Wow, I must be very cell phone ignorant. From what provider can I get unlimited domestic service for $40 per month? That's not meant to be an asinine question, the answer would help me a lot.
I don't use any of the file sharing utilities any more because I spend hours online to try to download an assortment of stuff (not exactly what I want, just whatever I can find that looks good).
If there was somewhere that I could download over a fast http connection and just find what I wanted without it being an all-night struggle, you bet I'd pay a quarter a song, or 5 bucks a movie.
And maybe everyone doesn't feel this way, but I would certainly feel better if I thought I was giving a fair price for what I got. In fact, there is a recent article in Scientific American (maybe 3 months ago) of a psychological study which showed exactly that: given the choice between paying a cheapish price for a good or service and getting the good or service for free, people will consistently pay the cheapish price. We don't really want to be freeloaders. Go figure.
To protect it from copying would require that your PC have hardware to prevent any unauthorized copying. (Well, even that would only stop the honest citizens, not criminals). Don't under any circumstances let them get their foot in the door to controlling what content you watch on your PC. Before you know it, they'll restrict you from downloading 'unapproved' music, movies and programs and you'll be force-fed nothing but corporate America, all the time.
I sincerely doubt that an ET would transmit anything we could understand unless they are specifically trying to communicate with young civilizations.
Firstly, compression, by its nature, removes redundancy and order from a signal. Since we would expect an advanced civilization to use near perfect compression to communicate, their signal would look like noise.
Secondly, how long have we had technology that could communicate between the stars? 100 years, tops. We're already discovering that the way we've been doing it is not the best way. 100 years is a blink of an eye in the age of the universe. Very, very few civilizations would be this early in their development right now. So very nearly all civilizations are probably using something that we've never even had the vaguest notion of to communicate. We're still cave men looking for fire signals while everyone else is using compressed spread spectrum radio for communication.
It is a non-java MS Office clone that seems excellent from what I've seen so far. And it's less than $50! (It used to be less than $30!!) I haven't used it very much yet (I'm not much of an office software kind of guy; I'm a geek) but it seems stable and it has correctly understood every MS format file I have tried to use with it. It supports MS Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.
It's a Qt based application; works great on KDE.
No, I'm not associated with them in any way other than having used the software.
Hmm, agreed. Er, I need to think about that for a while. I'm not positive that I still don't believe that an armed populace has a much better chance of stopping an oppressive government. F16s are nice, but they're not very effective when your target is all around you.
There is a kind of cloning, parthenogenesis, which only clones females. Dandelions and some amphibians do this as a matter of course, and it has been observed to naturally occur in mammals (rarely).
Somatic cell nuclear transfer is what most people are talking about when they talk about "cloning", and it can produce a clone of either males or females. However, with the current technology these clones have health problems throughout their (short) life. It is downright evil to use the technology to produce humans right now, since you're condemning the progeny to a short and unpleasant life. I have no ethical problems with cloning per se, just with any technology that makes people who will have a crappy quality of life.
Right now, cloned animals suffer an incredibly high mortality rate before birth, and suffer a myriad of health problems throughout their (short) life.
I have absolutely no problem with cloning once we get to the point where the mortality rate and health after the second trimester are comparable with that of normal pregnancy. However, given the state of current cloning technology, producing complete humans via cloning is incredibly irresponsible.
That is bullshit. The reason the 2nd amendment rights to 'keep and bear arms' exist is to keep the power to put down oppressive government in the hands of the people. The entire point is to put weapons that can easily kill people (e.g. soldiers in service to an evil government) in the hands of an informal militia made up of common citizens.
I'm not sure that I agree that it is a great argument in today's world (I'm also not sure that it isn't), but don't conflate the issue. Just because the weapons can essentially only be used to kill people doesn't mean that they shouldn't be covered by the second amendment. The opposite is the case.
An AC posted this and it's too good to sit at 0, so I'm gonna repost this with my +2. Mod either me or the parent; I don't care, karma: 48.
