As for torrented music, why bother? The new stuff is mostly indistinguishable crap, and anything that's remotely decent you'd probably already own, or you'll buy that 1 new song/collection every 6 months or so, since it's a drop in the bucket so to speak. Also, music is easier to justify buying, since if you like it, you'll most likely listen to it multiple times. Movies I'll generally only watch once, so a rental model works much better for me. There's a small subset that I'll want to watch more than once, and those I will buy. I'm sure I'm not unique in this approach.
An organism that fails to reproduce fails to evolve as fast as competitors. Earth is dominated by fast-evolving, gene-shuffling, sex-having life-forms - not Methuselahs.
That was true, until the last 40K years or so. There's some thought that evolution has actually stopped with humans.
Seems like make stem cells young again will extend us past 120. The last 115 year old that died had 2 stem cells supplying more than 80% of her red blood cells. If you can rejuvenate them, they should be able to slow down aging everywhere else as well.
It wasn't Apple that killed Nokia; it was Android.
Android, without the kick in the ass they got from the iphone, probably would have been as wonderfully successful as Windows Phone, given that they were copying the current smartphone operations of the time and had to do a 180 when the iphone came out.
As for Blackberry
The business world may not have liked the iphone, but the users did, and they did not like Blackberries. The users forced businesses to accept iphones. Sure, there are some areas (government primarily) that had needs that Blackberry fulfilled. but as far as the consumer/general business world went, Blackberry was dead about the time the iPhone 3G was released.
Ericsson got bought out by Sony
Given Sony's financial issues (not the profitable Sony Pictures, who's had a lot of negative news lately, but Sony proper) and lack of leadership, along with shrinking revenues and major misteps along with totally alienating a large segment of its potential market, it's quite possible that within a couple of years Sony as we know it will cease to exist. Justice will have been served if that happens, IMNSHO.
Result: Apple on constant brink of collapse, saved by Microsoft who bought Apple stock so they could say We are not a monopoly.
The "We are not a monopoly" statement was a bonus. The real issue was the patent lawsuits that were ongoing. The 150M and Office on the Mac settled the patent lawsuit issues. Also from wikipedia:
"The day before the announcement Apple had a market cap of $2.46 billion, and had ended its previous quarter with quarterly revenues of US$1.7 billion and cash reserves of US$1.2 billion, making the US$150 million amount of the investment largely symbolic. Apple CFO Fred Anderson stated that Apple would use the additional funds to invest in its core markets of education and creative content."
I didn't double check the references, but if true, Apple was already on the rebound sans $150M.
It's like Apple took the world of steam powered cars (BlackBerry, Nokia, Ericsson) and gave us a Porsche/Lexus/BMW at a Toyota Corolla price in one iteration. You'll note that all 3 of those giants have all but disappeared, much like all the steam car companies, and almost as fast, which is remarkable given that those three were already the "winners" of the cell phone market consolidation and had global markets.
You know, I actually read your linked retraction. The thing that stood out were the following quotes:
The paper, from a research group led by Gilles-Eric Séralini, a molecular biologist at the University of Caen, France, and published in 2012, showed “no evidence of fraud or intentional misrepresentation of the data,”
"The publication of his team's study was greeted by a storm of protest from scientists, and both the EFSA and Germany’s Federal Institute for Risk Assessment In Berlin slammed the paper for providing inadequate data to support its conclusions."
which in no way indicates that he was discredited. The retraction occurred in Nov 2013, the paper was published in 2012. There's also no mention of no one else failing to reproduce the results, which would be difficult to do since the paper was published in 2012, and the test ran 2 years. It sounds more like political and financial pressure than science. True science would run additional studies to support or discredit those published results. Your postings are reek of shill quality, I wonder how you're getting modded up so much.
I tend to agree that we should proceed with GMO very very carefully, and that Monsanto probably should be banned from the field. Why? Because they have shown that they're purely driven by greed and are thus unsuitable stewards for what's going to affect us potentially forever. That's the problem with GMO, it's not a 1 time item.
No time for TV, just working in data and reading the info they're collecting and imagining what I could do with that data pretty easily. "imagining" might be too strong a word, more like merely asking "what could I glean from this data". The answers would seriously surprise you it appears, and this is why mass surveillance needs to be stopped yesterday. The power to abuse is far too great.
