Yup... black holes "evaporate" after some time, they lose mass through radiation. So tiny micro ones would appear and just disappear pretty much instantly. Or so the physicists say.
Have we learned nothing from them? If this DRM plan goes through, the companies will obsolete media just as fast as the drug companies obsolete drugs that are about to lose their patent. (They remix the formula slightly, and take another patent out).
So basically, that copy of Blade Runner you bought 3 years ago? The Director's cut plus? Well, that was then, now we have a completely new product, Director's cut plus enhanced, with a never before seen napkin drawing of Roy Batty's potential haircuts that never made it into the movie. So yeah, we don't carry the old one any more, but if you want the plus enhanced, that'll be another $19.99 please.
Don't for a second think these a-holes are doing anything for YOU, the consumer. Just like the insurance industry doesn't give a shit about giving you actual medical care, these people don't care about giving you anything - it's all about their profits... perpetual and guaranteed.
Because making you wait 5 days *might* stop a Va Tech type massacre from happening. I would suggest that anyone who asks this sort of question is putting their own selfish self-gratification before the safety of others.
2) A woman's death - could've happened with a gun as well. The key to this problem might not lie in guns but other means, such as speeding up the restraining orders, better police protection, increased funding for safe houses, etc... I would argue the solution shouldn't lie in the "let's populate our town with huge wolves to fight the man-eating bats we used to solve an earlier small problem" approach. What's next? Battered wives getting permits to carry M-16s around?
3) The black market doesn't enforce wait periods, but going to the black market means you're putting yourself at a risk of sting operations and such. If your argument is that the black market exists, and you can get a gun there anyway, so why not just let anybody buy any gun they please, instantly, (in a nutshell, adjust the real market to what the black market offers), then why not extend that to drugs as well? You can buy any kind of a drug on the black market, why don't we just legalize all the drugs? It's the risk of getting caught that is supposed to be a real deterrent. In your case, I imagine they might strip you of all your other precious guns if they caught you. Why don't YOU buy your guns on the black market if it's so quick and cheap and easy?
4) Cars and guns are not the same thing. Objects that have one purpose, and one purpose only, to kill living things, should not be mentioned in the same breath as modes of transportation, or kitchen utensiles, etc. And no, target practice isn't "another purpose," it's just practice for the killing of living things.
5) Oh, and also, if you're so poor that you can't afford to take a day off from work, why are you buying weapons that cost hundreds of dollars?
There's you, and then there's the rest of America. Not everybody is you, the safe benign gun collector.
According to a buddy of mine who works in data recovery, yes. It's also not so much a question of quality as much as it is a question of platter density. According to him, a single platter 20Gb drive lasted a good long time. In the data recovery business, they're seeing a lot more high density drives than the older ones (even though you'd think the older drives would fail more frequently). (why do you think the HD companies dropped the warranty down to 1 year in the last few years?)
Personally, I must have bought about 30 HD's in the last 10 years, ranging from 4Gb in '97 to four 300Gb SATA drives two months ago. I guess I've had at least a third fail in one way or another. I'm not talking about dropping them or anything, they just quit working.
How's your track record? How many drives have you actually owned, and fully used, and how many have failed? I'm curious.
Yeah, we had a professor hand us a 70-page assembly program and said - this is supposed to be a primitive compiler that can compile a language with these specs. Debug it and give me the finished version. Ha! That was fun! Total detective work.:)
A lot of the work as a programmer is like that - even excellent programmers make mistakes, and the bigger the codebase, the harder it is to find the bug. Add to that the interactions on the part of the OS/framework/3-rd party code that are frequently no fault of the programmer, and you have constant debugging work on your hands. No matter how good you are.
You have to think, even when you think you're done.
Actually, the whole Yugoslavia thing had more to do with the fall of the Berlin wall and what was going on in Poland/Hungary and other countries rather than Tito's death (if that's who you're talking about as a strong man).
