Dude, the point is that they didn't have any violence at home, they just up and picked up all the men and put em in boats and carted em off for years and years. It's not a pissing contest.
In Soviet Russia, rich oligarchs that are hiding in Britain are not allowed to use their money to overthrow the government by sowing and supporting dissent?
An entire continent of women were abandoned for the better part of a decade while their men went off to war, then came back shell shocked and broken to women who'd had their families providers ripped away long ago and weren't the tender nurturers they used to be. A unique cultural trauma in the world. For both genders.
Try to be philosophical about it. Other cultures will rise.
They have several such products. There's a good one called VMWare.
Distributing game client software as a virtual machine image scoots around the whole operating system issue entirely, does it not?
If a company was so inclined, they could design their product to install on windows or on their own tweaked Wine, then distribute the windows installer for the current large windows base together with a VMWare image containing a barebones linux syste, with the tweaked wine and the game installed.
That would probably allow them to provide a higher-performance alternative for those who are using other operating systems, while still giving their application optimum Windows performance.
Because of the DRM. People don't trust it, and they're not buying it. They perceive that Vista is screwing them at a whole new level.
Aside from that, the compatibility with existing windows applications is pretty consistently reported to be poor, and that was the foundation upon which Wintel was built in the first place.
My point is that the people behind MySQL have no problem telling you that their software is suitable for a purpose even when it isn't.
They've come a long way, but unless I'm misinformed, they've still got problems with automatic data conversion breaking data integrity rules.
It wasn't that long ago they were pushing the worst possible practices as gospel to people who didn't know any better, all while labouring to catch up with the Jones because they knew they were behind.
They are deceitful.
Put it this way, which is more useful as a means of conveyance, a standard car that you don't know how to drive or a rocket car with one button, no steering and no breaks?
MySQL is a suitable tool for servicing trivial data at very high speeds. I don't knock that. My issue lies in the real fact that the team behind MySQL does not have a history of being forthright about the limitations of what they've built.
I don't think much of the parallels their corporate structure and licensing has with the whole Project Mayo/DivX debacle, either. It's just the sort of thing that leaves a sour taste in your mouth.
MySQL started off making their fast little datastore that uses a little SQL syntax, and they told everyone under the sun that if MySQL didn't do it, you didn't need it, and ought to design around it.
Referential integrity, ACID compliance, enforcement of rules... every step along the way, they tell you you don't need it and you ought to push the missing logic to the next tier, until they get it, if they get it, then they're so great.
Couple that with the Project Mayo/DivX corporate structure, then place Postgresql next to the whole shebang as a superior alternative, and the arguments for giving MySQL any of your attention become increasingly small.
MySQL owes its success to the fact that it was always so simple to choke it off when you were giving it to people on $5/month hosting plans, so it became popular among the very cheap.
During the second world war, entire civilizations of people, entire continents of people, all had their menfolk shipped away for years to fight on the other side of the world.
Many died.
While they were gone, women were forcibly taught not to trust the practical side of things to their menfolk and concern themselves with the continuation of the species and and the civilization, but rather to toughen themselves and be self-reliant and concerned with their own survival. Then men came back, and they had no one to nurture them.
Modern western civilization is an extension of that cultural scar, it's not healthy or sustainable, and it's going to collapse because of it.
North America has become the place genetic material comes to die.
Our culture, among the other things that it is, is like a special, magical secret, that if you tell it to a rat, they don't have babies anymore, but they still live and run around telling their friends.
Despite the magic of all that we've discovered and accomplished, the culture that will be important in the coming century won't be ours, because there won't be very many of us around.
We'll be a small minority in a world with tens of billions of people, and the people of those cultures will hopefully use the technology that we've developed to expand humanity off this planet.
That's our future.
There will be escalating desperate attempts to entice and rigidly control a massive influx of immigrant population so that the Boomers can live their retirement dreams before they go into the grave.
That will likely turn into a revolt, but it might be a relatively peaceful power shift through politics.
At any rate, those immigrant cultures will be in control, and their attitudes will be the dominant ones.
Our culture will become as significant as that of Tibet.
