The world is not a dichotomy, take the posterizing filter off your eyes. No matter how much you might want it to be, it is not as simple as choosing 'total censorship of everything' or 'I support kiddie porn.' There is a spectrum of how wrong or offensive something is, and somewhere along there you draw a line for things which are so wrong and offensive they should be suppressed. I draw this line at sexually exploiting children (who cannot consent) and I draw it at actions which knowingly and intentionally threaten life.
That is setting the bar for censorship and supression almost as low as it can get. I believe that child porn is so wrong that it should be suppressed and it's creators and consumers locked up forever. I believe that inciting a riot, committing a hate crime, conspiring to kill people in God's name, or yelling 'FIRE' in the theater should also be suppressed because if you do them you knowingly and intentionally harm others.
PS: If you truly support freedom of speech, you must support my right to yell 'FIRE' in a crowded theater. If you are against me saying this, you are anti-free speech, so stop being a hypocrite. Take your pick.
Actually America had at least 50 big army interventions around world in last 50 years
Define 'big.' World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf War I, Afghanistan and Gulf War II are the only ones that immediately leap to mind. Kosovo and Rwanda perhaps, too. What are the other 42?
Now these people are trying to teach us human rights and freedom by killing and humiliating us.
... Which is why, after invading Iraq and toppling Saddam, billions upon billions of dollars were tagged for reconstruction and improving the quality of life in Iraq. More than half of which has been lost because of the security needed for contractors due to the insurgency.
You think religious fanatics like al Zarqwai want you to lead a happy, fulfilling life? If you do that, they start to lose their power over you because if this life sucks less then you won't think so much about what comes after. THEY are your problem. The only God they believe in is their power over you. We have people like that over here too, like Pat Robertson. You need to just stop listening to them.
I mean, come on! Do you think the medieval Catholic Church was happy to see the Renissance come about? To see trade revive, and people's standard of life improve? Hell no, man! Their power has been waning ever since. Why would you think that the leaders of Islam would be any happier with the prospect of losing thier power?
After living in west more than 5 years i realized that West is actually ignorant, illiterate, untaught.
Because the rates of literacy and education are so much higher in the Middle East, and Western scholars routinely flee to Syria and Iran to continue with higher education.
The USSR were only officially atheists because the Bolsheviks didn't want anyone else competing with them for power. Think about it: If people thank *GOD* for good things, then they won't be thanking the Glorious Revolution! We can't have that, now can we Comrade?
People will do some pretty crazy things in the name of/out of devotion to religion. So totalitarian dictatorships have two choices WRT God: Convince people that God's on their side, or 'convice' them that God doesn't exist (so they'll do crazy shit in the name of the State instead).
If the walking death sticks who hijacked the planes and flew them into the WTC, Pentagon and Penn. field had been monitored more closely, they'd been stopped. That's just common sense.
I can't imagine how more monitoring would help when a memo that says 'bin Laden determined to strike!' gets ignored. The government bureaucracy had the information to stop 9/11, but the intel services failed to share the information effectively. Like a typical bureaucracy it took a catastrophe to get them off thier asses and en route toward fixing the problem, much like it took the equally avoidable Titanic disaster to get maritime safety rules up-to-date.
This is a *bureaucracy*. They will do anything, including alter the orbits of entire planets and utilize higher dimensions, to keep doing things exactly as their narrow interpertation of 'the rules' specifies. They will fight any change in 'the rules' (as well as change in general) like Spartan warriors on crack, until a massive loss of life forces a change:
however there are so many "PC users" below "novice" level which will disable an antivirus if they're unable to open an infected file.
I refuse to believe anyone could be that stupid. This is a problem that needs natural selection: No, I won't fix your computer again because you screwed it up doing exactly what I told you not to do last time. Fix it yourself.
As long as people know that when they frack their computers up they can get a nerd to fix it for them for free, they will remain ignorant because having their computer out of commission occasionally takes less time/energy/thought than learning to fix it and not screw it up in the first place. As long as nerds continue to subsidize this behavior by spending *our* time/energy/thought to fix broken boxes, lusers will stay lame. Start charging a lot of money to fix computers broken through stupid actions (like above), and even the dumbest dumb user will eventually figure that remaining dumb is too expensive. In short, raise the cost enough and not only will demand drop, but people will look for alternatives!
"Google is right to stand up against the Bush administration, but Google is wrong to not do the same against the Chinese administration."
In the US, when Google stands up to the government because of it's violating civil rights (wanting all search logs for X time) the government files a lawsuit against them. When you stand up to the Chinese government, the bastards run you over with a tank and make your family disappear.