Tito died in 1980, and it wasn't until 91 that the real war flared up over there. That nation was kept up by the notion that there was nowhere else to go. Once the communist regimes in the neighbourhood started loosening up, the former republics (Croatia/Slovenia) decided to reevaluate their options. Even then, there were extensive talks about the breakup in the Yugoslav parliament... If was really the Serbs, who couldn't take no for an answer, who started the whole war. Slovenia/Croatia and NATO finished it for them. But I digress:)
More importantly, why aren't they making ALL car radios with an simple signal-in jack? You take a cable, go from the headphones jack on your IPod/walkman/whatever, directly into your car stereo.
I can't believe that most new cars still don't come with that. How hard is this???
"I'll go further than that and say there is no reason for children to watch television until at least 5"
I guess you don't have kids, eh? While I wholeheartedly agree that in an ideal world, no toddler should be watching TV, there are moments when you just have to do it. I.e. you pick up the kid from daycare, he's screaming cause he's hungry, and you have to make him dinner - quick.
He wants to be held, and you can't really cook with half a hand left, nor is it advisable to be dangling the child in front of the stove with two burners on.
So then, you have a choice: Builder Bob for 10-15 minutes, or takeout for dinner every night. I think we all know which one is worse.
You know, every time I hear that it's really the terrorists' fault for civilian deaths because they're hiding behind the civilians I just cringe.
Kinda like a bank robber holding a hostage at gunpoint, then the police goes and grabs a bazooka and blows away the robber, the hostage, 3 tellers, and a dozen customers and then they say: "Well, it's clearly the robber's fault."
What happened to the CIA's cyber-ninja international assasination squad? Too much overtime in the past 6 years? Feeling a little burnt out?
The fact that he is not a "model citizen," of course, means that his testicles are subject to 220V treatment.
I don't care if he's purple, and has tree heads - if he's a US citizen, then god dammit, he has certain protections under the constitution. Period. End of discussion.
Anybody who violates those rights should go to jail.
Yeah, the Wash. Post had something to that effect. Here's my question: if you rob a bank, and give that money to your spouse, then die before you're actually convicted, do they get to keep all the money? Lay's money is no different. Sure, the accounting is more complicated, but let's face it, that family should be stripped of every last penny for the shit Kenny boy pulled. Let them work for a living for a change. That'll make other CEO's think twice about inflicting this kind of damage on their own family.
Shame Kenny Boy never got to experience jail. I'd put him in with the worst of the worst... let HIM experience what it's like to get ass raped. Only not financially, literally.
Instant free extra licenses - 'piracy' at its best.
Well, another way to look at it is this: you should be having per-person license, not a per-machine license. That person has already paid you once, and be happy with that. This especially pertains to individuals, and especially when it comes to software you actively use (as opposed to background services/server software, etc) - cause guess what, I only have two hands and I can only work on one copy at a time.
Price your stuff so people can afford a copy, and don't be so anal about licensing. The rest will be ok, and you and your company won't spend sleepless nights worrying about all those millions of fake licenses floating around.
They can cuff you any time they please, as far as I understand even for just looking at them. But they also have to charge you with a crime within a very short time, or let you go. Otherwise, you sic your lawyers on them.
Could the police use trespassing or something on this guy? If not, and you're using a wide open Wi-Fi point, they really have no case. (IANAL)
Of course, in at least one foreign country I know, if you have a TV set, you have to pay montly subscription... regardless of it being public airwaves or whatnot. Otherwise, they come to your house and seal your TV off.
You know what's funny... that the laptops were broken to begin with. He may as well have said: I tried installing Vista on my burnt our 386, and it didn't work. Therefore, the OS is shit. QED.
"OTOH, the liberal who claims to save the world, by depriving me of some of my wealth, might very well impoverish me to the point where I can no longer spend what I earned in fair trade to save my own life. "
Are you hearing yourself? Two key phrases: "depriving of wealth" and "save your own life". Sir, do you earn a few million dollars a year? And if the govt took a million of that, what options would that take away from you? Buying your own pacific island to live when your factories kill the water here?
