If silencing of perfectly legal speech was widespread it wouldn't be a problem; everyone would know, people would get angry, things would be changed or an illegal communications channel would pop up to replace it.
The problem is that it's relatively infrequent. It doesn't seem like a serious problem, so the small number of people getting screwed tend to be ignored.
ISPs are a dime a dozen. You can find them to pump your spam, serve your porn, email, whatever. If you don't agree to the terms of use for any reason, simply go to another one.
Great, if I want free speech online I get to share an ISP with porn sites and spammers. Which, of course, will get me blacklisted in other ways.
The reality is that DMCA is quite clear; when given a properly formed DMCA takedown request the content must be removed. Failure to do so exposes the ISP to liability. End result: very, very few ISPs will stand up for you. Worse, almost no ISP will tell you up front about their policy. When I arranged my current provider they seemed positively confused when I asked about their DMCA takedown policy. Given that they run tens of thousands of web sites I know they see DMCA takedowns. Because of the relatively infrequency of DMCA takedowns and the even smaller number of takedowns that are wrong there aren't enough data points to form a review web site to find out which ISPs are badly behaved.
I would imagine that most every ISP has a zero tolerance policy (aside from the sleezy ones that will host anything for a price) regarding copyrights, and don't care to spend any time figuring it out.
My point exactly. I get sleazy, blacklisted sites, or I get a near-zero tolerance policy. Even a day of having a page taken down can be a serious problem. The DMCA mandated 10 days is downright crippling. Just ask Fat Wallet, which was issued DMCA takedown requests that effectively destroyed their ability to compare post-Thanksgiving specials. By the time the content was back up, the day was past. Cost to Wal-mart? One nasty-gram from a lawyer.
But wait -- SPF doesn't block spam! It just blocks spam where the From: is not right.
SPF can help in three areas, even without 100% compliance. First, it can protect you from joe jobs where a spammer uses your domain as the return address, flooding you with bounce messages and angry complaints. As more and more people restrict mail based on SPF the damage from a joe jobs decreases. Second, with similar gradual pay-off, it can seriously limit attempted identity theft spams that fraudulently appear to come from eBay, BankAmerica, or whoever the target it. Third, again with increasing benefit as more people respect SPF, it will limit the amount of damage done by email worms that spoof the sender based on random addresses found on the infected source machine.
No solution is ever perfect, fortunately no solution ever needs to be.
Your exercise is merely there to burn excess calories you consume over your maintenance calorie level...
Well, actually if you want to lose weight you'll need to intake less than your maintenance calorie level. Of course, your maintenance calorie level is dependent in part upon your exercise level. If you have a stable weight and change nothing other than increasing the exercise you do, you'll lose weight. For example, if you're weight is stable and you're consuming 2,000 calories a day, if you keep to that level of intake but burn an addition 200 calories each day by playing DDR, you'll lose roughly one pound of weight every two weeks.
If it's strictly a choice been diet and exercise, yes, reducing intake is generally the more effective path. But ultimately to lose weight you need to take in fewer calories than your body uses. You can do this by either reducing intake or increases energy usage. Of course, the ideal plan combines a little of both.
We can get philosophical about how DRM infringes upon my fair use rights, but if people did NOT steal- then we wouldn't have this problem.
We can also get philosophical about how detaining people without trial infringes upon human rights, but if there weren't terrorists we wouldn't have this problem.
If you're willing to chuck it the moment things get complicated it wasn't much of a right at all. Personally I'm not willing to sacrifice fair use yet. Why the hell should I suffer for the actions of others? No, it's not as important as, say, the right to a trial or the right to freedom of speech, but that's not an excuse to ignore it. By denying people the ability to reproduce small portions for commentary, you can dramatically limit the effectiveness of valid criticism (See the Scientologists). By making it hard to preserve (that is, by copying it, often to shift from obsolete media to newer forms) you can effectively destroy the existance of a work you now find embarassing (See Disney and Song of the South).
The corporations who are spending tons of money to implement DRM would rather not have to spend that money.
True. They'd also rather we rented rather than owned, that they were insured an endless revenue stream for produced works. They'd also rather not spend money actually having to produce anything, they're just want free money. Life's tough.
I am a big supporter of paying money for the intellectual property I use.
That's nice. It's also completely irrelevant. I'm a big supporter of freedom from violence. I'm in favor of government taking steps to protect me and others from violence. But there are some freedoms I'm unwilling to sacrifice to achieve safety. I happen to also like the right to bear arms. The severity of violence would certainly decline if guns were outlawed, but I'm not willing to make that trade-off.
I'm a big supporter of the copyright system. I'm happy to pay for copyright protected works. But I'm not willing to make the sacrifice of fair use part of the price I pay.
First, try playing at an arcade first. A few games will be relatively cheap. If it turns out you don't like it, you'll have saved much more money. Investing in a game you end up not liking is ever bit as bad as investing in exercise equipment you don't use. DDR Freak offers a directory of machine locations.
