Because, in America we don't care about achievement in discovery. The typical attitude is something like why should we spend two billion dollars exploring space when we have real problems in our own country. Yes, that true American spirit that has propelled us since the first foot was stepped on the shores of this country is dead and buried. *sigh*
Seriously, when was the last time you heard a kid cite some social parasite, sports star or rapper as one of their heroes? When was the last time you heard one name an astronaut? In fact, how many people can name even one astronaut that is currently active in the space program?
Unless it involves devising some mechanism of getting us beer, porn or baby jebus in larger quantities and more efficient rates, my fellow Americans largely don't give a damn.
Sorry, but that's just plain bull. You are falling into the trap they want every consumer to fall into. For now, it's the trap of "fair use means listening to it yourself on your computer or listening to it yourself on another device that you own". Perhaps tomorrow they will further refine it in the public mind to mean "fair use is any use, except that which allows a second human being to listen, view or read it".
Say goodbye to the "fair use" of you videotaping you and your friends dancing like idiots to some song in at the family barbecue. Say goodbye to making a mixtape for your significant other. Say goodbye to ripping a song (as has been done for decades) for your friend who really likes that song you heard. Say goodbye to countless rational personal and non-commercial uses.
Once they can identify and track every single "copyrighted" material in existence with ease, prepare to be nickel-and-dimed to death.
As to your comment about the cable box - regardless of what the media companies want to convince us is right, they should not have the right to control everything you do with the content from broadcast material. You should still be allowed to record episodes of Mr. Belvedere and keep them on tape in your closet for 20 years and pull them out and play them for all your friends to show what a douche you were in the 80s. You should still be allowed to record songs off the radio for yourself to listen to when you want.
What exactly are you willing to give up? Right now, you have to pay royalties to play music or broadcast television in a bar or restaurant. When they've nailed this scheme down, should they be able to control how many friends you may have come watch the boxing fight on HBO at your place? Should they be able to control how many times you can watch your recording of the superbowl? Perhaps you should be forced to pay royalties on the songs that play at a party at your home when mom and dad are away?
I refuse to take things at face value. I refuse to simply let corporate greed and selfishness re-define fair use at their whim. I refuse to be placated by their promises that "oh, this is only going to be used to prevent someone from taking content, burning it to CD and redistributing it for payola without being tracked down via the watermark". What they can justify to us today, they can exploit tomorrow. And anyone who doesn't believe that they eventually will is a damned fool.
So, excuse me if I hold on to my fair-use and even encourage unfair use rampantly as a countermeasure to the measures taken by people who would see us paying Disney for Peter Pan in another five hundred years after they have lobbied congress to extend copyright to life of the universe, plus 95 years.
And, finally, it isn't Comcast's job to put a governor on anything to make sure I abide by the law.
Sorry, but he's talking about discouraging consumers from making copies by letting them know the watermarking is there. Consumers are not the same thing as pirates. Fuck them for constantly trying to portray every example of fair use or innocent sharing as some sort of fucking international mafia ring conspiracy to exploit their content for billions of dollars. Keep treating us like shit so I can enjoy it when I cancel my cable subscription forever.
By executing everyone who is guilty of sending or receiving any encrypted data. In America, we're only a step away from eventual legislation that would make encryption an instant guilt-marker and justifiable cause for further search and investigation.
Remember, the American motto is "if I ain't got nuttin' to hide, why should I care if you want to violate my civil liberties?". Not to mention, since encryption is a munition, it could be very easily rationalized that it is a "dangerous weapon".
No, YOU are the genius, sir! I mean, look at Microsoft and how piracy is completely ruining them. Why, I heard just the other day that they are going to stop making videogames and operating systems, because people pirate them both. Instead, I understand that the only thing Microsoft is only going to develop from now on are new versions of "Microsoft Bob" that can only be used when connected to the internet. Sure, nobody likes Microsoft Bob and it's a piece of crap. But at least it will be online and won't be pirated!
Right. And my point is that people who fall for these vocational schools are the worst of both worlds. If they were serious about education and career, they'd be able to attend a university to acquire the desired related degree. Or they might be capable of entering the field on their own steam (playing simon-says and going in debt six figures isn't the only way to pursue a career in a professional field).
