Thank you for that. I'm surprised at how many Slashdotters have difficulty grasping the idea that the studios are simply trying to sell you a product for a price that allows them to turn a profit. A maximized profit, to be sure, but it's clear that one sale at $20 followed by an infinite number of copies is untenable.
It seems to be a conflict of basic rights: the fair use rights vs. the right to enforce the no-duplication contract. That contract is implicit, to be sure, but can you imagine the spaz attack Slashdot would throw if people were forced to sign an explicit "you will not give away/sell/etc copies of this disc" every time they went down to Best Buy?
Slashdot hits them both ways on it. When they try to make copying impossible, they'll de-solder chips from the boards to get around it and accuse the studios of treating them like criminals. When they sue those who actually are criminals, or even try to figure out the identities of people who appear to be criminals, Slashdot throws a different spaz attack.
I can't think of any way to resolve that conflict: anything that allowed you to make excerpts or backups or format-shift would also be used to make things freely available P2P. There are frequent calls for "a new business model", usually by non-musicians calling for musicians to give up on selling CDs as a way to make a living. And I can hardly imagine how that's supposed to apply to movie studios: will the next Indiana Jones movie come out in the form of Harrison Ford and Sean Connery dropping by the local playhouse in hopes of selling some Indiana Jones tee-shirts?
It doesn't help that the RIAA and MPAA are being incredibly ham-handed in their approaches, but I'm no more thrilled with the way J. Random Slashdotter insists on his rights with no thoughts about the rights of anybody else. I'd much rather see Slashdot debate a cogent solution than complain about their treatment under the current regime.
(Just because I hate coming in to Slashdot and watching everybody post "Boy, they must be morons!" over and over).
Building a map of the school is obviously harmless. But think of how the map is used in the video game: you wander the halls shooting at things. I think you can understand how, immediately after Virginia Tech, this is going to make people a little bit nervous. If I'd discovered this, I would at least want to have a talk with the kid.
It's also obvious that they've massively overreacted. The hammer is an object of no interest; he had a reasonable alibi for having it. Although it's a cause for concern, it's also clear that it's fun to imagine shooting up monsters (not students) in a video game.
(I should note, however, that in a high school I am associated with, a student was brained by another student in broad daylight DURING CLASS with a hammer. His only disguise was a sweat shirt hood, but everybody recognized him and he was immediately arrested. He was, clearly, an idiot.)
So I'm not going to defend the overreaction, but I'd really like to see people admit that there was reasonable cause for at least a little concern here. They should have talked with him, figured out that he was no trouble, and dropped it. But completely ignoring the situation wouldn't have been right, either.
It's disappointing to hear that meta-moderating didn't catch that. I like to meta-moderate when I'm bored just because it lets me see a few random comments that somebody thought were interesting, but I'd always sorta hoped that some algorithm somewhere was noticing when somebody was judged unfair a lot.
Glad to hear that the jerk is off your case.
I'm curious: did they say who it was? I wonder if it was "Dr. Manhattan", who has declared himself your foe. (He shows up on your freaks page.) I'd love to think that a Slashdotter is too clever to actually announce himself before a vendetta, but hey, it takes all kinds.
I don't think so. There are a couple of things going on here:
1. This only applies to other countries.
2. It only applies to the AT&T patents inside the software.
It seems that the OEMs are nominally responsible for securing AT&T's patents in those countries before distributing the software. So if you're in Asia pirating copies of Windows, both Microsoft and AT&T will be suing you.
If you're in the US, only Microsoft will sue you, and part of the money they take out of your hide should go to AT&T.
So AT&T should, theoretically, be going after these OEMs; Microsoft isn't on the hook to pay them. But it's a lot easier for AT&T to pursue Microsoft than a bunch of Microsoft's OEMs./IANAL
Because I can hardly see somebody trying to fence an iPod with the little proviso that you have to keep around a fake thumbprint in order to use it.
Crime is something you deter, not forbid. Slashdotters get used to security being absolute because we work with computers, where we tend to put all of our data eggs in one password basket. Security of physical objects is much more about making it inconvenient, not impossible, to steal something.
