You see, that's where you and I differ. I don't think that campaigning for a copyright extention is as evil as a MULTI-BILLION DOLLAR PROFIT COMPANY* exploiting its workers even more than normal by making them share smelly, diseased underwear. I find both undesirable, but only one of them morally reprehensible.
(* Sorry, I hit Michael front page editorialising mode there for a second. I guess people would have totally missed my point if I hadn't felt the need to shout it at them.)
i agree that disney has turned into a money greedy corporation, but i am curious. anyone familiar on when exactly this took place? what was it like in the 50s? 60s?
I can't tell you when it took place but I can tell you that my feelings about Disney have less to do with their marketing and willingness to put their characters on anything that can be sold for a profit and more to do with shit like this.
Let's face it, George Lucas, Peter Jackson et al don't exactly spurn marketing and sales opportunities but I've never heard of extras playing stormtroopers or uruk-hai having to share smelly, diseased jock-straps and other "previously enjoyed" underwear.
My Slashdot karma (like it counts for anything) is "Excellent", so whether I get modded up for the post that you object to or not is pretty irrelevant to me; it's certainly not going to change my life one way or another.
But, whether you like it or not, the post that I wae replying to is factually incorrect. Worse, it's a fallacy that's I've seen repeated on Slashdot several times now. Which do you think is better, just ignoring incorrect information and letting people go on repeating it ad infinitum, or pointing it out and providing the reasons why it's wrong?
Reality check? These might be "just Slashdot forums" but some people assume every unchecked statement here is fact. Knowing that Apple's adoption of USB wasn't what brought USB into the mainstream might not interest you but it might enlighten someone who was under that misaprehension.
And, for your information, the reason why I added the "this isn't a 'PC is better than Mac' flame" is because some people assume any post that includes the words "PC" and "Mac" is a "PC vs Mac" flame, just as some people assume that any post that includes the words "Linux" and "BSD" is a "Linux vs BSD" flame. I wanted to make sure people who read the post looked past the label on their own computers are appreciated the point I was trying to make. Clearly, I didn't totally succeed.
Man, that's such rubbish. USB support on PCs was practically non-existant until the release of Windows 98 (there was a Windows 95 with USB Support version, but it was only shipped a few months before Windows 98 itself, and even then it wasn't in any way as popular as "vanilla" Windows 95).
Until USB was supported by mainstream OSes, there was very little point in PC motherboard manufacturers adding USB ports to their designs. Prior to Windows 98 being released, few mobo models had USB ports. After Windows 98 was released, almost every new mobo model had USB ports on board.
The myth that it was Apple that brought USB into the mainstream is just that: a myth. Yes, Apple was the first to ship USB-equipped computers but to suggest that a few hundred thousand iMacs and G3s, rather than millions of USB-equipped Windows 98 PCs, were responsible for the plethora of USB first generation of USB devices is laughable.
This isn't a "PC is better than Mac" flame, only an attempt to bring a degree of truth to the parent poster's misconception that Apple is able to dictate which hardware standards the rest of the industry adopts. If that were at all true, we'd all be using SCSI drives for storage,Appletalk for networking, single button mice, floppy drives without eject buttons, etc.
Well, it's a good thing that all those industrial waste materials are 100 percent safe, and that there aren't any companies that put profits before public health and the environment nowadays, because there are only 200 public health and environmental laws that George W. Bush has attempted to downgrade or weaken since he came into office.
Bush's presidency is a godsend to anyone who wants to make even more money by tossing the safety manual out of the window.
Each time a new local/remote root vulnerability is found the only way to be certain you haven't been cracked is to reinstall from scratch.
No, the only time that a new vulnerability is found, the only way to be certain that you won't be cracked in the future is to reinstall, or patch. Reinstalling doesn't retroactively guarantee that you haven't already been the victim of an exploit, which is what your post suggests.
I don't think that 10 Pounds is an achievable price point for the least capacious (ie, 128MB) of the most common type of memory (ie, DDR RAM) on the market at the moment.
Think about it: that 10 Pounds would have to include VAT (so that's 1.50 Pounds gone already), shipping to you (say, 2.00 Pounds), profit for the vendor (let's be conservative and say 1.50 Pounds), and the total cost to the vendor, including shipping to them is what's left (5.00 Pounds).
Assuming that the vendor buys from a distributor who takes a cut (say, 0.50 Pounds) that doesn't leave much for the manufacturing costs and any profit that the manufacturer hopes to make.
And that's on a 128MB module; you're talking about eight times as much memory to make up 1GB. Far likelier if prices had got that cut-throat is that one or more of the bigger manufacturer's would have folded or quit the business. And that would have left us with fewer manufacturers and prices that were just as high if not higher, thanks to less supply but just as much demand and less overall competition.
