If someone wanted to start something, (i.e. cheap, downloadable content), cut out the middle men (maybe./ could do this too:) - it couldn't happen. Not with the major labels, anyway. The major labels won't allow you to offer cheap, downloadable content that isn't DRM. It just won't happen.
iTunes doesn't give you everything - although it is a workable format. If you could set the price of the tracks lower, say 50 cents or whatever, and, as an artist, cut a deal with iTunes yourself - this would be much closer to the ideal.
We're still dealing with the major labels here, at least for the most part. Pretty traditional stuff, more or less - of course, with some exceptions.
Seriously - no one should be afraid of releasing multimedia content without any controls on it. It makes no difference. People will copy, people will share, it's just a fact of life. Forget about it - focus on your music, focus on getting a good deal with the distributor, and everything will be fine.
By far the biggest problems any artist is going to have to face are the managers and agents constantly taking a cut, the monolithic labels, the expensive producers, and his or her own ego. Not file sharing; not cracking of DRM.
DRM-free is the key to success! Geez, you could even charge MORE for it!
There does need to be some kind of control. Either copyright means something or it doesn't.
I think perhaps one of the problems is something that is kind of a cultural thing, at least in Hollywood it is, perhaps in other countries as well. You can see it in The Passion, sort of... the arrghhh "tough guy", "no pain no gain" approach to physical pain that the movie takes. Kind of an epic, grueling adventure, a manly, grizzly adventure.
I was reading this book called the Diamond Sutra, which is an old buddhist text. They were describing how through meditation and peace of mind you can avoid physical pain, and therefore avoid the controlling factors that evil rulers and evil empires try to control you with. I think that The Passion missed this aspect entirely. Wouldn't it be the ultimate rebellion against the crucifiers if the crucified felt no pain? Wouldn't that be the ultimate undermining of the immoral grab for power, the exploiting of human fears of pain for political gain? There are powers of the human mind that many societies (including Hollywood and its fans) don't understand. I don't think that it's unreasonble to wonder about how much pain Jesus actually felt - we may never know; but one thing I do know is that it's unreasonable and "isn't it just like Hollywood" to exaggerate it..
So it's this heavy-handed, power-driven image that makes it hard to take these MPAA guys seriously. It's not so much about the copyright, it's more about the "how", the way that they are approaching it - cracking down, no mercy -- that kind of attitude. The "tough guy" approach. Asking people to do something so they don't get hurt, just like your local mafia people.
What they should do instead is make it easy on everyone and adapt to the change - use their brains, not their muscles. Instead of acting like gorillas in a zoo, perhaps they should use intelligence to combat this problem. Of course there are no easy answers; but there is much to be gained from finding answers that do work; look at the success of iTunes, for instance. I think Netflix has the right idea; they are heading in the right direction.
You have to change the culture - the way the culture is now, people just eat up anything they are given, and this makes it very easy for p2p to come in and hand them freebies. Many people just don't think very much when it comes to their choice of films that they are going to watch, and so it follows that they don't think very much in regards to distribution channels that they are going to use - p2p is being handed to the masses on a silver platter, and in the usual unthinking way, the masses accept it, because that's just the way it is done.
If people were to think a little more critically about the films they have available to them, at the theaters, local superstores, and brick and mortar rental outlets, they might realize that most of them kind of suck. In the same way, if people were to think a little more critically about the distribution channels they have available to them, they would realize that p2p sucks because it doesn't channel money back to the people who put their hard work into the movie, and they would look for a better way that avoids price fixing and limited selection.
The problem is that the movie-going masses are being spoon-fed whatever Hollywood puts out, and they gladly eat up whatever that might be. Until you change this situation, by bringing in fresh talent, by avoiding obligatory multi-million dollar production costs, you won't be able to stop people from thoughtlessly accepting the p2p distrubution methods they are being spoon-fed.
Smaller production companies and independent films cannot compete with the multi-million dollar productions, the massive CGI budgets, and those production companies that can are getting the moviegoers accustomed to these kinds of things. This allows them to spoon-feed any content they like, provided that many millions of dollars have been spent. Moving the focus to the content of the films, the messages that the films
There's probably a connection between the vitality of your body, mind, and spirit as a whole and the vulnerability you will have to carpal tunnel, but the simple facts are that you do need the equipment - without the equipment, you're taking many steps back.
A good chair (which costs right around $1000), with good armrests. A good trackball (approx $100), a good keyboard ($200-$1000+). Per employee costs are unacceptable for most people, they would rather just treat you as a disposable tool than a human being.
The secret is to get to the point where you can have these nice things; and there is no way that you can get these with any amount of certainty if you keep switching jobs over and over. Unfortunately, there are very few things that you can recommend to "the masses", because that's what government is supposed to do.
I guess even a Logitech trackball, a Microsoft Natural Keyboard, and perhaps some sort of buckwheat pillow or other back-saving device you can purchase for yourself might get you through if you really need the job.
Disability will get you 65% of what your wage is, and you won't be eligible for that money unless you allow "them" to do surgery on you and so on. Your source of money will be tied to being completely at the mercy of doctors perhaps not even of your own choosing, any refusal or exercise of your rights to refuse medical treatment will leave you liable for any and all money you have recieved up to that point.
Let's face it - it's not hard to understand - computers have been with us yet a very short time; it's probably best to try to get a job where you can either have the "clout" to get the tools to do the job right and not hurt yourself, or just get a job where you use the computer as little as possible. Either that, or you can get a not-so great paying job having others do completely unnecessary surgery on you. Well, completely unnecessary except for as a means for your employer to save on per-employee costs.
I became concerned about RSI before I got any symptoms at all; and I found some Northgate split keyboards on e-bay for a good price, got myself a Bodybilt chair, and built myself a custom desk with a fancy articulating keyboard tray I purchased at the local university's clearance sale. I can pretty much type all day, very comfortably - although I do take breaks often because that's what is recommended that you do.
It's all in the tools you use to accomplish your job, and it also has something to do with your physical, mental, spiritual, emotional health as a whole.
This is a brave new world we have with computers everywhere in the past few decades - lots of bugs still need to be worked out. One shouldn't for a minute think that anybody actually has thought about any of this stuff or done any kind of research or even had time to worry about it.
There's lots of info on the web, just keep searching - spend a lot of time searching, reading Google groups, etc... you'll get the big picture eventually.
I always thought that getting a good CRT and cranking up the refresh rate was the best way to avoid eyestrain.
There are apparently a minority of users who develop intense headaches after 15 minutes of using LCD monitors. This is due to the backlight, which is usually a small flourescent bulb (at 60hz, obviously). To use an LCD monitor is to stare at a flourescent bulb.
I've just never quite felt like risking the money because of this reason, although, if the prices keep coming down, it might be worth it just to try it. They are more energy efficient.
I just figured it's better to get a really good CRT and crank up the refresh rate really high. I've not noticed any headaches, or anything from my CRT, my refresh is somewhere between 90 and 100 Hz, I don't remember exactly. I do have to say that there isn't anything much worse or painful than a CRT with a substandard refresh rate; that should definitely constitute torture of some kind.
All you really gotta do is look at the facts. Another view of the facts. You can say this, with no fear of anything: women tend not to do as well in math and science. Furthermore, you can also say without much fear of anything that many minorities tend to not do as well in our educational system in general.
The problem is with the educational system. Advancing through the educational system has to do with getting good grades on exams, more or less. It's all based on grades, and it is, in a sense, a dog-eat-dog, or a "groove"... in other words - there is momentum. If you are used to getting A's, that gets expected of you and you can breeze through without anyone so much as having even the slighest doubt you will get another A. If you fall behind somewhere in this process, this core process of getting good grades on exams, this momentum starts working against you. In this ultra-competitive environment, teachers and peers will begin to have doubts about the likelihood of your success, about your coming out on top, and the expectation becomes that you will not do that well. This can also rub off on you, and YOU begin to feel that you aren't going to do so well. This creates a chain cycle, and students fall behind, and get pushed out to the periphery of the educational system, the only criteria essentially being bad grades on exams.
It has to do with grades. Get rid of grades. Get rid of exams. Basing it all on grades and exams, and the figuring out some way of moving the periphery of the students, the students that don't do so well, into the core of the system. Change the core of the system so that you don't have students hanging out on the periphery of it simply because they don't get good grades on exams. It's just as likely that any "group" of individuals with a specific determining characteristic (let's say green eyes) that hasn't done well in a particular subject (let's say botany) may have a harder time developing that momentum, developing that trust, that confidence that those individuals who are expected to do well in a particular subject have.
So let's say that if people with green eyes haven't done very well in botany in the past, any individual with green eyes is going to have less confidence when they try to do well in botany. Combine that with the pressure of tests, exams, and grades, and any individual, green eyes or not, that hasn't done well in botany is at a disadvantage because they aren't expected to do well.
It could have much to do with the way the tests are written. It could have much to do with the way that the "core" of the educational system is set up. It could have much to do with, perhaps, that female students feel more comfortable with female teachers, and male students feel more comfortable with male teachers, and if math and science tend to be male-dominated fields, perhaps there are more male teachers. Perhaps that has something to do with it.
But in any case, I think the solution is to change the "core" of the educational system. The "core" concepts of how one "does well in school". It's really the only way to do it. It's sort of like what FreeBSD 5.x is being accused of - awkward fixes after awkard fix (i.e. "laying on hacks") when the real solution is just to do a cleaner re-write - get down into the "core" of the system, in this case the educational system, and upgrade it to be more effective in our modern, diverse world. Stop using the band-aids to try to get the periphery of the students who don't do so well incorporated into a messed-up core, change the core.
