What? It's only a crime if you can't avoid indictment for x years?
Well, first, it's presumably more and more difficult to prove as the years go by. So this prevents people witch-hunting on stuff that they have little chance of getting right.
But in a larger sense, it relies on a belief in the innate goodness of human nature. If you commit a murder and get away with it for 20 years, there's a good chance you regret it. There's a further good chance that you've lived for 20 years in fear of discovery. And if you haven't changed, well, there's probably more recent things that you've done and can be prosecuted for. But hunting down an 80 year old grandpa for a petty theft he committed when he was 19 just doesn't make sense. You're no longer punishing the person who committed the crime.
Bullshit. The states should be more powerful than they are. There's nothing worse than a federal government dictating one-size-fits-all laws that don't really work for 49% of the population.
When US record companies see no positive impact in sales, will Russia be allowed to let allofmp3 reopen?
Because, for some reason I find myself really doubting that people that were paying pennies for songs are going to suddenly turn around and start paying an order of magnitude more.
Actually, I bought at least 10 albums in the last year that I wouldn't have if I hadn't downloaded the whole thing on allofmp3 first. As well as several shows that I've gone to, enjoyed, bought a t-shirt at, etc...
And there isn't a single phone out there that you can store and play back an entire movie except the iPhone.
That isn't even close to true. There's plenty of phones out there that take an SD or miniSD expansion card, which gives you at least a 2GB space to play with. You can easily fit a DVD-res avi in that, and probably several at once if you downsize them to 320x240 or whatever your phone is natively.
In addition, cooling that much neural activity would require some weeeeird looking (and relatively fragile) physiology if the source of said heat were in the chest cavity.
Ignoring your misunderstanding of Iran (it's a democracy that's elected itself a theocracy)
The armed takeover in 1980, and the subsequent fascist-style secret police raids against anyone who spoke out against the new leadership, would tend to disagree with you there...
Especially when it's money taken from the citizens of the state to begin with, and then given back to them only when they buckle and comply with rules they'd rather not.
That, and the eye has evolved independently several different times on Earth. Offhand, I know the octopus eye is from a completely different evolutionary origin than that of mammals and all who share that branch, and I'm pretty sure there was a 3rd unique origin too.
The problem with ID is that, above and beyond the mental exercise you're illustrating, nearly all of their poster child examples for irreducibly complex systems can be contradicted with specific evidence. For flagella, the structure is a couple molecules different from that of a structure which sits in the cell wall and controls the passage of lipids or some such molecule. With the eye, as someone posted earlier, there's an evolutionary advantage to every step in the development of the structure from the presence of light-sensitive cells in the brain through to the final product -- that, along with the fact that the eye has evolved independently 2 or 3 times would tend to prove that it's not irreducible.
And, as someone else also posted earlier, it's an appeal to incredulity. I find that people who disbelieve the possibility of evolution tend not to have a grasp of the truly staggering number of organisms that are involved in the process over its total time span.
The difference is, Intelligent Design teaches specifically that certain structures found in biological systems are too complex to have come about through macro evolution. They point to things as varied as the eye, flagella on bacterium, and a number of other things which they call "irreducibly complex", meaning that they would have no function if broken apart, and so supposedly cannot have an evolutionary pathway leading to their creation. ID has nothing to do with explaining the origins of the universe. It's an attempt to prove the involvement of a deity in the development of life on Earth.
[Your incentive to change is] When Microsoft stops releasing security fixes for XP and starts making sure new software only works right on Vista, like they did to 98 and 2000 when XP came out.
That's my incentive to change to Linux. I was okay with XP, because it may be buggy, and it may be slow at times, but it wasn't intentionally infested with DRM that gave media companies more control over my computer than I'm allowed. But Vista will never touch a machine in my home.
You know, I thought the same thing when I read Stardust, but from the trailer it looks like they've fleshed out a lot of little things that I missed. It looks like a very interesting, twisted fairy tale, from the trailers. I know a movie version of Good Omens was in the works, but that was a while ago so it may have been dropped. I would love to see what they could do with Anansi Boys.