I live in a relatively small town and know how many police officers are on duty at one time. If I know where all those police offices are I also know where they are not.
That's easy enough to know, if the town is small enough. By your reasoning, any small town with a maximum of 1 or 2 police officers should be a veritable hotbed of criminal activity.
Sorry but your "scenario" misses a huge piece. People do not go to jail for having beer spilled on their shirt. If the police can not prove alcohol over the limit in the person's body they do not go to jail.
Sorry, hate to pop your bubble, but I've witnessed this issue first hand. Friend got to a party, some nimrod spilled beer on him, he was driving home to change when he got pulled over for one of those "general checks". Spent the night in jail and had to go through court to get it thrown out. Oh, and police don't have to prove alcohol over the limit, that's just there to help them, not you. You thought breathalyzers were there for you? How cute. If it's the policeman's opinion that you're impaired, off to jail you go. At least he was lucky enough to get it thrown out of court.
You also completely missed the point that even if someone gets tracked an pulled over the general public was not privy to the exact location of that person.
Finally, do you realize the manpower needed to put that chain of events together? Sorry but a DWI charge is not enough to justify that amount of manpower to any police force.
You're missing the point that we live in a big data world. All that's needed is for the policeman to scan your license along with the reason for you being pulled over. 5s later the various systems have correlated the data and stated that you're an AA member and thus likely to be drunk - no warning should be given. After all, what good is data if you're not going to use it?
All it does is notify you when police are known to be nearby.
One of the deterrent effects of police is never knowing where they are.
Strongly disagree. The main deterrent is knowing the police are in an area. Otherwise it falls into the category of being anywhere, so why not commit crime x here?
Another issue is that mass storage and scanning of communications does not lead to public disclosure of an individual's location.
Also incorrect, mass scanning of communications including metadata gives you not only locations of people, but patterns of movement. So every Tu evening at 7pm, you truck over to the YMCA for what appears to be an AA meeting, since there are several convicted and recently released DWI people there. How do we know they're DWI people? Because we know where they sleep every night and have cross-referenced that information against our criminal DB. The sad part? That's the only day you're free to meet John for racquetball. But now, thanks to that inconsequential scanning of communications, when you're pulled over next Sun coming home from Joe's house watching the Superbowl, and having a beer spilled on you, you're now heading for a DWI and prison because you've been tagged. You're innocent? Prove it.
Incorrect - the Bill of Rights were a list of rights that should not be abridged. Numbers 9 and 10 were there to reinforce that the feds were limited strictly to what was in that 10K word document.
Are you kidding? Have you played the latest Assassins Creed?
Nope, and I have no interest in it either. My interests lay with developers like Black Isle, iD, Valve, and Bioware in the distant past and a bunch of independents today are more likely to get my dollar. I'm not interested in massively online game play, unlike most, because I simply have 0 time available for such game play. Heck, even posting on/. takes too much time some days.
While games with DRM based on online codes is at least semi-problematic for reasons that have been listed ad-nauseum, my original writing off of Ubisoft was due to the always on DRM stance they took a long time ago. Apparently they've retracted that stance in 2012, but after reviewing their game list for the past few years, I see why I was unaware of it - not a single one is on my potential "to-play" list so no interest in anything related to Ubisoft. Honestly, I was surprised they were still in business.
What I really like is the outcry by police against the Waze app. All it does is notify you when police are known to be nearby. Apparently that's not ok at all. So why is it ok to track random non-officer 'A'?
Not sure how you figure that one. No party affiliation on the ballot would eliminate rote party voting. It would also probably give rise to many local parties, although I doubt nationally there would be more than 4 or 5.
Wow, I just went through the list. It's like someone went through the game catalogue and listed every game I don't own nor want to own. How is Ubisoft in business? Except for one game from 2009, there's not a single title on the list that I own or have played or wanted to play that Ubisoft was involved with since 2002 (and they were merely distributors for that one). That's absolutely amazing. I stopped in the late 90s, it appears a long string of losers as far as I'm concerned. (I will mention that I own Far Cray, but that came as part of a graphics card package, was never installed, and Crytek was the owner/publisher at the time.)