If you do like it (and don't have downstairs neighbors... *sigh*) playing at home is the cheapest option. Again, I'd go cheap at first; you can scale up as you need to. If you don't have a console already, grab a cheap used PS1 ($30 bucks or so), a cheap vinyl dance pad ($20), and a used copy of the original DDR or DDR Konamix for the PS1 ($10). The cheap pads are just fine to start. Which of the expensive pads to get is a much more complex question, but if you reach the point where you really want one, you'll have learned what you're looking for and be better able to sort through the available information.
All that said, just increasing your exercise level alone won't necessarily help if you just eat more to compensate. I know this to be true. Ummm, I'm talking about, er, a friend, yeah, a friend, that's it. Anyway, consider at least some minimal dieting in addition. I, erm, I mean my friend found The Hacker's Diet to be a welcomely rational discussion of dieting.
I see little difference between someone giving away (say) Madonna's recorded music without her permission, and someone giving away her car without her permission, *because* I accept that a reproducible performance can be property.
That's a heck of leap of logic. To suggest that there is little difference seems foolish to me. Copyright law creates a weird special case where a third party can claim harm regarding handling of property by two other parties. I've got a number of CDs I'm very fond of. If I loan one out, sell it, give it away, or it is stolen from me, I no longer have access to it. In the case of it being stolen from me that access was taken from me without permission. The CDs are mine, I own them (I have no claim on the music, but those particular copies are mine). Ultimately it's a matter of scarcity, someone else having it can deny me access. However, if I were to provide a friend with a copy of one of those CDs I've lost nothing. Instead, some third party that I've never met has lost something. Worse, it's not a real loss (they had something, now they don't), it's an opportunity loss, and a fractional one at that (since you can't really count those cases where the person would never have purchased the CD themselves). It's a weird special case.
I believe in the principle of property and will defend it as well. I simply limit private property to things subject to scarcity. I also believe in the copyright system, I believe that it is good for society and would fight against efforts to abolish it. But I believe in them for different reasons. Let the ethics of copyright law stand on its own; I think it's strong enough to do so. Most file sharers understand in their hearts, if not their minds, that they are different things. Confusing the two just leads to sloppy thinking and closes the minds of those you most want to influence.
The article seemed to indicate that because they use 2 tbsp coffee per cup brewed, you end up with more caffeine than other coffee. Is that all there is to it?
The claim that they do so to improve the flavor is likely accurate. If you're getting bitter coffee out of your pot there are two things to check: 1. It's too hot and you're burning the coffee, and 2. You're not using enough coffee grounds. Too little grounds means you end up leaching more stuff out of the grounds; eventually you run out of good coffee flavor and are left with bitter nasty stuff.
This is surprising to many people who assume "My coffee is too bitter, so it's too strong, so I'll use less grounds" which leads to more bitter, nastier coffee.
Does this lead to more caffeine in each pot? No idea. If the caffeine is quickly pulled out of the grounds, it's entirely possible.
That's not improving your security. That's improving your privacy (via anonymity) at the expense of your security.
It's a security trade off. He's potentially downgraded the security of his network connection (increased exposure of his personal machines, chance the network will be saturated with other users, chance he'll be blacklisted for behavior of other users on his wireless), in exchange for increased security from retribution for infringing on copyright (plausible deniability).
If you're uploading the file, other clients give you higher priority to download from them. Clients that never upload anything end up at the bottom of the queues and wait the longest.
ATM I'm downloading at 4KiB/s and up at 30KiB/s, generally I upload twice as much as I download. where's my "reward"?
You can fill your outgoing pipe actually causing downloads to slow down as ACK packets are delayed. Throttle your max upload rate (how you do it varies from client to client) to something less than what you theoretically can do. On my cable modem I tend to set it to 80kbps (out of a theoretical 128). That will probably help. It's unfortunate that this is so frequent; it should ideally self-manage better.
It wholly depends on how many people are downloading it at any specific moment, so when you come back maybe 3 days later, the download speeds drop to a trickle because you're the only one downloading the file now. And nobody leaves their BT clients open longer than it takes to download a file - I'm sorry, but relying on people's altruistic behavior is plain stupid.
And yet... it works anyway.
View it another way: I want to release my new Linux distribution (ChaosDiscordLinux 12.0). I've got my own site to distribute it from, and two guys who are willing to run mirrors.
Option 1: The old school way. I put the files on each site and serve them over HTTP and FTP. The maximum speed I can serve my files at is limited by the bandwidth to those three sites. If I get surprisingly popular, my bandwidth will peg out and things will generally suck.
Option 2: Bittorrent. I run seed the torrent, as do the other two sites. Now, as a worst possible case people who want to download the file are still limited to the bandwidth of those three sites. However, if there are any surges in demand during those surges everyone downloading starts helping each other. End result: at the worst case it's about the same as the old way, but can potentially be good.
