The "cell phone" theory is a golden example of people projecting their own limited conception of the world onto something they don't recognize. Someone 40 years ago probably would've imagined that they saw someone singing along to a transistor radio. Someone from 120 years ago would've thought they saw someone listening to a seashell and chewing gum. If she's really holding something (IMO the video isn't clear enough to be sure), it's almost certainly a contemporary hearing aid.
It isn't the $89.99, but the $89.99 times 1000 junk domains.
Plus different TLD operators have different policies: some actually police who can register, requiring that the perp put some effort into pretending to be eligible to use them..COM obviously does not.
There's also the factor that nobody has ever heard of.TRAVEL (so it looks bogus), but.COM is familiar and friendly-looking.
That's what I meant by showing them that he was a real person. Acting like the RIAA (the evil fantasy that pirates hold in their heads to justify the way they treat creators) wouldn't have helped. Call the emotional reaction what you wish; it was a response to him as a person.
It wasn't the free sharing of this book that boosted its sales. What boosted sales was that the artist got tipped off about it, and had a chance to introduce himself and interact with the pirates, and put a face on "the copyright holder" for them. He was no longer some non-person they could continue to not give a fuck about; he was a human being (and a pretty cool one) whose creativity should be rewarded. It's easy to rip off some anonymous corporation like "Disney" or "Sony" or even "Image Comics", but not so easy to rip off "Steve Lieber" and his co-creator "Jeff Parker". Lieber met them where they lived, and gently poked a hole in their disregard for him as a creator by being a real person. It's a good lesson for other creators... but it'd be nice if more consumers were willing to meet the creators on their own home field as well. If you like a person's work, don't just "share" it with 100,000 of your closest friends: bring them to the creator's web site or Facebook page or whatever, so he has a chance to interact with them like a human being. An artist shouldn't have to engage in detective work to ferret out the people who like his work; if they really like it, they should act like real fans (rather than leeches) and reach out to him.
"No privacy" is (almost literally) coded into Facebook's DNA. The very premise of the site is that privacy is a thing of the past. The fact that this dovetails nicely with its business model of selling access to information is simply the reason it's financially successful.
The location of the hardware where the data is stored is only a part of the challenge they face. Whether you put it on a platform in international waters, on a seagoing vessel, in orbit, or even on a sovereign planetoid, for it to be of use to terra-bound, law-bound consumers you need a communications link to that site, and one end of that link is going to be subject to the laws of whatever state the consumer is in.
Missing the point. He could "prove that it could be done" without going anywhere or doing anything, just by pointing at all of the instructions for doing each step, which he found online.
I know it's hard to start a fire like this. I've tried and tried and tried it unsuccessfully. But as soon as he skipped that step, he was no longer doing what he set out to do: creating dits and dahs without using any post-stone-age gear.
If I set out to walk across the country, but take a bus from Pittsburgh to Toledo because it's raining, and I know that I could walk between them, I haven't actually walked across the country, have I?
Interesting as a premise as that is, it isn't the concept behind what he was doing. This wasn't a DIY hard hack demonstration in the sense that those usually show up on/. This was a conceptual activity, intended to explore an idea. Think "art" not "science". His idea was that this example of technology could be built from nature without any preceding technology at hand, just the knowledge of how to do it. He wanted to to stand on the shoulders of the giants who'd come before him, but not take along any of their tools.
The fact that ultimately he did use one of those tools (a lighter) is why (IMHO) this exercise failed. I understand his reasoning: He could have started the fire without the lighter, and on previous occasions he had started fires without it. But once he made that argument, he could say that he could have have built a battery, and on another occasion he did, so he used a prefab one... and you might at well just leave it as a thought experiment. The performance itself was incomplete, and all that was left was a proof of concept rather than the execution of a concept.
I'm old enough to remember when Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher, Project, Visio, and whatever else MS is bundling these days as "Office" were simply separate products, which anyone could buy individually. "Microsoft Office" was just a less expensive way to get a bunch of them together. They were put together to leverage the more popular apps in the package, to entice (and then lock) users into using the less successful ones. The idea was to cut into (for example) WordPerfect sales by giving people who were already going to buy Excel a discounted copy of Word to go along with it. Or if you wanted Word and Powerpoint, you could get Excel along with them for a lot less than buying a separate license for Lotus 1-2-3. It worked, obviously, and now it's totally impractical to pick and choose which apps you want. If you want WordPerfect for its markup capabilities and Excel for its charting options, you pretty much have to pay for a bunch of other software you don't want to go with them.
