I am not a psychologist, but how can you really be sure that the reason you don't drive around at 100+ MPH isn't because of fear? As your sibling poster said, it's not a fear thing, it's a "that's stupid" thing. I'm not sure I really see the difference. If you have no fear of getting hurt or getting in an accident, then weaving through traffic at 100 MPH makes perfect sense, because the result is you get to your destination faster. Kids do "stupid" things all the time, because they don't realize they'll get hurt, which means they have no fear. Once they are told that doing X (about 50 times) will get them hurt, or they get hurt doing something, then they start to get the point. There's been a couple medical dramas who have patients on them who didn't feel pain, and they were continually getting hurt (in the physical sense, broken bones, cuts, and scrapes), because they didn't feel any pain, they're body never learned to not do these things that get them hurt. I'm not saying these shows are completely accurate, but if this is rooted in reality, we can see how pain can affect how people learn, and how our decision making process actually works.
Why would you want to cure pain? Pain is what lets you know there's something wrong with your body. Yet there's tons of medication on the market to either decrease the amount of pain felt, or get rid of it completely. Some people use Ibuprofen/Aspirin/Acetaminophen every time they have the smallest pain. They never stop to think, hey, maybe that pain is telling me there's something wrong, and I should get it checked out by a doctor. I agree, that getting rid of fear would be a bad thing, but that if they could get such a drug approved, that there would be a ton of people willing to use it.
The other thing I'm wondering about what "no fear" would result in for humans. Humans have a lot more complex brains than mice (unless you listen to Douglas Adams) and it would be interesting what people would do if they had no fear. Would they just walk out into the middle of a busy street without looking for oncoming cars? It's not just fear of getting hit, but a learned behaviour to look when you're crossing the road. Would you make stupid decisions, just because you weren't afraid of the consequences?
While getting rid of some fear would be nice, you don't want your soldiers running to cower in a corner when they aren't in danger, eliminating all fear could be bad thing. If you had no fear, you might run head first into enemy fire, without thinking about whether or not you would die. Fear makes us cautious of our actions, and stops us from doing stupid things.
Actually, Identical drives are in fact, not identical. What they are is built to the same specifications. They actually use different atoms and molecules to make up the components of the drive. They were most likely manufactured on different days, or at least at different times. If you took two drives from the same production line, and put them through the exact same usage, I imagine the probability of them both breaking within the same week to be somewhere close to zero, maybe even close to requiring the "Heart of Gold". I've never seen a corporate Raid setup that used different models of drives for drives in the same array, and have never heard of this being an issue.
I thought that most CF cards were working up to 1 million writes/block now. They are making hard drives for laptops that use only flash/NAND memory for storing data. However, I'd still shy away from using the device for swap or temp/log files. Any extra strain on these types of devices could probably spell bad news. I don't even see why you'd need swap space if you're just running a file server. The amount of RAM you would need is very minimal, especially on a home setup, with maybe 5 computers accessing it, and any gain you'd get from adding swap would probably be offset by the longevity of the server.
Exactly. I don't think this is supposed to be some replacement for a large corporate NAS. Then again, I didn't read the article. But if you want a file server for your home use, and you want it to be encrypted, then there's probably not a lot wrong with what he's doing. RAID mirroring makes the cost of storage double, so I could see why a home user might back away from that. Also, a UPS, while nice, probably isn't completely necessary, because a little bit of downtime while the power is off probably isn't a bad thing, because we can assume all the other computers in the house will have lost power also. I don't usually have localized blackouts within different areas of my house.
Well, it isn't the point of VMWare and Parallels to ensure that it isn't detectable. A simple check of the video card driver or something else similar will show that it is indeed a virtual machine. If you wanted to build a VM that was much harder to detect, then it could be done. But instead VMWare et al have other priorities such as increasing the efficiency and adding management functions. If you have malware installed on your ESX server, then you got more issues then whether or not it can detect that you are running in a VM.
Sounds like the security methods most online banking systems use. Here's the current layers:
password
mother's maiden name/ what's you're favourite movie
secret picture
randomized keypad for entiring password
It's all layers of useless crap piled on top of eachother which doesn't stop the real problem of people falling for stupid fishing sites, and entering a password in a site that looks like their bank's. If they really wanted to add real security they'd hand out RSA key fobs to everyone instead of adding layers of stuff that makes it look more secure but actually isn't.
