Holy cow, Slashdotters, admit it already. What bugs you about copy protection is the fact that it's going to make it harder for you to copy your friend's CD. Period. Is it a pain in the butt that it'll make it harder to copy your own discs? Of course. But that's not why you own a CD burner. You download MP3's like a fiend and burn them straight to CDR. Fair use is one thing, but let's face it: if you don't like the RIAA's policies about the use of their music, then don't listen to their music. Don't forget, the only reason you like their music is because it's always on the radio, which is because the RIAA is in collusion with the radio stations and the record stores. Notice how you usually can't buy independently-labelled CDs at Sam Goody?
There is nothing the RIAA can do to stop you from trading pirated or legal tracks from non-RIAA artists, because those artists aren't under the RIAA's "jurisdiction."
My point is, we tend to whine and complain everytime the RIAA takes some draconian measure to stop us from obtaining their music for free, that we would have otherwise purchased. They're not making it so we can't obtain music in general for free... they're making it so we can't obtain their music for free. The RIAA isn't going away, so neither is collusion in the music industry. It's time to admit that the big bad RIAA legally owns the music you like, and if you want it you're gonna have to pay for it. Me, I'll sticktoindependentbands for now.
I applied for Computer Engineering because it was a growing department that was looking for more students. CS, on the other hand, had like hundreds and hundreds more students already enrolled. I think that apply for ECE was one of the reasons I actually got accepted at my school. After deciding I didn't want to keep at it, I switched to CS after two semesters. Hell, I coulda switched to English for all they care. Once you're in, you're in. ECE will get you in.
Perhaps "rant" was the wrong word. I do know how to talk to people, and it wasn't HOW I was saying it, but rather WHAT i was saying. If I had tried getting her into a conversation about it, she would have probably told me flat-out that she didn't care. As Slashdotters, we have a hard time imaginging that non-Slashdotters don't get all riled up about lies spreading.
So when you write that "the ignorance will just go away on its own", my thoughts are:
1. You're very optimistic, or else you're content with a much longer time scale than I am.
2. The fact that you've given up means the rest of us have to work harder.
First of all, I thank you for your intelligent response- it means a lot to me. You do understand what I'm getting at here, because you recognize the role of the long time scale needed for a misconception to die. I won't argue that, if you apply a little effort, you can educate people about misconceptions. Educating people, however, and making a common misconception go away are two very different things. Yes, it's important to me that my mom knows to not FWD: people urban myth emails.
But my original posting was an appeal to the enlightened soul's urge to evangelize the truth to the unwashed masses, due to the utter gnawing pain that comes from knowing that people are just blindly swallowing things like bad astronomy and other bad conspiracy theories. You know what I'm talking about. It's that feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when the talking heads of the local news call Napster a "website", or when your friends come back from the movie "Hackers" and ask you if you can do any of the stuff they saw on the screen. We, as Slashdotters, are so proud that it's usually as important to us that people KNOW we went to the moon, as it is that we actually WENT to the moon.
History shows us that, while it may not happen within a single lifetime, misconceptions like the moon-landing theory simply go away. Perhaps a good prediction would be that our descendents will be able to go to the moon themselves. Much of the doubt about the moon landings centers around disbelief that we could actually GO to the moon. That doubt would not exist in an age where going to the moon is a plane ticket away.
I'm slowly learning to just live stuff like this. The badastronomy.org link has beeen on Slashdot before, so I have checked it out. When I saw a commercial for the Fox special, I went on a 2-minute explanation to my girlfriend about how most of the evidence that we DIDN'T go to the moon is, in fact, better applied to the argument that we DID. Her eyes literally glazed over. I was in protracted-rant mode; clearly hellbent on showing the world how ignorant it really is, incited by things I read on Slashdot.
I'm sick of making peoples' eyes glaze over. This stuff is definitely News for Nerds. It's definitely Stuff that Matters. But honestly, the world is very fickle about what it chooses to believe. There will always be people who say the landings were faked, as long as it's one person's word against another's.
People used to think the world was flat. As it turned out, the best way to teach people the world was round was not mass re-education, but by showing them that if you kept sailing, you wouldn't fall off. Nobody (except a scarce few) believes the world is flat anymore. The downside to this process is that nobody really gets the satisfaction of saying "I convinced the world they were wrong." The upside is, the ignorance is eventually conquered.
