They can't even manage to preserve "digital artifacts" between two different versions of Word
It's ok, this time they're including clear instructions on how to access that information... any bets on how many pages those instructions will run to? 6000 maybe?:)
Their parents that dutifully paid for entertainment media will be gone from the marketplace, having been replaced by folks that know better.
Sure, some people will refuse to pay for music (that happens already), but most of us *want* to compensate the artist with a fair amount of money if we like their music.
The point of DRM is to discourage "casual copying". It doesn't make it impossible, just difficult.
The problem is that it also discourages me from buying the content. I want to pay the artist, but if my legitimately purchased content can't be used then screw 'em - I'll download it instead. Pretty much all of my music gets played back on my computer, so the "won't play on computers" discs are completely useless to me.
Piracy? No hope of cutting that off.
And therein lies the problem with DRM. You'll never succeed in preventing illegal copies of your content from becoming available. The people who were going to download it illegally will continue to do so, and all the people who would've bought it are unable to use the DRM'd content how they want so they are just going to switch to illegal downloads too.
Unless you can stop *all* copying, DRM is pointless.
everyone under 40 understands that P2P is the way to get music, movies, etc.
No... everyone under 40 understands that P2P is *A* way to get music, movies, etc. Sure, I download music I'm interested in - if I like it I then go out and buy it, otherwise I delete it.
Preventing me from conveniently using the music I purchase is a sure-fire way to make me download it illegally instead, but if I can get DRM-free music then I will pay for it. Similarly, preventing me from downloading the music and listening to it before I buy it is a fairly good way of making sure I'll spend my money on someone else's music - I want to hear what I'm paying for before I lay down cash.
Ok numbnuts, that's exactly the kind of attitude that spammers have. That they can do anything because they pay for it.
Last I checked, spammers didn't pay to rent the bandwidth and processor time on each zombie machine they use.
You have to have limits. There have to be rules.
However, those limits shouldn't put a stop on legitimate activity. Just because _you_ do not have a legitimate reason to be running a mail server doesn't mean no one else does.
I'm all for ISPs cracking down on spammers, but not in a way that prevents people legitimately using the service.
(For the record, the great-great-great grandparent cited NTL as an example, who unfortunately have a history of _not_ dealing with abuse of their service, even when the recipient of the attack reports the abuse and supplies logging proving the source of the attack.)
In other words, MS basically documented Office's behavior down to the smallest detail
They didn't even do that. A lot of the document states that when you encounter certain tags you will emulate a Office bug, but never specifies the details of that bug because that is "beyond the scope of the document". So even if you have the standards document, you can't fully implement the standard without getting all the old versions of Office and reverse engineering their behavior.
Not since 1889. 1 L == 1 dm^3, 1 kg == the mass of that thing over there.
As a rule of thumb it's still pretty accurate.
Fresh water? Where are you windsurfing, Lake Michigan?
Actually, I do most of my sailing on salt water (South Hayling Island, Poole, etc) - that 3% extra density does make a slight difference, but the 1Kg == 1L rule of thumb is still useful. Occasionally I do sail on fresh water, usually at Rutland Water.
As they say, "Google Maps is the best. Double true!"
Actually, going a bit offtopic here, but whilest Google has the most userfriendly interface, the actual maps they present are pretty crap. MultiMap are a lot better, with scans of OS maps. Google's UK maps don't even have motorway junction numbers on them.:(
And it's already possible via trivial javascript to hide that part of the page from search engines, if you actually had a reason to do that....which harms accessibility... Not a bright idea really, since not only are you preventing some of your customers from seeing the site, but in many parts of the world this is actually illegal.
No one over 50 *EVER* uses centigrade for the temperature except for setting the oven. Nobody.
All the people I know who are over 50 (over 65 even) would beg to differ.
I'll assume you picked a bad example of the top of your head here, but this statement really just makes you look silly....
Yes, it was a bad example. Better: 2 st + 12 lb + 12 lb.
