If nobody would write viruses, nobody would need virus scanners.
That's of course very true. Also, if no-one stole anything, we wouldn't need locks. If people weren't violent, we would have no need for police.
[/sarcasm]
Seriously, though, wouldn't the whole world work better if people just realised that their actions have a direct result on the quality of everyone's life? People in general don't recognise that society is an unspoken contract: they don't realise that their actions either enrich society, or make it worse. The "What's in it for me" crowd are the ones who make society much much worse for everyone.
Utopia doesn't exist, though, so we all have to do what we can to make our own part of society a better place.
The problem with this though is that if there is no recognised reward for doing the right thing by society, then there will be less inclination to do the right thing. So most people will just do what's right for themselves, contributing that little bit more to the decline...
A common number plate among asians where I grew up included the number 168. I asked a chinese guy I worked with what it was all about, and his explanation was:
I have a Waltham (actually it belongs to my wife...), an IWC and a Stewart Dawson & Co pocket watch. These watches are works of art - if you've never seen an old pocket watch working, you're really missing out.
I worked for a short time at a computer retailer, who assembled their own PCs for government departments and such. Every single case had maybe 40-50 screws too many, so by the time I got there they had buckets and buckets of computer screws. An urban legend circulating around at the time had that they gave a work experience kid the job of sorting the buckets of mixed screws into bins of each kind. The funny part of the legend is at the end of the day, when they tipped all the sorted bins back into the big bucket, right in front of the work experience kid...
I buy my 3com 3c905 and Intel Etherexpress Pro 10/100 cards from garagae sales and flea markets for no more than $5AUD each (about 3EUR). Of course, this isn't a valid scenario for business use, but it keeps my home network running nicely.
Is that really a problem for him, though? If his motive is (as many here suspect) pure profit, surely he would have cashed most of his checks by then and the outcome of any trial SCO vs IBM or whatever becomes irrelevent. It's the outcome of that other (potential) trial, SEC vs McBride et al that he would have to worry about...
It was special enough to recognize in our bill of rights. The highest law of the land recognizes it as a right, that's what makes it special.
So, by your own reasoning, why did the USA invade Iraq? Saddam Hussain was exercising his right to bear arms. Where do you draw the line on arms? Is it firearms? Is it knives? Is it biological weapons? Is it a baseball bat? Is it cruise missiles with nuclear warheads? Is it automatic weapons? All of these are "arms", where is your line drawn on what you are allowed by your constitution to bear?
What you are missing is the fact that our universe *did* come into being. It's all well and good to say that the odds against it are 100:1 or whatever, but the fact of the matter is that we are part of the universe that beat the house, so to speak. Maybe we are but one of 100 parallel universes - we'll never know if the other possible universes exist or not.
Using the low probability of our universe coming into being as an argument either in favour or against any scientific theory is like telling the guy who won $10,000,00 on lotto that his $2 investment in a ticket was stupid because the odds were so bad.
It was Godel who proved that the rules of logic are both complete and consistent. He also proved (within the framework of logic) that anything with a set of rules at least as complex as basic arithmetic on integers cannot be both complete and consistent. By "complete", it means that any proposition that can be stated within that framework can be proved within that framework. By "consistent" it means that only one of the proposition and its negation can be proved within the framework.
There are many other very interesting results from number theory developed during the 20th century, but I think Godel's was the most important of those.
You are right, of course, but your example leaves a little to be desired. 80 points is a significant amount of a 10,000 point market. 1 per cent in a day is a big change - imagine if you could get 1% per business day return on $10000. After a year, you'd have tripled your money.
Look at DVDs. I'm speaking only for myself but I would be far less interested in downloading a DiVX rip of a movie than a MP3 of a song. The fact of the matter is that more is lost in the translation of the DVD; I don't get surround sound and I don't get extras or outtakes.
And there's the rub - with a DVD, you get all sorts of "extras" that you don't (very often) get with the downloaded, compressed movie.
