So that means you either hand out your code, which in the case of Netflix would have a "Razr1911 fuck teh man LOL!" edition less than a week later, or they "pull an Nvidia" and pay a whole team of developers round the clock to deal with everytime Torvalds breaks every damed thing with one of his wild hairs.
Bullshit. Even with a pirated Netflix app, you'd still have to log in to your Netflix account - there's no way to break that.
And if you're using a pirated, DRM-broken Netflix app to rip media - well, why would you do that in the first place? You can almost always torrent it hours after it shows up on TV or days after it shows up in theaters, and there won't be missing episodes like in the Netflix streams.
The competition for tenure track positions is currently insane, since the professors from previous generations have trained too many PhDs. The funding agencies reward large labs under a single PI with large grants, with the labs mostly running on graduate students and post-docs who themselves see no way out. Now we are seeing career post-doctoral positions, especially in the biomedical sciences; see the recent suggestions about making a post-doctoral position more permanent. Not everyone can be a manager (PI), so we are stuck being graduate students or post-docs. I know industry is also a home for PhDs as I am one of those happy campers, but the fact is there are too many PhDs being trained relative to the number of positions available.
Lets have a system where the professor is rewarded for doing their own research, rather than their ability to write grants and farm out the work to their subjugated minions.
So what you're saying is - we should put more money into funding higher education? What a weird idea, I thought the only thing we could spend money on was either preparing to blow things up or blowing things up.
Actually, if you or the people in front of you are getting a lot of produce, it may very well be worth your time to go through a cashier line; cashiers generally have all of the produce codes memorized and know that they can look at a sticker on the item to get it if the need to, while the idiot in front of you probably has to scroll through the entire list of fruits and vegetables to get to the one he wants because he doesn't understand what the numbers on the sticker are for.
The voters, even if they remember the incident come November, will still vote for the same politicians they have been voting for their whole lives.
Hah! No, the voters will remember this incident - they'll remember it as "a pedophile got tossed around by our powerful, effective policing forces! Go USA!"
I mean, why do you think there's so much funding for dramatic paramilitary-esque SWAT-style police protection? Because people love drama, and having dramatic police actions makes voters think that the cops are doing their jobs, regardless of what the real effect is.
Eugenics really had some potential for doing good - just a matter of convincing those with genetic diseases to not breed, and in a few generations they could be almost eliminated.
Well that's the thing - it can't be mandated, we should just try to convince carriers for the more vicious genetic diseases to adopt instead of have children.
It's the same thing as trying to convince teenagers to not have children, really. You shouldn't mandate that they can't, but they should be fully informed that it's a really bad idea.
The Kindle 3 is Amazon's best-selling item ever - more people bought it than bought the best-selling Harry Potter tome.
It's Amazon's best-selling item - but where can you get a Kindle at all, besides Amazon?
The Harry Potter book, on the other hand, was available everywhere - in fact, I remember waiting around at the end of a line to get a copy at midnight at Borders, only to have a friend tell me that the supermarket down the street would have them available at midnight too and they didn't have a line.
Now? I don't even want to pick up a paper book. IN fact, I am considering replacing my favorite books with eBook and then selling my paper books.
Well that's pretty much precisely what's keeping me from buying a Kindle - I have a large library of physical books, and if I get a Kindle I'm going to have to either re-purchase the majority of them or get little benefit from the Kindle, though of course I would start buying new books for the device.
Personally, I think Amazon should offer discounts on the Kindle edition of a book if your account shows that you've bought the physical copy from them in the past - an enticement like that would help people like me, who already have large paper libraries, switch over.
(as a side note, my wife has a Kindle DX and loves it - but only because she was never one to collect books in the first place, and she uses it primarily to read transient things like journal articles that would otherwise get printed out once and recycled)
Having someone on hand to support a problem 24 hours a day, and a supply chain that can send a part out in 4 hours is a safety net sometimes worth paying for.
There, fixed that for you - a lot of companies who buy Cisco products don't need that level of support, and yet are paying for it anyway because Cisco is the "enterprise" solution.
Open Source, the way we know and love it today, is filled with projects that struggle with direction. GNOME, KDE and other extremely well known projects suffer from having too many people in charge. Meanwhile, commercial projects have the advantage of having stronger direction which is great from a perspective of getting a project planned, built and "completed."
Really? Do you have any statistics on the ship rate of commercial projects vs open source projects?
Because even though it is readily apparent that open source projects are abandoned quite frequently, I would wager that commercial projects are abandoned at comparable rates, the only difference being that the wreckage of commercial products doesn't litter the Internet, unlike closed source projects.
