Why shouldn't we agree? I agree with almost everything you said in this post, with a few exceptions. First, I think aid and comfort is too vague to be a useful definition. For example, giving a wounded enemy soldier first aid is definitely not treason in the spirit of the law. Similarly, giving a speech in Vietnam about how you hate your own stupid country should not be, IMO, considered treason. Whether it actually is, is of course, to the courts to decide.
Second, I stick to my opinion that if you are religious (judging from this post, probably a Jew), then you are most likely extremely stupid (even if you and your close friends do not think so). Again, this is not your fault, although you can fix it if you have the inclination or if you are lucky.
I just have to wonder how it will affect us as people and our society as a whole.
Not much. All timeshifting will stop when we actually fix the broken copyright laws and give every human unlimited access to all works ever created in the preferred format. You wouldn't need to timeshift, because there won't be anything to shift, since nobody forces you to watch/read/listen in a particular time.
And having such access would have mostly good effects, like Amazon and KaZaA put on steroids. Expect to have reasonably good librarian AI by then (~2010, not human-level AI, but one capable of being quite helpful in research), so it will remove the tedious part from searching for things to read/watch/listen to. It's already possible technically in many respects, like opening Amazon.com, finding the relevant list, downloading/ordering all/most movies/books and reading/watching them at leisure, but expect the system improved and made more versatile and usable.
Simple conditioning. Let's say you play games instead of studying. They scold you. You learn to hide the fact that you are playing. Next time they catch you, you feel guilty, because you cheated and because by now you already feel that playing games is wrong. The same reasoning can be applied to any situation, like, say, browsing porn at work.;)
Have you been to Japan? Have you read or watched anything about Japan besides manga and anime?:)
They have/had huge problems with stress, to the point that the Prime Ministrer of the country had to urge every Japanese to take that goddamn vacation. People commited suicide on vacation because they didn't know how to spend time there (not en masse, but that happened). The normal Japanese working day ends with a corporate drunkfest. People either cram into 3 sq. m. rooms to sleep or spend 2 hours to get back to the home by crammed trains. You call that not stressful?:)))
To tell the truth, I've lived in Japan for three weeks and it has probably been the best and most fun three weeks in my life. I was practically at zero stress level all the time... But, on the other hand, I believe what I told you above is also true. So, in the end, I don't really know how stressful Japanese life is.;)
It's really weird, but then again, what would you expect? Humans exist to create bigger and better technologies. No wonder we were selected by THEM to be best suited to serving them. I have noticed that I am phisically capable of sitting in front of the computer playing UT2004 or something like that for any amount of time without as much as looking away from the screen, without sleeping, eating, drinking or doing to the toilet, even though I am tired, hungry, thirsty and my bladder is ready to burst. As soon as I stop using the computer (due to blackout or Windows crash), I suddenly feel all the urges I ignored for so long.
To feel better, you can write a very polite e-mail describing the incident and the stupidity of the user (in the most PC way possible, sticking to the facts). Call the e-mail "Attention, Keyboard Users", or "Power-User Keyboard Tips" and pretend it is intended to enpower the users to be more productive and help them feel more in control of their working environment.:)
May be because with a limited amount of comments you can't adopt someone else's code. It will forever be alien, like a step-daughter to you. If you think about the normal amount of lines of code per day written by a professional programmer and then consider how much time you should spend on adapting to the code somebody wrote, it will no longer look excessive.
When you are coding, you have a complete mental picture of the fragment of code. You know what it does and why, and how it interacts with other fragments of code and the environment. But usually all these intricacies are not commented and you tend to forget them (other programmers never knew them in the first place). If someone actually dictates lots of comments for the code, it can help a lot. Of course, either the person need to be proficient in spoken language (a good presenter or a lecturer), or the text needs to be edited heavily, including producing shorter summaries for quick reference.
Just tell them that programs are cracked every day. They can download any program for free from KaZaA or buy it in China, Russia, etc. If a program can be cracked without access to source code, surely some programs can also be hacked.
I would say it's a logical fallacy. Confusing cause and effect. Both patches and exploits are results of the bugs. Saying that exploits result from patches is like saying that obesity is a result of diets - many people become horribly obese after trying hundreds of diets, pills and what not. Surely there must be a link.
You are new here? This is not a news site. It's news and entertainment site. If you don't like it, block all Windows stories. And while you are at it, select a -5 modifier to all Funny posts in your user preferences.