If the music companies realised that people would pay more for extras on a music CD, like film clips, like passwords to one-time downloads (buddy icons, ring tones, phone logos, etc), then the music companies would start getting back that demographic that currently pirates the most CDs - the 12-20 year olds.
But that's just my opinion, it'll take a whole lot of money and "focus groups" to prove me right, so until then, the record companies will just keep on doing what they're doing: alienating customers.
I'm sorry, but someone who owns a NeXT Station cannot possibly own a sexier computer, unless he also has a hexagonal, liquid-cooled couch in his basement.
For me, the #1 reason why KDE is better than GNOME is GNOME's appalling support for multi-monitor, non-xinerama desktops (hint: it doesn't). Even though I use blackbox, if I had to choose between KDE and GNOME, KDE would win for that single feature.
It seems that slashcode ate my "original reply" - it went along the lines of it's not my CD drive - I tried the CD in 6 different systems with 3 different OS'es, with no luck. On one system I was able to get the first 6 tracks, while more modern CD drives couldn't even recognise the disc as an audio CD.
Forgot to add in my original reply, the fact that you can rip the CD is not really the point. The record company is being deceptive in their dealings, by selling a defective product. I am not going to pay extra for a product that is inferior to a red book CD. Don't think that the companies who develop the cd protection mechanisms give them away - the record companies have to pay a license to use them, most likely a per-cd fee. I'm happy to vote with my feet at this stage, by only buying CDs with the genuine, philips-endorsed, "Compact Disc" logo.
The ring tone point is also interesting, except for ( well, down under at least ), mobile ringtones are widely sold for any given popular song of the minute through automated services, and usually include all the latest "young person" tunes.
And that is exactly my point. The ringtones have value - add that value to the CD, or bundle it for free when you buy the CD (perhaps it could still be available separately). People pay to download the eminem logo to their phone - if the record company had any brains they would tie that download to a CD sale, rather than to an extra trail of revenue. ARIA (since I am downunder, too) is the Australian Recording Industry Association - their product is primarily music. Make the music worthwhile to buy (even if it means giving away that which they previously got "extra" profit from), and they sell more records. People who used to download music and pay to buy ringtones will now just buy the music, if they get the ringtones for free. At least, that's my theory.
I have some CDE disks in my library, and they are just audio cd's with ISO9660 content on them ( again, usually concert clips, etc ).
The CD was the new album by Jet; I particularly like the "Are you gonna be my girl" song. My experience with the "CD enhanced" format has been all bad - I have a Ben Harper CD that sometimes breaks my CD player when it plays on random - I have to turn the CD player off then on again when it barfs at the broken table of contents on that particular CD. It's not a junky CD player, either - not high-high-end, but certainly not something you buy at KMart.
My bad experience with that one CD (and also the fact that I can't rip it to MP3 to listen on my MP3 player) means I will never buy a CD again that doesn't have the real "Compact Disc" logo.
The cereal box trinkets are not aimed at the 20-50 demographic. They are aimed purely at the teenagers who would otherwise download the songs from the internet. Rather than threaten them with legal action, the record companies should be encouraging them to buy more CDs. If a teenager has a so-called "buddy icon" on their IM, and everyone goes "hey, that's cool - where did you get it?", they are going to reply that they got it with such-and-such album. I notice that record companies give away the buddy icons - there is a marketing opportunity lost, that they can potentially use to attract people back to buying CDs. Make the buddy icons valuable by lobking out those who haven't bought the CD, and you instantly make them more popular.
Similarly with ring-tones - send in a coupon you get with a CD, and the record company emails you a one-use password for a ring-tone for your mobile phone with the tune of one of the songs on the album. It also gets those teenagers onto your mailing list, which means you can send them more "special offers" etc as a reward for "supporting our artists".