Is it perfect? No. But it works damn well. One of the benefits is that it looks and behaves like a simple download manager. Not everyone is interested in the details of being on a file sharing network. I don't want an IRC client, to help distribute searches, to potentially share other files. Bittorrent just makes it work. As an added bonus, Bittorrent requires a certain level of accountability; there is a centralized location to send a DMCA takedown request. This makes it much more palatable for various people squeemish with the generally shady looking P2P services.
I downloaded Red Hat 9.0 months after its release and still found a number of seeds available. It was the fastest ISO download I've ever had. The World of Warcraft beta test is being distributed over Bittorrent and works great. I'm into video games and really appreciate
File Rush, which gets me game demos and video footage at lightning speeds. Bittorrent is the only download path I have that regularlly saturates my cable modem.
When I run a FreeNet node, items of data from other people are placed, in part, on my hard drive.
When you run a mail server items of data from other people are placed on your hard drive. The same for a Usenet server. Items of data from other people are placed on the hard drives that back thousands of web forums across the world. This comment itself is sitting on one of Slashdot's hard drives.
Every single one of these services is used for copyright infringement. People email infringing copies of small things all the time. Usenet is a popular place to find book scans, mp3s, warez, and porn. Web forums and similar beasts like Slashdot regularlly have articles reposted without permission in the comments.
By this reasoning, it could be argued that it is in fact illegal to use FreeNet.
Indeed. Of course, arguing that while not arguing that Usenet, email, and Slashdot are illegal will be a neat trick.
This post is a troll. Check his link for "GPL." (Not safe for work). I thought it was odd that it went to about.com, instead of something more obvious like the Free Software Foundation's site. He's using about.com to redirect to a disgusting picture of what appears to be feces on a woman's face. Check his posting history, lots of trolling.
I know a lot of people feel that there is some sort of hypocracy from Slashdot because some people are pro-GPL while some (not necessarily the same) people are anti-RIAA, but actually check that you're not being trolled before you up-mod it!
I don't see how that's any different from now. "Did I sign up for this list? No? Alright, they suck".
The biggest difference in how I react.
With an unexpected confirmation opt-in message I simply ignore it. It's unfortunate that I got it, but at least it's a one off irritation.
With an unexpected mailing list message things get more complicated. Is it spam? Definately don't reply, as it confirms the email address and earns you more spam. Is it a legit list? Well, read the message looking for the information on how to get off the list. Of course, it's not always clear which category a message is in. Either way I must take specific action (Basically blacklisting or unsubscribing), or I can expect further messages.
I don't agree with the earlier claim that unconfirm lists are spam. However, confirmed opt-in is a good way to show that your company or mailing list is interested in being a good citizen. It shows that you understand people's email boxes are full of unwelcome junk and you don't want to be another source. This won't end spam, but it can reduce the number of people complaining that you're a spam source. This will reduce the number of blacklists you end up on.
So wherever I go, businesses refuse my checks, all because some stupid check clearing service got a few reports about me bouncing checks. And just because I defaulted on a few loans here and there no one will loan me any money. This is clearly restraint of trade! People shouldn't be allowed to make decisions about my trustworthiness based on my prior behavior. There certainly shouldn't be anyone tracking that information and sharing it! The information in those databases is just a bunch of random claims from various other people; there are probably errors and maybe a few malicious lies. I've got half a mind to sue these credit report services. I bet I can get an injunction against them reporting anything negative on my credit reports!
(I realize that in this particular case there are other claims, including harassment, and that credit reporting companies are scum for other reasons, but the analogy just came to me and seemed particularlly relavent.)
The only thing confirmed opt-in gives you is that people who don't know how confirmed opt-in works wind up not being able to get useful emails, and only get crappy spam rather than the emails they want.
If you're running any sort of list without confirmed opt-in you're allowing your list to be used for a variety of nuisance attacks. Don't like someone? Subscribe them to as many single opt-in lists as possible. It's the modern day equivalent of taking a bunch of subscription cards from magazines at the library and subscribing someone you don't like to them. This is worse because it's so easy. As someone who has suffered exactly this sort of attack, it's extremely frustrating.
Confirmed opt-in isn't some sort of crazy, rare idea. It's increasingly common. People will learn to deal with them. Modern mailing list packages provide very clear messages explaining what is going on and how to get onto the list. It's almost identical to email confirmed account creation which is effectively the standard for getting a free account on any web site these days.
Let's say someone signs you up for a list that you didn't want them to. In the case of confirmed opt-in, they will get one useless extra email. In the case of unconfirmed opt-in, they will get one potentially useful extra email that they only have to reply or click on to get removed.