Even if what this individual said were true, it doesn't solve the problem, and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. There are many other "groups", if you will, of individuals with distinguishing characteristics that don't do well, not only in math and science, but the educational system as a whole. The are entire sections of society that are having the rug swept out from beneath their feet by the competitive nature of our current educational system. Competition is
Just yesterday, I was messing around and I installed what there is so far of Enlightenment 0.17 on an older (Celeron 667) machine running Linux.
It's really not quite there yet, it's really not quite stable yet, and it really has quite some way to go yet. But what is there is just incredible. I am extremely impressed.
I have been stuck on the current Enlightenment, 0.16, for quite some time now, and I use it on all of my personal computers, but on this older computer I have Gnome 2.8, KDE 3.3, I tried ion yesterday as well, but out of curiousity I had to try E 0.17.
I imagine that Gnome, as well as KDE, will have much greater commercial success, but the smoothness of E 0.17, even on this 667 Celeron, is just out of sight. It's smooth - it's fast, and it's incredibly beautiful without being over the top. Of course, not all of the components work, many things are still being worked on, and it's probably a long way off before it's going to be ready for prime time. The login manager (entrance) is incredible, although, again, I am having issues getting it to start up automatically upon boot. Things like this are to be expected.
Maybe it's just me, but I've cycled through all the desktop environments on this machine - Gnome, KDE, etc... but I can honestly say that I've never been quite as impressed with any of them as I am with this E 0.17. Even though this computer is just sort of a testbed for different things, and a computer I use to demonstrate to friends and family what Linux looks like (I use KDE for that) - I can't stop going over to it and turning it on and being impressed. E 0.17, whenever it's going to get done, is going to be well worth the wait. It's way, way different - the previews of Gnome don't even come close. I'm just so impressed I can't stop thinking about it. Still has a long way to go though.
Actually, with all due respect, it would be incorrect to say "many people have ordered the business services when they have been notified of excessive download" -- it's more accurate to say that a "limited amount" of individuals have done this in the interest, or in the hopes of having larger amount of data transfer being available to them - say, for instance, a family that has many teenagers and xboxes and audio streams and video communications and things like that - but the invisible caps appear to be the same regardless of the service levels you purchase.
The real problem is that people aren't given any clear guidelines how to go about limiting their bandwidth consumption (i.e. "how much is too much"), perhaps due to the invisible caps changing from month to month depending on various things, and of course, lots of people don't have a means of measuring how much they use anyway, which is probably the reasoning that Comcast uses when they instruct people to "just cut down".
They usually tell you to "just cut down", which, in the case of a single individual downloading tons of stuff is probably fairly self-explanatory, but when you have a shared connection with, say for instance, a houseful of college students, or a big family with numerous xboxes and such, this can become more difficult.
I think the solution would be to at least attempt to provide some sort of approximate guidelines, more specific than "just cut down", and perhaps institute a temporary suspension prior to cutting the service off for good. It's pretty clear that many customers would be perfectly happy to switch to DSL if their usage patterns are in excess of what Comcast would like, but DSL isn't available to them. In cases like these, it just seems that there ought to be some way to provide some sort of guidance for people as to how they can keep their connection, and not get cut off - something closer to a three strikes, you're out. The problem is that theoretically, at least, you may have used up too much bandwidth already for the current month by the time you get notified for last month's excesses, and you can do nothing but wait for the disconnect a month down the road. This has apparently happened to some people who were downloading extreme amounts of data, or to people who misunderstood what "just cut down" means. The invisible caps aren't advertised, and their existence isn't publicized anywhere, isn't in writing anywhere, and a number of customers have reported being caught totally by surprise, having had no idea that there were any kind of limitations on the data transfer they were allowed to do... DSL lines in the US certainly have no such restrictions. Nor does there appear to be any way to plead your case or get the service turned back on. These are just a couple things that Comcast could do to make the situation a little more "user friendly", I guess.
But as far as the connection, and the speeds, those are, for the most part, very stable and very good. It's just in these few isolated situations, particularly situations where you have a houseful of teenagers or college students all sharing the pipe, it becomes very difficult to know what to do; and it can be a very frustrating experience to deal with. It just seems that there has to be a better solution. Simply providing guidance to those individuals who have been warned wouldn't even require publishing any kinds of hard limits, and would still allow the limits to be computed from national aggregate data each month. Some people may not understand how to comply with "keep it under 100 gigs a month", or may not have any means to measure that, and for those customers, "just cut down" might be the best way to explain the situation, but there are plenty of tech-savvy people who have had this problem who would be more than happy to comply with "keep it under 100 gigs a month" or "keep it under 50 gigs a month" or whatever. There's just no reason to turn it into a guessing game, really.
I really don't mean to knock Comcast or anything, I am sure they hav
It was 300 gigs per month for a while, but all of a sudden it appears to be 200 or 225 gigs for last month (they just placed the calls last Friday).
The problem is that if you only get notified 13 days into the month that you went over last month, you're still dealing with everything you downloaded the first thirteen days of THIS month, and if that amount is too much for next month's cap (say they move it down to 150 gigs next month), then you just lost your internet connection and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
To add insult to injury, they say it's a "courtesy call", and suggest that you might be interested in their business offerings (which have the same exact limitations), and many people get the impression that there aren't these limitations with the business accounts, they order the more expensive business accounts, download away, with one strike already against them, and end up getting disconnected the next time around. It's evil.
They were cracking down on upload last year, but at the moment it appears to be something like 200 or 225 gigs per month combined. They crack down, though, whenever they upgrade the speeds so next month it could be 150 gigs per month or too much upload - which is usually anything over 30? or 40? gigs - something like that -
It's evil. It's just totally evil. I suppose it's better than some of these cable internet services with caps of 45 gigs a month or whatever; but it isn't anything even remotely approaching the rock-solid knowledge that you can download whatever you want, whenever you want (provided it's legal, of course) with your DSL line.
You need to be really, really careful with Comcast - they are very very unpredictable when it comes to using your internet connection. It's sort of like owning a Ferrari or something, but having a national speed limit of 70mph which you can practically reach in first gear. The speed is there, but you can't use it. It's very strange.
You can run OS X from within Linux - you could even use a really really clean window manager (or an artsy one like Enlightement), perhaps "fullscreen" that OS X window on one virtual desktop, and then do other linux apps on other virtual desktops or something like that.
Probably not the best idea for the cutting edge latest hardware, but it could probably breathe some new life into something a little less brand new. Interesting, anyway.
I think the key is to seperate "education" from a "license to get a real job". There are two camps here, really two sides. Pursuing philosophy because you LOVE it, and it enraptures you and consumes you and becomes your life's passion... or computer science, or theoretical physics, or economics, or any other subject like that. Versus working hard to get a BS so that someone will hire you. Versus "you forget most of what you study anyway, it just proves to your employer that you are willing to work hard".
When you focus objectively on the subject, when you do what is called "deep learning", when you really get into what you are studying, and actually get your brain working, thinking new ideas, coming up with new questions, trying to find new answers, you begin to experience the true value of education, which is, if you asked me, about learning the material, understanding the significance of astronomy or physics or ethics or philosophy or literature or art or film, or politics, economics, etc...
I am from the camp that respects education because education is good in and of itself, intrinsically. I find education to be an end in and of itself, a way to improve yourself, question your place in society, learn more about the world you live in. I am not from the camp that feels that education is a "license" to get a job.
What we are probably seeing here is a reflection of these values - perhaps ivy leaguers are more likely to be passionate about education; perhaps they attach a significance to education that goes beyond the ability to get a job or proving that one is a hard worker.
If you think about it, at least at the undergraduate level, the stuff you learn and study has been studied and taught for hundreds, even thousands of years... there must be some compelling reason for this; and I can speak from personal experience that if you open your mind and really focus on "deep learning", really get into what you are studying, that it becomes quite obvious why we are still studying these subjects thousands of years later.
Education can be a very, very powerful tool; but you have to recognize that it has value in and of itself, and that it's not just a way to get a better job. Looking at it from this point of view, perhaps the figures make a little more sense. The types of environments that you will find in these big businesses probably make those positions less attractive to people who have a genuine, deep respect for education. Larger businesses will probably place more emphasis on a degree as a qualification or requirement, potential hires may be required to possess a BS as matter of policy.
Perhaps the path to getting the most out of education doesn't lead to C* positions at large organizations; and if getting the most out of life has anything to do with getting the most out of education, and if getting the most out of education has anything to do with respecting education as being important in and of itself, not simply a means to get a job, then you may very well see the positions in large corporations being filled with individuals who are open to accepting the viewpoint of education as a requirement, as a prerequisite to employment, with less emphasis on the intellectual and creative side of education, which usually requires money and time to pursue.
An empirical theory can be called into question as far as in regards to it being empirical if there isn't at least some way to attempt to prove it wrong.
That's not to say that evolution is wrong, only that there needs to be a possibility that it can be challenged - it's not an absolute truth.
All science is a theory - the only absoulute truth is that there are no absolute truths. This includes things like medical science (a.k.a. the church of modern medicine), which people treat more like a religion than they do science.
It's not wrong to say that evolution is a theory - it's an empirical theory. It's not wrong to say that creation is an absolute truth for those who are members of certain Christian congregations - it is, creation certainly isn't being presented by the religions that believe in it as an empirical theory (you can't prove it wrong - it's just something you have to take on faith.)
