Which is all and well. But, the company should know as a part of their functionality testing that Opera wasn't supported/tested for before shipping the fucking server to them. It's like shipping a car with the steering wheel on the left to England or Japan - nothing wrong with that, as long as you don't intend to sell it in those countries. You end up looking stupid.
Re:Better DVD menu support?
on
VLC 1.0.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I wonder if there isn't any copy protection mechanism that breaks the player. I once tried to rip a Wall-E DVD and it appeared to have over 60GB in it. They are using false sectors in the disk to fool rippers. Perhaps these DVDs you tried to watch have some similar "feature" that messes up the Linux software. You could try playing the.vob files directly as a workaround.
Ok, but you are comparing all human history. There is no way to tell if alien history worked up the same way. Perhaps all aliens civilizations as violent as ours simply nuke themselves out of existence after 2 or 3 centuries of nuclear knowledge, while discovering FTL travel requires say a millenia or more of nuclear knowledge. There is just no way to know.
The DMCA gives Apple a nice club that they can beat anyone
over the head with should they dare to reverse engineer
enough information to get an iTunes movie onto the player
of their choice or get an iTunes song onto the OS of their
choice.
Not really. Even the evil DMCA explicitly allows reverse engineering for the sake of compatibility. I hardly believe they'll be able to fight using it. It's easier just to change iTunes in such a way that breaks Palm's implementation - but then, if Palm is smart enough, it might break some older iPod models as well, and users can't be forced to upgrade.
Well, I'm brazilian. I can tell you that ethanol will shred a motor prepared to run only with pure gasoline. Of course, brazilian motors can run either on pure ethanol or on gas (our gas has a high percentage of ethanol anyway), but our motors have been built to stand it - ethanol is very corrosive.
So I'd say if you americans are simply putting ethanol in an unprepared motor, yes, chaos will ensure. Your industries must have motors that can run on gas with and without ethanol. Our cars took some time to get there, and even then when a new car/motor is released usually it doesn't get a flex(ible - which run both on gas an ethanol) version until the next year.
Well then. Any monkey can put together words at random. Writing a good novel/book is what's hard, just like writing a good game is. Anyone with a basic understanding of programming can put together a game, and with some game engines not even that is necessary. I understand what you mean, I simply don't think it is possible - unless as you said they perfect mind reading, and then there will be a lot more interesting things to do I guess.
Ouch. Since when writing a novel is easy? Writing games needs talent. I understand that today you have to put together a skilled team in many areas - coders, 3D modellers, level designers, 2D artists for textures and sketches, and possibly a lot more that I may be missing. Not to mention actually good management unless you want to end up like 3DRealms. BUT, you will always need talent. Perhaps you can have a framework that may drastically reduce the need for coders, given a certain engine. But there is no way you can have all the rest simply pop out of thin air.
You seem to be honest about it and not a shill, so I'll try to be honest too.
I simply don't believe in copyright. Basically I think copyright law is wrong. Things that can be copied will be copied, and that looks just natural to me - copying is just having a hard way of memorizing information you already have. If copying were wrong per se, then you couldn't ever show any information to anyone - we all make a mental copy of it. That's how we evolve as a society, as sharing information and knowledge. Think of how much you could do if you couldn't rely on other people knowledge. Not much I guess. I see copyright as an artificial limitation to that, with the declared purpose of being an economic stimulus to authors. Then I see it seldom work that way, instead being an instrument of oppression of mega-corporations. So I see no reason to maintain copyright in it's current form.
I don't believe in people living off other's work on the other hand. So the question of whether The Pirate Bay owners did profit from the copyright infringement does matter to me. But in my understanding they don't profit from the copyright infringement - they just profit from the gathering of users there. Perhaps legally it might amount to the same, but to me there is a clear moral difference.
So, there it is, in a nutshell. I simply don't believe copying, specifically sharing between individuals, is wrong. I understand there may be people which don't believe this and still do it - a good test may be to see how they react if something they own the copyright of get shared - but that is my belief. Once someone copied an article I wrote to a website and apparently printed it in a newspaper, as well as its website. I simply didn't mind, as they left my name on it. So I guess I stand my own test. That way, I can't see how people who support this idea, such as the Pirate Bay founders, can be responsible for anything bad. Even if they did infringe the law, it's the law that is wrong. Most of us/.ers live in democracys, and if enought people believe that copyright laws are wrong, they can be changed. I hope TPB case raises awareness of this and help more people actually crusade for a copyright reform instead of only downloading stuff.