It would be better than the current situation. From best to worst, the options are:
-peaceful citizen uprising
-violent citizen uprising
-violent uprising with weapons and training supplied by foreign country
-violent uprising with weapons and training supplied by foreign country, and some of their troops as well
-invasion by foreign country at request of many citizens
-invasion by foreign country without request of citizens, for purely humanitarian reasons
-invasion by foreign country primarily for their benefit
We're somewhere between the last two, and leaning towards the last one now that the privatization of the Iraqi oil fields is finally on the table.
We went to Europe to stop Germany from forcibly overthrowing the governments of sovereign nations. We went to Iraq to overthrow the government of a sovereign nation. I have no love for the things Saddam was doing before he was removed from power, but no nation is going to keep a lasting democracy having it handed to them (and what we've done is quite a bit more sinister than that).
We went into Europe twice in the early half of this century in order to prevent the exact thing we went into Iraq to accomplish. You can't use one to justify the other.
Yes yes, a CD isn't truly lossless from the original. I'm talking about "digitally identical to the CD recording".
And no, an MP3 will almost certainly not be as good as a CD recording, no matter what. The algorithm tends to leave artifacts in the range above human hearing, which can cause problems when transcoding. And then there's the fact that the MP3 spec requires a silent gap at the end of each track, destroying the flow of albums where one song leads into the next.
It's all moot anyway, since no download service (that I know of) besides allofmp3 will give you better than about 192kbps lossy audio, which is certainly inferior to lossless data the second you change devices and need to support a new codec.
If I'm paying anything close to $1 a track, it damn well better be in a lossless format. So far, nobody's hit that particular requirement, so I keep buying discs.
I'm not arguing that, but the definition of "the right thing" may be different depending on the context. Taking actions that are within the ruleset of a game, but negative to another player... that's hardly 100% bad. It's all just part of the game. Just because some people take the game too seriously doesn't mean the guy's done anything immoral.
You don't think the fact that you occassionally like to "flame and act silly" or play "an annoying lowbie ganker" is telling ? It tells me that when you can hide behind the veil of Anonymous Coward, you don't have much respect for the people around you. Because let's face it, when you do those things you are causing real frustration for real people, and you do it for fun.
This would be a case of adding "but ONLINE" and thinking it's something new and different. I don't think anyone's personality is 100% consistent as they go from one social setting to another, but it is all facets of the same actual person.
You're taking this waaaaaay too seriously. Oh no, he's "causing real frustration for real people, for fun"?? Yeah, in a game. Not in real life, not in constructive endeavor of any kind, but in a game. And for this, you're ready to assume that he's a bad person?
I think the RIAA, and SoundExchange, would claim that they are representing YOU (or your computer), as a music creator, and collecting royalties on YOUR behalf.
I think SoundExchange wouldn't do a damn thing, since they're only legally bound to collect royalties in the case where no explicit license, such as royalty-free music, exists.
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But in a larger sense, it relies on a belief in the innate goodness of human nature. If you commit a murder and get away with it for 20 years, there's a good chance you regret it. There's a further good chance that you've lived for 20 years in fear of discovery. And if you haven't changed, well, there's probably more recent things that you've done and can be prosecuted for. But hunting down an 80 year old grandpa for a petty theft he committed when he was 19 just doesn't make sense. You're no longer punishing the person who committed the crime.
Bullshit. The states should be more powerful than they are. There's nothing worse than a federal government dictating one-size-fits-all laws that don't really work for 49% of the population.
In addition, cooling that much neural activity would require some weeeeird looking (and relatively fragile) physiology if the source of said heat were in the chest cavity.
Especially when it's money taken from the citizens of the state to begin with, and then given back to them only when they buckle and comply with rules they'd rather not.