But I don't think it's a major draw of power overall. If it's only 40 watts, it's going to be a much smaller power drain than the refrigerator/washer/air conditioner/computer. And all it's doing is charging cell phones or mp3 players, it would be on for only a few hours a day, at most.
It is throwing away power, but you'd almost certainly save more energy by proper insulation, getting over your hatred of compact fluorescent light bulbs, buying a new (and more efficient) water heater, etc. It seems penny-wise/pound foolish to worry about a few watt-hours per day for convenience when kilowatt-hours are being used.
It does happen, but I've found in my own experience that I'm often modded up for posts counter to the Slashthink.
I hold (or at least, express on Slashdot) contrarian views on several issues. I try to express them reasonably and politely, and find that I'm often moderated up for those posts, even though most of the other posts express the opposite views. It's as though there's a large but fairly silent majority on those issues, people with enough karma to have mod points.
Yeah, some days I get moderated down well under water before that happens (usually when I'm being too snide or to subtle in my sarcasm), but that's not often, and my karma can take it.
I can't guarantee that any particular posting will survive the whims of the moderators, but it seems to me that a whole view is rarely suppressed: somebody's similar postings will be modded up. (If you're the only one on Slashdot who thinks a particular way, then you're probably wrong about whatever it is. There's always somebody out there who agrees with you unless you're batshit crazy.)
I think that the proof of the pudding is in the eating: I find that although the Slashthink often infuriates me, there are enough insightful comments that it's worth going in to many articles. That's especially true when I feel there's something missing in the story, e.g. some energy breakthrough which I'm certain is overplayed but I don't know why.
Can you cite some evidence of that? I've never heard of Google taking money for higher rankings, and I've been using it since it was google.stanford.edu.
Wikipedia doesn't mention it, not that that necessarily means much. I'm willing to "take off the blinders" but thus far I'm not seeing anything except your allegation.
EMI's experiment in non-protected sales of music may be the news you missed. That's a genuinely new model for them: put it out there at $1.29 and hope that people would rather buy it reliably from a store than depend on unreliable P2P networks, getting it from friends, etc.
This model probably does still depend on considerable numbers of lawsuits. If P2P is unreliable it's only because they keep suing people, driving them out of business, and making people scared to keep their shares open lest the lawyers come down upon them like locusts. Otherwise everybody would have long since joined Napster and downloaded everything for free.
This change doesn't work without other changes. They make considerably less money selling 1 song for $1.29 than selling 12 songs for $18. Their model still depends on massive marketing to make you spend $1.29 at iTMS for a song, when you can get legal songs for less at eMusic. The difference is that you hear the songs at iTMS on the radio, in TV ads, in record stores, etc.
So EMI (via the RIAA) will still have to keep up pressure on the P2P services and allofmp3.com. But they are at least trying a small change in the business model, and that may lead to other changes, ultimately resulting in (hopefully) fewer lawsuits.
Or they'll discover that it doesn't work. Part of the problem with heavy marketing and trying to make a song universal is that people can just get it from their friends. And if the album is dead, people are shying away from the dreck they hear on Clear Channel, then everybody eventually ends up buying something they really like from eMusic instead. The major labels become far less profitable, dwindle, and maybe die.
The face on Mars was really more a trick of the shadows, exacerbated by the low resolution photography. This is on the relatively smooth surface of Saturn, without shadows. This is also a rather simple shape, unlike a face, which we have special circuitry in our brains to recognize (like the face of Jesus in a grilled cheese sandwich.)
We have much higher resolution pictures of this phenomenon relative to its scale. It could be a lot of things, including mere coincidence, though it seems more likely to be real. Unlike a face, which would have required a civilization (or wild coincidence) to create, there's reason to believe that there is a physical mechanism. It just may or may not be the one suggested in the article (though I'm willing to bet it's at least distantly related).
Good point. I sure wouldn't mind a voting holiday, though I'd like to see it extended a bit to ensure that those people who have to work anyway get to vote.
It's also possible that changing the way we vote, e.g. mail and/or internet voting, would allow more people to vote. Unfortunately, those are also fraught with problems: there's no way to ensure a secret ballot. That leads to the possibility of vote buying, coercion, etc.
