I drive a manual in my daily commute, and I get repetitive straing simptoms in my right ankle, before I get any in my left knee:-). Pushing the gas pedal can be so haaarrrd:-).
What you are missing is the max RPM stop. Most cars have an RPM limiter. It cuts off ignition temporarily if teh engine is running too fast. It's well in the red zone, though, so it's not really prudent to get your engine going fast enough for the RPM limiter to kick in, unless it's a race car and you don't care about engine wear. Or stolen car. Or rental car:-).
My VW used to do that -- the accelerator pedal got stuck sometimes, and I'd have to get under the hood and bang on some pulley to get it to release. My mechanic couldn't figure out what the problem was, so I drove it like that for a year or so. The pedal didn't get stuck every time, only sometimes, and only in really bad weather:-)
What happenes when you turn off the ignition, and I speak from experience, is:
1. You loose power steering. Unless your car is fly-by-wire... sorry, drive-by-wire... whatever, I think Volvo made one experimental model like that, but most normal cars retain manual steering even with he ignition off. Incidentally, the darn VW had no power steering to start with, so I didn't have to worry about loosing steering assist. Anyways, power steering is really only useful when you are parking. At speed, steering assist makes very little difference.
2. You have one brake assist charge in the vacuum accumulator. That is, you can apply the brakes once, normally. The next time you brake you have no brake assist, and you have to really lean on the brake pedal hard. Thankfully, I'm a big guy, so that wasn't a problem.
3. Steering wheel LOCKS UP. This is a theft prevention device that almost all cars have. Once you take the key out, the steering wheel would lock in a turned position. It would not lock up if the wheels are facing straight, only if you turn. The locking device is rather flimsy, and car thiefs would often brake it by yanking on the wheel real hard. Unfortunately, at speed this is not an option.
So, here's the algorithm:
1. Your gas pedal gets stuck.
2. You make sure the wheels are facing straight to prevent steering from locking up.
3. You turn off the ignition, put the car in neutral, and turn the ignition back on. The car is in neutral, so the engine won't re-start, but the ignition key is in "Run" position, so the steering won't lock up either.
4. You hit the emergency flashers, lean on the horn, and pull off. Nicely done. Don't forget that your brakes require a lot more control input then normal.
Now, I've done the above procedure, what, 20 or 30 times. It's fun, especially if you have a nervous passenger in the car, who gets scared out of their pants:-). Though the most I got a passenger scared was when I forgot to unlock the glove box before driving, and his lighter was in there. The glovebox in the VW, like most cars, locks with the same ignition key. I pulled the key out, unlocked the glove box, and restarted the engine, and gave the lighter to my friend, all while going 90 mph. Nothing dangerous, considering that the road was really straight, so I didn't even make a face, or even think it was gong to be scary. My friend, however, who wasn't used to this as much as I was, crapped his pants. Pardon my French.
Another option is to simply put the car in neutral. Any manual gearbox allows that, and most automatics would shift to neutral under power too. The engine starts racing, and quickly hits the max RPM stop, but you don't risk getting your steering wheel locked up:-). I would always turn the ignition off, though, since I didn't know if the stupid VW had a max RPM stop, and I didn't care to test it:-).
DISCLAIMER: If you do something stupid and get hurt, it's own damn fault, and don't blame me. Just because it worked for me doesn't mean it won't kill you.
The Palm device also should be upgradable. So why not have a build-in WiFi and upgrade both at the same time? Besides, most changes to WiFi over the years have been speed-related, and the little handheld device just can't use datastream wider than a good old 11Mbps 802.11B can provide. Unless you stream pr0n, that is.
..every Windows user I know has a computer at least 50% full of stolen shit (usually including the OS itself)
50%? Are you kidding? It's rare to see a Windows computer with less than 100% pure, unadulterated, stolen shit in it. Seriously, unless it's a corporate computer, have you really seen one where the user would have paid a single red cent for any of the soft/data, other than the kids' games?