I guess what I'm saying is, don't let this, nor the misuse of the word "hacker," or anything else make you feel like we need a grass-roots movement to end the stupidity. The ignorance will just go away on its own, to be replaced by more sophisticated ignorance:)
I go to Johns Hopkins, and they've been mighty proud of the NEAR craft since its inception. But I guess JHU has nothing to do with NEAR, since CNN doesn't say it does.
New York state, including NYC and the metro area, is all 7-digit dialing. Same with all of Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Maine.
I love it when people post shit like this as Anonymous Coward. Man, you wouldn't want to see what I would do to your anti-semitic ass if I knew who you were. Go hide behind your AC, asshole.
I love stuff like this.
Here is a little game for you to try out. Take the above essay and replace every reference to Bush and replace it with Clinton, and Gore and you will see how nicely the story fits.
-- George
Actually, Clinton was a Rhodes scholar. That means he is one of the most successful students in the country right now. If Clinton was lazy in college, it sure doesn't show.
On an added note, in Palm Beach County, FL a local news station took that "butterfly ballot" and replaced the candidates with cartoon characters. They then asked small children which circle to mark to vote for a particular character. Guess what? They figured it out... (and, keep in mind, that ballot was approved by the Democrats, published in the newspaper, and sent to the home of every registered voter prior to the election.)
The people who messed up while using the butterfly ballots were mostly elderly folks with poor eyesight. This makes the 'child test' akin to comparing apples and oranges.
by suggesting that cd-burners were made to ruin the music industry, you'd have to assume that the music industry was out to ruin itself. How else would you explain the fact that companies like Sony are manufacturing CD burners, whilst having a huge stake in the music industry?
I also voted for Harry Browne. I voted yesterday, via absentee ballot. Like Delaware, my state (NY) is about as solid a Gore state as you can get, so I felt good about making my Libertarian statement with my vote, without worryign about my vote helping Georgie Porgie along.
I went to an expensive, pretentious private school in New York instead of public school, and we didn't have any of this nonsense. Sure we had jocks, artists, nerds, hippies, etc. But everyone, including those above mentioned, hung out together. We all went to the same parties, hung out together in the hall, etc. Almost nobody was a social outcast of any kind, and yet comformity was almost nonexistent and was actually looked down upon.
My school was not normal. To get in, you had to pass their entrance exams and you had to be able to afford it. Not to toot my own horn, but you had to be an intelligent kid to be there. That, combined with the caliber of the teachers, created an environment where nobody looked down upon anyone else, and everyone was friends no matter who they were or what they were like. You could just as easily say that my core group of friends were the least popular kids in school as you could say that we were the most popular, because the word "popular" made my classmates' skins crawl. My best friends in school, who remain some of my closest friends today, included a 2 musicians, 1 artist, 1 jock/punk-rocker, 3 potheads, 2 nerds and myself, just to name a few. I was, of course, the computer geek. Everyone knew it, and nobody looked down upon me for it.
That was, of course, my second high school, where everyone was well-educated and knew how to behave. Don't get me started on my FIRST high school, which was a ski academy in Vermont, and consisted of a bunch of overly-competitive jocks. I, being the short kid who liked computers, obviously was not in a good situation there.
So what am I trying to say? Attention all young geeks: your problems are caused by stupid people. You are surrounded by stupid, uneducated people who do not know how to behave. They are acting purely on instinct, like our ape ancestors. These are the same people who will grow up and vote straight down party lines in every single presidential election because they don't have the brainpower to think independently. You are different. You think on your own. Pity them, because they are slaves to their homecoming crowns.
Democracy in America is happening, but it's not electing the President. If you want to ask a question of the Democrat or the Republic candidate, you either:
a) can't ask the question because you won't have the opportunity or
b) your question will be filtered, passed through middle men, and molded so that its a good lead-in to their pre-packaged, party-authorized answers.
The only guys who are making the Presidential Election truly democratic are the guys who don't have a chance of being elected (eg, Browne and McReynolds).
The last I heard, the IRS is more of a "quasi-government" agency. They're a not-for-profit federally funded agency that does the government's dirty work.
... this coincides with Microsoft's announcement of its new CEO, Leona Helmsley!
The tough part was probably the climb, though
on
Skiing Down Everest
·
· Score: 1
I have done a good amount of skiing that most people would qualify as extreme, and let me just say that climbing to the top is always the hardest part. The skiing is the reward for your climb and for your planning. To be honest, Everest probably wasn't that hard to ski. Being the tallest mountain in the world doesn't make it the steepest or the most difficult skiing terrain. I'm sure it was hard, but most people with a solid background in extreme skiing probably wouldn't have too hard a time with it. The hard part would STILL be the ascent. Climbing Mt. Everest, with or without skis on your back, is one of the most dangerous activities a human can do.
