Probably absolutely correct but you'll NEVER convince a sales droid or marketing weenie of this. Further, all they have to do is say, "Lost sale becuase we didn't have feature Y and brand X does," and management will be in a tizzy. The fact that the potential customer just wanted to get the sales droid out of their office so they could get some real work done never seem to occur to anyone except the poor SOB who gets to spend nights and weekend coding feature Y.
Rather than cut and paste the content from the original DVD to a new, derivative work, use the digital nature of a DVD to create a skip script and modify the player circuitry to apply a skip script (if supplied) to any content played. Think of it as supplying digital airbrushing to simply skip over the "naughty bits." The original work is not altered and its not illegal since its not illegal to hit the fast forward button or mute button. Companies such as those who lost in the ruling become "added value" content creators for those who don't want to see or hear the naughty bits.
It probably wouldn't be that hard to create a version of an open source player such as XMMS to do this. It would read the skip list and play to the first skip and then skips ahead to where the content should resume, read to the next skip, etc. It should also be possible to just mute the sound for any given interval so the same folks don't have to listen to what they don't want to hear.
Cheers, Dave
P.S. As an added benefit, the hypocrites who claim they don't watch "that kind of stuff" can publicly buy the skip edits but then watch the entire movie. Sort of like everyone says they don't watch/look at pr0n.
I look at old systems such as B-52s still flying missions and question whether the problem is *inherent*. How about, nobody has been asked to come up with a better solution. Why not "peel the banana" and have a coating on the external tank that is *designed* to safely fall away? Or use something like Space ShipOne/White Knight that uses and an aerodynamic system for initial assent?
It may be cheaper in the long run to replace the shuttle but I haven't seen enough discussion of the alternatives to know that. I look at SpaceShipOne/White Knight and see that its possible to have a safe, economical, and reusable launch system.
I don't think that the shuttle has an inherent design flaw; it just suffers from being the first operational attempt at making a reusable launch system. Its probably possible to design a shuttle version 2.0 that looks a lot like the existing shuttle (keeps lots of development costs down) but that doesn't have the risks or costs of the current shuttle. Most of the other posts regarding the shuttle focus on risks but NASA hasn't met the original goals for shuttle trip costs or turn-around time and this probably has a lot more to do with efforts to replace the shuttle than flight risks.
Whenever I've run across any of these purported piracy numbers, I've often wondered how many of the people who "pirate" a copy would never dream of paying for a copy? I know there are lots of things available like computer games, productivity software, music, etc. that I wouldn't pay a penny for but would play, try, listen to, etc. once to see what all the fuss is about. I'm guessing the MPAA, RIAA, SBA, etc. would all count any of these copies as potentially full retail sales thay have lost in ariving as the "cost of piracy" even though I would simply not buy the product if my only choice was to pay retail.
My gut level reaction is that most people who end up with a pirated copy of something would find a no-cost or low-cost alternative if they had to. This isn't to say that they don't get value from their pirated copy but just that there are enough low cost or no-cost alternatives (e.g., OpenOffice for software productivity) that most people would simply find a legally free alternative if they were somehow forced not to use the pirated copy. Bottom line is, they wouldn't pay full retail for a copy. I'd guess the same holds true for entertainment, music and games. If someone has no money to buy a copy, they'll find a no cost alternative if they have to pay retail for a legal copy.
Look into find and xargs. You will be amazed at what you can do. I started using Unix in 1988 with HP-UX which makes me only sort of an old-timer. DEC VAXen and CDC and IBM big iron before that.
Actually, when it was first published it was an excellent reference as to what behaved differently or maddeningly the same on various flavors of Unix. Kind of a repository of oddments and errata. Fairly useful if you had to move from one flavor to another and wanted to know what would behave differently even though it was ostensibly the same program (sendmail in particular comes to mind).
Speaking of quote, why did you shorten yours? The actual quote from Atlas Shrugged is, "I will never live my life for sake the of another man, nor ask another man to live his life for mine." Seems like it should fit.
BTW, given the way the original question was asked, I would have just answered "yes".
I taught college level math (trig through intro to calculus) back in the '80s and the same debate raged with regard to using calculators. If I was teaching arithemtic, I would argue against using calculators since the whole idea is the class is supposed to be about learning simple skills like add, subtract, multiply and divide. If I'm teaching a higher level subject like trig or calculus, I'd say using calculators is great because it allows the students to concentrate on the concepts and not get bogged down in the arithmetic. Hell, when I was working on my MS I used an IBM 5100 running APL to do a bunch of the matrix manipulations for my abstract algebra class and the prof thought it was great since I wasn't spending hours row reducing matrices to get eigenvectors and eigenvalues.