>> After all, Einstein wasn't merely bright(like me.) He was a genius for the ages.
Einstein's genius wasn't really related to what most people consider being smart/bright. The genius of Einstein was in being able to ask questions that on the surface look silly/trivial, but are deeply profound. That kind creativity can be more closely related to really great tech workers than you seem to think. But as you point out they are the rare ones... and in most operations you won't see them because they don't show up to write code... they are more interested in working on the fundamentally hard problems.
>>Of course, I was curious as to where all these super-geniuses were when the business plans were being drawn up, but ahh well, who am I to question them.
Simple, they were thinking about problems that interested them... business plans were not perceived as interesting.
Well, we do run an MMORPG (we prefer persistent online world) on Win32, Linux and Solaris with no recompilation. First person 3d, ~50fps on a 1.4 ghz w/ geforce2, etc. Ask someone who went to the GDC.
You thinking it's a hoax doesn't change the facts.
Why not use the higher level API that Sun is developing for you, Java3D? We're using it for Magicosm, and FullSail uses it for a 3d racing game and a MortalCombat style game. All work very smoothly and quickly; you would never know it was Java unless told.
It works fine on my Netscape 4.78 on RedHat 7.1. With Netscape you do have to make sure that you're using the netscape 4 plugin with ns 4 for hushmail. The NS 6 plugin seems to work fine for most java applets, but it nukes the window when you try hushmail with it. But the NS 4 plugin (with Netscape 4.78) works like a champ for me. I use only Linux...
Check out www.hushmail.com. Transparent encryption, you can sign documents and people can verify your signature at the hushmail site even if they don't use hushmail, and it interoperates with OpenPGP.
I would suspect that if you can get going that fast, you can get enough energy from a Bussard Ramjet engine to power a device to ionize and deflect the material that your ramject can't handle.
Dude, your repeated use of specifics gives an impression that you know what you're talking about, but your numbers are all fucked up.
1,000,000,000 seconds is 2,000,000 times 500 seconds, not 2,000 times.
There is no way 1000 square miles of material could encompass the sun, the surface area of the sun is much, much higher than this (the surface area of the earth is ~ 200 million square miles). Maybe you meant 1000 cubic miles of material? Or maybe you're just making shit up?
I stopped reading after that point...
How the hell is this flamebait? He gave numbers that are BS, I called him on it. Should we not correct people when they get things wrong?
Should lots of detail, with obvious mistakes, not be suspect?
Dude, your repeated use of specifics gives an impression that you know what you're talking about, but your numbers are all fucked up.
1,000,000,000 seconds is 2,000,000 times 500 seconds, not 2,000 times.
There is no way 1000 square miles of material could encompass the sun, the surface area of the sun is much, much higher than this (the surface area of the earth is ~ 200 million square miles). Maybe you meant 1000 cubic miles of material? Or maybe you're just making shit up?
Reposting an excellent AC reply with my bonus. I'm at the cap, so I'm not a ho.
See parent for the original comment -----------------
> Listen, they wrote the game. It cost them money, and brainpower to develop the game, and when it was finalized, they chose to provide it to the world. And they provided it for a price, because after all, they had to pay for the programmers, and administration, and deployment and on-going maintaince. > So you can see where they would be a little peeved if somebody came along and developed a free server that would let everyone get around paying them a little money to use their own server.
Nice strawman. However, no one was questioning Blizzard's right to sell the game, or run their own game server in whatever manner they see fit. What was done was providing an alternate server (in part because the official Blizzard server's service was so terrible).
Blizzard was asked to help with the authentication part so the new server would behave in an IP-friendly way. Blizzard chose not to help, so the new server doesn't authenticate - and it isn't required to.
Blizzard wants to control the game and how/where it's played, but like any monopolist, provide the lowest level of service possible in exchange for money.
