"People don't know that they're being screwed..."
Maybe it's because for the most part they're not? They're buying exactly what they payed for, a smartphone that has the most asskicking ensemblage of software and tech on the planet. There is absolutely nothing preventing anyone from buying music from whatever source they want, converting appropriately and uploading it to the iPhone. Apps? people have sampled the "freedom" of Blackberry and Palm, and they've rejected the comparatively miserable experience software has been on those machines by comparison.
Maybe Android is an alternative, well it's years behind the iPhone in release and they've got to play the game of catchup as just like anyone else who hasn't put in the time yet.
Apple did not invent the music player, nor the smart phone, nor the retail store. You're going to say they're screwing people over because compared to Real, Blackberry, and Dell, they're the folks who got it right in one package? News for you, Smartphones are appliances, the user does not give one freaking iota whether the innards are powered by linux, windows, or bloody Mac OS, they want a product that just works and in the iPhone for the overwhelming majority of it's users, that's what they get, and that's why iPhone sales continue to do well even during the latest recession.
One more thing. stop waving Net Neutrality like it's some holy shroud that can be laid on everything you dislike in tech. Net Neutrality has nothing to do with this. It's about access and the handling of data and Apple could very well be as much a loser as you and I if Net Neutrality sinks into a black hole of stratified data access. The bargain rates for iTunes and NetFlix video rentals disappear if users have to start paying premium rates based on large downloads. or suffer either blocked access or slowed down bitrates.
You don't have your science straight. Existing weapons have the fuel already available for it, uranium you dig out of the ground, Deuterium and Tritium you siphon out of existing water.
Antimatter however is not something that you find in nature... for rather obvious reasons. The only way to make it in physics is to convert Energy into matter which gives you antimatter and matter in equal proportions. Now mind you we're talking a HUGE amount of energy here. So you have to generate all that energy somehow to start with before being able to crank out antimatter.
Not to mention there's also the SAFETY issue. Right now antimatter is only made on the molecular scale and basically spends it's short period of time orbiting in a collider before being used as an experiment.
Actual macro levels of antimatter would be a serious containment issue and never a material that could be treated so casually that you'd just hand some off to some overly bright Ensign in training for use in a school science project.
Upshot... it sounds nice on '60's television but has no practical place for any real engineering use. Nor does lugging around mini black holes for that matter.
By the way, does anyone remember Rod Serling's "Night Gallery" with fondness?
-Gareth
From what I gather Rod Serling did not. He was basically screwed over and the network welched on the promise that it wouldn't become a "Witches and Warlock" type of show.
The other notable thing you forgot to mention.
Charles Bronson plays someone who rejects violence in that episode and sticks to it!
Montgomery pulls her part of the show as well It's definitely one of the must see episodes of the Zone.
Some of the best Zones are the ones with no dialogue such as the one with the lone woman who's menaced by the minature aliens who land on her roof.
BTW, as far as the poster above who has a problem with the fact that the Zone isn't SF (whatever the heck that means in these days) You probably don't enjoy Ray Bradbury that much either I imagine, or for that matter Star Trek which really is fantasy magick dressed up in chrome and plastic. Science Fiction is becoming a category in which fewer and fewer people can agree on the defining boundaries. I've actually become more interested in speculative fiction something that's a bit more inclusive and more defining.
What is there to stop you from using two computers? Granted, it wouldn't be such an elegant solution as spoofing hardware, but it seems to get the job done.,
When cheating is described as merely a "job to get done", it's a telling sign of just how far down the ethical toilet the hacking community, or perhaps modern American society has gone down. Heavens forbid that you actually have to take a test honestly! And I don't care what you use to rationalise it, if you're taking a test and using any means to go beyond the resources you're supposed to be limited to.... you're cheating and the only reason to cheat on a college test is because you haven't ether got the ability, or you did not posess the drive to learn the material you were supposed to learn.