I would argue that the same principle applies here. Higher level classes should encourage the students to use an IDE and higher level languages since the idea is to teach them concepts like data structures, complexity theory, numerical algorithms, etc. Introductory classes really benefit from having the students flail at things like compiler errors and trivial logic errors that a good IDE flags so they understand how little a computer can do until someone programs it. In between, the students need to be exposed to an IDE in a way that makes the transition itself a learning experience and ties in with software engineering, tools and the whole mess that Fred Brooks charaterized as accident vs. essence.
I'd also like to see a class that has students solve a problem using a programming language that's appropriate for the task and one that isn't (e.g., COBOL for a CGI problem) just so they also get some understanding of how using the right tool for the job makes a difference and the problem domain for a given tool is limited. This is probably beyond the scope of the original question.
Warning: not really plot spoilers but discussion of plots to various Dan Brown books.
Have to agree with you on that one. I read "Angles and Demons" prior to reading "The Da Vinci Code". Good reads but the overall plot between the two of aging professor and beautiful young woman solve thousand year old plot/mystery/conspiracy/code while never sleeping and performing at levels of Olympic athletes to be way to similar. Then I read "Digital Fortress" which I thought would be different only to find that the overall plot was again the basicaly the same with the only difference being the mystery/conspiracy wasn't a thousand years old. I can think of several other authors who do the same thing (same plot structure but just flesh-out the characters and locales a little differently).
Oh well. I guess when you can make that much money selling the same thing over and over, why change. Look what the same strategy has done for Microsoft.
The government can make the easy and valid argument that there isn't now and never has been any expectation of privacy when sending plain-text e-mail. This applies to *ANY* 'net traffic.
Take a look at your full mail header sometime to see how many systems an e-mail traverses and, while you're at it, do a traceroute from your box to the destination box to see even more routers and such that just pass the data along without adding anything to the mail header. Try the same exercise (traceroute) with some of your favorite web sites.
What you'll find is your traffic goes through lots of people's boxes and routers. Any of these systems can easily keep a copy either intentionally or accidentally. Get used to the idea that what you do on the web isn't private unless you take steps to make it so.
Gates is hardly the first "Robber Baron to try to purchase redemption. Of course, controversy over purchasing forgiveness for past transgressions has a long history.
"i don't care what happens to him. he picked the wrong side."
Actually, I care very much about what happens to him. He should be given a speedy trial (about five minutes should be sufficient), whatever useful information he has should be wrung out of him by any means necessary and then the scum bag should be killed in the most painful manner possible. Anything less than this would be a travesty.
If what you are downloading has no value, why do you download it? Obviously, you download it because you appreciate the entertainment value of the content. The asking price for making that copy available to you is the rental price or sale cost for the work. You have two choices: either pay the asking price or do without. If you feel the asking price is more than the entertainment value, don't buy it or rent it.
If you aren't willing to pay the asking price, do without but don't try to justify theft by playing logic games. The creator of the work went to the expense of creating it with an expectation of being compensated by those who enjoy the work. If you enjoy the work (that is it has value to you), you should be willing to pay for it. If you aren't willing to pay for such entertainment, stick with what is legally available for free.
Time to burn a little karma. So far 50% of the replies to my original post have attacked my sig as opposed to commenting on the post. Strangely enough, both of the off-topic posts complaining about my sig were from liberals who objected to the content of the sig. Of the two posts that actually had anything to say about the content of my post, neither of them had anything to do with Dan Lyons and whether he should be listened to or not either. But at least they were commenting on the content.
Come on folks. Most signatures are just lame attempts to be funny with a few political comments (like mine) that may or amy not overlap the commedy category. They are analogous to and about as deep as bumper stickers. Ignore sigs and reply to the post content.
BTW, for news I usually go to http://news.bbc.uk.co/ (international version). Tends to have a lot less noise in either direction than U.S. newsertainment outlets and a lot better depth.
Dan Lyons saying something bad about a Microsoft product is about like FoxNews (you know, "Fair and Balanced") saying something good about a liberal politician. Next thing you know, Dan will be saying good things about Linux and FoxNews will endorse Hillary for President.