Until you've faced 70 hostile sign up messages in a day, you don't really appreciate how frustrating this is. It's not potentially useful, it's a time wasting mess. I shouldn't need to read each message to determine how to unsubscribe from each list (this one require a response email, this one requires a specially formatted message to another address, this one requires visiting a web site, this one requires logging into a web site, this one doesn't provide any details on how to unsubscribe at all!). Worse, it's possible that the message is actually a test message from a spammer; anyone who tries to unsubscribe will be added to the known good list.
First of all, confirmed opt-in opens itself up to just as much spam as non-confirmed opt-in. You just wind up with a bunch of spam that starts "We have received a submission from someone claiming to be you to join our mailing list, 'Vicodin available at example.com'. In order to verify your email address for the opt-in list 'Vicodin available at example.com', you have to reply to this message.
What you describe isn't confirmed opt-in; it's just plain old forgery. Spammers already forge patterns for various tools already (as I look at the piles of faked eBay "Question for seller" and "WARNING: Cannot deliver to yahoo.com" messages in my mailbox). The response will be the same as always; mark it as spam (if you're using a trained system) and move on. This would change nothing for spammers. It will, however, make it much easier to distinguish the companies tries to do play fair.
True enough, but I still do it. Why? My Windows partition exists solely to play games. Lots of games are stupid and assume that they can write all of the drive at well. If you want to play arbitrary modern games under WindowsNT/XP, you're doing it as Administrator. I simply accept this.
Interestingly, the opposite is true of Linux. There was a really good looking RSS aggregator I was interested in; good enough that I was considering purchasing it. However, it pretty much demanded to be installed as root and world write permission for its install directories given to any user accounts who was going to use it. I didn't stand for it, I instead used
a less mature product that behaved like software should. (Not perfectly mind you; installing it as a user proved to be a mess. However, once installed as root it worked correctly without unusual permissions.)
My brother administrates a research lab of computers. He's asked to keep a wide selection of software packages available for his users. I regularly listen to his tales of woe as he complains that package X assumes write access to C:\Windows, package Y demands write access to sensitive parts of the Windows registry, and the like.
I work with an eclectic selection of specialized physics simulation software that runs on Unix-like systems (mostly Linux these days). Every single piece I've worked with was quite happy to be dumped into a random directory and run directly by the user .
There is an interesting difference in attitude between Windows and Unix-like systems. On Windows lots of developers assume Administrator access. On a Unix-like system assuming root access is gets you dirty looks. Microsoft officially wants software developers to play nice and support user-installed software and user-used software that was installed by Administrator, but developers simply don't take it seriously. The culture of respecting security boundaries doesn't exist. Sure, there are people doing great work on Windows, but there the main masses of Windows programmers doing specialized work just don't think about it. Microsoft needs to lean harder on them.
However, I've found that top-posting is most convenient in circumstances where all the conversing parties (especially if there are just two parties involved) use top-posting, as there is no need to scroll down to see the newest addition. If someone by chance enters the conversation late, they still have the info, but it's more convenienct for the majority.
For the majority the most convient option will be no quoting at all. The resulting messages will be more quickly downloaded, important if you're on a slow connection (say, cruddy hotel phone lines overseas). If you want to see the previous messages, you should have copies. If you don't have copies, get a better mail program. If you need to add someone to the conversation, "Bounce" (or whatever your client calls it) the entire conversation to them. Then their client can use threading, searching, and other cutting edge 1994 concepts on the previous messages, just like you.
Come to think of it, that's another advantage of trimming or eliminating quoted text: when a long conversation drifts topics, later messages won't turn up in searches for older topics.
Ultimately quoting entire messages is a gross hack. Prior to email we managed to correspond without including copies of every prior message in the envelope.
Of course, I'm bitter because I regularlly see the end result of people getting sloppy with quoting: I'll get copied on the twentieth message of a thread, all of it quoted increasing deeply with signatures, disclaimers, and in some cases headers included. The conversation will span a month of time and cover five different topics. At the top will simply be "Can we do this," leaving me to try and guess which of the many issues raised I'm supposed to care about.
If shoplifting was as harmless and easy to get away with as trading copyrighted material is, you can sure as hell bet I would get myself some free candy every day...
Note to self: Don't hire eggstasy for a job in retail sales. Come to think of it, just don't hire eggstasy for anything.
Fair warning, Wizard's Bane is very much trashy fantasy, of the "person from our world transported into a fantasy world" sub-genre. I enjoyed the hell out of it (and I now own the entire series), but it's not for everyone.
On the up side, it's part of the Baen Free Library. At free the only cost is your time.
Even traditional disclaimers such as "except for video games, which need to stay close to the machine level" usually don't hold water any more.
Sure, if you're talking about puzzle games.
However, for most retail games pushing the graphics as far as possible is important. If you can squeeze a 5% improvement out of the engine you can use the freed up time to make the game a bit prettier. Or put another way, art expands to fill available processing power. Graphics blocking on the video card? Well, you can use processing power for increasingly realistic physics simulations and artificial intelligence.