Not so stupid really. Most students don't have the money, or the room, to sport more than one computer for thier use. And if I understand correctly what the software is for, you're probably using it IN the classroom, so using a second machine can probably be said to be safely out of the question. The builders of the software built it to be secure and dependable on that platform. They no doubt rightly fear that running Exam4 on linux opens it up to backdoor cheating.
By the way the poster isn't lucky that the college in question isn't specifying that thier child has to have a specific model of laptop. Toshiba Satelites used to be popular mandatory choices in the college field.
It's not a matter of being actively hostile. (After all Mac people would have the same issue) It's a matter that this is the infrastructure that they invested in and they're simply requiring you to conform to it. I'm pretty sure if you could get the Exam4 software to run under Wine or Crossover and get the results that they need done, done, they probably wouldn't care less. But again because they're not babystepping you through what you'd have to do is not an expression of hostility, it's more like you're here, this is what you need to do and the only route that we support doing it is through Windows.
"Does your school support Linux?"
There are several problems with this question. The tech savvy would reply "Which version of Linux are you talking about?" Unlike Windows or Mac OS X, there is no coherent thing that you can point to and say "This Linux.... support it!" What you've got are competing distributions, and within them competing windows managers like KDE, and GNOME, each of which do things differently.
The second level of this question kind of begs the question... what kind of support are you asking for? Are you expecting them to have printer drivers available? Are you expecting them not to require Office? Or are you simply expecting requirements to be watered down enough so that the user is not asked to go beyond what software/hardware support there is for Linux compared to Windows and to a lesser degree, Mac? Expecting the same kind of support is sheer lunacy given the current state of the Linux non-platform in that it is far from being the unified platform the two big contenders are. Linux varies tremendously not only by what flavor of distribution, but even what window manager is being used. And I haven't even touched the driver issues! Expecting campus tech support to deal with that evershifting morass is simply not realistic given the limited resources usually available.
If all you need is network and web support, then you should be golden, of course as a Linux user, you're either a competent user who knows how to search for and install drivers and handle networks, or you were handed a Linux system by some tech geek who's of the delusion that Linux is at the same ready of desktop user accessibility that Windows and Mac are.
In short given the current state of the Linux desktop, that is a rather unrealistic and even meaningless question to ask at this time.
The reason it's creepy is because if these regimes had ended up ruling the whole world, 1984 style, no one would even know they had ever done anything wrong. History would be whatever the party says it is, language would be meaningless cliche and so on. In fact if that had happened, I'm not even sure we could have this conversation because the history and concepts we're discussing would have been erased.
Or we could be having the exact same conversation. The most effective prison is when the prisoner builds his own cage. The growth of the Internet has not only kept in pace but has accelerated the growth of gullibility.
When a population blindly accepts curbs on it's own liberties in the name of security, 1984 has long arrived. Large groups of Americans actively vote against their own interests which are kept narrowly defined by the manipulation of power in an effective two party monopoly. The most secure form of dictatorship is a "managed" democracy.
At the moment, that takes physics which simply does not exist yet. Hard reality of ground to orbit is that you've got throw 90 percent of your spaceship's mass away to get there.
[quote] [b]I'd go into detail about all the fantastic research that is being done on the ISS, but I simply don't have the facts.[/b] [/quote]
If there's any better argumennt for closing down the waste pile once known as "Space Station Freedom", I haven't heard it. If you don't have "the facts", it may very well be the possibility that there are no facts to have. The only fact of the matter is that there has been no credible refutation of the statement made that for all the billions poured into the Station, resulting in the cancellation of real space science, there has not been the return to justify it, not one item of significant unique science has been returned from it.
