If people want to lose weight long term, they should look at cutting their calorie intake to around 15% of the amount of calories they need to maintain their weight.
Shouldn't that read "15% less than", i.e. 85% of the calories they need to maintain their weight? 15% of that figure (i.e. an 85% reduction!!!) sounds like starvation to me.
Do you have nefarious stuff you'd rather not have leaked? Warez or other secret stuff you'd rather keep hidden? The solution? Don't run Windows, run HURD! As added bonus, there's no viruses, no nasties that'll install on your system.
Are you fucking serious?! The HURD has been in development for almost 20 years, still isn't properly finished, and I've never heard of any software for it, aside (I assume) from the GNU stuff that forms the basis of any Linux distro anyway.
The HURD has likely missed the boat anyway, Linux drove it away years ago.
Arguably, using the technique to garner free refills for your friends or say ordering a water and then using free soda is not technically morally wrong.
I'm not sure what you mean by "technically morally" wrong; and as the other guy said, you probably *did* pay specifically for the water rather than soda, so it's ethically wrong, and arguably morally wrong too if it's a small enough business to affect those who work there.
And FWIW, in that case it's probably "legally" wrong since you were taking something you didn't pay for. In reality, of course, it's not going to be worth their time pursuing that one- they'll say "GTFO and don't come back" and it'll end there. But that's beside the point.
And by social contract... I mean implied. Unless the store specifically puts up a sign that says "No refills for friends!"
That was my point. I believe the general understanding of refills by most people is that they're for use by one person such that there's no need for a sign explaining that any more than there's need of a sign permitting people to enter a shop.
there is no outright understanding between the two parties on what is the acceptable behavior while you are in the store other than social norms
The fact that the bounds of the agreement are blurred doesn't mean that there aren't areas in which any reasonable person would know that they are clearly outwith the bounds. They may be able to exploit this legally, but ethically they're still in the wrong.
Let's assume that we lived in an age where towns had no legally-defined boundaries. If I was to say "meet me in St.Louis" (har har, ahem) and we failed to meet up because you turned up in a suburb that one might or might not consider part of St.Louis, fair enough. But if you turned up in the countryside 100 miles away from St.Louis, you'd be clearly acting in bad faith, regardless of where the boundaries of St.Louis where.
But this is veering away from the intent of what I was originally saying (and I'm bored of making silly analogies!), which was that regardless of whether it's legally wrong, it's still ultimately assholish behaviour that in the end would probably result in the stupid, petty rules that everyone around here would be the first to complain about.
Is Engadget going to instruct us on how to distract the employees while you pour free coffee into your thermos too?
Hrm... Bad analogy.
The Cofeeshop already sold you the coffee (bandwidth) by the temporary key and you are simply pouring it in someone else's cup free of charge by running windows 7.
Another bad analogy. Okay, my turn to play the silly moral analogy game...
This is more akin to visiting a place that gives free refills, and you constantly pouring it in someone else's cup, then doing the same for all your friends, in the process using far more coffee than you would reasonably have drunk yourself. You know damn well that wasn't the deal that was being offered. (*)
You're ultimately gaming the system- regardless of what "agreement" you think you have with them, it's probably against the spirit of the deal. Doing this type of thing with (e.g.) small businesses that aren't too assholish is ultimately what forces them to include irritating small-print restrictions on such services which I'm willing to bet people would be the first to whine about.
(*) Please *don't* say "that was the agreement I get an hour's free Internet with my $1.50 coffee, it's mine, I can do what I like with it, their bad business model isn't my problem". There probably wasn't an "agreement" in that much detail- lots of thing in a given society function on implicit understanding of how they work (e.g. you don't get arrested for trespassing if you enter some random shop because any reasonable person would say that's how shops work). Or they may well have some small print in some terms and conditions that you (understandably) didn't want to read before you took up their offer. Or whatever... even if it was "legal", see the final paragraph above.
[..]what lies around the cities of Picher and Treece is an environmental catastrophe of the worst kind that needs to be cleaned up. If you want to see for yourself, look it up on Google Earth. These cities are dwarfed by dunes of this mining waste (chat).
This is Treece. Zoom out for what I assume are the dunes. Well.... yeah.
They can take the unelected Mr Mandelson with them into the political wilderness.
