I can just imagine someone using that argument, "Sorry, I had to pirate the music; all the marketing made me want it so bad. It's society's fault."
I guess that really doesn't fly with me. Yes, I do think that marketing is definitely high-pressure, but that doesn't mean absolve people of personal responsibility. I'd much rather people stand up and say "I pirate music because I don't want to pay for it" than to try and pass the blame on to society.
Yes the piracy losses figures are a joke, but that doesn't mean piracy isn't an issue. Certainly some sales have been lost, even if some sales may have been gained. In many ways it's the fault of the record companies. We used to be under the illusion that buying a CD supported the artist, but with that gone it's hard for a lot of people to feel bad about pirating music. Even worse, given the behavior of some record companies, to buy a CD from them could be considered wrong or dangerous (I'm looking at you SONY).
If God had taken out patents, people would be able to reference them, a good thing. We could probably cure cancer, and the whole Human Genome thing wouldn't have been necessary.
Also, they would have expired twenty years after they were granted, so they'd be public domain now anyway.
"These days we're talking about capacities that can hold ALL the information of every hurricane evar on a single disk. What a ways we've come." (emphasis mine)
I'll be pedantic.
You're not thinking big enough. ALL of the information would be the location of every molecule of air, etc at every point in time during the hurricane. For that, we would need a hard drive as massive as the hurricane for each point in time. I think we would quickly run out of mass in the universe if we stored ALL of the information.:-)
If you look at the linked article, it directs to the XVIVO site, not his blog. In the past he often linked to his blog which linked to the article, but lately his ways seem to have changed. Clicking his name will still take you to his blog, but I don't see anything wrong with that.
While I'll admit that a good cable modem can make a lot of difference over a bad one (and when I've had cable, the surfboard behaved admirably), a sketchy modem is one of many places that cable can have problems.
Then why has the Bush administration cut taxes to the wealthiest people and raised spending, sending the deficit higher than it's ever been before? Under Clinton we were paying it off.
We're all for freedom of religion.
I'm skeptical of this one. The republican party seems intent on keeping everyone a functional christian through the legal system. Gay people can't get married, sodomy is illegal in some places. Even fornication (an unmarried couple having sex) is technically illegal in some localities, even if only used against prostitutes and their customers.
As for the rest of the things on your list, all you've managed to prove is that on some issues, definitions are ambiguous enough that both people can believe the "same thing". The education one is an example of this. Another example would be "We all agree that we should work toward a better society". Unfortunately, my definition of a better society isn't one where everyone goes to a lutheran church.
Lastly, the rest of those issues are things where the journey is the issue, not the destination. Protecting the environment and hindering terrorism are two prime examples of this. Please don't try and simplify politics with things like this. I feel like the only thing that we can agree on is: We're all human. We all have fingers, toes, mothers, and fathers. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean we agree that we shouldn't kill each other or that we should respect each other.
Once someone knows how to browse the internet, anyone with any amount of intelligence can figure out how to edit a wiki. Were you taught how to edit a wiki? I certainly hope not. I figured it out in half a second, and I would trust anyone who can browse the internet to figure it out in less than a minute unless they're severely disabled. Wikipedia is peppered with edit buttons; they're not hard to find. As a last resort, a ferry operator could always ask someone how to edit wikipedia. So not only does this person lack any computer skills, they lack communication skills or any problem solving skills.
Lastly, anyone who uses their own ignorance as an argument is someone to be avoided.
"We've thrown tens of billions of dollars on a pride issue, and what have we gotten in return? How much more do we know about the universe?"
What about the Hubble space telescope? That has taught us amazing things. How can you possibly say that NASA hasn't done anything worthwhile? Because of Hubble we know that the universe is actually accelerating outward. Hubble alone is worth the space program.
Actually, when I installed Windows XP on my iMac and installed drivers it only took an hour. Most of that was the actual XP installation. It was also probably one of the least painful windows installations I've ever done, sadly enough. I'll admit, I've only ever done it on a home-brew machine before.
Pounds is a measure of force (specifically weight). The US system doesn't have a true measurement of mass. Wikipedia provides a spot of interesting information. Please, don't confuse weight and mass!
I know you were joking, but here's the reason that performance enhancing drugs are banned.
When you add drugs into the equation then suddenly everyone needs them even to be competitive. Then, athletics becomes a race to see who's willing to shorten their life the most and shrink their testicles the most. That's not athleticism, it's a mass suicide.
"I think gambling is a tax on people who are bad at math, and should be 100% legal."
Plenty of people who know on an intellectual level that the odds are against them don't know this on an emotional level. There's a compulsion (not always) to test the odds or a feeling that this might be the time. Some people find their emotions on the matter too strong to overcome with what they know about gambling.
That said, I still think it should be legal, but gambling addiction should be confronted as a problem in our society.
