Whatever Curiosity weighs, it hitting a rock at 1m/s is still 900 newtons of force. Scarecrow hitting a rock at 1m/s is 342 newtons.
Stop accusing NASA scientists of not understanding their job when you don't remember basic physics.
F = m * a, not F = m * v. In this case a is the acceleration due to gravity. In addition, mass is measured in kg, weight is measured in Newtons, because weight is a force. The newtons are exactly the same between those two rovers.
I do very casual reading on such topics, the stuff generally meant for the layman. Since you appear to be much more knowledgeable, maybe you can answer this for me: any chance this could be a signal from evaporating primordial black holes? What kind of signal do we expect to see for those? Other than not finding a supernova in the direction of the burst, that is.
There is no expectation of privacy in public spaces
There is where I live. The fact that you do not know what the big deal is, is the big deal.
Remember how they got to Big Brother? Not by going to war. They got there because people were not interested in their privacy.
Or to quote from yet somewhere else: "So this is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause."
So I guess you don't live in the United States. I am really concerned about protecting these rights, which you seem to want to constrict.
This isn't even only limited to YOU, personally, but everyone around you. Google Glasses will see everything you do and they will run facial recognition on EVERYBODY AROUND YOU. Not only will YOU lose privacy but EVERYONE ELSE TOO.
There is no expectation of privacy in public spaces and private locations are free to ban video and photography just like they've always been, if they don't want it. I don't see what the big deal is.
The reason I liked Arrested Development is because it's a serial sitcom with no laugh track that doesn't rely on vulgarity or shock value to deliver its laughs to anywhere near the same degree as other shows (see: How I Met Your Mother)
Dude, seriously? If you had given It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia as an example, I'd understand, but How I Met Your Mother is way cleaner than Arrested.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a huge fan of Arrested, How I Met Your Mother, and Sunny. I'm also completely with you on the "no laugh track" thing, I seriously dislike that. I'm just really confused about your vulgarity and shock value comments. I mean, Tobias' character is entirely based on vulgar jokes. I mean, we're talking about a guy that has a card that says "analrapist", for a mixture of analyst and therapist. We had multiple episodes where the joke was that Oscar was walking around near buster with an erect penis, trying to pretend he wasn't banging his mother. None of this stuff bothers me, but I'm really curious about what it is that you find in How I Met Your Mother that triggers your vulgarity meter while Arrested doesn't.
Logo is a horrible language to start with because it doesn't trust you with responsibility. You are stuck in a la-la-land where the only thing you can do is draw pretty pictures. Beginning programmers, and even children, want to be trusted with responsibility, and feel like they are in control of their environment. So I suggest avoiding pedagogical languages and instead opt for practical languages.
When I took a graduate-level multi-agent systems course at my university, the language we used to implement algorithms we were finding in current research paper on the topic was netlogo. You can do a lot more than draw pretty pictures, and the language is used fairly heavily in certain research fields.
Then how does the company you're working for get paid? By your logic, books, movies and music should be free, too. How does an independent artist get paid?
People don't have a right to get paid in the profession they choose. If you can't survive as an independent artist the right choice is to say that you should go find a different profession, not force everybody else to pretend they can't make perfect copies of digital things.
That said, artists do find ways to introduce real scarcity to the supply. I paid $30 for a comic book that costs $3 because it was autographed by the artist. Just another copy isn't worth as much to me as one with the signature.
Except in the cases where you commission a work, that's not how the world works. When I go to the grocery store I haven't made any agreements to buy anything yet obviously a lot of work has been sunk into the products for sale
Right. The GP is arguing that for products with finite supply, the grocery store model works. For products with infinite supply, the only valid model is the commissioning of work. You're saying you don't want to assume the risk for commissioning work, and so you're trying to shoehorn the infinite supply product into the business model of finite supply products. Which as far as I'm concerned is fine as long as you understand there when you do that, you create additional problems which don't exist with the real finite supply products, like piracy. People can copy bits of your software in a way they can't copy bread.
IN real life even if we could travel at Warp speeds, there's hardly any planets - that we know of today - that can support life within a lifetime of Warp travel. Eight times - TEN times the speed of light is not good enough, I'm afraid.
We need THOUSANDs of times the speed of light to have a Star Trek or Star Wars type of intergalactic society.
Warp factors in Star Trek are not linear. The actual scales very a bit, and they're not always consistent between episodes and given distances + ETA, but if you take a look at the TNG section, warp 1 is the speed of light, but warp 2 is the 10x the speed of light, warp 3 is roughly 39x the speed of light, and by the time you get to warp 9 we're talking 1,516x the speed of light. So, with Star Trek, the scientific advisors to the writers know that.
If you weren't informed about it, how are you supposed to know that they are the good guys . . . ?
You shouldn't know,and you're supposed to treat them like the bad guys. Isn't that the entire point? How else are they going to know you're prepared against a real attack?
You are astoundingly unable to grapple with a rhetorical device that points out the GP's absurd proposition. It doesn't matter if it's rape of ripping off the entertainment that five hundred people just spent half a year making. Every "it's OK because the victim was asking for it" excuse is just as slimy as the next, ethically. You're pretending to be too obtuse to understand that basic point so that you can trot out some faux outrage to distract from the fact that you'd like to preserve your ability to rip things off when it suits you.
