There is more to what you point at. Porn is the driving force behind technology. Or, at the very least it is one of the early adopters.
Another reply mentioned the printing press; when it was invented we started dirty books. Coincidently, there was a link to some olde style smut on BoingBoing (Cory's blog) the other day.
It goes back further. Since we started drawing on cave walls, we've been drawing titties and dicks. Ditto scupture and art. Sex lines, late night porn on TV, erotism has always been the centre. Even the first movies that most folk saw ("What the butler saw") were smut. At least it's better than then running away from a celluloid train, however with this demo they might want to rush the stage instead!!
I can't remember where I read this; think it was a sig in the last week or so:
"If you took all the porn of the internet, there would only be one page left; BringBackThePorn.com"
Now I'm wondering, was this a problem? Were people actually putting the whole box, with the plastic wrap and frozen pizza, in the oven? Or just the pizza still wrapped in plastic? I say, if you're stupid enough to do this, then you should chalk your demise to evolution.
I've heard a story from a friend about an elderly relative who was new to the world of the pizza. Half-way through cooking she turned it over. I hope they made her clean up the mess it would have made!
I've also seen someone put it in with the cardboard bit remaining under the base, but that involved intoxication and doesn't count as I'm sure they'd have been unable to focus on the box in the first place.
I suspect a lot of peoples bad experiences with cars such as fires are down to driver error. I know someone that has had to scrap two cars because the oil ran dry. Most folk don't have a clue and are running their cars into the ground through their inaction.
I can't imagine how the RIAA/MPAA think that they have truly changed a culture. Most people that I have talked to still download music, movies and television shows, but they do it in a more anonymous way than what can be readily tracked by outside agencies.
They must know this; I can't believe they are not aware of it. What I believe is that they are saying p2p is going down to encourage others to stop using it. After all, people are sheep and if everyone is stopping p2p, shouldn't I?
Also, it justifies their current actions, as they appear to have an effect. If p2p usage were to "officially" go up during their litigation campaign, it would give ammunition to those opposing the strategy.
Just out of curiosity, on average how many DVDs that you watch are made for regions other than the one you live in?
Me, at least half of my 120+ movies. As an early adopter, the limited Region 2 releases forced me to look abroad. The savings and generally better product (extras etc) made me stay abroad. I had read about the problems before buying a player, and ensured that mine was all-region.
The region 2 disks I own are either ones that were on special offer, or in some way superiour to the region 1 offering, such as anamorphic picture, audio etc. I also own a couple of Austrailian disks (oi! release "The Castle" will ya!?!) and the superb Japanesse version of Leon (The Professional), which is about 30 minutes longer.
Strangely, I haven't bought one in two years. I refuse to as they played the same "new tech" lies that they did to justify CD prices vs. tape. All the cheap DVDs are either poor movies or ones that are old and I already have. I feel thourghly ripped off. But hey, there's always E-mule!
Yay. Chalk up another win for the good guys. It is nice to see, however, that the US legal system isn't the only one where extortion is a valid tactic.
Surely this would fall under RICO in the US?
IIRC, there was a similar battle between supermarkets and the music industry here in the UK a few years ago. They used to import CDs from European distributers and sell them in the UK for a cheaper price. The industry tried to combat this in two ways. First, they added "bonus" tracks to the UK one to make the versions they are selling different to the usual UK release. Japan seems to do this as well.
They also tried to stop them in the courts. IIRC, they lost. Other industries have done the same thing; some clothes companies went ballistic when they thought they might lose their rip-of-Britain sales.
Didn't some famous US founder once make a quote about the courts being involved in protecting business models? I tried to google for it, but no luck.
Is this another way of saying CD-WOW is a bunch of bootleggers? Being from Hong Kong, that would not be a surprise at all.
Nope, they are a legitimate online retailer like Amazon. I wonder however if they weren't the first to have this demand made to them. They aren't the only source of cheap CDs.
or how a Scottish customers cannot call an English landline or cell phone without paying an extra fee.
I've been using a mobile in Scotland for the last 10 years, with each of the four main carriers. Never have I heard of this "extra fee".
the one complaint I have about it is that most of the carriers here won't work in Europe or Asia.
You should have sorted that out by now. I was making GSM calls all over the world, including China of all places!, 8 years ago.
We also get free unlimited 3g WAP.
Minor niggle, but WAP is 2g. GPRS (packet radio, an improvement) is 2.5g. 3G gives you a much higher data rate, hense the video capabilities. For the record, I'd say avoid 3G for now. The handsets suck, the 2.5g ones are light-years ahead. They are drip-feeding the 3G features to encourage upgrading your handset to get new things further down-the-line.