But the vocational schools cater to those who either don't qualify to attend or are to lazy to commit to a university and don't have enough self-determination and focus to do anything on their own. So they're sitting around smelling like fry-grease late at night while watching cable and see an advertisement for some school where they can "learn how to make videogames" in eighteen months.
If that weren't the case, then why would these videogame vocational schools be advertised in exactly the same manner and during exactly the same times slots as the Sally Struthers "choose from these exciting careers!" commercials?
Not to mention, those vocational schools are usually scams. A buddy of mine back in the day went to a "computer vocational school". I don't know what the exact curriculum was but it had something to do with business-related computer skills. One guy in the class was a recently released ex-convict who had murdered someone seventeen years before and was looking to get started in a new career. Another had spent most of his youth in juvie for starting a forest fire. Several were serious drug addicts. In short, these were not people with a strong desire for a particular field or a particular drive to pursue a passion. I'm not passing judgement on these individuals as people, but it was quite clear they were the "what the hell else are my options?!" crowd.
And really, as an employer, why would you want to hire from the "what the hell else was I going to do with my life" pool of "talent" when you could hire from the pool of people who - either through a university or on their own - had the drive and passion to become part of a particular industry for a significant part of their life?
It doesn't really matter. Your job is eventually going to be outsourced for pennies on the dollar and you'll have to go learn how to sell houses or fold pants at the GAP anyway. This is the new economy; anything white-collar can be outsourced. Service-industry is where it's all at.
'Our concern with for-profit institutions is that students may not learn the fundamental the tools for understanding and solving complex issues,
Then don't hire people from vocational schools. Hire those who have excelled through self-learning and those who took the education seriously at an actual university. People who just jump into a cheap vocational school do so because they either don't have the patience or qualifications to attend a university or the self-determination and drive to become self-educated. They're like all the people who jumped into IT a decade ago and ruined the market and the reputation, because it went from being a place for people who enjoyed technology and were thrilled to make a living at it to people who jumped into it because they needed to feed their five kids and they heard it paid more than teaching or digging ditches.
Right. But that's an offline game. And from what I've read, it was a great game. So because their quality games are being "pirated", they're going to resort to only continuing to make their sucky (online) games?! That doesn't make much business sense.
Don't be so naive and ridiculous. Youtube and Napster became huge because of the illegitimate content that was traded over them. Turning a blind eye and claiming "oh noes, we can't do anything about what's going on with our own services!" until they became huge and sold out for millions and billions to legitimate companies is exactly what they both did.
If it were not for the illegitimate content, they would never have acquired the enormous number of eyeballs and accounts on their services which is what, in turn, drove them to be in demand by the corporations that took them over.
What was the last non-offline game that Funcom made which didn't suck? The last game I'm aware of was Anarchy Online which was literally not playable after even a month and was a total abortion of a release.
I'm tired of companies getting rich off of questionable or illegal practices and then, once they have a massive userbase, suddenly selling out to someone to go legit. It's what the original youtube did. It's what Napster did. Imagine if I started up a car dealership and instead of paying for my own cars to stock my dealership, I went down the street and stole them from my competition. Then I sold those and once I had sold enough of these stolen cars, I had enough customers and money and attention that I could afford to go legit.
It's even worse than companies like Worldcom that can completely screw people over and break every law on the books, fire one guy and just keep on doing business as usual. So the moral of the story is that it's wrong for you or me to "steal" and justify it with "fair use", but it's okay to do it if you're a corporation or are being eyed by hungry corporations.
You can't protect society without controlling society. You can't control society without controlling information. In the land of ignorance, the informed man is king. True democracies don't have kings. Information is communism. Ignorance is patriotic. Oh shit, American Idol is on -- gotta go!
What do you mean? How are the results not "owned" by anyone? The only people who will profit are the pharmaceutical companies. Other scientists may benefit from the use of this data, but in the long run all it does is provide a free pool of data at the user's expense that will ultimately benefit the companies doing research into drugs to treat disease so that they can charge an arm and a leg to keep people alive.
Curing cancer and other disease is still beneficial to the world, but it's not like this information is itself going to be put to some altruistic use that will benefit all of mankind through some sort of free pill that will cure you. It'll be used by companies like Pharmacia & Upjohn to help their R&D create drugs that you'll take the rest of your life to not die. Now, if they want to pay me for the utilization or at least cover my electric costs, I might reconsider. Otherwise... meh.