I'm not the person you're directly replying to, but since this all stems from people misunderstanding my point, I figured I'd clarify:
When I asked, "did you really just compare copyright infringement to rape," I didn't miss the point he was trying to make about blaming the victim. I also didn't mean to go the route of, "You said rape! It's too heinous a crime to be compared to anything, so you've just lost the argument!" My point is that the level of blame to the person committing the act is vastly different. If I stay logged in to my e-mail account when I leave my computer and a friend comes in, notices it, and starts reading it, I'm going to say, "dude, not cool." He'll say, "well, you just left it open, I saw it, and it made me curious." It doesn't make him right and I'm not to blame for the fact that he chose to read something that wasn't meant for him. That said, the "crime" isn't a big deal and I'm not seriously hurt by it. So even though it's not my fault that other people can't control themselves, the easiest way to prevent them from infringing on my privacy is to log out of my e-mail account.
Similarly, I don't think it's HBO's fault that people choose to pirate their show. That said, they can steps to encourage more people to go the legal route. This is why the comparison to rape was inappropriate. I think it's perfectly alright to tolerate some copyright infringement, in fact, I think it's the way to go in a simple cost-benefit analysis. It's not alright to tolerate violent crimes, even if it could lead to statistically significant lower amounts of it overall. With copyright infringement the victim gets to say, "you know, if the amount of pirating is below a certain threshold, it's actually beneficial for us from a marketing perspective." You're not going to see any rape victims say, "you know, I was only raped once. That wasn't so bad."
No, people who want to have some entertainment on their own terms, without paying for it, "induce" the piracy. No, they don't even "induce," they simply "commit" it. They can't be troubled to wait for a DVD or to grab it through Amazon, etc. No... they have to have it RIGHT NOW, because they are entitled to being entertained by the work of other people who spend millions of dollars.
That may be true, but if you're trying to have a successful business plan, do you really think it's a good idea to have one which depends on changing human nature?
Maybe you don't think these people are "entitled to being entertained by the work of other people who spend millions of dollars." It doesn't really matter does it? They think they are, and they have the means to achieve their goals, whether you like it or not. So you have one of two choices...spend lots of money trying to make it more difficult for these guys to get what they want, or give them most of what they want, lowering the number of people who choose to go the pirating route. As long as you gain more by doing the latter than you spend by doing the former, that's the way you should go. Simple cost-benefit analysis.
HBO is asking for it, man! Did you see that short skirt that HBO was wearing?
Did you really just compare copyright infringement to rape?
If you must use a human sexual behavior as an analogy, it's more like dealing with teenage sexual activity. You can argue they shouldn't be engaging in it, and you're probably correct in that they're not ready. That said, if you tell them that abstinence is the way to go, you're fighting against human nature, and you're going to fail. Instead, if you teach them the concepts behind safe sex, you let them have what you want and you minimize the dangers of pregnancy of STDs. There will still be those who will engage in unsafe sex, and there will always be those guys who will pirate no matter what because what they want is the free part. However, you haven't proposed an alternate solution that does a better job.
First-posted AC yesterday--get called a troll. Actually kinda perfect.
Eh. I'm not one to call anyone a troll just because they posted AC. In combination with all the other things I've mentioned, it was one more piece of evidence, because trolls do often go the AC route. Not always, though. And just because you've posted with a registered account now doesn't mean you're not a troll. It doesn't even mean you're really the original submitter. It's entirely possible you just now created a new account to take opportunity of this and get in on the trolling.
I'm not saying for sure that you're not on the level. Years on slashdot have made me cynical, though. Since you have made a post in an attempt to verify your authenticity, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. If you're really legit, I'll be glad to try to help you out. I will give you some recommendations, you can try them out and post additional questions.
I'm looking for opinions, not the One True & Best Distro. I take people's opinions into account and was interested in hearing what Slashdot had to say on the topic.
I think the other posters covered that one pretty well. The general consensus is that if Ubuntu is giving you problems, it's not yet time to move on to something else. I agree with that. Stick with Ubuntu right now for two reasons: the first is that it's more user friendly, and the second is that whoever installed it for you is already somewhat familiar with it, which means you have a friend to rely on for questions. If you move on to arch, or something else that your friend happens to be unfamiliar with, you lose that resource, and have to rely purely on your own googling skills.
I'm assuming the hardware is good because it has worked fine for the past five years, however, it is all five years old; it boots, but isn't recognizing input devices or the video card; mentioned this above, but I was copying.AVIs from a folder on the desktop to another folder, not system files.
The fact that it was working before and then ceased to work after the crash is the really strange part. I could see it being a software issue if it had happened after an update, I suppose, but only after a pretty major update at that, to a new version of Ubuntu. Happening after copying avi files around? At the very least, these two things are not related.
while I appreciate that my post came across as being written by a male, it wasn't--I prefer the third-person pronouns 'she' or 'her';
I made no assumptions as to your gender, and I honestly don't care what it is. I don't even know what you could possibly mean when you say your post "came across as being written by a male" when all you've talked about is a computer problem, an area where I don't see how gender has any relevance. It's merely customary and correct in English to use the masculine pronoun when being generic. I know some people these days classify it as a sexist practice, but I don't go for political correctness crap. Now that you've taken the ambiguity away and I'm aware you're female, I'll use the correct pronouns.
high-learning curves don't phase me;
And yet you had a friend install Linux for you, instead of doing it yourself. It's not exactly hard to do, especially with Ubuntu.
Don't take it the wrong way. I'm not trying to say any bullshit like, "real geeks install linux themselves" or anything like that. All I'm saying is that it's a natural assumption for me that since you got someone to install linux for you, that you're more interested in getting something running than learning about the details. There's nothing wrong with that, there are plenty of things I take that route for. When I first installed Linux, I asked a friend of mine for the distro he used, and installed the same one, so I'd have someone to ask questions. I think it's the best way to go, espec
Let's analyze this. His computer crashed while copying unimportant files with good hardware and now it fails to boot.. Even in 1997, this would have been an unreasonable scenario.