And if some Russian marketdroids join in, you will have Windows XP Elite and Windows XP Exclusive. I think Russia is the only country where you can see an add for both elite and exclusive second-hand clothes...
Yes, in the short term a good version of Windows is good. But you have to remember that MS is an evil monopoly. Thus in the long term Linux users and everyone else would be much better off if MS failed to deliver Longhorn and go bankrupt, Bill Gates died a terrible death and the whole world switched to GPL software.
But you still have a choice of buying the next version or not...
Smith would tell you it's inevitable.
The Oracle would tell you that the real test for any choice is having to make the same choice again, knowing full well what it might cost ($190) and how much it would suck.
The Merovingian might add that choice is an illusion, created between those with power, and those without.
The Architect would suggest that nearly 99% of all test subjects would accept the program, as long as they were given a choice, even if they were only aware of the choice at a near unconscious level, a he already knows what you are going to do.
And Morpheus would sarcastically ask you whether, being more secure or faster has anything to do with Windows marketshare in the first place.
Paradoxically, noone tried appealing to the lowest common denominator in the way Sims does it. And so this stupid mainstream game was innovative in some perverse sense, just like the first "some terrible natural disaster happens" movie or "a huge predator animal starts attacking people" move or "monsters from space attack Earth" movie were innovative.:)
It's not like small producers can't make games. No, the problem is that the industry strives to make the best possible games and the market is ready to support them. This means creating quite complex games with lots of content (levels, textures, etc.), which costs a lot of money, preventing competition by small producers as an unintended side effect.
It's the same with Hollywood blockbusters. You don't NEED 100 mln to make a great movie, 5-20 mln is often enough. It's just that some studios will invest 300 mln and make a film that is impossible to make cheaper, in effect monopolising a small segment of the market.
But don't despair. Eventually, after one or two generations of 3D engines we will likely see reusable engines and objects. Then the costs of creating a new game will dramatically drop. In addition, improving AI and programming technique will eventually make procedural textures, models and levels a reality, which is bound to seriously simplify content creation.
Good point about Darwinism. Where the analogy stretches too far is that corporations don't always allow entrepreneurship, which is analogous to sexual reproduction. If RIAA (a major label) had a hundred or so departments that would compete with each other, while still being a part of the whole, we would not have these problems. But the only competition is about who will be the director...
Evolution requires heredity and mutations. In the capitalism world mutations (change) are looked down upon.
The industry will fracture so fast that Verizon will be flat-footed before it can say cheese. Traditional companies can hope to survive only if they change into content providers soon. Wrong. Traditional telcos need to start thinking longterm and do quality analysis and forecasting of technology trends. That means no more 3G bullshit in order to drive up their share price or what was the point of that panopticum.
They should invest in those technologies that would allow to provide the cheap quality access in the formats the customers want. The investments should be such that they pay back before the technology becomes obsolete. In the end there can be both large telecommunication companies that just do it better as well as smaller ones that occupy a niche or specialise.
Before we get to the Singularity, there is still space in the economy for telecommunications providers. Someone will have to install Wi-Fi all over the world cities, launch telecommunication satellites and wire the Earth with fibre-optics, including transoceanic cables. Those who will do it most efficiently will win. No content gimmicks necessary.
If you had the power to storm into the police department, line up the policemen who raided the Internet cafes and shoot them for this crap, would you? I know I would.
The police in a modern society, like all other branches of the government should above all be accountable to people. People are the primary source of power in any democratic country. This cross between the nanny-state and the police-state is ugly and should have been done away with long ago.
Sorry if was mistaken. You were replying to k_head and may be your comment about god didn't reflect your personal beliefs, but the language of his question. If you do not actually believe in some God and do not believe also that he will judge her more harshly than he will judge you (i.e. your answer was just rhetoric), then my comment was in fact an ad hominem attack and I retract it.
But if you do believe that some god (christian or otherwise) will judge her for her stunt more harshly than you for assisting in many killings, than you are in fact stupid.
You are right, though, that technically the leaders didn't commit treason, but that's basically because it is usually defined by leaders themselves. As for Jane, there is nothing bad about opposing the actions of your country if you think they are wrong. If she had actually helped Vietnamese kill some American soldiers, she would technically commit a treason, but ethically she would be on the same ground as you are. Even better, she would be defending a country from an agressor, while you were that agressor, so her hypothetical action would be more morally correct.