In other words, the PRC commit the crimes that tinfoil-hat people think the US government does.
The LinuxQuestions.org Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) is an excellent guide to Linux-compatible hardware devices, generally listing the (in)compatible Kernel/Distro version as well. It seems that Belkin cards generally do well in Linux.
I recently bought and installed a Belkin Wireless Desktop Card, model F5D7000; Although it absolutely refused to work with WPA, getting 128-bit WEP to work with it was quite easy.
"bush is a sheep. dont give that monkey any credit. ever. seriously."
If someone brings up a legitimate point, they deserve credit for it, whether or not they're on your side of an argument. Hell, I think he's an idiot too - but statements like yours seriously hurt the credibility of liberal/democratic organizations. You don't have any position of your own or anything you're FOR; You're just AGAINST Bush.
The scary thing is, the things that the Bush administration will say in defense of it's actions are so seemingly unlimited that it's hard to tell if this is a parody or the real thing.
Why do you believe that a nuclear accident is likely? France gets more than 3/4 of it's power from nuclear reactors, and they've never had a single accident. In the one incident the USA has had, the reactor safety mechanisms worked correctly and shut the core off before it completely melted. People who take an airline flight get exposed to more radiation than nuclear power plant workers.
In the case of Chernobyl, we learned that if you use a reactor that has no safety dome and will continue functioning in the absence of water, purposefully shut off all the safety systems and then simulate a meltdown (That is to say, commit unforgivable crimes against safety, good engineering, and common sense), bad things will happen.
Re:But how much power does your machine use?
on
A Kilowatt of Power
·
· Score: 1
"Is there any easy way to measure how much power a machine actually uses?"
I remember reading on Gateworld.net that the idea behind introducing the Ori is that a large number of viewers wanted to learn more about the events and history surrounding the Ancients (isn't that what Atlantis was supposed to be for?...), and, well, the scriptwriters quasi-listened. There's why we got the Ori.
Although the concept of the Ori is interesting, their introduction was indeed contrived and painfully forced (2nd episode and we conveniently have new super-enemies? WTF?). I'd have preferred to see more focus on the formation and politics of the Jaffa nation, as well as the chaos surrounding the demise of the Go'auld. On the other hand, I agree wholeheartedly that we should liberally sprinkle in revisits to all those planets that SG-1 visited in seasons 1-3. What about the robotic copies? Urgo? Argo's world? As you mentioned, O'Neil's child? The Entity's world? They could throw in a sort of Greek tragedy too, switch between everyone's viewpoints and make it a question of who thinks what, rather than what will happen.
On the other hand, I find the intrigue surrounding Baal interesting (which would make a fantastic interplay with making the Gate public, too). As it is, the one thing that I can't wait to see resolved is: Will the Ancients break their hallowed rules to intervene and stop the Ori?
Don't you think that's reducing the meaning and intent of anti-trust laws too much to be meaningful?
Charging less is perfectly fine, unless you're a monopoly that's selling it's products at a loss for the purpose of driving a competitor out of business (MSIE vs Netscape). Charging more is perfectly fine, unless you are using the fact that your monopoly prevents customers from being able to go elsewhere to shaft them (common TelCo behavior WRT DSL/Cable). Charging the same is OK too, as long as you and your competitor don't conveniently rachet up the price by the same amount at the same time (see the oil cartel).
Long story short: The rules change when you gain a monopoly. They change to prevent you from using that monopoly to take advantage of customers. If you want to write your own office suite and enter the market charging $5000 a copy, that's fine - there are other choices. If MS does it, everyone is pretty much forced to follow suit because (if it were a true monopoly) there is no other choice (This disregards the effect of F/OSS, where screwing customers *too much* will make them decide that the time/effort cost of switching to F/OSS is less than the money cost of paying for the monopolist).
So, how are laws that protect consumers from something they can't protect themselves from bad?
I was under the impression that healthcare costs are sky-high because of people who sue when ANYTHING goes wrong, or could even be construed as having gone wrong, whether or not you could have done anything. This then forces everyone in the hospital to carry an unbelievable amount of insurance. Think of the cost of an NMR scanner's coolant for a year VS the operator's insurance.