Someone makes a huge, f$%king, wind, f$%king, turbine. So, f^&king, what? I'm, like, sitting here, and looking at this computer, and I really couldn't care less about some wind turbines. I mean, c'mon, my 2-yr-old son would probably find this interesting news. Really. He'd, like' point his little finger at it and say GHOOOO-WOOO. I'm, like, too old to get excited about this s@#t/. Really:-)
This is precisely why the topic of debate in Congress needs to be the reevaluation of copyright, rather than the assumption that the current legislation are sufficient for our needs.
To bad they don't read slashdot.
Major music labels (labels represented by the RIAA) have the most to lose, since most downloaders don't buy the albums they're leeching. Ten years ago they would've bought the album, or one of their friends would've bought the album. Now they simply download it.
What RIAA labels do is essentially this:
1. Find a crappy artist that has a potential to appeal to stupid teens.
2. Promote the artist to stardom, investing money in promotion.
3. Cash in on the records.
The artist gets a little bit of the records revenues, plus the ability to gather stadiums full of people for their concerts for a few years. Without the copyright there would be less record revenues, but the artist could still make the money on concerts, so their cash flow would not suffer that much. And I don't care about the RIAA's cash flow. Jack Valenti and his gang are parasites that don't deserve a cent of my money, or yours. So the only thing that would change for the artists is that the artists would not be able to get a label to promote them on the promise of the recording money. They would have to either promote themselves using the internet (like indie artists do now), or pay some of their future concert revenue for promotion. Either way, it's a viable business model, both for the artists and for the promoters.
How can you make that argument based the number of lines written? You are right, "lines written" is a far worse metric than "jobs dependent upon". Better yet, measure public good directly, as in "software that would not exist" were copyright not.
I suppose commercial commodity software would not be possible. You'd need someone to pay you to write an operating system and live off of it. like Sun pays their programmers ot work on Solaris. But the software would still get written. The only change you'd notice is that "Microsoft Windows" would probably be called "IBM Windows", or "IBM OS/2". And Bill Gates' paycheck would probably say IBM on it.
As intrusive as a bill like this might seem at first glance, it bothers me that there are those who think it's their God-given right to free music or movies simply because they're available to download.
As righteous as a bill like this may seem at the first glance, it bothers me that there are those who think that copyright is a God-given law, and not something some fat-walleted corporate assholes came up with fairly recently, around a 100 years ago. I really don't see any reason why copyright law shouldn't be abolished altogether. I doubt that a significant percentage of musicians, artists or computer programmers would suffer financially because of it. The only people who would loose profits are the RIAA labels, the commodity-software companies, book authors and song writers. Only the book authors and song writers have my simpathy, so I would just keep copyright for text only, just the way it used ot be before sound-recording devices ever appeared.
And don't give me the "starving artist" bullshit. Most musicians make lots more money off concerts than off recordings. And those that do could easily compensate by doing more concerts, and selling t-shirts or what-not. And commodity software is best done OSS-style anyways.
Now about software. Most software, line-count wise, written in the world, is custom software, written to order. Commodity software companies employ just a small percentage of all programmers. Try to think, of the software developers you know personally, how many would loose, or have to change, their jobs if the copyright law were abolished? I doubt it's more than 1%.
I suppose, without copyright, companies like microsoft would have to get payed by the hardware manufacturers, and would make a lot less money than they do now. But they make obscene amounts of money now, and I don't see why we should help them to do that by having copyright law.
Now, call me commie, mod me troll -1, and go pay your 10yr old sons $100,000 bail to get him out of jail where they put him for copying some stupid Britny Spears CD.
>I'm a big fan of mplayer, but there are many formats it wouldn't play if it weren't for the proprietary codecs.
I'm a big fan of MediaPlayer, but there are many proprietary formats that mplayer plays much better, including some M$ proprietary formats. By "plays much better" I mean seeks faster, jams less, zooms better, recovers from bad bits in the stream faster, etc. In other words, my impression was, there are a few formats that MediaPlayer won't play, and there are a few formats that mplayer won't play, but in general mplayer is better, and has fewer glitches. I was actually surprised to realize this, given that mplayer is an open-source application program, and OSS applications are usually catching up to commercial counterparts, especially where attention to detail goes.