I'm guessing you're not used to dealing with non-technical end users.
"My computer won't boot" can't be taken literally without a lot more evidence. I've had people say similar thing when what they mean is they can't successfully log on.
I don't know what possessed his friend to start a newbie off with Enlightenment, but I suspect he's screwed up or deleted his.e17/.enlightenment/.whatever-its-called-nowadays folder, and "won't boot" means something like startx is failing. He's a younger Windows user, so the idea of the command prompt is likely alien to him.
Well, any one of the things I mentioned by themselves, and I would give the submitter the benefit of the doubt, like you are. The combination is too damning, though. It's also pretty hard to mess up those config files you're talking about because they're in hidden folders. And again, it wouldn't have crashed his box to begin with.
I also feel like the copying files thing is an homage to the old troll about mac os x, where the troll would claim that it took an hour to copy a 20mb file or something like that.
I get the feeling it's a bored troll just trying to get a rise out of someone.
The question will never get a straightforward answer, especially here on slashdot - and because there's no one true answer.
Definitely a troll. In fact, it's so obvious I'm surprised the editors didn't realize it.
Let's analyze this. His computer crashed while copying unimportant files with good hardware and now it fails to boot.. Even in 1997, this would have been an unreasonable scenario. I've certainly seen applications in Linux crash, about as often as I see them crashing in other OSes. In very rare circumstances, I've seen the kernel crash. A kernel crash that prevents the computer from booting again, though? What exactly would cause that?
One thing would be if instead of copying, he was accidentally moving system files. That's pretty hard to do, he would have to get elevated privileges, and even if he did, any file that the system was currently using would remain loaded in ram, so it wouldn't be likely to crash then, he'd just have problems booting up later. Not only that, but this so guy who is self-identifying as inexperienced anticipated this response and made sure to point out the files were "non-important". I'm pretty sure he also chose that wording to avoid saying "system files", afraid that would betray his level of knowledge.
Another possibility is that he has a failing hard drive. Again, this would be unlikely to crash his box, but copying files around in a bad drive could maybe cause corruption of the file system preventing it from successfully booting up next time. So, of course, this guy also predicted this response and made sure to point out that his hardware is a-ok.
What are we left with here? Linux being hard on new users cliche? Check. Using a distro that is known to be user-friendly and suggesting he might want to move to a distro known to have a high learning curve? Check. Implication that Linux's reputation for stability is underserved? Check. Trying to rile up slashdot into "what's the best distro" flamewar? Check. Anonymous submission? Of course. The only thing missing is good old-fashioned vi vs. emacs debate.
What exactly is this iOSsification people keep complaining about? There's nothing forced onto you that I can think of.
Quite a few things:
They got rid of spaces. You still have different virtual desktops, but I can no longer assign applications to always open in a particular one. They're also not always there, assigned in a configuration that was easy for me to remember, "from here, go to the desktop above to get to the browser, or the desktop to my right to get to xcode.
Applications no longer quit, instead they keep running in the background, if you click the red button. You can command-q for now, but they still try to retain state. Which is insane. When I open up a new video in quicktime, why would I want the last video that I watched to pop up in a window beside it? I keep having to go and close that other window. (At least now they give me the option to not save the current state of the desktop when I log out. No, I do not want to log back in and see what I was working on before. It's very unlikely I'll be working on the same thing. If I do have something that I always open every time I log in, and I do, I know how to set applications to start automatically every time.)
Applications are auto-saving on me. I don't mind that things auto-save into a backup file, for recovery purposes, but you should NOT overwrite the file I'm working on without my specifically clicking save. I know mac os x lets you get back to previous versions. That's cumbersome unless you're the one who chose to punctuate where each new version starts.
Applications are trying to save to iCloud by default, instead of the local drive. I don't have a problem with iCloud, but it shouldn't be the default location.
The launchpad displays applications in multiple screens and I gotta swipe right to see the other applications. That doesn't make any sense when you have a wheel mouse...I just want to scroll down. The applications folder still exists, so this one doesn't bother me as much, I can avoid using launchpad altogether.
When the iPhone came out, I remember many people saying that apple fully intended to eventually make OS X as locked down as iOS, and a bunch of people dismissing that as conspiracy theories. They have, however, been slowly moving toward that. They released the Mac OS X app store, which isn't really a problem. But then they made it so that you can't install any application that doesn't come from the app store by default, until you go and change the settings to allow it. My prediction is that the next step is going to be making it a setting that you can't get to without going to the command-line, and then they'll just not give you the option, and people will have to jailbreak their macs.
You wanted emotions, there you got em. OS X is the best desktop I know. Debian Linux is the best server operating system I know. Windows is the best reason to shoot someone.
I'm not harping on you, because I believe taste is relative, and there's no right and wrong. Personally, however, I fall into the same camp as the submitter. OS X Leopard is the best desktop I know. It started getting worse with Snow Leopard, and by the time Lion came along, iOSsification had already made it unbearable.
When the second best choice, gnome 2, got dropped in favor of unity and gnome 3, Windows 7 got upgraded to best available option. Then Microsoft had to go all Metro on us. There's pretty much no current version of an UI in any OS that is acceptable to me anymore. The best you can do is KDE after spending a whole lot of time customizing it, because the default KDE is pretty awful as well.
What part of "don't stop across or past the line" is so hard to understand? If you're not sure it's clear then don't pull out in the first place. That's the whole point of the lines - so you stop a safe distance back, and when you start moving the people behind you can reasonably expect you to keep moving.
