Seriously, do you know any shop, market stall, or random bloke at all who would sell you a pirate copy of photoshop, or any other PC software?
I guess you've never been to the Middle East or Turkey then. Walk into a locally-owned store or market and 90% of the stuff will be pirated, and yes you can get Photoshop or any of a number of other high-end softwares. I have a friend who lived in Turkey for five years, and he told me he had trouble finding music CDs that were NOT pirated. He mailed home a huge box FULL of software to his brothers. He sent me a video-CD of Star Wars Episode 1, that would have been indistinguishable on the outside of the case from a commercial product, except that in the place a DVD would have the region code, it had the Mortal Kombat logo.
Same in the Palestinean Territories, according his brother. You walk into a store and buy pirated music, movies and software right off the shelf.
The people that use bots want valuable and rare items and they don't want to grind. They don't care about believable because they use a different character than their main one and they later drop goods for their main character to pick up. The reason why Blizzard doesn't like this is because if tons of people are cheating, and it is cheating, it ruins the perception of the game. People don't want to grind because they see dips cheating. You start questioning if awesome character X you know got there by cheating. It undermines trust and hurts morale. So blizzard combats this by finding and banning bots, which takes time and money. Bots don't add any value to the game nor add value to Blizzard's pocketbook, they take away value and money.
the truth is, you have control over your cops: via your government. There was an article a while back by a Miami-Dade, Florida television station. They sent guys into police stations to ask for a complaint form. The results were pretty bad across the board, and in multiple cases the complainant was physically threatened by an officer, for merely requesting a form to make a complaint against an officer.
http://cbs4.com/topstories/Miami.News.CBS4.2.395528.html
CBS4 News found that, in police departments across Miami-Dade and Broward Counties, large and small, it was virtually impossible to walk in the door, and walk out with a complaint form...there was one incident in which our tester went in to file a complaint. After several times asking for a form, being told "you're not leaving without a form," he was asked to leave and actually walked off the property, to the point where the officer reached for his gun, put his hand on his gun and said, "Take a step closer, and see what happens.". I think part of the problem is that a bad cop can hurt a lot of people before he hopefully eventually gets punished. If that undercover reporter ended up getting shot by that police officer, it wouldn't be any consolation to him or his family that the officer was punished, because he would be dead. I don't know if sites like this are more bad or good, but it's a reaction to this fact. There's police organizations that are actively fighting transparency for things like, how many complaints an officer has had filed against him. The police simply will not give you that information, so it's difficult to prove there's an administrative problem there where complaints are ignored.
Ideally you will as you said go through proper channels to force the police department to operate more transparently, but if you are in a situation where there are enough totally authoritarian citizens and/or city managers in your area, sites like this might be your only defense. Moving is not always an option, and at any rate everyone has the right to feel safe in their community and shouldn't have to leave.
Kepler wrote "The Harmonies of the Worlds" in the mid-1600's, which detailed a supposed connection between math and geometry, music and physics (specifically, planetary motion.) I know a few very smart people who hold this book in high regard, but it's hard for me to tell if it's something really profound or just a bunch of bullshit. Point however is that people have been making geometrical representations of music for a long time, if I understand the issue correctly. Doing this with string theory is very interesting though.
Apple DOESN'T have to support Java on the iPhone. Sun didn't ask for Apple to maintain a Java Cocoa bridge on the iPhone, they wanted to port Java and maintain it. But they had to back off because of Apple's restrictive licensing. So with regards to developer preference, had Java been ported that would have been Sun's problem so why would Apple even care? I'm also a full time Java developer and I have an Intel Mac, and I don't give two shits about Objective-C, I just think it would be cool to take my Java cellphone app and run it on the iPhone.
Re:It's a serious art form
on
Reading Comics
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· Score: 1
I mentioned this in a prior post, but after you posted your comment so I'll repeat it. I believe that Watchmen requires high familiarity with the comics medium to fully appreciate it, so it's not terribly accessible to people that are not comics fans. What I am getting at is that Watchmen may not be the great choice for exposing people to graphic novels that comics fans think it is, because they are overestimating how much people are familiar enough with the conventions of comics.