I went to my school's job fair this week as well. I stopped at some "e solutions provider" booth and asked them the usual questions, (what do you guys do, could I get an internship, etc). I told them that I was pretty picky about the internships and jobs I like to consider, because I'm a Unix geek and too many places just try to fit companies of all sizes with NT-based solutions.
Their reply was something to the effect of, "well, that's exactly what we do. We develop strictly for NT, because that's how it's done in business today. NT is simply the standard, and it's the best." I laughed at them and left, but I could have laughed at them all I wanted because in the end, they may be wrong about NT being the best, but they're RIGHT about NT being what people want. It's very saddening, but companies really DO trust Microsoft.
On that note, I think I'm going to do some more drinking.
The games are NOT fixed. Believe me, if the games were fixed, every one in the world would know about it. Olympic athletes are 20 year olds with big mouths who spent their entire childhood training so that one day, they could gloriously prevail against the best in the world.
The games are most definitely not fixed, and any attempts to prove they are simply show how ignorant you are. I just hope that no Olympic athlete has read your post. People like you make me sick.
I used to be an amateur ski racer; I even know a few kids who made it to the top and are now on the US Ski and Snowboard teams. What's unfortunate is that the IOC has let soft money and greed cause them to ignore the simple fact that without sponsors, some of these athletes wouldn't even have the equipment they need to compete. Runners may not have the money to buy running shoes, and the IOC is now telling them "sure, you can get your shoes for free, but if they're not from [our sponsors] then you better accept your medal barefoot." Most amateur athletes got put through athletic academies on full scholarship and will get the same when/if they go to college, simply because 1) they're too poor to begin with, or 2) if they spent their time working, then they wouldn't be spending it training.
I just hope the IOC doesn't start banning athletes from wearing branded equipment while competing. If a skier couldn't pop his ski off and hold it up for the cameras after his run, I think we'd start seeing lawsuits being filed by ski manufacturers against the IOC.
Slashdot Mirror
the Filthy Critic is just a lame bite-off of Mr. Cranky, who is, by the way, a LOT funnier (just read his review of Battlefield Earth).
No, you can get really high in The Netherlands. Pot is still illegal in Denmark.
Holy cow, Slashdotters, admit it already. What bugs you about copy protection is the fact that it's going to make it harder for you to copy your friend's CD. Period. Is it a pain in the butt that it'll make it harder to copy your own discs? Of course. But that's not why you own a CD burner. You download MP3's like a fiend and burn them straight to CDR. Fair use is one thing, but let's face it: if you don't like the RIAA's policies about the use of their music, then don't listen to their music. Don't forget, the only reason you like their music is because it's always on the radio, which is because the RIAA is in collusion with the radio stations and the record stores. Notice how you usually can't buy independently-labelled CDs at Sam Goody?
There is nothing the RIAA can do to stop you from trading pirated or legal tracks from non-RIAA artists, because those artists aren't under the RIAA's "jurisdiction."
My point is, we tend to whine and complain everytime the RIAA takes some draconian measure to stop us from obtaining their music for free, that we would have otherwise purchased. They're not making it so we can't obtain music in general for free... they're making it so we can't obtain their music for free. The RIAA isn't going away, so neither is collusion in the music industry. It's time to admit that the big bad RIAA legally owns the music you like, and if you want it you're gonna have to pay for it. Me, I'll stick to independent bands for now.
I applied for Computer Engineering because it was a growing department that was looking for more students. CS, on the other hand, had like hundreds and hundreds more students already enrolled. I think that apply for ECE was one of the reasons I actually got accepted at my school. After deciding I didn't want to keep at it, I switched to CS after two semesters. Hell, I coulda switched to English for all they care. Once you're in, you're in. ECE will get you in.
Perhaps "rant" was the wrong word. I do know how to talk to people, and it wasn't HOW I was saying it, but rather WHAT i was saying. If I had tried getting her into a conversation about it, she would have probably told me flat-out that she didn't care. As Slashdotters, we have a hard time imaginging that non-Slashdotters don't get all riled up about lies spreading.
So when you write that "the ignorance will just go away on its own", my thoughts are:
1. You're very optimistic, or else you're content with a much longer time scale than I am.
2. The fact that you've given up means the rest of us have to work harder.
First of all, I thank you for your intelligent response- it means a lot to me. You do understand what I'm getting at here, because you recognize the role of the long time scale needed for a misconception to die. I won't argue that, if you apply a little effort, you can educate people about misconceptions. Educating people, however, and making a common misconception go away are two very different things. Yes, it's important to me that my mom knows to not FWD: people urban myth emails.