It's like the old question, if a tree falls in the woods and nobody's around to hear it, does it make a sound? If a commercial project fails and nobody ever knows about it, does it still fail? If an open source project fails and remains on Freshmeat or Sourceforge for years to come, does it still fail?
- Any final object yields a unique second SHA for the DHT, enabling data deduplication and instantaneous uploads, but also enabling draconian copyright enforcement under the DMCA. Imagine torrentting a movie only for the MPAA to delete it from your private cloud drive!
- It's closed source! wtf?!? Is anyone really stupid enough to trust closed source encryption software these days? How does anyone know they don't secretly copy the original SHA / AES key?
- It's written in Java. Ack, a slow filesystem driver! (Alright, this third comment is pure trolling. I'll admit server side Java isn't that slow anymore, assuming you avoid all that double copy display idiocy.)
There's another one I can think of - due to the pigeon hole principle, you'll just randomly have a SHA collision every once in a while on completely unrelated files. The probability of this goes up as the number of files you're archiving increases. Once in college I was running out of hard disk space, so I wrote some bash scripts to take the SHA hash of every file on my file system, and find any duplicates like that. Much to my surprise, it turned out that some Quake 3 Arena asset had the same SHA hash as a random Linux system file - despite having radically different contents.
I would imagine that the probability of collision has only gone up in the intervening years, as people are storing more and more data on their hard drives.
So the game devs are jealous of all the perfectly legal abusive profits that Gamestop is making? Answer is obvious: open their own stores, and compete on used game prices. If there were competition in the used games market, Gamestop wouldn't be able to charge their insane markups (and they are insane).
That is almost exactly what Steam is doing, except without the "used games" part - instead of buying a game for cheap second-hand months later, they sell you a cheap digital download months later.
And I've never seen prices in a physical store that can even match Steam prices most of the time, much less actually beat them.
I think he was just hoping you didn't mean the site in your Slashdot profile, because that thing is a piece of junk. You aren't updating the main page even monthly and your content seems to consist of freely available information that you've just re-worded into blog posts and put into a database.
Basically, I'm sorry to say it but your site doesn't really deserve a good ranking.
That's changing, though, in case you haven't noticed. They've targeted aerospace. Sure, they're not competitive *now* but do you seriously think that's going stay that way?
The US automakers thought the same thing in the 60s, 70s, and 80s.
Exactly!
Quiz time: How do you turn unskilled labor into skilled labor? By putting the unskilled laborers to work learning skills and building experience!
Government is a bureaucracy. By definition, government produces exactly nothing. It takes from others in order to perform its functions.
You're exactly right! Why, the last time my house was on fire, the firefighters came by and removed the fire! The last time there was a burglar in the neighborhood, the police took him! Every couple of years, they come by and remove all the potholes in the road!
I believe the difference is that proving for the national defense is in the Constitution. Welfare and Planned Parenthood are not. At least with NASA, you can say it has military applications. Same with the Interstate system. But the federal government has no Constitutional right to fund Planned Parenthood, ACORN, GE, GM, Chrysler, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, or any of the thousands of other programs that get funded because the government is so big that no one will notice.
That's an awful lot of defending we're doing over in Afghanistan and Iraq, isn't it? And how, exactly, do things like DARPA* and NASA fall under the umbrella of defense? They're not actively defending us against anything, they're just doing research in potentially making defensive methods better - research which isn't mentioned in the constitution AFAIK.
It's funny how the programs you support are Constitutionally justified despite bearing only the vaguest resemblance to anything actually in the Constitution, while the ones you don't aren't.
Out of my own pocket, I have saved a six months emergency fund in the bank that could sustain my family for six months should I lose my job. But apparently I'm the only one left who actually saves for a rainy day, because all my medicare taxes go to medicare, and then on top of that an additional 24.3% of my general taxes go to healthcare (again, much of that amount medicare and medicaid), another 21.9% goes to job and family security (unemployment, housing, foodstamps, unearned income credit, etc), and another 5% goes to education and job training.
I'm not sure how much you budgeted for those six months, but one major medical emergency while not covered by health insurance would probably wipe out the majority of those savings.
Having a known publisher's logo on your ebook is going to be beneficial for quite some time, if only to say 'give this book a try, it's not crap like all those other ones you've looked at'. Plus most writers want to write, not spend time marketing, creating book covers, etc.
The other thing people forget all the time is that books don't just pop into existence as a perfect mass of storytelling and drama; every good publisher has editors on staff, who work with the authors in order to take the book from "acceptable" to "great". If you read almost any author's blog, you'll almost certainly see lots of comments from them about the editing process.
