It's not that they don't register... it's that watching and listening are two seriously different processes, and the consumers of visual and audio content have different thresholds of acceptable interference.
You see, people are accustomed to having their visual feed interrupted for short times. We blink, we turn our heads, a man crosses in front- whatever the cause, small visual breaks don't bother us. Hollywood (mostly in years past) would happily release a movie with a dropped frame or a hair on the corner of the screen, knowing that it won't bother the audience enough to hurt sales.
But perceptual reaction to modified sounds are different. Humans never stop hearing. They don't go deaf for 2 seconds to refresh the ears; a hand in front of your head doesn't block sound. Sound is something that normally will never be disturbed- and if it is, we're bothered. So the consumer's threshold for audio modification is much lower than for visual.
Considering even Windows 3.1 had the ability to modify its resolution instantly,
Untrue. Not even Windows 95 had that ability until a service pack supplied it 5+ months after release.
(Windows 3.1 allowed an individual program to reset the resolution and color-depth when going into a fullscreen mode, something Microsoft personnel called "DOS drawing". That is not equivalent to changing desktop resolution, and is more like the inadequate Ctrl-Alt-+ feature of XFree86)
The record companies need to see the added value that people experience by having the physical CD.
Is there really added value? The physical CD just takes up space on your shelf, is at risk of damage, and (worst of all) tremendously delays the playing of any specific song you own.
(In the heyday of Napster, it was often possible to search for a song and start it playing faster than one could walk to a box of CDs in the next room and get it out)
At this point its semantics, but it still comes down to theft.
Your definition of "theft" is so expansive that it can cover all forms of fraud and nearly every other nonviolent crime. (Which means, your definition is wrong)
This is difficult, I know, but try hard to get your head around it since once you do the rest follows quite logically.
I feel for you. Some people just can't handle reading a dictionary.
There are other reasons why, from a semantic standpoint, infringing on a copyright isn't "theft". (From a legal standpoint it's even clearer, since both "theft" and "piracy" are well-defined crimes that have nothing to do with IP)
For example, a copy of a song is not property. This is a more subtle point, but in Intellectual Property law, the "property" is right to control. Copyrights, patents, and trademarks are intellectual property. Music, inventions, and logos are not.
Unless the criminal actually takes away that right of control, it's nowhere close to stealing. If someone were to plagiarize a book and claim his own copyright on it, that could be considered theft of intellectual property. But xeroxing the book to read at home certainly is not.
Until Open Source came along, software innovation needed such encouragement.
That statement is either incorrect, or misusing terms.
If you think that the original development of software was in any way due to copyright protection, you're just wrong. Most important pre-1975 programs were either explicitly public domain, or owned but given freely to anyone with the hardware to use it. (The idea that software should be owned is largely a Bill Gates innovation)
Or, if you definition of "Open Source" is so expansive that you categorize that original development as part of it, then you're only engaging in light anachronism.
Ironically, it's *intolerance* that leads to forking in religion...
Bzzt. If the adherent members of the original religion had been less tolerant, then they'd have killed the infidels before their "fork" was 2 months old.
If capitalism encourages duplication of effort, why is one of the first lessons a student learns in business school to watch your competitors and see what works for them. They copied McDonald's in a lot of areas where McDonald's excelled, such as placement of stores and franchising.
See that word you use, "copied"? That's a synonym for "duplicate". You just contradicted yourself- the first sentence claims duplication is discouraged, the next demonstrates how it's taught in business schools.
The poster who said "YOU don't understand capitalism" was so totally right. So what if you can bring out a few examples of companies supposedly working together on something- the defining feature of capitalism is multiple groups working towards the same goal.
And all those "examples" were inadequate anyway. None of them showed corporations who stopped competing- they only demonstrated some companies coming to a cost-saving understanding of what their business really is. The hospitals, for example, decided (correctly) they are not in the database authoring business. But if they'd trued decided not to duplicate effort, they'd all have merged into one company.
If he is limited by lightspeed, things get complicated, but there is no reason to assume that such an arbitrary natural law applies to God
Why do you assume he's bound by arbitrary temporal laws and can't save all those planets concurrently?
This means that he is most likely purging other civilizations of sin.
What gives you the idea Christ would visit more than one civilization? I haven't heard of any of the other large nations existing 1970 years ago (China, India, the Aztecs...) being visited by the savior.