But my original posting was an appeal to the enlightened soul's urge to evangelize the truth to the unwashed masses, due to the utter gnawing pain that comes from knowing that people are just blindly swallowing things like bad astronomy and other bad conspiracy theories. You know what I'm talking about. It's that feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when the talking heads of the local news call Napster a "website", or when your friends come back from the movie "Hackers" and ask you if you can do any of the stuff they saw on the screen. We, as Slashdotters, are so proud that it's usually as important to us that people KNOW we went to the moon, as it is that we actually WENT to the moon.
History shows us that, while it may not happen within a single lifetime, misconceptions like the moon-landing theory simply go away. Perhaps a good prediction would be that our descendents will be able to go to the moon themselves. Much of the doubt about the moon landings centers around disbelief that we could actually GO to the moon. That doubt would not exist in an age where going to the moon is a plane ticket away.
I'm slowly learning to just live stuff like this. The badastronomy.org link has beeen on Slashdot before, so I have checked it out. When I saw a commercial for the Fox special, I went on a 2-minute explanation to my girlfriend about how most of the evidence that we DIDN'T go to the moon is, in fact, better applied to the argument that we DID. Her eyes literally glazed over. I was in protracted-rant mode; clearly hellbent on showing the world how ignorant it really is, incited by things I read on Slashdot.
:)
I'm sick of making peoples' eyes glaze over. This stuff is definitely News for Nerds. It's definitely Stuff that Matters. But honestly, the world is very fickle about what it chooses to believe. There will always be people who say the landings were faked, as long as it's one person's word against another's.
People used to think the world was flat. As it turned out, the best way to teach people the world was round was not mass re-education, but by showing them that if you kept sailing, you wouldn't fall off. Nobody (except a scarce few) believes the world is flat anymore. The downside to this process is that nobody really gets the satisfaction of saying "I convinced the world they were wrong." The upside is, the ignorance is eventually conquered.
I guess what I'm saying is, don't let this, nor the misuse of the word "hacker," or anything else make you feel like we need a grass-roots movement to end the stupidity. The ignorance will just go away on its own, to be replaced by more sophisticated ignorance
I go to Johns Hopkins, and they've been mighty proud of the NEAR craft since its inception. But I guess JHU has nothing to do with NEAR, since CNN doesn't say it does.
New York state, including NYC and the metro area, is all 7-digit dialing. Same with all of Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Maine.
I love it when people post shit like this as Anonymous Coward. Man, you wouldn't want to see what I would do to your anti-semitic ass if I knew who you were. Go hide behind your AC, asshole.
love,
Brian
I love stuff like this. Here is a little game for you to try out. Take the above essay and replace every reference to Bush and replace it with Clinton, and Gore and you will see how nicely the story fits. -- George Actually, Clinton was a Rhodes scholar. That means he is one of the most successful students in the country right now. If Clinton was lazy in college, it sure doesn't show.
On an added note, in Palm Beach County, FL a local news station took that "butterfly ballot" and replaced the candidates with cartoon characters. They then asked small children which circle to mark to vote for a particular character. Guess what? They figured it out... (and, keep in mind, that ballot was approved by the Democrats, published in the newspaper, and sent to the home of every registered voter prior to the election.)
The people who messed up while using the butterfly ballots were mostly elderly folks with poor eyesight. This makes the 'child test' akin to comparing apples and oranges.
by suggesting that cd-burners were made to ruin the music industry, you'd have to assume that the music industry was out to ruin itself. How else would you explain the fact that companies like Sony are manufacturing CD burners, whilst having a huge stake in the music industry?
I also voted for Harry Browne. I voted yesterday, via absentee ballot. Like Delaware, my state (NY) is about as solid a Gore state as you can get, so I felt good about making my Libertarian statement with my vote, without worryign about my vote helping Georgie Porgie along.
God, Bush is such a half-wit.
I went to an expensive, pretentious private school in New York instead of public school, and we didn't have any of this nonsense. Sure we had jocks, artists, nerds, hippies, etc. But everyone, including those above mentioned, hung out together. We all went to the same parties, hung out together in the hall, etc. Almost nobody was a social outcast of any kind, and yet comformity was almost nonexistent and was actually looked down upon.
