While this may be garbage, even if we presume that the comets we can currently see are at the maximum lifespan of comets, a big presumption in and of itself, then that would mean that at the time life began on this planet comets as old as the ones we see now probably existed, which would mean that those comets could have had a several billion year advantage on the earth.
Everyone on slashdot has been whinging about DRM for years now. UMG is offering to sell you music without DRM, so buy it. Sales are what they want to see, not piracy rates, but whether it increases sales. The presume that DRM saves them money, and if sales don't change then they'll keep it, if they sell 30-40% more without DRM they'll keep not using it.
When I was at university I worked for one of the campus libraries as a support officer. That meant in addition to supporting staff(which was moderately tedious, though the fiddler rate in librarians isn't too high so they weren't too problematic) that meant supporting a lab of about 50 pc's.
Now at the university, some of the the text books came with software, which we had to let the students install on the machines, which meant that they had to have admin rights. They were also allowed to use the PC's in pretty much any way they liked including looking at pornography assuming they didn't offend any nearby patrons.
We didn't use Freeze(don't think it existed back then), but we used a system which did a differential and removed changes as scripted. Let me tell you, as much as it was a pain in the ass to maintain the master index, it beat the hell out of trying to fix em any other way and beat imaging(doing the whole lab took over a day, big image slow links).
Actually, to be honest, the current standards problems(aside of course from the fact that Microsoft got slack and ignored IE for the real time equivilant of about a millenium(the web has changed a lot since IE6 first came out)) are more to do with trying to implement standards after the fact than any other reason.
Yes IE is terribly non standards compliant in some ways(particularly relating to DOM), but when IE first introduced the code the functionality didn't exist in the standards. Some of the functionality still doesn't exist in the standards(though relatively little, and most of it is of questionable security). This doesn't excuse the fact that the DOM model in some later versions of IE differs wildly from both the standard and from previous versions, but it does explain why things like document.all exist in the first place.
I'm a web developer these days, and from what I can see the W3C is in some ways just as guilty as Microsoft is for screwing things up. I don't really care about what's standard and what's not. I don't really care whether Microsof is to blame for not supporting standards, or whether the W3C is to blame for not putting the defacto Microsoft standards into the canonical standard. All I care about is being able to build JavaScript and DOM code which actually works in any browser I try to run it in.
The problem I have with this argument is that, presuming that this IP is actually encoded into the protocol it's completely unverifiable as being accurate. Kazaa was hacked a long time ago and a lot of the new alternatives have the source code available, or have been equally hacked. If the IP in the protocol isn't actively used for routing(and if it is it's no more use than the ip on the packet due to NAT and the like), then there's nothing to stop anything at all being inserted into that position.
To give an example, it's sort of like me saying during a phone call that my number is 867 5309, it's not, but since no one is putting it into a phone when I say it, I can say anything I like.
This being the case you could have anything in there at all, either put there by the user, by the coder of the software, by a virus, by anything else you might like. Someone could create a patch which put the IP address of a computer at RIAA headquarters into that slot if they wanted to. It's totally meaningless because it does't have to be true.
My favorite part of those is when the girl cancels her download and walks out of the room and we're all supposed to feel good about her honestly.
In reality if she'd been picked up by one of the MPAA's surveilance goons the fact that she cancelled it wouldn't make even a tiny bit of difference to their lawyers.
Basically it's all a balance of the "time is money" argument. Time is finite, money is finite, and you exchange one for the other, so the argument is technically true.
However they are not always of equal value. It's quite possible to have either more time than money or more money than time, in the former case it's usually advisable to spend time to save money, whereas in the latter case the same behavior would seem ludicrous.
If you're in a situation where whatever you save on a plane ticket by shopping around isn't a lot of money to you, and it's not worth your time to save it, then of course it would be silly to do it. If however you're in a position where the money you can save is important, or where you can't physically afford the higher price, then the time can be a quite worthwhile investment.
I like albums too, and I think they should and will continue to be made.
What this is about is choice, both for the artist and for the consumer. It hopefully means no more albums where there are 3 good songs and the rest are filler. Albums where the whole album is good will remain, but artists will no longer be locked into producing 45 minutes of music in order to be successful and consumers will no longer have to pay for the filler if they do.