Sweet god. Liberals, AFAIK, are for taxing those who have waaaaay too much, and whose wealth can in no way be explained how hard they work, now or ever.
The fact that you chose the word "wealth" to begin with tells me you're probably in the triple digits salary-wise (if you're a North American). If so, you need to travel a bit. See how people live on $5 a day, working 16 hour days.
If you see that, and you're still whining about taxes, you're just a cold hearted bastard.
The USA "freed people from the shackles of communism in east germany and former soviet states"...
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHA... ROTFLMAO. Where the fuck was the US in the 50s, the 60s and the 70s when the smaller countries tried to throw off the Soviets? Where the fuck was the almighty US when tanks were smearing protesters in Budapest all over the streets? They were shitting in their pants in the Pentagon for the fear that the Russians might overrun them in Western Europe.
It was the Polish and the Russian people who threw down the communism, not the Americans. As much as you'd like to belive Reagan was a Christ-like figure who single-handedly defeated the commies, that's not quite true. All Reagan would've done were it not for the *people* of eastern Europe would be to invite even more repression upon the rest of the Eastern bloc. Because when the going gets tough, those in the power will grab whatever's left, and ordinary people will suffer more.
As for the rest of the world, I think the US record speaks for itself. Funding death squads in Latin America in the name of anti-communist ideology, or napalming thousands of asian people for the same reason, that's nothing to be proud of.
If you go to Webster online, you'll see there are two valid pronunciations: sheek and sheik. Southern accents do "sound dumb". Then again, I think Bostonian accents do too. Or the heavy New York accent. Don't ask me why, or whether the reputation is deserved. I don't think that it's helping the sourthern cause right now that seem to be forever complaining about "the ivory tower elite," and the preznit (who flaunts his Southernness, deserved or not) who brags about getting C's. [listened to him introduce a speaker once, and he said something to the effect: yeah, this guy has a PhD, and I got C's in school, and look who's listening to whom now]...
Who's supposed to lead but smart people?
So to recap: southerners are waging war on smart people. Which puts them squarely in the other camp right now.
Just wanted to say - thanks for telling the truth. There are so many Linux obsessed people on Slashdot who don't realize that yes, Linux, and custom installations are a lot more work than standalone devices. They're fine if you have the expertise, and loads of time, and you use it for learning purposes, but sometimes stuff just needs to work. Out of the box. No tinkering needed. I own a Tivo and thank god it's one device that's been working solid for 2 years without me even as much as looking at it. I hate having to troubleshoot basic appliances like this in addition to all the other crap I have going on.
Uhm... don't you need to actually do something to *deserve* a privilege? Being born doesn't count, as it's really your mom squeezing you out, *you* yourself didn't do anything. Honor? That word is thrown around very lightly these days. What the US is doing in the world these days most people external to the US would describe as "bullying", not as something honorable. Not sure how that word pertains to living in the US though.
The majority of the people living inside the US would at this point also say that what the US govt is doing inside the US is not very honorable either, with all the endless scandals and lies just rolling off the very tip of the govt down...
One thing this country has is money, loads and loads of it. There's so much money that even after the people at the top grab all they can and then some more, people in the middle still get a pretty decent bagful of it.
And that's the benefit of living in the US - with a little effort, having access to boatloads of cash (when compared to the rest of the world).
Komodo dragons Lions Tigers (don't they need a place to live since India is all overpopulated anyway) Wolves Bears! They'll eat anything!... or maybe we can clone a T-rex from those DNA samples found. That would be freaking awesome!
Slashdot Mirror
Yup... black holes "evaporate" after some time, they lose mass through radiation. So tiny micro ones would appear and just disappear pretty much instantly. Or so the physicists say.
Have we learned nothing from them? If this DRM plan goes through, the companies will obsolete media just as fast as the drug companies obsolete drugs that are about to lose their patent. (They remix the formula slightly, and take another patent out).