Ever wonder why the first Wheel of Time books were so much better than the later ones? Initially, Robert Jordan wasn't such a huge name, so the editors could keep him from too much faffing around in the story; afterwards, he had significantly more clout, and the editors were more willing to rely on his judgement which led to five hundred page novels that advanced the plot by about a week.
So yeah. While I'm no fan of the publishing system as it is today (I shouldn't have to pay $8.00 for a paperback in a brick and mortar store!), saying that all publishers do is put books in stores and take a cut isn't really giving them enough credit.
I could totally see publishing houses surviving into the future by 1. providing a reputable, "you'll probably like this book" mark and 2. providing services to authors, like editing, marketing, advances and other such things.
They just need to realize that their core business isn't plonking books down on shelves at the local bookstore, it's doing whatever it takes to put good books into people's hands.
I bought a Kindle for my wife as a Christmas present a few years back. To be frank, my main purpose was to address the problem we had with ever-growing, increasingly-unstable, easy-to-trip-over piles of books scattered somewhat randomly around our house (she's always been a serious book hound). She wasn't completely sold on the idea, but it only took her a week or so to completely fall in love with the device.
We had pretty much the same problem, except with printouts of scientific literature. My wife initially got a regular Kindle, but it just couldn't handle the PDFs well enough (so now it's mine, and I read novels on it); she later bought a used Kindle DX, and it's basically perfect for reading journal papers.
Also, with arms and legs, if the texture is generally the same between the two (say you are wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt of the same color), then there really isn't enough information for the tracker to work with in order to distinguish a leg from an arm.
Arms have these things we like to call "hands" dangling from them, which would probably make identification of arms vs legs easier - unless you're going to go with the idea that people will use this while wearing not only clothing of a uniform color, but also gloves:)
That's the fun thing about machine learning algorithms - they pick up on things you miss.
I got the legit collectors edition but run a pirate version with ALL the dlc even the promotion offers from other shops that I can't buy from.
Yes, truly the pirate version IS the supreme version. And thanks to Bioware lack luster patches, it is 100% up to date.
That really bears repeating: there is content that paying customer cannot access, unless they're willing to buy the game at full price multiple times from various different stores! In some cases, there's even content that's locked unless you buy other, mostly unrelated games.
Now, to be fair, this content is generally restricted to just some shiny items and not much else, but still - pirates get the complete game experience, which is inaccessible to most reasonable legitimate players.
Honestly, it's almost like EA wants you to pirate the game; they certainly treat pirates better than the paying customers.
... that the idea behind human rights was to prevent torture, exploitation and give everyone the right to the fair trial.
Internet access? How pathetic the human race has become./blockquote>
What exactly is pathetic about this, pray tell?
Any declaration of human rights is constrained by what society can provide. Originally, all we promised was to not torture or exploit people, and to give them a fair trial because that was all we could afford.
As the amount of resources available to the global society increase, why not extend human rights to cover simple, effective things that we can now afford to provide? What is pathetic about that, exactly?
I'm not just saying that as a big scary threat. I'm telling you -- I know myself. This is a fact. If I know that I'll be able to live in a warm house and have food on my table, without ever doing anything to earn it, I will never do anything to earn it.
That may very well be the case, there are people like that.
However, decades of experience in countries where things like housing and food are provided to those who have none has demonstrated that the vast, vast majority of people are not like that.
The reason why you think you would act that way is probably because, as you imply in your post, you think you'd be living in a house - in other words, that your standard of living would be unchanged. That's not the case at all; you'd be living in high-density housing with relatively poor food. It would be good enough, but it wouldn't be very good.
In reality, it's not very different from your current situation. You could drop out of society and go become a homeless person at any time; why haven't you? Because the quality of life wouldn't be to your satisfaction? Well then, let me assure you that while the quality of life under such a system would be better, it probably still wouldn't be something you would choose over working, when given the option.
I've discussed this, and the figure was startling for them, as paying for culture sounds alien for them outside some specific titles they appreciate enough (one owns all the Civ games, but nothing else, another owns just Half-Life 2 and some indies).
That's a perfectly natural stance to take; it's only very recently in terms of human development that we've come to decide that "pay first, entertainment second" is supposed to be the proper way of things. For most of human history, the transaction has been "entertainment first, pay second based on how good it is". Buskers and storytellers and other performers have been operating on that business model for, probably, tens of thousands of years.
This is not to make a value judgment as to which one of them is better (that would be the naturalistic fallacy, after all), but merely to point out that your friends are probably just acting the way their ancestors did.