I do like the idea of early voting, like they have in some states already. Leave the polls open for a week, and then few people have an excuse to miss it entirely. But ensuring fairness is a hassle; it's hard enough to get volunteers for the single day of polling.
Sux that you got modded flamebait. Your point is extremely reasonable.
The thing that frustrates me most is the percentage shift in Bush's approval rating from the election to today. That 28% who still believe in him... well, I disagree, but at least they're being consistent. But there are some 20-25% of the American voters who believed in him on the crucial November day 2+ years ago and have since changed their minds. Nothing has happened since then that wasn't happening at the time, and they should have forseen it.
I suppose Katrina may have pushed them over the edge, but it came as a surprise to nobody who voted for Kerry.
Nonetheless, they voted for Bush, so, as usual, the voters get precisely the government they asked for.
I should point out that the French held their election on a Sunday, when people were off work. Americans always hold their elections on a Tuesday, a work day. Polls are usually open for a few hours outside of the working hours, but so many people show up at those times that there are long and frustrating waits.
So I don't think it's fair to conclude that American voters are apathetic. They do care and would vote if it were as easy here as it is in France.
Nonetheless, it does mean that elections are skewed towards those willing to take off work or stand in long lines, and towards those who don't have those kinds of time constraints in the first place. Mostly, that disenfranchises the working poor families, who work long hours hours and then have other responsibilities.
That is a call to change the system, not a denigration of the American voter.
The wave of neoconservatism (the portion of the right which believes in strong federal power and projection of American power overseas) seems to have largely collapsed. It has already lost control of the Congress, and is extremely unlikely to retain the Presidency in 2008. (Even if a Republican wins, it's unlikely that it will be of the extremely religious right. Brownback is an extreme long-shot, and even though McCain has moved much further right he's still not the darling of the ultraconservative religious types.)
They will retain control of the Supreme Court for quite some time, however. None of the right-wing of the Court are likely to retire in the next 10 years. The left-wingers are all over 65, and the oldest right-winger is 58. The only likely chance of shifting at all is when Kennedy (70) retires, and that's assuming that Stevens (87) manages to survive until a Democratic President.
Oh. And it's actually pretty funny. Now I feel dumb.
(Why do they take a scanned image of a document and wrap it in a PDF? Why not a GIF or JPG or something that plays more nicely with the rest of the web? Or even better, make a real PDF from the original document? I had to re-type the quote rather than copy-and-paste because of that.)
What part of "Despite all evidence to the contrary, the Vice President actively and systematically sought to deceive the citizens and Congress of the United States about an alleged threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction" tilts to the left?
In all likelihood they're being paid for with stolen credit cards. You'd do just as well to track down whoever is hosting the site, but then, the site is likely hacked and/or paid for with a stolen credit card.
I'd love to believe that the FBI is out there tracking down anybody dumb enough to pay for these with their own money, or at least tying this crime to somebody whom they catch in possession of the stolen credit cards. I'm also pretty sure that the reason my boss wants to talk to me privately in his office is to give me a pony.
In a plane, you are correct. But in three-space, lines can be perpendicular without intersecting.
Imagine perpendicular lines in a plane, then "lift" one of those two lines straight up in the third dimension. The two lines are still perpendicular: one points north-south, the other east-west.
That said, I honestly don't know the answer to part iii of the question. I suspect that it's not terribly difficult, given that the rest of the problem really isn't all that hard. In fact, nearly all of the angles are 30-60-90 and I bet it's one of those. But I don't know how it's done.
Plus the breadth. Wikipedia covers a lot of material you don't find in most encyclopedias, just because they have encyclopedia editors have limited time resources and Wikipedians have collectively nearly infinite free time.
It seems to me that cost+breadth gives the Wikipedia CD a reason to be. If you can't afford an encyclopedia but want something available even when you can't get to the Internet, it seems to be a huge bargain.
It doesn't entirely supplant real encyclopedias, either, but it does narrow their audience even further.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for that. I'm surprised at how many Slashdotters have difficulty grasping the idea that the studios are simply trying to sell you a product for a price that allows them to turn a profit. A maximized profit, to be sure, but it's clear that one sale at $20 followed by an infinite number of copies is untenable.
