Um, where exactly are those NWN and BG roots you speak of, apart from the fact that all these games use the same basic ruleset and are (vaguely) in the same genre? KOTOR most certainly is nothing even remotely like a NWN Star Wars mod.
Originally, the actual authors complained about publishers distributing their work lawfully. Nowadays, the publishers (and not the actual authors, who have sold away their copyright) complain about other people who illegaly distribute their work. Thus, it is almost the reverse. Although I agree that your argument is correct, too - however, the legal owner isn't necessarily the rightful owner: some people will say that selling away copyrights shouldn't be possible, and certainly not rightful.
While I agree with your main point, that piracy does lead to a decrease of market share for cheaper/free/open source alternatives, the number of pirated copies does still not equal the number of lost sales.
You say: Therefore, piracy of one Eminem CD does not imply the loss of a total sale in the entertainment industry, while a pirated copy of Microsoft Office does.
And then in the very next sentence you say: When someone pirates a copy of MS Office, they are willfully making the decision not to pay for a product, but they are also making the decision not to investigate other alternatives. Thus, in the absence of MS Office piracy, OpenOffice might find a larger audience. In the absense of Windows piracy, Linux would have a larger audience.
Which refutes the first sentence: If the person had not stolen MS Office in the first place, there is a (significant) chance that he would have gone for another cheaper or free product. That is, #pirated copies >> #lost sales.
A whole desktop email app written in JavaScript? The front end is written in HTML, which also means there might be CSS and ECMA Script ("JavaScript") involved. All the work is done by the backend, which is probably coded in either a web scripting language like Perl, Python or PHP, or more likely for performance reasons in some "proper" (ie. compiled) programming language like C, C++ or what have you. The HTML is just for presentation and user input - just like Hotmail and thousands of similar projects have done for years.
Of course GMail might do it somewhat better, but it really not as revolutionary as you make it out to be. And, for the most part, it is certainly not written in JavaScript. At least, so I would hope.
(fuel cells and H2 cars would be bad, because exhaust is H2O, which is an even better greenhouse gas than CO2)
I'm not a fan of fuel cells, because most people don't take them as what they are: batteries. You make the same mistake. Any widespread use of fuel cells would use them as a more or less neat way to store electricity. The Hydrogen used in the cells generating water would itself be generated from water. Creating H2 from water uses up electricity, of course. This is why fuel cells are no solution to any problem themselves - the electricity would still have to come from somewhere, and coal and oil power plants aren't a lot better than using fossil fuels in the first place. Nuclear energy is considered too dangerous by many people (let's not get into the discussion whether it is or not here); and regnerative energy like wind energy, while extremely common already here in Germany still only makes up like 5% of the general energy usage, and is very expensive. There's the possibility of using mined Hydrogen, but that's not really viable or cost-effective as of now.
No, the accurate word is "destroy". They wouldn't be moved by the climate change, they would be destroyed and we'd have to try and cultivate new areas.
People use what's cheapest, easiest, etc. Whatever has the most advantages.
People use what they perceive has the most advantages. That's something completely different and has almost always only a very loose relationship with the factors you mention first.
As many of us realize, the government is the most inefficient organization in the world.. why would I want to rely on them for my health care!?
Because governments answer to the people, while corporations answer to their shareholders. Supposedly, at least.
Re:And don't call "global warming" accurate scienc
on
A New Ice Age?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
It can't be "accurate science" or "proper science" or "real science" because there is no control, nor is there any way to run any experiments to actually measure any cause-and-effect relationships.
Wrong. While it is not possible to run experiments as such, it certainly is possible to make certain predictions based on the underlying physics and look how the predictions turn out based on empirical data. Then the theory is either validated or not - in which case you modify the theory trying to account for the difference. Or, in briefer terms, you apply the basic scientific process.
And of course it is still absolutely possible to run many experiments on a smaller-than-global scale - the outcome of which help the understanding of the global climate and help predict it's future development.
And even if either guess is true, there's no way to be sure that the problem was caused by man.
That's true. There's no way to be sure of anything per se. There are ways to be reasonably sure of it based on a given set of information, though.
Well, except if the older "global cooling" predictions were really true, then we should be cranking out the greenhouse gases, right?
No. I haven't been around to read about the older predictions, so I might be wrong. However, I imagine a global warming can well induce a severe global cooling, and the other way round. And furthermore, it might well be that the previous claims were just wrong - and the underlying assumptions corrected since then in the process I described above. Of course, now you're saying "Well, what if they're wrong again?!" - that's just the problem with any scientific claim, it can always be wrong. Unless you've got some indications that the current theories are failing, though, it'd be probably be wise to assume they are correct. If on the other hand you do have such indications, you probably should do some research into the matter and find out if either you're wrong, or they are.
