I agree totally. They always leave a 'backdoor' to allow people to pirate their operating system. The average person doesn't understand or perhaps know (I mean *most* people are not that computer savvy, right?) that they're not suppose to copy windows to every computer in their house, or loan the cd to their friends to copy it. In my experience a lot of people do this. That's the purpose of the copy protection IMO. To prevent casual copying between friends and whatnot. For the expert who never, ever will buy a MS product no matter what, it's still better to allow that person to run an MS operating system rather than linux.
Unlike the RIAA, MS I think is intelligent enough that they won't ever aggresively pursue piraters. In the business world and universities maybe (and they have), but not the individual home user. It just doesn't make and business sense.
"The rich record excutive that price fixes, rips of the artist and bribes congressmen has already lost all the revenue they would have gotten from me. Period. End of thought."
Are you honestly suggesting *they* deserve the money more than I do?
Re:Off topic but interesting definition for Monad
on
Microsoft's new CLI
·
· Score: 1
I love that fucking name. 'Wanna see my monad? (ultimate, indivisible unit)'
If they decided to charge a reasonable amount per song, say 2 cents, it might fly. 99 cents for a encoded track is absurd. They're not cd quality and I would still have to burn them to get a hard copy.
Secondly, selection is poor. Provide me with your *entire library*. Then we'll talk.
In other words: Put down the crack pipe. Get with the program.
If the piracy rate of soft synths *is actually* 90%, it's probably because they're overpriced. Typically such software is in the range of hundreds of dollars and up. Perhaps 10% of people have a serious enough interest in creating music to actually buy the software, the other 90% are just 'kids fooling around'. Actually I'm absolutly sure of this. If you were to make impossible to use a pirated copy of such software, I think you would find that sales would not increase at all, because all those people that were playing with the software for free are just going to move on to something else, drawing or rockclimbing maybe. It's obviously clear that it's actually very foolish to tighten the noose on piracy at this point for a couple reasons. The solution to the problem is to lower the price of the software. Regardless of what anyone thinks, we're not all total sociopaths. If that same piece of software was $50, it makes it reasonable for the amature / young / poor musician that never intended to be a pro in the first place to use a legit copy. I understand that it adds a professonalism / polish / this is a tool not a toy air to a piece of software when it costs $1000, but get with the program, that's a lot of burgers for Jimmy techno dj / rockstar wannabe to flip.
"There is no way that humans, or any other species, could evolve such a huge mass of their brain (90%) that would be unused. Evolution is quite specific about immediate feedback."
This is catagorically wrong even if the premise is a load of nonsense. Supposedly 'unused' traits can be carried through generations regardless of whether they carry a specific advantage at any given time. But that's really beside the point..
"The largest problem we run into is the fact that it's so easy to survive in comparison to previous times."
But the ultimate survivability of everyone is still ultimately zero.
"You don't have to be a physical competitor, nor even a mental competitor as even the least intellectually developed members of our society are provided for by federal help plans etc to help them survive despite the curse of their genes...If we don't take a sober look at ourselves and look at advancing our own species we have run a very real risk remaining in evolutionary limbo as a result of our ideas that humanity is the best possible thing we can be...I fear humans run more risk of dying out than doing too much more advancement as a result of Darwin's Wall. Being something other than human is really not so bad, as long as we're better than human."
Occasionally I come across someone arguing that humans have removed themselves from Darwinian evolution and that this is a Bad Thing. This is my response to those people:
The thing about evolution is that: if it's a 'law', how can we contradict it? We can't. If it's a so-called 'law', then we're still subject to it's rules, regardless of the circumstances. If we *can* contradict it, then it's a not a law, is it?
Let me ask you this question:
If Darwinism was invented in the 19th century, how is possible that all that evolution occured for the 4 billion years proceeding it?
Do you think that the fact that computers have been evolving at an ever increasing rate the past 50 years is a direct result of Darwin's idea? What I mean to say it that do you think that Darwinian evolution is a consideration when Intel engineers are designing the next chip?