So basically, that copy of Blade Runner you bought 3 years ago? The Director's cut plus? Well, that was then, now we have a completely new product, Director's cut plus enhanced, with a never before seen napkin drawing of Roy Batty's potential haircuts that never made it into the movie. So yeah, we don't carry the old one any more, but if you want the plus enhanced, that'll be another $19.99 please.
Don't for a second think these a-holes are doing anything for YOU, the consumer. Just like the insurance industry doesn't give a shit about giving you actual medical care, these people don't care about giving you anything - it's all about their profits... perpetual and guaranteed.
> First, why should I be made to wait 5 days?
Because making you wait 5 days *might* stop a Va Tech type massacre from happening. I would suggest that anyone who asks this sort of question is putting their own selfish self-gratification before the safety of others.
2) A woman's death - could've happened with a gun as well. The key to this problem might not lie in guns but other means, such as speeding up the restraining orders, better police protection, increased funding for safe houses, etc... I would argue the solution shouldn't lie in the "let's populate our town with huge wolves to fight the man-eating bats we used to solve an earlier small problem" approach. What's next? Battered wives getting permits to carry M-16s around?
3) The black market doesn't enforce wait periods, but going to the black market means you're putting yourself at a risk of sting operations and such. If your argument is that the black market exists, and you can get a gun there anyway, so why not just let anybody buy any gun they please, instantly, (in a nutshell, adjust the real market to what the black market offers), then why not extend that to drugs as well? You can buy any kind of a drug on the black market, why don't we just legalize all the drugs?
It's the risk of getting caught that is supposed to be a real deterrent. In your case, I imagine they might strip you of all your other precious guns if they caught you. Why don't YOU buy your guns on the black market if it's so quick and cheap and easy?
4) Cars and guns are not the same thing. Objects that have one purpose, and one purpose only, to kill living things, should not be mentioned in the same breath as modes of transportation, or kitchen utensiles, etc.
And no, target practice isn't "another purpose," it's just practice for the killing of living things.
5) Oh, and also, if you're so poor that you can't afford to take a day off from work, why are you buying weapons that cost hundreds of dollars?
There's you, and then there's the rest of America. Not everybody is you, the safe benign gun collector.
For those of us musically challenged, how does that translate into da's and the dum's, please?
Right. So they can not only have fractures, but horrible burns from the hot engine.
Sounds like a plan.
"Are drives today made of lower quality?"
According to a buddy of mine who works in data recovery, yes. It's also not so much a question of quality as much as it is a question of platter density. According to him, a single platter 20Gb drive lasted a good long time. In the data recovery business, they're seeing a lot more high density drives than the older ones (even though you'd think the older drives would fail more frequently). (why do you think the HD companies dropped the warranty down to 1 year in the last few years?)
Personally, I must have bought about 30 HD's in the last 10 years, ranging from 4Gb in '97 to four 300Gb SATA drives two months ago.
I guess I've had at least a third fail in one way or another. I'm not talking about dropping them or anything, they just quit working.
How's your track record? How many drives have you actually owned, and fully used, and how many have failed? I'm curious.
Yeah, we had a professor hand us a 70-page assembly program and said - this is supposed to be a primitive compiler that can compile a language with these specs. Debug it and give me the finished version. :)
Ha! That was fun! Total detective work.
A lot of the work as a programmer is like that - even excellent programmers make mistakes, and the bigger the codebase, the harder it is to find the bug. Add to that the interactions on the part of the OS/framework/3-rd party code that are frequently no fault of the programmer, and you have constant debugging work on your hands. No matter how good you are.
You have to think, even when you think you're done.
Actually, the whole Yugoslavia thing had more to do with the fall of the Berlin wall and what was going on in Poland/Hungary and other countries rather than Tito's death (if that's who you're talking about as a strong man).