But truth wins over beauty, and fibbing about the UK really helps nobody.
I actually wasn't fibbing. I measure my height and weight in metric because it makes calculations easier. Of course this backfired a bit a few months ago when they gym decided to change all their hardware to imperial and I had absolutely no clue how many pounds I weighed. But in general, knowing my weight in kilos is a lot more useful than knowing it in pounds.
We are not talking about your own oddball practices here, but what average people actually do.
A quick look in my stock of beer indicates that I have bottles of Hobgoblin (proper British ale) at 5.2% ABV - certainly more than the figures you quote, and Leffe Triple (Belgium beer) at 8.4%.
Of course, alcohol content isn't very important - the taste is the important thing, and American and Australian beers (which seem to be widely available here in the UK) just aren't very good.
Budweiser
And I rest my case, presenting that as a really bad beer:)
What a strange country you must live in and you must not have travelled at all.
I live in the UK. Yes I have traveled - just not to the US (nor would I want to).
Alcohol is still sold in standard amounts in bars in metric countries too and that's what you ask for
Utter rubbish - in Europe you ask for a half litre or beer. Places with plenty of tourists will understand you when you ask for a pint, but they will give you half a litre.
people buy as much fruit as they need/want not a specific amount as they're sold in both bags of apples (which are neither 1 pound or 1 kilo) or loose so you can buy what you want;
Fruit, meat, etc is all priced by the gram. Sure, you can buy "4 apples" or something but they will be weighed and charged by the gram.
The development of the language had nothing to do with imperial measurements; someone somewhere had to define what a pint/pound/inch actually represents and guess what it was this in the UK.
Well done for trying to argue that anything that was done in the 19th century must, by extension, still be happening in the 21st century. Yes, the imperial units were invented in the UK, but they have since been superseded, and for the most part, discarded. It's also worth noting that the lack of standardisation of imperial units (such as the US gallon != imperial gallon) does cause confusion.
Ok, a better example might've been "what's 2 stone 5 pounds added to 12 pounds". Yeah, you can do the conversion if you have good knowledge of every unit, but it isn't quite as simple as knowing that a "Kilofoo" is 1000 foo, etc.
But my point is, you can't sell the metric system by telling people metric makes it easy to do the kind of conversions they never need to do, like converting cubic inches to gallons.
Ok, here's a practical example: I'm a windsurfer. Knowing what a windsurf board will do when you stand on it is important - thus I know that if the windsurfer, board and rig weigh 90 kilos, any board under 90 litres in size is going to sink when used on fresh water. Doing a similar calculation using imperial units would be somewhat more complex.
Probably about 6 pints. (Yes, this is still measured in pints)
How tall are you?
180cm
What do you weigh?
Long time since I've weighed myself but at a guess, somewhere around the 72 Kilo mark.
What size trousers do you buy?
81cm waist.
How annoying is it when old people talk about the temperature in Fahrenheit and you have to convert it to make any sense of it?
This really doesn't happen - everyone I know, including the pensioners, uses centigrade. The only time I have to deal with Fahrenheit is when talking to Americans.
You'll probably be hard pushed to find anyone under the age of 30-something who was taught any imperial at school at all. Yes, people may well use imperial for discrete values (e.g. "I'll have 3 pints please"), but only the older generation will actually be able to do calculations involving imperial measurements.
I.e. what's 5 pounds added to 2 stone? I have absolutely no idea. But 500 grams added to 2 kilos is easy.
Having said that, if somebody asks my weight or height, I'd tell them in stones and feet, so we still have a way to go.
Well, I guess it depends on what situations you need to know things like weight for. I'm a windsurfer and I would always quote my weight in kilos since it makes working out things like volume of water displaced much easier (1 kilo == 1 litre of fresh water).
And whilst I may know specific values (my height, weight, etc) in imperial, I have no idea how to do calculations with those values. If I'm going to calculate anything I use metric (how many ounces in a pound? pounds in a stone? I have no idea - I'd have to look them up).