...when I saw this. I paid 200 Pounds for 1MB of RAM (two 512KB SIMMs) in 1990. I just paid 105 Pounds for 1GB of RAM (two 512MB DIMMs) a couple of weeks ago.
I'm not saying that price fixing shouldn't be punished but that comparison pretty much puts things in context. When it comes to putting together a PC, getting a decent amount of memory isn't as financially crippling as it once was.
No, I would rather a President who doesn't hesitate to wage unneccessary wars was around for more than glorious "Mission Accomplished" showboating.
Paying your respects to the dead isn't grandstanding, and accusations of grandstanding aren't why he doesn't do it: being associated with even the slightest whiff of failure is why he doesn't do it.
1. Bush hasn't attended a single funeral, and he hasn't even attended a single homecoming of the deceased. Not only that, but it's his administration that's banned the media from filming or photographing the returning coffins: you might chose to blame Bill Clinton, but he's not the President any more, so quit trying to pass the buck onto him.
I'm sure Bush is really busy and just can't find the time to attend a single funeral yet alone all 550+ of them. All that holiday time (he took 28 days off last year, compared to 13 for the average American) and all those fund raisers (he and Dick Cheney attended over 100 of those last year) must really cut into a big chunk of his schedule.
Isn't it funny how he doesn't mind creating widows and orphans but he doesn't like been seen with them?
Oh yeah, you might also want to look at this post that I made less than an hour an a half before the joke that you object to. Praising Ghandi for being an outstanding human being in a journal discussion isn't what you'd find from a real racist, is it?
I forgot to include the link to the post. Here it is now.
Oh My God. Learn to spot a joke. But if you want proof that I'm not racist towards Indians, why don't you look at someofmyposts in recent discussions.*
You'll note that in every case I'm the one defending India against some accusation or other made by someone who has a "India is bad because..." attitude. And those are only the posts that I could find in the last five minutes. There are plenty more like that.
Oh yeah, you might also want to look at this post that I made less than an hour an a half before the joke that you object to. Praising Ghandi for being an outstanding human being in a journal discussion isn't what you'd find from a real racist, is it?
If my joke was laughing at anyone it was laughing at the idiots who go through life saying "India sucks, USA rocks".
(* Click the links then search for my name. It's not that hard.)
As much as I think the Slashdot editors do a poor job generally, it's a bit harsh to blame them for the cookies set or registration requirements of third party sites.
...if you're Amazon and you're talking about one click ordering, or RAMBUS if you're talking about royalties on DDR RAM, etc. Obviously, if you're not the one holding the patents then you're not so lucky. But if you are that guy then you're laughing all the way to the bank.
This isn't a post about how good patents are. On the contrary, it's a post about how patents can be misused or abused to give one company an unfair advantage over its rivals.
I don't know where you draw the line between good patents and bad ones but it seems to me that a patent should at least illustrate a degree of innovation and invention beyond "Let's take this old idea and put it together with that old idea and have ourselves a licence to print money!", which is where we're at now with the USPTO handing out patents to overly-broad, far from unique ideas to anyone who ponies up the relevant filing fees.
Firstly, I'm not a Tolkien buff, but I do know that the Trilogy takes place over a relatively short time period. (18 months? 3 years? I can't remember which it is off the top of my head.)
Bearing that in mind, I don't think that Rohan is "5000+ km" away from Gondor. Considering that the hobbits travel from the Shire to Mount Doom, two points even further apart from each other than Rohan and Gondor, your statement seems highly unlikely. If I'm wrong, then I apologise in advance, but it does seem incredulous.
Secondly, I know this will sound patronising, but it's a fantasy story, so please let go of the "above the clouds posts and fires would be impractical and impossible" shit. If this was a film set in our world and our time you'd have a point, but it isn't, so you don't. Sorry.
And what does that, or the fact that Pip's role is similar to a small part Gimli's role at Helm's Deep, have to do with anything? We're not talking about scripts and storylines here, we're talking about cinematography.
Lastly, yes, I'm sure that if we disected those scenes, we'd find out that they basically involved flying around in a helicopter and adding a few CGI fires later on. But there's more to cinematography than just pointing a camera at something, just as there's more to directing than just sitting in a chair and saying "action" and "cut" and more to acting than just repeating lines that someone's written for you.
Slashdot Mirror
You see, that's where you and I differ. I don't think that campaigning for a copyright extention is as evil as a MULTI-BILLION DOLLAR PROFIT COMPANY* exploiting its workers even more than normal by making them share smelly, diseased underwear. I find both undesirable, but only one of them morally reprehensible.
(* Sorry, I hit Michael front page editorialising mode there for a second. I guess people would have totally missed my point if I hadn't felt the need to shout it at them.)
i agree that disney has turned into a money greedy corporation, but i am curious. anyone familiar on when exactly this took place? what was it like in the 50s? 60s?