My friend in Scotland got a tiny phone much more along the lines of something I'd like.
I would have thought US phones were much the same as ours. I have a tri-band now, but my last one, the incredibly tiny Motorola Vdot (though it wasn't called that when I got it) was dual-band and also available as a US version.
As far as I know, you can get these. You just don't get Palm drivers. I'd hardly call a shipping product as vapourware just because it's driver doesn't include a particular OS.
You complain about a cell phone only being used for a boss to get in touch with you?
Many of us use our phones to contact friends. My social life would not exist without a cell phone, the one person I know that doesn't have one is always missing out on nights out etc as she can't be contacted. My boss? Doesn't have the number for it.
How is having a phone bad in this context? I've had one since 94, wouldn't ever go without. Tried a pager in 97, waste of time. And text messages; fantastic. I can contact friends from noisy clubs, bars or quiet resteraunts without distrubing anything.
There is nowt wrong with mobiles, ever. All that may be wrong is stupid & inconsiderate users.
I made the same thing as the BioBrite about 10 years ago. Took an old clock radio, a Pixar style lamp, and a relay. Removed weight-ballast from base of lamp, put in clock circuit, replaced radio circuit with relay, hooked light up to relay.
Bingo; an ideal timer light, with the same snooze, sleep functions as a clock-radio. I set it for 30-45 minutes before my audible alarm goes of.
Makes a difference; the body is supposed to wake automatically at sunrise. Curtains and streetlamps messed that up, so this sort of thing helps get you back into it.
Of course, now she has zero chance of willingly going to said church again. She was humiliated in front of everyone, a presumably expensive piece of hardware was broken, and she was whacked.
So, it all worked out for the best for everyone involved? She doesn't need to go to church. I wish I had a cellphone at that age; I could have removed myself from the tyranany of religion earlier. 7 days, adam & eve, bah!
I personally know of two people who are sleep walkers/talkers that have extremely odd dream walking experiences... to the point of dangerous.
Saw a documentary on that about six months ago, think it was on the BBC. They had several cases on it; one guy couldn't play computer games at night as his girlfriend would wake up with him at the bottom of the bed thinking he was a sniper or something from the game.
Another guy, completely peaceful and loving husband, hit his wife in his sleep. It was freaking him out.
They covered it with night-vision cameras, it was a pretty interesting docu.
A sleep-depraved Saddam is forced to stare at a photo of his dead son's bodies. After he's finally allowed to sleep and REM kicks in, a voice-over script explains to him that its all his fault and guides him on how he should cooperate fully.
It's well known that sleep-deprivation is a tatic employed by western interogation. Somehow, our culture doesn't see phsychological torture as being torture at all, and it's "acceptable". Must be the lack of blood. It does as much damage though...sleep deprivation is a very powerful tool.
Here's a quote from a news article on the subject, that I just pulled out of Google.
Other U.S. government officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, acknowledged that interrogators deprive some captives of sleep, a practice with ambiguous status in international law.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, the authoritative interpreter of the international Convention Against Torture, has ruled that lengthy interrogation may incidentally and legitimately cost a prisoner sleep. But when employed for the purpose of breaking a prisoner's will, sleep deprivation "may in some cases constitute torture."
I've read stories about how Camp X-Ray is bathed in light 24 hours a day and prisoners aren't allowed to cover their eyes at all.
I'm surprised you haven't noticed yet just how homophobic many Slashdot readers really are.
It's not just slashdot, it's the net in general. "You are sooo gay!!" and all that, you see it anywhere there are American teens around. Seems to be a US thing though, I rarely see this sort of behaviour in non-US centric websites. A throw-back from Jock culture perhaps?
Not that kids elsewhere don't slag off anyone that's a little different, kids are kids. However, we don't seem to use it as a generic insult.
NPD uses two tools to monitor peer-to-peer activity. MusicWatch Digital is a tool that continuously examines PCs of roughly 40,000 participating individuals, recording which sites they have gone to and what they have downloaded on their hard drives. The ongoing survey has been compiling and analyzing data on a monthly basis since April 2003. The second tool, called MusicLab, is a traditional paper survey mailed to 5,000 individuals asking them to report their usage and Web surfing. The results represent the U.S. population.
So they are monitoring users that volintarilly run their software? Talk about a skewed sample!!
There are others though. Many companies have hacked versions of the p2p apps set up to gather data.
They aren't monitoring many of us though, and there are entire apps off-limit to them. The companies monitoring p2p are known, and their subnets are publicly listed. There are lists of "bad IPs" to block explicitly for this purpose, which some p2p apps ignore completely. For example, check out this site.