The part I don't understand is when people forget the spirit of the law in favor of exactly adhering to the letter of the law. Sometimes there's a large truck to your left, and you can't see if you're clear unless you go over the line a bit. You're not endangering anyone, so regardless of what the rules concerning what the line is for, you've obeyed the spirit of the law and shouldn't be faulted for it.
That's true, but irrelevant to the issue of following the law. Don't break the law, and you'll never need to challenge a ticket or worry about whose mercy you are at.
The world isn't black and white, and I wouldn't want it to be black and white. Every situation is different and needs to be treated according to what actually happened, not according to what was written to try to catch what's was predicted to be the most likely thing to happen. Especially when the laws are often written such that legislators think, "oh well, no one is going to apply it in that case, even if it is written to technically allow it."
People like you crack me up. You do realize that a drone is just a weapons platform right? If you can conceive of a reason why the US government might reasonable kill an American citizen with a pistol, a shotgun, an assault rifle, or a tank, why would the use of a drone somehow be any different? Surely the test is whether or not the killing was legal, not what weapons platform was used to deliver the strike. OMG, they haz robots!!!!!
Agreed, but I can't think of any possible way in which an american in US soil could be killed by a drone strike in a legal fashion.
The way I see it, there are only three manners in which the government can kill someone in US soil:
1. Self defense when attacked by a criminal, which rules out the drone.
2. Armed resistance to a legal arrest, which includes being holed up in a building, which I believe should require the officers to make every effort to take the criminals alive, so they can be tried in a court of law. This includes the case where the criminals are holed up with hostages, in which case sniping them is acceptable if it looks like they're not going to give up the hostages. A drone strike is again ruled out here. If they have no hostages, then an effort needs to be made to take them alive, and if they do have hostages, then the drone strike would harm the hostages as well.
3. After they've been sentenced in a trial to the death sentence. I don't actually approve of the death sentence, but I consider it legal until we change the books. Come to think of it, I'm actually ok if the drone strike is used in this situation. I don't think it's any more cruel than the electric chair, to have the sentenced men tied up in an open field and then order the drone strike. That said, I would argue it's far too expensive and impractical.
Asserting that the data is "bloated XML" or that their is bad scripting, spam or cookies involved is grossly stupid...Any of the posts that assume otherwise are a combination of arrogance and ignorance, which is typical for what passes as comments on Slashdot these days.
Although I'm always tired of the "what could possibly go wrong" posts (and was tired of them back in '03 too, slashdot has always had those posts)...Dude, the xml comment was a joke, and a pretty funny one at that. As I literally laughed out loud after reading it, it never even occurred to me that somebody else might read that post and think it was a serious concern that 100kb suddenly transformed into half a terabyte because of xml tags. Until I read your post that is.
You should go in search of your sense of humor. I think if you check your wallet, you'll discover you've lost it. After you find it again, I bet slashdot will seem a little less arrogant and ignorant.
makes cultural/historical blunders like a bunch of space brazilians naming a colony Lusitânia when it's somewhat ludicrous to name a colony after your colonizers, especially with the overall sentment towards Portugal being quite adversarial
Where exactly are you from, if you don't mind my asking?
I grew up in Sao Paulo until I was 14, and never got the impression that there was any adversarial feeling toward Portugal. Except for the Portuguese jokes, which are the equivalent to Polish jokes in the US. Those can be considered offensive, but I never knew anyone that told them to actually mean offense against the Portuguese people. In fact, the kids would often tell similar jokes that denigrates Brazil itself ("A Brazilian, and American, and an Italian were blindfolded in a helicopter, and don't know where they are. The Italian sticks his hand out the door and says, "We're in Italy." The others asks how he knows and he responds, "I'm pretty sure I've touched the Tower of Pisa." The American sticks his hand out next and says, "No, we're in the United States. I'm pretty sure what I've touched is the Statue of Liberty." The Brazilian sticks his hand out next and says, "Nope, we're definitely over Brazil." The others asks if he thinks he touched the Christ Redeemer statue, and he responds, "no, but my wristwatch was stolen.")
Now, Brazilian culture is very different depending on where you are in Brazil, and I've never really left Sao Paulo while I was there, so I'm curious if the feeling towards Portugal is different elsewhere.
(and for the record, like you, I've read the English version of Speaker for the Dead, and thought it was a good book, although I remember thinking the Portuguese was awkward and somewhat distracting)
Long favored? Most people that I've known doing.NET work are wired into the frameworks Microsoft developed, glued on thier own proprietary bits and called it a day. Can you please leave some feedback on these very popular community driven OSS efforts in the.NET umbrella (outside of Mono which is a re-implementation of Microsoft's API's), becase quite frankly, I've never heard of any.
Go check out codeplex. As a.NET developer, we've been using lots and lots of open source.NET libraries from there for many years. The.NET open-source community is very active and it has always been so.
There are two factors involved in a customer's decision. That which they get, and the price at which they get it. What's going on here is that most customers are not willing to shell out $50-$70 for Time Warner's top tiers, as the extra speed doesn't justify the cost over the lower tiers. On the surface, this would seem to back up Time Warner's assertion that customers don't want faster speeds for the most part. The analysis is missing one important factor, however: Time Warner has no real competition in most markets. As a result, they get to set the prices to dictate customer demand, not the other way around. To maximize their profit, Time Warner has chosen a price point at which most people will want to purchase the tier they're willing to provide minimizing the amount of investment in their infrastructure they would have to provide to support more people at higher tiers.
In a more competitive environment, other ISPs would compete by offering lower prices and faster tiers. Then we would see whether customers chose to pay less for the same speeds or get a faster internet for the same price.
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever Curiosity weighs, it hitting a rock at 1m/s is still 900 newtons of force. Scarecrow hitting a rock at 1m/s is 342 newtons.