I'll donate my cycles when a company starts offering me stock in compensation.
So let me get this straight. I pay the energy bill for cycles used to crunch genetic mapping data that will be used by corporations to develop drugs for lifelong treatment (like they'd develop a cure when they could profit more from treatment?) so that when I'm sick, I can pay a few thousand dollars a month to afford the pills?
Just because the project is managed from a university doesn't mean the project, its goals and it's results are altruistic.
I used Redhat back in the day, just before I became a die hard Debian user. I'm wondering what exactly should drive me to want to switch to Redhat at this point? They seem very fractured to me and the whole "Enterprise" setup with a "free version where we develop everything" or whatever doesn't strike me as very appealing.
But I'll grant, I'm somewhat ignorant of the whole Redhat thing these days. Anything I should be enthralled by and jump into Redhat for? Not trying to bait or troll. Would seriously love to hear what people with more recent experience of RH have to say (especially if they're also familiar with Debian and others so they know where I'm coming from).
So if the universe formed out of absolute nothing that makes it Christian-centric? I don't get it. Short of "a big guy got some dirt and molded it into a ball and made some magic incantation and life appeared on the ball", I don't see what religion has to do with it.
I'm sorry, but that is completely ridiculous. We should ban bars, because it's inevitable that most people will get drunk and then get behind the wheel of a car to drive home?
Why not ban knives and guns, then? Sure, most people may use them for personal protection, hunting and spreading butter on toast, but quite a few use them for muggings, rapes and murders! Let's ban it all!
How about just making the actual dangerous activity itself illegal rather than all elements of it? Further, how about enforcing such laws rather than letting the asshole who drives drunk do it a few dozen times before finally deciding maybe he should get his license taken away for a whopping ninety days?
No kidding. This is the first time in nine years that I've read a Slashdot submission and literally thought that shit just blew my mind.
The problem is that whether you are a physicist or philosopher or theologist or anything else, it is equally as valid and confusing to the human mind to conceive of the requirement of something prior to the universe as well as nothing. The concept is so abstract and impossible that neither seems right nor wrong.
Now, I'm not a physicist. I'm not even particularly smart, for that matter. However, from what I have heard, Hawking is somewhat less than seriously regarded among scientists as he is among layman. To us, he's the poster boy for absolute genius. Among scientists, I don't think he even made the list of top twenty scientists of the 20th century. And I seem to recall that his announcement over the whole bet he had on the theory of black holes was snickered at in all corners.
Don't get me wrong. I am a big Hawking fan. I think the guy is stunningly brilliant and has done amazing things despite his progressively debilitating affliction. I just take any claims or discoveries announced by him with a glacial grain of salt.
Driving is just fine. Driving would be completely safe if it weren't for the idiots. I see no reason that drunk driving, texting while driving, using your laptop while driving and possibly even using a cell phone without hands-free while driving should all be criminal offenses.
If you can't adhere to the most basic safety standards like paying attention to your driving, then you don't deserve to be on the road. And you don't deserve ten, twenty or fifty offenses before you finally get the right taken away from you. While I might see more leniency on non-alcohol-related offenses so that you get one warning, the drunk driving thing should be a termination of your license forever. Why should we play russian roulette with pedestrians and other people on the road in the hope that you'll somehow get your shit together and not drive drunk again?
And while we're at it, can we stop fucking coddling those god damned elderly people?! I don't fucking give a shit if you fought in World War II and had fifteen children and thirty grandchildren. When you can't tell the difference between the break and gas, it's time we forbid you from driving before you plow through another McDonald's, Starbucks, street fair, shopping mall, school yard or soccer field.
I doubt it. I bought my PS3 because I wanted a cheap blue-ray device for the time being (my television does 1080p, which a lot of them are starting to support now). I didn't want to drop $1,000 on a high quality blue-ray player yet, until we see how things pan out.
The porn industry has already gone with HD-DVD so I think that clearly tells us where everything else is going. Either that or any decent player will support both and we'll just have two standards that are equally available and distributed.