If you play a lot of games you know that there is great variance between games. Some games coast along at a bare minimum while others surprise you with their ability to create compelling visuals with older hardware.
After all, who ever thought you could use an interpreted, functional language to decode Targa images, especially without any performance concerns?
Ummmm, just about anyone sane? Wow, decoding a measely megabyte of data. And the encoding? Simple run length encoding. That's not a real programming problem; that's a homework assignment for Computer Science 101. If you're keen on loading graphics you could at least pick something that is slightly complicated like JPEG.
Is it true that optimization is massively overrated; that most programs are plenty fast? Sure. But this article doesn't provide a bit of evidence for that.
Indeed. And it's still funny. Much like the clickthough warnings "Read this entire document." The reality is that almost no one cares. You won't stop the minor offenses (people just chatting about it without intent to cheat) because it's pervasive. Those engaged in the minor offenses don't view themselves as offenders because they see no harm. And in practice there is no harm. As for those intending to cheat, well, if you're intending to cheat what incentive do you have to follow the other rules.
Sure, it's serious. So's the FBI warning on DVDs and the corporate disclaimers stuck on the bottom of email. They're still funny. If this warning is the key to preserving the fairness of their tests it's not only funny, it's pathetic.
Re:how to win a suit against spam filtering compan
on
Spammer Sues SpamCop
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Send out a bunch of spam that is legit complete with
the adv in the subject line and that meets all requirements by the new can spam law. When your messages get blocked sue every single spam filtering
solution out of existance.
Out of curiousity, exactly what would you be suing them for? The CAN-SPAM Act doesn't have anything to say about filtering systems. The prior arguments in favor of filtering solutions (In short: the filtering solution isn't forcing you to use it) still stand up just fine.
Slashdot Mirror
If silencing of perfectly legal speech was widespread it wouldn't be a problem; everyone would know, people would get angry, things would be changed or an illegal communications channel would pop up to replace it.
The problem is that it's relatively infrequent. It doesn't seem like a serious problem, so the small number of people getting screwed tend to be ignored.
Great, if I want free speech online I get to share an ISP with porn sites and spammers. Which, of course, will get me blacklisted in other ways.
The reality is that DMCA is quite clear; when given a properly formed DMCA takedown request the content must be removed. Failure to do so exposes the ISP to liability. End result: very, very few ISPs will stand up for you. Worse, almost no ISP will tell you up front about their policy. When I arranged my current provider they seemed positively confused when I asked about their DMCA takedown policy. Given that they run tens of thousands of web sites I know they see DMCA takedowns. Because of the relatively infrequency of DMCA takedowns and the even smaller number of takedowns that are wrong there aren't enough data points to form a review web site to find out which ISPs are badly behaved.
My point exactly. I get sleazy, blacklisted sites, or I get a near-zero tolerance policy. Even a day of having a page taken down can be a serious problem. The DMCA mandated 10 days is downright crippling. Just ask Fat Wallet, which was issued DMCA takedown requests that effectively destroyed their ability to compare post-Thanksgiving specials. By the time the content was back up, the day was past. Cost to Wal-mart? One nasty-gram from a lawyer.
It's a darn sight smaller than English, and you seem to manage that reasonably well.
SPF can help in three areas, even without 100% compliance. First, it can protect you from joe jobs where a spammer uses your domain as the return address, flooding you with bounce messages and angry complaints. As more and more people restrict mail based on SPF the damage from a joe jobs decreases. Second, with similar gradual pay-off, it can seriously limit attempted identity theft spams that fraudulently appear to come from eBay, BankAmerica, or whoever the target it. Third, again with increasing benefit as more people respect SPF, it will limit the amount of damage done by email worms that spoof the sender based on random addresses found on the infected source machine.
No solution is ever perfect, fortunately no solution ever needs to be.
Hmmmm, so exercise about 2 hours per week, multiplied by my billable rate, divided by expected frequency of sex... carry the 1, and...
Looks like spending the time doing additional consulting and paying for hookers is a better deal.
Well, actually if you want to lose weight you'll need to intake less than your maintenance calorie level. Of course, your maintenance calorie level is dependent in part upon your exercise level. If you have a stable weight and change nothing other than increasing the exercise you do, you'll lose weight. For example, if you're weight is stable and you're consuming 2,000 calories a day, if you keep to that level of intake but burn an addition 200 calories each day by playing DDR, you'll lose roughly one pound of weight every two weeks.
If it's strictly a choice been diet and exercise, yes, reducing intake is generally the more effective path. But ultimately to lose weight you need to take in fewer calories than your body uses. You can do this by either reducing intake or increases energy usage. Of course, the ideal plan combines a little of both.
We can also get philosophical about how detaining people without trial infringes upon human rights, but if there weren't terrorists we wouldn't have this problem.