Stop accusing NASA scientists of not understanding their job when you don't remember basic physics.
F = m * a, not F = m * v. In this case a is the acceleration due to gravity. In addition, mass is measured in kg, weight is measured in Newtons, because weight is a force. The newtons are exactly the same between those two rovers.
Thanks for the response. Finding people like you once in a while is the reason I still browse slashdot. Very interesting stuff.
I do very casual reading on such topics, the stuff generally meant for the layman. Since you appear to be much more knowledgeable, maybe you can answer this for me: any chance this could be a signal from evaporating primordial black holes? What kind of signal do we expect to see for those? Other than not finding a supernova in the direction of the burst, that is.
There is where I live. The fact that you do not know what the big deal is, is the big deal. Remember how they got to Big Brother? Not by going to war. They got there because people were not interested in their privacy.
Or to quote from yet somewhere else: "So this is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause."
So I guess you don't live in the United States. I am really concerned about protecting these rights, which you seem to want to constrict.
This isn't even only limited to YOU, personally, but everyone around you. Google Glasses will see everything you do and they will run facial recognition on EVERYBODY AROUND YOU. Not only will YOU lose privacy but EVERYONE ELSE TOO.
There is no expectation of privacy in public spaces and private locations are free to ban video and photography just like they've always been, if they don't want it. I don't see what the big deal is.
The reason I liked Arrested Development is because it's a serial sitcom with no laugh track that doesn't rely on vulgarity or shock value to deliver its laughs to anywhere near the same degree as other shows (see: How I Met Your Mother)
Dude, seriously? If you had given It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia as an example, I'd understand, but How I Met Your Mother is way cleaner than Arrested.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a huge fan of Arrested, How I Met Your Mother, and Sunny. I'm also completely with you on the "no laugh track" thing, I seriously dislike that. I'm just really confused about your vulgarity and shock value comments. I mean, Tobias' character is entirely based on vulgar jokes. I mean, we're talking about a guy that has a card that says "analrapist", for a mixture of analyst and therapist. We had multiple episodes where the joke was that Oscar was walking around near buster with an erect penis, trying to pretend he wasn't banging his mother. None of this stuff bothers me, but I'm really curious about what it is that you find in How I Met Your Mother that triggers your vulgarity meter while Arrested doesn't.
Logo is a horrible language to start with because it doesn't trust you with responsibility. You are stuck in a la-la-land where the only thing you can do is draw pretty pictures. Beginning programmers, and even children, want to be trusted with responsibility, and feel like they are in control of their environment. So I suggest avoiding pedagogical languages and instead opt for practical languages.
When I took a graduate-level multi-agent systems course at my university, the language we used to implement algorithms we were finding in current research paper on the topic was netlogo. You can do a lot more than draw pretty pictures, and the language is used fairly heavily in certain research fields.
Then how does the company you're working for get paid? By your logic, books, movies and music should be free, too. How does an independent artist get paid?
People don't have a right to get paid in the profession they choose. If you can't survive as an independent artist the right choice is to say that you should go find a different profession, not force everybody else to pretend they can't make perfect copies of digital things.
That said, artists do find ways to introduce real scarcity to the supply. I paid $30 for a comic book that costs $3 because it was autographed by the artist. Just another copy isn't worth as much to me as one with the signature.
Except in the cases where you commission a work, that's not how the world works. When I go to the grocery store I haven't made any agreements to buy anything yet obviously a lot of work has been sunk into the products for sale
Right. The GP is arguing that for products with finite supply, the grocery store model works. For products with infinite supply, the only valid model is the commissioning of work. You're saying you don't want to assume the risk for commissioning work, and so you're trying to shoehorn the infinite supply product into the business model of finite supply products. Which as far as I'm concerned is fine as long as you understand there when you do that, you create additional problems which don't exist with the real finite supply products, like piracy. People can copy bits of your software in a way they can't copy bread.
IN real life even if we could travel at Warp speeds, there's hardly any planets - that we know of today - that can support life within a lifetime of Warp travel. Eight times - TEN times the speed of light is not good enough, I'm afraid.
We need THOUSANDs of times the speed of light to have a Star Trek or Star Wars type of intergalactic society.
Warp factors in Star Trek are not linear. The actual scales very a bit, and they're not always consistent between episodes and given distances + ETA, but if you take a look at the TNG section, warp 1 is the speed of light, but warp 2 is the 10x the speed of light, warp 3 is roughly 39x the speed of light, and by the time you get to warp 9 we're talking 1,516x the speed of light. So, with Star Trek, the scientific advisors to the writers know that.
If you weren't informed about it, how are you supposed to know that they are the good guys . . . ?
You shouldn't know,and you're supposed to treat them like the bad guys. Isn't that the entire point? How else are they going to know you're prepared against a real attack?
You are astoundingly unable to grapple with a rhetorical device that points out the GP's absurd proposition. It doesn't matter if it's rape of ripping off the entertainment that five hundred people just spent half a year making. Every "it's OK because the victim was asking for it" excuse is just as slimy as the next, ethically. You're pretending to be too obtuse to understand that basic point so that you can trot out some faux outrage to distract from the fact that you'd like to preserve your ability to rip things off when it suits you.
I'm not the person you're directly replying to, but since this all stems from people misunderstanding my point, I figured I'd clarify:
When I asked, "did you really just compare copyright infringement to rape," I didn't miss the point he was trying to make about blaming the victim. I also didn't mean to go the route of, "You said rape! It's too heinous a crime to be compared to anything, so you've just lost the argument!" My point is that the level of blame to the person committing the act is vastly different. If I stay logged in to my e-mail account when I leave my computer and a friend comes in, notices it, and starts reading it, I'm going to say, "dude, not cool." He'll say, "well, you just left it open, I saw it, and it made me curious." It doesn't make him right and I'm not to blame for the fact that he chose to read something that wasn't meant for him. That said, the "crime" isn't a big deal and I'm not seriously hurt by it. So even though it's not my fault that other people can't control themselves, the easiest way to prevent them from infringing on my privacy is to log out of my e-mail account.