Frankly, even "mister" is too much of an honorific for that sleazy, undemocratic worthless piece of Tory-in-all-but-name shit that represents everything that was wrong with the Blair era (well, apart from that prick Blair himself).
The fact that he's still around is proof that shit floats; the fact that the phony, egotistical, smarmy prick Blair is up for the European Council presidency? The same guy who spent years kissing Bush's backside even long after anyone with an ounce of realpolitikal competence could see that his toadyish whoring of Britain's influence bought nothing in return? Proof that diarrhea floats.
Sorry, heading offtopic. But seriously, Labour and their deluded, smug chums can fuck off and die. I like the way that the unions are so wedded to Labour that over 12 years after they were elected to power, they're only *just* beginning to consider not bankrolling a party that's as bad as Thatcher's Tories in some respects, and worse in others. Fuckwitted, blinkered tossers with self-interested leadership.
Preorder bonuses. Every big game these days has an in-game bonus for preordering at a brick and mortar (usually Gamestop, but can also include Best Buy and others).
That's a contrivance though. There's nothing that inherently ties such bonuses to bricks and mortar retailers, and it could easily be switched to another distribution channel. I suspect it's being done as a sop to keep such retailers on side, because it's in the publishers interests to do so- at present.
But I'm pretty sure that this will only be done as long such retailers are still necessary to the publishers, while people are migrating to online downloads. After a certain point, they won't be as important, and since online distribution is ultimately more favourable to publishers, they'll either discontinue such bonuses or switch them to attract the remaining few buyers to online distribution.
We could do something like the old p-Code, where we compile to a virtual architecture, and then translate it to the machine during installation.
I assume you don't mean that p-Code itself was translated during installation (AFAIK it was translated on-the-fly during execution), just your modern equivalent.
I was sad to see we didn't have the compute power back then to make it fly. I bet we do now.
Possibly, but it would still likely give poorer performance. The benefits would have to outweigh that.
Also, in some respects, the x86 *is* a virtual machine that people are writing code for, albeit transparently for those who treat the CPU as a black box.
Reason being that all x86-compatible CPUs from the Pentium II/Pro onwards have been based around non-x86 cores (*). x86 code is translated on-the-fly by an outer layer before execution.
They probably had a good reason in that case. I assume that the x86 design- even by that stage- had acquired so much baggage that it was making it very difficult to proceed further with that architecture, and that even with the translation overheads, the non-x86 core made more sense in the long run.
In a perfect world, it would have been better still to be able to ditch x86 altogether, but for obvious reasons that wasn't going to happen here.
(*) I've heard them described as RISC-like, though someone else mentioned on Slashdot that in truth they weren't really *that* RISCy.
Different markets are different. Amazon doesn't owe you an explanation as to why it's "fair". You either take them up on their offer or not.
While you're correct that the public can accept or reject Amazon's offer, your implication that they don't have the right to discuss or criticise it as they're doing here is wrong.
The public don't owe Amazon the right to have them STFU and not discuss the merits and/or reasons behind their offer. Amazon have the right not to sell the product in the first place if they (or you) don't like it being discussed.
A lot of the information on the web/net prior to the late-90s is possibly lost for good, though I suspect that a good deal of Usenet is still out there- not that I necessarily approve of this, since I'm not convinced that it was seen- or intended by most people- to be more than ephemeral at the time.
The more recent stuff? There are probably enough caches and stuff around that it will reappear sooner or later if someone wants it to. Even if the originators don't.
If searching stimulates brain activity, then I ought to have found all the zeros to the Riemann zeta function, cured cancer and AIDS, and devised a way to travel to Mars for 50 cents.
Hey, come up with a way for the common man to go to Mars. Rich rappers like 50 Cents can pay their own way!
On the contrary, I'd pay good money for 50 Cent and Kanye West to travel to Mars, so long as the trip was guaranteed one-way.
And if you posted 'private' information on the public internet, guess what, it's no longer private, so no complaining about it's use
FWIW, don't complain when information you posted "anonymously" is identified with you in the not so distant future:-
Even if the websites were unwilling to share account info with each other, I suspect that one could write a screen-scraper for information and posts on the most popular sites, and group all the public info associated with a particular account anyway- which is probably enough.
From this post describing why "anonymous" accounts give a dangerous false sense of security.