And as for the original poster saying: "I refuse to forget how many times popular science has been wrong."
I'm not sure what exactly "popular science" is supposed to refer to, but science is one of the few fields were being wrong is not that bad. Newton's laws on gravity have also been proven wrong, but they were still an incredibly important discovery. And while you refuse to forget how often science was wrong, you do seem to forget how often it has learned from those errors and corrected them, and how often science is right. Also: Try reading a book some day.
I have no clue as to what exactly the option does to the kernel, however, APIC is short for Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller, and as far as I know is only benefitial - if it works, as it ought to on modern systems. The most obvious advantage is an increased number of interrupts available to the hardware.
Thanks for the reply. I had read about the ICH5/6 support, but I wasn't sure it'd translate to support for the E7210. Of course, if the mainboard can just act as if the S-ATA hard drives are regular P-ATA ones, at least for the scope of the installation process, all is well.
At work we're considering buying a new (low end) Dell server which uses S-ATA hard drives. It's supposed to house a SuSE Linux system in the future. However, I'm not sure how well Linux in general, and SuSE in particular works with Serial-ATA drives, especially when there's nothing but Serial-ATA available - ie. the installer would need to work with it, as well.
The best resource I found was this page, but it doesn't help me a lot, either. The server would be a Dell Poweredge 750 running the Intel 7210 chipset, which supports S-ATA.
The system which the new server should replace is currently running SuSE Pro 8.1, which I am fairly certain does not support S-ATA - but does SuSE 9.x?
Yes, of course. Occasionally, we also have little extra signposts which dynamically advise you of the correct speed ( < speed limit, obviously) to get the next light in time.
The two systems aren't contradictory, though, they complement each other fairly well. Synchronized lights work extremely well in urban areas with a lot of traffic, on main roads. The system referred to in this story works very well in rural areas, where there aren't that many traffic lights to start with.
After the copyrights lapse on all the music that Apple offers, then you can break the encryption and fuck with the songs all you want.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't one of the principal reasons against the DMCA that this is not correct? You are not allowed to circumvent copy-protection schemes, period. Whether the protected work is copyrighted or part of the public domain is irrelevant. E.g., if someone were to sell a CD of PD works, say, from Project Gutenberg and used some trivial copy protection on it, you wouldn't be allowed to copy the CD.
The point is, it does not have to be improved, even though it well might be. Microsoft has something like a monopole in desktop operating systems, and is once more using it to get the same position in other parts of the industry. Browsers a couple of years ago, now media players and the associated large market of digital music distribution.
So yes, because it's them it is a bad thing, even though they might innovate in the first place.
That's a really cool idea. As it is, I shuffle my feet all the time when sitting at the computer, doing this in a somewhat more structured manner would be great. That said, the typical computer seat probably makes cycling on pedals a bit difficult, no?
Actually, his formulation seems more akin to saying: "Yes, I did kill the victim, but I did it in self-defense." as a defense against murder. I guess your point is valid anyway, asserting Fair use is basically saying "Yes, I DID re-distribute (parts of) the work, BUT it was a case of Fair Use."
(This whole thing is assuming this is any kind of real danger - I don't think it is, but the discussion is pointless if the satellite coming down is harmless.)
Do you think maybe- just maybe -we'll have a better way to deal with it in several hundred years???
Yes, I think that we may have a better way to deal with it by then. But then again, we may not. It's not a very smart thing to gamble on, especially if the risks involved are (were) high.
But it doesn't. If it meant Wireless, that'd be a Wireless Area Network, which really doesn't make a lot of sense. I guess it could conceivably refer to the area covered by the wireless network, but you wouldn't normally called the "Wireless Area"...
Of course, it could still be a valid Wide Area Network by some definition, but I do think LAN fits better.
On a sidenote, if anyone has got a link to the original Calvin & Hobbes strip that came up with the previous quote, pleas post. I searched, but couldn't find it.
I think we have the technology nescicary to handle the data that would be required at the speeds that would be required, but nobody is focusing on things like smoothly increasing the resolution of a texture as it gets closer to the camera, or making it so that the edge of an object isn't a perfectly straight line, or simple curve. [...] Any engine writers out there listening?
All of that stuff is already done, more or less. It's all variation of the basic level of detail concept, with LOD increasing as you get nearer and decreasing as your framerate drops below a specified minimum value.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, where exactly are those NWN and BG roots you speak of, apart from the fact that all these games use the same basic ruleset and are (vaguely) in the same genre? KOTOR most certainly is nothing even remotely like a NWN Star Wars mod.
