Why not just have a single torrent file which you download with all the latest torrent files in it? You could easily pass the single torrent file around the internet, and have enough copies of it, that trying to shut down all the sources would be impossible. Currently shutting down most of bittorrent is possible because there are only a few many sites where people go to get torrent files. If you could distribute the actual torrent list over bittorrent, then there would almost be no way to shut it down.
Yes, and except for the ultralight 2 GB cap, they all seem pretty reasonable. They are at least telling you what they are, and presenting the pricing scheme for going over the cap. 60 GB is quite a lot of content. I could download a movie every day and still not go over. It wouldn't be a DVD ISO file, or BluRay, but the H.264 rips come in under 1 GB and look pretty good to me.
The problem with DRM on FOSS is that it's too hard to make it work in the slightest. With Linux you could easily write a video driver and a sound driver that just dumps everything to disk, thereby automatically bypassing the DRM. They could probably do some trickery by ensuring that you are only running specific drivers, but that will only go so far. The open source nature of Linux allows you to do whatever you want with the system. Thereby making DRM impossible. An actual open source library that would decrypt the DRM content would be even worse, because you could just recompile it to drop the decrypted info to the disk. No messing with drivers required.
I have raise both. I think the problem here is that most people have dogs (mine past dogs included) that don't get raised well enough, and therefore don't require much energy to raise. It's pretty easy, and low effort to raise a dog that you can trust to ask to be let out, and that's about it. It take a whole other level of attention if you want your dog to be one of those dogs that you can take for a walk without a leash, or have the discipline to not break into the garbage when they are felling hungry, or to not jump and bark at every person that comes to your front door. Raising a child is a lot of work, and you're right, it's probably more work than raising a dog. But if you want a dog that's well behaved, be prepared to sink a serious amount of time into them. And a final thing. At least at some point the child becomes able to survive completely without the parent. A dog never gets to this point, and will always require quite a bit of attention.
Back when John Carmack gained his fame, entire video games were produced by 3-4 people. It was entirely possible for the bulk of the work to be done by a single person. That is how they gained their fame. They did it all themselves. Now, with the complexity of games, it's impossible to do it all on your own. Therefore, it's impossible for somebody to claim all the credit, and impossible for anybody to become a superstar, just because they worked on a bunch of games. Also, there are no new video game guys, because the old guys are still going strong. Miyamoto, Carmack, Sid Meier, are all still producing games. GTA IV may sell a lot of copies, but it's still not a great game. I'm not sure if anybody will still be playing it 10-20 years from now. It will probably be forgotten about a week after GTA V comes out.
A dog is accurately described as man's best friend
I'm not sure how accurate that statement is. You don't hear stories of cats mauling their owners faces off. Sure a scratch or two, but nothing. Violence aside, raising a dog takes almost as much energy as raising a child, if you want to do it well. Even a well trained dog is only as independant as a 3-4 year old. If you want to have a dog, you might as well have a child. Cats on the other hand, are much more independent. Put food out for them, change the litter box every few days, and they are set. They are just as affectionate as dogs, and require much less maintenance. I'm not sure why more people prefer dogs.
So basically dogs are a lot like people. Kids raised in houses where the parents are yelling all the time, either at the children, or at eachother, or at whatever, tend to have more emotional problems then those who do not. Also the same holds true with giving children space. Even as babies it is important for their development not to have them in your arms 24 hours a day, let them go off and explore a safe part of the house, and play on their own.
Assuming these are purebred dogs, what's the likelihood that you could just pick up another purebred that would be just as identical? How much genetic variation is there between purebred dogs? Would the differences between the cloned dog and the original be any less noticeable than between the original, and another dog of the same breed, or possibly the same lineage?
The last time we landed someone on the moon was in 1972. That's 36 years ago. The next planned possible date that I've heard tossed around for the next manned moon landing is 2018, 46 years after the previous one. I wonder if it's worth anybody's time and money to even send someone there right now. Originally, we did it, because it was there, and because nobody had done it previously. We did it to prove to ourselves that it could be done. Now that it's been done, what reason is there for going there now? Does NASA or any other space agency have anything that could land us on the moon in the next 2-3 years? Or will it take another Apollo-like project to get us back up there. I doubt the US government would be willing to fund something like that again.