FWIW, this wasn't the first time I'd posted that, I spotted the danger some time before, as would anyone who'd even heard of 'data mining' have done if they'd applied even a small amount of thought to the issue.
Today's "safe", "anonymous" and "unrelated" data is tomorrow's personally-associated, tied-together overview of everything you've said. Even if you stopped today, you've probably put enough existing data out there to say a lot about you.
Hey, listen buddy. It's always worth a Slashdot story when even the hint of Microsoft screwing something up comes to light. Didn't you read your Slashlaws when you signed up?!? It's right there in Article 3, plain as day
Article 3- 'Any Slashdotter caught sniffing the saddle of the exercise bicycle in the women's gym will be discharged without trial'?
Hmm, I'm sorry, that doesn't quite get to the nub of the matter for me.
I have one. The stylus input device works quite well for drawing, but the UI sucks. There's not even a delete function.
The erase function only works with Apple's special stylus that features a carbon-based tip. And *then* you have to fork out more for the "erase" tool itself.
What a load of lock-in crap.
Some people are even complaining that the carbon styluses appear to be wearing down after a relatively short time.
And so, after removing the ads from her blog (they weren't really earning much money anyway) slashdot decided to mention it on the front page..
I bet she's thrilled.
I suspect that even among those not running adblock- or at least Flashblock- Slashdotters are among those least likely to click adverts anyway.
I very rarely click on adverts and may *once* have bought something as a result of one (I feel guilty about clicking them if I'm 99% sure that I'm not going to buy the thing they're advertising anyway).
Why should anyone have to create a file and add specific content to it to opt-out of anything? Would make more sense that one add the file with the line "allow".
You could argue that rationally about lots of things. Why should we assume that we're free to enter, wander freely about in, and examine the goods of a particular shop unless signs say otherwise?
Because that's the socially-accepted norm nowadays. Societies evolve implcit understandings that are eventually backed up by law. Similarly, as the web evolved, "disallow via robots.txt" became the accepted way of doing things.
Rationally, it could perhaps have worked out the other way if the web had been less open 15 years ago, but it's no undue hardship to restrict your content like that, so it would require pedantry to really argue against the socially-accepted robots.txt disallow.
Why do i have to install and configure noscript and adblock when i go to a site
You don't *have* to do that at all.
, instead of they asking me politely at first visit, if i want to see their crappy ads?
Because you're the one choosing to visit a particular site, and you're free not to.
And because- realistically- you know full well that it's likely to be a free site funded by advertising, you can't complain otherwise.
If you want to view it in pedantic, pseudo-legalistic terms, there's no prior agreement between you. You visited their site, they served you something that happens to include ads, and has a good reason (see above) for doing so. Even more pedantically, they're not *forcing* you to view the ads, your browser is, until you install adblock (and- again for reasons given above- they'd be quite fairly within their rights not to serve content if they somehow knew you weren't viewing the ads, although most sites aren't that much of assholes).
For example, I don't see people making free, commercial-standard computer games.
This only shows how much you know about games. Check out Battle for Wesnoth or Freeciv
Freeciv appears to be a rehash of a commercial game from years ago. Battle for Wesnoth appears to be another overhead strategy-oriented game. Possibly good, but not groundbreaking, and nowhere near state-of-the-art.
I haven't played them, so perhaps I'm being unfair, but those two examples don't cover all the bases of modern commercial games, nor do they appear to enjoy the popularity.
Check out WoW, which uses a monetization model where a huge chunk of the game (the back-end) is supposed to be an actual secret and the copyright law is therefore irrelevant.
Oddly enough, I posted something a few months back that IIRC used WoW as an example of what games would have to do without the protection of copyright.
The problem is that this forces all games into a particular structure and biases in favour of online games. (Arguably they're going to be forced in this direction because of piracy, regardless, but that doesn't make it more desirable).
And logically, this argument extends beyond games into all types of software.
And if (say) a business requires a particular piece of software that happens to be pretty uninteresting to a hacker type who writes software for the fun of it, who pays for that?
The business. I am surprised I have to spell it out for you.
I'd already considered what you suggest and spotted the obvious flaws.
Much off-the-shelf business software has very high development costs that are able to be met because the cost is spread over a very large number of users.
To develop a custom package to the same standard would be prohibitively expensive for all but the largest businesses.