Just to go back to the original problem: A government entity approved a massively more expensive Microsoft solution over an equivalent Google solution that would have saved the taxpayers significant amounts of cash. Microsoft is now saying that this is all because of the difference in title between "Premier" and "For Government." Call me skeptical, but this smells rotten to me.
While keeping in mind that (IIRC) the Microsoft solution currently does not have FISMA certification, and part of the reason why it was going to be so expensive is because they were going to get it certified in the process.
Slashdot Mirror
Bullshit. Even with a pirated Netflix app, you'd still have to log in to your Netflix account - there's no way to break that.
And if you're using a pirated, DRM-broken Netflix app to rip media - well, why would you do that in the first place? You can almost always torrent it hours after it shows up on TV or days after it shows up in theaters, and there won't be missing episodes like in the Netflix streams.
So what you're saying is - we should put more money into funding higher education? What a weird idea, I thought the only thing we could spend money on was either preparing to blow things up or blowing things up.
Actually, if you or the people in front of you are getting a lot of produce, it may very well be worth your time to go through a cashier line; cashiers generally have all of the produce codes memorized and know that they can look at a sticker on the item to get it if the need to, while the idiot in front of you probably has to scroll through the entire list of fruits and vegetables to get to the one he wants because he doesn't understand what the numbers on the sticker are for.
Hah! No, the voters will remember this incident - they'll remember it as "a pedophile got tossed around by our powerful, effective policing forces! Go USA!"
I mean, why do you think there's so much funding for dramatic paramilitary-esque SWAT-style police protection? Because people love drama, and having dramatic police actions makes voters think that the cops are doing their jobs, regardless of what the real effect is.
Well that's the thing - it can't be mandated, we should just try to convince carriers for the more vicious genetic diseases to adopt instead of have children.
It's the same thing as trying to convince teenagers to not have children, really. You shouldn't mandate that they can't, but they should be fully informed that it's a really bad idea.
It's Amazon's best-selling item - but where can you get a Kindle at all, besides Amazon?
The Harry Potter book, on the other hand, was available everywhere - in fact, I remember waiting around at the end of a line to get a copy at midnight at Borders, only to have a friend tell me that the supermarket down the street would have them available at midnight too and they didn't have a line.
Well that's pretty much precisely what's keeping me from buying a Kindle - I have a large library of physical books, and if I get a Kindle I'm going to have to either re-purchase the majority of them or get little benefit from the Kindle, though of course I would start buying new books for the device.
Personally, I think Amazon should offer discounts on the Kindle edition of a book if your account shows that you've bought the physical copy from them in the past - an enticement like that would help people like me, who already have large paper libraries, switch over.
(as a side note, my wife has a Kindle DX and loves it - but only because she was never one to collect books in the first place, and she uses it primarily to read transient things like journal articles that would otherwise get printed out once and recycled)
There, fixed that for you - a lot of companies who buy Cisco products don't need that level of support, and yet are paying for it anyway because Cisco is the "enterprise" solution.
Really? Do you have any statistics on the ship rate of commercial projects vs open source projects?
Because even though it is readily apparent that open source projects are abandoned quite frequently, I would wager that commercial projects are abandoned at comparable rates, the only difference being that the wreckage of commercial products doesn't litter the Internet, unlike closed source projects.
It's like the old question, if a tree falls in the woods and nobody's around to hear it, does it make a sound? If a commercial project fails and nobody ever knows about it, does it still fail? If an open source project fails and remains on Freshmeat or Sourceforge for years to come, does it still fail?
There's another one I can think of - due to the pigeon hole principle, you'll just randomly have a SHA collision every once in a while on completely unrelated files. The probability of this goes up as the number of files you're archiving increases. Once in college I was running out of hard disk space, so I wrote some bash scripts to take the SHA hash of every file on my file system, and find any duplicates like that. Much to my surprise, it turned out that some Quake 3 Arena asset had the same SHA hash as a random Linux system file - despite having radically different contents.
I would imagine that the probability of collision has only gone up in the intervening years, as people are storing more and more data on their hard drives.
That is almost exactly what Steam is doing, except without the "used games" part - instead of buying a game for cheap second-hand months later, they sell you a cheap digital download months later.
And I've never seen prices in a physical store that can even match Steam prices most of the time, much less actually beat them.
Sad but true. I've been bit by malware from actual games that I bought with money more often than I have from pirated releases.
Look, just because I use virtual CD-Rom drives doesn't mean I'm a pirate, okay? Some of us have MSDN subscriptions.