Unit testing tends to only confirm that the program under test works as designed. It does not catch design errors or requirements errors. To catch these, you need to design a test that confirms that the system works as its supposed to work. Where "as its supposed to work" is some arbitrary, external criteria. You should also note that I said "system" and not "program" where system is some larger assembly of components including the hardware and user environment.
You do better if you actually force the developers to create and run high quality unit tests so they fix the code before it gets into integration and becomes subject to automated testing. Peer and QA review of such unit tests tends to increase the quality of the software by ensuring that the unit tests actually test the functionality of the code against the requirements, are complete, coverage is complete, off nominal and boundary conditions are exercised, etc. Merely automatically running (and rerunning) poorly designed unit tests only turns the CPU into an inefficient space heater.
Of course this all presupposes testable functional requirements or user stories and corresponding test cases. Then you at best end up with a system that works as specified and you can turn it over to the users who will still manage to break it and/or complain that it doesn't do what they want it to do.
Gee, thanks, moron, for explaining how to put in a line break. Too bad the question was *why* not *how*. Try again, and this time, read the fucking question.
Gee asshole, why don't you keep the discussion civil? If that's actually your STUPID question, the answer is...
Drum roll, please...
because that's the way the original poster wanted it. (DUH!)
I didn't think someone would be so utterly lacking in intelligence as to ask that question so I replied to the one technical question I thought someone might validly ask.
In the mean time, I'll see if there is some way to transfer some karma points to you. I've heard if you collect enough of them you can use them to get a clue. You obviously need one.
at the end of the line and post using HTML given the software used by slashdot. Some oher sites such as Groklaw use different software that attempts to maintain formatting in simple text posts. Use preview and see what works on different sites.
The extra credit question is: How did I get "<br>" to show up instead of being interpreted as HTML?
Just a quick FYI for how long it takes for an e-mail address posted to/. to get harvested:
Unknown users:
xxxx@davenjudy.org from 81-208-60-207.ip.fastwebnet.it [81.208.60.207] 2 time(s).
My original post was 9 March at 21:02 and this came in on 10 March at 10:17:26. If I remember, I'll post the first attempts to send to this user from a Shaw Cable account. Shouldn't be too long.
If the folks at Shaw Cable would do something about the number of spambots and spammers on their network, they'd have more than enough bandwidth to provide VoIP. This is pretty nominal for my little corner of the internet:
I expect the stormtroopers to come crashing through the front door at any moment. We paid off the house. We paid off the car. We only use credit cards as charge cards (pay in full each month). I even told my previous emloyer to take a flying leap.
Last time I looked the front door was still there.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Probably absolutely correct but you'll NEVER convince a sales droid or marketing weenie of this. Further, all they have to do is say, "Lost sale becuase we didn't have feature Y and brand X does," and management will be in a tizzy. The fact that the potential customer just wanted to get the sales droid out of their office so they could get some real work done never seem to occur to anyone except the poor SOB who gets to spend nights and weekend coding feature Y.
Cheers,
Dave
Rather than cut and paste the content from the original DVD to a new, derivative work, use the digital nature of a DVD to create a skip script and modify the player circuitry to apply a skip script (if supplied) to any content played. Think of it as supplying digital airbrushing to simply skip over the "naughty bits." The original work is not altered and its not illegal since its not illegal to hit the fast forward button or mute button. Companies such as those who lost in the ruling become "added value" content creators for those who don't want to see or hear the naughty bits.
It probably wouldn't be that hard to create a version of an open source player such as XMMS to do this. It would read the skip list and play to the first skip and then skips ahead to where the content should resume, read to the next skip, etc. It should also be possible to just mute the sound for any given interval so the same folks don't have to listen to what they don't want to hear.
Cheers,
Dave
P.S. As an added benefit, the hypocrites who claim they don't watch "that kind of stuff" can publicly buy the skip edits but then watch the entire movie. Sort of like everyone says they don't watch/look at pr0n.
...drink a margarita in his honor.
Oh? Wrong Buffet you say?
OK. I'll still drink a magarita in his honor.
Cheers,
Dave
I look at old systems such as B-52s still flying missions and question whether the problem is *inherent*. How about, nobody has been asked to come up with a better solution. Why not "peel the banana" and have a coating on the external tank that is *designed* to safely fall away? Or use something like Space ShipOne/White Knight that uses and an aerodynamic system for initial assent?
It may be cheaper in the long run to replace the shuttle but I haven't seen enough discussion of the alternatives to know that. I look at SpaceShipOne/White Knight and see that its possible to have a safe, economical, and reusable launch system.