So it's not that evolution isn't a theory - of course it is, but all of science is - duh. That's what students are supposed to be learning. There has to be the presumption that any scientific theory could theoretically be proved wrong; any empirical theory that claims to be the absolute truth no longer really qualifies as being an empirical theory.
This has definitely changed my opinion of Apple. Not that I am that important or anything, or that I have any ability to make any difference - whether or not I like Apple isn't going to affect their business in one way or the other - but on a personal level, it has changed my opinion of Apple.
If they are going to waste their time, creating more pain and suffering in an already brutal world instead of focus on making good software, then obviously their products are probably not going to be as good as they could be.
I want nothing to do with such an uncouth company.
They're not going to take someone, like for instance, this individual whom I know and speak to at the grocery store from time to time, that has built himself a collection of close to 1000 DVD's - all legitimate, he paid for them all, they're all "the real thing", he's been collecting them for years and years and years ever since they came out.
You gotta take some of these articles with a grain of salt.
they will burn through stuff - they will burn through your clothes, plastic, cardboard (I don't know about metal) but certainly it's not one of those opening your car door things or a little red dot that your dog or cat chases around on the carpet - these types of things will probably burn a hole in your carpet. Pointing it at your skin would be incredibly painful, perhaps lead to some serious burns. It'll burn through your clothing.
It's more like shooting a BB gun up into the air just for fun. These types of lasers need to be thought of as a loaded gun (i.e. don't point them at people or anything else you wouldn't point a gun at). A cloud, a tree, a brick wall, freshly fallen snow, no harm done. These aren't any kind of expensive government things, they are apparently legal, but powerful. The idea is that you ought to treat it like a gun, not a toy. This probably has a lot to do with the "new-fangledness" of lasers, and perhaps a resistance to think that the science fiction stories would ever come true.
People just don't realize how powerful lasers can be, and that even legal ones you can buy for a couple hundred bucks can be very dangerous and need to be treated appropriately. We need to raise the awareness that they are dangerous.
I've been using the ctrl-r function of bash quite a bit recently after I found out about it - it's the "incremental search backwards" for the last time you issued the command you start typing after pressing the ctrl-r.
It's great for those complex commands or multiple commands all piped together that you just don't feel like typing in again. I've been using ctrl-r quite a bit recently, actually.
The HD-DVD and the Blu-Ray players both support the mpeg4 formats. While the disks you buy from the store might be all messed up, either play or not play, there isn't really anything stopping anyone from taking some mpeg4 content and placing that on a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD blank; those will probably play every time, more or less. It would not be surprising to see iTunes-like services springing up around the mpeg4 format.
What's going to happen is simple: the HD-DVD thing isn't going to take off; not if you have to keep upgrading keys all the time. Joe and Jane Average are probably going to stick with the regular DVD from Netflix, Blockbuster, or whomever, knowing that it will work every time.
If the new formats can be gotten to "work every time", perhaps by having the keys downloaded from the internet or something like that, then they might do better. Anytime you make something too complicated, though, it's bound to fail. Look at 3D movies with those uncomfortable cardboard 3D glasses. Where have they gone? Look at DVD-Audio or the SACD? Going nowhere fast. Lossless compression formats from iTunes or other services? We're not really there yet - if people are willing to settle for mp3 or aac quality sound, why would they want to spend extra money on a DVD-audio quality sound?
The movie industry risks entering a situation not unlike the music industry finds itself in today. Many of the same symptoms are there; the same attempt to control is there; the same low-quality, high-budget, intellectually lacking content is being pumped out. A new format that is harder and more expensive to use just isn't going to cut it. It would not be surprising to see mpeg4 take the place of mp3 files, with people cramming movie after mpeg4 movie onto a DVD5 or perhaps a DVD9 that they either downloaded from a legitimate service, or if no such legitimate services happen to spring up in the near future, a p2p network.
The popularity of iTunes and other legitimate music download services goes to show that consumers don't care so much about the absolute highest sound quality, but that they care more about convenience, selection, ease of use, accessibility, and things like that. These new formats are probably more or less doomed to not do as well as they could.
These new disks, though, the Blu-Ray especially, these are going to be GREAT for backing up systems, documents, and also for businesses to do backups and things like that. The technology is awesome; what Hollywood is trying to do with it is the part that isn't going to work very well.
personal use is limited by the amount of content any one person can watch while still doing things like sleeping, eating, working, studying, etc...
if an individual watches more than one "copied for personal use" movie; listens to more than one "copied for personal use" CD; etc, then the impact to any one particular artist/studio/prouducer, etc... is reduced even further. If an individual downloads something but never listens to it or watches it, as is a fairly common practice, or deletes without ever watching or listenting it, I would like to see someone explain how anyone had an injustice committed against them -- an explanation involving something other than wordplay and dictionary definitions from some imaginary dictionary.
One could argue about the effects of personal copying in aggregate; adding up everyone who is doing it - but that too, is limited by the popularity of the movie. The more popular the movie, the more "copying for personal use" there is going to be, so the percentages for any types of real or potential loss should remain approximately the same regardless of the popularity of the movie.
Either you have a hard drive on your local machine, or you are using a hard drive on a remote machine. OK, maybe if the remote location has gigs and gigs of ram and many clusters of machines the entire concept runs in RAM, but it's also got to at least be backed up on a hard drive somewhere; and if you don't have enough RAM locally you'll probably need swap, for which you'll need a hard drive as well. Can you imagine a PC without a hard drive?
The wonders of imagination.
All that this really is talking about is where the hard drive is located. The internet connection is analagous to a wire, to an IDE or SCSI or SATA cable. I have to disagree completely, because hard drives are incredibly inexpensive (relatively speaking) and increasing in capacity and performance all the time. As SATA takes off, and the speeds increase, you'll see a pretty big difference in the performance that you get out of your hard drives. PC's are not going hard-drive-less any time in the forseeable future.
Either you like the idea, don't like the idea, or are somewhere in between liking or not liking the idea.
In order to be happy at your job, or life in general - in order to be able to set any kind of goal for yourself at all regarding what type of environment you would like to work in you need to just be honest about where you stand on the issue. It's really not that big a deal, other than if you like the idea, you should try getting a job somewhere that uses this type of thing, and if you don't like the idea, then you should set a goal to try to get a job someplace that doesn't use this type of thing.
We see a lot of the "If you can't make it working here, then you won't be able to make it working anywhere" rhetoric, or the "every place of employment is just like us with regards to the things you don't like about working here", which is, of course, complete BS, unless you start believing it. Quit because you CAN. Not because you hate your job, not because you can't take it anymore, quit because it's your right to do it; quit because you can. More power to 'ya. It's good to quit your job often; it breeds self-confidence.
The possibility that there is only one individual - YOU - that feels a certain way about something is extremely remote. This is a situation where there is no universal wrong or right, just people who either like the idea, don't like the idea, or are somewhere in between liking or not liking the idea. It's as simple as that. Any employee is always going to be more productive in an environment where he or she feels more comfortable. There is no one right answer here, it's just that each of us needs to make a choice. No one should feel compelled to spend the rest of their life around people whom they don't get along with and don't have anything in common with, should they? Especially if there are other, better, choices of friends, coworkers, employers, spouses, etc... out there. Grab the bully's underwear and pull it up over his head, then tell him to leave you alone.
Just chill out and get a job someplace where you feel comfortable, or just don't worry about it. Rather than channeling your anger and frustration *against* the devices, channel your motivation towards surrounding yourself with people that are like-minded, employers, co-workers, friends, etc... with whom you get along and share similar values. Like I said, the likelihood that you are the only person that doesn't like this kind of thing is extremely, extremely remote if not entirely physically impossible.
It goes back to the concept that non-physical objects like electronic files ought to be treated as if they were physical objects. We hear plenty of this from the anti-p2p people; we hear that downloading a file is like stealing, that just because it's in electronic format doesn't mean that the copyright is somehow invalidated, that there are financial issues even though no physical media is being stolen, etc...
But how would it be if I were to go and purchase a CD that I would only be able to play on two CD players; if I were to purchase a DVD that I would only be able to play on two DVD players? Are we, or are we not treating non-physical objects as physical objects? Is there a difference between an electronic file and a physical medium or not? Apparently, at least as far as we can witness from the insane drive towards DRM, there IS in fact a difference between electronic files and physical media. What does this say, then, to the argument that there is no difference between downloading a file and stealing a physical CD from a shelf in a store? It's a mixed message at a minimum.
It seems to me that the industry is using electronic formats as an "excuse" to tighten their grip and to try to seize control of who gets to express themselves artistically - whether or not they are going to be successful remains to be seen. Of course it goes without saying that to follow this line of thought would lead one to conclude that many individuals are using electronic formats as an excuse to "steal" copyrighted material. Perhaps it's better to realize, that at least to some extent, the actions of individuals on both sides of this argument are wrong.
It seems to me that it would be so much easier to just do away with the DRM - for the consumer, that is - do away with the DRM and make the material available for a reasonable fee. That way, the consumer would be getting the electronic files from a trusted source, at the full speed of their internet connection, they wouldn't run the risk of viruses, they would have more consistent audio/video quality, and if they were to purchase these electronic files, those files could be archived away, and an individual would be able to build a collection, just as with LP's or cassette tapes or CDs or DVDs.
If everyone were to really look at the situation objectively, many would come to the conclusion that it could actually be easier to go with a legitimate service than downloading this or that or the other thing from some random quasi-anonymous source. However, this "ease" will never be achieved, and there will never be a level playing field, if this madness revolving around DRM doesn't stop.