I can't tell you when it took place but I can tell you that my feelings about Disney have less to do with their marketing and willingness to put their characters on anything that can be sold for a profit and more to do with shit like this.
Let's face it, George Lucas, Peter Jackson et al don't exactly spurn marketing and sales opportunities but I've never heard of extras playing stormtroopers or uruk-hai having to share smelly, diseased jock-straps and other "previously enjoyed" underwear.
I know a couple called Rebecca and Mark, or ReMark for short.
How is this relevant, you ask? Well it's relevant because I find it ReMarkable that you tried to pull off such a bad Ghibli/Gigli gag.
I thought my sense of humour was whack but you're so bad you make me look like Chris Rock...
Because I would like to watch one of their productions without selling my soul to the Most Evil Corporation from Hell.
Yeah, right. By any chance, do you see one of these "people you know" every time you look in the mirror?
...for the English-edited version of your post.
...one box to rule them all...
My Slashdot karma (like it counts for anything) is "Excellent", so whether I get modded up for the post that you object to or not is pretty irrelevant to me; it's certainly not going to change my life one way or another.
But, whether you like it or not, the post that I wae replying to is factually incorrect. Worse, it's a fallacy that's I've seen repeated on Slashdot several times now. Which do you think is better, just ignoring incorrect information and letting people go on repeating it ad infinitum, or pointing it out and providing the reasons why it's wrong?
Reality check? These might be "just Slashdot forums" but some people assume every unchecked statement here is fact. Knowing that Apple's adoption of USB wasn't what brought USB into the mainstream might not interest you but it might enlighten someone who was under that misaprehension.
And, for your information, the reason why I added the "this isn't a 'PC is better than Mac' flame" is because some people assume any post that includes the words "PC" and "Mac" is a "PC vs Mac" flame, just as some people assume that any post that includes the words "Linux" and "BSD" is a "Linux vs BSD" flame. I wanted to make sure people who read the post looked past the label on their own computers are appreciated the point I was trying to make. Clearly, I didn't totally succeed.
Man, that's such rubbish. USB support on PCs was practically non-existant until the release of Windows 98 (there was a Windows 95 with USB Support version, but it was only shipped a few months before Windows 98 itself, and even then it wasn't in any way as popular as "vanilla" Windows 95).
Until USB was supported by mainstream OSes, there was very little point in PC motherboard manufacturers adding USB ports to their designs. Prior to Windows 98 being released, few mobo models had USB ports. After Windows 98 was released, almost every new mobo model had USB ports on board.
The myth that it was Apple that brought USB into the mainstream is just that: a myth. Yes, Apple was the first to ship USB-equipped computers but to suggest that a few hundred thousand iMacs and G3s, rather than millions of USB-equipped Windows 98 PCs, were responsible for the plethora of USB first generation of USB devices is laughable.
This isn't a "PC is better than Mac" flame, only an attempt to bring a degree of truth to the parent poster's misconception that Apple is able to dictate which hardware standards the rest of the industry adopts. If that were at all true, we'd all be using SCSI drives for storage,Appletalk for networking, single button mice, floppy drives without eject buttons, etc.
Please, get your facts straight in future.
Well, it's a good thing that all those industrial waste materials are 100 percent safe, and that there aren't any companies that put profits before public health and the environment nowadays, because there are only 200 public health and environmental laws that George W. Bush has attempted to downgrade or weaken since he came into office.
Bush's presidency is a godsend to anyone who wants to make even more money by tossing the safety manual out of the window.
Each time a new local/remote root vulnerability is found the only way to be certain you haven't been cracked is to reinstall from scratch.
No, the only time that a new vulnerability is found, the only way to be certain that you won't be cracked in the future is to reinstall, or patch. Reinstalling doesn't retroactively guarantee that you haven't already been the victim of an exploit, which is what your post suggests.
What if there is an engine fire?
Then you need a fire engine.
I don't think that 10 Pounds is an achievable price point for the least capacious (ie, 128MB) of the most common type of memory (ie, DDR RAM) on the market at the moment.
Think about it: that 10 Pounds would have to include VAT (so that's 1.50 Pounds gone already), shipping to you (say, 2.00 Pounds), profit for the vendor (let's be conservative and say 1.50 Pounds), and the total cost to the vendor, including shipping to them is what's left (5.00 Pounds).
Assuming that the vendor buys from a distributor who takes a cut (say, 0.50 Pounds) that doesn't leave much for the manufacturing costs and any profit that the manufacturer hopes to make.
And that's on a 128MB module; you're talking about eight times as much memory to make up 1GB. Far likelier if prices had got that cut-throat is that one or more of the bigger manufacturer's would have folded or quit the business. And that would have left us with fewer manufacturers and prices that were just as high if not higher, thanks to less supply but just as much demand and less overall competition.