It could be argued that smaller, less-featured and more tailored software would do almost as well (since it was being developed custom anyway), but I'm willing to bet that much of the functionality of off-the-shelf software couldn't be replicated on most companies' budgets.
Obvious solution- a number of businesses agree to collectively meet the development cost.
Obvious problem with that solution- their rivals who don't can then sponge off their efforts.
Obvious solution for *that* problem- restrict its distribution.
Obvious problem with *this* solution(!)- this might be workable within one company, but across multiple companies the chances of it being leaked- if only by one person- are high, approaching 1.
And even if writing one-off software for every two-bit company out their was economic, it means lots and *lots* of pointless reinventing of the wheel.
What a soul-destroying waste of time.
You are operating under a false assumption that there is a shortage of commodity software.
Ubuntu and the like are very good. There is plenty of good, free commodity software in certain areas. I personally would prefer that a free (and freely modifiable) OS like Ubuntu were the standard.
But Ubuntu is an OS, not an application, and while there are many excellent free applications out there, I doubt that they cover- or will ever cover- every business (or human) need that proprietary software covers.
the proprietary commodity software still sucks compared to software which would have been developed without copyright (and therefore competition)
In some cases, yeah. In other cases, no. Photoshop is- despite what some zealots assert- a more powerful and more usable package than GIMP, for example (though GIMP admittedly has better scripting facilities).
We hope that Windows or MAC OS is not spying on us.
Here's an interesting point-of-view; would the removal of copyright protec
By "stuff" you must mean information in digital form, be it software or data. If so, then the easiest, the most economical (when you count everyone), the most innovative, and the most ethical way to give people "stuff" is by getting rid of the part of the law which prohibits production and dissemination of digital copies to willing parties.
Yes, and people can reproduce the same stuff forever and ever, or until they get sick of it. Then someone has to produce new "stuff", but they don't bother because there's nothing in it for them.
Of course, in some situations, people can and *will* make good stuff for free (e.g. free software), but I'm not buying for a second that this would cover all situations. For example, I don't see people making free, commercial-standard computer games. (Some might argue that commercial computer games are over-polished formulaic commercial rubbish, but there's still a market for them). And I don't see totally free games taking over from them either way.
And if (say) a business requires a particular piece of software that happens to be pretty uninteresting to a hacker type who writes software for the fun of it, who pays for that?
One solution would be for them to keep it entirely to themselves, under wraps, but that stops other people getting the benefit of that software. Perhaps they could supply it as a "service" via their own server, so that people can only use it via that method, but that sounds pretty restrictive to me.
New storage technology needs to be CHEAPER than current technology to be worthwhile except in niche markets.
Not necessarily; until recently, DVD-Rs were byte-for-byte cheaper than hard drives. No-one uses DVD-Rs as their main form of day-to-day computer storage though.
Similarly, having significantly fewer discs lying around could be considered an advantage over the older tech.
That's not to say I'm justifying Blu-Ray though; I'm in no hurry to buy it personally. The readers aren't that expensive now, but I'm not that bothered about prerecorded Blu-Ray stuff (still got tons of DVDs I've never watched) and even though £150 or so for a burner isn't horrendous, it's still expensive if (like me) you don't really have a need for it- it's stuck between cheap DVDs and usefully-large external HDDs. I'll probably buy one when they fall under £50, but... meh.
Try around US $3 (ex. tax) upwards. Admittedly, that's for single-layer 25GB write-once BD-R, and the very cheapest, generic original obscure brand ones at that. Nowhere near as cheap per GB as DVD-R, but still nowhere near $25.
Cosmic rays damaging electronic equipment? I've been using this computer for years and my RAM is doing just fi
How did you manage to submit half the posting after your RAM was hit by a cosmic ra
He didn't- what he originally typed was
"Help, my RAM is being corrupted up by cosmic rays."
Which just goes to prove his point!
By the way, I'm having the same problems with random-but-oddly-coincidental data corruption so if you see anything odd with this message DISREgarD th4T i 5UCk c0CKS. Thank you.
Slashdot Mirror
If people want to lose weight long term, they should look at cutting their calorie intake to around 15% of the amount of calories they need to maintain their weight.
Shouldn't that read "15% less than", i.e. 85% of the calories they need to maintain their weight? 15% of that figure (i.e. an 85% reduction!!!) sounds like starvation to me.