If consumers were given a choice, a real, legitimate choice, to go with an online service for their content, at a reasonable price, everyone would realize that downloading stuff via unofficial channels is much more complicated, dangerous, unreliable and time consuming than going with a reasonably priced legitimate service.
Is there, or is there not a difference between electronic files and physical media? Should there be a difference, or not? How many people would buy a CD or DVD that would only play in a particular DVD player, or require some special firmware to play in a DVD player, or wouldn't play on a DVD player made by a smaller competitor? It's just not realistic to treat electronic files with such a tighter grip - the industry should be more realistic in their approach, but unfortunately, it's obvious that isn't going to happen anytime soon.
What better incentive for individuals to stop downloading files from unofficial, non-legitimate sources that don't contribute royalties to the artists who deserve them than a legitimate service that is significantly more user-friendly? It's a win-win situation, without a doubt; not to mention that when royalties go where they are supposed to go, artists and everyone involved with the production process gets an incentive to create more works?
Legitimate services bogged down with DRM cannot compete against p
I happened to take an "Entertainment Law" course, taught by a Harvard-educated laywer.
The entire concept of "intellectual property" is based on the idea of taking something that is immaterial and treating it as if it were material.
So you cannot argue that it "isn't theft" or that it's "not stealing" without undermining hundreds of years of legal precedent that constitutes the very core of copyright law. You just simply can't do it. Those arguments don't hold. By saying that it's "not stealing" because nothing physical is taken, you are simply pointing out something that has been recognized for centuries; you are simply pointing out the very reasons that copyright and intellectual property law exist in the first place.
But all is not lost... there should be an exemption. If you (or someone you are downloading from) are sharing files, free of charge, and those files are going to be used for personal, non-commercial uses, there should be an exemption. It is not necessary to undermine centuries of legal precedent concerning copyright in order to make sense of the dilemna we have before us.
I feel that it boils down to the simple physical reality that if something is for "personal" use, then that means that you have to consider that a human being has to eat, sleep, work. study, and do other things besides watch movies 24/7 - so any outstanding royalties that might be due simply cannot be greater than the amount of movies that any reasonable individual can watch in a certain period of time. That, in and of itself, is a significantly limiting factor, compared to, for instance, an individual who manufactures illegal disks and sells them on the black market, perhaps to thousands of individuals - the outstanding royalties in that situation are not limited by the amount of time one person can spend watching movies, but the amount of time thousands of people spend watching movies. Personal use implies that an individual is only watching one movie at a time - I suppose if you are an alien from outer space you can have a wall of monitors and be watching 25 different films at the same time, but realistically, it's not going to happen.
On top of that, in order to download with a torrent, you must also upload, so there's even another exemption there - there is no one single source that is providing multiple downloads to multiple individuals - you download, you upload as well - there is no analogy to a single individual manufacturing hundreds or thousands of black-market disks and profiting from them. It's more or less a 1:1 ratio, as far as each individual torrent user is concerned - you download, you also upload.
The best way to look at it is that there should be some kind of exemption; there should be some sort of compromise. Furthermore, services like Netflix should be promoted and the industry should see to it that they don't discourage innovation in this area by attempting to continue their stranglehold on the industry.
People need to recognize that technically, file sharing is copyright infringment and theft; but instead of using some kind of mathematical or logical "formula" to determine guilt or innocence, we need to use our common sense to come up with solutions that can create some types of limited exemptions. Personally, I think that bittorrent already has one possible exemption available to it, something that creates the greatest legal risk, something that the industries have attacked vociferously - that being the moral of "don't enable leeches". By not being a leech, by being required to upload when you download, you are adjusting the ratio, and preventing any one individual from providing multiple downloads to multiple individuals. It's no wonder that the industry is "encouraging" leeching - that way the content providers become centralized.
I understand that the original idea behind Netflix was to make the content available online, but the bandwidth costs made it unfeasible. We need to find a way to transition from limitations of physical media for rental
I figured something out. Take a look at the price of DVD media (well, this is not exact) - but let's say a DVD-R costs 50 cents. Let's say a fairly active file sharer / movie downloader downloads 15 movies per month. That's 60 gigs or so, not that much compared to what some people are doing, and certainly not anywhere near what a broadband connection can accomplish.
15 movies * 12 months, let's say * 2 years = 360 movies. Of course dual-layer media is coming down in price, but let's just pretend someone's doing some shrinking. 360 movies, let's say $1 a piece (one copy for backup) - That's 360 dollars, two years, so divided by 24 is $15 dollars a month.
Of course, it's pretty easy to download more than 15 movies a month, but even at 15 movies a month, even if everything you get is via torrent or IRC or some other p2p and doesn't require any other provider fees or anything - $15 dollars a month (for blanks, essentially).
Now... how hard would it be to have an online "on-demand" repository of perhaps THOUSANDS of movies, where you could subscribe to it for $25 or $35 dollars a month? Put on the DRM. maybe a watermark so each download isn't distributed any further - but can you imagine a set-top box where you have access to thousands of movies "on demand", perhaps streaming to a temporary location on a hard drive or something... you could even qualify it by saying - $25 dollars a month, maximum of 20 movies per month, $2 each additional download, whatever... so who cares if you can't "burn" them, just watch them - if they're always there, and the subscription rate is less expensive not to mention less time consuming than the download-burn-try to find some way to organize them method - this is actually a better idea.
How many movies a month are people going to want to watch anyway?
You would get a much, much larger selection, you wouldn't have to buy blanks, you wouldn't have to sit there burning DVDs all day long, and it would be less expensive on top of everything else.
DVD blanks aren't cheap; downloading takes time; weeding through websites and torrents and p2p applications trying to find what you're looking for and having no quality assurance, no anti-virus assurance - all this stuff that these movie industry people are fighting in terms of file sharing is really just an expensive royal pain compared to what a reasonable monthly subscription fee would be to a service that would make massive quantities of DRM'd (perhaps non-burnable) content available "on demand" in one way or another.
It's way more expensive and time-consuming to "pirate" than it would be to subscribe to a half-way decent "on-demand" service, and it would literally take years of dedicated and disciplined file-sharing to build up a collection that would even come close to what this type of online "on-demand" service could provide.
Ok, it's all a pipedream, nothing like this is available - but if it were, it would be significantly less expensive and time-consuming to utilize such a service than it would be to "file-share" movies the way it is being done now.
I suppose (or maybe wonder is a better word) with some of the "Hong Kong movies", now that HK is no longer with England, to what extent do the people who make the movies there "tune in" to what is acceptable and what is not -- what morals are being put forth, are there tighter limits on the types of issues that can be addressed in the creative realm than there were before - are the producers, writers, etc... more paranoid of having the government give them a hard time? I am not an expert in this, perhaps it's just a cultural thing - but there is probably some kind of attention paid to these things in a policital environment such as Hong Kong. Really, not that HK movies are bad, I like them very much - "Breaking News" was one I saw that was cool, and that was very recent. It's just in terms of creative freedom that I pose this question, and any limitations real or perceived, of that creative freedom.
But here in the states, where we normally shouldn't be as concerned about what our government may or may not think about what concepts or ideas we are using our freedoms to express - provided it's not for TV - it strikes me as odd that the entertainment / multimedia arts community would be attempting to forge stronger bonds with the government, bonds that are strange - bonds that appear to be advanced in part by lobbying money, in part by a shameless appeal to the merits of harsh punishment that would cross the interests of tens of millions of Americans. In any case, point being that if the *AA's don't think the government is going to "want something in return" for this request for VIP status from the *AAs, they are smoking something that is messing with their ability to think clearly.
Isn't it better for the movie industry to present a counterpoint to the "goody goody two shoes" mentality? Isn't there something "cool" about a good movie? Not to be completely rebellious, but to just kind of stand out there on its own, make its voice heard, and exhibit a "coolness" that would be inappropriate and out of place in a government agency.
It's just something that has never made sense to me. One decade, fighting to not get warning labels on CD's, another, trying to earn massive brownie points by shamelessly appealing to government regulation in the worst way. Showing a wanton willingness to sacrifice any and all artistic or creative freedom in exchange for strict, broad, governmental control over any and all creative multimedia, with massive profits acting as a light at the end of a tunnel of inaccurate information and a lack of understanding of the "end-users" of the movie industry's artistic efforts. Who ARE these people? Human beings are multi-faceted creatures; there is more to human existence - and this is what the multimedia arts ought to address.
When the *AA's get closely involved with government, the profits of maintaining a stranglehold on an ineffective and antiquated distribution model become more important than the expression of ideas and concepts, and the artistic creativity of the people making the films.
This is not good - going to a movie becomes more like flying on an airplane - checking for camcorders, people with night vision goggles spying on you, being forced to watch "educational" materials.
Of course, they can argue that their morals are correct, that file sharing does have some negative consequences, or "piracy", as they put it (and piracy does have negative consequences, it's just that filesharing is not exactly piracy) - but in any case, I can understand the point of view that if everyone fileshares for free there may be problems from that... but here's my point...
You have all this freedom of expression in America. You have this big Hollywood industry. Isn't it a waste of the artistic and creative freedoms that we all enjoy here in the US to go hop in bed with the government? Isn't it almost like a self-inflicted censorship? Can Hollywood simultaneously expect to retain its creative freedoms while trying to forge a tighter, closer, more intima
last time I installed Maxima on Debian it had TeXmacs as a "suggests" or something - so yes, the two go together. TeXmacs is cool for this kind of stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
If someone wanted to start something, (i.e. cheap, downloadable content), cut out the middle men (maybe ./ could do this too :) - it couldn't happen. Not with the major labels, anyway. The major labels won't allow you to offer cheap, downloadable content that isn't DRM. It just won't happen.
iTunes doesn't give you everything - although it is a workable format. If you could set the price of the tracks lower, say 50 cents or whatever, and, as an artist, cut a deal with iTunes yourself - this would be much closer to the ideal.