Your healthcare costs are already coming out of your pay packet. If you think that the money your employer has to pay to insure you doesn't factor into what they're willing to pay you, you're dreaming. Every US employer who provides health care includes the cost of that health care in the calculations when they determine your pay. In theory(assuming you have bargaining power), you would be able to get at least some of that back in salary(probably enough of it to match the increased taxes), and get better services to boot.
That said there's probably not even really a need to dramatically increase taxes in the US, just to stop spending more on defense every year than the entire rest of the world combined.
Let's start off, I don't buy gold, nor do I sell gold. I never have, and I probably never will.
That said, buying gold doesn't cause inflation, because it doesn't create more gold. The only thing that creates more gold is time. True having people farming gold add players to the game which adds time to the game, but the amount of gold created on a server is still directly proportional to the number of total hours spent on that server by all its players. If you don't believe that try rolling on a brand new server that didn't have allowed transfers, nothing is worth anything because no one has any money to spend on it. Someone buying or selling gold can't change that.
In an MMO inflation is caused when the rate at which money leaves the system can't keep up with the rate at which money enters the system(repair bills, item purchases, AH fees, etc can't keep up with the influx of cash from drops and vendor sales). This is a problem with game design not with RMT.
If Blizzard started creating gold in exchange for cash, that would cause inflation and ruin the economy, but they don't, and they won't.
As for RP, that's not a problem with RMT, it's a problem wtih player behavior, there's no reason you can't have RMT and proper player behavior. People not RPing on RP servers has existed since way before the RMT system existed, so you can't really blame it on this company.
Your deep pockets argument doesn't work either because the game works the opposite way to real life. MMO's, and WoW in particular rewards time. You have more free time than I do, and so you get to participate in WoW on a level I can't, and even with RMT never will.
I have more money than time, you have more time than money, RMT offers an opportunity for you to exchange something you have a lot of for something you don't have a lot of and vice versa. This is a win win situation. Even with RMT deep pockets will never make you obsolete, because as I said before, the gold supply is directly proportional to the amount of time spent on the server, someone will always have to spend that time(people like you) before anyone can spend their money.
The problem with Guild Wars, or at least the problem when I played it, is that there's no random interaction at all. Far too much content is instanced.
I'm even reluctant to call Guild Wars an MMO. It's more like a traditional RPG with a graphical lobby(the cities).
Well, I'll admit that calling it an illegal war is probably stretching it. Immoral, dishonest, pointless, unwinnable, those words work, but it's probably technically legal.
However, the GP's other points are somewhat more valid.
Torture did happen, and is continuing to happen in Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere, and it seems rather obvious that the administration is both aware of this and condones it. Whether you buy the idea that everyone there is a terrorist with important information that we have to have to save lives is really rather irrelevant, torture is happening and torture is against international treaty(the geneva convention) and therefor illegal.
Suspending Habeus Corpus has also happened(or at least the attempt happened I'm a little behind on my news lately), and this was put forth by the AG, so we're not talking some loon with no authority in the issue. This is not only unconstitutional it is in violation of the very ideals upon which the United States was founded.
When I pay $30 plus snacks to take my fiancee to a movie, and I am then subjected to not only ads for non movie related products(ie the stuff you see on tv if you haven't got this chesnut in your area yet), and then a 5 minute advertisement calling me a thief(can't see any other reason why they're showing it to me), it pisses me off.
When I legally buy or rent a movie and I can't skip the previews for movies I saw 5 years ago, and when I am yet again subjected to the same god awful 5 minute add calling me a thief, it pisses me off.
When I buy a computer game and the disc comes in a paper sleeve with no printed manual and a box the size of a small paperback, and it doesn't cost any less than when they used to do that sort of thing, it pisses me off.
When I buy a cd and the album liner is a single sheet of paper with no lyrics, liner notes, or anything else, and it still costs as much as it used to, it pisses me off.
When the company that sold me that CD sues anyone who tries to provide me with the missing information(ie lyrics) that they didn't provide me with in the first place when I paid them, it pisses me off.
There seem to be a lot of people in the MAFIAA who have forgotten what business they are in.