She's a muscular 65kg and hhhhot. Who's going to bitch about that?
Not you I'm guessing, since it sounds like your girlfriend could beat you up now ;-P
Do you have nefarious stuff you'd rather not have leaked? Warez or other secret stuff you'd rather keep hidden? The solution? Don't run Windows, run HURD! As added bonus, there's no viruses, no nasties that'll install on your system.
Are you fucking serious?! The HURD has been in development for almost 20 years, still isn't properly finished, and I've never heard of any software for it, aside (I assume) from the GNU stuff that forms the basis of any Linux distro anyway.
The HURD has likely missed the boat anyway, Linux drove it away years ago.
"The only way" is to reorient the tractor beam vectors to generate a harmonic subspace bubble around the vessel.
No, the only way is to take off and nuke the site from orbit.
Arguably, using the technique to garner free refills for your friends or say ordering a water and then using free soda is not technically morally wrong.
I'm not sure what you mean by "technically morally" wrong; and as the other guy said, you probably *did* pay specifically for the water rather than soda, so it's ethically wrong, and arguably morally wrong too if it's a small enough business to affect those who work there.
And FWIW, in that case it's probably "legally" wrong since you were taking something you didn't pay for. In reality, of course, it's not going to be worth their time pursuing that one- they'll say "GTFO and don't come back" and it'll end there. But that's beside the point.
And by social contract... I mean implied. Unless the store specifically puts up a sign that says "No refills for friends!"
That was my point. I believe the general understanding of refills by most people is that they're for use by one person such that there's no need for a sign explaining that any more than there's need of a sign permitting people to enter a shop.
there is no outright understanding between the two parties on what is the acceptable behavior while you are in the store other than social norms
The fact that the bounds of the agreement are blurred doesn't mean that there aren't areas in which any reasonable person would know that they are clearly outwith the bounds. They may be able to exploit this legally, but ethically they're still in the wrong.
Let's assume that we lived in an age where towns had no legally-defined boundaries. If I was to say "meet me in St.Louis" (har har, ahem) and we failed to meet up because you turned up in a suburb that one might or might not consider part of St.Louis, fair enough. But if you turned up in the countryside 100 miles away from St.Louis, you'd be clearly acting in bad faith, regardless of where the boundaries of St.Louis where.
But this is veering away from the intent of what I was originally saying (and I'm bored of making silly analogies!), which was that regardless of whether it's legally wrong, it's still ultimately assholish behaviour that in the end would probably result in the stupid, petty rules that everyone around here would be the first to complain about.
Is Engadget going to instruct us on how to distract the employees while you pour free coffee into your thermos too?
Hrm... Bad analogy.
The Cofeeshop already sold you the coffee (bandwidth) by the temporary key and you are simply pouring it in someone else's cup free of charge by running windows 7.
Another bad analogy. Okay, my turn to play the silly moral analogy game...
This is more akin to visiting a place that gives free refills, and you constantly pouring it in someone else's cup, then doing the same for all your friends, in the process using far more coffee than you would reasonably have drunk yourself. You know damn well that wasn't the deal that was being offered. (*)
You're ultimately gaming the system- regardless of what "agreement" you think you have with them, it's probably against the spirit of the deal. Doing this type of thing with (e.g.) small businesses that aren't too assholish is ultimately what forces them to include irritating small-print restrictions on such services which I'm willing to bet people would be the first to whine about.
(*) Please *don't* say "that was the agreement I get an hour's free Internet with my $1.50 coffee, it's mine, I can do what I like with it, their bad business model isn't my problem". There probably wasn't an "agreement" in that much detail- lots of thing in a given society function on implicit understanding of how they work (e.g. you don't get arrested for trespassing if you enter some random shop because any reasonable person would say that's how shops work). Or they may well have some small print in some terms and conditions that you (understandably) didn't want to read before you took up their offer. Or whatever... even if it was "legal", see the final paragraph above.
[..]what lies around the cities of Picher and Treece is an environmental catastrophe of the worst kind that needs to be cleaned up. If you want to see for yourself, look it up on Google Earth. These cities are dwarfed by dunes of this mining waste (chat).
This is Treece. Zoom out for what I assume are the dunes. Well.... yeah.