Also, add the lack of standardisation in imperial units - the Americans like to call them "English units", but the gallons (rarely, these days) used in England aren't the same size as the American gallons...
There is a drive to convert road signs to metric - again, partly because of our EU membership - but there's no easy, straightforward way to do it.
They managed it in Ireland without any real problems, ISTR the new signs just have "Km/h" marked on them below the speed. All the cars have both KM/h and MPH marked on the speedo (although I must admit that the KM/h markings on my car are a bit too small to read while you're going along the road). I for one would welcome a complete switch to kilometres though - it would make working out stuff like fuel consumption much easier (which is still quoted in miles per gallon despite the fact that fuel hasn't been sold in gallons for at least 20 years, not to mention the disparity between US gallons and British gallons which means you're never entirely sure which units are being used).
Absolute rubbish. There are a few specific things still imperial (road speed measured in miles per hour, beer measured in pints), but most other stuff is metric. And frankly, metric makes a whole lot more sense since the different units are related to each other with nice easy multiples.
Note that it is only in English that the measure of distance is spelt "metre". Other languages (e.g. German, French) use "meter" for it (Italian and Spanish use "metro" for both). I have no idea why this letter switch happened in English.
there is a correlation between how many impressions of an ad you've seen and which product you actually get.
This may be true for "good" adverts (ones that aren't designed to be nothing but annoying), but the converse is true for me when I repeatedly see annoying adverts.
For example, when shopping around for car insurance, I never even bother to get a quote from elephant.co.uk because their TV ads are so unbelievably annoying. Yes, their advert made their name stick in my head, but sadly for them it was filed in the "never buy from these people" category.
If you want to make me pay attention to an advert in a good way, make it funny, non repetitive and relevant.
Agreed there. If an ad interferes with reading the site, or blares audio without asking me, I'll block it.
More than that - if an ad interferes with my use of a site or plays audio, I'll block the entire domain it comes from. I don't have time to block specific adverts, if an advertiser is condoning those ads then they don't deserve to show me anything.
Sadly, advertisers seem to think that circumventing adblock and showing the same annoying adverts is the way to go, rather than switching to more appropriate ads (e.g. targeted and not designed specifically to annoy) which I wouldn't block.
Meter == device for measuring stuff. I.e. volt meter, etc. Metre == measure of distance (the distance travelled by light in absolute vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.)
Just because Americans can't spell doesn't mean the rest of the world has to adopt your broken spelling.
That their copyright has been violated, because it has. The downloader is making a copy, without authorization.
If you post content you own on a BitTorrent tracker (such as what the MPAA are doing with their "fake" content), anyone downloading it is no more guilty of copyright infringement than if they downloaded the content from the owner's web site.
(Of course, strictly speaking the legality of accessing *any* website is questionable, at least here in the UK, since the Computer Misuse Act criminalises unauthorised access to computer systems, and I doubt most people get written authorisation from the owner of a webserver before accessing it).
Funny, at my middle school we had Macs (I think OS 8?) and we didn't think "oh cool" we thought "wow, these suck."
1. Schools are so underfunded that pretty much anything they buy will suck. 2. Kids don't necessarily know best about their education - they may not see the point in a learning exercise but that doesn't mean it's not worth doing. And in 15 years time their perspective may well have changed and they might see it as a worthwhile exercise.
Slashdot Mirror
What would be fascinating is if we were to discover interfaces that allow contents of memory or other brain contents to be read in this way.
As an anti-terrorism measure, all citizens are required to have their brain contents submitted to a government database in real-time.
If you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear and anyone who does not agree to this measure must be a terrorist.
They can't even manage to preserve "digital artifacts" between two different versions of Word
:)
It's ok, this time they're including clear instructions on how to access that information... any bets on how many pages those instructions will run to? 6000 maybe?
Their parents that dutifully paid for entertainment media will be gone from the marketplace, having been replaced by folks that know better.