While I agree that high end Apples are very expensive, you say that they are noisy. The G5 is one of the quietest towers I've ever seen. At my university we have a lab about half filled with G5s and half filled with some flavor of dell thing. The G5s are very quiet. I think the G4s were the last tower to be really loud, but I just replaced mine with a new iMac, and I've never heard so much as a peep out of it, even while playing some pretty beefy games or doing video encoding.
Don't feed the troll please. Please notice the total lack of command that the grand-parent has over the english language. It was clearly not written by anyone who's ever had to write any kind of serious paper (a necessity for a humanities PhD). Also, if he's on his way to a PhD, he is definitely not in line for tenure. Universities don't hire their own doctoral graduates. It's the worst of intellectual incest. Finally, all the extraneous line breaks in the post imply that it was copy and pasted from some shoddy text editor. There are a couple other clues, but they mostly fall under the command-of-the-english-language umbrella.
Games don't make use of the second core? Who the fuck is writing these things!? Shouldn't Windows be able to make it use the other core for parallel tasks?
Anyone?
I guess my definition of an operating system that supports multiple processors is a little different from Microsoft's.
A Missed Market
on
Talking iPods
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Apple is probably doing this to make their devices more accessible to the blind. OS X has a fairly sophisticated accessibility suite, and perhaps their extending it to their iPods. I know a blind person who would love to have an iPod, if it were accessible.
All of that said, I really hope this is something I can turn the fuck off. When I got my mobile phone it made a noise every time I'd press a button, when I'd turn it off, when I'd turn it on, when I'd dial a number, and probably a few things that I never got to. I was glad that I could turn it all off, otherwise I would have had to return it.
There seems to be an obsession with our technology beeping and buzzing to respond to our input. I know when I press a button; I don't need a noise to tell me what happened. The only time my phone needs to make noise is when I'm getting a phone call.
Slashdot Mirror
I can just imagine someone using that argument, "Sorry, I had to pirate the music; all the marketing made me want it so bad. It's society's fault."
I guess that really doesn't fly with me. Yes, I do think that marketing is definitely high-pressure, but that doesn't mean absolve people of personal responsibility. I'd much rather people stand up and say "I pirate music because I don't want to pay for it" than to try and pass the blame on to society.
Yes the piracy losses figures are a joke, but that doesn't mean piracy isn't an issue. Certainly some sales have been lost, even if some sales may have been gained. In many ways it's the fault of the record companies. We used to be under the illusion that buying a CD supported the artist, but with that gone it's hard for a lot of people to feel bad about pirating music. Even worse, given the behavior of some record companies, to buy a CD from them could be considered wrong or dangerous (I'm looking at you SONY).
Assuming the existence of God:
If God had taken out patents, people would be able to reference them, a good thing. We could probably cure cancer, and the whole Human Genome thing wouldn't have been necessary.
Also, they would have expired twenty years after they were granted, so they'd be public domain now anyway.
If only God actually HAD taken out patents...
"These days we're talking about capacities that can hold ALL the information of every hurricane evar on a single disk. What a ways we've come."
:-)
(emphasis mine)
I'll be pedantic.
You're not thinking big enough. ALL of the information would be the location of every molecule of air, etc at every point in time during the hurricane. For that, we would need a hard drive as massive as the hurricane for each point in time. I think we would quickly run out of mass in the universe if we stored ALL of the information.
Truthfully, I misremembered it. I'm not sure what that does to the joke. Perhaps it does enhance it?
I never noticed before that replying to comments strips away the signatures. Why is that anyway? You hear that slashdot?
"Please correct me if my facts are wrong."
:-)
(from the parents signature, for those who have them disabled)
I don't even know where to begin...
If you look at the linked article, it directs to the XVIVO site, not his blog. In the past he often linked to his blog which linked to the article, but lately his ways seem to have changed. Clicking his name will still take you to his blog, but I don't see anything wrong with that.
While I'll admit that a good cable modem can make a lot of difference over a bad one (and when I've had cable, the surfboard behaved admirably), a sketchy modem is one of many places that cable can have problems.
We're all for reducing the deficit.
Then why has the Bush administration cut taxes to the wealthiest people and raised spending, sending the deficit higher than it's ever been before? Under Clinton we were paying it off.
We're all for freedom of religion.
I'm skeptical of this one. The republican party seems intent on keeping everyone a functional christian through the legal system. Gay people can't get married, sodomy is illegal in some places. Even fornication (an unmarried couple having sex) is technically illegal in some localities, even if only used against prostitutes and their customers.
As for the rest of the things on your list, all you've managed to prove is that on some issues, definitions are ambiguous enough that both people can believe the "same thing". The education one is an example of this. Another example would be "We all agree that we should work toward a better society". Unfortunately, my definition of a better society isn't one where everyone goes to a lutheran church.