The next step will be for them to start using ADLS lines in residential buildings, so no one can tell where they are coming from.
This is an excellent example of how easy it is to dupe the public into believing something that is not entirely factual.
Bollocks. Has anyone posting here actually read the article? (stupid question).
The guy is tele-commuting!, that's about all this story is. For two weeks per month in the winter, and two weeks over the summer, he works from home.
How may people here do the exact same thing? What would be a better/. story would be "technology advances make it possible to record professional TV shows at home" or something along the lines of how this is done.
And where is this grand deception? He made a "brrr it's cold remark", while he was in warmer climbs? That's it? Fuck me, call the A-Team!! Frankly, I'm more worried that the news networks feel it's neccessary to put bullshit fluff like that on the news in the first place.
He's a news anchor. He turns up, looks "nice", reads someone elses story in a news-caster voice. That's all they do and it's hardly a secret. We know they aren't pounding the streets for stories themselves.
Because evolution, for humans (at least in the western world), has in effect come to a standstill. The sick don't die, and even when they do die they often have time to reproduce first (except for a very small minority). The weak don't get eaten by predators. The stupid don't get eaten by predators as well, though their country does... but that's another topic. Anyway so my point is that there are no selection factors that are able to affect humanity at large
That's not even half the problem. Without the selection, the gene pool actually gets progresively weaker! People with bad immune systems (e.g.) can take drugs to prolong their life. If the disease is genetic, then it won't be getting filtered out at all, and it will propagate if they have children. Within X generations, the majority of the population will carry serious flaws from the miriad of things that can go wrong with the human body.
Take bad eyesight as a simple example, assuming it was genetic. 1000 years ago, you would be a shit hunter or forrager, and your genetic seed would not prosper. But now, with corrective lenses and recently surgery, it's a non-issue to your prosperity. Who's to say that in a couple hundred years, all humans in the developed world may require corrective eye surgery? I think it's pretty likely.
Childbirth is the same. Several hundred years ago, you'd have at least ten kids, with maybe 2-3 making it to adulthood, basically the strongest ones. Evolution. Most would die in the first year. England has published some really old data on the net, such as the birth and death registrars. It's really scary and tragic to take a browse through them, as you can see clear evidence of the infant mortality rate. Now, every child saved nowadays from a random complication is a score for human progress. But every genetic problem we workaround is a potential problem for the following generations.
This has been on my mind for years. Evolution hasn't stopped; it's regressed. It pretty much stopped the moment we learned to read and write, although in reality we've just changed the rulebook, as you say yourself. Physical (i.e. genetic) attributes are now a side-note in our success in staying alive long enough to reproduce, and alcohol completely trashes the good looks==good health instict we have! The biggest factor now is simply how many babies each set of parents is willing to churn out. And in many cases, that's an entirely wrong metric, as a set of unresponsible parents can kick out another uncared-for kid almost every year, while families that actually rear their children into responsible adults tend to be smaller. Social de-evolution.
The solution? I wish I had one, I'm just pointing out the problem. The obvious ones are all morally rehensible and total non-starters, and some have been tried before, even in civilised countries. After much thought, the only one I can see is "live with it". I just hope our healthcare keeps up. The economic factors in access to healthcare could be come a key part of your evolutionary score in future, which will favour the rich. Which in it's own way is going back to basic evolution. It's a messy subject!
Slashdot Mirror
Another reply mentioned the printing press; when it was invented we started dirty books. Coincidently, there was a link to some olde style smut on BoingBoing (Cory's blog) the other day.
It goes back further. Since we started drawing on cave walls, we've been drawing titties and dicks. Ditto scupture and art. Sex lines, late night porn on TV, erotism has always been the centre. Even the first movies that most folk saw ("What the butler saw") were smut. At least it's better than then running away from a celluloid train, however with this demo they might want to rush the stage instead!!
I can't remember where I read this; think it was a sig in the last week or so:
"If you took all the porn of the internet, there would only be one page left; BringBackThePorn.com"
Sure. It's only a few countries that have become so corrupt that the legal system is intended to punish the poor and free the rich.
They grow up hating the country that made the landmines? Sounds all too familiar.
Could be as soon as Friday that he goes, but I doubt it. (Hutton Report about the "suicide" of Dr Kelly comes out Thur)
I've heard a story from a friend about an elderly relative who was new to the world of the pizza. Half-way through cooking she turned it over. I hope they made her clean up the mess it would have made!
