Paintballs travel at 300 feet per second. At 50 feet, that gives you 166 ms to see the paintball, determine where the paintball is going, and get out of the way.
Which doesn't happen. It's a little more realistic at 100 feet, and fairly easy to do at 150 - but again, this assumes that you happen to be looking at the person shooting when the paintball is fired, which in most cases is not true.
As for military types, I'm guessing you havn't played in at least 10 years, or you hang around with a lot of wierdo survivalist types. Go to any commercial field, and the vast majority of the players will be 10->18 years old, some with parents. The demographic is pretty much the same as the amusement park crowd, with less girls (as is true with most athletics, unfortunately.)
It should get appealed, and a wider panel with hopefully more sense will say "Yeah, the DMCA says that, but 1) This isn't what the DMCA was intened for 2) In conflicts with a bunch of other laws and 3) Democracy sucks, except that everything else is worse."
But default installations of his company's closed-source software kills systems.
Which creates jobs for people who fix systems.
I think Slashdot could really help with job creation. Every day, throw rocks through 5-10 windows. By the end of the year, we will have created millions of jobs in the window building industry. Granted, 10-20% of our economy will be window building, and everyone will be spending 10 to 20% of their money replacing windows, but we'll all have jobs!
Cheaper is only bad for people who used to provide the same thing for more money. In the case of Open Source, that's Microsoft.
Who said anything about "Truly verify identity"?
on
An Online ID Registry
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
IT seems some people here are overstating the problem - "You'll never be able to have a foolproof system for verifying peple's identity!" So what? That isn't the problem he's trying to solve.
The problem he's trying to solve is people avoiding paying for a service that offers free trials simply by creating multiple user IDs when the free trial is over. To prevent this, he doesn't need a foolproof system...
He just needs a system where it is EASIER TO PAY FOR THE SERVICE than it is to get another ID, for MOST people, MOST of the time.
If 1-5% of people still go through the bother of getting extra IDs, but 95-99% of people who would otherwise just keep abusing free trials end up paying for service instead, then the system might have value.
Whether that's enough value to justify the system however, I don't know. It seems a lot of places that have free trials actually BENEFIT from the "abuse" - take matchmaking sites for example. The larger a site is, the more value there is in a subscription. It's probably better for them to charge people willing to pay in order to keep the same login/profile and also have a buncha people who just keep doing free trials than it is to just have people who are willing to pay and get rid of the "leeches". Same reasoning as the "Pirated copies of Windows are good for microsoft" (market dominance) argument.
Ignore old Trek on the assumption that only the geekiest fans would remember that episode and the rest wouldn't care.
I think the real assumption is that a geeky fan who pays for a ticket isn't any better than a geeky fan who pays for a ticket and gets pissed off about plot inconsistencies.
If you were down to your last $1000 why in the world would you willingly hand it over to someone you have never heard for the promise of untold riches?
Because all of the prostitutes in your town are ugly?
For example, who really thinks that there is nothing wrong with going about pretending to be a dead persons uncle to claim money that isn't rightfully yours?
What's wrong with that? It's the $1,000 up-front out-of-pocket expense that I object to.
In the service industry, the customer who is paying the least, will invariably demand the greatest amount of service and attention. Big dollar-customers know what they want, know the value of what they are purchasing, and trust you to do it properly. I imagine there are similarities in the retail industry.
I'll take that one step further...
As a frequent purchaser of services, I make an effort to not piss the provider of said services off. Then, when I really *DO* need them to jump through some hoops for me, they're generally happy to return the favor.
I've bought the replacement plan once - for my laptop, which was the floor model (I needed the laptop right then, else I would have bought it online). Sure enough, 1.5 years later the thing wouldn't turn on.
I will say that if you DO have the replacement plan, the service is pretty damned good should you need to take advantage of it - one week turnaround from dropping the thing off to it being shipped back and in my possession.
But, I figured the replacement plan for something that had already taken some abuse was worth the gamble. Most things I just self-insure - should it break, I can scrap it and buy a new one.
That makes no sense - so you're arguing that people won't record anything because that'll be the only way to prevent copying....
But if it's not recorded, how are they going to sell it? They'd be better off selling 100 copies and having 1 million copies made for free than making no copies at all.
Just because you were allowed to do it doesn't make it a right - that's a common problem with a lot of people who post on Slashdot - they can't tell the difference between a right and a privilege.
Your assertion makes about as much sense as saying you have the RIGHT to get on an airplane without a photo ID. You don't. You USED to be able to do it, but your ability to do so in the past wasn't a right, just a privilege.
If you're an idiot, or you're consciously aware that your 'Study' is a pile of crap and you just want the extra traffic to your site.
Why do poor people need millions of dollars? Often, millions of dollars is considered to be a great democratizing and equalizing force. The people who most need equalizing are people who live in poverty. If they can't afford millions of dollars, how is it improving their lives? Maybe through trickle-down Reaganomics?
In any case, our goal was simply to get a bunch of people to visit our site and look at the information we made up and the links to a bunch of cyber cafes that have long since gone out of business. We seem to have been successful.
Slashdot Mirror
Paintballs travel at 300 feet per second. At 50 feet, that gives you 166 ms to see the paintball, determine where the paintball is going, and get out of the way.
Which doesn't happen. It's a little more realistic at 100 feet, and fairly easy to do at 150 - but again, this assumes that you happen to be looking at the person shooting when the paintball is fired, which in most cases is not true.
As for military types, I'm guessing you havn't played in at least 10 years, or you hang around with a lot of wierdo survivalist types. Go to any commercial field, and the vast majority of the players will be 10->18 years old, some with parents. The demographic is pretty much the same as the amusement park crowd, with less girls (as is true with most athletics, unfortunately.)