I think the reason for lower OSS application quality is the different prioritization of the bug list. OSS developera fix the bugs (and implement features) in the order of being interesting. A simple to fix, obvious bug can take a long time to get to because there are other bugs that are more interesting and exciting to hunt down. An obvious feature may be missing from an application for a long time because the developer cares more about more innovative or more exciting features. There is nothing you can do about it, short of paying people money to actually get mundane stuff done.
Commercial software gets its bug lists prioritized by the customer service feedback. The bugs that cause the dumb-ass users the most grief get fixed first. Then, the next release deadline prevents the developers from fixing the really challenging bugs.
In Russia they DON'T PAY for software. It just doesnt make sense. Let me explain. Suppose you have these choices:
1. Pay hard-earned dollars for a limited version of software.
2. Get a full version for free.
The dollars you have to pay if you take option 1 are MUCH harder to earn in Russia than in any developed country. So, to be fair, for you Americans, multiply the price of the software by 10. Say, you'd have to pay $360 for the preview WinXP. Would you ever seriously consider NOT using a pirated XP pro instead? I don't think it would even occur to you. Besides, if you don't like downloading OS images from the internet, you can always go out and by a factory-cut CD full of latest versions of pretty much any software for about $5.
To sell anything in Russia M$ would have to really compete with pirates. They'd have to sell XP Pro for, say, 36 cents, not $36. Which is about what it's worth anyways.
I just wonder what these politicians are smoking when they come up with these "solutions."
These politicians are simply doing what they can with what they got. What they got (laws) is inappropriate for solving technical problems, such as spam, kiddie porn, and spyware. Politicians don't understand it because they are stupid. They are not smoking anything. They are just stupid, which is quite a bit worse. If they weren't stupid they'd leave technical problems the hell alone, to be solved by technical means.
So, anyways, is anything I said above news to you?
(not to mention they'll just repackage it and sell it as new)
I think not. I think, they'll tape it up and sell as "open box - customer return" at about 75% the price, reducing the price further until someone buys it. Which is sorta fair for LCDs with dead pixels.
Newegg can't do it, but they could put it up on eBay. I bet, even if Newegg doesn't do it, some places would. So, it's a safe bet most LCD monitors on eBay have dead pixels. So, I'm not buying an LCD monitor off eBay. DAMN IT, I'm so logical today!
Slashdot Mirror
I drive a manual in my daily commute, and I get repetitive straing simptoms in my right ankle, before I get any in my left knee:-). Pushing the gas pedal can be so haaarrrd:-).
What you are missing is the max RPM stop. Most cars have an RPM limiter. It cuts off ignition temporarily if teh engine is running too fast. It's well in the red zone, though, so it's not really prudent to get your engine going fast enough for the RPM limiter to kick in, unless it's a race car and you don't care about engine wear. Or stolen car. Or rental car:-).
My VW used to do that -- the accelerator pedal got stuck sometimes, and I'd have to get under the hood and bang on some pulley to get it to release. My mechanic couldn't figure out what the problem was, so I drove it like that for a year or so. The pedal didn't get stuck every time, only sometimes, and only in really bad weather:-)
What happenes when you turn off the ignition, and I speak from experience, is:
1. You loose power steering. Unless your car is fly-by-wire... sorry, drive-by-wire... whatever, I think Volvo made one experimental model like that, but most normal cars retain manual steering even with he ignition off. Incidentally, the darn VW had no power steering to start with, so I didn't have to worry about loosing steering assist. Anyways, power steering is really only useful when you are parking. At speed, steering assist makes very little difference.
2. You have one brake assist charge in the vacuum accumulator. That is, you can apply the brakes once, normally. The next time you brake you have no brake assist, and you have to really lean on the brake pedal hard. Thankfully, I'm a big guy, so that wasn't a problem.