I've also seen someone put it in with the cardboard bit remaining under the base, but that involved intoxication and doesn't count as I'm sure they'd have been unable to focus on the box in the first place.
I suspect a lot of peoples bad experiences with cars such as fires are down to driver error. I know someone that has had to scrap two cars because the oil ran dry. Most folk don't have a clue and are running their cars into the ground through their inaction.
They must know this; I can't believe they are not aware of it. What I believe is that they are saying p2p is going down to encourage others to stop using it. After all, people are sheep and if everyone is stopping p2p, shouldn't I?
Also, it justifies their current actions, as they appear to have an effect. If p2p usage were to "officially" go up during their litigation campaign, it would give ammunition to those opposing the strategy.
It'll likely be a Macrovision stripper. Which kinda misses the point; screeners are usually DVD but this crew was working from VHS. Patsy?
Would that also be the "off" button?
Me, at least half of my 120+ movies. As an early adopter, the limited Region 2 releases forced me to look abroad. The savings and generally better product (extras etc) made me stay abroad. I had read about the problems before buying a player, and ensured that mine was all-region.
The region 2 disks I own are either ones that were on special offer, or in some way superiour to the region 1 offering, such as anamorphic picture, audio etc. I also own a couple of Austrailian disks (oi! release "The Castle" will ya!?!) and the superb Japanesse version of Leon (The Professional), which is about 30 minutes longer.
Strangely, I haven't bought one in two years. I refuse to as they played the same "new tech" lies that they did to justify CD prices vs. tape. All the cheap DVDs are either poor movies or ones that are old and I already have. I feel thourghly ripped off. But hey, there's always E-mule!
Surely this would fall under RICO in the US?
IIRC, there was a similar battle between supermarkets and the music industry here in the UK a few years ago. They used to import CDs from European distributers and sell them in the UK for a cheaper price. The industry tried to combat this in two ways. First, they added "bonus" tracks to the UK one to make the versions they are selling different to the usual UK release. Japan seems to do this as well.
They also tried to stop them in the courts. IIRC, they lost. Other industries have done the same thing; some clothes companies went ballistic when they thought they might lose their rip-of-Britain sales.
Didn't some famous US founder once make a quote about the courts being involved in protecting business models? I tried to google for it, but no luck.
Nope, they are a legitimate online retailer like Amazon. I wonder however if they weren't the first to have this demand made to them. They aren't the only source of cheap CDs.
I've been using a mobile in Scotland for the last 10 years, with each of the four main carriers. Never have I heard of this "extra fee".
the one complaint I have about it is that most of the carriers here won't work in Europe or Asia.
You should have sorted that out by now. I was making GSM calls all over the world, including China of all places!, 8 years ago.
We also get free unlimited 3g WAP.
Minor niggle, but WAP is 2g. GPRS (packet radio, an improvement) is 2.5g. 3G gives you a much higher data rate, hense the video capabilities. For the record, I'd say avoid 3G for now. The handsets suck, the 2.5g ones are light-years ahead. They are drip-feeding the 3G features to encourage upgrading your handset to get new things further down-the-line.
My friend in Scotland got a tiny phone much more along the lines of something I'd like.
I would have thought US phones were much the same as ours. I have a tri-band now, but my last one, the incredibly tiny Motorola Vdot (though it wasn't called that when I got it) was dual-band and also available as a US version.
As far as I know, you can get these. You just don't get Palm drivers. I'd hardly call a shipping product as vapourware just because it's driver doesn't include a particular OS.
Many of us use our phones to contact friends. My social life would not exist without a cell phone, the one person I know that doesn't have one is always missing out on nights out etc as she can't be contacted. My boss? Doesn't have the number for it.
How is having a phone bad in this context? I've had one since 94, wouldn't ever go without. Tried a pager in 97, waste of time. And text messages; fantastic. I can contact friends from noisy clubs, bars or quiet resteraunts without distrubing anything.
There is nowt wrong with mobiles, ever. All that may be wrong is stupid & inconsiderate users.
Bingo; an ideal timer light, with the same snooze, sleep functions as a clock-radio. I set it for 30-45 minutes before my audible alarm goes of.
Makes a difference; the body is supposed to wake automatically at sunrise. Curtains and streetlamps messed that up, so this sort of thing helps get you back into it.
So, it all worked out for the best for everyone involved? She doesn't need to go to church. I wish I had a cellphone at that age; I could have removed myself from the tyranany of religion earlier. 7 days, adam & eve, bah!
Saw a documentary on that about six months ago, think it was on the BBC. They had several cases on it; one guy couldn't play computer games at night as his girlfriend would wake up with him at the bottom of the bed thinking he was a sniper or something from the game.