...when I saw this. I paid 200 Pounds for 1MB of RAM (two 512KB SIMMs) in 1990. I just paid 105 Pounds for 1GB of RAM (two 512MB DIMMs) a couple of weeks ago.
I'm not saying that price fixing shouldn't be punished but that comparison pretty much puts things in context. When it comes to putting together a PC, getting a decent amount of memory isn't as financially crippling as it once was.
No, I would rather a President who doesn't hesitate to wage unneccessary wars was around for more than glorious "Mission Accomplished" showboating.
Paying your respects to the dead isn't grandstanding, and accusations of grandstanding aren't why he doesn't do it: being associated with even the slightest whiff of failure is why he doesn't do it.
1. Bush hasn't attended a single funeral, and he hasn't even attended a single homecoming of the deceased. Not only that, but it's his administration that's banned the media from filming or photographing the returning coffins: you might chose to blame Bill Clinton, but he's not the President any more, so quit trying to pass the buck onto him.
I'm sure Bush is really busy and just can't find the time to attend a single funeral yet alone all 550+ of them. All that holiday time (he took 28 days off last year, compared to 13 for the average American) and all those fund raisers (he and Dick Cheney attended over 100 of those last year) must really cut into a big chunk of his schedule.
Isn't it funny how he doesn't mind creating widows and orphans but he doesn't like been seen with them?
Oh yeah, you might also want to look at this post that I made less than an hour an a half before the joke that you object to. Praising Ghandi for being an outstanding human being in a journal discussion isn't what you'd find from a real racist, is it?
I forgot to include the link to the post. Here it is now.
I think I've proved my point.
Oh My God. Learn to spot a joke. But if you want proof that I'm not racist towards Indians, why don't you look at some of my posts in recent discussions.*
You'll note that in every case I'm the one defending India against some accusation or other made by someone who has a "India is bad because..." attitude. And those are only the posts that I could find in the last five minutes. There are plenty more like that.
Oh yeah, you might also want to look at this post that I made less than an hour an a half before the joke that you object to. Praising Ghandi for being an outstanding human being in a journal discussion isn't what you'd find from a real racist, is it?
If my joke was laughing at anyone it was laughing at the idiots who go through life saying "India sucks, USA rocks".
(* Click the links then search for my name. It's not that hard.)
Now their stealing our asteroid collisions too!
As much as I think the Slashdot editors do a poor job generally, it's a bit harsh to blame them for the cookies set or registration requirements of third party sites.
What is this "A" that you are referring to?
Someone please inform the Pentagon that m1a1's sense of humour is MIA.
Dude, it's a joke. Lighten up before you get an ulcer.
Sheesh. And I thought I was tense...
Great I can pick it up at the same time as my pre-ordered copy of Duke Nukem Forever!
...if you're Amazon and you're talking about one click ordering, or RAMBUS if you're talking about royalties on DDR RAM, etc. Obviously, if you're not the one holding the patents then you're not so lucky. But if you are that guy then you're laughing all the way to the bank.
This isn't a post about how good patents are. On the contrary, it's a post about how patents can be misused or abused to give one company an unfair advantage over its rivals.
I don't know where you draw the line between good patents and bad ones but it seems to me that a patent should at least illustrate a degree of innovation and invention beyond "Let's take this old idea and put it together with that old idea and have ourselves a licence to print money!", which is where we're at now with the USPTO handing out patents to overly-broad, far from unique ideas to anyone who ponies up the relevant filing fees.
Firstly, I'm not a Tolkien buff, but I do know that the Trilogy takes place over a relatively short time period. (18 months? 3 years? I can't remember which it is off the top of my head.)
Bearing that in mind, I don't think that Rohan is "5000+ km" away from Gondor. Considering that the hobbits travel from the Shire to Mount Doom, two points even further apart from each other than Rohan and Gondor, your statement seems highly unlikely. If I'm wrong, then I apologise in advance, but it does seem incredulous.
Secondly, I know this will sound patronising, but it's a fantasy story, so please let go of the "above the clouds posts and fires would be impractical and impossible" shit. If this was a film set in our world and our time you'd have a point, but it isn't, so you don't. Sorry.
And what does that, or the fact that Pip's role is similar to a small part Gimli's role at Helm's Deep, have to do with anything? We're not talking about scripts and storylines here, we're talking about cinematography.
Lastly, yes, I'm sure that if we disected those scenes, we'd find out that they basically involved flying around in a helicopter and adding a few CGI fires later on. But there's more to cinematography than just pointing a camera at something, just as there's more to directing than just sitting in a chair and saying "action" and "cut" and more to acting than just repeating lines that someone's written for you.