Ok, IE isn't that bad. I mean, I'd rather use Firefox, but given the choice between not visiting a website and visiting it on IE, well that's a pretty dumb choice. It's like saying, I'd really only want to win the lottery if it was powerball, not one of those $50,000 scratch tickets. This is where you realize I'm equating winning the lottery to visiting Slashdot.
I have Metroid Prime, and I love the game, but I got to one part where it was really far between save points, and no matter how many times I tried, I couldn't make it past all the enemies, even by reading walk-throughs and stuff. It became very frustrating very fast when I would play for about half an hour, only to die and have to start all over at the last save point. I like Zelda quite a bit more, because there's not so many instances where you can die. And when you make a small mistake and die, you usually don't start so far back.
Well if you want to pick up some 14 year old GPL software package and start modifying it and releasing it under some different license, then I don't think there would be any objection to that. You're still working off 14 year old code, and assuming the project has been under active development, you'd be quite far behind the current version. However, if it hasn't been under active development, and you have a close to current version with your 14 year old version, then it's probably better that the software goes into the public domain.
I'm not sure how the Sony Mario and Zelda thing would work. On one hand, if the copyright is expired on the game they should be able to release old Mario games for their old system, as well as release new Mario games and call them derivative works. However, Nintendo probably has the Mario and Zelda characters trademarked, which means that Sony wouldn't be able to use these trademarked entities. Does anybody else know more about IP law and how this would work?
While the Wii doesn't have hi-res graphics, it still has "good graphics". Check out Twilight Princess. That game has awesome graphics, with lots of detail and great scenery. There are tons of good games for the Wii, maybe not something that fits your style, but there are lots of games that people are buying in droves. As for "alone" games, there's twilight princess, super monkey ball, super swing golf, the entire virtual console, paper mario, and a bunch of other games. And just because Wii sports is fun with many people, doesn't mean it can't be fun by yourself.
Trees have adapted to compete with other trees. That's why you'll find really tall trees in the rainforest, because the tallest tree gets the most sunlight. Now if certain species of trees could move to where there was the most sun or non-frozen water, like birds migrating for the winter, then I think they would have a significant advantage over the other trees. Also if trees could kill other trees that are taking up the better land then they would have yet another advantage. Things like the Venus Flytrap do have a http://www.scientific-conference.net/bsa/misc/carn .html>nervous system of sorts, and are able to catch prey. Although that last article states that they don't have a nervous system, it also states that
Scientists theorize that it moves from some type of fluid pressure activated by an actual electrical current that runs through each lobe. Sounds like a primitive nervous system to me. Even if it doesn't have a brain, it still has electrical stimulation causing the body to react and perform a specific task. A lot of human actions don't require the brain, including reflex actions such as removing your hand from a hot stove, but they are still considered part of the nervous system.
You don't even need "Portable Firefox". The Windows version of Firefox comes with an installer so the Windows users can just click next and won't be confused. The Linux version of firefox is just a compressed archive that you can put anywhere you like and run it. I think the advantage of portable firefox is that it saves user files to the same directory as it's being run from (or a subdirectory thereof), so that you can take all your bookmarks and history with you. I think more applications should be written so that you can just take the entire thing with all your settings to whichever computer you happen to be working. I can't see that happening for and MS software though. They want you to buy a copy for each computer you use, and each time you upgrade that computer.
Because of the original seven wonders, only the Great Pyramid still exists. The list kind of sucks. Here's a bunch of things you can't see anymore, that were built a long time ago, and are now gone. I think it's better to add things to the list which still exist, and which have stood the test of time.
This is my biggest problem with software patents. If they want the patent, they should have to sumbit the source code. Otherwise the patent is useless. When software patents expire, there is still no way of reproducing the invention. Unless of course, the answer was so obvious that anybody presented with the same problem would come to a very similar solution. But that's another matter entirely.