Similarly, I don't think it's HBO's fault that people choose to pirate their show. That said, they can steps to encourage more people to go the legal route. This is why the comparison to rape was inappropriate. I think it's perfectly alright to tolerate some copyright infringement, in fact, I think it's the way to go in a simple cost-benefit analysis. It's not alright to tolerate violent crimes, even if it could lead to statistically significant lower amounts of it overall. With copyright infringement the victim gets to say, "you know, if the amount of pirating is below a certain threshold, it's actually beneficial for us from a marketing perspective." You're not going to see any rape victims say, "you know, I was only raped once. That wasn't so bad."
No, people who want to have some entertainment on their own terms, without paying for it, "induce" the piracy. No, they don't even "induce," they simply "commit" it. They can't be troubled to wait for a DVD or to grab it through Amazon, etc. No... they have to have it RIGHT NOW, because they are entitled to being entertained by the work of other people who spend millions of dollars.
That may be true, but if you're trying to have a successful business plan, do you really think it's a good idea to have one which depends on changing human nature?
Maybe you don't think these people are "entitled to being entertained by the work of other people who spend millions of dollars." It doesn't really matter does it? They think they are, and they have the means to achieve their goals, whether you like it or not. So you have one of two choices...spend lots of money trying to make it more difficult for these guys to get what they want, or give them most of what they want, lowering the number of people who choose to go the pirating route. As long as you gain more by doing the latter than you spend by doing the former, that's the way you should go. Simple cost-benefit analysis.
HBO is asking for it, man! Did you see that short skirt that HBO was wearing?
Did you really just compare copyright infringement to rape?
If you must use a human sexual behavior as an analogy, it's more like dealing with teenage sexual activity. You can argue they shouldn't be engaging in it, and you're probably correct in that they're not ready. That said, if you tell them that abstinence is the way to go, you're fighting against human nature, and you're going to fail. Instead, if you teach them the concepts behind safe sex, you let them have what you want and you minimize the dangers of pregnancy of STDs. There will still be those who will engage in unsafe sex, and there will always be those guys who will pirate no matter what because what they want is the free part. However, you haven't proposed an alternate solution that does a better job.
First-posted AC yesterday--get called a troll. Actually kinda perfect.
Eh. I'm not one to call anyone a troll just because they posted AC. In combination with all the other things I've mentioned, it was one more piece of evidence, because trolls do often go the AC route. Not always, though. And just because you've posted with a registered account now doesn't mean you're not a troll. It doesn't even mean you're really the original submitter. It's entirely possible you just now created a new account to take opportunity of this and get in on the trolling.
I'm not saying for sure that you're not on the level. Years on slashdot have made me cynical, though. Since you have made a post in an attempt to verify your authenticity, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. If you're really legit, I'll be glad to try to help you out. I will give you some recommendations, you can try them out and post additional questions.
I'm looking for opinions, not the One True & Best Distro. I take people's opinions into account and was interested in hearing what Slashdot had to say on the topic.
I think the other posters covered that one pretty well. The general consensus is that if Ubuntu is giving you problems, it's not yet time to move on to something else. I agree with that. Stick with Ubuntu right now for two reasons: the first is that it's more user friendly, and the second is that whoever installed it for you is already somewhat familiar with it, which means you have a friend to rely on for questions. If you move on to arch, or something else that your friend happens to be unfamiliar with, you lose that resource, and have to rely purely on your own googling skills.
I'm assuming the hardware is good because it has worked fine for the past five years, however, it is all five years old; it boots, but isn't recognizing input devices or the video card; mentioned this above, but I was copying .AVIs from a folder on the desktop to another folder, not system files.
The fact that it was working before and then ceased to work after the crash is the really strange part. I could see it being a software issue if it had happened after an update, I suppose, but only after a pretty major update at that, to a new version of Ubuntu. Happening after copying avi files around? At the very least, these two things are not related.
while I appreciate that my post came across as being written by a male, it wasn't--I prefer the third-person pronouns 'she' or 'her';
I made no assumptions as to your gender, and I honestly don't care what it is. I don't even know what you could possibly mean when you say your post "came across as being written by a male" when all you've talked about is a computer problem, an area where I don't see how gender has any relevance. It's merely customary and correct in English to use the masculine pronoun when being generic. I know some people these days classify it as a sexist practice, but I don't go for political correctness crap. Now that you've taken the ambiguity away and I'm aware you're female, I'll use the correct pronouns.
high-learning curves don't phase me;
And yet you had a friend install Linux for you, instead of doing it yourself. It's not exactly hard to do, especially with Ubuntu.
Don't take it the wrong way. I'm not trying to say any bullshit like, "real geeks install linux themselves" or anything like that. All I'm saying is that it's a natural assumption for me that since you got someone to install linux for you, that you're more interested in getting something running than learning about the details. There's nothing wrong with that, there are plenty of things I take that route for. When I first installed Linux, I asked a friend of mine for the distro he used, and installed the same one, so I'd have someone to ask questions. I think it's the best way to go, espec
Let's analyze this. His computer crashed while copying unimportant files with good hardware and now it fails to boot.. Even in 1997, this would have been an unreasonable scenario.
I'm guessing you're not used to dealing with non-technical end users.