This isn't Europe. In America "Fair Use" is a four letter word. And even in Europe I'd probably warrant that a statement such as "Copying (downloading) music for personal purposes is considered fair use" bears qualification
Tell that to the families of the crews of Apollo 1 and 13. or Challenger or Columbia. The Space Shuttle is particurlarly problematic because unlike an expendable capsule, it has a heat shield which is designed for repeated use and is exposed during liftoff and in space (this was the primary reason that the Service Module on Apollo 13 was not jettisoned even after it had become dead weight. Unlike an ablative heatshied the shuttle's bricks are inherently more fragile.
Space flight will never obtained the ease of commercial airlines.
Kaku has his points. Plutonium is extremely nasty stuff if it's dispersed aerially into the atmosphere, and NASA has had a history of overconfidence in it's designs leading to shortcuts that would prove fatal later.
Flyby's aren't infallible, NASA messed up at least one orbital approach causing Mars Observer to HIT Mars instead of orbit it. If Cassini had come down in a populated area and released the plutonium upon a crash we'd be looking at some serious collateral damage.
And quite frankly if the difference between enough solar power to operate at Saturn and the RTG was only 130 lbs, than perhaps NASA should have looked at the alternative.
I will quite concede that the Voyagers needed thier nuclear batteries, but it should be noted that they only had one window of Earth risk over a nonpouplated area as they were express shoots instead of gravity assists designed to make up for what NASA was lacking in launch capacity.
If this is true, Venus is now the number one planet to study. If it started out to be that much more Earthlike than we had previouly figured out to be than we need to know what happened to turn a potential Twin Earth to Hell. And is Earth going towards the same route and how much may Humanity have to say about it one way or the other? Why is it's rotation so slow? (Little known factiod, the extra weird thing about Venus' rotation is that it is locked to Earth in that whenever it is at closest approach to our world, it is always showing the same side)
You also forgot one country that would have a motive to claim fakage of the moon landings... the Soviet Union which was in a desperate race to take back it's space leads. But as I recall, the Russians never once challenged the actuality of the American feat.
You could still see it because the animated show had an uncommon feature of continuity. Months later the Tick was sent to the Moon to fill in those letters. He only got one of them done before Ominus (not sure of the spelling), a Galactus spoof showed up to have Earth for dinner. While the Tick got him to leave, he compromised by letting him have one bite of the Moon "for the road".
Episodes after that showed the moon now having "Chi" and a bitemark out of the corner.
1. State a conclusion and put forth your premise
2. Quote at best a barely related statistic, relevant facts are for academic types
3. Become a Slashdot author and gain user cred by advocating the "You're not doing anything wrong by pirating the music you want instead of paying for it.
4. NonProfit!
I've heard time and time again about how the creators are not being served by copyright, usually by some self-righteous user defending his right to pirate.
So I'll ask the original poster, who and where are the creators supposedly advocating YOUR side of the argument? It's kind of self serving for a pirate user to trumpet the buzzwords of "fair use", "creator's freedom", when all they're doing is grabbing the material, and using it without paying.
Maybe the real reason that you're not hearing the "creator's" side is that they're happy with the status quo as it is. Maybe because they hire agents to deal with items regarding to their compensation so they don't have to.
And when I mean creators, I'm talking about the big ticket folks whose stuff you're pirating, not the local band who can't give thier CDs away, much less get them published.
For the forseeable future, the bulk of desktops and notebooks on this planet are going to be running Windows software. If the failures of VISTA did not push a significant fraction of Windows users to Mac OS or Linux, nothing is going to change that. So yes, site developers will be using Silverlight, especially if MS makes it cheaper to develop for than Flash, because they don't really care if you're going to avoid thier site if the bulk of the computing market doesn't share your issues.
This doesn't please me as a Mac user, but I've lived in worse times than this.
Then don't show it to them in the first place! the thing is you you don't have to visibly deploy it. You can just put on the button, leave it in your pocket or purse and net away.