How about this idea: If evolution is happening all the time, wouldn't you have to consider that evolution itself as a concept could also be subject to its own laws? Then at that point it would be necessary to alter our abstract ideas to fit with reality, rather than taking the reverse approach. The reverse approach necessitating rather inhuman behavior, ie, eugenics or just a general lack of compassion. And without compassion, what are we? I for one am not willing to take such dractic measures to defend a purely abstract ideal.
I'm friends with a few teachers and one thing about them is they are all organized and studious *control freaks*. The reason why this is important is because I remember one of my teacher friends relating this story of being unable to get one student to sit straight in their chair. Not just that they were getting up and stuff, but that according to my friend this student must *sit straight*. I wonder if the problem is the so called 'ADD' student or the up tight teacher. I myself was a student that didn't sit straight in my seat and got bored easy. I happened to get through much of my schooling before the whole 'ADD' craze and so I was just the flighty student that got bored easy and distracted my classmates -- without a convenient excuse to put me on drugs to make their jobs easier. 'You people' (you know who you are), just don't understand 'us people' -- unfortunatly 'you people' tend to fall into the position of primary school teacher quite often. By now I'm so far into my advanced education whether or not I could have ever been diagnosed the 'illness' of 'ADD' (big air quotes here people) is a moot point. The point is that the school cirriculum is geared toward a personally type, ie, people who like to sit straight in their seats. Those of us that found that system awkward just struggled to pay attention through years of boring, pointless crap. *Now* we can be easily pigeon holed into a disease, which is all clinical psychology does. Notice psychology doesn't classify positive traits. It doesn't say 'this person is different, but that's okay'. Clinical psychology's paradigm is dysfunction. I'm willing to say the whole thing a load of hookum made up to make life easier for the neat and tidy, uncreative control freaks.
I'd just like to point out something I don't think anyone has commented on. I hope all realize the futility in reasoning these sorts of things.. i.e. 'Am I simulation?'
Think about it this way. Godel's (dots above the o) incompleteness theorem states in simple terms:
No axiomatic (true/false) system provides correct answers all the time because some propositions have neither true nor false answers. Example:
This sentence is false.
Is the above sentence true or false?
Furthermore, Godel theorem is itself an axiomatic system that just attempted to define an absolute truth statement, which clearly by it's own rules, it can't do with any certainty. Now If you've happened to notice by now, I myself am reasoning this entire line of thought in terms of truth and falseness. Given that, clearly everything I've written is utter nonsense.
..it seems to be saying what I believe: that the law should be a means to an end, not and end unto itself. or.. no harm, no foul. Blinding following the rules is why bad things happen.
One of my favorite mangas.. The anime version IMO has a lot of the meat of the story pulled out. Ultimately it's this very tragic love story about charecters trying to rise above their circumstances. I have a feeling that James Cameron would turn the story into an action movie. Ridley Scott might do an okay job.. Ang Lee would do an excellent job.. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is one of the greatest films ever made IMO, and Battle Angel Alita should be made with the same sense of tragedy and loss. James Cameron is too Hollywood. One thing that Hollywood directors don't understand is charecterization in fight scenes, which is very important in anime/manga.
..We could TLDs to seperate the porn.. i.e..XXX or something, from everything else.. and.KIDS for G rated material. Isn't this what the IANA is for anyway? I personally don't have any moral problem with forcing the porn industry to use specific TLDs, that way filtering is totally trivial, but isn't censored.
That's kind of off topic anyway because I'm not sure exactly what the point of this article is. On the one hand we have the church guilt machine, on the other hand we have porn addicts. Do either of these groups (prudish christians.. hello, that's _so_ victorian era, can anyone say 'sexual revolution happened in the '60s, we're not scared of naked bodies any more' -- or porn addicts) actually install filter software to protect _themselves_? That's kind of mind bogling. Those people have some serious self denile issues.
My experience with video game addiction goes back to the hayday of Quake. The way it was like was exactly the same way that crack addicts or heroin addicts are portrayed. That is to say, I sacrificed basically a couple of years that I can't really remember and what justified playing Quake, say, 12 hours a day was that there were other 'friends' I had that did the same thing, and that's really the only thing we had in common. I'm sure I would have fit the psychological profile of an addict in other ways too.
My point is this however. Since then I've done and tried a variety of different drugs and while they're fun, they've never interfered with my life in any way, and I always felt like I got bored really quickly and it was just a pasttime. also I rarely drink and it doesn't really appeal to me most of the time.