"My computer won't boot" can't be taken literally without a lot more evidence. I've had people say similar thing when what they mean is they can't successfully log on.
I don't know what possessed his friend to start a newbie off with Enlightenment, but I suspect he's screwed up or deleted his .e17/.enlightenment/.whatever-its-called-nowadays folder, and "won't boot" means something like startx is failing. He's a younger Windows user, so the idea of the command prompt is likely alien to him.
Well, any one of the things I mentioned by themselves, and I would give the submitter the benefit of the doubt, like you are. The combination is too damning, though. It's also pretty hard to mess up those config files you're talking about because they're in hidden folders. And again, it wouldn't have crashed his box to begin with.
I also feel like the copying files thing is an homage to the old troll about mac os x, where the troll would claim that it took an hour to copy a 20mb file or something like that.
Is this a repost from 1997?
I get the feeling it's a bored troll just trying to get a rise out of someone.
The question will never get a straightforward answer, especially here on slashdot - and because there's no one true answer.
Definitely a troll. In fact, it's so obvious I'm surprised the editors didn't realize it.
Let's analyze this. His computer crashed while copying unimportant files with good hardware and now it fails to boot.. Even in 1997, this would have been an unreasonable scenario. I've certainly seen applications in Linux crash, about as often as I see them crashing in other OSes. In very rare circumstances, I've seen the kernel crash. A kernel crash that prevents the computer from booting again, though? What exactly would cause that?
One thing would be if instead of copying, he was accidentally moving system files. That's pretty hard to do, he would have to get elevated privileges, and even if he did, any file that the system was currently using would remain loaded in ram, so it wouldn't be likely to crash then, he'd just have problems booting up later. Not only that, but this so guy who is self-identifying as inexperienced anticipated this response and made sure to point out the files were "non-important". I'm pretty sure he also chose that wording to avoid saying "system files", afraid that would betray his level of knowledge.
Another possibility is that he has a failing hard drive. Again, this would be unlikely to crash his box, but copying files around in a bad drive could maybe cause corruption of the file system preventing it from successfully booting up next time. So, of course, this guy also predicted this response and made sure to point out that his hardware is a-ok.
What are we left with here? Linux being hard on new users cliche? Check. Using a distro that is known to be user-friendly and suggesting he might want to move to a distro known to have a high learning curve? Check. Implication that Linux's reputation for stability is underserved? Check. Trying to rile up slashdot into "what's the best distro" flamewar? Check. Anonymous submission? Of course. The only thing missing is good old-fashioned vi vs. emacs debate.
Except when it comes to nuclear power plants.
No, that's definitely including nuclear power plants. When you look at the number of deaths vs. energy provided, turns out nuclear is the safest technology there is, beating wind, solar, and hydro.
What exactly is this iOSsification people keep complaining about? There's nothing forced onto you that I can think of.
Quite a few things:
They got rid of spaces. You still have different virtual desktops, but I can no longer assign applications to always open in a particular one. They're also not always there, assigned in a configuration that was easy for me to remember, "from here, go to the desktop above to get to the browser, or the desktop to my right to get to xcode.
Applications no longer quit, instead they keep running in the background, if you click the red button. You can command-q for now, but they still try to retain state. Which is insane. When I open up a new video in quicktime, why would I want the last video that I watched to pop up in a window beside it? I keep having to go and close that other window. (At least now they give me the option to not save the current state of the desktop when I log out. No, I do not want to log back in and see what I was working on before. It's very unlikely I'll be working on the same thing. If I do have something that I always open every time I log in, and I do, I know how to set applications to start automatically every time.)
Applications are auto-saving on me. I don't mind that things auto-save into a backup file, for recovery purposes, but you should NOT overwrite the file I'm working on without my specifically clicking save. I know mac os x lets you get back to previous versions. That's cumbersome unless you're the one who chose to punctuate where each new version starts.
Applications are trying to save to iCloud by default, instead of the local drive. I don't have a problem with iCloud, but it shouldn't be the default location.
The launchpad displays applications in multiple screens and I gotta swipe right to see the other applications. That doesn't make any sense when you have a wheel mouse...I just want to scroll down. The applications folder still exists, so this one doesn't bother me as much, I can avoid using launchpad altogether.
When the iPhone came out, I remember many people saying that apple fully intended to eventually make OS X as locked down as iOS, and a bunch of people dismissing that as conspiracy theories. They have, however, been slowly moving toward that. They released the Mac OS X app store, which isn't really a problem. But then they made it so that you can't install any application that doesn't come from the app store by default, until you go and change the settings to allow it. My prediction is that the next step is going to be making it a setting that you can't get to without going to the command-line, and then they'll just not give you the option, and people will have to jailbreak their macs.
You wanted emotions, there you got em. OS X is the best desktop I know. Debian Linux is the best server operating system I know. Windows is the best reason to shoot someone.
I'm not harping on you, because I believe taste is relative, and there's no right and wrong. Personally, however, I fall into the same camp as the submitter. OS X Leopard is the best desktop I know. It started getting worse with Snow Leopard, and by the time Lion came along, iOSsification had already made it unbearable.
When the second best choice, gnome 2, got dropped in favor of unity and gnome 3, Windows 7 got upgraded to best available option. Then Microsoft had to go all Metro on us. There's pretty much no current version of an UI in any OS that is acceptable to me anymore. The best you can do is KDE after spending a whole lot of time customizing it, because the default KDE is pretty awful as well.
What part of "don't stop across or past the line" is so hard to understand? If you're not sure it's clear then don't pull out in the first place. That's the whole point of the lines - so you stop a safe distance back, and when you start moving the people behind you can reasonably expect you to keep moving.