We're still dealing with the major labels here, at least for the most part. Pretty traditional stuff, more or less - of course, with some exceptions.
Seriously - no one should be afraid of releasing multimedia content without any controls on it. It makes no difference. People will copy, people will share, it's just a fact of life. Forget about it - focus on your music, focus on getting a good deal with the distributor, and everything will be fine.
By far the biggest problems any artist is going to have to face are the managers and agents constantly taking a cut, the monolithic labels, the expensive producers, and his or her own ego. Not file sharing; not cracking of DRM.
DRM-free is the key to success! Geez, you could even charge MORE for it!
There does need to be some kind of control. Either copyright means something or it doesn't.
I think perhaps one of the problems is something that is kind of a cultural thing, at least in Hollywood it is, perhaps in other countries as well. You can see it in The Passion, sort of... the arrghhh "tough guy", "no pain no gain" approach to physical pain that the movie takes. Kind of an epic, grueling adventure, a manly, grizzly adventure.
I was reading this book called the Diamond Sutra, which is an old buddhist text. They were describing how through meditation and peace of mind you can avoid physical pain, and therefore avoid the controlling factors that evil rulers and evil empires try to control you with. I think that The Passion missed this aspect entirely. Wouldn't it be the ultimate rebellion against the crucifiers if the crucified felt no pain? Wouldn't that be the ultimate undermining of the immoral grab for power, the exploiting of human fears of pain for political gain? There are powers of the human mind that many societies (including Hollywood and its fans) don't understand. I don't think that it's unreasonble to wonder about how much pain Jesus actually felt - we may never know; but one thing I do know is that it's unreasonable and "isn't it just like Hollywood" to exaggerate it..
So it's this heavy-handed, power-driven image that makes it hard to take these MPAA guys seriously. It's not so much about the copyright, it's more about the "how", the way that they are approaching it - cracking down, no mercy -- that kind of attitude. The "tough guy" approach. Asking people to do something so they don't get hurt, just like your local mafia people.
What they should do instead is make it easy on everyone and adapt to the change - use their brains, not their muscles. Instead of acting like gorillas in a zoo, perhaps they should use intelligence to combat this problem. Of course there are no easy answers; but there is much to be gained from finding answers that do work; look at the success of iTunes, for instance. I think Netflix has the right idea; they are heading in the right direction.
You have to change the culture - the way the culture is now, people just eat up anything they are given, and this makes it very easy for p2p to come in and hand them freebies. Many people just don't think very much when it comes to their choice of films that they are going to watch, and so it follows that they don't think very much in regards to distribution channels that they are going to use - p2p is being handed to the masses on a silver platter, and in the usual unthinking way, the masses accept it, because that's just the way it is done.
If people were to think a little more critically about the films they have available to them, at the theaters, local superstores, and brick and mortar rental outlets, they might realize that most of them kind of suck. In the same way, if people were to think a little more critically about the distribution channels they have available to them, they would realize that p2p sucks because it doesn't channel money back to the people who put their hard work into the movie, and they would look for a better way that avoids price fixing and limited selection.
The problem is that the movie-going masses are being spoon-fed whatever Hollywood puts out, and they gladly eat up whatever that might be. Until you change this situation, by bringing in fresh talent, by avoiding obligatory multi-million dollar production costs, you won't be able to stop people from thoughtlessly accepting the p2p distrubution methods they are being spoon-fed.
Smaller production companies and independent films cannot compete with the multi-million dollar productions, the massive CGI budgets, and those production companies that can are getting the moviegoers accustomed to these kinds of things. This allows them to spoon-feed any content they like, provided that many millions of dollars have been spent. Moving the focus to the content of the films, the messages that the films
There's probably a connection between the vitality of your body, mind, and spirit as a whole and the vulnerability you will have to carpal tunnel, but the simple facts are that you do need the equipment - without the equipment, you're taking many steps back.
A good chair (which costs right around $1000), with good armrests. A good trackball (approx $100), a good keyboard ($200-$1000+). Per employee costs are unacceptable for most people, they would rather just treat you as a disposable tool than a human being.
The secret is to get to the point where you can have these nice things; and there is no way that you can get these with any amount of certainty if you keep switching jobs over and over. Unfortunately, there are very few things that you can recommend to "the masses", because that's what government is supposed to do.
I guess even a Logitech trackball, a Microsoft Natural Keyboard, and perhaps some sort of buckwheat pillow or other back-saving device you can purchase for yourself might get you through if you really need the job.
Disability will get you 65% of what your wage is, and you won't be eligible for that money unless you allow "them" to do surgery on you and so on. Your source of money will be tied to being completely at the mercy of doctors perhaps not even of your own choosing, any refusal or exercise of your rights to refuse medical treatment will leave you liable for any and all money you have recieved up to that point.
Let's face it - it's not hard to understand - computers have been with us yet a very short time; it's probably best to try to get a job where you can either have the "clout" to get the tools to do the job right and not hurt yourself, or just get a job where you use the computer as little as possible. Either that, or you can get a not-so great paying job having others do completely unnecessary surgery on you. Well, completely unnecessary except for as a means for your employer to save on per-employee costs.
I became concerned about RSI before I got any symptoms at all; and I found some Northgate split keyboards on e-bay for a good price, got myself a Bodybilt chair, and built myself a custom desk with a fancy articulating keyboard tray I purchased at the local university's clearance sale. I can pretty much type all day, very comfortably - although I do take breaks often because that's what is recommended that you do.
It's all in the tools you use to accomplish your job, and it also has something to do with your physical, mental, spiritual, emotional health as a whole.
This is a brave new world we have with computers everywhere in the past few decades - lots of bugs still need to be worked out. One shouldn't for a minute think that anybody actually has thought about any of this stuff or done any kind of research or even had time to worry about it.
There's lots of info on the web, just keep searching - spend a lot of time searching, reading Google groups, etc... you'll get the big picture eventually.
I always thought that getting a good CRT and cranking up the refresh rate was the best way to avoid eyestrain.
There are apparently a minority of users who develop intense headaches after 15 minutes of using LCD monitors. This is due to the backlight, which is usually a small flourescent bulb (at 60hz, obviously). To use an LCD monitor is to stare at a flourescent bulb.
I've just never quite felt like risking the money because of this reason, although, if the prices keep coming down, it might be worth it just to try it. They are more energy efficient.
I just figured it's better to get a really good CRT and crank up the refresh rate really high. I've not noticed any headaches, or anything from my CRT, my refresh is somewhere between 90 and 100 Hz, I don't remember exactly. I do have to say that there isn't anything much worse or painful than a CRT with a substandard refresh rate; that should definitely constitute torture of some kind.
yup, "B" for "Bombay"
All you really gotta do is look at the facts. Another view of the facts. You can say this, with no fear of anything: women tend not to do as well in math and science. Furthermore, you can also say without much fear of anything that many minorities tend to not do as well in our educational system in general.
... in other words - there is momentum. If you are used to getting A's, that gets expected of you and you can breeze through without anyone so much as having even the slighest doubt you will get another A. If you fall behind somewhere in this process, this core process of getting good grades on exams, this momentum starts working against you. In this ultra-competitive environment, teachers and peers will begin to have doubts about the likelihood of your success, about your coming out on top, and the expectation becomes that you will not do that well. This can also rub off on you, and YOU begin to feel that you aren't going to do so well. This creates a chain cycle, and students fall behind, and get pushed out to the periphery of the educational system, the only criteria essentially being bad grades on exams.
The problem is with the educational system. Advancing through the educational system has to do with getting good grades on exams, more or less. It's all based on grades, and it is, in a sense, a dog-eat-dog, or a "groove"
It has to do with grades. Get rid of grades. Get rid of exams. Basing it all on grades and exams, and the figuring out some way of moving the periphery of the students, the students that don't do so well, into the core of the system. Change the core of the system so that you don't have students hanging out on the periphery of it simply because they don't get good grades on exams. It's just as likely that any "group" of individuals with a specific determining characteristic (let's say green eyes) that hasn't done well in a particular subject (let's say botany) may have a harder time developing that momentum, developing that trust, that confidence that those individuals who are expected to do well in a particular subject have.
So let's say that if people with green eyes haven't done very well in botany in the past, any individual with green eyes is going to have less confidence when they try to do well in botany. Combine that with the pressure of tests, exams, and grades, and any individual, green eyes or not, that hasn't done well in botany is at a disadvantage because they aren't expected to do well.
It could have much to do with the way the tests are written. It could have much to do with the way that the "core" of the educational system is set up. It could have much to do with, perhaps, that female students feel more comfortable with female teachers, and male students feel more comfortable with male teachers, and if math and science tend to be male-dominated fields, perhaps there are more male teachers. Perhaps that has something to do with it.
But in any case, I think the solution is to change the "core" of the educational system. The "core" concepts of how one "does well in school". It's really the only way to do it. It's sort of like what FreeBSD 5.x is being accused of - awkward fixes after awkard fix (i.e. "laying on hacks") when the real solution is just to do a cleaner re-write - get down into the "core" of the system, in this case the educational system, and upgrade it to be more effective in our modern, diverse world. Stop using the band-aids to try to get the periphery of the students who don't do so well incorporated into a messed-up core, change the core.