I was really good about not playing games for a while. But I had to go cold turkey..
Then a year ago one day I was suppose to to meet up with this girl that I really liked and I ended up playing puzzle fighter for 8 hours straight and totally losing track of time. After that I wiped all my games and broke all my game cds and vowed never to return to video games.
So really for me games interfered with my life as much as a serious drug problem would, I disagree that it's 'better' than a drug addiction. Maybe somewhat more healthy physically I guess.
Er.. I'm not an expert.. but aren't these formats *dvd*? How are the disks formated and stuff compared to other dvd formats? Could some patch or hack the bios on a computer dvd player to rip or read these? Like some sort of clonecd thing and and just pull the raw data right off. Sounds to me like the watermarking and stuff is prevent people from playing copied disks in a *legetimate* player.
Strange thing to say because I saw Episode II in one of the very few digital theaters and there's still a touch of grain in the picture. If need be.. I would imagine a filmmaker could digitally put the real 'filmy' grain back in anyway. I'm not sure that digital is 'ready for prime time' as the picture I saw, while very clean and consistant, suffered from some weirdness when panning in the horizontal at certain speeds (one caveat being that I happened to be in the 4th row).. while the picture seemed out of focus to the point where I almost got up and looked for some staff I was so sure it wasn't quite right. Other than that (equipment problem? or crappy equipment?), colors were brighter and contrast seemed better.. I find the eveness and smoothness of the picture to be more convincing.
This technology has potential, provided the theaters are installing quality equipment that's in focus (?), but the impression I got was that it's still somewhat in the experimental stage. When you think about it about it for a minute, the flexibility and power that having the entire film in digital will give you.. it's a no brainer...
Think about it.. I'm not an expert in filmmaking, but I know there's an art to getting the exposure and light right with film.. and processing and all that.. that work totally a crap shoot with film. With digital it'll be like photoshop.. you can mess with all the levels and the quality and tone of the film right away (no middle process).. I think it will allow filmmakers more options and is far more efficent.. Spielburg should know about that. In Saving Private Ryan, the beginning part where the film was de-saturated the film was washed and treated in a very labor intensive way to achieve the effect.. Done digitally I would imagine this would have saved a huge amount of work. Also on the extras CD of Seven that I have they explain how they digitally cleaned up the new DVD.. if you happen to own this one watch it (even though they're considering a digital transfer from film) and you'll be convinced that digital manipulation is the way to go.
So Spielburg is just being nostalgic. Like people who say records are better than CDs.
The frequency response, distortion, dynamic range and stereo seperation are far better in CDs. As much as some pureists would like to claim that records 'sound better' in some none specific way.. the record is the dinosaur, as some day (but probably not for the time being) film will be.
As far as I remember, retroviruses are pretty good at inserting correctly into the genome. That is to say, they insert only in one place (the same place) and the insert is pretty stable. H. simplex is a retrovirus and it remains in your body for the rest of your life.
Of course using a plasmid vector would result in a much less stable transformant (duh). I think the *big* problem with gene therapy is getting the insert into the cells. Retrovirus vectors have had some success in treating somatic cells. In this case, inserting the gene into stem cells works becase once you have inserted the gene into very small amount of cells then it will repopulate or 'regrow' the entire population. In contrast, if you had a defective gene in the neurons in your brain you would have to infect every single cell. This would be hard.
The other option is to screen the fertilized egg for geneitic diseases and then correct a broken gene at the single cell level so that the development of the person is normal. Of course this is GATTACA type stuff.. which is a whole other discussion.
Actually, that's true, you'd have to knock out the other gene. Hrm.. it was just an idea. The neat thing is that even if you have a small number of modified cells, that the resulting T-cells would out-compete the HIV infected ones.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree totally. They always leave a 'backdoor' to allow people to pirate their operating system. The average person doesn't understand or perhaps know (I mean *most* people are not that computer savvy, right?) that they're not suppose to copy windows to every computer in their house, or loan the cd to their friends to copy it. In my experience a lot of people do this. That's the purpose of the copy protection IMO. To prevent casual copying between friends and whatnot. For the expert who never, ever will buy a MS product no matter what, it's still better to allow that person to run an MS operating system rather than linux.