I don't think that the shuttle has an inherent design flaw; it just suffers from being the first operational attempt at making a reusable launch system. Its probably possible to design a shuttle version 2.0 that looks a lot like the existing shuttle (keeps lots of development costs down) but that doesn't have the risks or costs of the current shuttle. Most of the other posts regarding the shuttle focus on risks but NASA hasn't met the original goals for shuttle trip costs or turn-around time and this probably has a lot more to do with efforts to replace the shuttle than flight risks.
Cheers,
Dave
Whenever I've run across any of these purported piracy numbers, I've often wondered how many of the people who "pirate" a copy would never dream of paying for a copy? I know there are lots of things available like computer games, productivity software, music, etc. that I wouldn't pay a penny for but would play, try, listen to, etc. once to see what all the fuss is about. I'm guessing the MPAA, RIAA, SBA, etc. would all count any of these copies as potentially full retail sales thay have lost in ariving as the "cost of piracy" even though I would simply not buy the product if my only choice was to pay retail.
My gut level reaction is that most people who end up with a pirated copy of something would find a no-cost or low-cost alternative if they had to. This isn't to say that they don't get value from their pirated copy but just that there are enough low cost or no-cost alternatives (e.g., OpenOffice for software productivity) that most people would simply find a legally free alternative if they were somehow forced not to use the pirated copy. Bottom line is, they wouldn't pay full retail for a copy. I'd guess the same holds true for entertainment, music and games. If someone has no money to buy a copy, they'll find a no cost alternative if they have to pay retail for a legal copy.
Cheers,
Dave
Look into find and xargs. You will be amazed at what you can do. I started using Unix in 1988 with HP-UX which makes me only sort of an old-timer. DEC VAXen and CDC and IBM big iron before that.
Cheers,
Dave
Actually, when it was first published it was an excellent reference as to what behaved differently or maddeningly the same on various flavors of Unix. Kind of a repository of oddments and errata. Fairly useful if you had to move from one flavor to another and wanted to know what would behave differently even though it was ostensibly the same program (sendmail in particular comes to mind).
Cheers,
Dave
It would be interesting to see how many Linux complaints and annoyances date back to Unix.
Cheers,
Dave
Speaking of quote, why did you shorten yours? The actual quote from Atlas Shrugged is, "I will never live my life for sake the of another man, nor ask another man to live his life for mine." Seems like it should fit.
Cheers,
Dave
BTW, given the way the original question was asked, I would have just answered "yes".
I taught college level math (trig through intro to calculus) back in the '80s and the same debate raged with regard to using calculators. If I was teaching arithemtic, I would argue against using calculators since the whole idea is the class is supposed to be about learning simple skills like add, subtract, multiply and divide. If I'm teaching a higher level subject like trig or calculus, I'd say using calculators is great because it allows the students to concentrate on the concepts and not get bogged down in the arithmetic. Hell, when I was working on my MS I used an IBM 5100 running APL to do a bunch of the matrix manipulations for my abstract algebra class and the prof thought it was great since I wasn't spending hours row reducing matrices to get eigenvectors and eigenvalues.
I would argue that the same principle applies here. Higher level classes should encourage the students to use an IDE and higher level languages since the idea is to teach them concepts like data structures, complexity theory, numerical algorithms, etc. Introductory classes really benefit from having the students flail at things like compiler errors and trivial logic errors that a good IDE flags so they understand how little a computer can do until someone programs it. In between, the students need to be exposed to an IDE in a way that makes the transition itself a learning experience and ties in with software engineering, tools and the whole mess that Fred Brooks charaterized as accident vs. essence.
I'd also like to see a class that has students solve a problem using a programming language that's appropriate for the task and one that isn't (e.g., COBOL for a CGI problem) just so they also get some understanding of how using the right tool for the job makes a difference and the problem domain for a given tool is limited. This is probably beyond the scope of the original question.
Cheers,
Dave
Hump? What hump?
...
...
Wow! What knockers!
So which brain did you get?
Abby.
Abby who?
Abby normal.
Warning: not really plot spoilers but discussion of plots to various Dan Brown books.
Have to agree with you on that one. I read "Angles and Demons" prior to reading "The Da Vinci Code". Good reads but the overall plot between the two of aging professor and beautiful young woman solve thousand year old plot/mystery/conspiracy/code while never sleeping and performing at levels of Olympic athletes to be way to similar. Then I read "Digital Fortress" which I thought would be different only to find that the overall plot was again the basicaly the same with the only difference being the mystery/conspiracy wasn't a thousand years old. I can think of several other authors who do the same thing (same plot structure but just flesh-out the characters and locales a little differently).
