Actually, the were having thousand years of choice and they choose their path, far away from the good and the bad of modern civilization.
Eh? How does living so far into a jungle that nobody can get to you until they cut most of it down a 'choice' to avoid the modern civilization?
If they're truly uncontacted, they likely have no idea whatsoever that modern people exist.
I think isolated people in vast tracts of land isn't so much a choice, as a fluke of geography and history. You go off the established path in parts of South America, and you're an awful long way away from everyone else.
I just don't see a bunch of natives hanging around in the forest all painted up with no where to go.
Why, exactly?
The Amazon basin is immense and large parts of it are almost as remote as you can get on the planet.
It's not like there isn't a long history of remote tribes who haven't really had much or any contact with "modern" people in that area.
Even a lot of the tribes which have had contact are still so isolated from the modern world that there have been only minor changes in their lives.
Short of a little outright disbelief in anything you hear, on what basis would you conclude there can't be any remote tribes that haven't been contacted before?
"All it takes for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing." Edmund Burke
I'm not saying do nothing. I'm saying pick your venue and what you do.
Getting yourself arrested and kicking up a stink might help them say "See, the system is working, we found a crazy person already who had planned to disrupt the flight".
There's a huge gap between doing nothing, and doing something stupid which won't actually help what you're trying to do.
If 1/2 of every flight began doing this, you can bet they'd change the rules (or they'd hide the cameras elsewhere, like they do behind the CRT monitor glass at the ATM machines now)
For starters, I can't imagine you could get half of the people on an A380 to stir up that kind of shit. It's a big plane, and most people aren't that politically concerned.
I have no idea if you can easily request to be let off the plane or not. There are very strict rules to ensure that you can't have checked baggage that flies when you don't. They could conceivably have to empty the cargo hold to find your bag. If you kick up too big of a stink, well, disruptive passengers get arrested and can get fined for flight disruptions.
Activism is good. I'm sure someone will do the kinds of things you're suggesting -- I'm just saying, once you start messing about in airports/planes, you enter into a whole new level of ways to get into trouble.
Don't undertake such acts without seriously thinking if that is the best way to achieve your point and not end up in some serious legal troubles. The consequences could be well beyond what you're prepared to deal with.
Sales of Sharpies and other black magic markers that can be used to black out airplane seat cameras increased in the EU today.
Well, unless you carefully black out the camera before you sit, they'll have a picture of your face. Since the airline knows who was sitting in a seat, they know who you are anyway. If cameras start dropping off-line, and if they're monitored in real time, don't you think someone will notice?
Do you really not think that it will be a criminal offense to tamper with the airline safety system? And, clearly, people with good intentions would never do such a thing, so they'll presume you had bad intentions from the start.
I simply can't believe that they'd neither catch your nor fail to charge you with something. I'm not in favor of being on camera while in flight (I think it's an appalling idea), but I don't imagine the powers that be will react nicely to people mucking about with their security toys.
People seriously pondering something like this should accept the fact that their principled stand might find themselves in some trouble.
A copied song--as it was not produced by the authorized agent--could be considered "counterfeit." At least, that's the closest to understanding that I can get to by guessing. It sounds like someone's buggered all their sense away.
Except, here in Canada, we have the legal right to at the very least format shift CDs we've bought. Arguably, we also have (for now) the right to download songs and the like since they're charging a fee on blank media.
There is no way in hell that anyone can tell from the music on my iPod where in the hell I got the songs. Are they going to come back to my house ans inventory my CD collection from whence it was ripped? Or will they assume that all MP3s are illegal.
I just can't see how this would ever stand up in court.
What amazes me is it says about searching iPod's for illegal content... And in Canada currently it's LEGAL to download music. (Despite the CRIA's objections.)
What amazes me is how they figure they can identify illegal content.
Seriously, how the hell can a border services agent tell that the MP3s on my iPod have all been legally ripped from CDs I have purchased? They can't. I buy probably close to about $1000 CDN in CDs each year, all of which end up ripped and played on my iPods or in mixes.
If they simply look and say anything which isn't an AAC bought from the iTunes store then they'll be flagging a tremendous amount of people for no good reason.