If Jesus can visit one nation and tell them to spread the gospel to the others, why wouldn't he visit just one planet and then expect it to share with the rest?
(This implies that evangelical charities should fund interstellar radios to broadcast the Bible...)
Or it could be that there are no aliens in the universe because God didn't create them. In fact, if He had created them, it would have said so in the Bible.
There are no penguins, because God didn't create them. If He had, it would have said so in the Bible.
Apparently Kurzweil doesn't comprehend how truly, staggeringly large Space is...
I'll assume that slanderous insult springs from ignorance. Read a little of Kurzweil's books, or even just the parent post, and enlighten yourself.
Hint: the whole point of Kurzweil's theory is that the nanoprobes are the living alien beings. Hint: he never said launching physical probes would supplant radio signals.
here is nothing they can gain by visiting in person that they couldn't gain by simply talking to us,
Ok, so the aliens live 50 light years away. So "simply talking to us" means a conversation where each new line is transmitted by a whole new human generation. Not all that efficient.
Physical transmission has the big advantage that it can still work even if the parties on either side of the communication are entirely temporally disjoint. Humanity was happy to send out phonograph disks on long-range probes that have little hope of receipt before our civilization collapses. In 75 years, with a little nanotech development, maybe we can launch a rocket with 85 petabytes of cultural and scientific knowledge, including DNA samples of prominent terrestrial animals.
Such a package might lead of a partial "ressurection" of humanity on a distant world a trillion parsecs away- even if it's only in a zoo.
Not to mention almost every instance of convincing alien life in SF and "xenobiology" is so strange and different that the likelihood of them using radio is very small.
Uhn, no. Scifi authors make up tons of weird and entertaining lifeforms, but little of it even approaches "convincing". Any serious evo-biologist can make a game of demolishing nearly every non-boring alien speculation.
Some people attack "Star Trek" because most of the aliens it presents are bipedal tool-using hominids with an assortment of cranial adornment. But that's really the most realistic way to look at it. Chances are that any creature we'd be interested in talking to will be close to equivalent in terms of respiration, vision, hearing, and limbs.
It would be like broadcasting a red tint over everything you see.
Spectra. As a non-blind human, I'm not bothered at all when someone gets out a television remote control and broadcasts a red tint over everything I see. The infra-red doesn't bother me much.
It's vaguely possible (but highly unlikely) a creature could evolve to use radio-spectrum in its natural senses. Even if that were the case, they probably don't use the entire range of possible communication frequencies. Or even if they did, they could willingly give some of them up. The advantage of instantaneous trans-global communication is worth losing sight of 1-2 shades of a particular "color".
possible Bantu language clicks.
Bantu languages don't involve clicks. You must be thinking of Khoisan languages, which originated in regions of Africa southeast of the Bantu homeland.
What I *DID* say is that Debian isn't the only distro with good package management.
Which implies that emerge is (nearly) as good as apt-get. Something which is needlessly very slow is not good. Therefore his attacks on Gentoo's slowness are completely appropriate.
Grab a man off the street and try to convince him that a system which takes 3 hours to install a web-browser is "good"...
it's going to get a semi-random IP address from the router's DHCP server.
Run something like ping -b 192.168.0.0 and you'll get a response from every system on your lan. If its not an overwhelming number, you can pick out which of those is the new one.
If you are really installing a lot on modern machines you may find it much easier to install over the network and build a set of kernel packages with updated drivers. Works a treat.
To do that requires an expert knowledge of the Debian package system. And if he had that knowledge, he wouldn't have been complaining that the installer was difficult.
The normal way to measure IDE speed on a linux system is hdparm: #/sbin/hdparm -t/dev/hda/dev/hda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.60 seconds = 39.96 MB/sec #/sbin/hdparm -T/dev/hda/dev/hda:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 0.40 seconds =316.62 MB/sec
Beyond just measurement, hdparm is also a way to tune settings (such as whether or not DMA is active). However, a non-expert should use control panels supplied by the Linux distrib to make any changes.
this state is easy to achieve. *jedi mind trick* Simply pretend that nvidia has not released any drivers. Don't download them, don't install them. You are now exactly where you want to be. Now, in the true tradition of open source, you have every opportunity to reverse engineer and code up your own drivers. Nothing gained, nothing lost.