If you're dealing with a bunch of peasants who are too primitive and uneducated to be able to behave in a fashion that is in their own long term self interest, religion will allow a wise man to say to his fellows "Forget why we should live this way, GOD said to live this way, so do it." and they do.
This will allow them to behave in a co-ordinated fashion, and that is going to provide them benefits.
But it makes them sheep.
If you follow a religion, you're following a cult of a dead wise primitive. If it's good advice, good. But when not if it becomes bad advice, you all die and scatter to the four winds. You die because you're a bunch of stupid sheep and you didn't know why you were doing what you were doing in the first place, let alone how to recognize when it's stopped being wise.
It's served humanity well. Take the whole sexual taboo thing. Look at Africa, the AIDS problem thing, imagine there's no condoms and no medicine. In an environment like that, the group of primitives that has a religion with sexual taboos will survive while the others go the way of Soddom.
But it's not ideal.
It's not even good, not by the standards of any educated person.
It's a bunch of lies and charlatanism and propaganda techniques, generally only effective on the young and the desperate.
People should be able to make educated and informed decisions about how to live without having their minds polluted with the belief that justifying actions and decisions with faith and desire instead of reason is an ok thing for them to do.
It's not an ok thing for them to do, it's an insane thing for them to do.
It makes them a danger to themselves and others, and it makes them a weapon with shining eyes and no brain, ready to be wielded by power-hungry charlatans.
Oh, if you want a more direct example, you can look at yesterdays headline on CBC.ca.
Jehovah's Witness parents of sextuplets. Don't believe in blood transfusions, so they let 2 of their babies die before someone with more sense than political savvy stepped in and seized the kids. Now they're suing the government for violating their human rights. They'll likely win. Shame about the dead babies...
The purpose of copyright is to subsidize creation for the larger benefit of society.
The cost of copyright is that those good works which are created are not distributed to the population as widely as they might be.
The goal is to have an educated, enlightened society which has been exposed to a great deal of culture and knowledge, that they might be better peers and neighbours.
When 90% of the society is too dog tired from working in the fields to even think about doing something so frivolous as writing...
When only the few and the rich can afford recording gear and instruments...
When the cost to respect the copyright and maintain an artist is a pittance next to the massive costs of the manufacturing and distribution network...
In such a civilization, copyright is a defensible mechanism.
This is not such a world.
In this world, it is trivial to distribute information.
It is trivial to get your hands on the tools to create.
It is trivial to find the idle time to set your hand to it.
And with 6 billion of us and growing, if you don't want to do it without getting paid, go to hell. Someone else will do it, you're not special.
In this world, it is a trivial enterprise to make vast libraries of culture and knowledge accessible to peasants in the jungle.
Soon, it will be trivial to provide a copy of every creative work ever made to every man, woman and child on earth.
At which point, the only thing holding us back from doing so will be small-minded dickheads harping about their "rights".
If you're a creator, stop thinking about copyright.
Brainstorm for other ideas on how you might get subsidized by our society without it being necessary to keep people isolated from what you've created, and throw your weight behind getting them into place.
The writing is on the wall. Copyright is done. Find another way.
There's no debate. Analogue recordings are better. And they keep better too. If you make an analogue recording of something using top of the line equipment, 50 years from now, you'll be able to use superior tools to pull a more accurate representation of the sonic environment than anything we can do now. If you record digital, a bit is a bit is a bit.
Best method, use the highest quality analogue gear you can find to record, then sample it in the highest quality digital you can for editing and distribution, then throw the original analogue in the vault so you can re-sample it again in 5 years.
The article also talks about the surprising applications this new technology may evolve into
Like making your dog's head explode.
The article talks about the military being interested in acquiring the technology so they can see through peoples clothes, and that was the best you could come up with?
Exploit a XSS attack on a major website, to exploit a major browser and force it to auto-launch a downloaded document, forcing a reboot of the machine?
Or hack a corporate internet application that generates such documents and distributes them so it distributes malformed documents across an enterprise.
Or write a worm that modifies all word documents it finds in this fashion then cleanly uninstalls itself after it's propagated to another machine.
So if someone is sharing an older ISO, and it happens to have large portions that exactly match the one you're downloading, with other portions that are not identical, you don't want to download the identical chunks off that person?
