if you make the switch to Linux ;)
Having recently migrated a server to Debian, I second that - I was faced with the same choice for an existing NTFS drive (keep as NTFS or convert), and eventually decided to go with properly backing up the contents, reformatting as ext3, and unbacking up. I also noticed little problems here and there with the ntfs-3g support, like directories that didn't show up (I didn't investigate why in depth, but think it may have had to with permissions), possible odd Windows interactions (e.g. Windows complaining about a removable NTFS drive not having been unmounted properly). It's also a bit more of a hassle to mount/unmount (and install the software in the first place), but the second clincher for me (next to 'missing' directories) was that the CPU usage seemed very much higher than any native ext3 accessing - it would actually bottleneck on CPU during copies.
Sorry but this is slashdot. Sticking it to Microsoft NEVER gets old.
I'm about as anti-MS as they come, but even I'll stop sticking it to Microsoft the day they start making good products and start using quality as their primary market differentiator instead of strategy, deception and lock-in. It is as simple as that and the bashing will stop.
To Eddy: Vista may be a joke but it's huge and is selling by the million because most people get it with their new computers and don't know better, and crap as it is, it's the platform of the future that will run the majority of computers sold for quite some time to come ... also, ISVs (of which many of us develop for) HAVE TO use it to make sure our apps run on Vista for our customers --- so yes, here in the real world, all these Vista messes ARE news on a tech site where many of us will have to deal with the fall-out in one way or another (whether it's on the corporate side or just helping grandma with her computer etc.).
So just reconfigure the name lookups to use DNS and/or use LLMNR, it hardly sounds like the end of the world to me, although I admit I'm no expert on this.
Not really, not every potential possibility can be found via a few keywords.
Surely the interesting bit is not the existence of a health records database (yawn), but the data mining possibilities thereof, and I suspect that Google has the potential/skills/software/vision to do far more interesting things with such a database than Microsoft are ever likely to even consider. This idea is a personal interest of mine - if you could have detailed medical records of a large number of people, and even (think bigger) the ability to later tie in information about e.g. their sleeping/eating/working/exercising habits, environment / geographic location, or even their DNA (e.g. think www.23andme.com - funded by Google), as well as all sorts of other data (e.g. it won't be long before things like heart rate monitors or stomach acid/reflux monitors could be hooked to the Internet and the data uploaded automatically, the possibilities are unprecedented, you could sit and run various 'brute force' algorithms all day to search for new correlations and patterns that nobody has ever looked for (or been able to) before, possibly making hundreds of new medical discoveries very quickly. I'm quite excited by these developments, and hope that people take these ideas to their full potential soon.
IP theft is theft. Just because it is easy to do or everyone does it does not make it right.
There's the source of your confusion right there - you are getting uppety and making irrational claims because you assume that claiming IP infringement to NOT be theft is inherently an argument that it is "right". Who made that claim? IP infringement is NOT theft AND it is not right. That is not a contradiction (strange as that might seem to you), because theft isn't the only 'wrong' activity in the world.
"Theft" and "stealing" are at best metaphors for IP infringement, i.e. "similar to stealing in some respects", but by legal definition IP infringement is not theft and it is not stealing. Is it still wrong, certainly, but stop calling it what it by definition is not just to keep the explicit value judgement.
That analogy makes sense for the pumpkin market, but *by definition* it doesn't really apply to Intellectual Property. IP by definition states that by law only the original pumpkin grower would be allowed to sell those pumpkins - and while that sounds bad for pumpkins, it's not for IP - because in the analogy, he spent ten years of his life and all his savings *inventing* pumpkins, they literally DID NOT EXIST before he invented them, and it cost him a lot to invent them.
A great novel is nothing like a pumpkin, neither is a movie, these things weren't provided by nature and left in a field somewhere and someone just found them and declared a sole right to sell.
Also, Jack O'Lanterns are not a basic need; if $30 was truly "outrageous", everyone could simply choose not to buy them and go without. If people are voluntarily paying $30 for a Jack O'Lantern, it means that the Jack O'Lantern is worth MORE to them than $30, so why is it "outrageous" to charge what the market will bear? Nobody "needs" the latest Britney album or whatever.
Every time you pirate a CD, you are undermining the copyright. You have created another source from which copyrighted works can come, which eats into the value of the copyright itself.
