I wish I had a suggestion as to how this whole system could be fixed to prevent this type of fraud.
I know: Get back with your old company and patent the self-replicating general-assembler (a "StarTrek Replicator") so that even the greediest of the greedy among us no longer have the motivation to screw other people in order get a bigger yacht and bigger house?:)
For the same reason you buy Intel instead of AMD: Going against the grain is just too "risky." The lemming that strays from the safety of the herd might get eaten by a predator, despite the fact that the whole herd may be heading off a cliff anyway.
Ray Kurzweil (search down page for "Why SETI Will Fail") has a similar take on this subject.
Unfortunately, I don't think the odds are that great for us, or other civilizations, being able to cope with increasingly destructive tech while still stuck with violent reptile-brains (especially if nanotech develops much earlier Intelligence Enhancement & AI). IMHO, the odds are 1 in 1,000 that we survive another 30 years. The odds'd be much better if us morons would seed an offworld, self-sustainable colony.
The guy I replied to got modded down for laughing at a politically incorrect joke, and that pissed me off, so I added some sarcasm to see if I'd get modded down too. (By the end of the day this post will probably be -1 Offtopic, and the previous one will be -1 Flamebait, but that's okay: easy come, easy go.)
Why get shit-quality copies of music for free from Napster, when a different p2p service would offer sales-quality copies of music for free?
Because there's a point for many people (not all) where paying a reasonable fee for a 'legit', reliably-good datafile, is much more convenient than spending the time and effort to sift through multiple p2p networks full of unknowns.
Of course, even if the per-track and/or monthly fee was reasonable (not in this life), I'd still have a major problem filtering my money through those bloodsucking middlemen instead of getting it directly to the deserving artists.
Assuming the artists were in control, I wouldn't pay for the ads^H^H^Hmp3's individually, but I would pay a flat fee for access to a universal service with users-like-you-also-like-this recommendations & ratings and such. Multiple islands of p2p would pale in comparison.
You reminded me of a business idea I had a few years ago (and since I'm not going to impliment it, and with 6+ billion ppl on the planet there's no way it's an original idea, so keeping it "secret" is just selfish & stupid):
Basically, I thought it would be really cool to combine a camera (get color), 3D laser-scanner (get shape), styrofoam mill (make shape), and airbrush (put color). Then, place the device beside the traditional PhotoBooth in malls across america, and people would be lining up for their own "instant 3D statues"... until the fad died out.
Obviously, it's still a bit too expensive to make such a "3D photobooth".
How DARE YOU! How dare you make light of the horror that was the Holocaust! Millions were murdered, and yet you can laugh?! Racist jokes are like totally un-PC, man, especially on this holiest of holy Sundays! Only a certified jew like myself can get away with laughing at it, you anti-dentite!
(You humor-impaired, hyper-sensitive, zero-tolerance hypocrites can mod me down now too.)
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Re:Get with the times? What tells you I haven't?
on
Getting Rid of the Disks
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
[sarcasm]Oh, you mean those files that sent you to jail after the RIAA came knocking on your door?[/sarcasm]
Still amazes me how many people refuse to believe that a LOT of people would rather rip their CDs to mp3. You know... convenience?
Ever heard about the demo scene? I didn't think so.
Congrats on your h4rdc0re 64K intro/extro collection d00d.
"500MB should be enough for anyone"... Oooookay Grandpa.
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Re:Cats are edible
on
Easter Humor
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
It's not about logic, it's all emotion. There's nothing wrong with eating cats, dogs, pigs, or cows, unless you grew up in a culture that arbitrarily empathizes with them as if they were sentient like humans.
Americans eat cow, Indian's worship them; Asians eat dog & cat, Americans love them; Redneck Americans eat Nutria (rats), some Indians worship rats.
Oh please! There's 6+ billion people on the planet now, and not enough unique namespace for everyone or every business to have that one 'cool' short name, so why they don't do what us humans have done? GET A LAST NAME.
Grub The SearchEngine
Grub The Bootloader
FireBird von Browser
FireBird von Database
Gentoo el Distro
Gentoo el FileManager
Apple Computer
Apple Records
I'm serious. Nobody should feel entitled to an exclusive piece of namespace just because they think they had it first or are bigger & badder and more deserving than some newbie treading on their turf. (trademark `this!')
So your friend was dumb enough to not use robots.txt and to leave insecure Directory Indexes enabled, but smart(ass) enough to redirect his newfound visitors to funny pages? cute.
... they can't quite wipe out humanity, so they keep them as pets as the next best thing.
Honor your ancestors... I agree... but why keep all the useless bodies around when the mind is the only thing that matters inside the Matrix? The machines are supposed to be smart, and getting smarter all the time, right?