The part I don't understand is when people forget the spirit of the law in favor of exactly adhering to the letter of the law. Sometimes there's a large truck to your left, and you can't see if you're clear unless you go over the line a bit. You're not endangering anyone, so regardless of what the rules concerning what the line is for, you've obeyed the spirit of the law and shouldn't be faulted for it.
That's true, but irrelevant to the issue of following the law. Don't break the law, and you'll never need to challenge a ticket or worry about whose mercy you are at.
The world isn't black and white, and I wouldn't want it to be black and white. Every situation is different and needs to be treated according to what actually happened, not according to what was written to try to catch what's was predicted to be the most likely thing to happen. Especially when the laws are often written such that legislators think, "oh well, no one is going to apply it in that case, even if it is written to technically allow it."
People like you crack me up. You do realize that a drone is just a weapons platform right? If you can conceive of a reason why the US government might reasonable kill an American citizen with a pistol, a shotgun, an assault rifle, or a tank, why would the use of a drone somehow be any different? Surely the test is whether or not the killing was legal, not what weapons platform was used to deliver the strike. OMG, they haz robots!!!!!
Agreed, but I can't think of any possible way in which an american in US soil could be killed by a drone strike in a legal fashion.
The way I see it, there are only three manners in which the government can kill someone in US soil:
1. Self defense when attacked by a criminal, which rules out the drone.
2. Armed resistance to a legal arrest, which includes being holed up in a building, which I believe should require the officers to make every effort to take the criminals alive, so they can be tried in a court of law. This includes the case where the criminals are holed up with hostages, in which case sniping them is acceptable if it looks like they're not going to give up the hostages. A drone strike is again ruled out here. If they have no hostages, then an effort needs to be made to take them alive, and if they do have hostages, then the drone strike would harm the hostages as well.
3. After they've been sentenced in a trial to the death sentence. I don't actually approve of the death sentence, but I consider it legal until we change the books. Come to think of it, I'm actually ok if the drone strike is used in this situation. I don't think it's any more cruel than the electric chair, to have the sentenced men tied up in an open field and then order the drone strike. That said, I would argue it's far too expensive and impractical.
Asserting that the data is "bloated XML" or that their is bad scripting, spam or cookies involved is grossly stupid...Any of the posts that assume otherwise are a combination of arrogance and ignorance, which is typical for what passes as comments on Slashdot these days.
Although I'm always tired of the "what could possibly go wrong" posts (and was tired of them back in '03 too, slashdot has always had those posts)...Dude, the xml comment was a joke, and a pretty funny one at that. As I literally laughed out loud after reading it, it never even occurred to me that somebody else might read that post and think it was a serious concern that 100kb suddenly transformed into half a terabyte because of xml tags. Until I read your post that is.
You should go in search of your sense of humor. I think if you check your wallet, you'll discover you've lost it. After you find it again, I bet slashdot will seem a little less arrogant and ignorant.
makes cultural/historical blunders like a bunch of space brazilians naming a colony Lusitânia when it's somewhat ludicrous to name a colony after your colonizers, especially with the overall sentment towards Portugal being quite adversarial
Where exactly are you from, if you don't mind my asking?
I grew up in Sao Paulo until I was 14, and never got the impression that there was any adversarial feeling toward Portugal. Except for the Portuguese jokes, which are the equivalent to Polish jokes in the US. Those can be considered offensive, but I never knew anyone that told them to actually mean offense against the Portuguese people. In fact, the kids would often tell similar jokes that denigrates Brazil itself ("A Brazilian, and American, and an Italian were blindfolded in a helicopter, and don't know where they are. The Italian sticks his hand out the door and says, "We're in Italy." The others asks how he knows and he responds, "I'm pretty sure I've touched the Tower of Pisa." The American sticks his hand out next and says, "No, we're in the United States. I'm pretty sure what I've touched is the Statue of Liberty." The Brazilian sticks his hand out next and says, "Nope, we're definitely over Brazil." The others asks if he thinks he touched the Christ Redeemer statue, and he responds, "no, but my wristwatch was stolen.")
Now, Brazilian culture is very different depending on where you are in Brazil, and I've never really left Sao Paulo while I was there, so I'm curious if the feeling towards Portugal is different elsewhere.
(and for the record, like you, I've read the English version of Speaker for the Dead, and thought it was a good book, although I remember thinking the Portuguese was awkward and somewhat distracting)
Long favored? Most people that I've known doing .NET work are wired into the frameworks Microsoft developed, glued on thier own proprietary bits and called it a day. Can you please leave some feedback on these very popular community driven OSS efforts in the .NET umbrella (outside of Mono which is a re-implementation of Microsoft's API's), becase quite frankly, I've never heard of any.
Go check out codeplex. As a .NET developer, we've been using lots and lots of open source .NET libraries from there for many years. The .NET open-source community is very active and it has always been so.
There are two factors involved in a customer's decision. That which they get, and the price at which they get it. What's going on here is that most customers are not willing to shell out $50-$70 for Time Warner's top tiers, as the extra speed doesn't justify the cost over the lower tiers. On the surface, this would seem to back up Time Warner's assertion that customers don't want faster speeds for the most part. The analysis is missing one important factor, however: Time Warner has no real competition in most markets. As a result, they get to set the prices to dictate customer demand, not the other way around. To maximize their profit, Time Warner has chosen a price point at which most people will want to purchase the tier they're willing to provide minimizing the amount of investment in their infrastructure they would have to provide to support more people at higher tiers.
In a more competitive environment, other ISPs would compete by offering lower prices and faster tiers. Then we would see whether customers chose to pay less for the same speeds or get a faster internet for the same price.