If you're willing to chuck it the moment things get complicated it wasn't much of a right at all. Personally I'm not willing to sacrifice fair use yet. Why the hell should I suffer for the actions of others? No, it's not as important as, say, the right to a trial or the right to freedom of speech, but that's not an excuse to ignore it. By denying people the ability to reproduce small portions for commentary, you can dramatically limit the effectiveness of valid criticism (See the Scientologists). By making it hard to preserve (that is, by copying it, often to shift from obsolete media to newer forms) you can effectively destroy the existance of a work you now find embarassing (See Disney and Song of the South).
True. They'd also rather we rented rather than owned, that they were insured an endless revenue stream for produced works. They'd also rather not spend money actually having to produce anything, they're just want free money. Life's tough.
That's nice. It's also completely irrelevant. I'm a big supporter of freedom from violence. I'm in favor of government taking steps to protect me and others from violence. But there are some freedoms I'm unwilling to sacrifice to achieve safety. I happen to also like the right to bear arms. The severity of violence would certainly decline if guns were outlawed, but I'm not willing to make that trade-off.
I'm a big supporter of the copyright system. I'm happy to pay for copyright protected works. But I'm not willing to make the sacrifice of fair use part of the price I pay.
First, try playing at an arcade first. A few games will be relatively cheap. If it turns out you don't like it, you'll have saved much more money. Investing in a game you end up not liking is ever bit as bad as investing in exercise equipment you don't use. DDR Freak offers a directory of machine locations.
If you do like it (and don't have downstairs neighbors... *sigh*) playing at home is the cheapest option. Again, I'd go cheap at first; you can scale up as you need to. If you don't have a console already, grab a cheap used PS1 ($30 bucks or so), a cheap vinyl dance pad ($20), and a used copy of the original DDR or DDR Konamix for the PS1 ($10). The cheap pads are just fine to start. Which of the expensive pads to get is a much more complex question, but if you reach the point where you really want one, you'll have learned what you're looking for and be better able to sort through the available information.
All that said, just increasing your exercise level alone won't necessarily help if you just eat more to compensate. I know this to be true. Ummm, I'm talking about, er, a friend, yeah, a friend, that's it. Anyway, consider at least some minimal dieting in addition. I, erm, I mean my friend found The Hacker's Diet to be a welcomely rational discussion of dieting.
That's a heck of leap of logic. To suggest that there is little difference seems foolish to me. Copyright law creates a weird special case where a third party can claim harm regarding handling of property by two other parties. I've got a number of CDs I'm very fond of. If I loan one out, sell it, give it away, or it is stolen from me, I no longer have access to it. In the case of it being stolen from me that access was taken from me without permission. The CDs are mine, I own them (I have no claim on the music, but those particular copies are mine). Ultimately it's a matter of scarcity, someone else having it can deny me access. However, if I were to provide a friend with a copy of one of those CDs I've lost nothing. Instead, some third party that I've never met has lost something. Worse, it's not a real loss (they had something, now they don't), it's an opportunity loss, and a fractional one at that (since you can't really count those cases where the person would never have purchased the CD themselves). It's a weird special case.
I believe in the principle of property and will defend it as well. I simply limit private property to things subject to scarcity. I also believe in the copyright system, I believe that it is good for society and would fight against efforts to abolish it. But I believe in them for different reasons. Let the ethics of copyright law stand on its own; I think it's strong enough to do so. Most file sharers understand in their hearts, if not their minds, that they are different things. Confusing the two just leads to sloppy thinking and closes the minds of those you most want to influence.
The claim that they do so to improve the flavor is likely accurate. If you're getting bitter coffee out of your pot there are two things to check: 1. It's too hot and you're burning the coffee, and 2. You're not using enough coffee grounds. Too little grounds means you end up leaching more stuff out of the grounds; eventually you run out of good coffee flavor and are left with bitter nasty stuff.
This is surprising to many people who assume "My coffee is too bitter, so it's too strong, so I'll use less grounds" which leads to more bitter, nastier coffee.
Does this lead to more caffeine in each pot? No idea. If the caffeine is quickly pulled out of the grounds, it's entirely possible.
I tried that, but my boss got angry when I refused to give him my business address.
It's a security trade off. He's potentially downgraded the security of his network connection (increased exposure of his personal machines, chance the network will be saturated with other users, chance he'll be blacklisted for behavior of other users on his wireless), in exchange for increased security from retribution for infringing on copyright (plausible deniability).
If you're uploading the file, other clients give you higher priority to download from them. Clients that never upload anything end up at the bottom of the queues and wait the longest.
You can fill your outgoing pipe actually causing downloads to slow down as ACK packets are delayed. Throttle your max upload rate (how you do it varies from client to client) to something less than what you theoretically can do. On my cable modem I tend to set it to 80kbps (out of a theoretical 128). That will probably help. It's unfortunate that this is so frequent; it should ideally self-manage better.