Sure, some people will refuse to pay for music (that happens already), but most of us *want* to compensate the artist with a fair amount of money if we like their music.
The point of DRM is to discourage "casual copying". It doesn't make it impossible, just difficult.
The problem is that it also discourages me from buying the content. I want to pay the artist, but if my legitimately purchased content can't be used then screw 'em - I'll download it instead. Pretty much all of my music gets played back on my computer, so the "won't play on computers" discs are completely useless to me.
Piracy? No hope of cutting that off.
And therein lies the problem with DRM. You'll never succeed in preventing illegal copies of your content from becoming available. The people who were going to download it illegally will continue to do so, and all the people who would've bought it are unable to use the DRM'd content how they want so they are just going to switch to illegal downloads too.
Unless you can stop *all* copying, DRM is pointless.
everyone under 40 understands that P2P is the way to get music, movies, etc.
No... everyone under 40 understands that P2P is *A* way to get music, movies, etc. Sure, I download music I'm interested in - if I like it I then go out and buy it, otherwise I delete it.
Preventing me from conveniently using the music I purchase is a sure-fire way to make me download it illegally instead, but if I can get DRM-free music then I will pay for it.
Similarly, preventing me from downloading the music and listening to it before I buy it is a fairly good way of making sure I'll spend my money on someone else's music - I want to hear what I'm paying for before I lay down cash.
Ok numbnuts, that's exactly the kind of attitude that spammers have. That they can do anything because they pay for it.
Last I checked, spammers didn't pay to rent the bandwidth and processor time on each zombie machine they use.
You have to have limits. There have to be rules.
However, those limits shouldn't put a stop on legitimate activity. Just because _you_ do not have a legitimate reason to be running a mail server doesn't mean no one else does.
I'm all for ISPs cracking down on spammers, but not in a way that prevents people legitimately using the service.
(For the record, the great-great-great grandparent cited NTL as an example, who unfortunately have a history of _not_ dealing with abuse of their service, even when the recipient of the attack reports the abuse and supplies logging proving the source of the attack.)
In other words, MS basically documented Office's behavior down to the smallest detail
They didn't even do that. A lot of the document states that when you encounter certain tags you will emulate a Office bug, but never specifies the details of that bug because that is "beyond the scope of the document". So even if you have the standards document, you can't fully implement the standard without getting all the old versions of Office and reverse engineering their behavior.
Could you mix LOX and liquid methane in the correct proportion in the same fuel/oxidizer tank and eliminate 1/2 of the pumps/plumbing, etc?
:)
:)
Is it me or does that sound _really_ dangerous?
I know, let's put a stupidly large, explosive mix of fuel/oxidiser in a tank under very high pressure and hope nothing ignites it.
Not since 1889. 1 L == 1 dm^3, 1 kg == the mass of that thing over there.
As a rule of thumb it's still pretty accurate.
Fresh water? Where are you windsurfing, Lake Michigan?
Actually, I do most of my sailing on salt water (South Hayling Island, Poole, etc) - that 3% extra density does make a slight difference, but the 1Kg == 1L rule of thumb is still useful. Occasionally I do sail on fresh water, usually at Rutland Water.
As they say, "Google Maps is the best. Double true!"
:(
Actually, going a bit offtopic here, but whilest Google has the most userfriendly interface, the actual maps they present are pretty crap. MultiMap are a lot better, with scans of OS maps. Google's UK maps don't even have motorway junction numbers on them.
And it's already possible via trivial javascript to hide that part of the page from search engines, if you actually had a reason to do that. ...which harms accessibility... Not a bright idea really, since not only are you preventing some of your customers from seeing the site, but in many parts of the world this is actually illegal.
You must not be a very good one if you are still moving at displacement speeds.
You kinda don't have a choice if the wind drops when you're a kilometre out to sea...
No one over 50 *EVER* uses centigrade for the temperature except for setting the oven. Nobody.
All the people I know who are over 50 (over 65 even) would beg to differ.