My school was not normal. To get in, you had to pass their entrance exams and you had to be able to afford it. Not to toot my own horn, but you had to be an intelligent kid to be there. That, combined with the caliber of the teachers, created an environment where nobody looked down upon anyone else, and everyone was friends no matter who they were or what they were like. You could just as easily say that my core group of friends were the least popular kids in school as you could say that we were the most popular, because the word "popular" made my classmates' skins crawl. My best friends in school, who remain some of my closest friends today, included a 2 musicians, 1 artist, 1 jock/punk-rocker, 3 potheads, 2 nerds and myself, just to name a few. I was, of course, the computer geek. Everyone knew it, and nobody looked down upon me for it.
That was, of course, my second high school, where everyone was well-educated and knew how to behave. Don't get me started on my FIRST high school, which was a ski academy in Vermont, and consisted of a bunch of overly-competitive jocks. I, being the short kid who liked computers, obviously was not in a good situation there.
So what am I trying to say? Attention all young geeks: your problems are caused by stupid people. You are surrounded by stupid, uneducated people who do not know how to behave. They are acting purely on instinct, like our ape ancestors. These are the same people who will grow up and vote straight down party lines in every single presidential election because they don't have the brainpower to think independently. You are different. You think on your own. Pity them, because they are slaves to their homecoming crowns.
Course thats just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Democracy in America is happening, but it's not electing the President. If you want to ask a question of the Democrat or the Republic candidate, you either:
a) can't ask the question because you won't have the opportunity or
b) your question will be filtered, passed through middle men, and molded so that its a good lead-in to their pre-packaged, party-authorized answers.
The only guys who are making the Presidential Election truly democratic are the guys who don't have a chance of being elected (eg, Browne and McReynolds).
BTW, I'm voting for Browne.
The last I heard, the IRS is more of a "quasi-government" agency. They're a not-for-profit federally funded agency that does the government's dirty work.
... this coincides with Microsoft's announcement of its new CEO, Leona Helmsley!
I have done a good amount of skiing that most people would qualify as extreme, and let me just say that climbing to the top is always the hardest part. The skiing is the reward for your climb and for your planning. To be honest, Everest probably wasn't that hard to ski. Being the tallest mountain in the world doesn't make it the steepest or the most difficult skiing terrain. I'm sure it was hard, but most people with a solid background in extreme skiing probably wouldn't have too hard a time with it. The hard part would STILL be the ascent. Climbing Mt. Everest, with or without skis on your back, is one of the most dangerous activities a human can do.
I went to my school's job fair this week as well. I stopped at some "e solutions provider" booth and asked them the usual questions, (what do you guys do, could I get an internship, etc). I told them that I was pretty picky about the internships and jobs I like to consider, because I'm a Unix geek and too many places just try to fit companies of all sizes with NT-based solutions.
Their reply was something to the effect of, "well, that's exactly what we do. We develop strictly for NT, because that's how it's done in business today. NT is simply the standard, and it's the best." I laughed at them and left, but I could have laughed at them all I wanted because in the end, they may be wrong about NT being the best, but they're RIGHT about NT being what people want. It's very saddening, but companies really DO trust Microsoft.
On that note, I think I'm going to do some more drinking.
mmmm... beer on a Wednesday night. Brings back fond memories of freshman year. :)
The games are NOT fixed. Believe me, if the games were fixed, every one in the world would know about it. Olympic athletes are 20 year olds with big mouths who spent their entire childhood training so that one day, they could gloriously prevail against the best in the world.
The games are most definitely not fixed, and any attempts to prove they are simply show how ignorant you are. I just hope that no Olympic athlete has read your post. People like you make me sick.
This post makes a valid point. come on moderators, use your heads.
We still have a Campus Printing Center at my school. They make me want to go Joe Pesci.
I used to be an amateur ski racer; I even know a few kids who made it to the top and are now on the US Ski and Snowboard teams. What's unfortunate is that the IOC has let soft money and greed cause them to ignore the simple fact that without sponsors, some of these athletes wouldn't even have the equipment they need to compete. Runners may not have the money to buy running shoes, and the IOC is now telling them "sure, you can get your shoes for free, but if they're not from [our sponsors] then you better accept your medal barefoot." Most amateur athletes got put through athletic academies on full scholarship and will get the same when/if they go to college, simply because 1) they're too poor to begin with, or 2) if they spent their time working, then they wouldn't be spending it training.
I just hope the IOC doesn't start banning athletes from wearing branded equipment while competing. If a skier couldn't pop his ski off and hold it up for the cameras after his run, I think we'd start seeing lawsuits being filed by ski manufacturers against the IOC.