US courts have specifically ruled that the Fourth Amendment doesn't apply crossing international borders.
This expectation of no-privacy going through customs has even been used to justify warrantless searches of someone who is merely near an international border.
Maybe you should switch your users to a better OS and their machines won't need to be rebooted so often.
Sure, I'll just sit down with a platform-independent toolkit and rewrite all of the Windows-only vertical-market crapware that they run. Should only take me a weekend.
Not enough people, if you ask me (front line support tech). Laptop users especially have completely gotten out of the habit of shutting down their computers, making their systems progressively slower and less stable as time goes on. Then they come into my office or call me on the phone with a problem (e.g. Program X won't start or keeps crashing). I shut down ("not just 'shut' but actually 'shut down'") their computer, turn it back on again, and it's "fixed". A waste of my time... and theirs.
Annoying as it is, the boot process has the benefit of restoring a system to a largely-predictable known-good state. I miss it already.
"Why is science education important in public schools?"
Because "science education" is not about having safety lessons in the use of technology (as you suggested it should be). Science is a process by which human knowledge is tested and expanded. If you don't know how to test and evaluate what others claim to be true, then you are dependent on others to do it for you. In short, you cannot think critically and rationally for yourself. A population which is unable to do that is a population that is not properly equipped to govern itself. In other words, science education is essential to the proper functioning of democracy. If that's not important to you, the you're right: science education isn't important either, and we can go back to letting an educated priesthood or aristocracy run our governments.
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The "cell phone" theory is a golden example of people projecting their own limited conception of the world onto something they don't recognize. Someone 40 years ago probably would've imagined that they saw someone singing along to a transistor radio. Someone from 120 years ago would've thought they saw someone listening to a seashell and chewing gum. If she's really holding something (IMO the video isn't clear enough to be sure), it's almost certainly a contemporary hearing aid.
Welcome to the club. :)
It isn't the $89.99, but the $89.99 times 1000 junk domains.
Plus different TLD operators have different policies: some actually police who can register, requiring that the perp put some effort into pretending to be eligible to use them. .COM obviously does not.
There's also the factor that nobody has ever heard of .TRAVEL (so it looks bogus), but .COM is familiar and friendly-looking.
"Nobody has a trademark on OpenOffice.org"
There are lawyers at Oracle who disagree with you.
"crisper...?"
The pixels it displays have sharper edges. :)
Not "Darwin"... "Darwinism".
Darwinism is not the worship of a guy called Darwin, but a scientific principle named after a guy called Darwin.
I would have said "Good Old Natural Selection", but that wouldn't have spelled "GOD", so it wouldn't have been funny.
It's an abbreviation for Good Old Darwinism.
I can't count them. Too blurry at this distance.
It figures that they would develop displays with this pixel density just as my ability to focus close enough to appreciate them goes away. {sigh}
"His sales increased because people liked him,"
That's what I meant by showing them that he was a real person. Acting like the RIAA (the evil fantasy that pirates hold in their heads to justify the way they treat creators) wouldn't have helped. Call the emotional reaction what you wish; it was a response to him as a person.
It wasn't the free sharing of this book that boosted its sales. What boosted sales was that the artist got tipped off about it, and had a chance to introduce himself and interact with the pirates, and put a face on "the copyright holder" for them. He was no longer some non-person they could continue to not give a fuck about; he was a human being (and a pretty cool one) whose creativity should be rewarded. It's easy to rip off some anonymous corporation like "Disney" or "Sony" or even "Image Comics", but not so easy to rip off "Steve Lieber" and his co-creator "Jeff Parker". Lieber met them where they lived, and gently poked a hole in their disregard for him as a creator by being a real person. It's a good lesson for other creators... but it'd be nice if more consumers were willing to meet the creators on their own home field as well. If you like a person's work, don't just "share" it with 100,000 of your closest friends: bring them to the creator's web site or Facebook page or whatever, so he has a chance to interact with them like a human being. An artist shouldn't have to engage in detective work to ferret out the people who like his work; if they really like it, they should act like real fans (rather than leeches) and reach out to him.