Blizzard has viable, legitimate competition for its server's service, and wishes to quash it. If Blizzard were really interested in good customer service, or protecting the terms of use of its beta games, they would have: 1. Improved the quality of their own server so that the Bnetd server was seen as unnecessary, 2. Assisted the Bnetd coders in providing an authentication mechanism using the Blizzard network. No more uncontrolled beta uses, no more using pirated games.
Blizzard did neither; explain again why they deserve any of their customer's server loyalty under a competitive, non-utopian, capitalist society? > Listen, they wrote the game. It cost them money, and brainpower to develop the game, and when it was finalized, they chose to provide it to the world. And they provided it for a price, because after all, they had to pay for the programmers, and administration, and deployment and on-going maintaince. > So you can see where they would be a little peeved if somebody came along and developed a free server that would let everyone get around paying them a little money to use their own server.
Nice strawman. However, no one was questioning Blizzard's right to sell the game, or run their own game server in whatever manner they see fit. What was done was providing an alternate server (in part because the official Blizzard server's service was so terrible).
Blizzard was asked to help with the authentication part so the new server would behave in an IP-friendly way. Blizzard chose not to help, so the new server doesn't authenticate - and it isn't required to.
Blizzard wants to control the game and how/where it's played, but like any monopolist, provide the lowest level of service possible in exchange for money.
Blizzard has viable, legitimate competition for its server's service, and wishes to quash it. If Blizzard were really interested in good customer service, or protecting the terms of use of its beta games, they would have: 1. Improved the quality of their own server so that the Bnetd server was seen as unnecessary, 2. Assisted the Bnetd coders in providing an authentication mechanism using the Blizzard network. No more uncontrolled beta uses, no more using pirated games.
Blizzard did neither; explain again why they deserve any of their customer's server loyalty under a competitive, non-utopian, capitalist society?
Wow, that is one of the most insightfful responses I've ever seen regarding open source and corporatism. You consistently dodged his straw men and demonstrated the fundamental difference in mindset between people who just want your money and people who want to make products that help.
Copyright is your right to restrict people from making copies that are substantively the same of some significant work of yours. Obviously you can't copyright one word, but you can copyright a picture or a paragraph. If someone makes a copy that a jury judges to be substantively the same, then that person has violated your copyright. Any media you produce is copyright to you, without you doing anything special.
Trademark is something that you use to identify a product. So, while copyright stands on its own (a book or picture is copyrighted no matter what its about), a trademark is used to identify some other product. A trademark is typically a picture, word, or phrase; I'm not sure if other things can be trademarks or not. You must declare a trademark, otherwise it's not a trademark. Declaring it just means saying that it is your trademark. You can't restrict other people from using your trademark, but they can only use it to refer to your product. So the Nike swish is a trademark for Nike shoes, Monopoly is a trademark for a Parker Bro.s game, etc. You couldn't copyright the word Monopoly, though.
If they accept that Napster improves sales, why the hell would they fight against it? It seems much more likely to me that they don't accept the facts themselves.
And... all of this AIM versus p2p stuff is a red herring. We shouldn't be arguing over how many files you can download in a certain period of time, or what mechanisms you use to do it. Our concept of intellectual property is broken, and they are pushing through laws that hurt the public good more and more deeply, while we quibble over what program was used to download files!
What we need to focus on is that they are doing things that reduce software reliability (SSSCA will do that), hurt people (snuffing our ability to copy will do that), and retard progress to protect an industry that is composed of trivial entertainment. Don't be distracted from the issues.
What OS do you run? On Windows, I get about 100 Kbytes/second on the new system and on the old. On Linux (RH 7.1) I get about 180Kbytes/second on the new system. On @Home, I regularly got 500+ Kbytes/second!!!
I'm not complaining, though. I'm happy with my service, and they did an amazing job swapping us over to the new ISP in record time.
Positive/Negative correlation of one event does not *prove* cause, it necessary but not sufficient for proof of cause.
To nitpick, it's not even necessary. Other factors may overwhelm the correlation.
However, unless you can show the correlation is due to something else, it is sufficient to make one examine the situation more closely. Not that I believe for a second that unauthorized copying negatively impacted music sales; I'm just arguing scientific philosophy with you.