It seems to be a conflict of basic rights: the fair use rights vs. the right to enforce the no-duplication contract. That contract is implicit, to be sure, but can you imagine the spaz attack Slashdot would throw if people were forced to sign an explicit "you will not give away/sell/etc copies of this disc" every time they went down to Best Buy?
Slashdot hits them both ways on it. When they try to make copying impossible, they'll de-solder chips from the boards to get around it and accuse the studios of treating them like criminals. When they sue those who actually are criminals, or even try to figure out the identities of people who appear to be criminals, Slashdot throws a different spaz attack.
I can't think of any way to resolve that conflict: anything that allowed you to make excerpts or backups or format-shift would also be used to make things freely available P2P. There are frequent calls for "a new business model", usually by non-musicians calling for musicians to give up on selling CDs as a way to make a living. And I can hardly imagine how that's supposed to apply to movie studios: will the next Indiana Jones movie come out in the form of Harrison Ford and Sean Connery dropping by the local playhouse in hopes of selling some Indiana Jones tee-shirts?
It doesn't help that the RIAA and MPAA are being incredibly ham-handed in their approaches, but I'm no more thrilled with the way J. Random Slashdotter insists on his rights with no thoughts about the rights of anybody else. I'd much rather see Slashdot debate a cogent solution than complain about their treatment under the current regime.
(Just because I hate coming in to Slashdot and watching everybody post "Boy, they must be morons!" over and over).
Building a map of the school is obviously harmless. But think of how the map is used in the video game: you wander the halls shooting at things. I think you can understand how, immediately after Virginia Tech, this is going to make people a little bit nervous. If I'd discovered this, I would at least want to have a talk with the kid.
It's also obvious that they've massively overreacted. The hammer is an object of no interest; he had a reasonable alibi for having it. Although it's a cause for concern, it's also clear that it's fun to imagine shooting up monsters (not students) in a video game.
(I should note, however, that in a high school I am associated with, a student was brained by another student in broad daylight DURING CLASS with a hammer. His only disguise was a sweat shirt hood, but everybody recognized him and he was immediately arrested. He was, clearly, an idiot.)
So I'm not going to defend the overreaction, but I'd really like to see people admit that there was reasonable cause for at least a little concern here. They should have talked with him, figured out that he was no trouble, and dropped it. But completely ignoring the situation wouldn't have been right, either.
It's disappointing to hear that meta-moderating didn't catch that. I like to meta-moderate when I'm bored just because it lets me see a few random comments that somebody thought were interesting, but I'd always sorta hoped that some algorithm somewhere was noticing when somebody was judged unfair a lot.
Glad to hear that the jerk is off your case.
I'm curious: did they say who it was? I wonder if it was "Dr. Manhattan", who has declared himself your foe. (He shows up on your freaks page.) I'd love to think that a Slashdotter is too clever to actually announce himself before a vendetta, but hey, it takes all kinds.
I looked at some of your recent posts. You do seem to get modded down a lot for no particular reason. Have you done something to piss somebody off?
I don't think so. There are a couple of things going on here:
/IANAL
1. This only applies to other countries.
2. It only applies to the AT&T patents inside the software.
It seems that the OEMs are nominally responsible for securing AT&T's patents in those countries before distributing the software. So if you're in Asia pirating copies of Windows, both Microsoft and AT&T will be suing you.
If you're in the US, only Microsoft will sue you, and part of the money they take out of your hide should go to AT&T.
So AT&T should, theoretically, be going after these OEMs; Microsoft isn't on the hook to pay them. But it's a lot easier for AT&T to pursue Microsoft than a bunch of Microsoft's OEMs.
Because I can hardly see somebody trying to fence an iPod with the little proviso that you have to keep around a fake thumbprint in order to use it.
Crime is something you deter, not forbid. Slashdotters get used to security being absolute because we work with computers, where we tend to put all of our data eggs in one password basket. Security of physical objects is much more about making it inconvenient, not impossible, to steal something.
But I don't think it's a major draw of power overall. If it's only 40 watts, it's going to be a much smaller power drain than the refrigerator/washer/air conditioner/computer. And all it's doing is charging cell phones or mp3 players, it would be on for only a few hours a day, at most.