Even if what this individual said were true, it doesn't solve the problem, and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. There are many other "groups", if you will, of individuals with distinguishing characteristics that don't do well, not only in math and science, but the educational system as a whole. The are entire sections of society that are having the rug swept out from beneath their feet by the competitive nature of our current educational system. Competition is
Just yesterday, I was messing around and I installed what there is so far of Enlightenment 0.17 on an older (Celeron 667) machine running Linux.
It's really not quite there yet, it's really not quite stable yet, and it really has quite some way to go yet. But what is there is just incredible. I am extremely impressed.
I have been stuck on the current Enlightenment, 0.16, for quite some time now, and I use it on all of my personal computers, but on this older computer I have Gnome 2.8, KDE 3.3, I tried ion yesterday as well, but out of curiousity I had to try E 0.17.
I imagine that Gnome, as well as KDE, will have much greater commercial success, but the smoothness of E 0.17, even on this 667 Celeron, is just out of sight. It's smooth - it's fast, and it's incredibly beautiful without being over the top. Of course, not all of the components work, many things are still being worked on, and it's probably a long way off before it's going to be ready for prime time. The login manager (entrance) is incredible, although, again, I am having issues getting it to start up automatically upon boot. Things like this are to be expected.
Maybe it's just me, but I've cycled through all the desktop environments on this machine - Gnome, KDE, etc... but I can honestly say that I've never been quite as impressed with any of them as I am with this E 0.17. Even though this computer is just sort of a testbed for different things, and a computer I use to demonstrate to friends and family what Linux looks like (I use KDE for that) - I can't stop going over to it and turning it on and being impressed. E 0.17, whenever it's going to get done, is going to be well worth the wait. It's way, way different - the previews of Gnome don't even come close. I'm just so impressed I can't stop thinking about it. Still has a long way to go though.
Actually, with all due respect, it would be incorrect to say "many people have ordered the business services when they have been notified of excessive download" -- it's more accurate to say that a "limited amount" of individuals have done this in the interest, or in the hopes of having larger amount of data transfer being available to them - say, for instance, a family that has many teenagers and xboxes and audio streams and video communications and things like that - but the invisible caps appear to be the same regardless of the service levels you purchase.
The real problem is that people aren't given any clear guidelines how to go about limiting their bandwidth consumption (i.e. "how much is too much"), perhaps due to the invisible caps changing from month to month depending on various things, and of course, lots of people don't have a means of measuring how much they use anyway, which is probably the reasoning that Comcast uses when they instruct people to "just cut down".
They usually tell you to "just cut down", which, in the case of a single individual downloading tons of stuff is probably fairly self-explanatory, but when you have a shared connection with, say for instance, a houseful of college students, or a big family with numerous xboxes and such, this can become more difficult.
I think the solution would be to at least attempt to provide some sort of approximate guidelines, more specific than "just cut down", and perhaps institute a temporary suspension prior to cutting the service off for good. It's pretty clear that many customers would be perfectly happy to switch to DSL if their usage patterns are in excess of what Comcast would like, but DSL isn't available to them. In cases like these, it just seems that there ought to be some way to provide some sort of guidance for people as to how they can keep their connection, and not get cut off - something closer to a three strikes, you're out. The problem is that theoretically, at least, you may have used up too much bandwidth already for the current month by the time you get notified for last month's excesses, and you can do nothing but wait for the disconnect a month down the road. This has apparently happened to some people who were downloading extreme amounts of data, or to people who misunderstood what "just cut down" means. The invisible caps aren't advertised, and their existence isn't publicized anywhere, isn't in writing anywhere, and a number of customers have reported being caught totally by surprise, having had no idea that there were any kind of limitations on the data transfer they were allowed to do... DSL lines in the US certainly have no such restrictions. Nor does there appear to be any way to plead your case or get the service turned back on. These are just a couple things that Comcast could do to make the situation a little more "user friendly", I guess.
But as far as the connection, and the speeds, those are, for the most part, very stable and very good. It's just in these few isolated situations, particularly situations where you have a houseful of teenagers or college students all sharing the pipe, it becomes very difficult to know what to do; and it can be a very frustrating experience to deal with. It just seems that there has to be a better solution. Simply providing guidance to those individuals who have been warned wouldn't even require publishing any kinds of hard limits, and would still allow the limits to be computed from national aggregate data each month. Some people may not understand how to comply with "keep it under 100 gigs a month", or may not have any means to measure that, and for those customers, "just cut down" might be the best way to explain the situation, but there are plenty of tech-savvy people who have had this problem who would be more than happy to comply with "keep it under 100 gigs a month" or "keep it under 50 gigs a month" or whatever. There's just no reason to turn it into a guessing game, really.
I really don't mean to knock Comcast or anything, I am sure they hav
It was 300 gigs per month for a while, but all of a sudden it appears to be 200 or 225 gigs for last month (they just placed the calls last Friday).
The problem is that if you only get notified 13 days into the month that you went over last month, you're still dealing with everything you downloaded the first thirteen days of THIS month, and if that amount is too much for next month's cap (say they move it down to 150 gigs next month), then you just lost your internet connection and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
To add insult to injury, they say it's a "courtesy call", and suggest that you might be interested in their business offerings (which have the same exact limitations), and many people get the impression that there aren't these limitations with the business accounts, they order the more expensive business accounts, download away, with one strike already against them, and end up getting disconnected the next time around. It's evil.
They were cracking down on upload last year, but at the moment it appears to be something like 200 or 225 gigs per month combined. They crack down, though, whenever they upgrade the speeds so next month it could be 150 gigs per month or too much upload - which is usually anything over 30? or 40? gigs - something like that -
It's evil. It's just totally evil. I suppose it's better than some of these cable internet services with caps of 45 gigs a month or whatever; but it isn't anything even remotely approaching the rock-solid knowledge that you can download whatever you want, whenever you want (provided it's legal, of course) with your DSL line.
You need to be really, really careful with Comcast - they are very very unpredictable when it comes to using your internet connection. It's sort of like owning a Ferrari or something, but having a national speed limit of 70mph which you can practically reach in first gear. The speed is there, but you can't use it. It's very strange.
maconlinux.org
You can run OS X from within Linux - you could even use a really really clean window manager (or an artsy one like Enlightement), perhaps "fullscreen" that OS X window on one virtual desktop, and then do other linux apps on other virtual desktops or something like that.
Probably not the best idea for the cutting edge latest hardware, but it could probably breathe some new life into something a little less brand new. Interesting, anyway.
I think the key is to seperate "education" from a "license to get a real job". There are two camps here, really two sides. Pursuing philosophy because you LOVE it, and it enraptures you and consumes you and becomes your life's passion... or computer science, or theoretical physics, or economics, or any other subject like that. Versus working hard to get a BS so that someone will hire you. Versus "you forget most of what you study anyway, it just proves to your employer that you are willing to work hard".
When you focus objectively on the subject, when you do what is called "deep learning", when you really get into what you are studying, and actually get your brain working, thinking new ideas, coming up with new questions, trying to find new answers, you begin to experience the true value of education, which is, if you asked me, about learning the material, understanding the significance of astronomy or physics or ethics or philosophy or literature or art or film, or politics, economics, etc...
I am from the camp that respects education because education is good in and of itself, intrinsically. I find education to be an end in and of itself, a way to improve yourself, question your place in society, learn more about the world you live in. I am not from the camp that feels that education is a "license" to get a job.
What we are probably seeing here is a reflection of these values - perhaps ivy leaguers are more likely to be passionate about education; perhaps they attach a significance to education that goes beyond the ability to get a job or proving that one is a hard worker.
If you think about it, at least at the undergraduate level, the stuff you learn and study has been studied and taught for hundreds, even thousands of years... there must be some compelling reason for this; and I can speak from personal experience that if you open your mind and really focus on "deep learning", really get into what you are studying, that it becomes quite obvious why we are still studying these subjects thousands of years later.
Education can be a very, very powerful tool; but you have to recognize that it has value in and of itself, and that it's not just a way to get a better job. Looking at it from this point of view, perhaps the figures make a little more sense. The types of environments that you will find in these big businesses probably make those positions less attractive to people who have a genuine, deep respect for education. Larger businesses will probably place more emphasis on a degree as a qualification or requirement, potential hires may be required to possess a BS as matter of policy.
Perhaps the path to getting the most out of education doesn't lead to C* positions at large organizations; and if getting the most out of life has anything to do with getting the most out of education, and if getting the most out of education has anything to do with respecting education as being important in and of itself, not simply a means to get a job, then you may very well see the positions in large corporations being filled with individuals who are open to accepting the viewpoint of education as a requirement, as a prerequisite to employment, with less emphasis on the intellectual and creative side of education, which usually requires money and time to pursue.
An empirical theory can be called into question as far as in regards to it being empirical if there isn't at least some way to attempt to prove it wrong.
That's not to say that evolution is wrong, only that there needs to be a possibility that it can be challenged - it's not an absolute truth.
All science is a theory - the only absoulute truth is that there are no absolute truths. This includes things like medical science (a.k.a. the church of modern medicine), which people treat more like a religion than they do science.
It's not wrong to say that evolution is a theory - it's an empirical theory. It's not wrong to say that creation is an absolute truth for those who are members of certain Christian congregations - it is, creation certainly isn't being presented by the religions that believe in it as an empirical theory (you can't prove it wrong - it's just something you have to take on faith.)