I agree, I don't buy EA or Ubisoft. Especially nothing Sony. If it's got DRM, it's not going to run on my system (this is not merely an idealistic stance, but a realistic one - it literally most likely won't run on my system or, if it does, it will screw something else up)
People are still buying Ubisoft? Why? That's a serious question actually, why would you pay money for some DRM infested crap that corrupts your system? There's no game so important I'll corrupt my system to play it. Any Ubisoft game can wait until it goes on sale on GOG, or be avoided forever. No loss here.
OK, I'm not watching 240P, I'm watching 1080P on a 55"+ screen. It's why I bought them and not a 15" B&W CRT. On 55+, everything I've seen so far streaming wise sucks, because the compressed bit rate is far too low. Based on my analysis of the stream sizes, Netflix / Hulu run between 2-3 Mbps, Dish runs 2-3 Mbps for SD, AT&T U-verse runs about 6-8 Mbps for HD, TWC runs about 5-6 Mbps for HD, and OTA runs between 8 and 15 Mbps locally. I'll note that Netflix/Hulu had horrible artifacts, TWC is very noticeable, U-verse is mediocre, and OTA has very few artifacts. For comparison, BD runs roughly between 25 and 33Mbps streams depending upon material and compression schemes and has virtually no artifacts. As you can tell from these numbers, 10Mbps is a bare minimum for streaming a single TV channel for me (up and down, since I'd like to be able to stream to the relatives).
Friends and family are surely tired of my tinfoil hat, they just do not seem to care about their privacy. Many say the "I have nothing to hide" line.
Many are idiots. And the tin-foil hat line seems passe now that it's been proven that quite likely even the most paranoid tin-foil hat wearer underestimated the true scope of the surveillance operations.
Slashdot Mirror
As for torrented music, why bother? The new stuff is mostly indistinguishable crap, and anything that's remotely decent you'd probably already own, or you'll buy that 1 new song/collection every 6 months or so, since it's a drop in the bucket so to speak. Also, music is easier to justify buying, since if you like it, you'll most likely listen to it multiple times. Movies I'll generally only watch once, so a rental model works much better for me. There's a small subset that I'll want to watch more than once, and those I will buy. I'm sure I'm not unique in this approach.
The last 115 year old that died had 2 stem cells supplying more than 80% of her red blood cells.
Citation needed.
Citations
An organism that fails to reproduce fails to evolve as fast as competitors. Earth is dominated by fast-evolving, gene-shuffling, sex-having life-forms - not Methuselahs.
That was true, until the last 40K years or so. There's some thought that evolution has actually stopped with humans.
Seems like make stem cells young again will extend us past 120. The last 115 year old that died had 2 stem cells supplying more than 80% of her red blood cells. If you can rejuvenate them, they should be able to slow down aging everywhere else as well.
It wasn't Apple that killed Nokia; it was Android.
Android, without the kick in the ass they got from the iphone, probably would have been as wonderfully successful as Windows Phone, given that they were copying the current smartphone operations of the time and had to do a 180 when the iphone came out.
As for Blackberry
The business world may not have liked the iphone, but the users did, and they did not like Blackberries. The users forced businesses to accept iphones. Sure, there are some areas (government primarily) that had needs that Blackberry fulfilled. but as far as the consumer/general business world went, Blackberry was dead about the time the iPhone 3G was released.
Ericsson got bought out by Sony
Given Sony's financial issues (not the profitable Sony Pictures, who's had a lot of negative news lately, but Sony proper) and lack of leadership, along with shrinking revenues and major misteps along with totally alienating a large segment of its potential market, it's quite possible that within a couple of years Sony as we know it will cease to exist. Justice will have been served if that happens, IMNSHO.
Result: Apple on constant brink of collapse, saved by Microsoft who bought Apple stock so they could say We are not a monopoly.
The "We are not a monopoly" statement was a bonus. The real issue was the patent lawsuits that were ongoing. The 150M and Office on the Mac settled the patent lawsuit issues. Also from wikipedia:
"The day before the announcement Apple had a market cap of $2.46 billion, and had ended its previous quarter with quarterly revenues of US$1.7 billion and cash reserves of US$1.2 billion, making the US$150 million amount of the investment largely symbolic. Apple CFO Fred Anderson stated that Apple would use the additional funds to invest in its core markets of education and creative content."
