It's the other way around: the EFF wait 'till it gets dark, then they shine a DVD logo on the clouds, which is DVD Jon's que to make evil DRM makers piss their pants with fear.
Isn't circumventing access control a crime nowadays in the US ?
Surprise, surprise, surprise... more restrictions from the land of the free.
USA != Whole world
USA's opinion of its own importance is grossly out of step with reality. The empire is in decline - the future lies with China & India (and to some extent, the European Union).
I view a lot of these rights management/fair use issues as irrelevant, solely because the USA is in a strong period of decline. Suppression of science and knowledge in favor of faith and supposed morality is a great way to enter into a modern 'dark age'. I feel great pity towards the ordinary citizens - they'll be the ones paying for this down the track.
Don't whine at us because your logic deficiency precludes having the ability to tell the difference between an imaginary friend and a real friend. Trust me, if you didn't have that faith shit pushed into your head with the twin fangs of sin and guilt back when your head was still soft you would be a much happier person today.
I'm getting that made into a t-shirt. Fucking hilarious!
I use Linux on my desktop at work, and have Gimp installed, and I've found it the least usable program I've ever seen.
The GIMP developers really haven't taken the GUI to its logical extreme - which is to dump it completely ofcourse. GIMP would be perfect if it had no GUI, only a command line. All functions would be performed by passing options that have no relationship to their purpose, ie. Resize is -k, select all is -x, etc. All error messages should be as terse as possible and direct the user to the man page. The man page should either be incomprehensible or voluminous, or both.
Why do such obviously smart people such as the GIMP devs go to such effort to abuse the users of the program? Trying to use GIMP is about as much fun as poking yourself in the eye with a pointy stick.
The majority of people out there still haven't even heard of Linux. The people who just use their computers for email and think that AOL is the internet. Have there ever even been any TV ads for any of the commercial linux distros? What the linux community needs to do is make a real ad campain. I realize it costs money, but with all the people out there that love linux with a furvor, there shouldn't be that much of a problem raising funds.
If you can install and use Linux without difficulty, then you are already in the top 99th percentile of computer users. If it isn't easy to use, then it won't get used.
If people don't know about Linux, then they won't use it. It's not a case of some rabid fanboy trying to beat them over the head with Linux - if joe and jane six-pack's friends aren't talking about Linux then it doesn't exist to them.
I have years of professional experience fixing computer problems, and even more years of experience making and fixing my own computer problems for fun. Linux frequently pisses me of with its' obscurities - do you really think an ordinary user is going to bother?
Linux games are a joke.
If people are serious about wanting Linux on the desktop, it's easy - It has to be easy enough for an AOL user to make it work, it must be able to run on any hardware made in the last 10 years (and performance must be tolerable on crap hardware), it has to look good and it has to be cheaper than Windows. That's actually not asking that much - most of the work required is in the GUI.
The home market is based around gaming and is therefore out of reach to Linux. The business market is ripe for change - just get an alternative to Outlook/Exchange (and not the rubbish that already exists, it isn't good enough) and Linux is good to go (all the other common office apps already exist).
Linux acceptance has never been about how 'good' linux is, people use Windows and it's crap - but it's usable crap. Can the same really be said of Linux?
Why are emotions and logical understanding mutually incompatible? Show me the emotion that doesn't have a logical cause? If I'm angry with someone, I have a reason. If I'm afraid of something, then I have a reason.
The short version: a) emotions != logic because the two are frequently unrelated, b) an emotion without logical cause is: worry.
The long version: It is often useful to look at abnormal or abberant versions of a given object of study to ascertain more about the workings of the 'normal' object.
I am male, I score within the 90th percentile on IQ tests (99th percentile for visual tasks), I am an INTJ on the meyer-briggs scale (which has an incident of less than 1% of the population), I have a mood disorder (depression with suicidal ideation), most of my blood relatives are either very smart (similar IQ scores to myself) or autistic/aspbergers, some of my relatives exhibit dyslexia (as I do, to a minor degree) and I am gay (the jury's out on whether this is a genetically heritable trait, but I include it for the sake of completeness). I believe that these factors make me 'abnormal' enough to offer some useful insights into the relationship between emotions and logic.