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
See, once you start to look into that quote, you'll see exactly why DRM technologies are terrible, and why copyrights are all messed up right now. The whole "limited time" thing is a sham. The media companies have push to have copyrights extended way beyond their usefulness. Now you can write a single song when you're 20, and royalties will still be going to your grandkids when you die. How does that promote the progress of useful arts, if you can live off the royalties of a single book,song,album, or whatever. People with these talents should be driven to create more music, by having their copyrights expire. Software with a 75 year copyright is like the worst idea ever, where it might as well be perpetual copyright, because how many people really care about running 75 year old software (there currently isn't any). I'll agree with you that there's a lot of people just mooching and stealing music, it would be nice if it would stop. However, the answer isn't stronger copyright infringement laws, sue all your customers/listeners, or putting DRM on the disk so that the people who did pay for it can't execute their fair use rights. The media companies need to wake up and realize that the entertainment budget has been stretched by video games, cable TV, Cell phones, and a whole bunch of other things that people didn't spend money on 30 years ago. They need to make the music more accessible and more affordable to give people a reason to buy it. Charging $37 for a Phantom of the Opera CD (as another poster pointed out) is not the way to draw in customers. The music should be cheap, so that people don't have to think about whether or not they should buy it. If they started selling CDs for $5 I would buy about 5 or 6 a month, because there's a lot CDs that are worth that much. But at $15 a pop, well, I'm sticking to indy music on emusic, because it seems they are the only ones charging reasonable prices.
When I was going to university there was a single apartment building with their own polling station. That's right, a building filled with mostly immigrants, students, and people riding the poverty line. This buidling had it's own polling station specifically because they had low voter turnout and wanted to encourage people to vote. Especially people who were not upper class. I lived across the street in a nicer yet not rich building. I had to walk down the street to the local school to cast my vote. I live in Canada, I've never had to walk more than 10 minutes to cast my vote, and I've never had to stand in line for more than 10 minutes. Last Election I just walked in and voted. No waiting whatsoever. This is the way voting should work. Quick, simple, and trying to include everybody. Trying to cram 10,000 people through a single polling station in a single day does not work. Keep the polling stations very localized, and people will want to vote, or at least not have any excuse not to. Hell, the Canadian system is completely paper. Paper ballots, and Paper (cardboard) voting booths. Can't get much cheaper or simpler than that.
Many open source applications down require any installation at all. They could just be a bunch of files that you drop in your "My Documents" folder if you so choose (or if that's the only place you have write access to. Unless you're going to specifically restrict which files can be executable on the machine, then blacklisting a few specific programs isn't going to stop people from "installing" anything.
That's a nice story grandpa... Anyway, you'll often find less popular or older stuff at smaller record stores. However, there's a lot of stuff that's at the big chains that you won't find at the smaller stores. International music and kids music comes to mind. Although you'll find your fair share of Barney on emusic.com, most smaller record stores either specialize in something like classic rock or punk, that doesn't get any attention in the larger stores, and that people will go looking for. While smaller record stores are good for some things, there's a lot of things at the chain retailers that you'll never find in a smaller store.
Sorry if they have an outdated business model, but that doesn't mean people aren't buying the music and movies. Most people I know get their music from either iTunes or from Amazon or other online stores. It's much easier and often cheaper to get the stuff online. STRM closed because they have no more image with the young people of today. Their stores are few and far between, and they don't advertise to the people or even attempt to have their name known. HMV on the other hand has stores on every street corner, and has partnered with Amazon to give themselves a name in the online business. STRM failed to adapt and that is why they are closed, not because people aren't buying music.
Finally, we have proof. Ok, not really proof, but here's some data to back up what we've been saying all along. Piracy is not the opposite of a healthy media marketplace. It actually helps to improve the market place. Piracy gives people better access to media that they would otherwise not get to see. They see it, and sometimes buy a legitimate copy. Many times they don't buy a legit copy, but if they never knew about it in the first place, then you can guarantee that they aren't going to buy it.
I've never seen an open source license that controls how a person uses the software. The license only comes into effect once you start to modify and distribute said software. Why are people afraid of running open source software? It's not like you are going to get sued just for running GIMP.
Slashdot Mirror
I am not a psychologist, but how can you really be sure that the reason you don't drive around at 100+ MPH isn't because of fear? As your sibling poster said, it's not a fear thing, it's a "that's stupid" thing. I'm not sure I really see the difference. If you have no fear of getting hurt or getting in an accident, then weaving through traffic at 100 MPH makes perfect sense, because the result is you get to your destination faster. Kids do "stupid" things all the time, because they don't realize they'll get hurt, which means they have no fear. Once they are told that doing X (about 50 times) will get them hurt, or they get hurt doing something, then they start to get the point. There's been a couple medical dramas who have patients on them who didn't feel pain, and they were continually getting hurt (in the physical sense, broken bones, cuts, and scrapes), because they didn't feel any pain, they're body never learned to not do these things that get them hurt. I'm not saying these shows are completely accurate, but if this is rooted in reality, we can see how pain can affect how people learn, and how our decision making process actually works.