No, your suggestion is not nearly equivalent to his desires.
If Nvidia didn't release binary drivers, it would effect not just him, but millions of Linux users and Nvidia itself. The combined force of those users wanting software and Nvidia wanting sales would push for a driver to be released- and since it can't be closed source (per his fantasy stipulations), then it will be open.
Why don't the panics go to someone with nvidia's source code, even if it's nvidia themselves?
1. Because nvidia doesn't care about fixing Linux. It's a tiny sideline for them. Windows and XBox is where the money comes from; it's what they'll concentrate on.
2. Because a kernel panic could've been caused by any module loaded (or compiled) into the kernel. Where the bug originated may be entirely different from where it started. Kernel modules aren't protected from each other- a bad module could damage anything.
Therefore the best way to go about solving a kernel panic is to have the entire code for what was running. And since the kernel developers are volunteers, they're not going to waste their time on anything but the "best" way.
Suppose they figure out after much work that the nvidia driver was at fault? What can they do about it then? Nothing. Why debug something you're not allowed to fix?
For me the source might as well be written in Hebrew. I get no benefits from having the code available.
Here on planet earth, we have several million coders, thousands of whom live near you and are available for hiring.
If you had the code for one platform, and needed another supported, they could do it for you. Your ability to get a specific need met is tremendously higher if you can use the free-market to choose from ANY programmer, not just the 10-20 working at NVidia corporation.
NVidia wouldn't be interested in porting a driver for $4000, but J.Random kernel-hacker certainly would.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget the part about telephoning ahead of time, just so there's no chance of surprising them!
It seems that each and every day there is another movement to make copyright violation (a long-beat-to-death civil matter) a criminal offense.
I see you're upholding the long Slashdot tradition of presuming to lecture about something you don't understand yourself.
Google first! Or just watch the first 20 seconds of any DVD...
In both the US and EU, copyright infringement is criminal!
Furthermore, what crime was David Koresh guilty of? Are you ready for the answer? Failing to pay taxes on 2 machine guns.
It was more than that. They had a quarter million $ in unpaid bills outstanding. Even the real estate they were sitting on was no longer theirs.
None of that's a serious or violent crime, of course.
the silence created by your ususal XTerms
^G^G^G ^G ^G ^G ^G^G^G
Ozzy? He's more stylish than The Enigma, and those are the only famous geeks I can think of...
It's not that they don't register... it's that watching and listening are two seriously different processes, and the consumers of visual and audio content have different thresholds of acceptable interference.
You see, people are accustomed to having their visual feed interrupted for short times. We blink, we turn our heads, a man crosses in front- whatever the cause, small visual breaks don't bother us. Hollywood (mostly in years past) would happily release a movie with a dropped frame or a hair on the corner of the screen, knowing that it won't bother the audience enough to hurt sales.
But perceptual reaction to modified sounds are different. Humans never stop hearing. They don't go deaf for 2 seconds to refresh the ears; a hand in front of your head doesn't block sound. Sound is something that normally will never be disturbed- and if it is, we're bothered. So the consumer's threshold for audio modification is much lower than for visual.
Considering even Windows 3.1 had the ability to modify its resolution instantly,
Untrue. Not even Windows 95 had that ability until a service pack supplied it 5+ months after release.
(Windows 3.1 allowed an individual program to reset the resolution and color-depth when going into a fullscreen mode, something Microsoft personnel called "DOS drawing". That is not equivalent to changing desktop resolution, and is more like the inadequate Ctrl-Alt-+ feature of XFree86)
In a production X-Term environment, you would likely keep the display and data networks on separate switches, so they shouldn't collide.
In the 25+ production X11 environment I've visited, I've never seen this happen.
X11 display traffic is data networking.
The record companies need to see the added value that people experience by having the physical CD.
Is there really added value? The physical CD just takes up space on your shelf, is at risk of damage, and (worst of all) tremendously delays the playing of any specific song you own.
(In the heyday of Napster, it was often possible to search for a song and start it playing faster than one could walk to a box of CDs in the next room and get it out)
At this point its semantics, but it still comes down to theft.