"No privacy" is (almost literally) coded into Facebook's DNA. The very premise of the site is that privacy is a thing of the past. The fact that this dovetails nicely with its business model of selling access to information is simply the reason it's financially successful.
The location of the hardware where the data is stored is only a part of the challenge they face. Whether you put it on a platform in international waters, on a seagoing vessel, in orbit, or even on a sovereign planetoid, for it to be of use to terra-bound, law-bound consumers you need a communications link to that site, and one end of that link is going to be subject to the laws of whatever state the consumer is in.
We know that all of it has been done before. The point of doing it like this is to do it.
Missing the point. He could "prove that it could be done" without going anywhere or doing anything, just by pointing at all of the instructions for doing each step, which he found online.
Instead he set out to actually do it. But didn't.
I know it's hard to start a fire like this. I've tried and tried and tried it unsuccessfully. But as soon as he skipped that step, he was no longer doing what he set out to do: creating dits and dahs without using any post-stone-age gear.
If I set out to walk across the country, but take a bus from Pittsburgh to Toledo because it's raining, and I know that I could walk between them, I haven't actually walked across the country, have I?
"If civilization collapsed..."
Interesting as a premise as that is, it isn't the concept behind what he was doing. This wasn't a DIY hard hack demonstration in the sense that those usually show up on /. This was a conceptual activity, intended to explore an idea. Think "art" not "science". His idea was that this example of technology could be built from nature without any preceding technology at hand, just the knowledge of how to do it. He wanted to to stand on the shoulders of the giants who'd come before him, but not take along any of their tools.
The fact that ultimately he did use one of those tools (a lighter) is why (IMHO) this exercise failed. I understand his reasoning: He could have started the fire without the lighter, and on previous occasions he had started fires without it. But once he made that argument, he could say that he could have have built a battery, and on another occasion he did, so he used a prefab one... and you might at well just leave it as a thought experiment. The performance itself was incomplete, and all that was left was a proof of concept rather than the execution of a concept.
I'm old enough to remember when Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher, Project, Visio, and whatever else MS is bundling these days as "Office" were simply separate products, which anyone could buy individually. "Microsoft Office" was just a less expensive way to get a bunch of them together. They were put together to leverage the more popular apps in the package, to entice (and then lock) users into using the less successful ones. The idea was to cut into (for example) WordPerfect sales by giving people who were already going to buy Excel a discounted copy of Word to go along with it. Or if you wanted Word and Powerpoint, you could get Excel along with them for a lot less than buying a separate license for Lotus 1-2-3. It worked, obviously, and now it's totally impractical to pick and choose which apps you want. If you want WordPerfect for its markup capabilities and Excel for its charting options, you pretty much have to pay for a bunch of other software you don't want to go with them.
US courts have specifically ruled that the Fourth Amendment doesn't apply crossing international borders.
This expectation of no-privacy going through customs has even been used to justify warrantless searches of someone who is merely near an international border.
"I have no porn to declare but my self."
What makes you think they know how to do that?
Sure, I'll just sit down with a platform-independent toolkit and rewrite all of the Windows-only vertical-market crapware that they run. Should only take me a weekend.
I'm guessing that the Australian constitution doesn't include something equivalent to the US's Fifth Amendment?
Not enough people, if you ask me (front line support tech). Laptop users especially have completely gotten out of the habit of shutting down their computers, making their systems progressively slower and less stable as time goes on. Then they come into my office or call me on the phone with a problem (e.g. Program X won't start or keeps crashing). I shut down ("not just 'shut' but actually 'shut down'") their computer, turn it back on again, and it's "fixed". A waste of my time... and theirs.
Annoying as it is, the boot process has the benefit of restoring a system to a largely-predictable known-good state. I miss it already.
"Why is science education important in public schools?"
Because "science education" is not about having safety lessons in the use of technology (as you suggested it should be). Science is a process by which human knowledge is tested and expanded. If you don't know how to test and evaluate what others claim to be true, then you are dependent on others to do it for you. In short, you cannot think critically and rationally for yourself. A population which is unable to do that is a population that is not properly equipped to govern itself. In other words, science education is essential to the proper functioning of democracy. If that's not important to you, the you're right: science education isn't important either, and we can go back to letting an educated priesthood or aristocracy run our governments.