In all fairness, MS tried their EEE development model with HTML, and look where it landed them. Firefox is making big inroads into their browser market, and MS is being forced to make their browser more standards compliant. Granted, just about everybody else was also trying to extend HTML also, but it seems like MS was the last major browser to come around in adhering to standards. They also tried it with Java, and now they can no longer make a Java VM.
Well, I guess the answer to that is, if you want a format that maintains your formatting perfectly down to the pixel across all implementations of the standard, then you had better go with PDF (or TIFF). But if you want a format you can easily edit and pass between colleagues, without worrying too much about how the formatting is going to be a little off, then go with ODF, DOC, or some other word processing format. No word processing format looks the same across all platforms. Even something as simple as using a different printer can cause problems with the same version of MS Word opening it's own doc files. If formatting is so important that you can' have things be moved around a little bit, then use PDF.
Yes, planning for releases at certain periodic intervals is a good idea. However, those dates should not be set in stone. If the planned release date is December 25, and something comes up, and the release has to be held back a couple weeks, then it should be held back. Obviously you should have a release date, with a corresponding featureset in mind, but that doesn't mean that release dates should be carved in stone.
I have a 2 year old and a 7 month old myself. Personally, I've found I eat a lot healthier with the kids around. Especially since the 2 year old was 1, and started eating whatever we did. It seems irresponsible to feed the kids something that you know isn't good for them, so you tend to make much more healthier meals and snacks. The only downside is that I often eat the leftovers from the kid, because the food is really good, and I don't like to see it going to waste. So I have a little bigger portions than I would normally serve myself.
I didn't read that Lockhart's Lament that you linked to (I will later). But I have to say, that in a lot of instances, I haven't really seen the need for textbooks, especially in the K-12 school range. Up until high school, I don't really recall having many textbooks. Most of the information was provided by the teachers, and there was a few photocopied handouts for the most part. Once I hit highschool, mostly only math courses had textbooks, but for those it was mostly so the teachers could assign questions out of them, and they weren't really ever just read for studying purposes. Most of my learning even through university has been done without a textbook. And the courses where the textbook was important in learning the material are some of the worse taught courses I have ever had.
I think it's possible. You can get a portable DVD player for $80 retail. This thing has the same screen, probably doesn't have a DVD drive, but has some other internals that a different. Cut out the cost of the DVD licensing fees, and you could easily have an ebook reader using this screen for $75. Granted, I'm not so sure that these screens are the best for reading a lot of text. An eInk display would probably work a lot better. But it's definitely doable at that price.
Even if the schools did spend money on these devices, there would be no content to put on them. The same problem exists for the original OLPC project. Luckily they had Open Source software, and were able to get a working machine with no software cost, but I still don't think there's a lot out there in free textbooks. It's a wonder that the US Government just doesn't hire a few people to write some textbooks that they would use in their schools. For gradeschool and even highschool, the material is simple enough that it wouldn't take that much to get the job done, and then they could have textbooks for the cost of the paper, or if they used ebook readers, then copies would be free. Is there any particular reason textbooks are bought from third parties instead of just written once and used in all the schools?
I'm not a blacksmith, and don't know much about metallurgy, but couldn't you mix in the color with the metal also. Where extreme stress isn't a huge factor (game controllers), couldn't something be done to actually change the color of the metal. Also, metal can be melted and molded almost as well as plastic, So I don't see why you couldn't have a controller made completely out of metal.
Well, in the 70s, people would have actually considered walking down to the arcade. Tough luck trying to make anybody walk now. Although, you are right. Compared to PCs or the giant arcade machines, game consoles seem to be much better in terms of environmental impact than the alternative designs.
Would anybody say the same about the department that handles purchases of office equipment. Some employee wants a $6000 chair, and even though they know if they gave that to everybody, the company would go bankrupt, they should still do it, because the employee requests it. Some things should be non-negotiable. Just because some employee thinks they need a $6000 chair, or because they think they need a PC without a firewall, does not mean that they should be allowed to have it. Maybe some employee feels like having to carry around an ID/door lock card is an inconvenience, they should just leave all the doors unlocked, and do away with the security guards too, because Joe in accounting doesn't like the felling he gets when they look at him.