Your definition of "theft" is so expansive that it can cover all forms of fraud and nearly every other nonviolent crime. (Which means, your definition is wrong)
This is difficult, I know, but try hard to get your head around it since once you do the rest follows quite logically.
I feel for you. Some people just can't handle reading a dictionary.
There are other reasons why, from a semantic standpoint, infringing on a copyright isn't "theft". (From a legal standpoint it's even clearer, since both "theft" and "piracy" are well-defined crimes that have nothing to do with IP)
For example, a copy of a song is not property. This is a more subtle point, but in Intellectual Property law, the "property" is right to control. Copyrights, patents, and trademarks are intellectual property. Music, inventions, and logos are not.
Unless the criminal actually takes away that right of control, it's nowhere close to stealing. If someone were to plagiarize a book and claim his own copyright on it, that could be considered theft of intellectual property. But xeroxing the book to read at home certainly is not.
Until Open Source came along, software innovation needed such encouragement.
That statement is either incorrect, or misusing terms.
If you think that the original development of software was in any way due to copyright protection, you're just wrong. Most important pre-1975 programs were either explicitly public domain, or owned but given freely to anyone with the hardware to use it. (The idea that software should be owned is largely a Bill Gates innovation)
Or, if you definition of "Open Source" is so expansive that you categorize that original development as part of it, then you're only engaging in light anachronism.
Ironically, it's *intolerance* that leads to forking in religion...
Bzzt. If the adherent members of the original religion had been less tolerant, then they'd have killed the infidels before their "fork" was 2 months old.
If capitalism encourages duplication of effort, why is one of the first lessons a student learns in business school to watch your competitors and see what works for them. They copied McDonald's in a lot of areas where McDonald's excelled, such as placement of stores and franchising.
See that word you use, "copied"? That's a synonym for "duplicate". You just contradicted yourself- the first sentence claims duplication is discouraged, the next demonstrates how it's taught in business schools.
The poster who said "YOU don't understand capitalism" was so totally right. So what if you can bring out a few examples of companies supposedly working together on something- the defining feature of capitalism is multiple groups working towards the same goal.
And all those "examples" were inadequate anyway. None of them showed corporations who stopped competing- they only demonstrated some companies coming to a cost-saving understanding of what their business really is. The hospitals, for example, decided (correctly) they are not in the database authoring business. But if they'd trued decided not to duplicate effort, they'd all have merged into one company.
If he is limited by lightspeed, things get complicated, but there is no reason to assume that such an arbitrary natural law applies to God
Why do you assume he's bound by arbitrary temporal laws and can't save all those planets concurrently?
This means that he is most likely purging other civilizations of sin.
What gives you the idea Christ would visit more than one civilization? I haven't heard of any of the other large nations existing 1970 years ago (China, India, the Aztecs...) being visited by the savior.
If Jesus can visit one nation and tell them to spread the gospel to the others, why wouldn't he visit just one planet and then expect it to share with the rest?
(This implies that evangelical charities should fund interstellar radios to broadcast the Bible...)
Or it could be that there are no aliens in the universe because God didn't create them. In fact, if He had created them, it would have said so in the Bible.
There are no penguins, because God didn't create them. If He had, it would have said so in the Bible.
Therefore Linux is a tool of the Devil!
Apparently Kurzweil doesn't comprehend how truly, staggeringly large Space is...
I'll assume that slanderous insult springs from ignorance. Read a little of Kurzweil's books, or even just the parent post, and enlighten yourself.
Hint: the whole point of Kurzweil's theory is that the nanoprobes are the living alien beings.
Hint: he never said launching physical probes would supplant radio signals.
here is nothing they can gain by visiting in person that they couldn't gain by simply talking to us,
Ok, so the aliens live 50 light years away. So "simply talking to us" means a conversation where each new line is transmitted by a whole new human generation. Not all that efficient.
Physical transmission has the big advantage that it can still work even if the parties on either side of the communication are entirely temporally disjoint. Humanity was happy to send out phonograph disks on long-range probes that have little hope of receipt before our civilization collapses. In 75 years, with a little nanotech development, maybe we can launch a rocket with 85 petabytes of cultural and scientific knowledge, including DNA samples of prominent terrestrial animals.
Such a package might lead of a partial "ressurection" of humanity on a distant world a trillion parsecs away- even if it's only in a zoo.