I think he was just hoping you didn't mean the site in your Slashdot profile, because that thing is a piece of junk. You aren't updating the main page even monthly and your content seems to consist of freely available information that you've just re-worded into blog posts and put into a database.
Basically, I'm sorry to say it but your site doesn't really deserve a good ranking.
Exactly!
Quiz time: How do you turn unskilled labor into skilled labor? By putting the unskilled laborers to work learning skills and building experience!
You're exactly right! Why, the last time my house was on fire, the firefighters came by and removed the fire! The last time there was a burglar in the neighborhood, the police took him! Every couple of years, they come by and remove all the potholes in the road!
That damn government, only taking things away!
That's an awful lot of defending we're doing over in Afghanistan and Iraq, isn't it? And how, exactly, do things like DARPA* and NASA fall under the umbrella of defense? They're not actively defending us against anything, they're just doing research in potentially making defensive methods better - research which isn't mentioned in the constitution AFAIK.
It's funny how the programs you support are Constitutionally justified despite bearing only the vaguest resemblance to anything actually in the Constitution, while the ones you don't aren't.
*besides the D in DARPA of course
I'm not sure how much you budgeted for those six months, but one major medical emergency while not covered by health insurance would probably wipe out the majority of those savings.
The other thing people forget all the time is that books don't just pop into existence as a perfect mass of storytelling and drama; every good publisher has editors on staff, who work with the authors in order to take the book from "acceptable" to "great". If you read almost any author's blog, you'll almost certainly see lots of comments from them about the editing process.
Ever wonder why the first Wheel of Time books were so much better than the later ones? Initially, Robert Jordan wasn't such a huge name, so the editors could keep him from too much faffing around in the story; afterwards, he had significantly more clout, and the editors were more willing to rely on his judgement which led to five hundred page novels that advanced the plot by about a week.
So yeah. While I'm no fan of the publishing system as it is today (I shouldn't have to pay $8.00 for a paperback in a brick and mortar store!), saying that all publishers do is put books in stores and take a cut isn't really giving them enough credit.
I could totally see publishing houses surviving into the future by 1. providing a reputable, "you'll probably like this book" mark and 2. providing services to authors, like editing, marketing, advances and other such things.
They just need to realize that their core business isn't plonking books down on shelves at the local bookstore, it's doing whatever it takes to put good books into people's hands.
We had pretty much the same problem, except with printouts of scientific literature. My wife initially got a regular Kindle, but it just couldn't handle the PDFs well enough (so now it's mine, and I read novels on it); she later bought a used Kindle DX, and it's basically perfect for reading journal papers.
Arms have these things we like to call "hands" dangling from them, which would probably make identification of arms vs legs easier - unless you're going to go with the idea that people will use this while wearing not only clothing of a uniform color, but also gloves :)
That's the fun thing about machine learning algorithms - they pick up on things you miss.
That really bears repeating: there is content that paying customer cannot access, unless they're willing to buy the game at full price multiple times from various different stores! In some cases, there's even content that's locked unless you buy other, mostly unrelated games.
Now, to be fair, this content is generally restricted to just some shiny items and not much else, but still - pirates get the complete game experience, which is inaccessible to most reasonable legitimate players.
Honestly, it's almost like EA wants you to pirate the game; they certainly treat pirates better than the paying customers.
That may very well be the case, there are people like that.
However, decades of experience in countries where things like housing and food are provided to those who have none has demonstrated that the vast, vast majority of people are not like that.
The reason why you think you would act that way is probably because, as you imply in your post, you think you'd be living in a house - in other words, that your standard of living would be unchanged. That's not the case at all; you'd be living in high-density housing with relatively poor food. It would be good enough, but it wouldn't be very good.
In reality, it's not very different from your current situation. You could drop out of society and go become a homeless person at any time; why haven't you? Because the quality of life wouldn't be to your satisfaction? Well then, let me assure you that while the quality of life under such a system would be better, it probably still wouldn't be something you would choose over working, when given the option.
That's a perfectly natural stance to take; it's only very recently in terms of human development that we've come to decide that "pay first, entertainment second" is supposed to be the proper way of things. For most of human history, the transaction has been "entertainment first, pay second based on how good it is". Buskers and storytellers and other performers have been operating on that business model for, probably, tens of thousands of years.
This is not to make a value judgment as to which one of them is better (that would be the naturalistic fallacy, after all), but merely to point out that your friends are probably just acting the way their ancestors did.
While keeping in mind that (IIRC) the Microsoft solution currently does not have FISMA certification, and part of the reason why it was going to be so expensive is because they were going to get it certified in the process.