It is not (only) about money. It's about control. They don't want Google sending visitors to them, they don't want people comparing different sources in a news aggregator, they don't want their asses exposed without them knowing when a bad piece of news slips by. This all takes control from them. It gets much harder to manipulate people this way, and their business model fails without tight control.
No, when all big newspapers are out of business people will have news from other sources. Perhaps a less concentrated, less politically biased model of news distribution and generation. The concept that a media behemoth is needed to generate content is outdated, perhaps excepting movies, since you need big budgets for productions (but not for distribution anymore).
Really? I want one too. Hope this stays over, it's not like/.ers actually have anything serious to do (I'm not trolling, I mean it) and it's kind of nice to see the time spent here somewhat quantified.
Not really. The only games tested were FPS. You have no basis to be sure that is their fast-paced nature alone that improves eyesight. You'd have to have control groups consisting of non-violent fast paced games to be sure. The only thing that can be known from the study is that violent FPSs improve eyesight. Perhaps non-violent ones (there a few, I remember a Quake 3 mod called world of Padman, and a Unreal engine game called Nerf Arena or something like that) don't inspire that same sense of urgency, and therefore, have diminished or no benefits. You might write the author of the study and suggest this as a followup.
For me it is the contrary. I've played Quake 2 and 3, UT2004, and then some HL2, for ten hours without any eyestrain. Then I started being interested in RTS - but after 3 or 4 hours of Supcom my eyes beg for mercy. It doesn't help that the zoom feature of Supcom encourages you to zoom all the way out and look at tiny squares all the time. That's good use of a dual core processor and a latest-gen videocard.:P
You have a point. I'd still consider some of the more graphic violence gratuitous, specially those scenes put in there by Snyder. OTOH, I have no special prejudice against gratuitous violence (such as present in 300, the movie). Perhaps by "gratuitous violence" I mean violence that could be shown in a less explicit manner without forfeiting the original intention of the author. Some of the violence in Watchmen (the movie) is there only to shock (don't recall if Snyder said so himself). But you're right in that Watchmen wouldn't be what it is if it wasn't a violent story in certain parts.
Heck, I agree with you: Watchmen is not suitable for an 11 yo. There is too much gratuitous violence (some of it from the HQ, some from the director), people being blown up to pieces, sexual violence, children being beat (and beating other children),murders, realistic sex scenes, complex themes that most 11 yo won't understand.
But it has nothing to do with Dr. Manhattan's penis. It appears because he doesn't care about clothes, not because he is about to have quantum sex with anyone. It is as sexual, in the context of the movie, as his arm or leg - he walks around naked just as a child would. I doubt any children would care about the penis - it's the fucked-up adults that instantly associate it with sexual perversion. Get over it, 50% of the human population have penises.
Besides, it is not even big. Heck, what size are yours to be so obsessed with his?
I'll concede you came with some very good ideas here, specially about selecting heterogeneous groups of units ("all tanks on the east of the mountain with health below 30%" for instance). But, as Acapulco pointed, it will never be as fast as using a keyboard (and I really suck at RTS, but just watch the APM of some reasonably proficient players). And you still need a mouse for pointing anyway. BTW, RTS are mainly a PC gaming phenomena, so if voice recognition should be developed as a viable interface, it would be in a PC. But you convinced me that voice recognition might be a good alternative interface in some kinds of situation, for complex selections and orders (like "heal all mountain giants which have a club and have health below 40%").
Attack where? Go where, following which path? What if you want tanks on the left to perform a certain task and the ones on the right to run away? You really think you can say that out loud quicker than you can point and type a few keystrokes?
In fact your suggestion reminds me of some japanese live-action, where the good guys would cry out loud each and every action they were doing. The bad guys/monsters had to stay in the same place waiting for them to complete their speech. Ok, your idea is not completely wthout merit, but voice recognition is overrated. That's why it is not more widespread, since, as you noted it, we already have the tech.
It doesn't matter. We have the technology to completely switch to ethanol (where cars are concerned, anyways) if we need to.
I agree the politic on ethanol pricing is less than ideal (and sometimes downright stupid), but I think the important point is that we managed to develop a viable fuel alternative -ok, we might have been lucky for already having an established sugar cane production, and having the area to do so but nonetheless we made it. Most other countries would love to be in that position. Biodiesel still haven't got volume simply because it isn't economically viable at the moment, but we could easily increase production in a few years if needed.
That's exactly why sharing movies/software/information is way BETTER than sharing physical goods. In my definition, not sharing is definitely immoral. Large companies making ridiculous profits is immoral to me, at least while there are homeless people around. So, I hope I convinced you my concept of what's immoral is very different from yours.