There is simply no way that from an iPod you can verify the pedigree of the songs on it.
For so long I've been proud to live in Canada, but with that fucktard Harper at the helm they're trying more and more to make it America 2.
Amen to that. Harper et al are really sucking up to Bush just far too much. Though, I must say I reserve some bile for the asshat American government (NOT everyday Americans, for you knee jerk mods) for shoving these &*^%&*(^ laws down everyone's throats. America's chief export nowadays seems to be laws to protect the *AA's and screw the rest of us.
There's still no one tool that replaces everything that HyperCard did. The genius of HyperCard was that it brought application development to the masses.
That, was also where it became a nuisance.:-P
I remember gathering requirements from a customer who was looking to migrate a legacy application from a mainframe to a "modernized" package which would capture what they did and how they did it, as well as giving them GUIs and the like.
After we had gathered the information on what the mainframe did, we were suddenly confronted by an app that the engineers had bodged together using hypercard. Absolutely nobody could explain what it did, how it did it, or what was happening behind the scenes. It was, however, the unofficial app they all used to do their work and wouldn't hear of it going away.
However, judging by the user's fanatical loyalty to the HyperCard app, it must have done what they needed quite well.
In the end, after several pilot programs and a few million dollars (yes, really), they canned the project since it would have cost a ridiculous amount of money to completely replace and migrate a 30+ year old app to run on 'modern' machines and with GUIs and which could account for the seemingly infinite number of exceptions in which their data "was always like this, except when it isn't". The business risks of not capturing that legacy app 100% were just too dire. It was boggling to see how many times they could say that their process worked *exactly* like this, and then see in how many cases it didn't even come close. The original system had been added to over so many years that it was beyond understanding (and, they no longer had most of the personnel who did understand it).
Somewhere, there is a retired mainframe guy, drawing his pension, and getting paid $1k/day to keep maintaining the system he retired from. Whe he finally kicks the bucket or retires for good -- that company is fsckd. Only about 3 people were really familiar with the entire system.:-P
I suspect between HyperCard (and the like), mainframe apps, and stuff which was cobbled together in house that there's a stunning amount of applications out there which nobody could ever hope to replace since nobody actually can paint a full picture of how the system works. I predict some real doozies over the next few years as corporate knowledge rots away with the infrastructure.
In the linked FA it says neither insurers or employers can request, require or purchase records pertaining to someones genetic makeup.
However, like most DRM schemes, I'm sure a "hack" will be found soon.
Spot on. They'll likely just have one of their managers buy it as a personal transaction or under a shell company as "market research", or just do it all under the table and find another pretense to refuse you.
Let's face it -- if nobody in HP did jail time for the pre-texting done on their behalf, companies will find an easy end-run around the spirit of this law.
Insurance companies will not readily accept that they need to cover people for known genetic predispositions. It would undermine their models that tell them who is a risk or not.
I seriously doubt the iPod would be their device of choice.
I'm sure Microsoft would sell them on some technology which was more to their liking, and a distribution model where the tracks cost more and only ran on Microsoft approved (provided) platforms. You know, one what automatically bills your credit card for each time you listened to a song.
From what I can tell, the media companies are starting to grumble about the iPod because they figure the 70cents/track isn't gouging us nearly enough for the zero work they do to get it into the hands of the consumer. Well, that and the fact that my iPod allows me to play DRM free MP3s I ripped directly from my own CDs. I'm sure they're incapable to recognizing that I'm a heavy buyer of CDs or that I should be allowed to buy a CD and then play the MP3s wherever I choose.
wonder if game developers have ever even considered that some piracy occurs because the gamers cannot afford the games themselves.
Well, if you can't afford it, don't play it.
I'm not in favor of these measures, but I hardly see why the developers should give a crap about people who can't afford their product. They're, ultimately, not the customer (in any sense).
On the one hand, I don't want hardware installed in my machine that limits my legitimate uses. On the other hand, it's not obvious why the people who can't afford it are the problem of the game publishers.
The middle ground isn't to encourage piracy/borrowing/unlicensed copies on the basis you can't afford it. It isn't OK to cripple the hardware of everyone to protect the rights of content holders who have yet to prove that my machine will be infringing -- that's like outlawing cars because someone might speed or use it as a getaway car.