They can take the unelected Mr Mandelson with them into the political wilderness.
Frankly, even "mister" is too much of an honorific for that sleazy, undemocratic worthless piece of Tory-in-all-but-name shit that represents everything that was wrong with the Blair era (well, apart from that prick Blair himself).
The fact that he's still around is proof that shit floats; the fact that the phony, egotistical, smarmy prick Blair is up for the European Council presidency? The same guy who spent years kissing Bush's backside even long after anyone with an ounce of realpolitikal competence could see that his toadyish whoring of Britain's influence bought nothing in return? Proof that diarrhea floats.
Sorry, heading offtopic. But seriously, Labour and their deluded, smug chums can fuck off and die. I like the way that the unions are so wedded to Labour that over 12 years after they were elected to power, they're only *just* beginning to consider not bankrolling a party that's as bad as Thatcher's Tories in some respects, and worse in others. Fuckwitted, blinkered tossers with self-interested leadership.
Preorder bonuses. Every big game these days has an in-game bonus for preordering at a brick and mortar (usually Gamestop, but can also include Best Buy and others).
That's a contrivance though. There's nothing that inherently ties such bonuses to bricks and mortar retailers, and it could easily be switched to another distribution channel. I suspect it's being done as a sop to keep such retailers on side, because it's in the publishers interests to do so- at present.
But I'm pretty sure that this will only be done as long such retailers are still necessary to the publishers, while people are migrating to online downloads. After a certain point, they won't be as important, and since online distribution is ultimately more favourable to publishers, they'll either discontinue such bonuses or switch them to attract the remaining few buyers to online distribution.
We could do something like the old p-Code, where we compile to a virtual architecture, and then translate it to the machine during installation.
I assume you don't mean that p-Code itself was translated during installation (AFAIK it was translated on-the-fly during execution), just your modern equivalent.
I was sad to see we didn't have the compute power back then to make it fly. I bet we do now.
Possibly, but it would still likely give poorer performance. The benefits would have to outweigh that.
Also, in some respects, the x86 *is* a virtual machine that people are writing code for, albeit transparently for those who treat the CPU as a black box.
Reason being that all x86-compatible CPUs from the Pentium II/Pro onwards have been based around non-x86 cores (*). x86 code is translated on-the-fly by an outer layer before execution.
They probably had a good reason in that case. I assume that the x86 design- even by that stage- had acquired so much baggage that it was making it very difficult to proceed further with that architecture, and that even with the translation overheads, the non-x86 core made more sense in the long run.
In a perfect world, it would have been better still to be able to ditch x86 altogether, but for obvious reasons that wasn't going to happen here.
(*) I've heard them described as RISC-like, though someone else mentioned on Slashdot that in truth they weren't really *that* RISCy.
Different markets are different. Amazon doesn't owe you an explanation as to why it's "fair". You either take them up on their offer or not.
While you're correct that the public can accept or reject Amazon's offer, your implication that they don't have the right to discuss or criticise it as they're doing here is wrong.
The public don't owe Amazon the right to have them STFU and not discuss the merits and/or reasons behind their offer. Amazon have the right not to sell the product in the first place if they (or you) don't like it being discussed.
A lot of the information on the web/net prior to the late-90s is possibly lost for good, though I suspect that a good deal of Usenet is still out there- not that I necessarily approve of this, since I'm not convinced that it was seen- or intended by most people- to be more than ephemeral at the time.
The more recent stuff? There are probably enough caches and stuff around that it will reappear sooner or later if someone wants it to. Even if the originators don't.
If searching stimulates brain activity, then I ought to have found all the zeros to the Riemann zeta function, cured cancer and AIDS, and devised a way to travel to Mars for 50 cents.
Hey, come up with a way for the common man to go to Mars. Rich rappers like 50 Cents can pay their own way!
On the contrary, I'd pay good money for 50 Cent and Kanye West to travel to Mars, so long as the trip was guaranteed one-way.
And if you posted 'private' information on the public internet, guess what, it's no longer private, so no complaining about it's use
FWIW, don't complain when information you posted "anonymously" is identified with you in the not so distant future:-
Even if the websites were unwilling to share account info with each other, I suspect that one could write a screen-scraper for information and posts on the most popular sites, and group all the public info associated with a particular account anyway- which is probably enough.