I am not sure that preventing someone from making a bigger profit is immoral to many people, as you seem to believe. Because that is the only true consequence of sharing/"pirating". You can't even be sure of how much profits are being prevented, since someone who downloaded a movie for free at the Bay might not spend 30 bucks to buy a DVD or Blu-ray.
So, in my mind, sharing is absolutely moral. I'd say it is a moral obligation indeed. I do not condone people who sell copyrighted stuff though. And I'd say that most countries believe that sharing information is the moral thing to do, since eventually all copyright expires and go into public domain.
Bzzt. Make up your mind. Either I paid for possessing it - and so I can use it anyway I see fit - or I just licensed it, and so they can (reasonably) limit the circumstances under which I can use it.
You can use it in any way you see fit other than the purpose for which it was intended which requires a license. A fraudulent agreement grants no rights.
Obligatory car analogy: you can own an unlicensed car if never drive it. You can use it as a very large paperweight if you like, or a doorstop (typically an outward-swinging door). But to use it on public roads, it (and its driver) need to be licensed.
IANAL. I'm not saying I agree with this reasoning. I'm just putting forth a possible legal theory by which someone trying to get around a EULA applying to them may be in for more trouble than breach of contract. It could also be argued that the EULA is an effective control preventing access to the work and that defeating it through deception is a violation of the DMCA.
It doesn't work that way. You don't license your car from Ford or Honda. The government grants you a license to drive it, if some conditions are met. This have nothing to do with how you intend to use the car. For your analogy to be accurate, you'd be able to buy a car but Ford could forbid you in their EULA from driving it over 100mph, or in a race, or in the countryside, or to buy tires from another vendor, and you'd be able to drive it only if you agree with all that.
As for breaching the EULA as a DMCA violation... I guess that may be a wet dream to some lawyers, but again no. The DMCA deals with digital copy-protection, it is a different beast alltogether. A judge might rule that an EULA is legally binding based on contract law but I really can't imagine one who would do it on the basis of the DMCA.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is all and well. But, the company should know as a part of their functionality testing that Opera wasn't supported/tested for before shipping the fucking server to them. It's like shipping a car with the steering wheel on the left to England or Japan - nothing wrong with that, as long as you don't intend to sell it in those countries. You end up looking stupid.
I wonder if there isn't any copy protection mechanism that breaks the player. I once tried to rip a Wall-E DVD and it appeared to have over 60GB in it. They are using false sectors in the disk to fool rippers. Perhaps these DVDs you tried to watch have some similar "feature" that messes up the Linux software. You could try playing the .vob files directly as a workaround.
Ok, but you are comparing all human history. There is no way to tell if alien history worked up the same way. Perhaps all aliens civilizations as violent as ours simply nuke themselves out of existence after 2 or 3 centuries of nuclear knowledge, while discovering FTL travel requires say a millenia or more of nuclear knowledge. There is just no way to know.
The DMCA gives Apple a nice club that they can beat anyone over the head with should they dare to reverse engineer enough information to get an iTunes movie onto the player of their choice or get an iTunes song onto the OS of their choice.
Not really. Even the evil DMCA explicitly allows reverse engineering for the sake of compatibility. I hardly believe they'll be able to fight using it. It's easier just to change iTunes in such a way that breaks Palm's implementation - but then, if Palm is smart enough, it might break some older iPod models as well, and users can't be forced to upgrade.
Well, I'm brazilian. I can tell you that ethanol will shred a motor prepared to run only with pure gasoline. Of course, brazilian motors can run either on pure ethanol or on gas (our gas has a high percentage of ethanol anyway), but our motors have been built to stand it - ethanol is very corrosive.
So I'd say if you americans are simply putting ethanol in an unprepared motor, yes, chaos will ensure. Your industries must have motors that can run on gas with and without ethanol. Our cars took some time to get there, and even then when a new car/motor is released usually it doesn't get a flex(ible - which run both on gas an ethanol) version until the next year.
Well then. Any monkey can put together words at random. Writing a good novel/book is what's hard, just like writing a good game is. Anyone with a basic understanding of programming can put together a game, and with some game engines not even that is necessary. I understand what you mean, I simply don't think it is possible - unless as you said they perfect mind reading, and then there will be a lot more interesting things to do I guess.
Ouch. Since when writing a novel is easy? Writing games needs talent. I understand that today you have to put together a skilled team in many areas - coders, 3D modellers, level designers, 2D artists for textures and sketches, and possibly a lot more that I may be missing. Not to mention actually good management unless you want to end up like 3DRealms. BUT, you will always need talent. Perhaps you can have a framework that may drastically reduce the need for coders, given a certain engine. But there is no way you can have all the rest simply pop out of thin air.
