Yes, if you have fancy hardware, like your typical PC or VCR, and can go to the hardware store to get some AV cables, there is no way the MPAA can stop you from recording to a sensible format like MPEG without their special watermaks, give it some compression, send it over the internet, and screw the MPAA.
The same thing works in audio, and it still will no matter what the RIAA does.
If either of these groups wants true protection, which can only be approached, they'd have to use special hardware, then get it into everybody's houses. In other words, theyre fighting a losing battle, and we're caught in it.
Price shouldn't really be as much of a factor as it obviously is. I have wireless internet that gets great speeds (it says 6 mbps) for only $29.99 a month. That's what you pay for AOL dialup, so why not get wireless instead?
Exactly. A good example of the OO way of doing a fractal program, lack of optimization notwithstanding, is KFract, which usually comes with KDE. It has different objects for different types of fractals and could be extended quite easily, but if you just want something to draw a Mandelbrot, you can do that in a page of BASIC.
Salon has an article on just this sort of thing, where schools are turning their research into Big Business instead of Big Teaching.
By the way, have you seen the advertisements for a college, I think it was called "Stevens" or something like that, that touted the way people not only created technology, but brought it to the market? It sounds like the sort of crazy place you're talking about.
You're right. Colleges are for learning, not for making the college money.
All you have to do is distribute a file that "lets you own M$ boxen!" and there will still be a large number of script kiddies that will download the file and run it as root
It's called evolution. The script kiddies that do that will get their boxen rooted, and possibly be discouraged from sharing their efforts. This could weed out stupid ones.
I have a simple way of determining if a particular act of software piracy is immoral, and it doesn't involve the law: ask, "Would I buy this software if it weren't free?". If I wouldn't then the piracy is good. I do no harm to anyone, and I do good to myself. If I would buy it, I buy it.
Just try to say that I'm doing something evil with that method.
And please, don't you atheists drone on about how Christians are supposed to be pacificts, loving, caring, and above all, against violence.
Unless I'm mistaken, most of the time we point out that only a few Christians are really as loving, caring, etc. as they often claim. It can deflate people preaching at you pretty nicely.
Treating the common man like a common criminal provides us with neither liberty, nor security.
It's good to see that I'm not the only one who truly cares about this sort of thing. And you're right. Most of us aren't criminals, and we shouldn't be treated like it. By the way, if you'd like some of those bomb-making instuctions censors are always warning about, just read Steal This Book.
Yes, good graphics and stuff are a huge part of what makes games good. A very relevant article would be Playing the Open Source Game, in which Shawn Hargreaves talks about Open Source, game development, and how the game engine is just a part of the game.
I still think that a good game engine can make plenty of difference. Compare Nethack to Diablo, and think how much better Diablo could be.
Microsoft Linux would be a flop. The sort of people who would use Linux wouldn't buy MS Linux, People wouldn't want to leave Windows, and any way, MS Linux ould probably have the same sort of idiotic bugs that have plagued Microsoft products for years. Such as:
You can either log in, or press cancel to log in as root automatically...
>Your government put a man on the Moon. Do you think that would have happened if it was left up to the private sector?
I'll leave arguing with your main points to other people, but I'd like to give you a link to a bunch of privately funded people who just might make something of the moon: the Artemis Project.
I wish them all the luck in the world, except for my luck. I need it myself.
One interesting type of junk DNA is a ~1020 letter sequence that is repeated over and over. I believe the idea here is that this DNA is like a virus; it replicates itsself to different places. It makes up a double digit percent of the human DNA.
That was part of the justification for having solitare installed on machines at work. Solitare supposedly helps develop the player's mousing skills which is then assumed to increase productivity for all other tasks in the point-and-click windows interface.
Nice joke!
...Oh. It wasn't a joke?
You can improve mouse skills by simply doing work with pointing and clicking on little buttons and stuff. There's realy no need for solitaire.
The idea here is that there would be a lot of competition between a lot of venture capitalists, they would do less, and they wouldn't be so eager to snatch all the money because you can get a contract with better conditions from a competitor. As it is, the record labels are pretty secure in the knowledge that by offering slightly better conditions they can get a lot of good bands.
As much as I am a libertarian, and think that whatever the market will bear is fair, I do not particularly like participants in a free market that (a) leverage their counterpart's vulnerabilities to their advantage, and more importantly (b) fight tooth and nail to prevent their counterparts from seeking alternatives.