From this post describing why "anonymous" accounts give a dangerous false sense of security.
FWIW, this wasn't the first time I'd posted that, I spotted the danger some time before, as would anyone who'd even heard of 'data mining' have done if they'd applied even a small amount of thought to the issue.
Today's "safe", "anonymous" and "unrelated" data is tomorrow's personally-associated, tied-together overview of everything you've said. Even if you stopped today, you've probably put enough existing data out there to say a lot about you.
is this really worth a Slashdot story??
Hey, listen buddy. It's always worth a Slashdot story when even the hint of Microsoft screwing something up comes to light. Didn't you read your Slashlaws when you signed up?!? It's right there in Article 3, plain as day
Article 3- 'Any Slashdotter caught sniffing the saddle of the exercise bicycle in the women's gym will be discharged without trial'?
Hmm, I'm sorry, that doesn't quite get to the nub of the matter for me.
I have one. The stylus input device works quite well for drawing, but the UI sucks. There's not even a delete function.
The erase function only works with Apple's special stylus that features a carbon-based tip. And *then* you have to fork out more for the "erase" tool itself.
What a load of lock-in crap.
Some people are even complaining that the carbon styluses appear to be wearing down after a relatively short time.
And so, after removing the ads from her blog (they weren't really earning much money anyway) slashdot decided to mention it on the front page..
I bet she's thrilled.
I suspect that even among those not running adblock- or at least Flashblock- Slashdotters are among those least likely to click adverts anyway.
I very rarely click on adverts and may *once* have bought something as a result of one (I feel guilty about clicking them if I'm 99% sure that I'm not going to buy the thing they're advertising anyway).
Why should anyone have to create a file and add specific content to it to opt-out of anything? Would make more sense that one add the file with the line "allow".
You could argue that rationally about lots of things. Why should we assume that we're free to enter, wander freely about in, and examine the goods of a particular shop unless signs say otherwise?
Because that's the socially-accepted norm nowadays. Societies evolve implcit understandings that are eventually backed up by law. Similarly, as the web evolved, "disallow via robots.txt" became the accepted way of doing things.
Rationally, it could perhaps have worked out the other way if the web had been less open 15 years ago, but it's no undue hardship to restrict your content like that, so it would require pedantry to really argue against the socially-accepted robots.txt disallow.
Why do i have to install and configure noscript and adblock when i go to a site
You don't *have* to do that at all.
, instead of they asking me politely at first visit, if i want to see their crappy ads?
Because you're the one choosing to visit a particular site, and you're free not to.
And because- realistically- you know full well that it's likely to be a free site funded by advertising, you can't complain otherwise.
If you want to view it in pedantic, pseudo-legalistic terms, there's no prior agreement between you. You visited their site, they served you something that happens to include ads, and has a good reason (see above) for doing so. Even more pedantically, they're not *forcing* you to view the ads, your browser is, until you install adblock (and- again for reasons given above- they'd be quite fairly within their rights not to serve content if they somehow knew you weren't viewing the ads, although most sites aren't that much of assholes).
For example, I don't see people making free, commercial-standard computer games.
This only shows how much you know about games. Check out Battle for Wesnoth or Freeciv
Freeciv appears to be a rehash of a commercial game from years ago. Battle for Wesnoth appears to be another overhead strategy-oriented game. Possibly good, but not groundbreaking, and nowhere near state-of-the-art.
I haven't played them, so perhaps I'm being unfair, but those two examples don't cover all the bases of modern commercial games, nor do they appear to enjoy the popularity.
Check out WoW, which uses a monetization model where a huge chunk of the game (the back-end) is supposed to be an actual secret and the copyright law is therefore irrelevant.
Oddly enough, I posted something a few months back that IIRC used WoW as an example of what games would have to do without the protection of copyright.
The problem is that this forces all games into a particular structure and biases in favour of online games. (Arguably they're going to be forced in this direction because of piracy, regardless, but that doesn't make it more desirable).
And logically, this argument extends beyond games into all types of software.
And if (say) a business requires a particular piece of software that happens to be pretty uninteresting to a hacker type who writes software for the fun of it, who pays for that?
The business. I am surprised I have to spell it out for you.
I'd already considered what you suggest and spotted the obvious flaws.
Much off-the-shelf business software has very high development costs that are able to be met because the cost is spread over a very large number of users.