In my experience, both of myself and through observation of others, I have come to the conclusion that emotions frequently have little logical relationship with anything. Emotions can occur without a clear connection to any internal stimulus (thoughts) or external stimulus (events). Emotions can occur with a physical stimulus (ie. people with serious illnesses often experience 'personality' changes (even prior to diagnosis), taking drugs or medication can alter mood, small children frequently cry and become fractious when tired (which, when you think about it, it totally pointless. Tiredness is rarely painful and can be easily remedied by sleep - why cry about it?). Emotions are frequently out of scale with the stimulus.
I personally don't operate on an emotional level. I'm not without emotion (on the contrary, I find my emotions to be more intense than most people's) but I don't use it to form my thinking or make descisions. To me, emotions are meaningless and often without value, being happy or sad is irrelevant - It doesn't change anything, it's pointless.
When I am seriously ill (psychiatrically speaking) I am unable to control my emotions (I burst into tears for no reason - completely without a stimulus, 10mins later I'll be fine, 10min after that I'll be in a homicidal mood, etc.) and I have uncontrollable thoughts of killing myself - not because I feel like killing myself but because my brain chemistry is awry. So many of our thoughts and feelings have direct biological causes - I think and feel the way I do because my brain is 'broken'.
Worry is a good example of a pointless emotion. First, because the language used to describe emotion is so broad, I will define worry as stressful, obsessive and unpleasant thoughts/feelings which focus on negative outcomes of past (usually as they relate to present or future events), present or potential future events. Worrying is pointless because it doesn't contribute to solving problems - it focusses on the (potential) negative outcome of a situation not all possible outcomes of the situation (it also tends to amplify the negative consquences of the situation ie. the worst possible outcome will happen, with the most negative emotional effects ie. catastrophising). This is not logical as the emotional value placed on a outcome has nothing to do with the likelyhood of any given outcome occurring - how you feel about something cannot effect it's likelyhood of occurring. Worry is not the same as being prudent, ie. X happened in the past when I doing Y, therefore I will be mindful not to cause X again. Worry is: X happened in the past when I was doing Y, therefore X will always happen when I am doing Y. This line of thought/emotion is not logical.
I'm thinking that the well-paying IT job affords us to take a woman out for $200 sushi, not $20 chinese.
You can rent a whole woman for that much, and no raw fish is involved.
Disclaimer: Dropping cash in front of shallow women will usually make them like you a bit more, but it will not always make them want to fuck you.
Dropping rohypnol into her drink is likely to work better and be cheaper to boot.
Disclaimer: I'm a gay man, we don't have to go through the complex and confusing mating ritual of the heterosexual - I feel truly sorry for you people.
Another interesting thing as brough up by the author of the post to which I am replying.. liies in the fact that certain companies are inexorably tied to their hardware. Some institutions, for example, running Pro Tools may not be able to upgrade to the new hardware as their software will not be availible. This is speculative... but it is possible.
Why doesn't apple (or some third party) simply release a hardware compatibility card like they did in the good old days? It can't be that difficult to wack a G5 onto a pci card and get it to handle the G5 specific code.
I hate the assumtion that people buy blank cds so they can pirate music. First of all, copying a cd so you have a backup in case it gets scratched (or better yet, so you can use the copy so the one you paid for doesn't get scratched) is legal, is fair-use, and not piracy. Second, there are thousands on things I have done with blank cds that have nothing to do with music. I buy cd-rs by the hundreds and I don't think one in a hundred of them gets music on it. I read some stupid article the other day that had some quote from some crying music store owner about how people only come in for blank cds anymore, not for music, and I just wanted to say "HELLO!" blank cds are not just for music. If your store sells cd-rs for cheaper then other stores, I'll buy hundreds of cd-rs from you, but that indicates I'm stealing music about as much as it indicates I'm stealing breakfast cereal.