Does this really make sense? If so, it would also imply that every new legitimate copy of a copyrighted work decreases the value of the copyright itself. For example, every time MS sells another copy of Vista, the value would decrease? It also implies that the value of more popular music that sells millions of copies would be far less than music that only sell a few thousand copies. That doesn't make sense. I think, rather, what you're getting at, is that when you make illegal copies of IP, what you are diluting is not the value per se, but you are *removing the artificial scarcity* that the seller has attempted to put in place (distorting the market by forcing the producer to compete with free versions of their own product - making it harder to sell).
The "value" of a copyrighted work is basically the value it imparts to the end-user. A good piece of music that I like, is *exactly* as good, to me, *regardless* of how many other people on the planet have a copy. I get the same "value" out of a software product regardless if I've pirated it or paid for it. Scarcity != value, scarcity = price. Maybe by "value" you really were referring to the *ability* of the IP owner to sell an IP product at a given *price* in the market (it's a bit ambiguous as you stated it). Piracy weakens the seller's ability to determine a selling price.
I still say copyright infringement is NOT stealing: If I make a copy of an album for, say, 100,000,000 or so of my closest friends, I can still get just as much enjoyment out of the album as I could before - the enjoyment is not diluted (except in cases where elitism is part of the experience).
The difference is crucial, there are THREE parties involved not two: When you steal a car from your friend, your friend no longer has a car - but the CAR MANUFACTURER is not affected at all (in fact, he might be MORE likely to sell another car, since your friend now needs a new one, and you were too poor to buy one anyway). When you make a copy of some IP from your friend, your friend STILL has their IP - but the "MANUFACTURER"'s market position is weakened. (It's still not theft, theft is only an anology.)
A related anecdote, yesterday I wondered into a music store (near a big university) I used to sometimes buy CDs from over a decade ago when I was a student, and asked if they still bought and sold used CDs. 'No --- we're closing down'. I asked why, and they said, with a shrug and a sigh, 'people don't buy CDs anymore - they don't want to pay for music'.
That seems kind of sad on one hand. But OTOH maybe music just isn't all as valuable to us as the price tags have led us to usually think. Firstly music competes not only with pirated versions of itself, but also other forms of mainstream entertainment that were unusual ten years ago. Secondly most of the music being pushed by the major labels now really is just crap, and of course people are less likely to buy crap (duh).
XP has 1990s networking support (read that pdf if you don't believe me)
Christ, you made me read the whole PDF: Wouldn't it have been easier to just state the reason mentioned is "Windows XP doesn't have IPv6 DNS lookup support"? Oh, right, because then you couldn't have vastly exaggerated the problem with hyperbolic vague and sweeping statements like "XP has 1990s networking support" (that people would be unlikely to refute because that PDF is so long) ... if DNS is the only thing that doesn't work, that's a friggin TINY issue, and could be resolved with a small patch.
caused by a combination of my own stupidity and medical bills beyond my control
Yup, that's one good reason to save money and live within your means - the possibility of medical issues raising their head, which can become very expensive.
Ya know what bothers me? We spend hundreds of millions of dollars on "special education" for students with disabilities but nowhere near that amount of money on gifted students. IMHO, the gifted student deserves at least as much individual attention and praise as the disabled one. I'm not knocking special education by any means -- just saying we should have a similar focus on the best and the brightest students and a desire to see that they maximize their potential in this World.
Yes, very, very good point there. Nowadays we're almost reaching a point where we're embarrassed to say out loud that some kid is much smarter than some other kid for fear of offending the dumb kids or something - I don't know. This is so wrong on so many levels - e.g. apart from terrible allocation of resources, there's also a psychological aspect, i.e. the smart kid gets no 'reward' for doing good, intelligent things, so they will lose motivation (while the dumb kids almost get "taught" that being dumb is to be rewarded). Gifted kids are *precisely* the kids you should be pouring tonnes of extra money into, and praising the loudest, they should be primed into becoming the future leaders of society/industry/innovation etc., they are the valuable ones who are most likely to take society forward in the best way possible. Yeah it's not nice to have to admit that not everyone is equally smart, but that's tough luck, because it's a fact, some people are dumb and some are smart, nature works that way. The brightest kids are light years ahead of the dumbest kids and have infinitely more potential. Bright kids have a hard enough time as it is in life as they're usually looked down upon socially, who still values intelligence? Where I'm from there used to be a 'gifted school' program where they would identify the brightest kids from each school in the area, and give them an opportunity to have extra classes whereby they would receive more advanced e.g. university-level instruction. That school has been shut down sometime in the last decade or so, not sure what happened to that, but nobody seems to care.