To develop a custom package to the same standard would be prohibitively expensive for all but the largest businesses.
It could be argued that smaller, less-featured and more tailored software would do almost as well (since it was being developed custom anyway), but I'm willing to bet that much of the functionality of off-the-shelf software couldn't be replicated on most companies' budgets.
Obvious solution- a number of businesses agree to collectively meet the development cost.
Obvious problem with that solution- their rivals who don't can then sponge off their efforts.
Obvious solution for *that* problem- restrict its distribution.
Obvious problem with *this* solution(!)- this might be workable within one company, but across multiple companies the chances of it being leaked- if only by one person- are high, approaching 1.
And even if writing one-off software for every two-bit company out their was economic, it means lots and *lots* of pointless reinventing of the wheel.
What a soul-destroying waste of time.
You are operating under a false assumption that there is a shortage of commodity software.
Ubuntu and the like are very good. There is plenty of good, free commodity software in certain areas. I personally would prefer that a free (and freely modifiable) OS like Ubuntu were the standard.
But Ubuntu is an OS, not an application, and while there are many excellent free applications out there, I doubt that they cover- or will ever cover- every business (or human) need that proprietary software covers.
the proprietary commodity software still sucks compared to software which would have been developed without copyright (and therefore competition)
In some cases, yeah. In other cases, no. Photoshop is- despite what some zealots assert- a more powerful and more usable package than GIMP, for example (though GIMP admittedly has better scripting facilities).
We hope that Windows or MAC OS is not spying on us.
Here's an interesting point-of-view; would the removal of copyright protec
By "stuff" you must mean information in digital form, be it software or data. If so, then the easiest, the most economical (when you count everyone), the most innovative, and the most ethical way to give people "stuff" is by getting rid of the part of the law which prohibits production and dissemination of digital copies to willing parties.
Yes, and people can reproduce the same stuff forever and ever, or until they get sick of it. Then someone has to produce new "stuff", but they don't bother because there's nothing in it for them.
Of course, in some situations, people can and *will* make good stuff for free (e.g. free software), but I'm not buying for a second that this would cover all situations. For example, I don't see people making free, commercial-standard computer games. (Some might argue that commercial computer games are over-polished formulaic commercial rubbish, but there's still a market for them). And I don't see totally free games taking over from them either way.
And if (say) a business requires a particular piece of software that happens to be pretty uninteresting to a hacker type who writes software for the fun of it, who pays for that?
One solution would be for them to keep it entirely to themselves, under wraps, but that stops other people getting the benefit of that software. Perhaps they could supply it as a "service" via their own server, so that people can only use it via that method, but that sounds pretty restrictive to me.
New storage technology needs to be CHEAPER than current technology to be worthwhile except in niche markets.
Not necessarily; until recently, DVD-Rs were byte-for-byte cheaper than hard drives. No-one uses DVD-Rs as their main form of day-to-day computer storage though.
Similarly, having significantly fewer discs lying around could be considered an advantage over the older tech.
That's not to say I'm justifying Blu-Ray though; I'm in no hurry to buy it personally. The readers aren't that expensive now, but I'm not that bothered about prerecorded Blu-Ray stuff (still got tons of DVDs I've never watched) and even though £150 or so for a burner isn't horrendous, it's still expensive if (like me) you don't really have a need for it- it's stuck between cheap DVDs and usefully-large external HDDs. I'll probably buy one when they fall under £50, but... meh.
Blu-ray blanks are what, $25 a disk still?
Try around US $3 (ex. tax) upwards. Admittedly, that's for single-layer 25GB write-once BD-R, and the very cheapest, generic original obscure brand ones at that. Nowhere near as cheap per GB as DVD-R, but still nowhere near $25.
Cosmic rays damaging electronic equipment? I've been using this computer for years and my RAM is doing just fi
How did you manage to submit half the posting after your RAM was hit by a cosmic ra
He didn't- what he originally typed was
"Help, my RAM is being corrupted up by cosmic rays."
Which just goes to prove his point!
By the way, I'm having the same problems with random-but-oddly-coincidental data corruption so if you see anything odd with this message DISREgarD th4T i 5UCk c0CKS. Thank you.
GBC Boot ROM dumped? After 10 years?
It's more likely than you think.
Can you play Centipede on it? :-)