Re:Comics as real literature
on
Reading Comics
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· Score: 1
I think you're hearing these suggestions from lifelong comic book readers. I enjoyed "Watchmen" though in my opinion it required too much familiarity with the comic book medium to be accessible. I am not a fan of Sandman though, I think the art is crappy and the writing is overrated. For a pretty accessible graphic novel, I suggest "Blankets" by Craig Thompson. Superhero fans are not necessarily going to like it, at least the ones I showed it to didn't. But I've shown it to a few non-comics-readers who liked it.
Are you talking about science or society? Because when it comes to society, you practically answered your own question. Unpopular things are popular targets for criticism. Popular things are unpopular targets for criticism. When it comes to science, more research is probably going to be done where demand is highest, for example whatever a popular target in society is. At the same time there is research done on less prominent possible causes, but sometimes the possibility of a socially unacceptable solution makes it impossible to even ask the question. The hysterical, semi-scientific backlash against the book "The Bell Curve" definitely put a chill on research into genetic determinism with regards to intelligence and race--you're at risk for even asking the question because people will question your motives; and since a particular major flap in the 1990's it's well known in psychology that anyone researching child sexuality in the USA is walking on eggshells. I am making broad assertions about fields that I am not an expert in, but the social backlash (left-wing and right wing, respectively) in each case was undeniable. Even in science there are questions you simply cannot ask.
as we move it to 3-D and add a bit of blood rather then just random colors it now is violent. Yes. Because when we talk about violence we are not talking about conceptual violence but of depicted violence. Conceptually, Risk is one of the most violent games ever made, but in Quake blood and body parts are flying everywhere among machine gun fire. You can see this borne out in tv and movies where to soften effect, violence is insinuated rather than depicted because actual depiction is far more emotionally disturbing. Conceptually they are equivalent.
I like one way I've heard it phrased, "prefer the explanation with the least variables." Something that ID'ers have trouble with is that by itself evidence of a creator is still not preferable to a natural explanation because of another science rule of thumb, "extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence." It sounded to me that this was what you were alluding to. Because yeah, it's still a lot easier to believe in an amazing coincidence that works in terms of natural laws than introducing an omnipotent creator that there has been no physical evidence for to date. It's not so hard with pottery and people because when you find a pot buried under the ground, you already know that people exist and pots are made by people. It's just so hard to get them to understand this because if you start out "knowing" that God exists, then the scant evidence that _may_ insinuate a creator looks that much more powerful to you.
Let's assume for the sake of argument that scientific evidence did actually point to a creator. We already have methods by which we determine objects to be man-made or not, so pretend that we find some evidence like this with regards to life, the planet, whatever. At that point science could being inquiry into the nature of this creator. Science doesn't just throw up its hands and exclaim "Great! More work!" and quit. Okham's Razor is a tool that's used to simplify analysis but the simplest possible explanation being correct is not an unerring fact of the universe (And Okham's Razor does not exactly say this.) Sometimes you discover evidence that reality is far, far more complicated than you expected.
It isn't totally an issue of security, it's of relying on the rules of society that all civilized grownups are aware of. For the convenience of everyone, most places will give you the benefit of the doubt if you look like you're doing what you're supposed to be doing. My gym doesn't check the fingerprints of everyone who walks through the door because by and large they expect people not to be assholes and take advantage of a system that is intentionally left simple. They want to get along with you, they want to trust you, they want to make their lives and your lives simpler.
Isn't that what Slashdot pisses and moans about that all companies should be doing? Yet there is always a contention on Slashdot between people that complain about how businesses and government don't trust them and spy on them and make excessive regulations, and the people on Slashdot that think that if something's not nailed down you are perfectly within your rights to take it because there wasn't a chain and a sign that said "DON'T STEAL PARK BENCHES."
I agree with you on the point that they are asserting this rather than via force of law. I personally know an individual who was busted (yes, he's an idiot,) but this was actually prior to 2004. I have not heard of any individuals being fined since then, so I concede the point that there COULD be legal means of travel there. With them actually tightening regulations, I would not want to test that right now though.
I personally would love to travel there but the educational licenses really were being used for vacations, so I don't blame them for cracking down on it. And I don't want to go there to learn pottery or be indoctrinated, I want to go there because it's a cool place.