Good. In order for a libertarian society to be good, people must not be reluctant to go against stuff like this that is bad. Whatever the market will bear is fair, so the market must not bear crap.
I have an idea for a better arrangement of the whole deal. I could be wrong; I don't have much experience with this sort of thing.
First, this band makes some cool music. Then they make a few advertisements, perhaps using other people's money (Venture capitalist's money, that is), and put MP3 versions of their music on file sharing services and online, and see if any radio stations are interested. They find someone willing to sell CDs and sell a bunch. After various people sre finished taking their cut of the booty, the actual musicians will have more left over.
This would require better organizations than RIAA and such, but if these existed, it shouldn't be too hard for a lot of good music to be created. People will create cool music anyway, and this sets them up for money as well, and not just super-successful ones.
I hear that TeX was originally created when Knuth saw the declining quality of typesetting in The Art of Computer Programming and wanted to solve the problem once and for all. Then Leslie Lamport improved it a lot with LaTeX, making it very consistant. Now, it's great!
Alright, if you want review by people who don't know how to use TeX, you can work around this in two ways that I can think of:
Do the initial writing in some format like Word or plain text, send out for review, then once you're satisfied, copy and paste to LyX. Plus, AbiWord can output LaTeX from all sorts of files.
Write in TeX to begin with, and send your review people a copy of LyX for the platform of their choice, available, even for windows, here. Then these people might try LaTeX and the world will become a better place.
They aren't perfect, but they can cruft around dependance on Microsoft products. Your point is still a good one.
I can imagine what the article would be like if everyone learned Linux and Windows was in the newcomer position.
Why Windows is a hard sell
Windows is an operating system and has plenty of software, but can it really measure up to the power of Linux? Its frequent errors and bugs are enough to annoy anyone, and its GUI doesn't even support virtual desktops. It has some usability advantages, such as a single widget set, but these are outweighed by its tendency to hide the option you're looking for in layers of user obsequiousness.
...
Perhaps Windows shouldn't be regarded as an OS at all, but more of a multiplayer game with a number of naiive players. You can lose yourself for hours, looking for the proper driver configuration for some software it doesn't support. It's great fun if you like that sort of thing. But if you need to produce a good document, you'ss probably be able to do it better and more easily on Linux with a good tool made for the job.
If you want to produce a text document, you can often produce it faster and better by staying away from the Microsoft devil you know and using TeX, with the LyX GUI front end. It produces beautiful output, is incredibly full-featured, and can do just about everything you could want. You don't have to waste time on typesetting details because LaTeX takes care of all that. All in all, it's better than Micros~1 Word for most things. And OpenOffice is coming along very well too. Linux is a very nice system.
> I thought Info used something like the Less engine to display pages.
Info uses something more aking to emacs, but without all the functionality. My main objections are two: info doesn't make certain parts boldface, and less allows me to go up or down one line at a time, which may seem trivial, but they are important things for me.
The idea here, I believe, is that you can store all that information in a very small space. It could be on a necklace, or a wrist watch type thing, or in your hand. But it is good to have a very compact data storage medium like this.
This sounds like the GUI on an old NEXT computer. It had one window that wouldn't go away, and it had the filesystem. The commonly used programs were in a special place off to the right, but mainly the desktop was a file manager. And we liked it that way!
Info is good for larger manuals with user friendly detail because it can organize the file into a hypertext type structure. Man is good for terse descriptions of how to use a command line program. Two different uses, two different programs. The thing I find annoying, though, is when things are put in info that ought to be man pages, and if there isn't an info node you will be shown a man page, without the viewing power of less.
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The same thing works in audio, and it still will no matter what the RIAA does.
If either of these groups wants true protection, which can only be approached, they'd have to use special hardware, then get it into everybody's houses. In other words, theyre fighting a losing battle, and we're caught in it.
Price shouldn't really be as much of a factor as it obviously is. I have wireless internet that gets great speeds (it says 6 mbps) for only $29.99 a month. That's what you pay for AOL dialup, so why not get wireless instead?
By the way, an AC first post got modded up to 5!
By the way, have you seen the advertisements for a college, I think it was called "Stevens" or something like that, that touted the way people not only created technology, but brought it to the market? It sounds like the sort of crazy place you're talking about.
You're right. Colleges are for learning, not for making the college money.
It's called evolution. The script kiddies that do that will get their boxen rooted, and possibly be discouraged from sharing their efforts. This could weed out stupid ones.