:)
Tito died in 1980, and it wasn't until 91 that the real war flared up over there. That nation was kept up by the notion that there was nowhere else to go. Once the communist regimes in the neighbourhood started loosening up, the former republics (Croatia/Slovenia) decided to reevaluate their options. Even then, there were extensive talks about the breakup in the Yugoslav parliament...
If was really the Serbs, who couldn't take no for an answer, who started the whole war. Slovenia/Croatia and NATO finished it for them.
But I digress
More importantly, why aren't they making ALL car radios with an simple signal-in jack? You take a cable, go from the headphones jack on your IPod/walkman/whatever, directly into your car stereo.
I can't believe that most new cars still don't come with that. How hard is this???
"I'll go further than that and say there is no reason for children to watch television until at least 5"
I guess you don't have kids, eh? While I wholeheartedly agree that in an ideal world, no toddler should be watching TV, there are moments when you just have to do it. I.e. you pick up the kid from daycare, he's screaming cause he's hungry, and you have to make him dinner - quick.
He wants to be held, and you can't really cook with half a hand left, nor is it advisable to be dangling the child in front of the stove with two burners on.
So then, you have a choice: Builder Bob for 10-15 minutes, or takeout for dinner every night. I think we all know which one is worse.
Series3? $800? You must love your TV...
Hey, he never said how old the kids were. Maybe they're all 30+ living at home.
You don't think anybody has thought of that? That there won't be utilities to commit cache to disk before moving the hard drive?
You know, every time I hear that it's really the terrorists' fault for civilian deaths because they're hiding behind the civilians I just cringe.
Kinda like a bank robber holding a hostage at gunpoint, then the police goes and grabs a bazooka and blows away the robber, the hostage, 3 tellers, and a dozen customers and then they say:
"Well, it's clearly the robber's fault."
What happened to the CIA's cyber-ninja international assasination squad? Too much overtime in the past 6 years? Feeling a little burnt out?
The fact that he is not a "model citizen," of course, means that his testicles are subject to 220V treatment.
I don't care if he's purple, and has tree heads - if he's a US citizen, then god dammit, he has certain protections under the constitution. Period. End of discussion.
Anybody who violates those rights should go to jail.
Yeah, the Wash. Post had something to that effect. Here's my question: if you rob a bank, and give that money to your spouse, then die before you're actually convicted, do they get to keep all the money? Lay's money is no different. Sure, the accounting is more complicated, but let's face it, that family should be stripped of every last penny for the shit Kenny boy pulled. Let them work for a living for a change. That'll make other CEO's think twice about inflicting this kind of damage on their own family.
Shame Kenny Boy never got to experience jail. I'd put him in with the worst of the worst... let HIM experience what it's like to get ass raped. Only not financially, literally.
Instant free extra licenses - 'piracy' at its best.
Well, another way to look at it is this: you should be having per-person license, not a per-machine license. That person has already paid you once, and be happy with that. This especially pertains to individuals, and especially when it comes to software you actively use (as opposed to background services/server software, etc) - cause guess what, I only have two hands and I can only work on one copy at a time.
Price your stuff so people can afford a copy, and don't be so anal about licensing. The rest will be ok, and you and your company won't spend sleepless nights worrying about all those millions of fake licenses floating around.
Relax a little.
They can cuff you any time they please, as far as I understand even for just looking at them. But they also have to charge you with a crime within a very short time, or let you go. Otherwise, you sic your lawyers on them.
Could the police use trespassing or something on this guy? If not, and you're using a wide open Wi-Fi point, they really have no case. (IANAL)
Of course, in at least one foreign country I know, if you have a TV set, you have to pay montly subscription... regardless of it being public airwaves or whatnot. Otherwise, they come to your house and seal your TV off.
You know what's funny... that the laptops were broken to begin with. He may as well have said: I tried installing Vista on my burnt our 386, and it didn't work. Therefore, the OS is shit. QED.
Ha ha.