I don't think you can ever prevent that anyway, with the intellectual property situation the way it is. Microsoft is doing this to Linux right now regarding patents, and Windows isn't even open source. I guess it comes down to trust as to whether or not you take a look at the source. I sure don't trust MS' word on the Linux/patents thing, I don't trust that they are acting in good faith on the OOXML thing, so maybe I'm dumb for trusting them on this. But I think they are legitimately putting their toe in the water with regards to open source and how they are going to run the company in the future.
I couldn't use NetStumbler with my wifi card via NDISWrapper because apparently much of the wifi functionality is not controlled through the standard windows networking interface and so is not exportable via NDISWrapper. To do that I needed native drivers. If you want a fully functional card, you still want a native solution.
The sniper gets to see every non-sniper's bids all the way up to the very last few seconds, leaving no opportunity for the non-sniper to react and counter-bid. The advantage is entirely with the sniper. He knows what you bid, but you don't know what he bids because he waits til you can't counterbid.
The buyer doesn't lose money because the highest bidder always wins. I said the buyer makes substantially less money than in a non-sniping scenario. Auction sniping on eBay badly models a sealed-bid silent auction. The difference between that and a sniped ebay auction is that in a sealed auction you can't do bullshit like screw other bidders who bid early or win in part because you simply have a faster connection and can see and outbid other snipes in the interim few seconds.
You're totally wrong, sniped auctions do not benefit the seller or the buyer. From the buyer perspective, most everyone is out for a deal, and part of the auction is reacting to other bids to see how much OTHERS are willing to pay. Sniping eliminates that. From a seller perspective, I can tell you that sniping drastically reduces your final selling price BECAUSE of the fact that buyers can't react to those final bids. The selling price gets comparatively jacked up in a non-sniped auction because most people do not really put in the maximum they are willing to pay because, frankly, they don't actually know that until they size up the other bids.
I have seen this in practice. I bid primarily on classic video games, and some of that stuff is prime sniper material. It just so happens that I lost out on a particular game with niche appeal, about five or six times. The game typically went for around 250 dollars. Out of frustration at being sniped on several other auctions of late, I set up a bid snipe program and got the game for 150. The seller got totally screwed. I started sniping more and consistently found that it significantly reduced the final selling price.
So what happens in a sniped auction is that the seller sells at a lower price, and a bunch of typical, non-sniping buyers are pissed off because the item actually sold at a lower price than they were willing to pay. There is nothing unfair about that, but the situation is generally unsatisfactory to everyone but the single sniper who wins the auction.
I actually prefer the uBid method, where any bids in the last five minutes extend the bidding another fifteen. This is like a real auction, buyers are happy, sellers are happy, the only people who are unhappy in that scenario are the people who can't game the system anymore. And I don't have any sympathy for them.
Just because they offer the source code under a noncommercial license does not preclude them from offering a commercial product based on that kernel. Microsoft is a smart company when it comes to making money, and if they think it will help and not hurt them to have their kernel open source, they will do it. Tons of people on Slashdot say this all the time, that to truly understand the system you need to have the source, and that there is not really a business downside to making it available. I believe this is true IF the source is basically good. The Windows source code is probably a liability because, from all accounts I've heard, the code is pretty embarrassing. I could definitely see Microsoft writing a next-gen kernel from scratch, commercializing it, and open sourcing it to keep developers happy.
Why should anyone spend any time learning and working with this tool if their efforts cannot be used commercially? Two reasons: Because it is, allegedly, a highly modern kernel design that (I've read) implements a next-generation security model that is conceptually too different to be bolted on conventional modular monolithic kernels. With an academic, noncommercial license you can use it to to learn about kernels. If you're not interested in or learning about kernels, only potentially using them, then yeah, I concede your point. However, secondly, an academic noncommercial license to the source doesn't preclude Microsoft selling an OS based on that kernel commercially, in which case having the source does have practical value for programmers even if it cannot be modified.
Whether it is God or aliens or time travelers, saying "some intelligent designer did it" is of no scientific value, because all it does is add a layer of needless complexity to the question without offering any real answers. No it doesn't if that's what the evidence points towards (it does not, but that's beside my point.) Your argument doesn't hold for things that are in fact created but of unknown origin, otherwise how would you ever evaluate that fact? I find a pot in the ground, I assume it was created even before I know who or why. If I am a scientist studying pots for some reason, my field of study may not even care who made it.