I didn't double check the references, but if true, Apple was already on the rebound sans $150M.
It's like Apple took the world of steam powered cars (BlackBerry, Nokia, Ericsson) and gave us a Porsche/Lexus/BMW at a Toyota Corolla price in one iteration. You'll note that all 3 of those giants have all but disappeared, much like all the steam car companies, and almost as fast, which is remarkable given that those three were already the "winners" of the cell phone market consolidation and had global markets.
Bringing the utility of useless pocket computing to over 1 billion new people who would not have had it is hardly "no value".
FTFY
Seems like "VPN" will solve that problem. Whether it engenders a new problem is a different story.
The paper, from a research group led by Gilles-Eric Séralini, a molecular biologist at the University of Caen, France, and published in 2012, showed “no evidence of fraud or intentional misrepresentation of the data,”
"The publication of his team's study was greeted by a storm of protest from scientists, and both the EFSA and Germany’s Federal Institute for Risk Assessment In Berlin slammed the paper for providing inadequate data to support its conclusions."
which in no way indicates that he was discredited. The retraction occurred in Nov 2013, the paper was published in 2012. There's also no mention of no one else failing to reproduce the results, which would be difficult to do since the paper was published in 2012, and the test ran 2 years. It sounds more like political and financial pressure than science. True science would run additional studies to support or discredit those published results. Your postings are reek of shill quality, I wonder how you're getting modded up so much.
I tend to agree that we should proceed with GMO very very carefully, and that Monsanto probably should be banned from the field. Why? Because they have shown that they're purely driven by greed and are thus unsuitable stewards for what's going to affect us potentially forever. That's the problem with GMO, it's not a 1 time item.
Are privacy and security issues the leverage that finally puts Linux in people's hands in significant numbers?"
(Are there enough people who *care* about these issues?)
Nah, BSD will be on the desktop before Linux makes it. Wait, it already has...
No time for TV, just working in data and reading the info they're collecting and imagining what I could do with that data pretty easily. "imagining" might be too strong a word, more like merely asking "what could I glean from this data". The answers would seriously surprise you it appears, and this is why mass surveillance needs to be stopped yesterday. The power to abuse is far too great.
I live in a relatively small town and know how many police officers are on duty at one time. If I know where all those police offices are I also know where they are not.
That's easy enough to know, if the town is small enough. By your reasoning, any small town with a maximum of 1 or 2 police officers should be a veritable hotbed of criminal activity.
Sorry but your "scenario" misses a huge piece. People do not go to jail for having beer spilled on their shirt. If the police can not prove alcohol over the limit in the person's body they do not go to jail.
Sorry, hate to pop your bubble, but I've witnessed this issue first hand. Friend got to a party, some nimrod spilled beer on him, he was driving home to change when he got pulled over for one of those "general checks". Spent the night in jail and had to go through court to get it thrown out. Oh, and police don't have to prove alcohol over the limit, that's just there to help them, not you. You thought breathalyzers were there for you? How cute. If it's the policeman's opinion that you're impaired, off to jail you go. At least he was lucky enough to get it thrown out of court.
You also completely missed the point that even if someone gets tracked an pulled over the general public was not privy to the exact location of that person.
Finally, do you realize the manpower needed to put that chain of events together? Sorry but a DWI charge is not enough to justify that amount of manpower to any police force.
You're missing the point that we live in a big data world. All that's needed is for the policeman to scan your license along with the reason for you being pulled over. 5s later the various systems have correlated the data and stated that you're an AA member and thus likely to be drunk - no warning should be given. After all, what good is data if you're not going to use it?
All it does is notify you when police are known to be nearby.
One of the deterrent effects of police is never knowing where they are.
Strongly disagree. The main deterrent is knowing the police are in an area. Otherwise it falls into the category of being anywhere, so why not commit crime x here?
Another issue is that mass storage and scanning of communications does not lead to public disclosure of an individual's location.