Significant, non-infringing uses should preclude "possible, suspected infringement, by some people".
EULA's on hardware like the game consoles should be illegal. We buy those, they are not returnable later if we discover a feature of it we don't agree with.
Not only that, but we have to bear the cost of buying machines which have features we don't want in them. The manufacturers sure as hell aren't doing it for free or recovering their costs from the ones who want this TPM crap installed.
An EULA on hardware would be evil -- it's a general purpose computing device, I own it, I retain right of first sale. You (well, not you;-) as a 3rd party have no options to control what I do with it.
Sadly, the media companies seem to have far more control over such things than we do.:(
I continue to be irked by the fact that 3rd parties increasingly have more control over my PC than I do.
I'm not interested in pirating someone's games or music, but I'm just waiting until a fairly obvious operation suddenly becomes disallowed to me because some peckerwood decided I should never be able to do that on my own damned PC for fear that I might be doing something they don't like.
If the media companies had their way, they'd basically get rid of the entire concept of general purpose computing and be stuck with an appliance they could control and which would force us to become a monetized revenue source with marketing options controlled by them.
I'm getting tired of crappy solutions which are mostly just restricting what I can already do.
It's a waste of money to pay someone who doesn't even want to be working for you. Obviously their output is going to be nill so their pay should be nill.
Doesn't work that way. If I give you notice, you still have to pay me.
I don't think you as an employer can take my notice and turn it into a termination and then not pay me. If I give you two weeks notice, you give me two weeks pay.
As an employer you can decide that you don't want to use that time. But, you don't get to opt out of the pay, so, it won't be nil.
Wow, I will have to remember to give four weeks notice next time instead of two.
*laugh* That's nothing. One of our tech writers gave his notice two months ago, and has been working on tying up loose ends since.
I've never actually seen anyone give that much notice.
But, yes, giving advance notice and having them lock you out doesn't sound so bad. I've known instances in my company where someone gives notice and gets told "OK, you're on paid leave until you are done" because they don't want people who are leaving poking around in systems.
I guess to some employers, once you say you're leaving, you're persona non grata. If they don't want to use your time any more, it's their dime.
So, yeah, you definitely need MORE information to play drums on a rhythm game like this than just "hit the pad corresponding to the color of the note". It's a totally different game than, say, DDR, where you don't NEED to learn how to dance to play it.
Interesting. Since I've not yet played Rock Band, I've no experience with the drumming in it, just playing through GH on medium.
How far into the game does one need to go before one simply can't wing it? I don't expect to ever reach Expert, and doubtfully even hard.
I guess it makes sense that it would require some actual drumming technique. It just never occurred to me.
I don't know that Slash is a good indication of anything, especially whether or not actual guitar playing is involved...
*shrug* I'm not a fan of his music, but he's a rock star and I'm not.
From what I've heard, his technical ability isn't anything to sneeze at.
My point is that people whining that it isn't enough like a "real" guitar have completely missed the point of the game. It just seems such a bizarre thing to kvetch about.
In my experience, people who feel the need to bash this game because it's not like playing a "real guitar" usually aren't that good at "real guitar playing".
I figure with all of the actual, real world "guitar heroes" who have been associated with this project, and the fact that a lot of them were fans of it before they got invited to be part of it... any one doing that amount of whining just needs something to bitch about.
Seriously, if Slash and all those guys were fans of it and playing it, isn't the point of how much it's like a "real guitar" mostly irrelevant? I mean, it's a game, and I would think that anyone who is less of a "guitar hero" than someone like Slash hasn't got a whole lot of room to be whining about the fact that it's not "real" guitar.
I wouldn't claim that my "mad skills" of muddling through medium would carry into any actual real-world ability to play music. I've had to learn more about the beats and rhythms of these songs, but I doubt I know much more about music than I used to.
But, seriously, who is claiming that it's just like playing a "real" guitar? If professional musicians play the game and find it fun, us mere mortals bitching about it's lack of accuracy to a real guitar just seems silly. This just seems like a bunch of people whining that the rest of us get to pretend to be musicians in the privacy of our own homes.