Slashdot Mirror
"People don't know that they're being screwed..." Maybe it's because for the most part they're not? They're buying exactly what they payed for, a smartphone that has the most asskicking ensemblage of software and tech on the planet. There is absolutely nothing preventing anyone from buying music from whatever source they want, converting appropriately and uploading it to the iPhone. Apps? people have sampled the "freedom" of Blackberry and Palm, and they've rejected the comparatively miserable experience software has been on those machines by comparison. Maybe Android is an alternative, well it's years behind the iPhone in release and they've got to play the game of catchup as just like anyone else who hasn't put in the time yet. Apple did not invent the music player, nor the smart phone, nor the retail store. You're going to say they're screwing people over because compared to Real, Blackberry, and Dell, they're the folks who got it right in one package? News for you, Smartphones are appliances, the user does not give one freaking iota whether the innards are powered by linux, windows, or bloody Mac OS, they want a product that just works and in the iPhone for the overwhelming majority of it's users, that's what they get, and that's why iPhone sales continue to do well even during the latest recession. One more thing. stop waving Net Neutrality like it's some holy shroud that can be laid on everything you dislike in tech. Net Neutrality has nothing to do with this. It's about access and the handling of data and Apple could very well be as much a loser as you and I if Net Neutrality sinks into a black hole of stratified data access. The bargain rates for iTunes and NetFlix video rentals disappear if users have to start paying premium rates based on large downloads. or suffer either blocked access or slowed down bitrates.
Actually Apple can get them for just installing the Mac OS on non-Mac hardware. That alone breaks the End User License Agreement.
You don't have your science straight. Existing weapons have the fuel already available for it, uranium you dig out of the ground, Deuterium and Tritium you siphon out of existing water. Antimatter however is not something that you find in nature... for rather obvious reasons. The only way to make it in physics is to convert Energy into matter which gives you antimatter and matter in equal proportions. Now mind you we're talking a HUGE amount of energy here. So you have to generate all that energy somehow to start with before being able to crank out antimatter. Not to mention there's also the SAFETY issue. Right now antimatter is only made on the molecular scale and basically spends it's short period of time orbiting in a collider before being used as an experiment. Actual macro levels of antimatter would be a serious containment issue and never a material that could be treated so casually that you'd just hand some off to some overly bright Ensign in training for use in a school science project. Upshot... it sounds nice on '60's television but has no practical place for any real engineering use. Nor does lugging around mini black holes for that matter.
By the way, does anyone remember Rod Serling's "Night Gallery" with fondness? -Gareth
From what I gather Rod Serling did not. He was basically screwed over and the network welched on the promise that it wouldn't become a "Witches and Warlock" type of show.
The other notable thing you forgot to mention. Charles Bronson plays someone who rejects violence in that episode and sticks to it! Montgomery pulls her part of the show as well It's definitely one of the must see episodes of the Zone. Some of the best Zones are the ones with no dialogue such as the one with the lone woman who's menaced by the minature aliens who land on her roof. BTW, as far as the poster above who has a problem with the fact that the Zone isn't SF (whatever the heck that means in these days) You probably don't enjoy Ray Bradbury that much either I imagine, or for that matter Star Trek which really is fantasy magick dressed up in chrome and plastic. Science Fiction is becoming a category in which fewer and fewer people can agree on the defining boundaries. I've actually become more interested in speculative fiction something that's a bit more inclusive and more defining.
Male lead on the old old tv series "Policewoman"
What is there to stop you from using two computers? Granted, it wouldn't be such an elegant solution as spoofing hardware, but it seems to get the job done.,
When cheating is described as merely a "job to get done", it's a telling sign of just how far down the ethical toilet the hacking community, or perhaps modern American society has gone down. Heavens forbid that you actually have to take a test honestly! And I don't care what you use to rationalise it, if you're taking a test and using any means to go beyond the resources you're supposed to be limited to.... you're cheating and the only reason to cheat on a college test is because you haven't ether got the ability, or you did not posess the drive to learn the material you were supposed to learn.
