You own a computer. You can read and write. If we're playing "teeming masses", everyone posting on here is gonna get eaten. I'm sure you think you're middle class as well, etc., etc.
In fact, if you look at the main things social conservatives of all religions are "for", it amounts to supporting this stone age social structure. Have lots of kids, be fearful of your lord, keep the young folks locked up until they can be indoctrinated in the system, don't question any of this or we'll knock the shit out of you. Actually, large parts of the world still work this way.
David Brin writes about this a lot. He talks about the feudal pyramid being replaced by a diamond-shaped society, where the poor aren't the largest class, for the first time in human history.
If the only way you can give your life meaning is by putting a stupid and pointless and to some extent avoidable end on it, then I think the problem lies with your imagination.
I concur---we use much less manual labor nowadays because we have machines that do it for us. True, your laundry machine isn't a steam-powered analytic engine that says "pip, pip, wot, sah!" while it scrubs the skidmarks from your shorts, but it does prevent you from mailing said shorts to China. Consider how much energy the average American uses; a good deal of that is employing machines instead of slaves to wash dishes and clothes, to cart oneself about, and to build pretty much anything.
Look at the proportion of the world's population living on less than a dollar a day, or the local equivalent thereof. It's lower now than it has been at any point in history. Ever. Also consider that a denizen of the twentieth century was less likely to die a violent death (yes, counting two World Wars, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and the like) than their predecessors, as far as we can tell. We're more likely to die old and expensive in bed than our ancestors were.
Things are better than they ever have been. Trouble is, they still kinda suck in a lot of places.
No, it isn't. It's not like no one knew how to produce food. But without ready-made crops (did you know that the original wild corncobs were about the size of your thumb? Makes for a rather meager Thanksgiving), it's not a huge improvement over hunting and gathering. (Not to mention that some places, like the Americas, didn't have domesticated animals, so agriculture relied on large masses of slaves instead of serfs and animals, and the wheel never took off, because you still had to pull the cart yourself.)
Now, after a few hundred years of selection and breeding, crops got better, and farming really took off. But it wasn't an obvious choice from the get-go---which is why it took so damn long to "catch on", as you say.
YouSendIt.com has problems scaling up. You want to use things like Rapidshare.de or similar services, so that thousands and thousands can download the item.
I remember reading that article some time ago, and loving it. Sometimes academic eggheads get it right (using CSS to separate form from content), and sometimes they labor for years on an idea that you can show to be worthless in a single page (like the Semantic Web). And here I just spent twenty minutes googling for it because I couldn't remember the author's name, I finally found it so that I could show it to the world... and you already found it. Good stuff, eh?
For example, the food industry: did you know that one of the most healthy foods you can eat is tuna? And if you're trying to lose weight it can be a keystone in that goal. Did you know that some brands of tuna have artificially introduced certain appetite inducing chemicals? No intrinsic added value to the food, just a manipulation of you to buy more food (hopefully, their tuna).
Holy crap! As someone who eats a heck of a lot of tuna, I'd like to know more about this. Alas, googling for "appetite" and "tuna" just gets me some articles about trade wars between the U.S. and tuna-exporting nations. (Oh, and a suggestion to feed anorexic cats tuna juice.) Where did you learn of this from?
I was thinking more of "cheap" or "reusable", which it failed miserably. Y'know, things that the Apollo system didn't already do (with the exception of landing at an AFB). And I don't know if "not monstrously more complex than it absolutely needs to be" was a design goal, but it should have been.
Thanks! I wonder if there's any good guide to fighting rootkits out there. (Apart from, of course, the above suggestions.) The idea seemed particularly scary to me, since it's not just a malicious program being installed---you can't even trust your own system. Brrr.
It is all about creative control. Someone with a real strong vision can make something uniquely cohesive and brilliant. Whether it's Straczynski's Babylon 5 or Frank Miller's Sin City, it's amazing what can be done when the grubby fingers of mediocrity are kept away from someone's bright ideas.
Of course, creative control doesn't guarantee quality. (See Ilene Chaiken's utter failure to even have consistend characterization on The L Word.) But a lack of it will pretty much guarantee mediocrity.
I want to come out of the theater saying "I have never, ever seen anything like that before." I did that after Sin City; I did that after the preview screening of Serenity that I saw.
[at a scrapyard] Kaylee: Figures - first time in the Core, and what do I get to do? Dig through trash. Why couldn't he send me shopping at the Tri-plex, or...Ooh! Synchronizer!
I'm going to use that line on my friends. (I've been pimping it to everyone I know; maybe one or two people who weren't going to go see it before will now.)
The shuttle was originally sold as a cheaper way to get things into space. It's not meaningfully cheaper. They said it would cost $28 million per launch. As of January 1986, (in the same 1980 dollars), it cost over $200 million per launch. They said it would turn around in seventy-two hours. As for reliability, how many fatal failure modes does the shuttle design have? What sort of improvement over the final Apollo design is that?