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Wow, I must be very cell phone ignorant. From what provider can I get unlimited domestic service for $40 per month? That's not meant to be an asinine question, the answer would help me a lot.
Bullshit.
I don't use any of the file sharing utilities any more because I spend hours online to try to download an assortment of stuff (not exactly what I want, just whatever I can find that looks good).
If there was somewhere that I could download over a fast http connection and just find what I wanted without it being an all-night struggle, you bet I'd pay a quarter a song, or 5 bucks a movie.
And maybe everyone doesn't feel this way, but I would certainly feel better if I thought I was giving a fair price for what I got. In fact, there is a recent article in Scientific American (maybe 3 months ago) of a psychological study which showed exactly that: given the choice between paying a cheapish price for a good or service and getting the good or service for free, people will consistently pay the cheapish price. We don't really want to be freeloaders. Go figure.
To protect it from copying would require that your PC have hardware to prevent any unauthorized copying. (Well, even that would only stop the honest citizens, not criminals). Don't under any circumstances let them get their foot in the door to controlling what content you watch on your PC. Before you know it, they'll restrict you from downloading 'unapproved' music, movies and programs and you'll be force-fed nothing but corporate America, all the time.
I sincerely doubt that an ET would transmit anything we could understand unless they are specifically trying to communicate with young civilizations.
Firstly, compression, by its nature, removes redundancy and order from a signal. Since we would expect an advanced civilization to use near perfect compression to communicate, their signal would look like noise.
Secondly, how long have we had technology that could communicate between the stars? 100 years, tops. We're already discovering that the way we've been doing it is not the best way. 100 years is a blink of an eye in the age of the universe. Very, very few civilizations would be this early in their development right now. So very nearly all civilizations are probably using something that we've never even had the vaguest notion of to communicate. We're still cave men looking for fire signals while everyone else is using compressed spread spectrum radio for communication.
Has anyone else tried HancomOffice?
It is a non-java MS Office clone that seems excellent from what I've seen so far. And it's less than $50! (It used to be less than $30!!) I haven't used it very much yet (I'm not much of an office software kind of guy; I'm a geek) but it seems stable and it has correctly understood every MS format file I have tried to use with it. It supports MS Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.
It's a Qt based application; works great on KDE.
No, I'm not associated with them in any way other than having used the software.
Hmm, agreed. Er, I need to think about that for a while. I'm not positive that I still don't believe that an armed populace has a much better chance of stopping an oppressive government. F16s are nice, but they're not very effective when your target is all around you.
There is a kind of cloning, parthenogenesis, which only clones females. Dandelions and some amphibians do this as a matter of course, and it has been observed to naturally occur in mammals (rarely).
Somatic cell nuclear transfer is what most people are talking about when they talk about "cloning", and it can produce a clone of either males or females. However, with the current technology these clones have health problems throughout their (short) life. It is downright evil to use the technology to produce humans right now, since you're condemning the progeny to a short and unpleasant life. I have no ethical problems with cloning per se, just with any technology that makes people who will have a crappy quality of life.
Right now, cloned animals suffer an incredibly high mortality rate before birth, and suffer a myriad of health problems throughout their (short) life.
I have absolutely no problem with cloning once we get to the point where the mortality rate and health after the second trimester are comparable with that of normal pregnancy. However, given the state of current cloning technology, producing complete humans via cloning is incredibly irresponsible.
That is bullshit. The reason the 2nd amendment rights to 'keep and bear arms' exist is to keep the power to put down oppressive government in the hands of the people. The entire point is to put weapons that can easily kill people (e.g. soldiers in service to an evil government) in the hands of an informal militia made up of common citizens.
I'm not sure that I agree that it is a great argument in today's world (I'm also not sure that it isn't), but don't conflate the issue. Just because the weapons can essentially only be used to kill people doesn't mean that they shouldn't be covered by the second amendment. The opposite is the case.