Lastly, the rest of those issues are things where the journey is the issue, not the destination. Protecting the environment and hindering terrorism are two prime examples of this. Please don't try and simplify politics with things like this. I feel like the only thing that we can agree on is: We're all human. We all have fingers, toes, mothers, and fathers. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean we agree that we shouldn't kill each other or that we should respect each other.
Once someone knows how to browse the internet, anyone with any amount of intelligence can figure out how to edit a wiki. Were you taught how to edit a wiki? I certainly hope not. I figured it out in half a second, and I would trust anyone who can browse the internet to figure it out in less than a minute unless they're severely disabled. Wikipedia is peppered with edit buttons; they're not hard to find. As a last resort, a ferry operator could always ask someone how to edit wikipedia. So not only does this person lack any computer skills, they lack communication skills or any problem solving skills.
Lastly, anyone who uses their own ignorance as an argument is someone to be avoided.
French would be a better language to teach. It's easier to learn, and it's a language already in use by most of the ivory coast.
Just out of curiosity, why don't cancer patients have to worry about addiction?
"We've thrown tens of billions of dollars on a pride issue, and what have we gotten in return? How much more do we know about the universe?"
p e
What about the Hubble space telescope? That has taught us amazing things. How can you possibly say that NASA hasn't done anything worthwhile? Because of Hubble we know that the universe is actually accelerating outward. Hubble alone is worth the space program.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telesco
To be fair, VHS has better sound quality than BetaMax
Actually, when I installed Windows XP on my iMac and installed drivers it only took an hour. Most of that was the actual XP installation. It was also probably one of the least painful windows installations I've ever done, sadly enough. I'll admit, I've only ever done it on a home-brew machine before.
It's not a canon. It's a chaconne.
"that's why Star Wars is considered fantasy by most people that care about fantasy"
I really think it's considered fantasy by most people who care about _Sci-Fi_.
Startrek has always been about the group overcoming a challenge. This is why I prefer it to most other science fiction.
I really think you distinction is artificial. There are plenty of fantasy settings with only a single hero.
I'd argue that a single hero is more conducive to a game anyway, unless it features co-op multiplayer (drool).
Pounds is a measure of force (specifically weight). The US system doesn't have a true measurement of mass. Wikipedia provides a spot of interesting information. Please, don't confuse weight and mass!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._customary_units
I know you were joking, but here's the reason that performance enhancing drugs are banned.
When you add drugs into the equation then suddenly everyone needs them even to be competitive. Then, athletics becomes a race to see who's willing to shorten their life the most and shrink their testicles the most. That's not athleticism, it's a mass suicide.
"I think gambling is a tax on people who are bad at math, and should be 100% legal."
Plenty of people who know on an intellectual level that the odds are against them don't know this on an emotional level. There's a compulsion (not always) to test the odds or a feeling that this might be the time. Some people find their emotions on the matter too strong to overcome with what they know about gambling.
That said, I still think it should be legal, but gambling addiction should be confronted as a problem in our society.
While I agree that high end Apples are very expensive, you say that they are noisy. The G5 is one of the quietest towers I've ever seen. At my university we have a lab about half filled with G5s and half filled with some flavor of dell thing. The G5s are very quiet. I think the G4s were the last tower to be really loud, but I just replaced mine with a new iMac, and I've never heard so much as a peep out of it, even while playing some pretty beefy games or doing video encoding.
Wastage?
Fuck you for diluting the language.
Don't feed the troll please. Please notice the total lack of command that the grand-parent has over the english language. It was clearly not written by anyone who's ever had to write any kind of serious paper (a necessity for a humanities PhD). Also, if he's on his way to a PhD, he is definitely not in line for tenure. Universities don't hire their own doctoral graduates. It's the worst of intellectual incest. Finally, all the extraneous line breaks in the post imply that it was copy and pasted from some shoddy text editor. There are a couple other clues, but they mostly fall under the command-of-the-english-language umbrella.
Games don't make use of the second core? Who the fuck is writing these things!? Shouldn't Windows be able to make it use the other core for parallel tasks?
Anyone?
I guess my definition of an operating system that supports multiple processors is a little different from Microsoft's.
Apple is probably doing this to make their devices more accessible to the blind. OS X has a fairly sophisticated accessibility suite, and perhaps their extending it to their iPods. I know a blind person who would love to have an iPod, if it were accessible.
All of that said, I really hope this is something I can turn the fuck off. When I got my mobile phone it made a noise every time I'd press a button, when I'd turn it off, when I'd turn it on, when I'd dial a number, and probably a few things that I never got to. I was glad that I could turn it all off, otherwise I would have had to return it.
There seems to be an obsession with our technology beeping and buzzing to respond to our input. I know when I press a button; I don't need a noise to tell me what happened. The only time my phone needs to make noise is when I'm getting a phone call.