If you are only using blank media for legitimate purposes, then a)good on you, and b)you are in the minority.
Whilst legitimate use is entirely possible, you cannot tell me that you seriously believe that all the buyers of blank media are only using it for good not evil (feel free to invert the 'good' and 'evil' based on your beliefs).
I personally believe that media cartels are unnecessary, evil organisations that should be wiped out. They give nothing to the artist and the give nothing to the fans. They are parasites. Anything that aids their demise (ie. filesharing, etc.) is alright by me. See here for some good reasons they should go.
Rather than chasing clock speeds, Intel is focusing on lowering power consumption with its new architecture.
Exactly what we've all been waiting for. Is Intel Good(tm) now?
Any apparent gains in 'goodness' by Intel will be offset when their clone army of marketing execs tries to kill my brain with a new unintelligible labelling campaign that has as little to do with the performance of each different processor as possible whilst trying to sound better than AMD. Something like 'Fastium Lite/Regular/Large/Jumbo'.
Wake up and smell the coffee. "Intellectual Property" (OK, so I lied) is the mainstay US export for the rest of this century. The rest of the world is not safe and should be very worried.
If you are basing your future economy on your IP exports, then you're fucked. This year has been the worst year for films in living memory and I don't see it getting better anytime soon.
DRM will effect the very way we retain our knowledge as a society. The "keyholders" will dictate what information is acceptable and what is not.
This isn't new, what you see, hear and read is all controlled anyway. New tools, but same old tactics.
This is what makes the web (and filesharing in particular) very interesting. People are free to do as they please, without any of the usual controls. People reject the "keyholders" terms of use, piracy (I *hate* that word) is rife. The fact you can buy blank CDs in record stores is an acceptance that ordinary people copy CDs all the time. Christ, you can buy blank media and breakfast cereal in the same store these days - it's a defacto part of society now.
People aren't stupid either, they know that everytime a corporate mouthpiece complains about "evil pirates stealing the artists income" that what they are really saying is you are stealing our income. I don't give a shit about fat, stupid record execs getting ripped off - they've been screwing the artists for years and everyone knows it. The fact that some bands can now make a living by going direct to the fanbase must have the MPAA/RIAA in a cold sweat.
Oh please, irrational much? You could probably count the number of recorded fatal accidents in the history of MRI on one hand and how many people have had the procedure? Tens of millions, likely. The benefits of having an MRI so vastly outweigh the risks it is not even a tradeoff worth talking about at all.
The problem is that people are irrational. Which is why it's MRI and not NMRI (The N is for nuclear, which, thanks to the stupid treehugging hippies, is the kiss of death for any technology - the N had to be dropped so that you could actually get patients into the machine).
Slashdot Mirror
That 98% doesn't use Linux because it doesn't come with Windows or AOL ...
Just because they've got opposable thumbs doesn't mean that they know how to use them.
I've got a free version of Windows 2003 (currently situated under my coffee mug).
Is that dead too?
Some things don't die - they just smell bad instead.
Lawyers come in pipes, just like effluent does.
It's the other way around: the EFF wait 'till it gets dark, then they shine a DVD logo on the clouds, which is DVD Jon's que to make evil DRM makers piss their pants with fear.
Surprise, surprise, surprise ... more restrictions from the land of the free.
I view a lot of these rights management/fair use issues as irrelevant, solely because the USA is in a strong period of decline. Suppression of science and knowledge in favor of faith and supposed morality is a great way to enter into a modern 'dark age'. I feel great pity towards the ordinary citizens - they'll be the ones paying for this down the track.
I'm getting that made into a t-shirt. Fucking hilarious!
Ahem, communist is not very PC you know ... the preferred term is terrorist.
As every public pool administrator in Europe and North America realize they could get sued if they don't have the system and someone drowns.