Slashdot Mirror
Because, in America we don't care about achievement in discovery. The typical attitude is something like why should we spend two billion dollars exploring space when we have real problems in our own country. Yes, that true American spirit that has propelled us since the first foot was stepped on the shores of this country is dead and buried. *sigh*
Seriously, when was the last time you heard a kid cite some social parasite, sports star or rapper as one of their heroes? When was the last time you heard one name an astronaut? In fact, how many people can name even one astronaut that is currently active in the space program?
Unless it involves devising some mechanism of getting us beer, porn or baby jebus in larger quantities and more efficient rates, my fellow Americans largely don't give a damn.
If you copy and share, you are a pirate.
Sorry, but that's just plain bull. You are falling into the trap they want every consumer to fall into. For now, it's the trap of "fair use means listening to it yourself on your computer or listening to it yourself on another device that you own". Perhaps tomorrow they will further refine it in the public mind to mean "fair use is any use, except that which allows a second human being to listen, view or read it".
Say goodbye to the "fair use" of you videotaping you and your friends dancing like idiots to some song in at the family barbecue. Say goodbye to making a mixtape for your significant other. Say goodbye to ripping a song (as has been done for decades) for your friend who really likes that song you heard. Say goodbye to countless rational personal and non-commercial uses.
Once they can identify and track every single "copyrighted" material in existence with ease, prepare to be nickel-and-dimed to death.
As to your comment about the cable box - regardless of what the media companies want to convince us is right, they should not have the right to control everything you do with the content from broadcast material. You should still be allowed to record episodes of Mr. Belvedere and keep them on tape in your closet for 20 years and pull them out and play them for all your friends to show what a douche you were in the 80s. You should still be allowed to record songs off the radio for yourself to listen to when you want.
What exactly are you willing to give up? Right now, you have to pay royalties to play music or broadcast television in a bar or restaurant. When they've nailed this scheme down, should they be able to control how many friends you may have come watch the boxing fight on HBO at your place? Should they be able to control how many times you can watch your recording of the superbowl? Perhaps you should be forced to pay royalties on the songs that play at a party at your home when mom and dad are away?
I refuse to take things at face value. I refuse to simply let corporate greed and selfishness re-define fair use at their whim. I refuse to be placated by their promises that "oh, this is only going to be used to prevent someone from taking content, burning it to CD and redistributing it for payola without being tracked down via the watermark". What they can justify to us today, they can exploit tomorrow. And anyone who doesn't believe that they eventually will is a damned fool.
So, excuse me if I hold on to my fair-use and even encourage unfair use rampantly as a countermeasure to the measures taken by people who would see us paying Disney for Peter Pan in another five hundred years after they have lobbied congress to extend copyright to life of the universe, plus 95 years.
And, finally, it isn't Comcast's job to put a governor on anything to make sure I abide by the law.
Sorry, but he's talking about discouraging consumers from making copies by letting them know the watermarking is there. Consumers are not the same thing as pirates. Fuck them for constantly trying to portray every example of fair use or innocent sharing as some sort of fucking international mafia ring conspiracy to exploit their content for billions of dollars. Keep treating us like shit so I can enjoy it when I cancel my cable subscription forever.
By executing everyone who is guilty of sending or receiving any encrypted data. In America, we're only a step away from eventual legislation that would make encryption an instant guilt-marker and justifiable cause for further search and investigation.
Remember, the American motto is "if I ain't got nuttin' to hide, why should I care if you want to violate my civil liberties?". Not to mention, since encryption is a munition, it could be very easily rationalized that it is a "dangerous weapon".
Apparently, being a NASA engineer is a tankless job.
No, YOU are the genius, sir! I mean, look at Microsoft and how piracy is completely ruining them. Why, I heard just the other day that they are going to stop making videogames and operating systems, because people pirate them both. Instead, I understand that the only thing Microsoft is only going to develop from now on are new versions of "Microsoft Bob" that can only be used when connected to the internet. Sure, nobody likes Microsoft Bob and it's a piece of crap. But at least it will be online and won't be pirated!
Right. And my point is that people who fall for these vocational schools are the worst of both worlds. If they were serious about education and career, they'd be able to attend a university to acquire the desired related degree. Or they might be capable of entering the field on their own steam (playing simon-says and going in debt six figures isn't the only way to pursue a career in a professional field).
But the vocational schools cater to those who either don't qualify to attend or are to lazy to commit to a university and don't have enough self-determination and focus to do anything on their own. So they're sitting around smelling like fry-grease late at night while watching cable and see an advertisement for some school where they can "learn how to make videogames" in eighteen months.