As for the 20-50 demographic, I have no ideas on how to get them to buy more CDs, although I will say that I am in that particular (broad) demographic. I went into my local record store the other day with the intention of buying a particular CD, then when I noticed it had the "CD enhanced" logo on it, I bought a book instead. I've tried to find an email address for the particular record company to let them know that I didn't buy the CD because of their practice of crippling the CDs, but can't as yet find one.
Slashdot Mirror
We have a euphemism for masturbation around here: "Charging the Torch". Obvious, really, when you see the hand-powered torch demonstrated...
Fairy Nuff.
I thought OO used XML as its internal data structure. XML is inherently tag-ful.
Q. Why do the Irish nickname their currency the "punt"?
A. Because it rhymes with "Bank Manager".
That's of course very true. Also, if no-one stole anything, we wouldn't need locks. If people weren't violent, we would have no need for police. [/sarcasm]
Seriously, though, wouldn't the whole world work better if people just realised that their actions have a direct result on the quality of everyone's life? People in general don't recognise that society is an unspoken contract: they don't realise that their actions either enrich society, or make it worse. The "What's in it for me" crowd are the ones who make society much much worse for everyone.
Utopia doesn't exist, though, so we all have to do what we can to make our own part of society a better place.
The problem with this though is that if there is no recognised reward for doing the right thing by society, then there will be less inclination to do the right thing. So most people will just do what's right for themselves, contributing that little bit more to the decline...
A common number plate among asians where I grew up included the number 168. I asked a chinese guy I worked with what it was all about, and his explanation was:
'1' for One;
'6' was like "Way";
'8' was like "fortune" or "prosperity".
So the explanation was "1 way (to) prosperity".
That's true, unless IE has hung, in which case it will close all the open IE windows. And Windows Explorer, too. Go figure.
Alt-F4 is your friend.
I have a Waltham (actually it belongs to my wife...), an IWC and a Stewart Dawson & Co pocket watch. These watches are works of art - if you've never seen an old pocket watch working, you're really missing out.
I worked for a short time at a computer retailer, who assembled their own PCs for government departments and such. Every single case had maybe 40-50 screws too many, so by the time I got there they had buckets and buckets of computer screws. An urban legend circulating around at the time had that they gave a work experience kid the job of sorting the buckets of mixed screws into bins of each kind. The funny part of the legend is at the end of the day, when they tipped all the sorted bins back into the big bucket, right in front of the work experience kid...
I buy my 3com 3c905 and Intel Etherexpress Pro 10/100 cards from garagae sales and flea markets for no more than $5AUD each (about 3EUR). Of course, this isn't a valid scenario for business use, but it keeps my home network running nicely.
Is that really a problem for him, though? If his motive is (as many here suspect) pure profit, surely he would have cashed most of his checks by then and the outcome of any trial SCO vs IBM or whatever becomes irrelevent. It's the outcome of that other (potential) trial, SEC vs McBride et al that he would have to worry about...
So, by your own reasoning, why did the USA invade Iraq? Saddam Hussain was exercising his right to bear arms. Where do you draw the line on arms? Is it firearms? Is it knives? Is it biological weapons? Is it a baseball bat? Is it cruise missiles with nuclear warheads? Is it automatic weapons? All of these are "arms", where is your line drawn on what you are allowed by your constitution to bear?
What you are missing is the fact that our universe *did* come into being. It's all well and good to say that the odds against it are 100:1 or whatever, but the fact of the matter is that we are part of the universe that beat the house, so to speak. Maybe we are but one of 100 parallel universes - we'll never know if the other possible universes exist or not.
Using the low probability of our universe coming into being as an argument either in favour or against any scientific theory is like telling the guy who won $10,000,00 on lotto that his $2 investment in a ticket was stupid because the odds were so bad.
It was Godel who proved that the rules of logic are both complete and consistent. He also proved (within the framework of logic) that anything with a set of rules at least as complex as basic arithmetic on integers cannot be both complete and consistent. By "complete", it means that any proposition that can be stated within that framework can be proved within that framework. By "consistent" it means that only one of the proposition and its negation can be proved within the framework.