It would be interesting if the implementing software could also look for possible matches within your existing file structure and reduce the data downloaded automatically, kind of like using diff and just downloading the patch.
If it wasn't for adblock, I wouldn't come to slashdot anymore, or go to the sites I do go to. The presence of ads overrides whatever trivial value they might have had to offer.
I've already stopped watching television entirely, and buying magazines, and listening to the radio.
The modern equation is, the value of content is how much you can pollute it with propaganda and still have people keep reading. If the value of the content is high, you can surround it with flashy crap and people won't leave, if it's low, they won't.
#1 Fasterfox: Don't use it, it hammers webservers! There are a lot of links on the page that you are NEVER going to click on, mostly ads. This prefetches all those ads from the adservers webserver, but you're not looking at them! Not cool!
#2 NoScript: Don't use it, it's annoying. Plus, it screws up important scripts. For example, the article has these scripts:
function popup(... function popup_noscroll(... function switchPage(...// this ord is used for Double Click Integration ord=Math.random()*10000000000000000;
Do you really want to have to deal with the trouble?
#3 AdBlock: Do you think we do this to provide you with lame lists? We don't. We do this to make you watch ads. And you have to watch them! Didn't you get that under #2? You're breaking the social contract, you bastard!
Slashdot Mirror
This article is such a propaganda piece. I don't find it hard to imagine that said rich oligarch had a hand in financing it.
Broadcast mass media should be restricted to the government anyways. It doesn't belong in private hands.
Dude, the point is that they didn't have any violence at home, they just up and picked up all the men and put em in boats and carted em off for years and years. It's not a pissing contest.
In Soviet Russia, rich oligarchs that are hiding in Britain are not allowed to use their money to overthrow the government by sowing and supporting dissent?
An entire continent of women were abandoned for the better part of a decade while their men went off to war, then came back shell shocked and broken to women who'd had their families providers ripped away long ago and weren't the tender nurturers they used to be. A unique cultural trauma in the world. For both genders.
Try to be philosophical about it. Other cultures will rise.
They have several such products. There's a good one called VMWare.
Distributing game client software as a virtual machine image scoots around the whole operating system issue entirely, does it not?
If a company was so inclined, they could design their product to install on windows or on their own tweaked Wine, then distribute the windows installer for the current large windows base together with a VMWare image containing a barebones linux syste, with the tweaked wine and the game installed.
That would probably allow them to provide a higher-performance alternative for those who are using other operating systems, while still giving their application optimum Windows performance.
Because of the DRM. People don't trust it, and they're not buying it. They perceive that Vista is screwing them at a whole new level.
Aside from that, the compatibility with existing windows applications is pretty consistently reported to be poor, and that was the foundation upon which Wintel was built in the first place.
My point is that the people behind MySQL have no problem telling you that their software is suitable for a purpose even when it isn't.
They've come a long way, but unless I'm misinformed, they've still got problems with automatic data conversion breaking data integrity rules.
It wasn't that long ago they were pushing the worst possible practices as gospel to people who didn't know any better, all while labouring to catch up with the Jones because they knew they were behind.
They are deceitful.
Put it this way, which is more useful as a means of conveyance, a standard car that you don't know how to drive or a rocket car with one button, no steering and no breaks?
MySQL is a suitable tool for servicing trivial data at very high speeds. I don't knock that. My issue lies in the real fact that the team behind MySQL does not have a history of being forthright about the limitations of what they've built.
I don't think much of the parallels their corporate structure and licensing has with the whole Project Mayo/DivX debacle, either. It's just the sort of thing that leaves a sour taste in your mouth.
You know what it is?
It's lack of trust.
MySQL started off making their fast little datastore that uses a little SQL syntax, and they told everyone under the sun that if MySQL didn't do it, you didn't need it, and ought to design around it.
Referential integrity, ACID compliance, enforcement of rules... every step along the way, they tell you you don't need it and you ought to push the missing logic to the next tier, until they get it, if they get it, then they're so great.
Couple that with the Project Mayo/DivX corporate structure, then place Postgresql next to the whole shebang as a superior alternative, and the arguments for giving MySQL any of your attention become increasingly small.