To play the Guitar, you only need to know the most basic information about a guitar, but to use the drums, you need to know how to play the drums.
Really? What more information do you need? Hit the pad which corresponds to the color of the note which needs playing now.
It will be one of the six inputs on the drums (three pads, 2 cymbals, and 1 foot pedal.)
Other than overcoming ones own natural lack of rhythm and coordination... what else do you need to know?
Yes, it's a real question, I'm not making the connection to what else you'd need to know. It just seems you'll need to muddle through figuring out how to actually make your neurons help you do it.
I guess the fact that I know nothing about drumming might be blinding me from an otherwise obvious answer.:-P
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Yes, but she has to eat it without using her hands, and no biting. I don't care what it would prove.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I need some 'alone time' after visualizing that.
Cheers
Eh? How does living so far into a jungle that nobody can get to you until they cut most of it down a 'choice' to avoid the modern civilization?
If they're truly uncontacted, they likely have no idea whatsoever that modern people exist.
I think isolated people in vast tracts of land isn't so much a choice, as a fluke of geography and history. You go off the established path in parts of South America, and you're an awful long way away from everyone else.
Cheers
Why, exactly?
The Amazon basin is immense and large parts of it are almost as remote as you can get on the planet.
It's not like there isn't a long history of remote tribes who haven't really had much or any contact with "modern" people in that area.
Even a lot of the tribes which have had contact are still so isolated from the modern world that there have been only minor changes in their lives.
Short of a little outright disbelief in anything you hear, on what basis would you conclude there can't be any remote tribes that haven't been contacted before?
Cheers
Yes, you should just pee in your seat. That'll learn 'em.
Cheers
I'm not saying do nothing. I'm saying pick your venue and what you do.
Getting yourself arrested and kicking up a stink might help them say "See, the system is working, we found a crazy person already who had planned to disrupt the flight".
There's a huge gap between doing nothing, and doing something stupid which won't actually help what you're trying to do.
Cheers
For starters, I can't imagine you could get half of the people on an A380 to stir up that kind of shit. It's a big plane, and most people aren't that politically concerned.
I have no idea if you can easily request to be let off the plane or not. There are very strict rules to ensure that you can't have checked baggage that flies when you don't. They could conceivably have to empty the cargo hold to find your bag. If you kick up too big of a stink, well, disruptive passengers get arrested and can get fined for flight disruptions.
Activism is good. I'm sure someone will do the kinds of things you're suggesting -- I'm just saying, once you start messing about in airports/planes, you enter into a whole new level of ways to get into trouble.
Don't undertake such acts without seriously thinking if that is the best way to achieve your point and not end up in some serious legal troubles. The consequences could be well beyond what you're prepared to deal with.
Cheers
Well, unless you carefully black out the camera before you sit, they'll have a picture of your face. Since the airline knows who was sitting in a seat, they know who you are anyway. If cameras start dropping off-line, and if they're monitored in real time, don't you think someone will notice?
Do you really not think that it will be a criminal offense to tamper with the airline safety system? And, clearly, people with good intentions would never do such a thing, so they'll presume you had bad intentions from the start.
I simply can't believe that they'd neither catch your nor fail to charge you with something. I'm not in favor of being on camera while in flight (I think it's an appalling idea), but I don't imagine the powers that be will react nicely to people mucking about with their security toys.
People seriously pondering something like this should accept the fact that their principled stand might find themselves in some trouble.
Cheers
Except, here in Canada, we have the legal right to at the very least format shift CDs we've bought. Arguably, we also have (for now) the right to download songs and the like since they're charging a fee on blank media.
There is no way in hell that anyone can tell from the music on my iPod where in the hell I got the songs. Are they going to come back to my house ans inventory my CD collection from whence it was ripped? Or will they assume that all MP3s are illegal.
I just can't see how this would ever stand up in court.
Cheers
What amazes me is how they figure they can identify illegal content.
Seriously, how the hell can a border services agent tell that the MP3s on my iPod have all been legally ripped from CDs I have purchased? They can't. I buy probably close to about $1000 CDN in CDs each year, all of which end up ripped and played on my iPods or in mixes.