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Why not just have a single torrent file which you download with all the latest torrent files in it? You could easily pass the single torrent file around the internet, and have enough copies of it, that trying to shut down all the sources would be impossible. Currently shutting down most of bittorrent is possible because there are only a few many sites where people go to get torrent files. If you could distribute the actual torrent list over bittorrent, then there would almost be no way to shut it down.
Yes, and except for the ultralight 2 GB cap, they all seem pretty reasonable. They are at least telling you what they are, and presenting the pricing scheme for going over the cap. 60 GB is quite a lot of content. I could download a movie every day and still not go over. It wouldn't be a DVD ISO file, or BluRay, but the H.264 rips come in under 1 GB and look pretty good to me.
If you live in Ottawa, you can go with Rogers. Their rates are comparable to Bell, and I haven't heard any new of them throttling yet.
The problem with DRM on FOSS is that it's too hard to make it work in the slightest. With Linux you could easily write a video driver and a sound driver that just dumps everything to disk, thereby automatically bypassing the DRM. They could probably do some trickery by ensuring that you are only running specific drivers, but that will only go so far. The open source nature of Linux allows you to do whatever you want with the system. Thereby making DRM impossible. An actual open source library that would decrypt the DRM content would be even worse, because you could just recompile it to drop the decrypted info to the disk. No messing with drivers required.
I have raise both. I think the problem here is that most people have dogs (mine past dogs included) that don't get raised well enough, and therefore don't require much energy to raise. It's pretty easy, and low effort to raise a dog that you can trust to ask to be let out, and that's about it. It take a whole other level of attention if you want your dog to be one of those dogs that you can take for a walk without a leash, or have the discipline to not break into the garbage when they are felling hungry, or to not jump and bark at every person that comes to your front door. Raising a child is a lot of work, and you're right, it's probably more work than raising a dog. But if you want a dog that's well behaved, be prepared to sink a serious amount of time into them. And a final thing. At least at some point the child becomes able to survive completely without the parent. A dog never gets to this point, and will always require quite a bit of attention.
Quake 1/2/3 are much too late in his career. That is not where he gained his fame. Try Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D.
Back when John Carmack gained his fame, entire video games were produced by 3-4 people. It was entirely possible for the bulk of the work to be done by a single person. That is how they gained their fame. They did it all themselves. Now, with the complexity of games, it's impossible to do it all on your own. Therefore, it's impossible for somebody to claim all the credit, and impossible for anybody to become a superstar, just because they worked on a bunch of games. Also, there are no new video game guys, because the old guys are still going strong. Miyamoto, Carmack, Sid Meier, are all still producing games. GTA IV may sell a lot of copies, but it's still not a great game. I'm not sure if anybody will still be playing it 10-20 years from now. It will probably be forgotten about a week after GTA V comes out.
Maybe if we just had cloned dogs, and made all dogs sterile, we wouldn't have such a problem with the dog population.
So basically dogs are a lot like people. Kids raised in houses where the parents are yelling all the time, either at the children, or at eachother, or at whatever, tend to have more emotional problems then those who do not. Also the same holds true with giving children space. Even as babies it is important for their development not to have them in your arms 24 hours a day, let them go off and explore a safe part of the house, and play on their own.
Assuming these are purebred dogs, what's the likelihood that you could just pick up another purebred that would be just as identical? How much genetic variation is there between purebred dogs? Would the differences between the cloned dog and the original be any less noticeable than between the original, and another dog of the same breed, or possibly the same lineage?
The last time we landed someone on the moon was in 1972. That's 36 years ago. The next planned possible date that I've heard tossed around for the next manned moon landing is 2018, 46 years after the previous one. I wonder if it's worth anybody's time and money to even send someone there right now. Originally, we did it, because it was there, and because nobody had done it previously. We did it to prove to ourselves that it could be done. Now that it's been done, what reason is there for going there now? Does NASA or any other space agency have anything that could land us on the moon in the next 2-3 years? Or will it take another Apollo-like project to get us back up there. I doubt the US government would be willing to fund something like that again.
That's a flawed premise. You can't write good code in Ruby.