MySQL owes its success to the fact that it was always so simple to choke it off when you were giving it to people on $5/month hosting plans, so it became popular among the very cheap.
Period.
Here's how I figure it.
During the second world war, entire civilizations of people, entire continents of people, all had their menfolk shipped away for years to fight on the other side of the world.
Many died.
While they were gone, women were forcibly taught not to trust the practical side of things to their menfolk and concern themselves with the continuation of the species and and the civilization, but rather to toughen themselves and be self-reliant and concerned with their own survival. Then men came back, and they had no one to nurture them.
Modern western civilization is an extension of that cultural scar, it's not healthy or sustainable, and it's going to collapse because of it.
North America has become the place genetic material comes to die.
Our culture, among the other things that it is, is like a special, magical secret, that if you tell it to a rat, they don't have babies anymore, but they still live and run around telling their friends.
Despite the magic of all that we've discovered and accomplished, the culture that will be important in the coming century won't be ours, because there won't be very many of us around.
We'll be a small minority in a world with tens of billions of people, and the people of those cultures will hopefully use the technology that we've developed to expand humanity off this planet.
That's our future.
There will be escalating desperate attempts to entice and rigidly control a massive influx of immigrant population so that the Boomers can live their retirement dreams before they go into the grave.
That will likely turn into a revolt, but it might be a relatively peaceful power shift through politics.
At any rate, those immigrant cultures will be in control, and their attitudes will be the dominant ones.
Our culture will become as significant as that of Tibet.
Religion has a utility.
e ts-court.html
If you're dealing with a bunch of peasants who are too primitive and uneducated to be able to behave in a fashion that is in their own long term self interest, religion will allow a wise man to say to his fellows "Forget why we should live this way, GOD said to live this way, so do it." and they do.
This will allow them to behave in a co-ordinated fashion, and that is going to provide them benefits.
But it makes them sheep.
If you follow a religion, you're following a cult of a dead wise primitive. If it's good advice, good. But when not if it becomes bad advice, you all die and scatter to the four winds. You die because you're a bunch of stupid sheep and you didn't know why you were doing what you were doing in the first place, let alone how to recognize when it's stopped being wise.
It's served humanity well. Take the whole sexual taboo thing. Look at Africa, the AIDS problem thing, imagine there's no condoms and no medicine. In an environment like that, the group of primitives that has a religion with sexual taboos will survive while the others go the way of Soddom.
But it's not ideal.
It's not even good, not by the standards of any educated person.
It's a bunch of lies and charlatanism and propaganda techniques, generally only effective on the young and the desperate.
People should be able to make educated and informed decisions about how to live without having their minds polluted with the belief that justifying actions and decisions with faith and desire instead of reason is an ok thing for them to do.
It's not an ok thing for them to do, it's an insane thing for them to do.
It makes them a danger to themselves and others, and it makes them a weapon with shining eyes and no brain, ready to be wielded by power-hungry charlatans.
Oh, if you want a more direct example, you can look at yesterdays headline on CBC.ca.
http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2007/04/16/sextupl
Jehovah's Witness parents of sextuplets. Don't believe in blood transfusions, so they let 2 of their babies die before someone with more sense than political savvy stepped in and seized the kids. Now they're suing the government for violating their human rights. They'll likely win. Shame about the dead babies...
I think the Western world is going to go away, actually. When the baby boomers die.
I don't hold much respect for any of this shit... it's a fucked up non-sustainable system we live in, and I fully expect to see collapse before I die.
Say what you will. The forces at work make the whole thing a moot point. It will happen just as I've outlined, and it will take less than 20 years.
The purpose of copyright is to subsidize creation for the larger benefit of society.
The cost of copyright is that those good works which are created are not distributed to the population as widely as they might be.
The goal is to have an educated, enlightened society which has been exposed to a great deal of culture and knowledge, that they might be better peers and neighbours.
When 90% of the society is too dog tired from working in the fields to even think about doing something so frivolous as writing...
When only the few and the rich can afford recording gear and instruments...
When the cost to respect the copyright and maintain an artist is a pittance next to the massive costs of the manufacturing and distribution network...