An AC posted this and it's too good to sit at 0, so I'm gonna repost this with my +2. Mod either me or the parent; I don't care, karma: 48.
... business plans were not perceived as interesting.
>> After all, Einstein wasn't merely bright(like me.) He was a genius for the ages.
Einstein's genius wasn't really related to what most people consider being smart/bright. The genius of Einstein was in being able to ask questions that on the surface look silly/trivial, but are deeply profound. That kind creativity can be more closely related to really great tech workers than you seem to think. But as you point out they are the rare ones... and in most operations you won't see them because they don't show up to write code... they are more interested in working on the fundamentally hard problems.
>>Of course, I was curious as to where all these super-geniuses were when the business plans were being drawn up, but ahh well, who am I to question them.
Simple, they were thinking about problems that interested them
Come see us. Unfortunately, release is probably still at least a year away. We made a very good showing at the Sun booth at GDC, though.
Well, we do run an MMORPG (we prefer persistent online world) on Win32, Linux and Solaris with no recompilation. First person 3d, ~50fps on a 1.4 ghz w/ geforce2, etc. Ask someone who went to the GDC.
You thinking it's a hoax doesn't change the facts.
Why not use the higher level API that Sun is developing for you, Java3D? We're using it for Magicosm, and FullSail uses it for a 3d racing game and a MortalCombat style game. All work very smoothly and quickly; you would never know it was Java unless told.
It works fine on my Netscape 4.78 on RedHat 7.1. With Netscape you do have to make sure that you're using the netscape 4 plugin with ns 4 for hushmail. The NS 6 plugin seems to work fine for most java applets, but it nukes the window when you try hushmail with it. But the NS 4 plugin (with Netscape 4.78) works like a champ for me. I use only Linux...
Check out www.hushmail.com. Transparent encryption, you can sign documents and people can verify your signature at the hushmail site even if they don't use hushmail, and it interoperates with OpenPGP.
I would suspect that if you can get going that fast, you can get enough energy from a Bussard Ramjet engine to power a device to ionize and deflect the material that your ramject can't handle.
How the hell is this flamebait? He gave numbers that are BS, I called him on it. Should we not correct people when they get things wrong?
Should lots of detail, with obvious mistakes, not be suspect?
Dude, your repeated use of specifics gives an impression that you know what you're talking about, but your numbers are all fucked up.
1,000,000,000 seconds is 2,000,000 times 500 seconds, not 2,000 times.
There is no way 1000 square miles of material could encompass the sun, the surface area of the sun is much, much higher than this (the surface area of the earth is ~ 200 million square miles). Maybe you meant 1000 cubic miles of material? Or maybe you're just making shit up?
I stopped reading after that point...
Reposting an excellent AC reply with my bonus. I'm at the cap, so I'm not a ho.
See parent for the original comment
-----------------
> Listen, they wrote the game. It cost them money, and brainpower to develop the game, and when it was finalized, they chose to provide it to the world. And they provided it for a price, because after all, they had to pay for the programmers, and administration, and deployment and on-going maintaince.
> So you can see where they would be a little peeved if somebody came along and developed a free server that would let everyone get around paying them a little money to use their own server.
Nice strawman. However, no one was questioning Blizzard's right to sell the game, or run their own game server in whatever manner they see fit. What was done was providing an alternate server (in part because the official Blizzard server's service was so terrible).
Blizzard was asked to help with the authentication part so the new server would behave in an IP-friendly way. Blizzard chose not to help, so the new server doesn't authenticate - and it isn't required to.
Blizzard wants to control the game and how/where it's played, but like any monopolist, provide the lowest level of service possible in exchange for money.
Blizzard has viable, legitimate competition for its server's service, and wishes to quash it. If Blizzard were really interested in good customer service, or protecting the terms of use of its beta games, they would have:
1. Improved the quality of their own server so that the Bnetd server was seen as unnecessary,
2. Assisted the Bnetd coders in providing an authentication mechanism using the Blizzard network. No more uncontrolled beta uses, no more using pirated games.