If that weren't the case, then why would these videogame vocational schools be advertised in exactly the same manner and during exactly the same times slots as the Sally Struthers "choose from these exciting careers!" commercials?
Not to mention, those vocational schools are usually scams. A buddy of mine back in the day went to a "computer vocational school". I don't know what the exact curriculum was but it had something to do with business-related computer skills. One guy in the class was a recently released ex-convict who had murdered someone seventeen years before and was looking to get started in a new career. Another had spent most of his youth in juvie for starting a forest fire. Several were serious drug addicts. In short, these were not people with a strong desire for a particular field or a particular drive to pursue a passion. I'm not passing judgement on these individuals as people, but it was quite clear they were the "what the hell else are my options?!" crowd.
And really, as an employer, why would you want to hire from the "what the hell else was I going to do with my life" pool of "talent" when you could hire from the pool of people who - either through a university or on their own - had the drive and passion to become part of a particular industry for a significant part of their life?
It doesn't really matter. Your job is eventually going to be outsourced for pennies on the dollar and you'll have to go learn how to sell houses or fold pants at the GAP anyway. This is the new economy; anything white-collar can be outsourced. Service-industry is where it's all at.
Man, no kidding. How are they going to spread the increased costs to all six of their listeners?! That will suck for them.
'Our concern with for-profit institutions is that students may not learn the fundamental the tools for understanding and solving complex issues,
Then don't hire people from vocational schools. Hire those who have excelled through self-learning and those who took the education seriously at an actual university. People who just jump into a cheap vocational school do so because they either don't have the patience or qualifications to attend a university or the self-determination and drive to become self-educated. They're like all the people who jumped into IT a decade ago and ruined the market and the reputation, because it went from being a place for people who enjoyed technology and were thrilled to make a living at it to people who jumped into it because they needed to feed their five kids and they heard it paid more than teaching or digging ditches.
Right. But that's an offline game. And from what I've read, it was a great game. So because their quality games are being "pirated", they're going to resort to only continuing to make their sucky (online) games?! That doesn't make much business sense.
Don't be so naive and ridiculous. Youtube and Napster became huge because of the illegitimate content that was traded over them. Turning a blind eye and claiming "oh noes, we can't do anything about what's going on with our own services!" until they became huge and sold out for millions and billions to legitimate companies is exactly what they both did.
If it were not for the illegitimate content, they would never have acquired the enormous number of eyeballs and accounts on their services which is what, in turn, drove them to be in demand by the corporations that took them over.
What was the last non-offline game that Funcom made which didn't suck? The last game I'm aware of was Anarchy Online which was literally not playable after even a month and was a total abortion of a release.
Little guys shouldn't be allowed to defend themselves. If you can't afford to win, you don't deserve to win!
I'm tired of companies getting rich off of questionable or illegal practices and then, once they have a massive userbase, suddenly selling out to someone to go legit. It's what the original youtube did. It's what Napster did. Imagine if I started up a car dealership and instead of paying for my own cars to stock my dealership, I went down the street and stole them from my competition. Then I sold those and once I had sold enough of these stolen cars, I had enough customers and money and attention that I could afford to go legit.
It's even worse than companies like Worldcom that can completely screw people over and break every law on the books, fire one guy and just keep on doing business as usual. So the moral of the story is that it's wrong for you or me to "steal" and justify it with "fair use", but it's okay to do it if you're a corporation or are being eyed by hungry corporations.
You can't protect society without controlling society. You can't control society without controlling information. In the land of ignorance, the informed man is king. True democracies don't have kings. Information is communism. Ignorance is patriotic. Oh shit, American Idol is on -- gotta go!
What do you mean? How are the results not "owned" by anyone? The only people who will profit are the pharmaceutical companies. Other scientists may benefit from the use of this data, but in the long run all it does is provide a free pool of data at the user's expense that will ultimately benefit the companies doing research into drugs to treat disease so that they can charge an arm and a leg to keep people alive.
Curing cancer and other disease is still beneficial to the world, but it's not like this information is itself going to be put to some altruistic use that will benefit all of mankind through some sort of free pill that will cure you. It'll be used by companies like Pharmacia & Upjohn to help their R&D create drugs that you'll take the rest of your life to not die. Now, if they want to pay me for the utilization or at least cover my electric costs, I might reconsider. Otherwise... meh.