So it's not that evolution isn't a theory - of course it is, but all of science is - duh. That's what students are supposed to be learning. There has to be the presumption that any scientific theory could theoretically be proved wrong; any empirical theory that claims to be the absolute truth no longer really qualifies as being an empirical theory.
This has definitely changed my opinion of Apple. Not that I am that important or anything, or that I have any ability to make any difference - whether or not I like Apple isn't going to affect their business in one way or the other - but on a personal level, it has changed my opinion of Apple.
If they are going to waste their time, creating more pain and suffering in an already brutal world instead of focus on making good software, then obviously their products are probably not going to be as good as they could be.
I want nothing to do with such an uncouth company.
They're not going to take someone, like for instance, this individual whom I know and speak to at the grocery store from time to time, that has built himself a collection of close to 1000 DVD's - all legitimate, he paid for them all, they're all "the real thing", he's been collecting them for years and years and years ever since they came out.
You gotta take some of these articles with a grain of salt.
they will burn through stuff - they will burn through your clothes, plastic, cardboard (I don't know about metal) but certainly it's not one of those opening your car door things or a little red dot that your dog or cat chases around on the carpet - these types of things will probably burn a hole in your carpet. Pointing it at your skin would be incredibly painful, perhaps lead to some serious burns. It'll burn through your clothing.
It's more like shooting a BB gun up into the air just for fun. These types of lasers need to be thought of as a loaded gun (i.e. don't point them at people or anything else you wouldn't point a gun at). A cloud, a tree, a brick wall, freshly fallen snow, no harm done. These aren't any kind of expensive government things, they are apparently legal, but powerful. The idea is that you ought to treat it like a gun, not a toy. This probably has a lot to do with the "new-fangledness" of lasers, and perhaps a resistance to think that the science fiction stories would ever come true.
People just don't realize how powerful lasers can be, and that even legal ones you can buy for a couple hundred bucks can be very dangerous and need to be treated appropriately. We need to raise the awareness that they are dangerous.
I've been using the ctrl-r function of bash quite a bit recently after I found out about it - it's the "incremental search backwards" for the last time you issued the command you start typing after pressing the ctrl-r.
It's great for those complex commands or multiple commands all piped together that you just don't feel like typing in again. I've been using ctrl-r quite a bit recently, actually.
The HD-DVD and the Blu-Ray players both support the mpeg4 formats. While the disks you buy from the store might be all messed up, either play or not play, there isn't really anything stopping anyone from taking some mpeg4 content and placing that on a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD blank; those will probably play every time, more or less. It would not be surprising to see iTunes-like services springing up around the mpeg4 format.
What's going to happen is simple: the HD-DVD thing isn't going to take off; not if you have to keep upgrading keys all the time. Joe and Jane Average are probably going to stick with the regular DVD from Netflix, Blockbuster, or whomever, knowing that it will work every time.
If the new formats can be gotten to "work every time", perhaps by having the keys downloaded from the internet or something like that, then they might do better. Anytime you make something too complicated, though, it's bound to fail. Look at 3D movies with those uncomfortable cardboard 3D glasses. Where have they gone? Look at DVD-Audio or the SACD? Going nowhere fast. Lossless compression formats from iTunes or other services? We're not really there yet - if people are willing to settle for mp3 or aac quality sound, why would they want to spend extra money on a DVD-audio quality sound?
The movie industry risks entering a situation not unlike the music industry finds itself in today. Many of the same symptoms are there; the same attempt to control is there; the same low-quality, high-budget, intellectually lacking content is being pumped out. A new format that is harder and more expensive to use just isn't going to cut it. It would not be surprising to see mpeg4 take the place of mp3 files, with people cramming movie after mpeg4 movie onto a DVD5 or perhaps a DVD9 that they either downloaded from a legitimate service, or if no such legitimate services happen to spring up in the near future, a p2p network.
The popularity of iTunes and other legitimate music download services goes to show that consumers don't care so much about the absolute highest sound quality, but that they care more about convenience, selection, ease of use, accessibility, and things like that. These new formats are probably more or less doomed to not do as well as they could.
These new disks, though, the Blu-Ray especially, these are going to be GREAT for backing up systems, documents, and also for businesses to do backups and things like that. The technology is awesome; what Hollywood is trying to do with it is the part that isn't going to work very well.
personal use is limited by the amount of content any one person can watch while still doing things like sleeping, eating, working, studying, etc...
if an individual watches more than one "copied for personal use" movie; listens to more than one "copied for personal use" CD; etc, then the impact to any one particular artist/studio/prouducer, etc... is reduced even further. If an individual downloads something but never listens to it or watches it, as is a fairly common practice, or deletes without ever watching or listenting it, I would like to see someone explain how anyone had an injustice committed against them -- an explanation involving something other than wordplay and dictionary definitions from some imaginary dictionary.
One could argue about the effects of personal copying in aggregate; adding up everyone who is doing it - but that too, is limited by the popularity of the movie. The more popular the movie, the more "copying for personal use" there is going to be, so the percentages for any types of real or potential loss should remain approximately the same regardless of the popularity of the movie.
Either you have a hard drive on your local machine, or you are using a hard drive on a remote machine. OK, maybe if the remote location has gigs and gigs of ram and many clusters of machines the entire concept runs in RAM, but it's also got to at least be backed up on a hard drive somewhere; and if you don't have enough RAM locally you'll probably need swap, for which you'll need a hard drive as well. Can you imagine a PC without a hard drive?
The wonders of imagination.
All that this really is talking about is where the hard drive is located. The internet connection is analagous to a wire, to an IDE or SCSI or SATA cable. I have to disagree completely, because hard drives are incredibly inexpensive (relatively speaking) and increasing in capacity and performance all the time. As SATA takes off, and the speeds increase, you'll see a pretty big difference in the performance that you get out of your hard drives. PC's are not going hard-drive-less any time in the forseeable future.
The idea obviously appeals to some people.
Other people don't like it.
Either you like the idea, don't like the idea, or are somewhere in between liking or not liking the idea.
In order to be happy at your job, or life in general - in order to be able to set any kind of goal for yourself at all regarding what type of environment you would like to work in you need to just be honest about where you stand on the issue. It's really not that big a deal, other than if you like the idea, you should try getting a job somewhere that uses this type of thing, and if you don't like the idea, then you should set a goal to try to get a job someplace that doesn't use this type of thing.
We see a lot of the "If you can't make it working here, then you won't be able to make it working anywhere" rhetoric, or the "every place of employment is just like us with regards to the things you don't like about working here", which is, of course, complete BS, unless you start believing it. Quit because you CAN. Not because you hate your job, not because you can't take it anymore, quit because it's your right to do it; quit because you can. More power to 'ya. It's good to quit your job often; it breeds self-confidence.
The possibility that there is only one individual - YOU - that feels a certain way about something is extremely remote. This is a situation where there is no universal wrong or right, just people who either like the idea, don't like the idea, or are somewhere in between liking or not liking the idea. It's as simple as that. Any employee is always going to be more productive in an environment where he or she feels more comfortable. There is no one right answer here, it's just that each of us needs to make a choice. No one should feel compelled to spend the rest of their life around people whom they don't get along with and don't have anything in common with, should they? Especially if there are other, better, choices of friends, coworkers, employers, spouses, etc... out there. Grab the bully's underwear and pull it up over his head, then tell him to leave you alone.
Just chill out and get a job someplace where you feel comfortable, or just don't worry about it. Rather than channeling your anger and frustration *against* the devices, channel your motivation towards surrounding yourself with people that are like-minded, employers, co-workers, friends, etc... with whom you get along and share similar values. Like I said, the likelihood that you are the only person that doesn't like this kind of thing is extremely, extremely remote if not entirely physically impossible.
It goes back to the concept that non-physical objects like electronic files ought to be treated as if they were physical objects. We hear plenty of this from the anti-p2p people; we hear that downloading a file is like stealing, that just because it's in electronic format doesn't mean that the copyright is somehow invalidated, that there are financial issues even though no physical media is being stolen, etc...
But how would it be if I were to go and purchase a CD that I would only be able to play on two CD players; if I were to purchase a DVD that I would only be able to play on two DVD players? Are we, or are we not treating non-physical objects as physical objects? Is there a difference between an electronic file and a physical medium or not? Apparently, at least as far as we can witness from the insane drive towards DRM, there IS in fact a difference between electronic files and physical media. What does this say, then, to the argument that there is no difference between downloading a file and stealing a physical CD from a shelf in a store? It's a mixed message at a minimum.
It seems to me that the industry is using electronic formats as an "excuse" to tighten their grip and to try to seize control of who gets to express themselves artistically - whether or not they are going to be successful remains to be seen. Of course it goes without saying that to follow this line of thought would lead one to conclude that many individuals are using electronic formats as an excuse to "steal" copyrighted material. Perhaps it's better to realize, that at least to some extent, the actions of individuals on both sides of this argument are wrong.
It seems to me that it would be so much easier to just do away with the DRM - for the consumer, that is - do away with the DRM and make the material available for a reasonable fee. That way, the consumer would be getting the electronic files from a trusted source, at the full speed of their internet connection, they wouldn't run the risk of viruses, they would have more consistent audio/video quality, and if they were to purchase these electronic files, those files could be archived away, and an individual would be able to build a collection, just as with LP's or cassette tapes or CDs or DVDs.
If everyone were to really look at the situation objectively, many would come to the conclusion that it could actually be easier to go with a legitimate service than downloading this or that or the other thing from some random quasi-anonymous source. However, this "ease" will never be achieved, and there will never be a level playing field, if this madness revolving around DRM doesn't stop.