They're not in the record industry(even assuming that they actually still make records, and they're not in the movie industry. They are in the ENTERTAINMENT industry. The product they sell is entertainment, they just specialize in a particular form of entertainment. If their product doesn't entertain me then they failed.
Yes, but that toner cartridge will usually print out several thousand sheets as opposed to the between 200 and 400 you get from an ink jet, assuming you use it often enough not to get drying or clogging.
$100 for 2000 sheets is a hell of a lot better than $30 for 200. Especially when it doesn't dry out or have to get tossed because you haven't printed for two weeks.
I've recently bought Vista, and it is a bit like the upgrade from 2000 to XP. There isn't really a compelling reason to upgrade from XP, but there's not really a compelling reason to fight against an upgrade you were going to get anyway.
I think the word he was looking for is click(sp?) as applied to tight social groups where most members have a great deal in common with one another, particularly in high schools.
At least I assume he meant that since it's the only way the statement makes sense.
Dell gets a lot of flack, but in my experience they're usually the best of a bad lot. If you are an average user and you want an affordable pre-built PC which you can get support for, it's about your best bet.
The first dimensions sucked, but they've gotten better, and they even seem to have worked through the problems they were having with their business models(the Optiplex 270's and 280's were pretty shocking, the 260's were ok though and the 520's are reasonable). I'd personally never buy one, but that's because building the PC is half the fun of buying one for me.
As for their support experience, yes you'll end up talking to someone from Southeast Asia(Dell left India some time ago) who barely speaks English, and yes they will be working really hard not to send the technician out to see you(assuming you have on-site support in the first place), but if you are sufficiently obnoxious and forceful(I hate doing it, but when I was working in support I just got tired of playing the game), they'll do what you want them to do and fix your problem. HP's support on any of their consumer grade products is much worse, at least it is over here.
When people ask me what computer to buy, I generally recommend Dell simply because their products are as good as most, they're prices are reasonable, and they'll be around in 5 years. I don't build PC's for people because I don't support home PC's, so Dell is as good a solution as any.
From what I know, the navy doesn't really care about adultery. I'm also relatively sure that if there isn't a rank conflict(ie he was her commanding officer or vice versa), they don't really care about two naval personally having an intimiate relationship. Lord knows that sort of thing has been going on for eternity.
The problem actually has nothing to do with sending skilled immigrants home or letting unskilled immigrants in. It comes from classifying immigrants as different than everyone else.
When you class an immigrant worker as different, he or she loses all legal protections and is forced to work under whatever conditions his employer dictates. Apu doesn't make 100k a year(unless he's exceptionally lucky), he makes 50k because if he complains about it he goes back to Bangalore. He doesn't fight for a shorter work week or better conditions, because if he complains he goes back to Bangalore. Joe Seispack has the same problem. He works under whatever conditions his employer sets for him or he goes back home.
This is great for employers because they get cheap labor, it's great for politicians because these companies have more profits and can donate more to their campaigns, plus they get to blame economic hardship on immigrants instead of their own &#$% ups.
It sucks for the government(as opposed to politicians) because there is less tax revenue, and it definitely sucks for you because it means that you can't compete. You can't even offer to work for whatever Apu is getting because the company doesn't believe(quite rightly probably) that you'd be willing to work for peanunts for 6 years, and wont' hire you.
Personally I reckon just open up the damned borders, it's not like the government really provides many services anyway, and without the threat of deportation over their heads the immigrants would probably want to work for the same wages as you or I, and with the same conditions as you or I. Apu might not be willing to work 80 hours a week for half of the industry standard just so he can stay in the US long enough to maybe, just maybe get his citizenship, and we'd go back to employing people based on their qualificiations.
The comparison is based on the meaning of the words. The vast majority of female circumcisions performed around the world involve heavy mutilation for the reasons specified above. The vast majority of male circumcisions involve removing the foreskin. There are probably places where women have hood splits and the like(though I've never heard of it), and there are probably places where men have much more barbaric things done to their genitals, but the meanings of the words are the previously mentioned procedures.
The logical fallacy is based around the fact that male circumcision and female circumcision are not comparable processes.
Male circumcision involves the removal of a small piece of skin which, supposedly reduces sensitivity and theoretically reduces the risk of cancer(though a lot of this seems to be related to cleanliness). It's possibly useless, and might do a slight amount of harm, but it's not really that big a deal, especially since any reputed side effects wouldn't be repaired by regrowing it anyway.