There are many other very interesting results from number theory developed during the 20th century, but I think Godel's was the most important of those.
You are right, of course, but your example leaves a little to be desired. 80 points is a significant amount of a 10,000 point market. 1 per cent in a day is a big change - imagine if you could get 1% per business day return on $10000. After a year, you'd have tripled your money.
No, it's not, honey.
"Anyways" is not a word.
And there's the rub - with a DVD, you get all sorts of "extras" that you don't (very often) get with the downloaded, compressed movie.
If the music companies realised that people would pay more for extras on a music CD, like film clips, like passwords to one-time downloads (buddy icons, ring tones, phone logos, etc), then the music companies would start getting back that demographic that currently pirates the most CDs - the 12-20 year olds.
But that's just my opinion, it'll take a whole lot of money and "focus groups" to prove me right, so until then, the record companies will just keep on doing what they're doing: alienating customers.
I'm sorry, but someone who owns a NeXT Station cannot possibly own a sexier computer, unless he also has a hexagonal, liquid-cooled couch in his basement.
For me, the #1 reason why KDE is better than GNOME is GNOME's appalling support for multi-monitor, non-xinerama desktops (hint: it doesn't). Even though I use blackbox, if I had to choose between KDE and GNOME, KDE would win for that single feature.
It seems that slashcode ate my "original reply" - it went along the lines of it's not my CD drive - I tried the CD in 6 different systems with 3 different OS'es, with no luck. On one system I was able to get the first 6 tracks, while more modern CD drives couldn't even recognise the disc as an audio CD.
Forgot to add in my original reply, the fact that you can rip the CD is not really the point. The record company is being deceptive in their dealings, by selling a defective product. I am not going to pay extra for a product that is inferior to a red book CD. Don't think that the companies who develop the cd protection mechanisms give them away - the record companies have to pay a license to use them, most likely a per-cd fee. I'm happy to vote with my feet at this stage, by only buying CDs with the genuine, philips-endorsed, "Compact Disc" logo.
And that is exactly my point. The ringtones have value - add that value to the CD, or bundle it for free when you buy the CD (perhaps it could still be available separately). People pay to download the eminem logo to their phone - if the record company had any brains they would tie that download to a CD sale, rather than to an extra trail of revenue. ARIA (since I am downunder, too) is the Australian Recording Industry Association - their product is primarily music. Make the music worthwhile to buy (even if it means giving away that which they previously got "extra" profit from), and they sell more records. People who used to download music and pay to buy ringtones will now just buy the music, if they get the ringtones for free. At least, that's my theory.
I have some CDE disks in my library, and they are just audio cd's with ISO9660 content on them ( again, usually concert clips, etc ).
The CD was the new album by Jet; I particularly like the "Are you gonna be my girl" song. My experience with the "CD enhanced" format has been all bad - I have a Ben Harper CD that sometimes breaks my CD player when it plays on random - I have to turn the CD player off then on again when it barfs at the broken table of contents on that particular CD. It's not a junky CD player, either - not high-high-end, but certainly not something you buy at KMart.
My bad experience with that one CD (and also the fact that I can't rip it to MP3 to listen on my MP3 player) means I will never buy a CD again that doesn't have the real "Compact Disc" logo.
Similarly with ring-tones - send in a coupon you get with a CD, and the record company emails you a one-use password for a ring-tone for your mobile phone with the tune of one of the songs on the album. It also gets those teenagers onto your mailing list, which means you can send them more "special offers" etc as a reward for "supporting our artists".
As for the 20-50 demographic, I have no ideas on how to get them to buy more CDs, although I will say that I am in that particular (broad) demographic. I went into my local record store the other day with the intention of buying a particular CD, then when I noticed it had the "CD enhanced" logo on it, I bought a book instead. I've tried to find an email address for the particular record company to let them know that I didn't buy the CD because of their practice of crippling the CDs, but can't as yet find one.