A watermark can't be visible to the viewer, which severely limits how many bits they can play with to create the watermark. Try this: Open Photoshop or the GIMP, create an image as wide as your screen's resolution, and make a gradient from black to a pure color running across it. See how much you can posterize it before you can see vertical bars. Green becomes visible to me around 200 colors, red and blue at 120-150. That means they can't change more than 1 or *maybe* 2 bits per color in RGB, which gives 3 to 5 bpp of watermark (realistically - your eye is very good at picking green apart, only getting 1 bit there). Try blending increasing numbers of 8 and 32-color static frames together and see when they get close to flat gray.
Buy the movie that many times, record each DVD the same way (placing the pictures taken with the digital camera into ~/set1/, ~/set2/, ~/set3/...), then use a script in an image manipulation program to create ~/set_average. The watermark is now static, effectively removed. No watermark, no refused playback.
How can the government help the little guy help themselves when we all know that microsoft will do anything, no matter how scummy, to force you to use their products (DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run). What can the government do for Netscape when Microsoft's response is to give away IE for free and absorb the cost with Win/Office sales?
Likewise, what can the government do today for independent developers who MS denies API documentation, other than force MS to release the documentation?
Mount camera, use oscilloscope to find light intensity over time, integrate to arrive at proper multi-second exposure time that nullifies flickering.
The MPAA just doesn't get this one simple fact: I can see it, therefore photons are travelling across the room, therefore they can be recorded. End of story.
To begin with, the analog hole can not be closed because the brain's audio and video inputs are analog. Therefore, I can point my lovingly cared for pre-drm camera at the screen, record every frame, then reassemble them.
This bill only affects the USA. Overseas manufacturers *can* tell Congress to shove it, and *will* when they see the profit to be had.
Any attempt to enforce it will cause a consumer revolt. When someone can't use their Sony DVD-RW to record thier home movies any more, can't use a digital camcorder, and can't do any of a myriad other convenient things this bill will break, they will revolt.
The new DRM was just released. ETA of hack: 3... 2... 1... hacked.
This is move made by an organization that is desperate to avoid losing control. They are evil people, who think only of themselves and what they want at the expense of hundreds of millions of others. In many ways, they are like terrorists. While defenders of freedom must stop them at every turn, they only have to succeed once with a crime like this to hurt everyone. Like terrorists, they can only survive as long as most people support them or don't care. Before the Internet, this was easy as they controlled every means of getting information out. With the Internet, people who see them for what they are will speak out uncontrollably and they will be destroyed once and for all.
The end is coming for them. They know it. And because they both powerful and evil, they will hurt many many people before they are brought to economic justice. I will celebrate the day the MPAA and RIAA are dissolved when their last member goes bankrupt for the rest of my life.
1. Precisely align a pre-DRM digital camera with a DRM-approved LCD screen and mount in place.
2. Step the DVD frame-by-frame and take pictures.
3. Use OSS on a pre-DRM computer to reassemble the pictures into MyFairUseCopy(fsck_the_MPAA).mpeg.
4. MPAA loses - Noone sheds a tear.
The same procedure applies to DRMed sound: Carefully slice apart each DRMed speaker to access magnet control wires, read using 24bit AD converter, splice that back into the mpeg from before, MPAA loses.
Dear MPAA: The analog hole can never be closed, because guess what: All inputs to the human brain are ANALOG, you executive fucktards.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh fuck off. That's not what I mean and you know it perfectly damn well.
The world is not a dichotomy, take the posterizing filter off your eyes. No matter how much you might want it to be, it is not as simple as choosing 'total censorship of everything' or 'I support kiddie porn.' There is a spectrum of how wrong or offensive something is, and somewhere along there you draw a line for things which are so wrong and offensive they should be suppressed. I draw this line at sexually exploiting children (who cannot consent) and I draw it at actions which knowingly and intentionally threaten life.
That is setting the bar for censorship and supression almost as low as it can get. I believe that child porn is so wrong that it should be suppressed and it's creators and consumers locked up forever. I believe that inciting a riot, committing a hate crime, conspiring to kill people in God's name, or yelling 'FIRE' in the theater should also be suppressed because if you do them you knowingly and intentionally harm others.
PS: If you truly support freedom of speech, you must support my right to yell 'FIRE' in a crowded theater. If you are against me saying this, you are anti-free speech, so stop being a hypocrite. Take your pick.
You think religious fanatics like al Zarqwai want you to lead a happy, fulfilling life? If you do that, they start to lose their power over you because if this life sucks less then you won't think so much about what comes after. THEY are your problem. The only God they believe in is their power over you. We have people like that over here too, like Pat Robertson. You need to just stop listening to them.