It doesn't matter how I define it, what matters is how ancient Jews defined it. According to my limited understanding, murder was somewhat similar to what you legally call a murder today. But they realised that there are many cases in which you need to kill people and those legit killings were not murders.:) The point is that the commandment didn't prohibit all killings.
I didn't attack you personally, I just pointed out that Americans are no better than other people in the eyes of [non-existing] Allmighty and that to commit the sin you do not have to kill someone with your own hands.
So the "murderer" was justified, according to your own religion. As for calling you a retard, that was not an ad hominem attack. I did that simply because I truly think that most Christian (and other religious people) lack something very important under their skull. May be you do not fall under the medical definition of retarded, but by being a Christian you prove that you have low intelligence. Nothing personal, it wasn't really your fault.
Well, saying anything cannot be wrong, especially if it is true (don't know whether she really wanted that, though). As for flying, Russians seemed to do the job quite well. VCs were more efficient in the jungle.
It definitely should be possible, but I never really needed it too much. There likely are some tools to remove visible watermarks and this surely can be done in Photoshop manually if you have enough sample images.
You are right regarding the hidden watermarks, though. Corbis images have DigiMarc. DigiMark watermark in particular is retained even when you cut a part of the image as small as 100x100, but is removed when you reduce the image to 50% of the original resolution (or enlarge to 200%.
But such watermarks can probably be removed even without scanning. There are various software tools and techniques (some links and further info). Of course, it is kind of pointless, since if you use my copyrighted images, it is quite easy to prove, if necessary.
I just tried and here is a simple (but tedious) method of manually removing the DigiMarc. Open the image in any image editing programs (make sure not to pay for those that refuse to open scanned dollar bills). Cut it into many pieces (smaller than 100x100 or narrow and long). Digimark will not be read in such small images, so you can easily overwrite it with your own watermark. Do it. Embed your own watermarks in every piece. Combine the images together. Check out if it works. If it doesn't, check out parts of the image. Locate those stubborn places that still show the old mark. Repeat the procedure on them (cut and embed your watermark in each piece). After a while the image will contain your own watermark and will still look pretty much the same.
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Why shouldn't we agree? I agree with almost everything you said in this post, with a few exceptions. First, I think aid and comfort is too vague to be a useful definition. For example, giving a wounded enemy soldier first aid is definitely not treason in the spirit of the law. Similarly, giving a speech in Vietnam about how you hate your own stupid country should not be, IMO, considered treason. Whether it actually is, is of course, to the courts to decide.
Second, I stick to my opinion that if you are religious (judging from this post, probably a Jew), then you are most likely extremely stupid (even if you and your close friends do not think so). Again, this is not your fault, although you can fix it if you have the inclination or if you are lucky.
Yes.
No.
I just have to wonder how it will affect us as people and our society as a whole.
Not much. All timeshifting will stop when we actually fix the broken copyright laws and give every human unlimited access to all works ever created in the preferred format. You wouldn't need to timeshift, because there won't be anything to shift, since nobody forces you to watch/read/listen in a particular time.
And having such access would have mostly good effects, like Amazon and KaZaA put on steroids. Expect to have reasonably good librarian AI by then (~2010, not human-level AI, but one capable of being quite helpful in research), so it will remove the tedious part from searching for things to read/watch/listen to. It's already possible technically in many respects, like opening Amazon.com, finding the relevant list, downloading/ordering all/most movies/books and reading/watching them at leisure, but expect the system improved and made more versatile and usable.
Parents.
;)
Simple conditioning. Let's say you play games instead of studying. They scold you. You learn to hide the fact that you are playing. Next time they catch you, you feel guilty, because you cheated and because by now you already feel that playing games is wrong. The same reasoning can be applied to any situation, like, say, browsing porn at work.
Have you been to Japan? Have you read or watched anything about Japan besides manga and anime? :)
:)))
;)
They have/had huge problems with stress, to the point that the Prime Ministrer of the country had to urge every Japanese to take that goddamn vacation. People commited suicide on vacation because they didn't know how to spend time there (not en masse, but that happened). The normal Japanese working day ends with a corporate drunkfest. People either cram into 3 sq. m. rooms to sleep or spend 2 hours to get back to the home by crammed trains. You call that not stressful?
To tell the truth, I've lived in Japan for three weeks and it has probably been the best and most fun three weeks in my life. I was practically at zero stress level all the time... But, on the other hand, I believe what I told you above is also true. So, in the end, I don't really know how stressful Japanese life is.