Female circumcision on the other hand involves the mutilation or removal of the clitoris in order to severely reduce or entirely eliminate the ability of the woman to feel pleasure from sex. The supposed benefit of this is that the woman won't be tempted by sex(since she won't enjoy it anyway).
Do you see your logical fallacy here, male circumcision is a relatively minor alteration which has relatively minor reputed benefits and side effects. Female circumcision is a mutilation(usually performed primitively without proper tools or sterylization) designed to enforce an artificial morality on it's recipients.
If male cirucumcision involved having your member removed and a pump inserted so that you could impregnate women without any sort of enjoyment, then it might be comparable, but it doesn't. This doesn't take into account the fact that circumcision is still a parental decision not a government mandate.
In short, please actually understand what you're talking about before you open your mouth.
The Emancipation Proclamation was made after the South ceceded and actually only freed slaves within the South. If you were a slave within the Union, you were SOL.
Not to mention that the vast majority of the confederacy was fighting for states rights not slavery.
Slashdot Mirror
While this may be garbage, even if we presume that the comets we can currently see are at the maximum lifespan of comets, a big presumption in and of itself, then that would mean that at the time life began on this planet comets as old as the ones we see now probably existed, which would mean that those comets could have had a several billion year advantage on the earth.
Everyone on slashdot has been whinging about DRM for years now. UMG is offering to sell you music without DRM, so buy it. Sales are what they want to see, not piracy rates, but whether it increases sales. The presume that DRM saves them money, and if sales don't change then they'll keep it, if they sell 30-40% more without DRM they'll keep not using it.
When I was at university I worked for one of the campus libraries as a support officer. That meant in addition to supporting staff(which was moderately tedious, though the fiddler rate in librarians isn't too high so they weren't too problematic) that meant supporting a lab of about 50 pc's.
Now at the university, some of the the text books came with software, which we had to let the students install on the machines, which meant that they had to have admin rights. They were also allowed to use the PC's in pretty much any way they liked including looking at pornography assuming they didn't offend any nearby patrons.
We didn't use Freeze(don't think it existed back then), but we used a system which did a differential and removed changes as scripted. Let me tell you, as much as it was a pain in the ass to maintain the master index, it beat the hell out of trying to fix em any other way and beat imaging(doing the whole lab took over a day, big image slow links).
It sort of depends what he's measuring. The legal limit is .08 in most US states, but that's .8% AFAIK, so his math is actually accurate.
Yes IE is terribly non standards compliant in some ways(particularly relating to DOM), but when IE first introduced the code the functionality didn't exist in the standards. Some of the functionality still doesn't exist in the standards(though relatively little, and most of it is of questionable security). This doesn't excuse the fact that the DOM model in some later versions of IE differs wildly from both the standard and from previous versions, but it does explain why things like document.all exist in the first place.
I'm a web developer these days, and from what I can see the W3C is in some ways just as guilty as Microsoft is for screwing things up. I don't really care about what's standard and what's not. I don't really care whether Microsof is to blame for not supporting standards, or whether the W3C is to blame for not putting the defacto Microsoft standards into the canonical standard. All I care about is being able to build JavaScript and DOM code which actually works in any browser I try to run it in.
To give an example, it's sort of like me saying during a phone call that my number is 867 5309, it's not, but since no one is putting it into a phone when I say it, I can say anything I like.
This being the case you could have anything in there at all, either put there by the user, by the coder of the software, by a virus, by anything else you might like. Someone could create a patch which put the IP address of a computer at RIAA headquarters into that slot if they wanted to. It's totally meaningless because it does't have to be true.
In reality if she'd been picked up by one of the MPAA's surveilance goons the fact that she cancelled it wouldn't make even a tiny bit of difference to their lawyers.
However they are not always of equal value. It's quite possible to have either more time than money or more money than time, in the former case it's usually advisable to spend time to save money, whereas in the latter case the same behavior would seem ludicrous.
If you're in a situation where whatever you save on a plane ticket by shopping around isn't a lot of money to you, and it's not worth your time to save it, then of course it would be silly to do it. If however you're in a position where the money you can save is important, or where you can't physically afford the higher price, then the time can be a quite worthwhile investment.