Which of its original design goals has the shuttle actually met?
No! Downloading IS reproducing the work. The sender reproduces the work into TCP/IP packets, which come to your computer where the downloader reproduces them from RAM to disk. By the time the download is finished, you've already made a copyright-infringing reproduction.
Fascinating. So you're saying that when I rip a CD that I own to my hard drive, even if I never distribute it from there, I'm infringing copyright. And perhaps, also, when I reproduce the data from the disk into RAM for playback? Into the anti-skip buffer in my Discman? I don't think your understanding of copyright law is of the highest quality.
Jack Valenti? Is that you?
In truth, downloading leaves you even MORE able to make further reproductions, because it implies that any anti-copying provisions built into the physical media have already been defeated.
Err... yes. And so? Copyright law doesn't give a damn how easy it is for me to make copies. If I'm horning in on the exclusive rights of the copyright holder, I'm violating copyright. If I'm not, I'm not. What's so hard about this?
Downloading a copyrighted work automatically gives you the ability to reproduce the work,
No more or less than purchasing the work does. (Less any DMCA twiddlery, which doesn't affect whether a work is protected under copyright or not.) See, I can duplicate a work, but it's whether or not I do that matters. And hey, if I duplicate and distribute a work that I downloaded, that's called uploading, and we're back where we started.
I doubt that the NET Act requires that a complete copy be transmitted. MSRP for a CD album is roughly US$18. Now, say you have a collection of, oh, sixty MP3s from different artists. Now let's say that each of those files is at least partially uploaded within a six-month period. Do a little multiplication and---oh!---welcome to felony-land.
You don't honestly think that if you don't upload every singly part of a file you're sharing, you're not liable for copyright infringement, do you? Because that's what it seems like.
Presumably one would download Debian ISOs from something like cdimage.debian.org. To poison that, one would have to hack Debian's servers, and at that point, your vulnerability isn't really in bittorrent, now is it?
Heck, if you're a movie buff, you can just use their monthly fee (what is it, $20 a month?) to rent movies as you want them; in that case, your rate of DVD rippage is only slowed by your desire to stop by the Blockbuster on the way back from work, and your desire to bother ripping all of those DVDs.
Slashdot Mirror
You own a computer. You can read and write. If we're playing "teeming masses", everyone posting on here is gonna get eaten. I'm sure you think you're middle class as well, etc., etc.
In fact, if you look at the main things social conservatives of all religions are "for", it amounts to supporting this stone age social structure. Have lots of kids, be fearful of your lord, keep the young folks locked up until they can be indoctrinated in the system, don't question any of this or we'll knock the shit out of you. Actually, large parts of the world still work this way.
David Brin writes about this a lot. He talks about the feudal pyramid being replaced by a diamond-shaped society, where the poor aren't the largest class, for the first time in human history.
Ha, ha. No, it's not in constant dollars. Most of the people living on that little don't actually use dollars, anyway.
If the only way you can give your life meaning is by putting a stupid and pointless and to some extent avoidable end on it, then I think the problem lies with your imagination.
I concur---we use much less manual labor nowadays because we have machines that do it for us. True, your laundry machine isn't a steam-powered analytic engine that says "pip, pip, wot, sah!" while it scrubs the skidmarks from your shorts, but it does prevent you from mailing said shorts to China. Consider how much energy the average American uses; a good deal of that is employing machines instead of slaves to wash dishes and clothes, to cart oneself about, and to build pretty much anything.
Look at the proportion of the world's population living on less than a dollar a day, or the local equivalent thereof. It's lower now than it has been at any point in history. Ever. Also consider that a denizen of the twentieth century was less likely to die a violent death (yes, counting two World Wars, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and the like) than their predecessors, as far as we can tell. We're more likely to die old and expensive in bed than our ancestors were.
Things are better than they ever have been. Trouble is, they still kinda suck in a lot of places.
No, it isn't. It's not like no one knew how to produce food. But without ready-made crops (did you know that the original wild corncobs were about the size of your thumb? Makes for a rather meager Thanksgiving), it's not a huge improvement over hunting and gathering. (Not to mention that some places, like the Americas, didn't have domesticated animals, so agriculture relied on large masses of slaves instead of serfs and animals, and the wheel never took off, because you still had to pull the cart yourself.)
Now, after a few hundred years of selection and breeding, crops got better, and farming really took off. But it wasn't an obvious choice from the get-go---which is why it took so damn long to "catch on", as you say.
YouSendIt.com has problems scaling up. You want to use things like Rapidshare.de or similar services, so that thousands and thousands can download the item.
Err... what the crap is it, though?
I remember reading that article some time ago, and loving it. Sometimes academic eggheads get it right (using CSS to separate form from content), and sometimes they labor for years on an idea that you can show to be worthless in a single page (like the Semantic Web). And here I just spent twenty minutes googling for it because I couldn't remember the author's name, I finally found it so that I could show it to the world... and you already found it. Good stuff, eh?