Unlike the RIAA, MS I think is intelligent enough that they won't ever aggresively pursue piraters. In the business world and universities maybe (and they have), but not the individual home user. It just doesn't make and business sense.
How about this:
"The rich record excutive that price fixes, rips of the artist and bribes congressmen has already lost all the revenue they would have gotten from me. Period. End of thought."
Are you honestly suggesting *they* deserve the money more than I do?
I love that fucking name. 'Wanna see my monad? (ultimate, indivisible unit)'
...buying a IBM Deskstar GXP75 harddrive. Otherwise know as the 'deathstar'. I mean really, how much more stupid can you get?
(Hearing a tone of bitterness? No no.)
Holy shit.. I totally thought I would get them wrong but I got them all right too:)
Short Answer:
No
Why?
Greed.
If they decided to charge a reasonable amount per song, say 2 cents, it might fly. 99 cents for a encoded track is absurd. They're not cd quality and I would still have to burn them to get a hard copy.
Secondly, selection is poor. Provide me with your *entire library*. Then we'll talk.
In other words: Put down the crack pipe. Get with the program.
If the piracy rate of soft synths *is actually* 90%, it's probably because they're overpriced. Typically such software is in the range of hundreds of dollars and up. Perhaps 10% of people have a serious enough interest in creating music to actually buy the software, the other 90% are just 'kids fooling around'. Actually I'm absolutly sure of this. If you were to make impossible to use a pirated copy of such software, I think you would find that sales would not increase at all, because all those people that were playing with the software for free are just going to move on to something else, drawing or rockclimbing maybe. It's obviously clear that it's actually very foolish to tighten the noose on piracy at this point for a couple reasons. The solution to the problem is to lower the price of the software. Regardless of what anyone thinks, we're not all total sociopaths. If that same piece of software was $50, it makes it reasonable for the amature / young / poor musician that never intended to be a pro in the first place to use a legit copy. I understand that it adds a professonalism / polish / this is a tool not a toy air to a piece of software when it costs $1000, but get with the program, that's a lot of burgers for Jimmy techno dj / rockstar wannabe to flip.
"There is no way that humans, or any other species, could evolve such a huge mass of their brain (90%) that would be unused. Evolution is quite specific about immediate feedback."
This is catagorically wrong even if the premise is a load of nonsense. Supposedly 'unused' traits can be carried through generations regardless of whether they carry a specific advantage at any given time. But that's really beside the point..
"The largest problem we run into is the fact that it's so easy to survive in comparison to previous times."
But the ultimate survivability of everyone is still ultimately zero.
"You don't have to be a physical competitor, nor even a mental competitor as even the least intellectually developed members of our society are provided for by federal help plans etc to help them survive despite the curse of their genes...If we don't take a sober look at ourselves and look at advancing our own species we have run a very real risk remaining in evolutionary limbo as a result of our ideas that humanity is the best possible thing we can be...I fear humans run more risk of dying out than doing too much more advancement as a result of Darwin's Wall. Being something other than human is really not so bad, as long as we're better than human."
Occasionally I come across someone arguing that humans have removed themselves from Darwinian evolution and that this is a Bad Thing. This is my response to those people:
The thing about evolution is that: if it's a 'law', how can we contradict it? We can't. If it's a so-called 'law', then we're still subject to it's rules, regardless of the circumstances. If we *can* contradict it, then it's a not a law, is it?
Let me ask you this question:
If Darwinism was invented in the 19th century, how is possible that all that evolution occured for the 4 billion years proceeding it?
Do you think that the fact that computers have been evolving at an ever increasing rate the past 50 years is a direct result of Darwin's idea? What I mean to say it that do you think that Darwinian evolution is a consideration when Intel engineers are designing the next chip?
How about this idea: If evolution is happening all the time, wouldn't you have to consider that evolution itself as a concept could also be subject to its own laws? Then at that point it would be necessary to alter our abstract ideas to fit with reality, rather than taking the reverse approach. The reverse approach necessitating rather inhuman behavior, ie, eugenics or just a general lack of compassion. And without compassion, what are we? I for one am not willing to take such dractic measures to defend a purely abstract ideal.