Wouldn't it just be cheaper to fill up the pool with that crap they breathed in the movie 'Abyss'?
You Indians all look alike to me ...
It isn't finished until its got a window and a cold-cathode light.
It's steam powered and the backbone links are made from pidgeons.
The GIMP developers really haven't taken the GUI to its logical extreme - which is to dump it completely ofcourse. GIMP would be perfect if it had no GUI, only a command line. All functions would be performed by passing options that have no relationship to their purpose, ie. Resize is -k, select all is -x, etc. All error messages should be as terse as possible and direct the user to the man page. The man page should either be incomprehensible or voluminous, or both.
Why do such obviously smart people such as the GIMP devs go to such effort to abuse the users of the program? Trying to use GIMP is about as much fun as poking yourself in the eye with a pointy stick.
If people are serious about wanting Linux on the desktop, it's easy - It has to be easy enough for an AOL user to make it work, it must be able to run on any hardware made in the last 10 years (and performance must be tolerable on crap hardware), it has to look good and it has to be cheaper than Windows. That's actually not asking that much - most of the work required is in the GUI.
The home market is based around gaming and is therefore out of reach to Linux. The business market is ripe for change - just get an alternative to Outlook/Exchange (and not the rubbish that already exists, it isn't good enough) and Linux is good to go (all the other common office apps already exist).
Linux acceptance has never been about how 'good' linux is, people use Windows and it's crap - but it's usable crap. Can the same really be said of Linux?
Observe the fundamental differences between british and american culture:
The short version: a) emotions != logic because the two are frequently unrelated, b) an emotion without logical cause is: worry.
The long version: It is often useful to look at abnormal or abberant versions of a given object of study to ascertain more about the workings of the 'normal' object.
I am male, I score within the 90th percentile on IQ tests (99th percentile for visual tasks), I am an INTJ on the meyer-briggs scale (which has an incident of less than 1% of the population), I have a mood disorder (depression with suicidal ideation), most of my blood relatives are either very smart (similar IQ scores to myself) or autistic/aspbergers, some of my relatives exhibit dyslexia (as I do, to a minor degree) and I am gay (the jury's out on whether this is a genetically heritable trait, but I include it for the sake of completeness). I believe that these factors make me 'abnormal' enough to offer some useful insights into the relationship between emotions and logic.
In my experience, both of myself and through observation of others, I have come to the conclusion that emotions frequently have little logical relationship with anything. Emotions can occur without a clear connection to any internal stimulus (thoughts) or external stimulus (events). Emotions can occur with a physical stimulus (ie. people with serious illnesses often experience 'personality' changes (even prior to diagnosis), taking drugs or medication can alter mood, small children frequently cry and become fractious when tired (which, when you think about it, it totally pointless. Tiredness is rarely painful and can be easily remedied by sleep - why cry about it?). Emotions are frequently out of scale with the stimulus.
I personally don't operate on an emotional level. I'm not without emotion (on the contrary, I find my emotions to be more intense than most people's) but I don't use it to form my thinking or make descisions. To me, emotions are meaningless and often without value, being happy or sad is irrelevant - It doesn't change anything, it's pointless.
When I am seriously ill (psychiatrically speaking) I am unable to control my emotions (I burst into tears for no reason - completely without a stimulus, 10mins later I'll be fine, 10min after that I'll be in a homicidal mood, etc.) and I have uncontrollable thoughts of killing myself - not because I feel like killing myself but because my brain chemistry is awry. So many of our thoughts and feelings have direct biological causes - I think and feel the way I do because my brain is 'broken'.