In all fairness, MS tried their EEE development model with HTML, and look where it landed them. Firefox is making big inroads into their browser market, and MS is being forced to make their browser more standards compliant. Granted, just about everybody else was also trying to extend HTML also, but it seems like MS was the last major browser to come around in adhering to standards. They also tried it with Java, and now they can no longer make a Java VM.
Well, I guess the answer to that is, if you want a format that maintains your formatting perfectly down to the pixel across all implementations of the standard, then you had better go with PDF (or TIFF). But if you want a format you can easily edit and pass between colleagues, without worrying too much about how the formatting is going to be a little off, then go with ODF, DOC, or some other word processing format. No word processing format looks the same across all platforms. Even something as simple as using a different printer can cause problems with the same version of MS Word opening it's own doc files. If formatting is so important that you can' have things be moved around a little bit, then use PDF.
Yes, planning for releases at certain periodic intervals is a good idea. However, those dates should not be set in stone. If the planned release date is December 25, and something comes up, and the release has to be held back a couple weeks, then it should be held back. Obviously you should have a release date, with a corresponding featureset in mind, but that doesn't mean that release dates should be carved in stone.
I have a 2 year old and a 7 month old myself. Personally, I've found I eat a lot healthier with the kids around. Especially since the 2 year old was 1, and started eating whatever we did. It seems irresponsible to feed the kids something that you know isn't good for them, so you tend to make much more healthier meals and snacks. The only downside is that I often eat the leftovers from the kid, because the food is really good, and I don't like to see it going to waste. So I have a little bigger portions than I would normally serve myself.
I didn't read that Lockhart's Lament that you linked to (I will later). But I have to say, that in a lot of instances, I haven't really seen the need for textbooks, especially in the K-12 school range. Up until high school, I don't really recall having many textbooks. Most of the information was provided by the teachers, and there was a few photocopied handouts for the most part. Once I hit highschool, mostly only math courses had textbooks, but for those it was mostly so the teachers could assign questions out of them, and they weren't really ever just read for studying purposes. Most of my learning even through university has been done without a textbook. And the courses where the textbook was important in learning the material are some of the worse taught courses I have ever had.
I think it's possible. You can get a portable DVD player for $80 retail. This thing has the same screen, probably doesn't have a DVD drive, but has some other internals that a different. Cut out the cost of the DVD licensing fees, and you could easily have an ebook reader using this screen for $75. Granted, I'm not so sure that these screens are the best for reading a lot of text. An eInk display would probably work a lot better. But it's definitely doable at that price.
Even if the schools did spend money on these devices, there would be no content to put on them. The same problem exists for the original OLPC project. Luckily they had Open Source software, and were able to get a working machine with no software cost, but I still don't think there's a lot out there in free textbooks. It's a wonder that the US Government just doesn't hire a few people to write some textbooks that they would use in their schools. For gradeschool and even highschool, the material is simple enough that it wouldn't take that much to get the job done, and then they could have textbooks for the cost of the paper, or if they used ebook readers, then copies would be free. Is there any particular reason textbooks are bought from third parties instead of just written once and used in all the schools?
I'm not a blacksmith, and don't know much about metallurgy, but couldn't you mix in the color with the metal also. Where extreme stress isn't a huge factor (game controllers), couldn't something be done to actually change the color of the metal. Also, metal can be melted and molded almost as well as plastic, So I don't see why you couldn't have a controller made completely out of metal.
Well, in the 70s, people would have actually considered walking down to the arcade. Tough luck trying to make anybody walk now. Although, you are right. Compared to PCs or the giant arcade machines, game consoles seem to be much better in terms of environmental impact than the alternative designs.
Whatever the case, game consoles are much more efficient than PCs. Especially ones that can play comparable levels of games.
Can you even buy replacement BIOS chips anymore? Are they cheaper than a replacement motherboard?
Would anybody say the same about the department that handles purchases of office equipment. Some employee wants a $6000 chair, and even though they know if they gave that to everybody, the company would go bankrupt, they should still do it, because the employee requests it. Some things should be non-negotiable. Just because some employee thinks they need a $6000 chair, or because they think they need a PC without a firewall, does not mean that they should be allowed to have it. Maybe some employee feels like having to carry around an ID/door lock card is an inconvenience, they should just leave all the doors unlocked, and do away with the security guards too, because Joe in accounting doesn't like the felling he gets when they look at him.