I'll assume you picked a bad example of the top of your head here, but this statement really just makes you look silly....
Yes, it was a bad example. Better: 2 st + 12 lb + 12 lb.
But truth wins over beauty, and fibbing about the UK really helps nobody.
I actually wasn't fibbing. I measure my height and weight in metric because it makes calculations easier. Of course this backfired a bit a few months ago when they gym decided to change all their hardware to imperial and I had absolutely no clue how many pounds I weighed. But in general, knowing my weight in kilos is a lot more useful than knowing it in pounds.
We are not talking about your own oddball practices here, but what average people actually do.
I don't consider these practices "oddball".
most british beer is around 4-4.2% by volume.
:)
A quick look in my stock of beer indicates that I have bottles of Hobgoblin (proper British ale) at 5.2% ABV - certainly more than the figures you quote, and Leffe Triple (Belgium beer) at 8.4%.
Of course, alcohol content isn't very important - the taste is the important thing, and American and Australian beers (which seem to be widely available here in the UK) just aren't very good.
Budweiser
And I rest my case, presenting that as a really bad beer
What a strange country you must live in and you must not have travelled at all.
I live in the UK. Yes I have traveled - just not to the US (nor would I want to).
Alcohol is still sold in standard amounts in bars in metric countries too and that's what you ask for
Utter rubbish - in Europe you ask for a half litre or beer. Places with plenty of tourists will understand you when you ask for a pint, but they will give you half a litre.
people buy as much fruit as they need/want not a specific amount as they're sold in both bags of apples (which are neither 1 pound or 1 kilo) or loose so you can buy what you want;
Fruit, meat, etc is all priced by the gram. Sure, you can buy "4 apples" or something but they will be weighed and charged by the gram.
The development of the language had nothing to do with imperial measurements; someone somewhere had to define what a pint/pound/inch actually represents and guess what it was this in the UK.
Well done for trying to argue that anything that was done in the 19th century must, by extension, still be happening in the 21st century. Yes, the imperial units were invented in the UK, but they have since been superseded, and for the most part, discarded. It's also worth noting that the lack of standardisation of imperial units (such as the US gallon != imperial gallon) does cause confusion.
It is two stone five pounds. That's easy.
Ok, a better example might've been "what's 2 stone 5 pounds added to 12 pounds". Yeah, you can do the conversion if you have good knowledge of every unit, but it isn't quite as simple as knowing that a "Kilofoo" is 1000 foo, etc.
But my point is, you can't sell the metric system by telling people metric makes it easy to do the kind of conversions they never need to do, like converting cubic inches to gallons.
Ok, here's a practical example: I'm a windsurfer. Knowing what a windsurf board will do when you stand on it is important - thus I know that if the windsurfer, board and rig weigh 90 kilos, any board under 90 litres in size is going to sink when used on fresh water. Doing a similar calculation using imperial units would be somewhat more complex.
How much beer do you drink in average month?
Probably about 6 pints. (Yes, this is still measured in pints)
How tall are you?
180cm
What do you weigh?
Long time since I've weighed myself but at a guess, somewhere around the 72 Kilo mark.
What size trousers do you buy?
81cm waist.
How annoying is it when old people talk about the temperature in Fahrenheit and you have to convert it to make any sense of it?
This really doesn't happen - everyone I know, including the pensioners, uses centigrade. The only time I have to deal with Fahrenheit is when talking to Americans.
You'll probably be hard pushed to find anyone under the age of 30-something who was taught any imperial at school at all. Yes, people may well use imperial for discrete values (e.g. "I'll have 3 pints please"), but only the older generation will actually be able to do calculations involving imperial measurements.
I.e. what's 5 pounds added to 2 stone? I have absolutely no idea. But 500 grams added to 2 kilos is easy.
I prefer to use the imperial system when I'm measuring my penis. I'm sure you guys do the same.
Generally, I'm not insecure enough to need to measure mine...