So, Upload the mind to the simulation, and chuck the waste-of-space-and-energy body. Either the machines are really stupid, or the writers needed bodies for human audiences to empathize with.
Why wire them up instead of killing them all? For power. Why not use solar energy or some other source? Sky was darkened.
No, not power; human's aren't an energy source, or even a very efficient energy transformer. Energy doesn't come from nothing. Apparently they had to dumb down the movie by calling people batteries instead of computers, and even that's a huge stetch IMO, but without humans, you're right, there's not much of a story to relate to.
Frankly, the Matrix could have been just as good without the "shocking" people-farms == energy crap.
e.g. In MY version it goes like this: The vast majority of people (including Neo) would have been unknowningly (that's important!) and forcefully uploaded into the Matrix when The Machines took over. Morpheus, and the rest of the rebels who managed to survive in the "real world" outside the Matrix are determined to either free the Minds by "downloading" them back into wasteful corporeal form, or to free the Matrix of Machine control, thereby freeing the Minds to live in a virtual world of their own choosing.
That's a much more interesting, and realistic story in my not so humble opinion.
Oh, but there really is and ideal body expectation built into all males, whether you want to believe it or not, and whether you agree with chicks striving for it or not.
It's called evolutionary psychology, and here a few examples of it:
A sexy, child-bearing 0.7 waist-to-hip ratio; this is what ALL cultures have been shown to find the most desirable. Anorexics like Aeon Flux are sickly-thin, and >1.0 fatasses are just disgusting (and might be pregnant).
Large tits: Large tits produce just as much milk as small tits, so we're not wired for that reason. Rather, the theory is that when humans started fucking missionary-style, large tits reminded the male of the plump ass they used to grab onto from when they used to do it exclusively doggy-style like the rest of the 4-legged primates.
Lipstick == red lips == guys think of vagina-mouth wrapped around penis.
Botox == labia lips == softer, better blowjobs... and kisses.
High heels: Get that ass up there, girl!
Hmm. My list seems to have gotten progressively cruder, but I am being half-serious.:)
You could always make it in the poetic video collage style of a Naqoyqatsi.
But you're right in the humans crave a story, and just about every damn story is centered around CONFLICT of some kind because we thrive on it. I suppose you could make the conflict the subtext of a utopic future; don't know how well that would work though.
.torrent files are static metainfo (though the 'announce' URL can change without effecting the info_hash) - it's the tracker server that does the pointing.
But, you're right that GPG is a headache - I mean, why else haven't webs of trust taken off yet? It's an awesome idea way past due, but not easy to impliment.
"Innocent until proven guilty" is OUT, and "assumption of guilt" is IN, along with his friend: "preemptive defense."
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Re:They are irrelavent anyhow....
on
DMCA, Auf Deutsch
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Copyrights are very quickly becoming unenforceable...
Well, if copyrights eventually do become effectively unenforcable (which they will be without a totalitarian world government), how would artists eat, and how would media execs be able to pay for their 4th vacation house? Would civilization as we know it collapse (heh), or would a new balance emerge on its own? Yeah, the latter.
It seems to me that two things would happen: 1) The original and valuable act of creation can't be copied (there's no A.I. Van Gogh, yet), so variations on the Street Performer Protocol would gain prominence as a way to fund new projects, and 2) unfunded/unknown artists would simply have to accept that society had rewritten the social contract to say "we abhor artificial-scarcity in the face of so much real-scarcity, but if you're nice we'll still support your creative efforts." So artists'll have to continue working to continue earning like everyone else. Just as architects, sysadmins, and plumbers can't live off royalties from long past work, neither would artists.
And 15 to 30 years from now this debate will get much hotter (if people aren't any wiser) when mature nanotechnology enables anyone to make exact copies of any desired object (given that the chemical elements are available), from diamond to clothes to BK Whoppers. But if BurgerKing goes out of business, how will they eat?! And how will they clothe their kids?!... Oh... wait a sec...
Slashdot Mirror
I know: Get back with your old company and patent the self-replicating general-assembler (a "StarTrek Replicator") so that even the greediest of the greedy among us no longer have the motivation to screw other people in order get a bigger yacht and bigger house? :)
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Unfortunately, I don't think the odds are that great for us, or other civilizations, being able to cope with increasingly destructive tech while still stuck with violent reptile-brains (especially if nanotech develops much earlier Intelligence Enhancement & AI). IMHO, the odds are 1 in 1,000 that we survive another 30 years. The odds'd be much better if us morons would seed an offworld, self-sustainable colony.
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Because there's a point for many people (not all) where paying a reasonable fee for a 'legit', reliably-good datafile, is much more convenient than spending the time and effort to sift through multiple p2p networks full of unknowns.
Of course, even if the per-track and/or monthly fee was reasonable (not in this life), I'd still have a major problem filtering my money through those bloodsucking middlemen instead of getting it directly to the deserving artists.