Why would you want to cure pain? Pain is what lets you know there's something wrong with your body. Yet there's tons of medication on the market to either decrease the amount of pain felt, or get rid of it completely. Some people use Ibuprofen/Aspirin/Acetaminophen every time they have the smallest pain. They never stop to think, hey, maybe that pain is telling me there's something wrong, and I should get it checked out by a doctor. I agree, that getting rid of fear would be a bad thing, but that if they could get such a drug approved, that there would be a ton of people willing to use it.
The other thing I'm wondering about what "no fear" would result in for humans. Humans have a lot more complex brains than mice (unless you listen to Douglas Adams) and it would be interesting what people would do if they had no fear. Would they just walk out into the middle of a busy street without looking for oncoming cars? It's not just fear of getting hit, but a learned behaviour to look when you're crossing the road. Would you make stupid decisions, just because you weren't afraid of the consequences?
While getting rid of some fear would be nice, you don't want your soldiers running to cower in a corner when they aren't in danger, eliminating all fear could be bad thing. If you had no fear, you might run head first into enemy fire, without thinking about whether or not you would die. Fear makes us cautious of our actions, and stops us from doing stupid things.
I suspect it hasn't gone down, specifically because the script kiddies aren't the ones writing the major viruses.
Actually, Identical drives are in fact, not identical. What they are is built to the same specifications. They actually use different atoms and molecules to make up the components of the drive. They were most likely manufactured on different days, or at least at different times. If you took two drives from the same production line, and put them through the exact same usage, I imagine the probability of them both breaking within the same week to be somewhere close to zero, maybe even close to requiring the "Heart of Gold". I've never seen a corporate Raid setup that used different models of drives for drives in the same array, and have never heard of this being an issue.
I thought that most CF cards were working up to 1 million writes/block now. They are making hard drives for laptops that use only flash/NAND memory for storing data. However, I'd still shy away from using the device for swap or temp/log files. Any extra strain on these types of devices could probably spell bad news. I don't even see why you'd need swap space if you're just running a file server. The amount of RAM you would need is very minimal, especially on a home setup, with maybe 5 computers accessing it, and any gain you'd get from adding swap would probably be offset by the longevity of the server.
Exactly. I don't think this is supposed to be some replacement for a large corporate NAS. Then again, I didn't read the article. But if you want a file server for your home use, and you want it to be encrypted, then there's probably not a lot wrong with what he's doing. RAID mirroring makes the cost of storage double, so I could see why a home user might back away from that. Also, a UPS, while nice, probably isn't completely necessary, because a little bit of downtime while the power is off probably isn't a bad thing, because we can assume all the other computers in the house will have lost power also. I don't usually have localized blackouts within different areas of my house.
Well, it isn't the point of VMWare and Parallels to ensure that it isn't detectable. A simple check of the video card driver or something else similar will show that it is indeed a virtual machine. If you wanted to build a VM that was much harder to detect, then it could be done. But instead VMWare et al have other priorities such as increasing the efficiency and adding management functions. If you have malware installed on your ESX server, then you got more issues then whether or not it can detect that you are running in a VM.
It's all layers of useless crap piled on top of eachother which doesn't stop the real problem of people falling for stupid fishing sites, and entering a password in a site that looks like their bank's. If they really wanted to add real security they'd hand out RSA key fobs to everyone instead of adding layers of stuff that makes it look more secure but actually isn't.
Ok, IE isn't that bad. I mean, I'd rather use Firefox, but given the choice between not visiting a website and visiting it on IE, well that's a pretty dumb choice. It's like saying, I'd really only want to win the lottery if it was powerball, not one of those $50,000 scratch tickets. This is where you realize I'm equating winning the lottery to visiting Slashdot.
I have Metroid Prime, and I love the game, but I got to one part where it was really far between save points, and no matter how many times I tried, I couldn't make it past all the enemies, even by reading walk-throughs and stuff. It became very frustrating very fast when I would play for about half an hour, only to die and have to start all over at the last save point. I like Zelda quite a bit more, because there's not so many instances where you can die. And when you make a small mistake and die, you usually don't start so far back.
Well if you want to pick up some 14 year old GPL software package and start modifying it and releasing it under some different license, then I don't think there would be any objection to that. You're still working off 14 year old code, and assuming the project has been under active development, you'd be quite far behind the current version. However, if it hasn't been under active development, and you have a close to current version with your 14 year old version, then it's probably better that the software goes into the public domain.