What this is about is choice, both for the artist and for the consumer. It hopefully means no more albums where there are 3 good songs and the rest are filler. Albums where the whole album is good will remain, but artists will no longer be locked into producing 45 minutes of music in order to be successful and consumers will no longer have to pay for the filler if they do.
That said there's probably not even really a need to dramatically increase taxes in the US, just to stop spending more on defense every year than the entire rest of the world combined.
That said, buying gold doesn't cause inflation, because it doesn't create more gold. The only thing that creates more gold is time. True having people farming gold add players to the game which adds time to the game, but the amount of gold created on a server is still directly proportional to the number of total hours spent on that server by all its players. If you don't believe that try rolling on a brand new server that didn't have allowed transfers, nothing is worth anything because no one has any money to spend on it. Someone buying or selling gold can't change that.
In an MMO inflation is caused when the rate at which money leaves the system can't keep up with the rate at which money enters the system(repair bills, item purchases, AH fees, etc can't keep up with the influx of cash from drops and vendor sales). This is a problem with game design not with RMT.
If Blizzard started creating gold in exchange for cash, that would cause inflation and ruin the economy, but they don't, and they won't.
As for RP, that's not a problem with RMT, it's a problem wtih player behavior, there's no reason you can't have RMT and proper player behavior. People not RPing on RP servers has existed since way before the RMT system existed, so you can't really blame it on this company.
Your deep pockets argument doesn't work either because the game works the opposite way to real life. MMO's, and WoW in particular rewards time. You have more free time than I do, and so you get to participate in WoW on a level I can't, and even with RMT never will.
I have more money than time, you have more time than money, RMT offers an opportunity for you to exchange something you have a lot of for something you don't have a lot of and vice versa. This is a win win situation. Even with RMT deep pockets will never make you obsolete, because as I said before, the gold supply is directly proportional to the amount of time spent on the server, someone will always have to spend that time(people like you) before anyone can spend their money.
I'm even reluctant to call Guild Wars an MMO. It's more like a traditional RPG with a graphical lobby(the cities).
However, the GP's other points are somewhat more valid.
Torture did happen, and is continuing to happen in Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere, and it seems rather obvious that the administration is both aware of this and condones it. Whether you buy the idea that everyone there is a terrorist with important information that we have to have to save lives is really rather irrelevant, torture is happening and torture is against international treaty(the geneva convention) and therefor illegal.
Suspending Habeus Corpus has also happened(or at least the attempt happened I'm a little behind on my news lately), and this was put forth by the AG, so we're not talking some loon with no authority in the issue. This is not only unconstitutional it is in violation of the very ideals upon which the United States was founded.
When I legally buy or rent a movie and I can't skip the previews for movies I saw 5 years ago, and when I am yet again subjected to the same god awful 5 minute add calling me a thief, it pisses me off.
When I buy a computer game and the disc comes in a paper sleeve with no printed manual and a box the size of a small paperback, and it doesn't cost any less than when they used to do that sort of thing, it pisses me off.
When I buy a cd and the album liner is a single sheet of paper with no lyrics, liner notes, or anything else, and it still costs as much as it used to, it pisses me off.
When the company that sold me that CD sues anyone who tries to provide me with the missing information(ie lyrics) that they didn't provide me with in the first place when I paid them, it pisses me off.
There seem to be a lot of people in the MAFIAA who have forgotten what business they are in.
They're not in the record industry(even assuming that they actually still make records, and they're not in the movie industry. They are in the ENTERTAINMENT industry. The product they sell is entertainment, they just specialize in a particular form of entertainment. If their product doesn't entertain me then they failed.
Yes, but that toner cartridge will usually print out several thousand sheets as opposed to the between 200 and 400 you get from an ink jet, assuming you use it often enough not to get drying or clogging. $100 for 2000 sheets is a hell of a lot better than $30 for 200. Especially when it doesn't dry out or have to get tossed because you haven't printed for two weeks.
I've recently bought Vista, and it is a bit like the upgrade from 2000 to XP. There isn't really a compelling reason to upgrade from XP, but there's not really a compelling reason to fight against an upgrade you were going to get anyway.