"OTOH, the liberal who claims to save the world, by depriving me of some of my wealth, might very well impoverish me to the point where I can no longer spend what I earned in fair trade to save my own life. "
Are you hearing yourself? Two key phrases: "depriving of wealth" and "save your own life".
Sir, do you earn a few million dollars a year? And if the govt took a million of that, what options would that take away from you? Buying your own pacific island to live when your factories kill the water here?
Sweet god. Liberals, AFAIK, are for taxing those who have waaaaay too much, and whose wealth can in no way be explained how hard they work, now or ever.
The fact that you chose the word "wealth" to begin with tells me you're probably in the triple digits salary-wise (if you're a North American). If so, you need to travel a bit. See how people live on $5 a day, working 16 hour days.
If you see that, and you're still whining about taxes, you're just a cold hearted bastard.
The USA "freed people from the shackles of communism in east germany and former soviet states"...
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHA... ROTFLMAO.
Where the fuck was the US in the 50s, the 60s and the 70s when the smaller countries tried to throw off the Soviets? Where the fuck was the almighty US when tanks were smearing protesters in Budapest all over the streets? They were shitting in their pants in the Pentagon for the fear that the Russians might overrun them in Western Europe.
It was the Polish and the Russian people who threw down the communism, not the Americans. As much as you'd like to belive Reagan was a Christ-like figure who single-handedly defeated the commies, that's not quite true.
All Reagan would've done were it not for the *people* of eastern Europe would be to invite even more repression upon the rest of the Eastern bloc. Because when the going gets tough, those in the power will grab whatever's left, and ordinary people will suffer more.
As for the rest of the world, I think the US record speaks for itself. Funding death squads in Latin America in the name of anti-communist ideology, or napalming thousands of asian people for the same reason, that's nothing to be proud of.
If you go to Webster online, you'll see there are two valid pronunciations: sheek and sheik.
Southern accents do "sound dumb". Then again, I think Bostonian accents do too. Or the heavy New York accent. Don't ask me why, or whether the reputation is deserved. I don't think that it's helping the sourthern cause right now that seem to be forever complaining about "the ivory tower elite," and the preznit (who flaunts his Southernness, deserved or not) who brags about getting C's.
[listened to him introduce a speaker once, and he said something to the effect: yeah, this guy has a PhD, and I got C's in school, and look who's listening to whom now]...
Who's supposed to lead but smart people?
So to recap: southerners are waging war on smart people. Which puts them squarely in the other camp right now.
I agree with the other stuff you said though...
Just wanted to say - thanks for telling the truth. There are so many Linux obsessed people on Slashdot who don't realize that yes, Linux, and custom installations are a lot more work than standalone devices. They're fine if you have the expertise, and loads of time, and you use it for learning purposes, but sometimes stuff just needs to work. Out of the box. No tinkering needed.
I own a Tivo and thank god it's one device that's been working solid for 2 years without me even as much as looking at it. I hate having to troubleshoot basic appliances like this in addition to all the other crap I have going on.
Uhm... don't you need to actually do something to *deserve* a privilege? Being born doesn't count, as it's really your mom squeezing you out, *you* yourself didn't do anything.
Honor? That word is thrown around very lightly these days. What the US is doing in the world these days most people external to the US would describe as "bullying", not as something honorable. Not sure how that word pertains to living in the US though.
The majority of the people living inside the US would at this point also say that what the US govt is doing inside the US is not very honorable either, with all the endless scandals and lies just rolling off the very tip of the govt down...
One thing this country has is money, loads and loads of it. There's so much money that even after the people at the top grab all they can and then some more, people in the middle still get a pretty decent bagful of it.
And that's the benefit of living in the US - with a little effort, having access to boatloads of cash (when compared to the rest of the world).
Komodo dragons ...
Lions
Tigers (don't they need a place to live since India is all overpopulated anyway)
Wolves
Bears! They'll eat anything!
or maybe we can clone a T-rex from those DNA samples found. That would be freaking awesome!