Not so stupid really. Most students don't have the money, or the room, to sport more than one computer for thier use. And if I understand correctly what the software is for, you're probably using it IN the classroom, so using a second machine can probably be said to be safely out of the question. The builders of the software built it to be secure and dependable on that platform. They no doubt rightly fear that running Exam4 on linux opens it up to backdoor cheating. By the way the poster isn't lucky that the college in question isn't specifying that thier child has to have a specific model of laptop. Toshiba Satelites used to be popular mandatory choices in the college field.
It's not a matter of being actively hostile. (After all Mac people would have the same issue) It's a matter that this is the infrastructure that they invested in and they're simply requiring you to conform to it. I'm pretty sure if you could get the Exam4 software to run under Wine or Crossover and get the results that they need done, done, they probably wouldn't care less. But again because they're not babystepping you through what you'd have to do is not an expression of hostility, it's more like you're here, this is what you need to do and the only route that we support doing it is through Windows.
"Does your school support Linux?" There are several problems with this question. The tech savvy would reply "Which version of Linux are you talking about?" Unlike Windows or Mac OS X, there is no coherent thing that you can point to and say "This Linux.... support it!" What you've got are competing distributions, and within them competing windows managers like KDE, and GNOME, each of which do things differently. The second level of this question kind of begs the question... what kind of support are you asking for? Are you expecting them to have printer drivers available? Are you expecting them not to require Office? Or are you simply expecting requirements to be watered down enough so that the user is not asked to go beyond what software/hardware support there is for Linux compared to Windows and to a lesser degree, Mac? Expecting the same kind of support is sheer lunacy given the current state of the Linux non-platform in that it is far from being the unified platform the two big contenders are. Linux varies tremendously not only by what flavor of distribution, but even what window manager is being used. And I haven't even touched the driver issues! Expecting campus tech support to deal with that evershifting morass is simply not realistic given the limited resources usually available. If all you need is network and web support, then you should be golden, of course as a Linux user, you're either a competent user who knows how to search for and install drivers and handle networks, or you were handed a Linux system by some tech geek who's of the delusion that Linux is at the same ready of desktop user accessibility that Windows and Mac are. In short given the current state of the Linux desktop, that is a rather unrealistic and even meaningless question to ask at this time.
The reason it's creepy is because if these regimes had ended up ruling the whole world, 1984 style, no one would even know they had ever done anything wrong. History would be whatever the party says it is, language would be meaningless cliche and so on. In fact if that had happened, I'm not even sure we could have this conversation because the history and concepts we're discussing would have been erased.
Or we could be having the exact same conversation. The most effective prison is when the prisoner builds his own cage. The growth of the Internet has not only kept in pace but has accelerated the growth of gullibility. When a population blindly accepts curbs on it's own liberties in the name of security, 1984 has long arrived. Large groups of Americans actively vote against their own interests which are kept narrowly defined by the manipulation of power in an effective two party monopoly. The most secure form of dictatorship is a "managed" democracy.
At the moment, that takes physics which simply does not exist yet. Hard reality of ground to orbit is that you've got throw 90 percent of your spaceship's mass away to get there.
[quote] [b]I'd go into detail about all the fantastic research that is being done on the ISS, but I simply don't have the facts.[/b] [/quote] If there's any better argumennt for closing down the waste pile once known as "Space Station Freedom", I haven't heard it. If you don't have "the facts", it may very well be the possibility that there are no facts to have. The only fact of the matter is that there has been no credible refutation of the statement made that for all the billions poured into the Station, resulting in the cancellation of real space science, there has not been the return to justify it, not one item of significant unique science has been returned from it.
This isn't Europe. In America "Fair Use" is a four letter word. And even in Europe I'd probably warrant that a statement such as "Copying (downloading) music for personal purposes is considered fair use" bears qualification
Spaceflight was so much easier forty years ago...