I mean, come on! Do you think the medieval Catholic Church was happy to see the Renissance come about? To see trade revive, and people's standard of life improve? Hell no, man! Their power has been waning ever since. Why would you think that the leaders of Islam would be any happier with the prospect of losing thier power?
Because the rates of literacy and education are so much higher in the Middle East, and Western scholars routinely flee to Syria and Iran to continue with higher education.
"It... It seems like information is not this Administration's problem. They take the information and... fuck things up."
Against the Cybrids?
The USSR were only officially atheists because the Bolsheviks didn't want anyone else competing with them for power. Think about it: If people thank *GOD* for good things, then they won't be thanking the Glorious Revolution! We can't have that, now can we Comrade?
People will do some pretty crazy things in the name of/out of devotion to religion. So totalitarian dictatorships have two choices WRT God: Convince people that God's on their side, or 'convice' them that God doesn't exist (so they'll do crazy shit in the name of the State instead).
This is a *bureaucracy*. They will do anything, including alter the orbits of entire planets and utilize higher dimensions, to keep doing things exactly as their narrow interpertation of 'the rules' specifies. They will fight any change in 'the rules' (as well as change in general) like Spartan warriors on crack, until a massive loss of life forces a change:
As long as people know that when they frack their computers up they can get a nerd to fix it for them for free, they will remain ignorant because having their computer out of commission occasionally takes less time/energy/thought than learning to fix it and not screw it up in the first place. As long as nerds continue to subsidize this behavior by spending *our* time/energy/thought to fix broken boxes, lusers will stay lame. Start charging a lot of money to fix computers broken through stupid actions (like above), and even the dumbest dumb user will eventually figure that remaining dumb is too expensive. In short, raise the cost enough and not only will demand drop, but people will look for alternatives!
"Google is right to stand up against the Bush administration, but Google is wrong to not do the same against the Chinese administration."
In the US, when Google stands up to the government because of it's violating civil rights (wanting all search logs for X time) the government files a lawsuit against them. When you stand up to the Chinese government, the bastards run you over with a tank and make your family disappear.
In other words, the PRC commit the crimes that tinfoil-hat people think the US government does.
The LinuxQuestions.org Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) is an excellent guide to Linux-compatible hardware devices, generally listing the (in)compatible Kernel/Distro version as well. It seems that Belkin cards generally do well in Linux. I recently bought and installed a Belkin Wireless Desktop Card, model F5D7000; Although it absolutely refused to work with WPA, getting 128-bit WEP to work with it was quite easy.
"bush is a sheep. dont give that monkey any credit. ever. seriously."
If someone brings up a legitimate point, they deserve credit for it, whether or not they're on your side of an argument. Hell, I think he's an idiot too - but statements like yours seriously hurt the credibility of liberal/democratic organizations. You don't have any position of your own or anything you're FOR; You're just AGAINST Bush.
The scary thing is, the things that the Bush administration will say in defense of it's actions are so seemingly unlimited that it's hard to tell if this is a parody or the real thing.
Why do you believe that a nuclear accident is likely? France gets more than 3/4 of it's power from nuclear reactors, and they've never had a single accident. In the one incident the USA has had, the reactor safety mechanisms worked correctly and shut the core off before it completely melted. People who take an airline flight get exposed to more radiation than nuclear power plant workers.
In the case of Chernobyl, we learned that if you use a reactor that has no safety dome and will continue functioning in the absence of water, purposefully shut off all the safety systems and then simulate a meltdown (That is to say, commit unforgivable crimes against safety, good engineering, and common sense), bad things will happen.
"Is there any easy way to measure how much power a machine actually uses?"
Buy a Kill-a-watt from Thinkgeek.
I remember reading on Gateworld.net that the idea behind introducing the Ori is that a large number of viewers wanted to learn more about the events and history surrounding the Ancients (isn't that what Atlantis was supposed to be for?...), and, well, the scriptwriters quasi-listened. There's why we got the Ori.
Although the concept of the Ori is interesting, their introduction was indeed contrived and painfully forced (2nd episode and we conveniently have new super-enemies? WTF?). I'd have preferred to see more focus on the formation and politics of the Jaffa nation, as well as the chaos surrounding the demise of the Go'auld. On the other hand, I agree wholeheartedly that we should liberally sprinkle in revisits to all those planets that SG-1 visited in seasons 1-3. What about the robotic copies? Urgo? Argo's world? As you mentioned, O'Neil's child? The Entity's world? They could throw in a sort of Greek tragedy too, switch between everyone's viewpoints and make it a question of who thinks what, rather than what will happen.