Worry is a good example of a pointless emotion. First, because the language used to describe emotion is so broad, I will define worry as stressful, obsessive and unpleasant thoughts/feelings which focus on negative outcomes of past (usually as they relate to present or future events), present or potential future events. Worrying is pointless because it doesn't contribute to solving problems - it focusses on the (potential) negative outcome of a situation not all possible outcomes of the situation (it also tends to amplify the negative consquences of the situation ie. the worst possible outcome will happen, with the most negative emotional effects ie. catastrophising). This is not logical as the emotional value placed on a outcome has nothing to do with the likelyhood of any given outcome occurring - how you feel about something cannot effect it's likelyhood of occurring. Worry is not the same as being prudent, ie. X happened in the past when I doing Y, therefore I will be mindful not to cause X again. Worry is: X happened in the past when I was doing Y, therefore X will always happen when I am doing Y. This line of thought/emotion is not logical.
Most people accept their emotions without
Not yet. But the RIAA/MPAA are lobbying as hard as they can.
You can rent a whole woman for that much, and no raw fish is involved.
Disclaimer: Dropping cash in front of shallow women will usually make them like you a bit more, but it will not always make them want to fuck you.
Dropping rohypnol into her drink is likely to work better and be cheaper to boot.
Disclaimer: I'm a gay man, we don't have to go through the complex and confusing mating ritual of the heterosexual - I feel truly sorry for you people.
TV Exec 1: That Firefly show is way too good to be on our network.
TV Exec 2: It just doesn't appeal to our target demographic, what are we going to do?
TV Exec 3: Easy, we'll just cancel it. I've got a new show lined up already.
TV Exec 2: What's the concept.
TV Exec 3: Get this: 'Who's the boss redux', with Michael Jackson as the father and that kid who sings 'I want candy' as the child.
TV Exec 1: Awsome. Could we get Paris Hilton in there somewhere too.
TV Exec 3: She could be the ex-streetwalker turned nun who mentors the boy.
TV Exec 2: Goddamn we're on fire! Cocaine and hookers for everyone!
Why doesn't apple (or some third party) simply release a hardware compatibility card like they did in the good old days? It can't be that difficult to wack a G5 onto a pci card and get it to handle the G5 specific code.
If you are only using blank media for legitimate purposes, then a)good on you, and b)you are in the minority.
Whilst legitimate use is entirely possible, you cannot tell me that you seriously believe that all the buyers of blank media are only using it for good not evil (feel free to invert the 'good' and 'evil' based on your beliefs).
I personally believe that media cartels are unnecessary, evil organisations that should be wiped out. They give nothing to the artist and the give nothing to the fans. They are parasites. Anything that aids their demise (ie. filesharing, etc.) is alright by me. See here for some good reasons they should go.
Exactly what we've all been waiting for. Is Intel Good(tm) now?
Any apparent gains in 'goodness' by Intel will be offset when their clone army of marketing execs tries to kill my brain with a new unintelligible labelling campaign that has as little to do with the performance of each different processor as possible whilst trying to sound better than AMD. Something like 'Fastium Lite/Regular/Large/Jumbo'.
If only it were. The first thing I'd do is delete all the crap and then defrag it. And then I'd index it.
If you are basing your future economy on your IP exports, then you're fucked. This year has been the worst year for films in living memory and I don't see it getting better anytime soon.
This isn't new, what you see, hear and read is all controlled anyway. New tools, but same old tactics.
This is what makes the web (and filesharing in particular) very interesting. People are free to do as they please, without any of the usual controls. People reject the "keyholders" terms of use, piracy (I *hate* that word) is rife. The fact you can buy blank CDs in record stores is an acceptance that ordinary people copy CDs all the time. Christ, you can buy blank media and breakfast cereal in the same store these days - it's a defacto part of society now.
People aren't stupid either, they know that everytime a corporate mouthpiece complains about "evil pirates stealing the artists income" that what they are really saying is you are stealing our income. I don't give a shit about fat, stupid record execs getting ripped off - they've been screwing the artists for years and everyone knows it. The fact that some bands can now make a living by going direct to the fanbase must have the MPAA/RIAA in a cold sweat.
The problem is that people are irrational. Which is why it's MRI and not NMRI (The N is for nuclear, which, thanks to the stupid treehugging hippies, is the kiss of death for any technology - the N had to be dropped so that you could actually get patients into the machine).