It's really weird, but then again, what would you expect? Humans exist to create bigger and better technologies. No wonder we were selected by THEM to be best suited to serving them. I have noticed that I am phisically capable of sitting in front of the computer playing UT2004 or something like that for any amount of time without as much as looking away from the screen, without sleeping, eating, drinking or doing to the toilet, even though I am tired, hungry, thirsty and my bladder is ready to burst. As soon as I stop using the computer (due to blackout or Windows crash), I suddenly feel all the urges I ignored for so long.
To feel better, you can write a very polite e-mail describing the incident and the stupidity of the user (in the most PC way possible, sticking to the facts). Call the e-mail "Attention, Keyboard Users", or "Power-User Keyboard Tips" and pretend it is intended to enpower the users to be more productive and help them feel more in control of their working environment. :)
May be because with a limited amount of comments you can't adopt someone else's code. It will forever be alien, like a step-daughter to you. If you think about the normal amount of lines of code per day written by a professional programmer and then consider how much time you should spend on adapting to the code somebody wrote, it will no longer look excessive.
When you are coding, you have a complete mental picture of the fragment of code. You know what it does and why, and how it interacts with other fragments of code and the environment. But usually all these intricacies are not commented and you tend to forget them (other programmers never knew them in the first place). If someone actually dictates lots of comments for the code, it can help a lot. Of course, either the person need to be proficient in spoken language (a good presenter or a lecturer), or the text needs to be edited heavily, including producing shorter summaries for quick reference.
Just tell them that programs are cracked every day. They can download any program for free from KaZaA or buy it in China, Russia, etc. If a program can be cracked without access to source code, surely some programs can also be hacked.
I would say it's a logical fallacy. Confusing cause and effect. Both patches and exploits are results of the bugs. Saying that exploits result from patches is like saying that obesity is a result of diets - many people become horribly obese after trying hundreds of diets, pills and what not. Surely there must be a link.
You are new here? This is not a news site. It's news and entertainment site. If you don't like it, block all Windows stories. And while you are at it, select a -5 modifier to all Funny posts in your user preferences.
And if some Russian marketdroids join in, you will have Windows XP Elite and Windows XP Exclusive. I think Russia is the only country where you can see an add for both elite and exclusive second-hand clothes...
Yes, in the short term a good version of Windows is good. But you have to remember that MS is an evil monopoly. Thus in the long term Linux users and everyone else would be much better off if MS failed to deliver Longhorn and go bankrupt, Bill Gates died a terrible death and the whole world switched to GPL software.
But you still have a choice of buying the next version or not...
Smith would tell you it's inevitable.
The Oracle would tell you that the real test for any choice is having to make the same choice again, knowing full well what it might cost ($190) and how much it would suck.
The Merovingian might add that choice is an illusion, created between those with power, and those without.
The Architect would suggest that nearly 99% of all test subjects would accept the program, as long as they were given a choice, even if they were only aware of the choice at a near unconscious level, a he already knows what you are going to do.
And Morpheus would sarcastically ask you whether, being more secure or faster has anything to do with Windows marketshare in the first place.
Paradoxically, noone tried appealing to the lowest common denominator in the way Sims does it. And so this stupid mainstream game was innovative in some perverse sense, just like the first "some terrible natural disaster happens" movie or "a huge predator animal starts attacking people" move or "monsters from space attack Earth" movie were innovative. :)
It's not like small producers can't make games. No, the problem is that the industry strives to make the best possible games and the market is ready to support them. This means creating quite complex games with lots of content (levels, textures, etc.), which costs a lot of money, preventing competition by small producers as an unintended side effect.
It's the same with Hollywood blockbusters. You don't NEED 100 mln to make a great movie, 5-20 mln is often enough. It's just that some studios will invest 300 mln and make a film that is impossible to make cheaper, in effect monopolising a small segment of the market.
But don't despair. Eventually, after one or two generations of 3D engines we will likely see reusable engines and objects. Then the costs of creating a new game will dramatically drop. In addition, improving AI and programming technique will eventually make procedural textures, models and levels a reality, which is bound to seriously simplify content creation.
Good point about Darwinism. Where the analogy stretches too far is that corporations don't always allow entrepreneurship, which is analogous to sexual reproduction. If RIAA (a major label) had a hundred or so departments that would compete with each other, while still being a part of the whole, we would not have these problems. But the only competition is about who will be the director...