With regards to interpretation, you certainly did make a claim in that regard when you said that everyone can do the same experiments or research and get the same results. This totally disregards the role of interpretation in science, because the same set of data can elicit many different and sometimes contradictory interpretations depending on the scientist and their personal field of study. I do not consider changing interpretations over time in science to be evidence of a flawed process. I was just pointing out that part of what the corrective process in science has to overcome is, in retrospect, unscientific arguments from scientists that are accepted because of reputation of adherents, inertia, or because of political or career investment in that ultimately wrong idea.
What evidence would prove that there *wasn't* a creator? Superior evidence for natural selection, which we have in abundant quantities. If you take it back to whether or not a creator kicked off evolution or something, that of course is unfalsifiable, but that is also something that Intelligent Design does not address either so the point is moot.
I don't really have a problem with not trying to describe the root cause of an observable phenomenon where the root cause is not actually known. This is done all the time in science, otherwise no progress would ever be made. For crying out loud, evolution doesn't address the origin of life at all, which is not actually known, but that does not undermine the fact that evolution is an observable phenomenon.
Slashdot Mirror
And the latency is crap, leading to dropped frames if you are doing analog video capture.
I guess you've never been to the Middle East or Turkey then. Walk into a locally-owned store or market and 90% of the stuff will be pirated, and yes you can get Photoshop or any of a number of other high-end softwares. I have a friend who lived in Turkey for five years, and he told me he had trouble finding music CDs that were NOT pirated. He mailed home a huge box FULL of software to his brothers. He sent me a video-CD of Star Wars Episode 1, that would have been indistinguishable on the outside of the case from a commercial product, except that in the place a DVD would have the region code, it had the Mortal Kombat logo.
Same in the Palestinean Territories, according his brother. You walk into a store and buy pirated music, movies and software right off the shelf.
The people that use bots want valuable and rare items and they don't want to grind. They don't care about believable because they use a different character than their main one and they later drop goods for their main character to pick up. The reason why Blizzard doesn't like this is because if tons of people are cheating, and it is cheating, it ruins the perception of the game. People don't want to grind because they see dips cheating. You start questioning if awesome character X you know got there by cheating. It undermines trust and hurts morale. So blizzard combats this by finding and banning bots, which takes time and money. Bots don't add any value to the game nor add value to Blizzard's pocketbook, they take away value and money.
http://cbs4.com/topstories/Miami.News.CBS4.2.395528.html CBS4 News found that, in police departments across Miami-Dade and Broward Counties, large and small, it was virtually impossible to walk in the door, and walk out with a complaint form...there was one incident in which our tester went in to file a complaint. After several times asking for a form, being told "you're not leaving without a form," he was asked to leave and actually walked off the property, to the point where the officer reached for his gun, put his hand on his gun and said, "Take a step closer, and see what happens.". I think part of the problem is that a bad cop can hurt a lot of people before he hopefully eventually gets punished. If that undercover reporter ended up getting shot by that police officer, it wouldn't be any consolation to him or his family that the officer was punished, because he would be dead. I don't know if sites like this are more bad or good, but it's a reaction to this fact. There's police organizations that are actively fighting transparency for things like, how many complaints an officer has had filed against him. The police simply will not give you that information, so it's difficult to prove there's an administrative problem there where complaints are ignored.
Ideally you will as you said go through proper channels to force the police department to operate more transparently, but if you are in a situation where there are enough totally authoritarian citizens and/or city managers in your area, sites like this might be your only defense. Moving is not always an option, and at any rate everyone has the right to feel safe in their community and shouldn't have to leave.
Kepler wrote "The Harmonies of the Worlds" in the mid-1600's, which detailed a supposed connection between math and geometry, music and physics (specifically, planetary motion.) I know a few very smart people who hold this book in high regard, but it's hard for me to tell if it's something really profound or just a bunch of bullshit. Point however is that people have been making geometrical representations of music for a long time, if I understand the issue correctly. Doing this with string theory is very interesting though.
Incidentally, Sun doesn't have a port of J2ME on Windows Mobile.