On the other hand, I find the intrigue surrounding Baal interesting (which would make a fantastic interplay with making the Gate public, too). As it is, the one thing that I can't wait to see resolved is: Will the Ancients break their hallowed rules to intervene and stop the Ori?
Don't you think that's reducing the meaning and intent of anti-trust laws too much to be meaningful?
Charging less is perfectly fine, unless you're a monopoly that's selling it's products at a loss for the purpose of driving a competitor out of business (MSIE vs Netscape). Charging more is perfectly fine, unless you are using the fact that your monopoly prevents customers from being able to go elsewhere to shaft them (common TelCo behavior WRT DSL/Cable). Charging the same is OK too, as long as you and your competitor don't conveniently rachet up the price by the same amount at the same time (see the oil cartel).
Long story short: The rules change when you gain a monopoly. They change to prevent you from using that monopoly to take advantage of customers. If you want to write your own office suite and enter the market charging $5000 a copy, that's fine - there are other choices. If MS does it, everyone is pretty much forced to follow suit because (if it were a true monopoly) there is no other choice (This disregards the effect of F/OSS, where screwing customers *too much* will make them decide that the time/effort cost of switching to F/OSS is less than the money cost of paying for the monopolist).
So, how are laws that protect consumers from something they can't protect themselves from bad?
I was under the impression that healthcare costs are sky-high because of people who sue when ANYTHING goes wrong, or could even be construed as having gone wrong, whether or not you could have done anything. This then forces everyone in the hospital to carry an unbelievable amount of insurance. Think of the cost of an NMR scanner's coolant for a year VS the operator's insurance.
Am I wrong?
And 'humans' too.
A watermark can't be visible to the viewer, which severely limits how many bits they can play with to create the watermark. Try this: Open Photoshop or the GIMP, create an image as wide as your screen's resolution, and make a gradient from black to a pure color running across it. See how much you can posterize it before you can see vertical bars. Green becomes visible to me around 200 colors, red and blue at 120-150. That means they can't change more than 1 or *maybe* 2 bits per color in RGB, which gives 3 to 5 bpp of watermark (realistically - your eye is very good at picking green apart, only getting 1 bit there). Try blending increasing numbers of 8 and 32-color static frames together and see when they get close to flat gray.
...), then use a script in an image manipulation program to create ~/set_average. The watermark is now static, effectively removed. No watermark, no refused playback.
Buy the movie that many times, record each DVD the same way (placing the pictures taken with the digital camera into ~/set1/, ~/set2/, ~/set3/
How can the government help the little guy help themselves when we all know that microsoft will do anything, no matter how scummy, to force you to use their products (DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run). What can the government do for Netscape when Microsoft's response is to give away IE for free and absorb the cost with Win/Office sales?
Likewise, what can the government do today for independent developers who MS denies API documentation, other than force MS to release the documentation?
Mount camera, use oscilloscope to find light intensity over time, integrate to arrive at proper multi-second exposure time that nullifies flickering.
The MPAA just doesn't get this one simple fact: I can see it, therefore photons are travelling across the room, therefore they can be recorded. End of story.
This is move made by an organization that is desperate to avoid losing control. They are evil people, who think only of themselves and what they want at the expense of hundreds of millions of others. In many ways, they are like terrorists. While defenders of freedom must stop them at every turn, they only have to succeed once with a crime like this to hurt everyone. Like terrorists, they can only survive as long as most people support them or don't care. Before the Internet, this was easy as they controlled every means of getting information out. With the Internet, people who see them for what they are will speak out uncontrollably and they will be destroyed once and for all.
The end is coming for them. They know it. And because they both powerful and evil, they will hurt many many people before they are brought to economic justice. I will celebrate the day the MPAA and RIAA are dissolved when their last member goes bankrupt for the rest of my life.
1. Precisely align a pre-DRM digital camera with a DRM-approved LCD screen and mount in place.
2. Step the DVD frame-by-frame and take pictures.
3. Use OSS on a pre-DRM computer to reassemble the pictures into MyFairUseCopy(fsck_the_MPAA).mpeg.
4. MPAA loses - Noone sheds a tear.
The same procedure applies to DRMed sound: Carefully slice apart each DRMed speaker to access magnet control wires, read using 24bit AD converter, splice that back into the mpeg from before, MPAA loses.
Dear MPAA: The analog hole can never be closed, because guess what: All inputs to the human brain are ANALOG, you executive fucktards.
The same person the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act is named after? Screw him!
That depends. If the bastards can make it a felony in the US, none of the people they screw can vote against their whores in congress.