If they simply look and say anything which isn't an AAC bought from the iTunes store then they'll be flagging a tremendous amount of people for no good reason.
There is simply no way that from an iPod you can verify the pedigree of the songs on it.
Amen to that. Harper et al are really sucking up to Bush just far too much. Though, I must say I reserve some bile for the asshat American government (NOT everyday Americans, for you knee jerk mods) for shoving these &*^%&*(^ laws down everyone's throats. America's chief export nowadays seems to be laws to protect the *AA's and screw the rest of us.
This really is appalling.
Cheers
That, was also where it became a nuisance.
I remember gathering requirements from a customer who was looking to migrate a legacy application from a mainframe to a "modernized" package which would capture what they did and how they did it, as well as giving them GUIs and the like.
After we had gathered the information on what the mainframe did, we were suddenly confronted by an app that the engineers had bodged together using hypercard. Absolutely nobody could explain what it did, how it did it, or what was happening behind the scenes. It was, however, the unofficial app they all used to do their work and wouldn't hear of it going away.
However, judging by the user's fanatical loyalty to the HyperCard app, it must have done what they needed quite well.
In the end, after several pilot programs and a few million dollars (yes, really), they canned the project since it would have cost a ridiculous amount of money to completely replace and migrate a 30+ year old app to run on 'modern' machines and with GUIs and which could account for the seemingly infinite number of exceptions in which their data "was always like this, except when it isn't". The business risks of not capturing that legacy app 100% were just too dire. It was boggling to see how many times they could say that their process worked *exactly* like this, and then see in how many cases it didn't even come close. The original system had been added to over so many years that it was beyond understanding (and, they no longer had most of the personnel who did understand it).
Somewhere, there is a retired mainframe guy, drawing his pension, and getting paid $1k/day to keep maintaining the system he retired from. Whe he finally kicks the bucket or retires for good -- that company is fsckd. Only about 3 people were really familiar with the entire system.
I suspect between HyperCard (and the like), mainframe apps, and stuff which was cobbled together in house that there's a stunning amount of applications out there which nobody could ever hope to replace since nobody actually can paint a full picture of how the system works. I predict some real doozies over the next few years as corporate knowledge rots away with the infrastructure.
Anyway, just a few random thoughts.
Cheers
Spot on. They'll likely just have one of their managers buy it as a personal transaction or under a shell company as "market research", or just do it all under the table and find another pretense to refuse you.
Let's face it -- if nobody in HP did jail time for the pre-texting done on their behalf, companies will find an easy end-run around the spirit of this law.
Insurance companies will not readily accept that they need to cover people for known genetic predispositions. It would undermine their models that tell them who is a risk or not.
Cheers
I seriously doubt the iPod would be their device of choice.
I'm sure Microsoft would sell them on some technology which was more to their liking, and a distribution model where the tracks cost more and only ran on Microsoft approved (provided) platforms. You know, one what automatically bills your credit card for each time you listened to a song.
From what I can tell, the media companies are starting to grumble about the iPod because they figure the 70cents/track isn't gouging us nearly enough for the zero work they do to get it into the hands of the consumer. Well, that and the fact that my iPod allows me to play DRM free MP3s I ripped directly from my own CDs. I'm sure they're incapable to recognizing that I'm a heavy buyer of CDs or that I should be allowed to buy a CD and then play the MP3s wherever I choose.
Cheers
So, Martian dirt. We're done. The presence of organic matter hasn't been established yet.
I'll ignore your random insertion of 'sic' in relation to your own typing since it makes no sense in context.
Cheers
Well, if you can't afford it, don't play it.
I'm not in favor of these measures, but I hardly see why the developers should give a crap about people who can't afford their product. They're, ultimately, not the customer (in any sense).
On the one hand, I don't want hardware installed in my machine that limits my legitimate uses. On the other hand, it's not obvious why the people who can't afford it are the problem of the game publishers.
The middle ground isn't to encourage piracy/borrowing/unlicensed copies on the basis you can't afford it. It isn't OK to cripple the hardware of everyone to protect the rights of content holders who have yet to prove that my machine will be infringing -- that's like outlawing cars because someone might speed or use it as a getaway car.