Not to mention almost every instance of convincing alien life in SF and "xenobiology" is so strange and different that the likelihood of them using radio is very small.
Uhn, no. Scifi authors make up tons of weird and entertaining lifeforms, but little of it even approaches "convincing". Any serious evo-biologist can make a game of demolishing nearly every non-boring alien speculation.
Some people attack "Star Trek" because most of the aliens it presents are bipedal tool-using hominids with an assortment of cranial adornment. But that's really the most realistic way to look at it. Chances are that any creature we'd be interested in talking to will be close to equivalent in terms of respiration, vision, hearing, and limbs.
It would be like broadcasting a red tint over everything you see.
Spectra. As a non-blind human, I'm not bothered at all when someone gets out a television remote control and broadcasts a red tint over everything I see. The infra-red doesn't bother me much.
It's vaguely possible (but highly unlikely) a creature could evolve to use radio-spectrum in its natural senses. Even if that were the case, they probably don't use the entire range of possible communication frequencies. Or even if they did, they could willingly give some of them up. The advantage of instantaneous trans-global communication is worth losing sight of 1-2 shades of a particular "color".
possible Bantu language clicks.
Bantu languages don't involve clicks. You must be thinking of Khoisan languages, which originated in regions of Africa southeast of the Bantu homeland.
What I *DID* say is that Debian isn't the only distro with good package management.
Which implies that emerge is (nearly) as good as apt-get. Something which is needlessly very slow is not good. Therefore his attacks on Gentoo's slowness are completely appropriate.
Grab a man off the street and try to convince him that a system which takes 3 hours to install a web-browser is "good"...
it's going to get a semi-random IP address from the router's DHCP server.
Run something like ping -b 192.168.0.0 and you'll get a response from every system on your lan. If its not an overwhelming number, you can pick out which of those is the new one.
If you are really installing a lot on modern machines you may find it much easier to install over the network and build a set of kernel packages with updated drivers. Works a treat.
To do that requires an expert knowledge of the Debian package system. And if he had that knowledge, he wouldn't have been complaining that the installer was difficult.
The normal way to measure IDE speed on a linux system is hdparm: /sbin/hdparm -t /dev/hda /dev/hda: /sbin/hdparm -T /dev/hda /dev/hda:
#
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.60 seconds = 39.96 MB/sec
#
Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 0.40 seconds =316.62 MB/sec
Beyond just measurement, hdparm is also a way to tune settings (such as whether or not DMA is active). However, a non-expert should use control panels supplied by the Linux distrib to make any changes.
this state is easy to achieve. *jedi mind trick* Simply pretend that nvidia has not released any drivers. Don't download them, don't install them. You are now exactly where you want to be. Now, in the true tradition of open source, you have every opportunity to reverse engineer and code up your own drivers. Nothing gained, nothing lost.
No, your suggestion is not nearly equivalent to his desires.
If Nvidia didn't release binary drivers, it would effect not just him, but millions of Linux users and Nvidia itself. The combined force of those users wanting software and Nvidia wanting sales would push for a driver to be released- and since it can't be closed source (per his fantasy stipulations), then it will be open.
Why don't the panics go to someone with nvidia's source code, even if it's nvidia themselves?
1. Because nvidia doesn't care about fixing Linux. It's a tiny sideline for them. Windows and XBox is where the money comes from; it's what they'll concentrate on.
2. Because a kernel panic could've been caused by any module loaded (or compiled) into the kernel. Where the bug originated may be entirely different from where it started. Kernel modules aren't protected from each other- a bad module could damage anything.
Therefore the best way to go about solving a kernel panic is to have the entire code for what was running. And since the kernel developers are volunteers, they're not going to waste their time on anything but the "best" way.
Suppose they figure out after much work that the nvidia driver was at fault? What can they do about it then? Nothing. Why debug something you're not allowed to fix?
For me the source might as well be written in Hebrew. I get no benefits from having the code available.
Here on planet earth, we have several million coders, thousands of whom live near you and are available for hiring.
If you had the code for one platform, and needed another supported, they could do it for you. Your ability to get a specific need met is tremendously higher if you can use the free-market to choose from ANY programmer, not just the 10-20 working at NVidia corporation.
NVidia wouldn't be interested in porting a driver for $4000, but J.Random kernel-hacker certainly would.