I'm not sure how the Sony Mario and Zelda thing would work. On one hand, if the copyright is expired on the game they should be able to release old Mario games for their old system, as well as release new Mario games and call them derivative works. However, Nintendo probably has the Mario and Zelda characters trademarked, which means that Sony wouldn't be able to use these trademarked entities. Does anybody else know more about IP law and how this would work?
While the Wii doesn't have hi-res graphics, it still has "good graphics". Check out Twilight Princess. That game has awesome graphics, with lots of detail and great scenery. There are tons of good games for the Wii, maybe not something that fits your style, but there are lots of games that people are buying in droves. As for "alone" games, there's twilight princess, super monkey ball, super swing golf, the entire virtual console, paper mario, and a bunch of other games. And just because Wii sports is fun with many people, doesn't mean it can't be fun by yourself.
You don't even need "Portable Firefox". The Windows version of Firefox comes with an installer so the Windows users can just click next and won't be confused. The Linux version of firefox is just a compressed archive that you can put anywhere you like and run it. I think the advantage of portable firefox is that it saves user files to the same directory as it's being run from (or a subdirectory thereof), so that you can take all your bookmarks and history with you. I think more applications should be written so that you can just take the entire thing with all your settings to whichever computer you happen to be working. I can't see that happening for and MS software though. They want you to buy a copy for each computer you use, and each time you upgrade that computer.
Because of the original seven wonders, only the Great Pyramid still exists. The list kind of sucks. Here's a bunch of things you can't see anymore, that were built a long time ago, and are now gone. I think it's better to add things to the list which still exist, and which have stood the test of time.
This is my biggest problem with software patents. If they want the patent, they should have to sumbit the source code. Otherwise the patent is useless. When software patents expire, there is still no way of reproducing the invention. Unless of course, the answer was so obvious that anybody presented with the same problem would come to a very similar solution. But that's another matter entirely.
When I was going to university there was a single apartment building with their own polling station. That's right, a building filled with mostly immigrants, students, and people riding the poverty line. This buidling had it's own polling station specifically because they had low voter turnout and wanted to encourage people to vote. Especially people who were not upper class. I lived across the street in a nicer yet not rich building. I had to walk down the street to the local school to cast my vote. I live in Canada, I've never had to walk more than 10 minutes to cast my vote, and I've never had to stand in line for more than 10 minutes. Last Election I just walked in and voted. No waiting whatsoever. This is the way voting should work. Quick, simple, and trying to include everybody. Trying to cram 10,000 people through a single polling station in a single day does not work. Keep the polling stations very localized, and people will want to vote, or at least not have any excuse not to. Hell, the Canadian system is completely paper. Paper ballots, and Paper (cardboard) voting booths. Can't get much cheaper or simpler than that.
Many open source applications down require any installation at all. They could just be a bunch of files that you drop in your "My Documents" folder if you so choose (or if that's the only place you have write access to. Unless you're going to specifically restrict which files can be executable on the machine, then blacklisting a few specific programs isn't going to stop people from "installing" anything.
That's a nice story grandpa... Anyway, you'll often find less popular or older stuff at smaller record stores. However, there's a lot of stuff that's at the big chains that you won't find at the smaller stores. International music and kids music comes to mind. Although you'll find your fair share of Barney on emusic.com, most smaller record stores either specialize in something like classic rock or punk, that doesn't get any attention in the larger stores, and that people will go looking for. While smaller record stores are good for some things, there's a lot of things at the chain retailers that you'll never find in a smaller store.
Sorry if they have an outdated business model, but that doesn't mean people aren't buying the music and movies. Most people I know get their music from either iTunes or from Amazon or other online stores. It's much easier and often cheaper to get the stuff online. STRM closed because they have no more image with the young people of today. Their stores are few and far between, and they don't advertise to the people or even attempt to have their name known. HMV on the other hand has stores on every street corner, and has partnered with Amazon to give themselves a name in the online business. STRM failed to adapt and that is why they are closed, not because people aren't buying music.
Finally, we have proof. Ok, not really proof, but here's some data to back up what we've been saying all along. Piracy is not the opposite of a healthy media marketplace. It actually helps to improve the market place. Piracy gives people better access to media that they would otherwise not get to see. They see it, and sometimes buy a legitimate copy. Many times they don't buy a legit copy, but if they never knew about it in the first place, then you can guarantee that they aren't going to buy it.
I've never seen an open source license that controls how a person uses the software. The license only comes into effect once you start to modify and distribute said software. Why are people afraid of running open source software? It's not like you are going to get sued just for running GIMP.