I'll donate my cycles when a company starts offering me stock in compensation.
So let me get this straight. I pay the energy bill for cycles used to crunch genetic mapping data that will be used by corporations to develop drugs for lifelong treatment (like they'd develop a cure when they could profit more from treatment?) so that when I'm sick, I can pay a few thousand dollars a month to afford the pills?
Just because the project is managed from a university doesn't mean the project, its goals and it's results are altruistic.
I had not heard of this before. I guess I must have been in the dark.
Thanks, I'll be here all week.
I used Redhat back in the day, just before I became a die hard Debian user. I'm wondering what exactly should drive me to want to switch to Redhat at this point? They seem very fractured to me and the whole "Enterprise" setup with a "free version where we develop everything" or whatever doesn't strike me as very appealing.
But I'll grant, I'm somewhat ignorant of the whole Redhat thing these days. Anything I should be enthralled by and jump into Redhat for? Not trying to bait or troll. Would seriously love to hear what people with more recent experience of RH have to say (especially if they're also familiar with Debian and others so they know where I'm coming from).
So if the universe formed out of absolute nothing that makes it Christian-centric? I don't get it. Short of "a big guy got some dirt and molded it into a ball and made some magic incantation and life appeared on the ball", I don't see what religion has to do with it.
I'm sorry, but that is completely ridiculous. We should ban bars, because it's inevitable that most people will get drunk and then get behind the wheel of a car to drive home?
Why not ban knives and guns, then? Sure, most people may use them for personal protection, hunting and spreading butter on toast, but quite a few use them for muggings, rapes and murders! Let's ban it all!
How about just making the actual dangerous activity itself illegal rather than all elements of it? Further, how about enforcing such laws rather than letting the asshole who drives drunk do it a few dozen times before finally deciding maybe he should get his license taken away for a whopping ninety days?
No kidding. This is the first time in nine years that I've read a Slashdot submission and literally thought that shit just blew my mind.
The problem is that whether you are a physicist or philosopher or theologist or anything else, it is equally as valid and confusing to the human mind to conceive of the requirement of something prior to the universe as well as nothing. The concept is so abstract and impossible that neither seems right nor wrong.
Now, I'm not a physicist. I'm not even particularly smart, for that matter. However, from what I have heard, Hawking is somewhat less than seriously regarded among scientists as he is among layman. To us, he's the poster boy for absolute genius. Among scientists, I don't think he even made the list of top twenty scientists of the 20th century. And I seem to recall that his announcement over the whole bet he had on the theory of black holes was snickered at in all corners.
Don't get me wrong. I am a big Hawking fan. I think the guy is stunningly brilliant and has done amazing things despite his progressively debilitating affliction. I just take any claims or discoveries announced by him with a glacial grain of salt.
Driving is just fine. Driving would be completely safe if it weren't for the idiots. I see no reason that drunk driving, texting while driving, using your laptop while driving and possibly even using a cell phone without hands-free while driving should all be criminal offenses.
If you can't adhere to the most basic safety standards like paying attention to your driving, then you don't deserve to be on the road. And you don't deserve ten, twenty or fifty offenses before you finally get the right taken away from you. While I might see more leniency on non-alcohol-related offenses so that you get one warning, the drunk driving thing should be a termination of your license forever. Why should we play russian roulette with pedestrians and other people on the road in the hope that you'll somehow get your shit together and not drive drunk again?
And while we're at it, can we stop fucking coddling those god damned elderly people?! I don't fucking give a shit if you fought in World War II and had fifteen children and thirty grandchildren. When you can't tell the difference between the break and gas, it's time we forbid you from driving before you plow through another McDonald's, Starbucks, street fair, shopping mall, school yard or soccer field.
I doubt it. I bought my PS3 because I wanted a cheap blue-ray device for the time being (my television does 1080p, which a lot of them are starting to support now). I didn't want to drop $1,000 on a high quality blue-ray player yet, until we see how things pan out.
The porn industry has already gone with HD-DVD so I think that clearly tells us where everything else is going. Either that or any decent player will support both and we'll just have two standards that are equally available and distributed.