Yup, like I said, "all of the above" worked perfectly back on XP even on the same computer. But no, I couldn't leave well enough alone, thought "oh how bad can it be" when Vista came out, and I 'wanted to try the latest' :/ ... also needed a Vista machine so we could our own company's software working on it, so thought I'd use mine. In hindsight I should've just bought a separate system or maybe used Vista on VMWare only, just for testing and nothing else. Will definitely be trying harder to 'route around' Windows in future, probably either by buying more Mac systems for the office, or Linux (at least as an experiment, to see what extent we can live without Vista). The last time I've hated using Windows this much was in the days of crashy Windows 98, so it says a lot.
I don't doubt that others have had better experiences than me, in fact, I can't even imagine it can get much worse (I think anyone who had half as many problems would long ago have either thrown out the computer and bought a new different one, or upgraded to XP or something, thereby 'avoiding' further problems, instead of sticking it out for a year like I've done) - so I do think my case is probably one of the outliers. But even so, it remains a fact that it's been an absolute horror nightmare for me, and the nightmare continues (my digital camera, for example, which I only just got working a couple months ago after large amounts of hoop-jumping, just randomly stopped working again yesterday .. *sigh* .. and this is my story of *everything* with Vista). And I'm not stupid, I *really* do know what I'm doing. And it's a high-end laptop with 2GB RAM that worked 'perfectly' with XP beforehand.
:/). Then on top of that I also (like you) disable unused services and scheduled tasks etc. and do other streamlining, plus there are literally over a hundred updates with several reboots plus antivirus updates etc. --- how do you manage four hours, what kind of work do you do? I just started realised how much I'm doing, no wonder I feel over-extended.
I'm on the verge of putting XP back on the system now, I just need to set aside a couple of days out my schedule (which is about what it takes to reinstall the many various apps I need --- I'm happy that you could do it 4 hours but for me that's impossible, I need amongst others Visual Studio 6, Visual Studio 2005, Photoshop, Eraser, Apache/PHP/MySQL, PostgreSQL, TortoiseSVN, Firefox, Opera, my mail client, PuTTY, Total Commander, a proper text editor, doxygen, Private Disk Light, the cellphone software, the digital camera software, codecs, VLC, WinAmp, Skype, Pidgin, OpenOffice, MS Office 2007, VNC viewer, anti-virus and many more - that's a good two or three days of just straight installing
I realise, yes, the system is quite loaded with apps, but then, like I said, the SAME setup was working very well with Windows XP on the very same computer.
In general I have a heterogenous setup whereby I use Mac, Linux and Windows, each for various different tasks. Each sucks at some things, but is better at other things. I 'dream' of the day that the software industry can provide me with one OS and I can just stick to that, but we're not there yet.
I don't think you can say it's the "exact same thing"; the person/company/country/whatever who performs an action provides a context that can and *does* often even dramatically affect the morality/ethics of that action, even if the action appears identical if viewed without context. There are numerous examples of this, e.g. a cop shooting someone in self-defence IS NOT even nearly morally equivalent to, say, a rapist/murderer shooting his victim for fun, even if the "act of shooting someone" is identical (taken out of context). The very act of procuring a weapon is another great example - the act is identical no matter who procures the weapon, but the intent may be very very different (e.g. one person for self-defence, another for shooting up a school).
Likewise a country's intentions make or break the moral validity of identical apparent actions. E.g. 'what do they want to use such technology for'. China is known for its unapologetic ongoing human rights violations (much worse than the US) and has known imperialist dreams.
If you believe actions should always be judged outside of context under the assumption that all acting agents are equal, I'm not sure how you manage to get by from day to day, because this general principle guides us in hundreds of everyday decisions.
We need to get back to a focus on science, technology and engineering if we want to remain competitive
I don't think those are the main dangers, I think the main dangers are economic and demographic - I'm going to be slightly hyperbolic, but we've arrived at a kind of culture whereby you try get as much as debt as possible to buy the biggest house and car possible and fill the house with as much meaningless mindless entertainment as possible all the while avoiding making babies as far as possible and avoiding thinking at all about the real world. Add to that the anti-intellectualism where thinking as little as possible has practically become a cultural imperative and ideal. Cut back on luxuries, spend more efficiently and carefully, actually save a bit of money, have a few more kids, raise them with discipline, and reward and focus on intelligence/science/technology/engingeering (real hard stuff, not just 'how do I launch Word' or 'how do I send an SMS').