Tell that to the families of the crews of Apollo 1 and 13. or Challenger or Columbia. The Space Shuttle is particurlarly problematic because unlike an expendable capsule, it has a heat shield which is designed for repeated use and is exposed during liftoff and in space (this was the primary reason that the Service Module on Apollo 13 was not jettisoned even after it had become dead weight. Unlike an ablative heatshied the shuttle's bricks are inherently more fragile. Space flight will never obtained the ease of commercial airlines.
Kaku has his points. Plutonium is extremely nasty stuff if it's dispersed aerially into the atmosphere, and NASA has had a history of overconfidence in it's designs leading to shortcuts that would prove fatal later. Flyby's aren't infallible, NASA messed up at least one orbital approach causing Mars Observer to HIT Mars instead of orbit it. If Cassini had come down in a populated area and released the plutonium upon a crash we'd be looking at some serious collateral damage. And quite frankly if the difference between enough solar power to operate at Saturn and the RTG was only 130 lbs, than perhaps NASA should have looked at the alternative. I will quite concede that the Voyagers needed thier nuclear batteries, but it should be noted that they only had one window of Earth risk over a nonpouplated area as they were express shoots instead of gravity assists designed to make up for what NASA was lacking in launch capacity.
If this is true, Venus is now the number one planet to study. If it started out to be that much more Earthlike than we had previouly figured out to be than we need to know what happened to turn a potential Twin Earth to Hell. And is Earth going towards the same route and how much may Humanity have to say about it one way or the other? Why is it's rotation so slow? (Little known factiod, the extra weird thing about Venus' rotation is that it is locked to Earth in that whenever it is at closest approach to our world, it is always showing the same side)
You also forgot one country that would have a motive to claim fakage of the moon landings... the Soviet Union which was in a desperate race to take back it's space leads. But as I recall, the Russians never once challenged the actuality of the American feat.
With the direct ferry from Auberdine to Stormwind, getting to Goldshire is no longer a problem for a Night Elf or Draenei.
You could still see it because the animated show had an uncommon feature of continuity. Months later the Tick was sent to the Moon to fill in those letters. He only got one of them done before Ominus (not sure of the spelling), a Galactus spoof showed up to have Earth for dinner. While the Tick got him to leave, he compromised by letting him have one bite of the Moon "for the road". Episodes after that showed the moon now having "Chi" and a bitemark out of the corner.
1. State a conclusion and put forth your premise 2. Quote at best a barely related statistic, relevant facts are for academic types 3. Become a Slashdot author and gain user cred by advocating the "You're not doing anything wrong by pirating the music you want instead of paying for it. 4. NonProfit!
And people who attend tech conferences represent what percentage of home and buisness users again?
I've heard time and time again about how the creators are not being served by copyright, usually by some self-righteous user defending his right to pirate. So I'll ask the original poster, who and where are the creators supposedly advocating YOUR side of the argument? It's kind of self serving for a pirate user to trumpet the buzzwords of "fair use", "creator's freedom", when all they're doing is grabbing the material, and using it without paying. Maybe the real reason that you're not hearing the "creator's" side is that they're happy with the status quo as it is. Maybe because they hire agents to deal with items regarding to their compensation so they don't have to. And when I mean creators, I'm talking about the big ticket folks whose stuff you're pirating, not the local band who can't give thier CDs away, much less get them published.
For the forseeable future, the bulk of desktops and notebooks on this planet are going to be running Windows software. If the failures of VISTA did not push a significant fraction of Windows users to Mac OS or Linux, nothing is going to change that. So yes, site developers will be using Silverlight, especially if MS makes it cheaper to develop for than Flash, because they don't really care if you're going to avoid thier site if the bulk of the computing market doesn't share your issues. This doesn't please me as a Mac user, but I've lived in worse times than this.
Then don't show it to them in the first place! the thing is you you don't have to visibly deploy it. You can just put on the button, leave it in your pocket or purse and net away.