Blizzard did neither; explain again why they deserve any of their customer's server loyalty under a competitive, non-utopian, capitalist society?
> Listen, they wrote the game. It cost them money, and brainpower to develop the game, and when it was finalized, they chose to provide it to the world. And they provided it for a price, because after all, they had to pay for the programmers, and administration, and deployment and on-going maintaince.
> So you can see where they would be a little peeved if somebody came along and developed a free server that would let everyone get around paying them a little money to use their own server.
Nice strawman. However, no one was questioning Blizzard's right to sell the game, or run their own game server in whatever manner they see fit. What was done was providing an alternate server (in part because the official Blizzard server's service was so terrible).
Blizzard was asked to help with the authentication part so the new server would behave in an IP-friendly way. Blizzard chose not to help, so the new server doesn't authenticate - and it isn't required to.
Blizzard wants to control the game and how/where it's played, but like any monopolist, provide the lowest level of service possible in exchange for money.
Blizzard has viable, legitimate competition for its server's service, and wishes to quash it. If Blizzard were really interested in good customer service, or protecting the terms of use of its beta games, they would have:
1. Improved the quality of their own server so that the Bnetd server was seen as unnecessary,
2. Assisted the Bnetd coders in providing an authentication mechanism using the Blizzard network. No more uncontrolled beta uses, no more using pirated games.
Blizzard did neither; explain again why they deserve any of their customer's server loyalty under a competitive, non-utopian, capitalist society?
Wow, that is one of the most insightfful responses I've ever seen regarding open source and corporatism. You consistently dodged his straw men and demonstrated the fundamental difference in mindset between people who just want your money and people who want to make products that help.
Thanks!
Copyright is your right to restrict people from making copies that are substantively the same of some significant work of yours. Obviously you can't copyright one word, but you can copyright a picture or a paragraph. If someone makes a copy that a jury judges to be substantively the same, then that person has violated your copyright. Any media you produce is copyright to you, without you doing anything special.
Trademark is something that you use to identify a product. So, while copyright stands on its own (a book or picture is copyrighted no matter what its about), a trademark is used to identify some other product. A trademark is typically a picture, word, or phrase; I'm not sure if other things can be trademarks or not. You must declare a trademark, otherwise it's not a trademark. Declaring it just means saying that it is your trademark. You can't restrict other people from using your trademark, but they can only use it to refer to your product. So the Nike swish is a trademark for Nike shoes, Monopoly is a trademark for a Parker Bro.s game, etc. You couldn't copyright the word Monopoly, though.
If they accept that Napster improves sales, why the hell would they fight against it? It seems much more likely to me that they don't accept the facts themselves.
And... all of this AIM versus p2p stuff is a red herring. We shouldn't be arguing over how many files you can download in a certain period of time, or what mechanisms you use to do it. Our concept of intellectual property is broken, and they are pushing through laws that hurt the public good more and more deeply, while we quibble over what program was used to download files!
What we need to focus on is that they are doing things that reduce software reliability (SSSCA will do that), hurt people (snuffing our ability to copy will do that), and retard progress to protect an industry that is composed of trivial entertainment. Don't be distracted from the issues.
No, Rowling will lose her trademark if she doesn't protect it. I'm pretty sure that doesn't apply to copyright or patents, just trademarks.
What OS do you run? On Windows, I get about 100 Kbytes/second on the new system and on the old. On Linux (RH 7.1) I get about 180Kbytes/second on the new system. On @Home, I regularly got 500+ Kbytes/second!!!
I'm not complaining, though. I'm happy with my service, and they did an amazing job swapping us over to the new ISP in record time.
To nitpick, it's not even necessary. Other factors may overwhelm the correlation.
However, unless you can show the correlation is due to something else, it is sufficient to make one examine the situation more closely. Not that I believe for a second that unauthorized copying negatively impacted music sales; I'm just arguing scientific philosophy with you.