If consumers were given a choice, a real, legitimate choice, to go with an online service for their content, at a reasonable price, everyone would realize that downloading stuff via unofficial channels is much more complicated, dangerous, unreliable and time consuming than going with a reasonably priced legitimate service.
Is there, or is there not a difference between electronic files and physical media? Should there be a difference, or not? How many people would buy a CD or DVD that would only play in a particular DVD player, or require some special firmware to play in a DVD player, or wouldn't play on a DVD player made by a smaller competitor? It's just not realistic to treat electronic files with such a tighter grip - the industry should be more realistic in their approach, but unfortunately, it's obvious that isn't going to happen anytime soon.
What better incentive for individuals to stop downloading files from unofficial, non-legitimate sources that don't contribute royalties to the artists who deserve them than a legitimate service that is significantly more user-friendly? It's a win-win situation, without a doubt; not to mention that when royalties go where they are supposed to go, artists and everyone involved with the production process gets an incentive to create more works?
Legitimate services bogged down with DRM cannot compete against p
I happened to take an "Entertainment Law" course, taught by a Harvard-educated laywer.
The entire concept of "intellectual property" is based on the idea of taking something that is immaterial and treating it as if it were material.
So you cannot argue that it "isn't theft" or that it's "not stealing" without undermining hundreds of years of legal precedent that constitutes the very core of copyright law. You just simply can't do it. Those arguments don't hold. By saying that it's "not stealing" because nothing physical is taken, you are simply pointing out something that has been recognized for centuries; you are simply pointing out the very reasons that copyright and intellectual property law exist in the first place.
But all is not lost... there should be an exemption. If you (or someone you are downloading from) are sharing files, free of charge, and those files are going to be used for personal, non-commercial uses, there should be an exemption. It is not necessary to undermine centuries of legal precedent concerning copyright in order to make sense of the dilemna we have before us.
I feel that it boils down to the simple physical reality that if something is for "personal" use, then that means that you have to consider that a human being has to eat, sleep, work. study, and do other things besides watch movies 24/7 - so any outstanding royalties that might be due simply cannot be greater than the amount of movies that any reasonable individual can watch in a certain period of time. That, in and of itself, is a significantly limiting factor, compared to, for instance, an individual who manufactures illegal disks and sells them on the black market, perhaps to thousands of individuals - the outstanding royalties in that situation are not limited by the amount of time one person can spend watching movies, but the amount of time thousands of people spend watching movies. Personal use implies that an individual is only watching one movie at a time - I suppose if you are an alien from outer space you can have a wall of monitors and be watching 25 different films at the same time, but realistically, it's not going to happen.
On top of that, in order to download with a torrent, you must also upload, so there's even another exemption there - there is no one single source that is providing multiple downloads to multiple individuals - you download, you upload as well - there is no analogy to a single individual manufacturing hundreds or thousands of black-market disks and profiting from them. It's more or less a 1:1 ratio, as far as each individual torrent user is concerned - you download, you also upload.
The best way to look at it is that there should be some kind of exemption; there should be some sort of compromise. Furthermore, services like Netflix should be promoted and the industry should see to it that they don't discourage innovation in this area by attempting to continue their stranglehold on the industry.
People need to recognize that technically, file sharing is copyright infringment and theft; but instead of using some kind of mathematical or logical "formula" to determine guilt or innocence, we need to use our common sense to come up with solutions that can create some types of limited exemptions. Personally, I think that bittorrent already has one possible exemption available to it, something that creates the greatest legal risk, something that the industries have attacked vociferously - that being the moral of "don't enable leeches". By not being a leech, by being required to upload when you download, you are adjusting the ratio, and preventing any one individual from providing multiple downloads to multiple individuals. It's no wonder that the industry is "encouraging" leeching - that way the content providers become centralized.
I understand that the original idea behind Netflix was to make the content available online, but the bandwidth costs made it unfeasible. We need to find a way to transition from limitations of physical media for rental
I figured something out. Take a look at the price of DVD media (well, this is not exact) - but let's say a DVD-R costs 50 cents. Let's say a fairly active file sharer / movie downloader downloads 15 movies per month. That's 60 gigs or so, not that much compared to what some people are doing, and certainly not anywhere near what a broadband connection can accomplish.
15 movies * 12 months, let's say * 2 years = 360 movies. Of course dual-layer media is coming down in price, but let's just pretend someone's doing some shrinking. 360 movies, let's say $1 a piece (one copy for backup) - That's 360 dollars, two years, so divided by 24 is $15 dollars a month.
Of course, it's pretty easy to download more than 15 movies a month, but even at 15 movies a month, even if everything you get is via torrent or IRC or some other p2p and doesn't require any other provider fees or anything - $15 dollars a month (for blanks, essentially).
Now... how hard would it be to have an online "on-demand" repository of perhaps THOUSANDS of movies, where you could subscribe to it for $25 or $35 dollars a month? Put on the DRM. maybe a watermark so each download isn't distributed any further - but can you imagine a set-top box where you have access to thousands of movies "on demand", perhaps streaming to a temporary location on a hard drive or something... you could even qualify it by saying - $25 dollars a month, maximum of 20 movies per month, $2 each additional download, whatever... so who cares if you can't "burn" them, just watch them - if they're always there, and the subscription rate is less expensive not to mention less time consuming than the download-burn-try to find some way to organize them method - this is actually a better idea.
How many movies a month are people going to want to watch anyway?
You would get a much, much larger selection, you wouldn't have to buy blanks, you wouldn't have to sit there burning DVDs all day long, and it would be less expensive on top of everything else.
DVD blanks aren't cheap; downloading takes time; weeding through websites and torrents and p2p applications trying to find what you're looking for and having no quality assurance, no anti-virus assurance - all this stuff that these movie industry people are fighting in terms of file sharing is really just an expensive royal pain compared to what a reasonable monthly subscription fee would be to a service that would make massive quantities of DRM'd (perhaps non-burnable) content available "on demand" in one way or another.
It's way more expensive and time-consuming to "pirate" than it would be to subscribe to a half-way decent "on-demand" service, and it would literally take years of dedicated and disciplined file-sharing to build up a collection that would even come close to what this type of online "on-demand" service could provide.
Ok, it's all a pipedream, nothing like this is available - but if it were, it would be significantly less expensive and time-consuming to utilize such a service than it would be to "file-share" movies the way it is being done now.
I suppose (or maybe wonder is a better word) with some of the "Hong Kong movies", now that HK is no longer with England, to what extent do the people who make the movies there "tune in" to what is acceptable and what is not -- what morals are being put forth, are there tighter limits on the types of issues that can be addressed in the creative realm than there were before - are the producers, writers, etc... more paranoid of having the government give them a hard time? I am not an expert in this, perhaps it's just a cultural thing - but there is probably some kind of attention paid to these things in a policital environment such as Hong Kong. Really, not that HK movies are bad, I like them very much - "Breaking News" was one I saw that was cool, and that was very recent. It's just in terms of creative freedom that I pose this question, and any limitations real or perceived, of that creative freedom.
But here in the states, where we normally shouldn't be as concerned about what our government may or may not think about what concepts or ideas we are using our freedoms to express - provided it's not for TV - it strikes me as odd that the entertainment / multimedia arts community would be attempting to forge stronger bonds with the government, bonds that are strange - bonds that appear to be advanced in part by lobbying money, in part by a shameless appeal to the merits of harsh punishment that would cross the interests of tens of millions of Americans. In any case, point being that if the *AA's don't think the government is going to "want something in return" for this request for VIP status from the *AAs, they are smoking something that is messing with their ability to think clearly.
Isn't it better for the movie industry to present a counterpoint to the "goody goody two shoes" mentality? Isn't there something "cool" about a good movie? Not to be completely rebellious, but to just kind of stand out there on its own, make its voice heard, and exhibit a "coolness" that would be inappropriate and out of place in a government agency.
It's just something that has never made sense to me. One decade, fighting to not get warning labels on CD's, another, trying to earn massive brownie points by shamelessly appealing to government regulation in the worst way. Showing a wanton willingness to sacrifice any and all artistic or creative freedom in exchange for strict, broad, governmental control over any and all creative multimedia, with massive profits acting as a light at the end of a tunnel of inaccurate information and a lack of understanding of the "end-users" of the movie industry's artistic efforts. Who ARE these people? Human beings are multi-faceted creatures; there is more to human existence - and this is what the multimedia arts ought to address.
When the *AA's get closely involved with government, the profits of maintaining a stranglehold on an ineffective and antiquated distribution model become more important than the expression of ideas and concepts, and the artistic creativity of the people making the films.
This is not good - going to a movie becomes more like flying on an airplane - checking for camcorders, people with night vision goggles spying on you, being forced to watch "educational" materials.
Of course, they can argue that their morals are correct, that file sharing does have some negative consequences, or "piracy", as they put it (and piracy does have negative consequences, it's just that filesharing is not exactly piracy) - but in any case, I can understand the point of view that if everyone fileshares for free there may be problems from that... but here's my point...
You have all this freedom of expression in America. You have this big Hollywood industry. Isn't it a waste of the artistic and creative freedoms that we all enjoy here in the US to go hop in bed with the government? Isn't it almost like a self-inflicted censorship? Can Hollywood simultaneously expect to retain its creative freedoms while trying to forge a tighter, closer, more intima
last time I installed Maxima on Debian it had TeXmacs as a "suggests" or something - so yes, the two go together. TeXmacs is cool for this kind of stuff.