Another guy, completely peaceful and loving husband, hit his wife in his sleep. It was freaking him out.
They covered it with night-vision cameras, it was a pretty interesting docu.
Good move! I considered asking myself for like 0.5 seconds then realised how silly and unlikely an idea it was! ;-)
It's well known that sleep-deprivation is a tatic employed by western interogation. Somehow, our culture doesn't see phsychological torture as being torture at all, and it's "acceptable". Must be the lack of blood. It does as much damage though...sleep deprivation is a very powerful tool.
Here's a quote from a news article on the subject, that I just pulled out of Google.
I've read stories about how Camp X-Ray is bathed in light 24 hours a day and prisoners aren't allowed to cover their eyes at all.
It's not just slashdot, it's the net in general. "You are sooo gay!!" and all that, you see it anywhere there are American teens around. Seems to be a US thing though, I rarely see this sort of behaviour in non-US centric websites. A throw-back from Jock culture perhaps?
Not that kids elsewhere don't slag off anyone that's a little different, kids are kids. However, we don't seem to use it as a generic insult.
So they are monitoring users that volintarilly run their software? Talk about a skewed sample!!
There are others though. Many companies have hacked versions of the p2p apps set up to gather data.
They aren't monitoring many of us though, and there are entire apps off-limit to them. The companies monitoring p2p are known, and their subnets are publicly listed. There are lists of "bad IPs" to block explicitly for this purpose, which some p2p apps ignore completely. For example, check out this site.
The next step will be for them to start using ADLS lines in residential buildings, so no one can tell where they are coming from.
Personally, I like the traditional way of having kids, you know, sex!! ;-)
It surely is A Brave New World.
Bollocks. Has anyone posting here actually read the article? (stupid question).
The guy is tele-commuting!, that's about all this story is. For two weeks per month in the winter, and two weeks over the summer, he works from home.
How may people here do the exact same thing? What would be a better /. story would be "technology advances make it possible to record professional TV shows at home" or something along the lines of how this is done.
And where is this grand deception? He made a "brrr it's cold remark", while he was in warmer climbs? That's it? Fuck me, call the A-Team!! Frankly, I'm more worried that the news networks feel it's neccessary to put bullshit fluff like that on the news in the first place.
He's a news anchor. He turns up, looks "nice", reads someone elses story in a news-caster voice. That's all they do and it's hardly a secret. We know they aren't pounding the streets for stories themselves.
That's not even half the problem. Without the selection, the gene pool actually gets progresively weaker! People with bad immune systems (e.g.) can take drugs to prolong their life. If the disease is genetic, then it won't be getting filtered out at all, and it will propagate if they have children. Within X generations, the majority of the population will carry serious flaws from the miriad of things that can go wrong with the human body.
Take bad eyesight as a simple example, assuming it was genetic. 1000 years ago, you would be a shit hunter or forrager, and your genetic seed would not prosper. But now, with corrective lenses and recently surgery, it's a non-issue to your prosperity. Who's to say that in a couple hundred years, all humans in the developed world may require corrective eye surgery? I think it's pretty likely.
Childbirth is the same. Several hundred years ago, you'd have at least ten kids, with maybe 2-3 making it to adulthood, basically the strongest ones. Evolution. Most would die in the first year. England has published some really old data on the net, such as the birth and death registrars. It's really scary and tragic to take a browse through them, as you can see clear evidence of the infant mortality rate. Now, every child saved nowadays from a random complication is a score for human progress. But every genetic problem we workaround is a potential problem for the following generations.
This has been on my mind for years. Evolution hasn't stopped; it's regressed. It pretty much stopped the moment we learned to read and write, although in reality we've just changed the rulebook, as you say yourself. Physical (i.e. genetic) attributes are now a side-note in our success in staying alive long enough to reproduce, and alcohol completely trashes the good looks==good health instict we have! The biggest factor now is simply how many babies each set of parents is willing to churn out. And in many cases, that's an entirely wrong metric, as a set of unresponsible parents can kick out another uncared-for kid almost every year, while families that actually rear their children into responsible adults tend to be smaller. Social de-evolution.
The solution? I wish I had one, I'm just pointing out the problem. The obvious ones are all morally rehensible and total non-starters, and some have been tried before, even in civilised countries. After much thought, the only one I can see is "live with it". I just hope our healthcare keeps up. The economic factors in access to healthcare could be come a key part of your evolutionary score in future, which will favour the rich. Which in it's own way is going back to basic evolution. It's a messy subject!
Any non-Nazi style solutions would be welcome!!