And yet... it works anyway.
View it another way: I want to release my new Linux distribution (ChaosDiscordLinux 12.0). I've got my own site to distribute it from, and two guys who are willing to run mirrors.
Option 1: The old school way. I put the files on each site and serve them over HTTP and FTP. The maximum speed I can serve my files at is limited by the bandwidth to those three sites. If I get surprisingly popular, my bandwidth will peg out and things will generally suck.
Option 2: Bittorrent. I run seed the torrent, as do the other two sites. Now, as a worst possible case people who want to download the file are still limited to the bandwidth of those three sites. However, if there are any surges in demand during those surges everyone downloading starts helping each other. End result: at the worst case it's about the same as the old way, but can potentially be good.
Is it perfect? No. But it works damn well. One of the benefits is that it looks and behaves like a simple download manager. Not everyone is interested in the details of being on a file sharing network. I don't want an IRC client, to help distribute searches, to potentially share other files. Bittorrent just makes it work. As an added bonus, Bittorrent requires a certain level of accountability; there is a centralized location to send a DMCA takedown request. This makes it much more palatable for various people squeemish with the generally shady looking P2P services.
I downloaded Red Hat 9.0 months after its release and still found a number of seeds available. It was the fastest ISO download I've ever had. The World of Warcraft beta test is being distributed over Bittorrent and works great. I'm into video games and really appreciate File Rush, which gets me game demos and video footage at lightning speeds. Bittorrent is the only download path I have that regularlly saturates my cable modem.
When you run a mail server items of data from other people are placed on your hard drive. The same for a Usenet server. Items of data from other people are placed on the hard drives that back thousands of web forums across the world. This comment itself is sitting on one of Slashdot's hard drives.
Every single one of these services is used for copyright infringement. People email infringing copies of small things all the time. Usenet is a popular place to find book scans, mp3s, warez, and porn. Web forums and similar beasts like Slashdot regularlly have articles reposted without permission in the comments.
Indeed. Of course, arguing that while not arguing that Usenet, email, and Slashdot are illegal will be a neat trick.
This post is a troll. Check his link for "GPL." (Not safe for work). I thought it was odd that it went to about.com, instead of something more obvious like the Free Software Foundation's site. He's using about.com to redirect to a disgusting picture of what appears to be feces on a woman's face. Check his posting history, lots of trolling.
I know a lot of people feel that there is some sort of hypocracy from Slashdot because some people are pro-GPL while some (not necessarily the same) people are anti-RIAA, but actually check that you're not being trolled before you up-mod it!
The biggest difference in how I react.
With an unexpected confirmation opt-in message I simply ignore it. It's unfortunate that I got it, but at least it's a one off irritation.
With an unexpected mailing list message things get more complicated. Is it spam? Definately don't reply, as it confirms the email address and earns you more spam. Is it a legit list? Well, read the message looking for the information on how to get off the list. Of course, it's not always clear which category a message is in. Either way I must take specific action (Basically blacklisting or unsubscribing), or I can expect further messages.
I don't agree with the earlier claim that unconfirm lists are spam. However, confirmed opt-in is a good way to show that your company or mailing list is interested in being a good citizen. It shows that you understand people's email boxes are full of unwelcome junk and you don't want to be another source. This won't end spam, but it can reduce the number of people complaining that you're a spam source. This will reduce the number of blacklists you end up on.
(I realize that in this particular case there are other claims, including harassment, and that credit reporting companies are scum for other reasons, but the analogy just came to me and seemed particularlly relavent.)
If you're running any sort of list without confirmed opt-in you're allowing your list to be used for a variety of nuisance attacks. Don't like someone? Subscribe them to as many single opt-in lists as possible. It's the modern day equivalent of taking a bunch of subscription cards from magazines at the library and subscribing someone you don't like to them. This is worse because it's so easy. As someone who has suffered exactly this sort of attack, it's extremely frustrating.
Confirmed opt-in isn't some sort of crazy, rare idea. It's increasingly common. People will learn to deal with them. Modern mailing list packages provide very clear messages explaining what is going on and how to get onto the list. It's almost identical to email confirmed account creation which is effectively the standard for getting a free account on any web site these days.
Until you've faced 70 hostile sign up messages in a day, you don't really appreciate how frustrating this is. It's not potentially useful, it's a time wasting mess. I shouldn't need to read each message to determine how to unsubscribe from each list (this one require a response email, this one requires a specially formatted message to another address, this one requires visiting a web site, this one requires logging into a web site, this one doesn't provide any details on how to unsubscribe at all!). Worse, it's possible that the message is actually a test message from a spammer; anyone who tries to unsubscribe will be added to the known good list.