Originally, the actual authors complained about publishers distributing their work lawfully. Nowadays, the publishers (and not the actual authors, who have sold away their copyright) complain about other people who illegaly distribute their work. Thus, it is almost the reverse.
Although I agree that your argument is correct, too - however, the legal owner isn't necessarily the rightful owner: some people will say that selling away copyrights shouldn't be possible, and certainly not rightful.
While I agree with your main point, that piracy does lead to a decrease of market share for cheaper/free/open source alternatives, the number of pirated copies does still not equal the number of lost sales.
You say: Therefore, piracy of one Eminem CD does not imply the loss of a total sale in the entertainment industry, while a pirated copy of Microsoft Office does.
And then in the very next sentence you say: When someone pirates a copy of MS Office, they are willfully making the decision not to pay for a product, but they are also making the decision not to investigate other alternatives. Thus, in the absence of MS Office piracy, OpenOffice might find a larger audience. In the absense of Windows piracy, Linux would have a larger audience.
Which refutes the first sentence: If the person had not stolen MS Office in the first place, there is a (significant) chance that he would have gone for another cheaper or free product. That is, #pirated copies >> #lost sales.
A whole desktop email app written in JavaScript? The front end is written in HTML, which also means there might be CSS and ECMA Script ("JavaScript") involved. All the work is done by the backend, which is probably coded in either a web scripting language like Perl, Python or PHP, or more likely for performance reasons in some "proper" (ie. compiled) programming language like C, C++ or what have you. The HTML is just for presentation and user input - just like Hotmail and thousands of similar projects have done for years.
Of course GMail might do it somewhat better, but it really not as revolutionary as you make it out to be. And, for the most part, it is certainly not written in JavaScript. At least, so I would hope.
(fuel cells and H2 cars would be bad, because exhaust is H2O, which is an even better greenhouse gas than CO2)
I'm not a fan of fuel cells, because most people don't take them as what they are: batteries. You make the same mistake. Any widespread use of fuel cells would use them as a more or less neat way to store electricity. The Hydrogen used in the cells generating water would itself be generated from water. Creating H2 from water uses up electricity, of course. This is why fuel cells are no solution to any problem themselves - the electricity would still have to come from somewhere, and coal and oil power plants aren't a lot better than using fossil fuels in the first place. Nuclear energy is considered too dangerous by many people (let's not get into the discussion whether it is or not here); and regnerative energy like wind energy, while extremely common already here in Germany still only makes up like 5% of the general energy usage, and is very expensive. There's the possibility of using mined Hydrogen, but that's not really viable or cost-effective as of now.
No, the accurate word is "destroy". They wouldn't be moved by the climate change, they would be destroyed and we'd have to try and cultivate new areas.
Debian is infamous for its difficult install. They are working on it, though.
People use what's cheapest, easiest, etc. Whatever has the most advantages.
People use what they perceive has the most advantages. That's something completely different and has almost always only a very loose relationship with the factors you mention first.
Neither am I, note the "supposedly". But corporations are not really better. And I can see the former working differently, not the latter.
As many of us realize, the government is the most inefficient organization in the world.. why would I want to rely on them for my health care!?
Because governments answer to the people, while corporations answer to their shareholders. Supposedly, at least.
It can't be "accurate science" or "proper science" or "real science" because there is no control, nor is there any way to run any experiments to actually measure any cause-and-effect relationships.
Wrong. While it is not possible to run experiments as such, it certainly is possible to make certain predictions based on the underlying physics and look how the predictions turn out based on empirical data. Then the theory is either validated or not - in which case you modify the theory trying to account for the difference. Or, in briefer terms, you apply the basic scientific process.
And of course it is still absolutely possible to run many experiments on a smaller-than-global scale - the outcome of which help the understanding of the global climate and help predict it's future development.
And even if either guess is true, there's no way to be sure that the problem was caused by man.
That's true. There's no way to be sure of anything per se. There are ways to be reasonably sure of it based on a given set of information, though.
Well, except if the older "global cooling" predictions were really true, then we should be cranking out the greenhouse gases, right?
No. I haven't been around to read about the older predictions, so I might be wrong. However, I imagine a global warming can well induce a severe global cooling, and the other way round. And furthermore, it might well be that the previous claims were just wrong - and the underlying assumptions corrected since then in the process I described above. Of course, now you're saying "Well, what if they're wrong again?!" - that's just the problem with any scientific claim, it can always be wrong. Unless you've got some indications that the current theories are failing, though, it'd be probably be wise to assume they are correct. If on the other hand you do have such indications, you probably should do some research into the matter and find out if either you're wrong, or they are.