For example, the food industry: did you know that one of the most healthy foods you can eat is tuna? And if you're trying to lose weight it can be a keystone in that goal. Did you know that some brands of tuna have artificially introduced certain appetite inducing chemicals? No intrinsic added value to the food, just a manipulation of you to buy more food (hopefully, their tuna).
Holy crap! As someone who eats a heck of a lot of tuna, I'd like to know more about this. Alas, googling for "appetite" and "tuna" just gets me some articles about trade wars between the U.S. and tuna-exporting nations. (Oh, and a suggestion to feed anorexic cats tuna juice.) Where did you learn of this from?
I was thinking more of "cheap" or "reusable", which it failed miserably. Y'know, things that the Apollo system didn't already do (with the exception of landing at an AFB). And I don't know if "not monstrously more complex than it absolutely needs to be" was a design goal, but it should have been.
Thanks! I wonder if there's any good guide to fighting rootkits out there. (Apart from, of course, the above suggestions.) The idea seemed particularly scary to me, since it's not just a malicious program being installed---you can't even trust your own system. Brrr.
It is all about creative control. Someone with a real strong vision can make something uniquely cohesive and brilliant. Whether it's Straczynski's Babylon 5 or Frank Miller's Sin City, it's amazing what can be done when the grubby fingers of mediocrity are kept away from someone's bright ideas.
Of course, creative control doesn't guarantee quality. (See Ilene Chaiken's utter failure to even have consistend characterization on The L Word.) But a lack of it will pretty much guarantee mediocrity.
I want to come out of the theater saying "I have never, ever seen anything like that before." I did that after Sin City; I did that after the preview screening of Serenity that I saw.
[at a scrapyard] ...Ooh! Synchronizer!
Kaylee: Figures - first time in the Core, and what do I get to do? Dig through trash. Why couldn't he send me shopping at the Tri-plex, or
Slashdot the theaters.
I'm going to use that line on my friends. (I've been pimping it to everyone I know; maybe one or two people who weren't going to go see it before will now.)
The shuttle was originally sold as a cheaper way to get things into space. It's not meaningfully cheaper. They said it would cost $28 million per launch. As of January 1986, (in the same 1980 dollars), it cost over $200 million per launch. They said it would turn around in seventy-two hours. As for reliability, how many fatal failure modes does the shuttle design have? What sort of improvement over the final Apollo design is that?
Which of its original design goals has the shuttle actually met?
the space shuttle, which provided cheap reliable frequent trips to a lower orbit
BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Thanks, I needed that.
No! Downloading IS reproducing the work. The sender reproduces the work into TCP/IP packets, which come to your computer where the downloader reproduces them from RAM to disk. By the time the download is finished, you've already made a copyright-infringing reproduction.
Fascinating. So you're saying that when I rip a CD that I own to my hard drive, even if I never distribute it from there, I'm infringing copyright. And perhaps, also, when I reproduce the data from the disk into RAM for playback? Into the anti-skip buffer in my Discman? I don't think your understanding of copyright law is of the highest quality.
Jack Valenti? Is that you?
In truth, downloading leaves you even MORE able to make further reproductions, because it implies that any anti-copying provisions built into the physical media have already been defeated.
Err... yes. And so? Copyright law doesn't give a damn how easy it is for me to make copies. If I'm horning in on the exclusive rights of the copyright holder, I'm violating copyright. If I'm not, I'm not. What's so hard about this?
Downloading a copyrighted work automatically gives you the ability to reproduce the work,
No more or less than purchasing the work does. (Less any DMCA twiddlery, which doesn't affect whether a work is protected under copyright or not.) See, I can duplicate a work, but it's whether or not I do that matters. And hey, if I duplicate and distribute a work that I downloaded, that's called uploading, and we're back where we started.
Are you an audiophile? Do you also need $100 power cables?
I doubt that the NET Act requires that a complete copy be transmitted. MSRP for a CD album is roughly US$18. Now, say you have a collection of, oh, sixty MP3s from different artists. Now let's say that each of those files is at least partially uploaded within a six-month period. Do a little multiplication and---oh!---welcome to felony-land.
You don't honestly think that if you don't upload every singly part of a file you're sharing, you're not liable for copyright infringement, do you? Because that's what it seems like.
Just the ones watching Fox News.
Presumably anyone interested in high-end computing would invest in a fifty-buck UPS to provide nice, clean power to their PSU.
At least, I guess that was their train of though.
Presumably one would download Debian ISOs from something like cdimage.debian.org. To poison that, one would have to hack Debian's servers, and at that point, your vulnerability isn't really in bittorrent, now is it?
Heck, if you're a movie buff, you can just use their monthly fee (what is it, $20 a month?) to rent movies as you want them; in that case, your rate of DVD rippage is only slowed by your desire to stop by the Blockbuster on the way back from work, and your desire to bother ripping all of those DVDs.