What you describe isn't confirmed opt-in; it's just plain old forgery. Spammers already forge patterns for various tools already (as I look at the piles of faked eBay "Question for seller" and "WARNING: Cannot deliver to yahoo.com" messages in my mailbox). The response will be the same as always; mark it as spam (if you're using a trained system) and move on. This would change nothing for spammers. It will, however, make it much easier to distinguish the companies tries to do play fair.
True enough, but I still do it. Why? My Windows partition exists solely to play games. Lots of games are stupid and assume that they can write all of the drive at well. If you want to play arbitrary modern games under WindowsNT/XP, you're doing it as Administrator. I simply accept this.
Interestingly, the opposite is true of Linux. There was a really good looking RSS aggregator I was interested in; good enough that I was considering purchasing it. However, it pretty much demanded to be installed as root and world write permission for its install directories given to any user accounts who was going to use it. I didn't stand for it, I instead used a less mature product that behaved like software should. (Not perfectly mind you; installing it as a user proved to be a mess. However, once installed as root it worked correctly without unusual permissions.)
My brother administrates a research lab of computers. He's asked to keep a wide selection of software packages available for his users. I regularly listen to his tales of woe as he complains that package X assumes write access to C:\Windows, package Y demands write access to sensitive parts of the Windows registry, and the like.
I work with an eclectic selection of specialized physics simulation software that runs on Unix-like systems (mostly Linux these days). Every single piece I've worked with was quite happy to be dumped into a random directory and run directly by the user .
There is an interesting difference in attitude between Windows and Unix-like systems. On Windows lots of developers assume Administrator access. On a Unix-like system assuming root access is gets you dirty looks. Microsoft officially wants software developers to play nice and support user-installed software and user-used software that was installed by Administrator, but developers simply don't take it seriously. The culture of respecting security boundaries doesn't exist. Sure, there are people doing great work on Windows, but there the main masses of Windows programmers doing specialized work just don't think about it. Microsoft needs to lean harder on them.
For the majority the most convient option will be no quoting at all. The resulting messages will be more quickly downloaded, important if you're on a slow connection (say, cruddy hotel phone lines overseas). If you want to see the previous messages, you should have copies. If you don't have copies, get a better mail program. If you need to add someone to the conversation, "Bounce" (or whatever your client calls it) the entire conversation to them. Then their client can use threading, searching, and other cutting edge 1994 concepts on the previous messages, just like you.
Come to think of it, that's another advantage of trimming or eliminating quoted text: when a long conversation drifts topics, later messages won't turn up in searches for older topics.
Ultimately quoting entire messages is a gross hack. Prior to email we managed to correspond without including copies of every prior message in the envelope.
Of course, I'm bitter because I regularlly see the end result of people getting sloppy with quoting: I'll get copied on the twentieth message of a thread, all of it quoted increasing deeply with signatures, disclaimers, and in some cases headers included. The conversation will span a month of time and cover five different topics. At the top will simply be "Can we do this," leaving me to try and guess which of the many issues raised I'm supposed to care about.
Note to self: Don't hire eggstasy for a job in retail sales. Come to think of it, just don't hire eggstasy for anything.
I do no envy you the world you live in, eggstasy.
On the up side, it's part of the Baen Free Library. At free the only cost is your time.
Sure, if you're talking about puzzle games.
However, for most retail games pushing the graphics as far as possible is important. If you can squeeze a 5% improvement out of the engine you can use the freed up time to make the game a bit prettier. Or put another way, art expands to fill available processing power. Graphics blocking on the video card? Well, you can use processing power for increasingly realistic physics simulations and artificial intelligence.
If you play a lot of games you know that there is great variance between games. Some games coast along at a bare minimum while others surprise you with their ability to create compelling visuals with older hardware.
Ummmm, just about anyone sane? Wow, decoding a measely megabyte of data. And the encoding? Simple run length encoding. That's not a real programming problem; that's a homework assignment for Computer Science 101. If you're keen on loading graphics you could at least pick something that is slightly complicated like JPEG.
Is it true that optimization is massively overrated; that most programs are plenty fast? Sure. But this article doesn't provide a bit of evidence for that.
Indeed. And it's still funny. Much like the clickthough warnings "Read this entire document." The reality is that almost no one cares. You won't stop the minor offenses (people just chatting about it without intent to cheat) because it's pervasive. Those engaged in the minor offenses don't view themselves as offenders because they see no harm. And in practice there is no harm. As for those intending to cheat, well, if you're intending to cheat what incentive do you have to follow the other rules.
Sure, it's serious. So's the FBI warning on DVDs and the corporate disclaimers stuck on the bottom of email. They're still funny. If this warning is the key to preserving the fairness of their tests it's not only funny, it's pathetic.
Out of curiousity, exactly what would you be suing them for? The CAN-SPAM Act doesn't have anything to say about filtering systems. The prior arguments in favor of filtering solutions (In short: the filtering solution isn't forcing you to use it) still stand up just fine.