Evolution requires heredity and mutations. In the capitalism world mutations (change) are looked down upon.
The industry will fracture so fast that Verizon will be flat-footed before it can say cheese. Traditional companies can hope to survive only if they change into content providers soon.
Wrong. Traditional telcos need to start thinking longterm and do quality analysis and forecasting of technology trends. That means no more 3G bullshit in order to drive up their share price or what was the point of that panopticum.
They should invest in those technologies that would allow to provide the cheap quality access in the formats the customers want. The investments should be such that they pay back before the technology becomes obsolete. In the end there can be both large telecommunication companies that just do it better as well as smaller ones that occupy a niche or specialise.
Before we get to the Singularity, there is still space in the economy for telecommunications providers. Someone will have to install Wi-Fi all over the world cities, launch telecommunication satellites and wire the Earth with fibre-optics, including transoceanic cables. Those who will do it most efficiently will win. No content gimmicks necessary.
Blizzard doesn't intentionally release demo versions of their games ahead of time, and I don't think it has hurt their sales.
You can't tell. May be they could have still sold 10% more copies if they had an early demo...
If you had the power to storm into the police department, line up the policemen who raided the Internet cafes and shoot them for this crap, would you? I know I would.
The police in a modern society, like all other branches of the government should above all be accountable to people. People are the primary source of power in any democratic country. This cross between the nanny-state and the police-state is ugly and should have been done away with long ago.
Sorry if was mistaken. You were replying to k_head and may be your comment about god didn't reflect your personal beliefs, but the language of his question. If you do not actually believe in some God and do not believe also that he will judge her more harshly than he will judge you (i.e. your answer was just rhetoric), then my comment was in fact an ad hominem attack and I retract it.
But if you do believe that some god (christian or otherwise) will judge her for her stunt more harshly than you for assisting in many killings, than you are in fact stupid.
You are right, though, that technically the leaders didn't commit treason, but that's basically because it is usually defined by leaders themselves. As for Jane, there is nothing bad about opposing the actions of your country if you think they are wrong. If she had actually helped Vietnamese kill some American soldiers, she would technically commit a treason, but ethically she would be on the same ground as you are. Even better, she would be defending a country from an agressor, while you were that agressor, so her hypothetical action would be more morally correct.
It doesn't matter how I define it, what matters is how ancient Jews defined it. According to my limited understanding, murder was somewhat similar to what you legally call a murder today. But they realised that there are many cases in which you need to kill people and those legit killings were not murders. :) The point is that the commandment didn't prohibit all killings.
I didn't attack you personally, I just pointed out that Americans are no better than other people in the eyes of [non-existing] Allmighty and that to commit the sin you do not have to kill someone with your own hands.
So the "murderer" was justified, according to your own religion. As for calling you a retard, that was not an ad hominem attack. I did that simply because I truly think that most Christian (and other religious people) lack something very important under their skull. May be you do not fall under the medical definition of retarded, but by being a Christian you prove that you have low intelligence. Nothing personal, it wasn't really your fault.
Well, saying anything cannot be wrong, especially if it is true (don't know whether she really wanted that, though). As for flying, Russians seemed to do the job quite well. VCs were more efficient in the jungle.
It definitely should be possible, but I never really needed it too much. There likely are some tools to remove visible watermarks and this surely can be done in Photoshop manually if you have enough sample images.
You are right regarding the hidden watermarks, though. Corbis images have DigiMarc. DigiMark watermark in particular is retained even when you cut a part of the image as small as 100x100, but is removed when you reduce the image to 50% of the original resolution (or enlarge to 200%.
But such watermarks can probably be removed even without scanning. There are various software tools and techniques (some links and further info). Of course, it is kind of pointless, since if you use my copyrighted images, it is quite easy to prove, if necessary.
I just tried and here is a simple (but tedious) method of manually removing the DigiMarc. Open the image in any image editing programs (make sure not to pay for those that refuse to open scanned dollar bills). Cut it into many pieces (smaller than 100x100 or narrow and long). Digimark will not be read in such small images, so you can easily overwrite it with your own watermark. Do it. Embed your own watermarks in every piece. Combine the images together. Check out if it works. If it doesn't, check out parts of the image. Locate those stubborn places that still show the old mark. Repeat the procedure on them (cut and embed your watermark in each piece). After a while the image will contain your own watermark and will still look pretty much the same.