Apple DOESN'T have to support Java on the iPhone. Sun didn't ask for Apple to maintain a Java Cocoa bridge on the iPhone, they wanted to port Java and maintain it. But they had to back off because of Apple's restrictive licensing. So with regards to developer preference, had Java been ported that would have been Sun's problem so why would Apple even care? I'm also a full time Java developer and I have an Intel Mac, and I don't give two shits about Objective-C, I just think it would be cool to take my Java cellphone app and run it on the iPhone.
I mentioned this in a prior post, but after you posted your comment so I'll repeat it. I believe that Watchmen requires high familiarity with the comics medium to fully appreciate it, so it's not terribly accessible to people that are not comics fans. What I am getting at is that Watchmen may not be the great choice for exposing people to graphic novels that comics fans think it is, because they are overestimating how much people are familiar enough with the conventions of comics.
I think you're hearing these suggestions from lifelong comic book readers. I enjoyed "Watchmen" though in my opinion it required too much familiarity with the comic book medium to be accessible. I am not a fan of Sandman though, I think the art is crappy and the writing is overrated. For a pretty accessible graphic novel, I suggest "Blankets" by Craig Thompson. Superhero fans are not necessarily going to like it, at least the ones I showed it to didn't. But I've shown it to a few non-comics-readers who liked it.
Are you talking about science or society? Because when it comes to society, you practically answered your own question. Unpopular things are popular targets for criticism. Popular things are unpopular targets for criticism. When it comes to science, more research is probably going to be done where demand is highest, for example whatever a popular target in society is. At the same time there is research done on less prominent possible causes, but sometimes the possibility of a socially unacceptable solution makes it impossible to even ask the question. The hysterical, semi-scientific backlash against the book "The Bell Curve" definitely put a chill on research into genetic determinism with regards to intelligence and race--you're at risk for even asking the question because people will question your motives; and since a particular major flap in the 1990's it's well known in psychology that anyone researching child sexuality in the USA is walking on eggshells. I am making broad assertions about fields that I am not an expert in, but the social backlash (left-wing and right wing, respectively) in each case was undeniable. Even in science there are questions you simply cannot ask.
I like one way I've heard it phrased, "prefer the explanation with the least variables." Something that ID'ers have trouble with is that by itself evidence of a creator is still not preferable to a natural explanation because of another science rule of thumb, "extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence." It sounded to me that this was what you were alluding to. Because yeah, it's still a lot easier to believe in an amazing coincidence that works in terms of natural laws than introducing an omnipotent creator that there has been no physical evidence for to date. It's not so hard with pottery and people because when you find a pot buried under the ground, you already know that people exist and pots are made by people. It's just so hard to get them to understand this because if you start out "knowing" that God exists, then the scant evidence that _may_ insinuate a creator looks that much more powerful to you.
Let's assume for the sake of argument that scientific evidence did actually point to a creator. We already have methods by which we determine objects to be man-made or not, so pretend that we find some evidence like this with regards to life, the planet, whatever. At that point science could being inquiry into the nature of this creator. Science doesn't just throw up its hands and exclaim "Great! More work!" and quit. Okham's Razor is a tool that's used to simplify analysis but the simplest possible explanation being correct is not an unerring fact of the universe (And Okham's Razor does not exactly say this.) Sometimes you discover evidence that reality is far, far more complicated than you expected.
It isn't totally an issue of security, it's of relying on the rules of society that all civilized grownups are aware of. For the convenience of everyone, most places will give you the benefit of the doubt if you look like you're doing what you're supposed to be doing. My gym doesn't check the fingerprints of everyone who walks through the door because by and large they expect people not to be assholes and take advantage of a system that is intentionally left simple. They want to get along with you, they want to trust you, they want to make their lives and your lives simpler.
Isn't that what Slashdot pisses and moans about that all companies should be doing? Yet there is always a contention on Slashdot between people that complain about how businesses and government don't trust them and spy on them and make excessive regulations, and the people on Slashdot that think that if something's not nailed down you are perfectly within your rights to take it because there wasn't a chain and a sign that said "DON'T STEAL PARK BENCHES."
I agree with you on the point that they are asserting this rather than via force of law. I personally know an individual who was busted (yes, he's an idiot,) but this was actually prior to 2004. I have not heard of any individuals being fined since then, so I concede the point that there COULD be legal means of travel there. With them actually tightening regulations, I would not want to test that right now though.