Also incorrect, mass scanning of communications including metadata gives you not only locations of people, but patterns of movement. So every Tu evening at 7pm, you truck over to the YMCA for what appears to be an AA meeting, since there are several convicted and recently released DWI people there. How do we know they're DWI people? Because we know where they sleep every night and have cross-referenced that information against our criminal DB. The sad part? That's the only day you're free to meet John for racquetball. But now, thanks to that inconsequential scanning of communications, when you're pulled over next Sun coming home from Joe's house watching the Superbowl, and having a beer spilled on you, you're now heading for a DWI and prison because you've been tagged. You're innocent? Prove it.
Incorrect - the Bill of Rights were a list of rights that should not be abridged. Numbers 9 and 10 were there to reinforce that the feds were limited strictly to what was in that 10K word document.
Are you kidding? Have you played the latest Assassins Creed?
Nope, and I have no interest in it either. My interests lay with developers like Black Isle, iD, Valve, and Bioware in the distant past and a bunch of independents today are more likely to get my dollar. I'm not interested in massively online game play, unlike most, because I simply have 0 time available for such game play. Heck, even posting on /. takes too much time some days.
While games with DRM based on online codes is at least semi-problematic for reasons that have been listed ad-nauseum, my original writing off of Ubisoft was due to the always on DRM stance they took a long time ago. Apparently they've retracted that stance in 2012, but after reviewing their game list for the past few years, I see why I was unaware of it - not a single one is on my potential "to-play" list so no interest in anything related to Ubisoft. Honestly, I was surprised they were still in business.
What I really like is the outcry by police against the Waze app. All it does is notify you when police are known to be nearby. Apparently that's not ok at all. So why is it ok to track random non-officer 'A'?
Not sure how you figure that one. No party affiliation on the ballot would eliminate rote party voting. It would also probably give rise to many local parties, although I doubt nationally there would be more than 4 or 5.
Wow, I just went through the list. It's like someone went through the game catalogue and listed every game I don't own nor want to own. How is Ubisoft in business? Except for one game from 2009, there's not a single title on the list that I own or have played or wanted to play that Ubisoft was involved with since 2002 (and they were merely distributors for that one). That's absolutely amazing. I stopped in the late 90s, it appears a long string of losers as far as I'm concerned. (I will mention that I own Far Cray, but that came as part of a graphics card package, was never installed, and Crytek was the owner/publisher at the time.)
I agree, I don't buy EA or Ubisoft. Especially nothing Sony. If it's got DRM, it's not going to run on my system (this is not merely an idealistic stance, but a realistic one - it literally most likely won't run on my system or, if it does, it will screw something else up)
People are still buying Ubisoft? Why? That's a serious question actually, why would you pay money for some DRM infested crap that corrupts your system? There's no game so important I'll corrupt my system to play it. Any Ubisoft game can wait until it goes on sale on GOG, or be avoided forever. No loss here.
I don't want higher priced 25/3 to be the new minimum.
I don't either, I want 25+/25 to be the new minimum, 100/100 would be a good upper end goal.
OK, I'm not watching 240P, I'm watching 1080P on a 55"+ screen. It's why I bought them and not a 15" B&W CRT. On 55+, everything I've seen so far streaming wise sucks, because the compressed bit rate is far too low. Based on my analysis of the stream sizes, Netflix / Hulu run between 2-3 Mbps, Dish runs 2-3 Mbps for SD, AT&T U-verse runs about 6-8 Mbps for HD, TWC runs about 5-6 Mbps for HD, and OTA runs between 8 and 15 Mbps locally. I'll note that Netflix/Hulu had horrible artifacts, TWC is very noticeable, U-verse is mediocre, and OTA has very few artifacts. For comparison, BD runs roughly between 25 and 33Mbps streams depending upon material and compression schemes and has virtually no artifacts. As you can tell from these numbers, 10Mbps is a bare minimum for streaming a single TV channel for me (up and down, since I'd like to be able to stream to the relatives).
Friends and family are surely tired of my tinfoil hat, they just do not seem to care about their privacy. Many say the "I have nothing to hide" line.
Many are idiots. And the tin-foil hat line seems passe now that it's been proven that quite likely even the most paranoid tin-foil hat wearer underestimated the true scope of the surveillance operations.