Just try to say that I'm doing something evil with that method.
Unless I'm mistaken, most of the time we point out that only a few Christians are really as loving, caring, etc. as they often claim. It can deflate people preaching at you pretty nicely.
Treating the common man like a common criminal provides us with neither liberty, nor security.
It's good to see that I'm not the only one who truly cares about this sort of thing. And you're right. Most of us aren't criminals, and we shouldn't be treated like it. By the way, if you'd like some of those bomb-making instuctions censors are always warning about, just read Steal This Book.
Reality need not get in the way of your ideology. ESR wrote this piece shortly after the plane crashes, and it is still relevant.
I still think that a good game engine can make plenty of difference. Compare Nethack to Diablo, and think how much better Diablo could be.
You can either log in, or press cancel to log in as root automatically...
I'll leave arguing with your main points to other people, but I'd like to give you a link to a bunch of privately funded people who just might make something of the moon: the Artemis Project.
I wish them all the luck in the world, except for my luck. I need it myself.
Perhaps it actually came from viruses.
Nice joke!
...Oh. It wasn't a joke?
You can improve mouse skills by simply doing work with pointing and clicking on little buttons and stuff. There's realy no need for solitaire.
Good thing the boss doesn't think this way...
Throw them a little insecurity!
Good. In order for a libertarian society to be good, people must not be reluctant to go against stuff like this that is bad. Whatever the market will bear is fair, so the market must not bear crap.
First, this band makes some cool music. Then they make a few advertisements, perhaps using other people's money (Venture capitalist's money, that is), and put MP3 versions of their music on file sharing services and online, and see if any radio stations are interested. They find someone willing to sell CDs and sell a bunch. After various people sre finished taking their cut of the booty, the actual musicians will have more left over.
This would require better organizations than RIAA and such, but if these existed, it shouldn't be too hard for a lot of good music to be created. People will create cool music anyway, and this sets them up for money as well, and not just super-successful ones.
I hear that TeX was originally created when Knuth saw the declining quality of typesetting in The Art of Computer Programming and wanted to solve the problem once and for all. Then Leslie Lamport improved it a lot with LaTeX, making it very consistant. Now, it's great!
They aren't perfect, but they can cruft around dependance on Microsoft products. Your point is still a good one.
The key word here is default. The font can easily be changed to, say, a sans serif font.
Besides, ugliness is a matter of opinion. I think the default font looks cool. You can change it if you want.
Why Windows is a hard sell
Windows is an operating system and has plenty of software, but can it really measure up to the power of Linux? Its frequent errors and bugs are enough to annoy anyone, and its GUI doesn't even support virtual desktops. It has some usability advantages, such as a single widget set, but these are outweighed by its tendency to hide the option you're looking for in layers of user obsequiousness.
...
Perhaps Windows shouldn't be regarded as an OS at all, but more of a multiplayer game with a number of naiive players. You can lose yourself for hours, looking for the proper driver configuration for some software it doesn't support. It's great fun if you like that sort of thing. But if you need to produce a good document, you'ss probably be able to do it better and more easily on Linux with a good tool made for the job.
If you want to produce a text document, you can often produce it faster and better by staying away from the Microsoft devil you know and using TeX, with the LyX GUI front end. It produces beautiful output, is incredibly full-featured, and can do just about everything you could want. You don't have to waste time on typesetting details because LaTeX takes care of all that. All in all, it's better than Micros~1 Word for most things. And OpenOffice is coming along very well too. Linux is a very nice system.
Info uses something more aking to emacs, but without all the functionality. My main objections are two: info doesn't make certain parts boldface, and less allows me to go up or down one line at a time, which may seem trivial, but they are important things for me.
The idea here, I believe, is that you can store all that information in a very small space. It could be on a necklace, or a wrist watch type thing, or in your hand. But it is good to have a very compact data storage medium like this.
This sounds like the GUI on an old NEXT computer. It had one window that wouldn't go away, and it had the filesystem. The commonly used programs were in a special place off to the right, but mainly the desktop was a file manager. And we liked it that way!
Info is good for larger manuals with user friendly detail because it can organize the file into a hypertext type structure. Man is good for terse descriptions of how to use a command line program. Two different uses, two different programs. The thing I find annoying, though, is when things are put in info that ought to be man pages, and if there isn't an info node you will be shown a man page, without the viewing power of less.