I personally would love to travel there but the educational licenses really were being used for vacations, so I don't blame them for cracking down on it. And I don't want to go there to learn pottery or be indoctrinated, I want to go there because it's a cool place.
I don't think you can ever prevent that anyway, with the intellectual property situation the way it is. Microsoft is doing this to Linux right now regarding patents, and Windows isn't even open source. I guess it comes down to trust as to whether or not you take a look at the source. I sure don't trust MS' word on the Linux/patents thing, I don't trust that they are acting in good faith on the OOXML thing, so maybe I'm dumb for trusting them on this. But I think they are legitimately putting their toe in the water with regards to open source and how they are going to run the company in the future.
I couldn't use NetStumbler with my wifi card via NDISWrapper because apparently much of the wifi functionality is not controlled through the standard windows networking interface and so is not exportable via NDISWrapper. To do that I needed native drivers. If you want a fully functional card, you still want a native solution.
The sniper gets to see every non-sniper's bids all the way up to the very last few seconds, leaving no opportunity for the non-sniper to react and counter-bid. The advantage is entirely with the sniper. He knows what you bid, but you don't know what he bids because he waits til you can't counterbid.
Yeah, but the monolithic kernel ring model is even older, isn't it? This isn't remotely my field of expertise.
You're totally wrong, sniped auctions do not benefit the seller or the buyer. From the buyer perspective, most everyone is out for a deal, and part of the auction is reacting to other bids to see how much OTHERS are willing to pay. Sniping eliminates that. From a seller perspective, I can tell you that sniping drastically reduces your final selling price BECAUSE of the fact that buyers can't react to those final bids. The selling price gets comparatively jacked up in a non-sniped auction because most people do not really put in the maximum they are willing to pay because, frankly, they don't actually know that until they size up the other bids.
I have seen this in practice. I bid primarily on classic video games, and some of that stuff is prime sniper material. It just so happens that I lost out on a particular game with niche appeal, about five or six times. The game typically went for around 250 dollars. Out of frustration at being sniped on several other auctions of late, I set up a bid snipe program and got the game for 150. The seller got totally screwed. I started sniping more and consistently found that it significantly reduced the final selling price.
So what happens in a sniped auction is that the seller sells at a lower price, and a bunch of typical, non-sniping buyers are pissed off because the item actually sold at a lower price than they were willing to pay. There is nothing unfair about that, but the situation is generally unsatisfactory to everyone but the single sniper who wins the auction.
I actually prefer the uBid method, where any bids in the last five minutes extend the bidding another fifteen. This is like a real auction, buyers are happy, sellers are happy, the only people who are unhappy in that scenario are the people who can't game the system anymore. And I don't have any sympathy for them.
Just because they offer the source code under a noncommercial license does not preclude them from offering a commercial product based on that kernel. Microsoft is a smart company when it comes to making money, and if they think it will help and not hurt them to have their kernel open source, they will do it. Tons of people on Slashdot say this all the time, that to truly understand the system you need to have the source, and that there is not really a business downside to making it available. I believe this is true IF the source is basically good. The Windows source code is probably a liability because, from all accounts I've heard, the code is pretty embarrassing. I could definitely see Microsoft writing a next-gen kernel from scratch, commercializing it, and open sourcing it to keep developers happy.
With regards to interpretation, you certainly did make a claim in that regard when you said that everyone can do the same experiments or research and get the same results. This totally disregards the role of interpretation in science, because the same set of data can elicit many different and sometimes contradictory interpretations depending on the scientist and their personal field of study. I do not consider changing interpretations over time in science to be evidence of a flawed process. I was just pointing out that part of what the corrective process in science has to overcome is, in retrospect, unscientific arguments from scientists that are accepted because of reputation of adherents, inertia, or because of political or career investment in that ultimately wrong idea.
I don't really have a problem with not trying to describe the root cause of an observable phenomenon where the root cause is not actually known. This is done all the time in science, otherwise no progress would ever be made. For crying out loud, evolution doesn't address the origin of life at all, which is not actually known, but that does not undermine the fact that evolution is an observable phenomenon.