Assuming the artists were in control, I wouldn't pay for the ads^H^H^Hmp3's individually, but I would pay a flat fee for access to a universal service with users-like-you-also-like-this recommendations & ratings and such. Multiple islands of p2p would pale in comparison.
--
Basically, I thought it would be really cool to combine a camera (get color), 3D laser-scanner (get shape), styrofoam mill (make shape), and airbrush (put color). Then, place the device beside the traditional PhotoBooth in malls across america, and people would be lining up for their own "instant 3D statues" ... until the fad died out.
Obviously, it's still a bit too expensive to make such a "3D photobooth".
--
(You humor-impaired, hyper-sensitive, zero-tolerance hypocrites can mod me down now too.)
--
Still amazes me how many people refuse to believe that a LOT of people would rather rip their CDs to mp3. You know ... convenience?
Ever heard about the demo scene? I didn't think so.
Congrats on your h4rdc0re 64K intro/extro collection d00d.
"500MB should be enough for anyone" ... Oooookay Grandpa.
--
Americans eat cow, Indian's worship them; Asians eat dog & cat, Americans love them; Redneck Americans eat Nutria (rats), some Indians worship rats.
--
Grub The SearchEngine
Grub The Bootloader
FireBird von Browser
FireBird von Database
Gentoo el Distro
Gentoo el FileManager
Apple Computer
Apple Records
I'm serious. Nobody should feel entitled to an exclusive piece of namespace just because they think they had it first or are bigger & badder and more deserving than some newbie treading on their turf. (trademark `this!')
--
--
--
Oh, you're one of those people. *hides contempt* ... :)
--
Honor your ancestors ... I agree ... but why keep all the useless bodies around when the mind is the only thing that matters inside the Matrix? The machines are supposed to be smart, and getting smarter all the time, right?
So, Upload the mind to the simulation, and chuck the waste-of-space-and-energy body. Either the machines are really stupid, or the writers needed bodies for human audiences to empathize with.
--
No, not power; human's aren't an energy source, or even a very efficient energy transformer. Energy doesn't come from nothing. Apparently they had to dumb down the movie by calling people batteries instead of computers, and even that's a huge stetch IMO, but without humans, you're right, there's not much of a story to relate to.
Frankly, the Matrix could have been just as good without the "shocking" people-farms == energy crap.
e.g. In MY version it goes like this: The vast majority of people (including Neo) would have been unknowningly (that's important!) and forcefully uploaded into the Matrix when The Machines took over. Morpheus, and the rest of the rebels who managed to survive in the "real world" outside the Matrix are determined to either free the Minds by "downloading" them back into wasteful corporeal form, or to free the Matrix of Machine control, thereby freeing the Minds to live in a virtual world of their own choosing.
That's a much more interesting, and realistic story in my not so humble opinion.
--
It's called evolutionary psychology, and here a few examples of it:
Hmm. My list seems to have gotten progressively cruder, but I am being half-serious. :)
--
"Because retards in wheelchairs are funny."
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You could always make it in the poetic video collage style of a Naqoyqatsi.
But you're right in the humans crave a story, and just about every damn story is centered around CONFLICT of some kind because we thrive on it. I suppose you could make the conflict the subtext of a utopic future; don't know how well that would work though.
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Oh, no, ... you just repeated yourself and both comments got modded up to 5. yay.
--
But, you're right that GPG is a headache - I mean, why else haven't webs of trust taken off yet? It's an awesome idea way past due, but not easy to impliment.
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Didn't you get the memo?
"Innocent until proven guilty" is OUT, and "assumption of guilt" is IN, along with his friend: "preemptive defense."
--
Well, if copyrights eventually do become effectively unenforcable (which they will be without a totalitarian world government), how would artists eat, and how would media execs be able to pay for their 4th vacation house? Would civilization as we know it collapse (heh), or would a new balance emerge on its own? Yeah, the latter.
It seems to me that two things would happen: 1) The original and valuable act of creation can't be copied (there's no A.I. Van Gogh, yet), so variations on the Street Performer Protocol would gain prominence as a way to fund new projects, and 2) unfunded/unknown artists would simply have to accept that society had rewritten the social contract to say "we abhor artificial-scarcity in the face of so much real-scarcity, but if you're nice we'll still support your creative efforts." So artists'll have to continue working to continue earning like everyone else. Just as architects, sysadmins, and plumbers can't live off royalties from long past work, neither would artists.
And 15 to 30 years from now this debate will get much hotter (if people aren't any wiser) when mature nanotechnology enables anyone to make exact copies of any desired object (given that the chemical elements are available), from diamond to clothes to BK Whoppers. But if BurgerKing goes out of business, how will they eat?! And how will they clothe their kids?! ... Oh... wait a sec...
--