Significant, non-infringing uses should preclude "possible, suspected infringement, by some people".
Cheers
Not only that, but we have to bear the cost of buying machines which have features we don't want in them. The manufacturers sure as hell aren't doing it for free or recovering their costs from the ones who want this TPM crap installed.
An EULA on hardware would be evil -- it's a general purpose computing device, I own it, I retain right of first sale. You (well, not you
Sadly, the media companies seem to have far more control over such things than we do.
Cheers
I continue to be irked by the fact that 3rd parties increasingly have more control over my PC than I do.
I'm not interested in pirating someone's games or music, but I'm just waiting until a fairly obvious operation suddenly becomes disallowed to me because some peckerwood decided I should never be able to do that on my own damned PC for fear that I might be doing something they don't like.
If the media companies had their way, they'd basically get rid of the entire concept of general purpose computing and be stuck with an appliance they could control and which would force us to become a monetized revenue source with marketing options controlled by them.
I'm getting tired of crappy solutions which are mostly just restricting what I can already do.
Cheers
Hey, whatever floats your boat. Me, I'll get excited when I see the pictures of the little green women.
Cheers
Other than for scientific purposes
Anyone? I mean really, "fine particulate matter eroded from the local soil" is dirt no matter what planet you're on, innit?
Cheers
Doesn't work that way. If I give you notice, you still have to pay me.
I don't think you as an employer can take my notice and turn it into a termination and then not pay me. If I give you two weeks notice, you give me two weeks pay.
As an employer you can decide that you don't want to use that time. But, you don't get to opt out of the pay, so, it won't be nil.
Cheers
*laugh* That's nothing. One of our tech writers gave his notice two months ago, and has been working on tying up loose ends since.
I've never actually seen anyone give that much notice.
But, yes, giving advance notice and having them lock you out doesn't sound so bad. I've known instances in my company where someone gives notice and gets told "OK, you're on paid leave until you are done" because they don't want people who are leaving poking around in systems.
I guess to some employers, once you say you're leaving, you're persona non grata. If they don't want to use your time any more, it's their dime.
Cheers
Interesting. Since I've not yet played Rock Band, I've no experience with the drumming in it, just playing through GH on medium.
How far into the game does one need to go before one simply can't wing it? I don't expect to ever reach Expert, and doubtfully even hard.
I guess it makes sense that it would require some actual drumming technique. It just never occurred to me.
Cheers
*shrug* I'm not a fan of his music, but he's a rock star and I'm not.
From what I've heard, his technical ability isn't anything to sneeze at.
My point is that people whining that it isn't enough like a "real" guitar have completely missed the point of the game. It just seems such a bizarre thing to kvetch about.
Cheers
I figure with all of the actual, real world "guitar heroes" who have been associated with this project, and the fact that a lot of them were fans of it before they got invited to be part of it
Seriously, if Slash and all those guys were fans of it and playing it, isn't the point of how much it's like a "real guitar" mostly irrelevant? I mean, it's a game, and I would think that anyone who is less of a "guitar hero" than someone like Slash hasn't got a whole lot of room to be whining about the fact that it's not "real" guitar.
I wouldn't claim that my "mad skills" of muddling through medium would carry into any actual real-world ability to play music. I've had to learn more about the beats and rhythms of these songs, but I doubt I know much more about music than I used to.
But, seriously, who is claiming that it's just like playing a "real" guitar? If professional musicians play the game and find it fun, us mere mortals bitching about it's lack of accuracy to a real guitar just seems silly. This just seems like a bunch of people whining that the rest of us get to pretend to be musicians in the privacy of our own homes.
Cheers
Really? What more information do you need? Hit the pad which corresponds to the color of the note which needs playing now.
It will be one of the six inputs on the drums (three pads, 2 cymbals, and 1 foot pedal.)
Other than overcoming ones own natural lack of rhythm and coordination
Yes, it's a real question, I'm not making the connection to what else you'd need to know. It just seems you'll need to muddle through figuring out how to actually make your neurons help you do it.
I guess the fact that I know nothing about drumming might be blinding me from an otherwise obvious answer.
Cheers
The irony of which, you seem to have missed.
Cheers