Oh well. I guess when you can make that much money selling the same thing over and over, why change. Look what the same strategy has done for Microsoft.
Cheers,
Dave
The government can make the easy and valid argument that there isn't now and never has been any expectation of privacy when sending plain-text e-mail. This applies to *ANY* 'net traffic.
Take a look at your full mail header sometime to see how many systems an e-mail traverses and, while you're at it, do a traceroute from your box to the destination box to see even more routers and such that just pass the data along without adding anything to the mail header. Try the same exercise (traceroute) with some of your favorite web sites.
What you'll find is your traffic goes through lots of people's boxes and routers. Any of these systems can easily keep a copy either intentionally or accidentally. Get used to the idea that what you do on the web isn't private unless you take steps to make it so.
Cheers,
Dave
Cheers,
Dave
Have a nice day!
Dave
If what you are downloading has no value, why do you download it? Obviously, you download it because you appreciate the entertainment value of the content. The asking price for making that copy available to you is the rental price or sale cost for the work. You have two choices: either pay the asking price or do without. If you feel the asking price is more than the entertainment value, don't buy it or rent it.
If you aren't willing to pay the asking price, do without but don't try to justify theft by playing logic games. The creator of the work went to the expense of creating it with an expectation of being compensated by those who enjoy the work. If you enjoy the work (that is it has value to you), you should be willing to pay for it. If you aren't willing to pay for such entertainment, stick with what is legally available for free.
Time to burn a little karma. So far 50% of the replies to my original post have attacked my sig as opposed to commenting on the post. Strangely enough, both of the off-topic posts complaining about my sig were from liberals who objected to the content of the sig. Of the two posts that actually had anything to say about the content of my post, neither of them had anything to do with Dan Lyons and whether he should be listened to or not either. But at least they were commenting on the content.
Come on folks. Most signatures are just lame attempts to be funny with a few political comments (like mine) that may or amy not overlap the commedy category. They are analogous to and about as deep as bumper stickers. Ignore sigs and reply to the post content.
BTW, for news I usually go to http://news.bbc.uk.co/ (international version). Tends to have a lot less noise in either direction than U.S. newsertainment outlets and a lot better depth.
Cheers,
Dave
Dan Lyons saying something bad about a Microsoft product is about like FoxNews (you know, "Fair and Balanced") saying something good about a liberal politician. Next thing you know, Dan will be saying good things about Linux and FoxNews will endorse Hillary for President.
Unit testing tends to only confirm that the program under test works as designed. It does not catch design errors or requirements errors. To catch these, you need to design a test that confirms that the system works as its supposed to work. Where "as its supposed to work" is some arbitrary, external criteria. You should also note that I said "system" and not "program" where system is some larger assembly of components including the hardware and user environment.
You do better if you actually force the developers to create and run high quality unit tests so they fix the code before it gets into integration and becomes subject to automated testing. Peer and QA review of such unit tests tends to increase the quality of the software by ensuring that the unit tests actually test the functionality of the code against the requirements, are complete, coverage is complete, off nominal and boundary conditions are exercised, etc. Merely automatically running (and rerunning) poorly designed unit tests only turns the CPU into an inefficient space heater.
Of course this all presupposes testable functional requirements or user stories and corresponding test cases. Then you at best end up with a system that works as specified and you can turn it over to the users who will still manage to break it and/or complain that it doesn't do what they want it to do.
Why
not?
Drum roll, please...
because that's the way the original poster wanted it. (DUH!)
I didn't think someone would be so utterly lacking in intelligence as to ask that question so I replied to the one technical question I thought someone might validly ask.
In the mean time, I'll see if there is some way to transfer some karma points to you. I've heard if you collect enough of them you can use them to get a clue. You obviously need one.
Cheers,
Dave
at the end of the line and post using HTML given the software used by slashdot. Some oher sites such as Groklaw use different software that attempts to maintain formatting in simple text posts. Use preview and see what works on different sites.
The extra credit question is: How did I get "<br>" to show up instead of being interpreted as HTML?
Cheers,
Dave
I expect the stormtroopers to come crashing through the front door at any moment. We paid off the house. We paid off the car. We only use credit cards as charge cards (pay in full each month). I even told my previous emloyer to take a flying leap.
;-)
Last time I looked the front door was still there.
Cheers,
Dave