It is throwing away power, but you'd almost certainly save more energy by proper insulation, getting over your hatred of compact fluorescent light bulbs, buying a new (and more efficient) water heater, etc. It seems penny-wise/pound foolish to worry about a few watt-hours per day for convenience when kilowatt-hours are being used.
Do you have a link to that? I'm not sure which article you're referring to.
It does happen, but I've found in my own experience that I'm often modded up for posts counter to the Slashthink.
I hold (or at least, express on Slashdot) contrarian views on several issues. I try to express them reasonably and politely, and find that I'm often moderated up for those posts, even though most of the other posts express the opposite views. It's as though there's a large but fairly silent majority on those issues, people with enough karma to have mod points.
Yeah, some days I get moderated down well under water before that happens (usually when I'm being too snide or to subtle in my sarcasm), but that's not often, and my karma can take it.
I can't guarantee that any particular posting will survive the whims of the moderators, but it seems to me that a whole view is rarely suppressed: somebody's similar postings will be modded up. (If you're the only one on Slashdot who thinks a particular way, then you're probably wrong about whatever it is. There's always somebody out there who agrees with you unless you're batshit crazy.)
I think that the proof of the pudding is in the eating: I find that although the Slashthink often infuriates me, there are enough insightful comments that it's worth going in to many articles. That's especially true when I feel there's something missing in the story, e.g. some energy breakthrough which I'm certain is overplayed but I don't know why.
Can you cite some evidence of that? I've never heard of Google taking money for higher rankings, and I've been using it since it was google.stanford.edu.
Wikipedia doesn't mention it, not that that necessarily means much. I'm willing to "take off the blinders" but thus far I'm not seeing anything except your allegation.
EMI's experiment in non-protected sales of music may be the news you missed. That's a genuinely new model for them: put it out there at $1.29 and hope that people would rather buy it reliably from a store than depend on unreliable P2P networks, getting it from friends, etc.
This model probably does still depend on considerable numbers of lawsuits. If P2P is unreliable it's only because they keep suing people, driving them out of business, and making people scared to keep their shares open lest the lawyers come down upon them like locusts. Otherwise everybody would have long since joined Napster and downloaded everything for free.
This change doesn't work without other changes. They make considerably less money selling 1 song for $1.29 than selling 12 songs for $18. Their model still depends on massive marketing to make you spend $1.29 at iTMS for a song, when you can get legal songs for less at eMusic. The difference is that you hear the songs at iTMS on the radio, in TV ads, in record stores, etc.
So EMI (via the RIAA) will still have to keep up pressure on the P2P services and allofmp3.com. But they are at least trying a small change in the business model, and that may lead to other changes, ultimately resulting in (hopefully) fewer lawsuits.
Or they'll discover that it doesn't work. Part of the problem with heavy marketing and trying to make a song universal is that people can just get it from their friends. And if the album is dead, people are shying away from the dreck they hear on Clear Channel, then everybody eventually ends up buying something they really like from eMusic instead. The major labels become far less profitable, dwindle, and maybe die.
Er, did you mean that the Dell product was a little bit more? Or is one of those numbers a typo?
5 4-12454-64287-321860-3328898-3232028.html
According to the HP site:
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF25a/124
the bottom-configuration DC7700 is $959 on sale, but that's not the bulk-purchase price.
The face on Mars was really more a trick of the shadows, exacerbated by the low resolution photography. This is on the relatively smooth surface of Saturn, without shadows. This is also a rather simple shape, unlike a face, which we have special circuitry in our brains to recognize (like the face of Jesus in a grilled cheese sandwich.)
We have much higher resolution pictures of this phenomenon relative to its scale. It could be a lot of things, including mere coincidence, though it seems more likely to be real. Unlike a face, which would have required a civilization (or wild coincidence) to create, there's reason to believe that there is a physical mechanism. It just may or may not be the one suggested in the article (though I'm willing to bet it's at least distantly related).
Good point. I sure wouldn't mind a voting holiday, though I'd like to see it extended a bit to ensure that those people who have to work anyway get to vote.
It's also possible that changing the way we vote, e.g. mail and/or internet voting, would allow more people to vote. Unfortunately, those are also fraught with problems: there's no way to ensure a secret ballot. That leads to the possibility of vote buying, coercion, etc.