.. 4187425 to go.
:-)
My Bad
.. 4187425 to good.
Good luck guys. Ever hear the expression 'pissing into a forest fire'?
I'm friends with a few teachers and one thing about them is they are all organized and studious *control freaks*. The reason why this is important is because I remember one of my teacher friends relating this story of being unable to get one student to sit straight in their chair. Not just that they were getting up and stuff, but that according to my friend this student must *sit straight*. I wonder if the problem is the so called 'ADD' student or the up tight teacher. I myself was a student that didn't sit straight in my seat and got bored easy. I happened to get through much of my schooling before the whole 'ADD' craze and so I was just the flighty student that got bored easy and distracted my classmates -- without a convenient excuse to put me on drugs to make their jobs easier. 'You people' (you know who you are), just don't understand 'us people' -- unfortunatly 'you people' tend to fall into the position of primary school teacher quite often. By now I'm so far into my advanced education whether or not I could have ever been diagnosed the 'illness' of 'ADD' (big air quotes here people) is a moot point. The point is that the school cirriculum is geared toward a personally type, ie, people who like to sit straight in their seats. Those of us that found that system awkward just struggled to pay attention through years of boring, pointless crap. *Now* we can be easily pigeon holed into a disease, which is all clinical psychology does. Notice psychology doesn't classify positive traits. It doesn't say 'this person is different, but that's okay'. Clinical psychology's paradigm is dysfunction. I'm willing to say the whole thing a load of hookum made up to make life easier for the neat and tidy, uncreative control freaks.
I'd just like to point out something I don't think anyone has commented on. I hope all realize the futility in reasoning these sorts of things.. i.e. 'Am I simulation?'
Think about it this way. Godel's (dots above the o) incompleteness theorem states in simple terms:
No axiomatic (true/false) system provides correct answers all the time because some propositions have neither true nor false answers. Example:
This sentence is false.
Is the above sentence true or false?
Furthermore, Godel theorem is itself an axiomatic system that just attempted to define an absolute truth statement, which clearly by it's own rules, it can't do with any certainty. Now If you've happened to notice by now, I myself am reasoning this entire line of thought in terms of truth and falseness. Given that, clearly everything I've written is utter nonsense.
..it seems to be saying what I believe: that the law should be a means to an end, not and end unto itself. or.. no harm, no foul. Blinding following the rules is why bad things happen.
..the internet is dying in America. Luckily the internet is a global affair.
One of my favorite mangas.. The anime version IMO has a lot of the meat of the story pulled out. Ultimately it's this very tragic love story about charecters trying to rise above their circumstances. I have a feeling that James Cameron would turn the story into an action movie. Ridley Scott might do an okay job.. Ang Lee would do an excellent job.. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is one of the greatest films ever made IMO, and Battle Angel Alita should be made with the same sense of tragedy and loss. James Cameron is too Hollywood. One thing that Hollywood directors don't understand is charecterization in fight scenes, which is very important in anime/manga.
..We could TLDs to seperate the porn.. i.e. .XXX or something, from everything else.. and .KIDS for G rated material. Isn't this what the IANA is for anyway? I personally don't have any moral problem with forcing the porn industry to use specific TLDs, that way filtering is totally trivial, but isn't censored.
That's kind of off topic anyway because I'm not sure exactly what the point of this article is. On the one hand we have the church guilt machine, on the other hand we have porn addicts. Do either of these groups (prudish christians.. hello, that's _so_ victorian era, can anyone say 'sexual revolution happened in the '60s, we're not scared of naked bodies any more' -- or porn addicts) actually install filter software to protect _themselves_? That's kind of mind bogling. Those people have some serious self denile issues.
Don't most new file sharing progs do that now anyway?
..the world trade towers have been hit by hyjacked planes. News at 11.
My experience with video game addiction goes back to the hayday of Quake. The way it was like was exactly the same way that crack addicts or heroin addicts are portrayed. That is to say, I sacrificed basically a couple of years that I can't really remember and what justified playing Quake, say, 12 hours a day was that there were other 'friends' I had that did the same thing, and that's really the only thing we had in common. I'm sure I would have fit the psychological profile of an addict in other ways too.