And as for the original poster saying: "I refuse to forget how many times popular science has been wrong."
I'm not sure what exactly "popular science" is supposed to refer to, but science is one of the few fields were being wrong is not that bad. Newton's laws on gravity have also been proven wrong, but they were still an incredibly important discovery. And while you refuse to forget how often science was wrong, you do seem to forget how often it has learned from those errors and corrected them, and how often science is right. Also: Try reading a book some day.
I have no clue as to what exactly the option does to the kernel, however, APIC is short for Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller, and as far as I know is only benefitial - if it works, as it ought to on modern systems. The most obvious advantage is an increased number of interrupts available to the hardware.
Thanks for the reply. I had read about the ICH5/6 support, but I wasn't sure it'd translate to support for the E7210. Of course, if the mainboard can just act as if the S-ATA hard drives are regular P-ATA ones, at least for the scope of the installation process, all is well.
At work we're considering buying a new (low end) Dell server which uses S-ATA hard drives. It's supposed to house a SuSE Linux system in the future. However, I'm not sure how well Linux in general, and SuSE in particular works with Serial-ATA drives, especially when there's nothing but Serial-ATA available - ie. the installer would need to work with it, as well.
The best resource I found was this page, but it doesn't help me a lot, either. The server would be a Dell Poweredge 750 running the Intel 7210 chipset, which supports S-ATA.
The system which the new server should replace is currently running SuSE Pro 8.1, which I am fairly certain does not support S-ATA - but does SuSE 9.x?
Do you also have synchronized lights?
Yes, of course. Occasionally, we also have little extra signposts which dynamically advise you of the correct speed ( < speed limit, obviously) to get the next light in time.
The two systems aren't contradictory, though, they complement each other fairly well. Synchronized lights work extremely well in urban areas with a lot of traffic, on main roads. The system referred to in this story works very well in rural areas, where there aren't that many traffic lights to start with.
Exactly. Thank you. :)
After the copyrights lapse on all the music that Apple offers, then you can break the encryption and fuck with the songs all you want.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't one of the principal reasons against the DMCA that this is not correct? You are not allowed to circumvent copy-protection schemes, period. Whether the protected work is copyrighted or part of the public domain is irrelevant. E.g., if someone were to sell a CD of PD works, say, from Project Gutenberg and used some trivial copy protection on it, you wouldn't be allowed to copy the CD.
We do? I don't think I've ever seen one. Maybe it's only parts of Germany...
The point is, it does not have to be improved, even though it well might be. Microsoft has something like a monopole in desktop operating systems, and is once more using it to get the same position in other parts of the industry. Browsers a couple of years ago, now media players and the associated large market of digital music distribution.
So yes, because it's them it is a bad thing, even though they might innovate in the first place.
That's a really cool idea. As it is, I shuffle my feet all the time when sitting at the computer, doing this in a somewhat more structured manner would be great. That said, the typical computer seat probably makes cycling on pedals a bit difficult, no?
Actually, his formulation seems more akin to saying: "Yes, I did kill the victim, but I did it in self-defense." as a defense against murder. I guess your point is valid anyway, asserting Fair use is basically saying "Yes, I DID re-distribute (parts of) the work, BUT it was a case of Fair Use."
(This whole thing is assuming this is any kind of real danger - I don't think it is, but the discussion is pointless if the satellite coming down is harmless.)
Do you think maybe- just maybe -we'll have a better way to deal with it in several hundred years???
Yes, I think that we may have a better way to deal with it by then. But then again, we may not. It's not a very smart thing to gamble on, especially if the risks involved are (were) high.
But it doesn't. If it meant Wireless, that'd be a Wireless Area Network, which really doesn't make a lot of sense. I guess it could conceivably refer to the area covered by the wireless network, but you wouldn't normally called the "Wireless Area"...
Of course, it could still be a valid Wide Area Network by some definition, but I do think LAN fits better.
Verbing weirds language. Note that this is extremely common thing in English.
On a sidenote, if anyone has got a link to the original Calvin & Hobbes strip that came up with the previous quote, pleas post. I searched, but couldn't find it.
I think we have the technology nescicary to handle the data that would be required at the speeds that would be required, but nobody is focusing on things like smoothly increasing the resolution of a texture as it gets closer to the camera, or making it so that the edge of an object isn't a perfectly straight line, or simple curve. [...] Any engine writers out there listening?
All of that stuff is already done, more or less. It's all variation of the basic level of detail concept, with LOD increasing as you get nearer and decreasing as your framerate drops below a specified minimum value.