You seem to be honest about it and not a shill, so I'll try to be honest too.
I simply don't believe in copyright. Basically I think copyright law is wrong. Things that can be copied will be copied, and that looks just natural to me - copying is just having a hard way of memorizing information you already have. If copying were wrong per se, then you couldn't ever show any information to anyone - we all make a mental copy of it. That's how we evolve as a society, as sharing information and knowledge. Think of how much you could do if you couldn't rely on other people knowledge. Not much I guess. I see copyright as an artificial limitation to that, with the declared purpose of being an economic stimulus to authors. Then I see it seldom work that way, instead being an instrument of oppression of mega-corporations. So I see no reason to maintain copyright in it's current form.
I don't believe in people living off other's work on the other hand. So the question of whether The Pirate Bay owners did profit from the copyright infringement does matter to me. But in my understanding they don't profit from the copyright infringement - they just profit from the gathering of users there. Perhaps legally it might amount to the same, but to me there is a clear moral difference.
So, there it is, in a nutshell. I simply don't believe copying, specifically sharing between individuals, is wrong. I understand there may be people which don't believe this and still do it - a good test may be to see how they react if something they own the copyright of get shared - but that is my belief. Once someone copied an article I wrote to a website and apparently printed it in a newspaper, as well as its website. I simply didn't mind, as they left my name on it. So I guess I stand my own test. That way, I can't see how people who support this idea, such as the Pirate Bay founders, can be responsible for anything bad. Even if they did infringe the law, it's the law that is wrong. Most of us /.ers live in democracys, and if enought people believe that copyright laws are wrong, they can be changed. I hope TPB case raises awareness of this and help more people actually crusade for a copyright reform instead of only downloading stuff.
It is not (only) about money. It's about control. They don't want Google sending visitors to them, they don't want people comparing different sources in a news aggregator, they don't want their asses exposed without them knowing when a bad piece of news slips by. This all takes control from them. It gets much harder to manipulate people this way, and their business model fails without tight control.
No, when all big newspapers are out of business people will have news from other sources. Perhaps a less concentrated, less politically biased model of news distribution and generation. The concept that a media behemoth is needed to generate content is outdated, perhaps excepting movies, since you need big budgets for productions (but not for distribution anymore).
They will all come here to get the new shiny achievements. Are there achievements in 4chan?
Really? I want one too. Hope this stays over, it's not like /.ers actually have anything serious to do (I'm not trolling, I mean it) and it's kind of nice to see the time spent here somewhat quantified.
ops, apparently access via 3G and EDGE is only for chat. Too good to be true...
the news: seem to work over 3G and EDGE as well as Wifi. iPod Touch included. Chat included. Looks pretty decent to me. Some photos here: http://www.engadget.com/photos/skype-for-iphone-goes-live-in-japan/1460639/
Not really. The only games tested were FPS. You have no basis to be sure that is their fast-paced nature alone that improves eyesight. You'd have to have control groups consisting of non-violent fast paced games to be sure. The only thing that can be known from the study is that violent FPSs improve eyesight. Perhaps non-violent ones (there a few, I remember a Quake 3 mod called world of Padman, and a Unreal engine game called Nerf Arena or something like that) don't inspire that same sense of urgency, and therefore, have diminished or no benefits. You might write the author of the study and suggest this as a followup.
For me it is the contrary. I've played Quake 2 and 3, UT2004, and then some HL2, for ten hours without any eyestrain. Then I started being interested in RTS - but after 3 or 4 hours of Supcom my eyes beg for mercy. It doesn't help that the zoom feature of Supcom encourages you to zoom all the way out and look at tiny squares all the time. That's good use of a dual core processor and a latest-gen videocard. :P
You have a point. I'd still consider some of the more graphic violence gratuitous, specially those scenes put in there by Snyder. OTOH, I have no special prejudice against gratuitous violence (such as present in 300, the movie). Perhaps by "gratuitous violence" I mean violence that could be shown in a less explicit manner without forfeiting the original intention of the author. Some of the violence in Watchmen (the movie) is there only to shock (don't recall if Snyder said so himself). But you're right in that Watchmen wouldn't be what it is if it wasn't a violent story in certain parts.
Heck, I agree with you: Watchmen is not suitable for an 11 yo. There is too much gratuitous violence (some of it from the HQ, some from the director), people being blown up to pieces, sexual violence, children being beat (and beating other children),murders, realistic sex scenes, complex themes that most 11 yo won't understand.