At least I assume he meant that since it's the only way the statement makes sense.
The first dimensions sucked, but they've gotten better, and they even seem to have worked through the problems they were having with their business models(the Optiplex 270's and 280's were pretty shocking, the 260's were ok though and the 520's are reasonable). I'd personally never buy one, but that's because building the PC is half the fun of buying one for me.
As for their support experience, yes you'll end up talking to someone from Southeast Asia(Dell left India some time ago) who barely speaks English, and yes they will be working really hard not to send the technician out to see you(assuming you have on-site support in the first place), but if you are sufficiently obnoxious and forceful(I hate doing it, but when I was working in support I just got tired of playing the game), they'll do what you want them to do and fix your problem. HP's support on any of their consumer grade products is much worse, at least it is over here.
When people ask me what computer to buy, I generally recommend Dell simply because their products are as good as most, they're prices are reasonable, and they'll be around in 5 years. I don't build PC's for people because I don't support home PC's, so Dell is as good a solution as any.
As for making it useless, if youtube detects a mangled watermark they know you pirated it and they'll block it.
From what I know, the navy doesn't really care about adultery. I'm also relatively sure that if there isn't a rank conflict(ie he was her commanding officer or vice versa), they don't really care about two naval personally having an intimiate relationship. Lord knows that sort of thing has been going on for eternity.
When you class an immigrant worker as different, he or she loses all legal protections and is forced to work under whatever conditions his employer dictates. Apu doesn't make 100k a year(unless he's exceptionally lucky), he makes 50k because if he complains about it he goes back to Bangalore. He doesn't fight for a shorter work week or better conditions, because if he complains he goes back to Bangalore. Joe Seispack has the same problem. He works under whatever conditions his employer sets for him or he goes back home.
This is great for employers because they get cheap labor, it's great for politicians because these companies have more profits and can donate more to their campaigns, plus they get to blame economic hardship on immigrants instead of their own &#$% ups.
It sucks for the government(as opposed to politicians) because there is less tax revenue, and it definitely sucks for you because it means that you can't compete. You can't even offer to work for whatever Apu is getting because the company doesn't believe(quite rightly probably) that you'd be willing to work for peanunts for 6 years, and wont' hire you.
Personally I reckon just open up the damned borders, it's not like the government really provides many services anyway, and without the threat of deportation over their heads the immigrants would probably want to work for the same wages as you or I, and with the same conditions as you or I. Apu might not be willing to work 80 hours a week for half of the industry standard just so he can stay in the US long enough to maybe, just maybe get his citizenship, and we'd go back to employing people based on their qualificiations.
The comparison is based on the meaning of the words. The vast majority of female circumcisions performed around the world involve heavy mutilation for the reasons specified above. The vast majority of male circumcisions involve removing the foreskin. There are probably places where women have hood splits and the like(though I've never heard of it), and there are probably places where men have much more barbaric things done to their genitals, but the meanings of the words are the previously mentioned procedures.
I didn't defend either, hence the supposedly and theoretically. I just said that one is not the other.
Male circumcision involves the removal of a small piece of skin which, supposedly reduces sensitivity and theoretically reduces the risk of cancer(though a lot of this seems to be related to cleanliness). It's possibly useless, and might do a slight amount of harm, but it's not really that big a deal, especially since any reputed side effects wouldn't be repaired by regrowing it anyway.
Female circumcision on the other hand involves the mutilation or removal of the clitoris in order to severely reduce or entirely eliminate the ability of the woman to feel pleasure from sex. The supposed benefit of this is that the woman won't be tempted by sex(since she won't enjoy it anyway).
Do you see your logical fallacy here, male circumcision is a relatively minor alteration which has relatively minor reputed benefits and side effects. Female circumcision is a mutilation(usually performed primitively without proper tools or sterylization) designed to enforce an artificial morality on it's recipients.
If male cirucumcision involved having your member removed and a pump inserted so that you could impregnate women without any sort of enjoyment, then it might be comparable, but it doesn't. This doesn't take into account the fact that circumcision is still a parental decision not a government mandate.
In short, please actually understand what you're talking about before you open your mouth.
Not to mention that the vast majority of the confederacy was fighting for states rights not slavery.