My point is this however. Since then I've done and tried a variety of different drugs and while they're fun, they've never interfered with my life in any way, and I always felt like I got bored really quickly and it was just a pasttime. also I rarely drink and it doesn't really appeal to me most of the time.
I was really good about not playing games for a while. But I had to go cold turkey..
Then a year ago one day I was suppose to to meet up with this girl that I really liked and I ended up playing puzzle fighter for 8 hours straight and totally losing track of time. After that I wiped all my games and broke all my game cds and vowed never to return to video games.
So really for me games interfered with my life as much as a serious drug problem would, I disagree that it's 'better' than a drug addiction. Maybe somewhat more healthy physically I guess.
He says he's been un-employed for 5 months. He's reducing his burden on UI and society by ensuring he's paid the money he's entitled to.
Furthermore it hurts everyone giving employers the idea that some people will work for free.
Er.. I'm not an expert.. but aren't these formats *dvd*? How are the disks formated and stuff compared to other dvd formats? Could some patch or hack the bios on a computer dvd player to rip or read these? Like some sort of clonecd thing and and just pull the raw data right off. Sounds to me like the watermarking and stuff is prevent people from playing copied disks in a *legetimate* player.
Just curious.
I thought you meant for they're raising the price of beer.
Strange thing to say because I saw Episode II in one of the very few digital theaters and there's still a touch of grain in the picture. If need be.. I would imagine a filmmaker could digitally put the real 'filmy' grain back in anyway. I'm not sure that digital is 'ready for prime time' as the picture I saw, while very clean and consistant, suffered from some weirdness when panning in the horizontal at certain speeds (one caveat being that I happened to be in the 4th row).. while the picture seemed out of focus to the point where I almost got up and looked for some staff I was so sure it wasn't quite right. Other than that (equipment problem? or crappy equipment?), colors were brighter and contrast seemed better.. I find the eveness and smoothness of the picture to be more convincing.
This technology has potential, provided the theaters are installing quality equipment that's in focus (?), but the impression I got was that it's still somewhat in the experimental stage. When you think about it about it for a minute, the flexibility and power that having the entire film in digital will give you.. it's a no brainer...
Think about it.. I'm not an expert in filmmaking, but I know there's an art to getting the exposure and light right with film.. and processing and all that.. that work totally a crap shoot with film. With digital it'll be like photoshop.. you can mess with all the levels and the quality and tone of the film right away (no middle process).. I think it will allow filmmakers more options and is far more efficent.. Spielburg should know about that. In Saving Private Ryan, the beginning part where the film was de-saturated the film was washed and treated in a very labor intensive way to achieve the effect.. Done digitally I would imagine this would have saved a huge amount of work. Also on the extras CD of Seven that I have they explain how they digitally cleaned up the new DVD.. if you happen to own this one watch it (even though they're considering a digital transfer from film) and you'll be convinced that digital manipulation is the way to go.
So Spielburg is just being nostalgic. Like people who say records are better than CDs.
The frequency response, distortion, dynamic range and stereo seperation are far better in CDs. As much as some pureists would like to claim that records 'sound better' in some none specific way.. the record is the dinosaur, as some day (but probably not for the time being) film will be.
As far as I remember, retroviruses are pretty good at inserting correctly into the genome. That is to say, they insert only in one place (the same place) and the insert is pretty stable. H. simplex is a retrovirus and it remains in your body for the rest of your life.
Of course using a plasmid vector would result in a much less stable transformant (duh). I think the *big* problem with gene therapy is getting the insert into the cells. Retrovirus vectors have had some success in treating somatic cells. In this case, inserting the gene into stem cells works becase once you have inserted the gene into very small amount of cells then it will repopulate or 'regrow' the entire population. In contrast, if you had a defective gene in the neurons in your brain you would have to infect every single cell. This would be hard.
The other option is to screen the fertilized egg for geneitic diseases and then correct a broken gene at the single cell level so that the development of the person is normal. Of course this is GATTACA type stuff.. which is a whole other discussion.
Actually, that's true, you'd have to knock out the other gene. Hrm.. it was just an idea. The neat thing is that even if you have a small number of modified cells, that the resulting T-cells would out-compete the HIV infected ones.