But it has nothing to do with Dr. Manhattan's penis. It appears because he doesn't care about clothes, not because he is about to have quantum sex with anyone. It is as sexual, in the context of the movie, as his arm or leg - he walks around naked just as a child would. I doubt any children would care about the penis - it's the fucked-up adults that instantly associate it with sexual perversion. Get over it, 50% of the human population have penises.
Besides, it is not even big. Heck, what size are yours to be so obsessed with his?
I'll concede you came with some very good ideas here, specially about selecting heterogeneous groups of units ("all tanks on the east of the mountain with health below 30%" for instance). But, as Acapulco pointed, it will never be as fast as using a keyboard (and I really suck at RTS, but just watch the APM of some reasonably proficient players). And you still need a mouse for pointing anyway. BTW, RTS are mainly a PC gaming phenomena, so if voice recognition should be developed as a viable interface, it would be in a PC. But you convinced me that voice recognition might be a good alternative interface in some kinds of situation, for complex selections and orders (like "heal all mountain giants which have a club and have health below 40%").
Attack where? Go where, following which path? What if you want tanks on the left to perform a certain task and the ones on the right to run away? You really think you can say that out loud quicker than you can point and type a few keystrokes?
In fact your suggestion reminds me of some japanese live-action, where the good guys would cry out loud each and every action they were doing. The bad guys/monsters had to stay in the same place waiting for them to complete their speech. Ok, your idea is not completely wthout merit, but voice recognition is overrated. That's why it is not more widespread, since, as you noted it, we already have the tech.
OMG! I knew I shouldn't have messed with the "Parent" button...
According to the Authors Guild logic, if I read aloud a book to my 4 y.o. son, I should pay another license.
Nah, just kidding. I don't have a son.
It doesn't matter. We have the technology to completely switch to ethanol (where cars are concerned, anyways) if we need to.
I agree the politic on ethanol pricing is less than ideal (and sometimes downright stupid), but I think the important point is that we managed to develop a viable fuel alternative -ok, we might have been lucky for already having an established sugar cane production, and having the area to do so but nonetheless we made it. Most other countries would love to be in that position. Biodiesel still haven't got volume simply because it isn't economically viable at the moment, but we could easily increase production in a few years if needed.
That's exactly why sharing movies/software/information is way BETTER than sharing physical goods. In my definition, not sharing is definitely immoral. Large companies making ridiculous profits is immoral to me, at least while there are homeless people around. So, I hope I convinced you my concept of what's immoral is very different from yours.
I am not sure that preventing someone from making a bigger profit is immoral to many people, as you seem to believe. Because that is the only true consequence of sharing/"pirating". You can't even be sure of how much profits are being prevented, since someone who downloaded a movie for free at the Bay might not spend 30 bucks to buy a DVD or Blu-ray.
So, in my mind, sharing is absolutely moral. I'd say it is a moral obligation indeed. I do not condone people who sell copyrighted stuff though. And I'd say that most countries believe that sharing information is the moral thing to do, since eventually all copyright expires and go into public domain.
Bzzt. Make up your mind. Either I paid for possessing it - and so I can use it anyway I see fit - or I just licensed it, and so they can (reasonably) limit the circumstances under which I can use it.
You can use it in any way you see fit other than the purpose for which it was intended which requires a license. A fraudulent agreement grants no rights.
Obligatory car analogy: you can own an unlicensed car if never drive it. You can use it as a very large paperweight if you like, or a doorstop (typically an outward-swinging door). But to use it on public roads, it (and its driver) need to be licensed.
IANAL. I'm not saying I agree with this reasoning. I'm just putting forth a possible legal theory by which someone trying to get around a EULA applying to them may be in for more trouble than breach of contract. It could also be argued that the EULA is an effective control preventing access to the work and that defeating it through deception is a violation of the DMCA.
It doesn't work that way. You don't license your car from Ford or Honda. The government grants you a license to drive it, if some conditions are met. This have nothing to do with how you intend to use the car. For your analogy to be accurate, you'd be able to buy a car but Ford could forbid you in their EULA from driving it over 100mph, or in a race, or in the countryside, or to buy tires from another vendor, and you'd be able to drive it only if you agree with all that.
As for breaching the EULA as a DMCA violation... I guess that may be a wet dream to some lawyers, but again no. The DMCA deals with digital copy-protection, it is a different beast alltogether. A judge might rule that an EULA is legally binding based on contract law but I really can't imagine one who would do it on the basis of the DMCA.