In such a civilization, copyright is a defensible mechanism.
This is not such a world.
In this world, it is trivial to distribute information.
It is trivial to get your hands on the tools to create.
It is trivial to find the idle time to set your hand to it.
And with 6 billion of us and growing, if you don't want to do it without getting paid, go to hell. Someone else will do it, you're not special.
In this world, it is a trivial enterprise to make vast libraries of culture and knowledge accessible to peasants in the jungle.
Soon, it will be trivial to provide a copy of every creative work ever made to every man, woman and child on earth.
At which point, the only thing holding us back from doing so will be small-minded dickheads harping about their "rights".
If you're a creator, stop thinking about copyright.
Brainstorm for other ideas on how you might get subsidized by our society without it being necessary to keep people isolated from what you've created, and throw your weight behind getting them into place.
The writing is on the wall. Copyright is done. Find another way.
Copyright infringement isn't stealing.
It shouldn't even be a crime.
It's an obsolete social mechanism that causes more than enough harm to offset any socially redeeming qualities it has.
This imbalance between harm and benefit becomes greater as our technological capacities increase.
If you make any long term plans around copyright continuing to exist, you're a fool, because it's not going to.
There's no debate. Analogue recordings are better. And they keep better too. If you make an analogue recording of something using top of the line equipment, 50 years from now, you'll be able to use superior tools to pull a more accurate representation of the sonic environment than anything we can do now. If you record digital, a bit is a bit is a bit.
Best method, use the highest quality analogue gear you can find to record, then sample it in the highest quality digital you can for editing and distribution, then throw the original analogue in the vault so you can re-sample it again in 5 years.
Islam is bad. But Christianity is worse.
Islam and Christianity are much worse than terrorists and the KKK.
Teaching religion to children is abuse. The children should be taken away.
Does that mean they're going to outlaw anything that's Pro-US?
It's not going to kill self-made video.
It's just going to kill any service provider stupid enough to try to use this technology.
The article also talks about the surprising applications this new technology may evolve into
Like making your dog's head explode.
The article talks about the military being interested in acquiring the technology so they can see through peoples clothes, and that was the best you could come up with?
That's weak.
Exploit a XSS attack on a major website, to exploit a major browser and force it to auto-launch a downloaded document, forcing a reboot of the machine?
Or hack a corporate internet application that generates such documents and distributes them so it distributes malformed documents across an enterprise.
Or write a worm that modifies all word documents it finds in this fashion then cleanly uninstalls itself after it's propagated to another machine.
Etc.
So if someone is sharing an older ISO, and it happens to have large portions that exactly match the one you're downloading, with other portions that are not identical, you don't want to download the identical chunks off that person?
It would be interesting if the implementing software could also look for possible matches within your existing file structure and reduce the data downloaded automatically, kind of like using diff and just downloading the patch.
Personally, I'm in favour of executing them.
This is neither a crime of passion nor of desperation. Kill em and have done with it.
If it wasn't for adblock, I wouldn't come to slashdot anymore, or go to the sites I do go to. The presence of ads overrides whatever trivial value they might have had to offer.
I've already stopped watching television entirely, and buying magazines, and listening to the radio.
The modern equation is, the value of content is how much you can pollute it with propaganda and still have people keep reading. If the value of the content is high, you can surround it with flashy crap and people won't leave, if it's low, they won't.
I don't like this equation. I won't participate.
That's funny as hell.
... ... ... // this ord is used for Double Click Integration
#1 Fasterfox: Don't use it, it hammers webservers! There are a lot of links on the page that you are NEVER going to click on, mostly ads. This prefetches all those ads from the adservers webserver, but you're not looking at them! Not cool!
#2 NoScript: Don't use it, it's annoying. Plus, it screws up important scripts. For example, the article has these scripts:
function popup(
function popup_noscroll(
function switchPage(
ord=Math.random()*10000000000000000;
Do you really want to have to deal with the trouble?
#3 AdBlock: Do you think we do this to provide you with lame lists? We don't. We do this to make you watch ads. And you have to watch them! Didn't you get that under #2? You're breaking the social contract, you bastard!
What a joke.