I do like the idea of early voting, like they have in some states already. Leave the polls open for a week, and then few people have an excuse to miss it entirely. But ensuring fairness is a hassle; it's hard enough to get volunteers for the single day of polling.
Sux that you got modded flamebait. Your point is extremely reasonable.
The thing that frustrates me most is the percentage shift in Bush's approval rating from the election to today. That 28% who still believe in him... well, I disagree, but at least they're being consistent. But there are some 20-25% of the American voters who believed in him on the crucial November day 2+ years ago and have since changed their minds. Nothing has happened since then that wasn't happening at the time, and they should have forseen it.
I suppose Katrina may have pushed them over the edge, but it came as a surprise to nobody who voted for Kerry.
Nonetheless, they voted for Bush, so, as usual, the voters get precisely the government they asked for.
I should point out that the French held their election on a Sunday, when people were off work. Americans always hold their elections on a Tuesday, a work day. Polls are usually open for a few hours outside of the working hours, but so many people show up at those times that there are long and frustrating waits.
So I don't think it's fair to conclude that American voters are apathetic. They do care and would vote if it were as easy here as it is in France.
Nonetheless, it does mean that elections are skewed towards those willing to take off work or stand in long lines, and towards those who don't have those kinds of time constraints in the first place. Mostly, that disenfranchises the working poor families, who work long hours hours and then have other responsibilities.
That is a call to change the system, not a denigration of the American voter.
The wave of neoconservatism (the portion of the right which believes in strong federal power and projection of American power overseas) seems to have largely collapsed. It has already lost control of the Congress, and is extremely unlikely to retain the Presidency in 2008. (Even if a Republican wins, it's unlikely that it will be of the extremely religious right. Brownback is an extreme long-shot, and even though McCain has moved much further right he's still not the darling of the ultraconservative religious types.)
They will retain control of the Supreme Court for quite some time, however. None of the right-wing of the Court are likely to retire in the next 10 years. The left-wingers are all over 65, and the oldest right-winger is 58. The only likely chance of shifting at all is when Kennedy (70) retires, and that's assuming that Stevens (87) manages to survive until a Democratic President.
60-90 minutes from Alexandria puts you in about Annandale, at least during certain times of the day.
Oh. And it's actually pretty funny. Now I feel dumb.
(Why do they take a scanned image of a document and wrap it in a PDF? Why not a GIF or JPG or something that plays more nicely with the rest of the web? Or even better, make a real PDF from the original document? I had to re-type the quote rather than copy-and-paste because of that.)
What part of "Despite all evidence to the contrary, the Vice President actively and systematically sought to deceive the citizens and Congress of the United States about an alleged threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction" tilts to the left?
What GP means is that he wants THE third party. You know, the one that agrees precisely with him, and therefore with all reasonable people.
In all likelihood they're being paid for with stolen credit cards. You'd do just as well to track down whoever is hosting the site, but then, the site is likely hacked and/or paid for with a stolen credit card.
I'd love to believe that the FBI is out there tracking down anybody dumb enough to pay for these with their own money, or at least tying this crime to somebody whom they catch in possession of the stolen credit cards. I'm also pretty sure that the reason my boss wants to talk to me privately in his office is to give me a pony.
In a plane, you are correct. But in three-space, lines can be perpendicular without intersecting.
Imagine perpendicular lines in a plane, then "lift" one of those two lines straight up in the third dimension. The two lines are still perpendicular: one points north-south, the other east-west.
That said, I honestly don't know the answer to part iii of the question. I suspect that it's not terribly difficult, given that the rest of the problem really isn't all that hard. In fact, nearly all of the angles are 30-60-90 and I bet it's one of those. But I don't know how it's done.
Plus the breadth. Wikipedia covers a lot of material you don't find in most encyclopedias, just because they have encyclopedia editors have limited time resources and Wikipedians have collectively nearly infinite free time.
It seems to me that cost+breadth gives the Wikipedia CD a reason to be. If you can't afford an encyclopedia but want something available even when you can't get to the Internet, it seems to be a huge bargain.
It doesn't entirely supplant real encyclopedias, either, but it does narrow their audience even further.