Having said that, if somebody asks my weight or height, I'd tell them in stones and feet, so we still have a way to go.
Well, I guess it depends on what situations you need to know things like weight for. I'm a windsurfer and I would always quote my weight in kilos since it makes working out things like volume of water displaced much easier (1 kilo == 1 litre of fresh water).
And whilst I may know specific values (my height, weight, etc) in imperial, I have no idea how to do calculations with those values. If I'm going to calculate anything I use metric (how many ounces in a pound? pounds in a stone? I have no idea - I'd have to look them up).
Also, add the lack of standardisation in imperial units - the Americans like to call them "English units", but the gallons (rarely, these days) used in England aren't the same size as the American gallons...
There is a drive to convert road signs to metric - again, partly because of our EU membership - but there's no easy, straightforward way to do it.
They managed it in Ireland without any real problems, ISTR the new signs just have "Km/h" marked on them below the speed. All the cars have both KM/h and MPH marked on the speedo (although I must admit that the KM/h markings on my car are a bit too small to read while you're going along the road). I for one would welcome a complete switch to kilometres though - it would make working out stuff like fuel consumption much easier (which is still quoted in miles per gallon despite the fact that fuel hasn't been sold in gallons for at least 20 years, not to mention the disparity between US gallons and British gallons which means you're never entirely sure which units are being used).
...nobody here uses metric.
Absolute rubbish. There are a few specific things still imperial (road speed measured in miles per hour, beer measured in pints), but most other stuff is metric. And frankly, metric makes a whole lot more sense since the different units are related to each other with nice easy multiples.
Note that it is only in English that the measure of distance is spelt "metre". Other languages (e.g. German, French) use "meter" for it (Italian and Spanish use "metro" for both). I have no idea why this letter switch happened in English.
This is untrue - the French use "mètre"
there is a correlation between how many impressions of an ad you've seen and which product you actually get.
This may be true for "good" adverts (ones that aren't designed to be nothing but annoying), but the converse is true for me when I repeatedly see annoying adverts.
For example, when shopping around for car insurance, I never even bother to get a quote from elephant.co.uk because their TV ads are so unbelievably annoying. Yes, their advert made their name stick in my head, but sadly for them it was filed in the "never buy from these people" category.
If you want to make me pay attention to an advert in a good way, make it funny, non repetitive and relevant.
Agreed there. If an ad interferes with reading the site, or blares audio without asking me, I'll block it.
More than that - if an ad interferes with my use of a site or plays audio, I'll block the entire domain it comes from. I don't have time to block specific adverts, if an advertiser is condoning those ads then they don't deserve to show me anything.
Sadly, advertisers seem to think that circumventing adblock and showing the same annoying adverts is the way to go, rather than switching to more appropriate ads (e.g. targeted and not designed specifically to annoy) which I wouldn't block.
And weird E and R switched in meter metric!
Meter == device for measuring stuff. I.e. volt meter, etc.
Metre == measure of distance (the distance travelled by light in absolute vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.)
Just because Americans can't spell doesn't mean the rest of the world has to adopt your broken spelling.
That their copyright has been violated, because it has. The downloader is making a copy, without authorization.
If you post content you own on a BitTorrent tracker (such as what the MPAA are doing with their "fake" content), anyone downloading it is no more guilty of copyright infringement than if they downloaded the content from the owner's web site.
(Of course, strictly speaking the legality of accessing *any* website is questionable, at least here in the UK, since the Computer Misuse Act criminalises unauthorised access to computer systems, and I doubt most people get written authorisation from the owner of a webserver before accessing it).
Funny, at my middle school we had Macs (I think OS 8?) and we didn't think "oh cool" we thought "wow, these suck."
1. Schools are so underfunded that pretty much anything they buy will suck.
2. Kids don't necessarily know best about their education - they may not see the point in a learning exercise but that doesn't mean it's not worth doing. And in 15 years time their perspective may well have changed and they might see it as a worthwhile exercise.