Those insensitive clods!
that my groceries won't check out properly
If you think checking them out will be bad, just wait until you try to return them!
Was that we needed to use atomic weapons at all.
Although it would take more flights, we could have killed just as many civilians by continuing our campaign of firebombing.
We destroyed 2 cities with nukes. We destroyed 4 cities by firebombing; in total about equalling the number of casualties.
Even if we had not used nukes, there's no reason to suspect we couldn't have accomplished the same task with further firebombing.
The map is misleading. The radiation doses are affected much more so by elevation than fallout, for most of the country.
At least this explains the high doses for such mountainous states as North and South Dakota, Iowa, and Missouri.
It should get appealed, and a wider panel with hopefully more sense will say "Yeah, the DMCA says that, but 1) This isn't what the DMCA was intened for 2) In conflicts with a bunch of other laws and 3) Democracy sucks, except that everything else is worse."
But default installations of his company's closed-source software kills systems.
Which creates jobs for people who fix systems.
I think Slashdot could really help with job creation. Every day, throw rocks through 5-10 windows. By the end of the year, we will have created millions of jobs in the window building industry. Granted, 10-20% of our economy will be window building, and everyone will be spending 10 to 20% of their money replacing windows, but we'll all have jobs!
Cheaper is only bad for people who used to provide the same thing for more money. In the case of Open Source, that's Microsoft.
IT seems some people here are overstating the problem - "You'll never be able to have a foolproof system for verifying peple's identity!" So what? That isn't the problem he's trying to solve.
The problem he's trying to solve is people avoiding paying for a service that offers free trials simply by creating multiple user IDs when the free trial is over. To prevent this, he doesn't need a foolproof system...
He just needs a system where it is EASIER TO PAY FOR THE SERVICE than it is to get another ID, for MOST people, MOST of the time.
If 1-5% of people still go through the bother of getting extra IDs, but 95-99% of people who would otherwise just keep abusing free trials end up paying for service instead, then the system might have value.
Whether that's enough value to justify the system however, I don't know. It seems a lot of places that have free trials actually BENEFIT from the "abuse" - take matchmaking sites for example. The larger a site is, the more value there is in a subscription. It's probably better for them to charge people willing to pay in order to keep the same login/profile and also have a buncha people who just keep doing free trials than it is to just have people who are willing to pay and get rid of the "leeches". Same reasoning as the "Pirated copies of Windows are good for microsoft" (market dominance) argument.
considering the last movie (they killed off Data, the bastards)
That I was not aware of this makes me refreshingly aware that I must have saved myself $9 over the past year or two...
Ignore old Trek on the assumption that only the geekiest fans would remember that episode and the rest wouldn't care.
I think the real assumption is that a geeky fan who pays for a ticket isn't any better than a geeky fan who pays for a ticket and gets pissed off about plot inconsistencies.
Maybe the Romulans wear Vulcan disguises?
Furthermore, a lot of the "stupid" have already spawned.
Well, that's at least good news for us morally bankrupt folk. Nice to know your market is expanding.
If you were down to your last $1000 why in the world would you willingly hand it over to someone you have never heard for the promise of untold riches?
Because all of the prostitutes in your town are ugly?
For example, who really thinks that there is nothing wrong with going about pretending to be a dead persons uncle to claim money that isn't rightfully yours?
What's wrong with that? It's the $1,000 up-front out-of-pocket expense that I object to.
You can always return a Best Buy service plan for the pro-rated value of the plan.
In the service industry, the customer who is paying the least, will invariably demand the greatest amount of service and attention. Big dollar-customers know what they want, know the value of what they are purchasing, and trust you to do it properly. I imagine there are similarities in the retail industry.
I'll take that one step further...
As a frequent purchaser of services, I make an effort to not piss the provider of said services off. Then, when I really *DO* need them to jump through some hoops for me, they're generally happy to return the favor.
I've bought the replacement plan once - for my laptop, which was the floor model (I needed the laptop right then, else I would have bought it online). Sure enough, 1.5 years later the thing wouldn't turn on.
I will say that if you DO have the replacement plan, the service is pretty damned good should you need to take advantage of it - one week turnaround from dropping the thing off to it being shipped back and in my possession.
But, I figured the replacement plan for something that had already taken some abuse was worth the gamble. Most things I just self-insure - should it break, I can scrap it and buy a new one.
It could have been raspberry jam.
They're betting that these mechanisms will establish control.
They could just as easily push everyone to use the content that doesn't use these mechanisms.
That makes no sense - so you're arguing that people won't record anything because that'll be the only way to prevent copying....
But if it's not recorded, how are they going to sell it? They'd be better off selling 100 copies and having 1 million copies made for free than making no copies at all.
Just because you were allowed to do it doesn't make it a right - that's a common problem with a lot of people who post on Slashdot - they can't tell the difference between a right and a privilege.
Your assertion makes about as much sense as saying you have the RIGHT to get on an airplane without a photo ID. You don't. You USED to be able to do it, but your ability to do so in the past wasn't a right, just a privilege.
If content producers want to control how their content is distributed, isn't that the content producer's perogative?
It's not so much telling you what you can do with your machine as telling you what you can do with their content.
If you're an idiot, or you're consciously aware that your 'Study' is a pile of crap and you just want the extra traffic to your site.
Why do poor people need millions of dollars? Often, millions of dollars is considered to be a great democratizing and equalizing force. The people who most need equalizing are people who live in poverty. If they can't afford millions of dollars, how is it improving their lives? Maybe through trickle-down Reaganomics?
In any case, our goal was simply to get a bunch of people to visit our site and look at the information we made up and the links to a bunch of cyber cafes that have long since gone out of business. We seem to have been successful.
This is not a study. This is an advertisement for his site.