That, and the eye has evolved independently several different times on Earth. Offhand, I know the octopus eye is from a completely different evolutionary origin than that of mammals and all who share that branch, and I'm pretty sure there was a 3rd unique origin too.
The problem with ID is that, above and beyond the mental exercise you're illustrating, nearly all of their poster child examples for irreducibly complex systems can be contradicted with specific evidence. For flagella, the structure is a couple molecules different from that of a structure which sits in the cell wall and controls the passage of lipids or some such molecule. With the eye, as someone posted earlier, there's an evolutionary advantage to every step in the development of the structure from the presence of light-sensitive cells in the brain through to the final product -- that, along with the fact that the eye has evolved independently 2 or 3 times would tend to prove that it's not irreducible.
And, as someone else also posted earlier, it's an appeal to incredulity. I find that people who disbelieve the possibility of evolution tend not to have a grasp of the truly staggering number of organisms that are involved in the process over its total time span.
The difference is, Intelligent Design teaches specifically that certain structures found in biological systems are too complex to have come about through macro evolution. They point to things as varied as the eye, flagella on bacterium, and a number of other things which they call "irreducibly complex", meaning that they would have no function if broken apart, and so supposedly cannot have an evolutionary pathway leading to their creation. ID has nothing to do with explaining the origins of the universe. It's an attempt to prove the involvement of a deity in the development of life on Earth.
You know, I thought the same thing when I read Stardust, but from the trailer it looks like they've fleshed out a lot of little things that I missed. It looks like a very interesting, twisted fairy tale, from the trailers. I know a movie version of Good Omens was in the works, but that was a while ago so it may have been dropped. I would love to see what they could do with Anansi Boys.
That, and "Stardust" which is coming out soon and has trailers all over the place...
Inability to accept change doesn't equate to a correct position.
It would be better than the current situation. From best to worst, the options are:
-peaceful citizen uprising
-violent citizen uprising
-violent uprising with weapons and training supplied by foreign country
-violent uprising with weapons and training supplied by foreign country, and some of their troops as well
-invasion by foreign country at request of many citizens
-invasion by foreign country without request of citizens, for purely humanitarian reasons
-invasion by foreign country primarily for their benefit
We're somewhere between the last two, and leaning towards the last one now that the privatization of the Iraqi oil fields is finally on the table.
We went to Europe to stop Germany from forcibly overthrowing the governments of sovereign nations. We went to Iraq to overthrow the government of a sovereign nation. I have no love for the things Saddam was doing before he was removed from power, but no nation is going to keep a lasting democracy having it handed to them (and what we've done is quite a bit more sinister than that).
Those first two look interesting. It's good to see that a few places are actually doing online delivery in a way that doesn't punish consumers.
It's because icons are different, names of things are different, and basically it doesn't look like a xerox copy of Windows. This scares many people.
We went into Europe twice in the early half of this century in order to prevent the exact thing we went into Iraq to accomplish. You can't use one to justify the other.
Yes yes, a CD isn't truly lossless from the original. I'm talking about "digitally identical to the CD recording".
And no, an MP3 will almost certainly not be as good as a CD recording, no matter what. The algorithm tends to leave artifacts in the range above human hearing, which can cause problems when transcoding. And then there's the fact that the MP3 spec requires a silent gap at the end of each track, destroying the flow of albums where one song leads into the next.
It's all moot anyway, since no download service (that I know of) besides allofmp3 will give you better than about 192kbps lossy audio, which is certainly inferior to lossless data the second you change devices and need to support a new codec.
If I'm paying anything close to $1 a track, it damn well better be in a lossless format. So far, nobody's hit that particular requirement, so I keep buying discs.
I'm not arguing that, but the definition of "the right thing" may be different depending on the context. Taking actions that are within the ruleset of a game, but negative to another player... that's hardly 100% bad. It's all just part of the game. Just because some people take the game too seriously doesn't mean the guy's done anything immoral.
And if not, the market gets slimmer, and the people who aren't very good at it go off and find other jobs. And I'm still okay with it.