3. Steering wheel LOCKS UP. This is a theft prevention device that almost all cars have. Once you take the key out, the steering wheel would lock in a turned position. It would not lock up if the wheels are facing straight, only if you turn. The locking device is rather flimsy, and car thiefs would often brake it by yanking on the wheel real hard. Unfortunately, at speed this is not an option.
So, here's the algorithm:
1. Your gas pedal gets stuck.
2. You make sure the wheels are facing straight to prevent steering from locking up.
3. You turn off the ignition, put the car in neutral, and turn the ignition back on. The car is in neutral, so the engine won't re-start, but the ignition key is in "Run" position, so the steering won't lock up either.
4. You hit the emergency flashers, lean on the horn, and pull off. Nicely done. Don't forget that your brakes require a lot more control input then normal.
Now, I've done the above procedure, what, 20 or 30 times. It's fun, especially if you have a nervous passenger in the car, who gets scared out of their pants:-). Though the most I got a passenger scared was when I forgot to unlock the glove box before driving, and his lighter was in there. The glovebox in the VW, like most cars, locks with the same ignition key. I pulled the key out, unlocked the glove box, and restarted the engine, and gave the lighter to my friend, all while going 90 mph. Nothing dangerous, considering that the road was really straight, so I didn't even make a face, or even think it was gong to be scary. My friend, however, who wasn't used to this as much as I was, crapped his pants. Pardon my French.
Another option is to simply put the car in neutral. Any manual gearbox allows that, and most automatics would shift to neutral under power too. The engine starts racing, and quickly hits the max RPM stop, but you don't risk getting your steering wheel locked up:-). I would always turn the ignition off, though, since I didn't know if the stupid VW had a max RPM stop, and I didn't care to test it:-).
DISCLAIMER: If you do something stupid and get hurt, it's own damn fault, and don't blame me. Just because it worked for me doesn't mean it won't kill you.
...a few cases. It's disgusting. Made me puke.
It's a plane!..
It's a Russian cargo ship full of human poo burning up in the atmosphere!
Duh..
And you don't have to poop on top of the same heap either:-)
Is the reason for you not giving an altavista link that altavista doesn't exist anymore?-:)
Well.. What does it run then? In the cockpit photos you can see the console screen. I couldn't quite make out the start button:-)
The Palm device also should be upgradable. So why not have a build-in WiFi and upgrade both at the same time? Besides, most changes to WiFi over the years have been speed-related, and the little handheld device just can't use datastream wider than a good old 11Mbps 802.11B can provide. Unless you stream pr0n, that is.
..every Windows user I know has a computer at least 50% full of stolen shit (usually including the OS itself)
50%? Are you kidding? It's rare to see a Windows computer with less than 100% pure, unadulterated, stolen shit in it. Seriously, unless it's a corporate computer, have you really seen one where the user would have paid a single red cent for any of the soft/data, other than the kids' games?
Someone makes a huge, f$%king, wind, f$%king, turbine. So, f^&king, what? I'm, like, sitting here, and looking at this computer, and I really couldn't care less about some wind turbines. I mean, c'mon, my 2-yr-old son would probably find this interesting news. Really. He'd, like' point his little finger at it and say GHOOOO-WOOO. I'm, like, too old to get excited about this s@#t/. Really:-)
P.S. This is a joke, damn it. Laugh.
IE does it all the time:-)
USPTO Patent Application
Summary:
The following are claimed in this patent:
1. Patenting and Invention
2. Sueing competitors that try to use similar technology as patented in paragraph (1).
A format worthy of the content!
This is precisely why the topic of debate in Congress needs to be the reevaluation of copyright, rather than the assumption that the current legislation are sufficient for our needs.
To bad they don't read slashdot.
Major music labels (labels represented by the RIAA) have the most to lose, since most downloaders don't buy the albums they're leeching. Ten years ago they would've bought the album, or one of their friends would've bought the album. Now they simply download it.
What RIAA labels do is essentially this:
1. Find a crappy artist that has a potential to appeal to stupid teens.
2. Promote the artist to stardom, investing money in promotion.
3. Cash in on the records.
The artist gets a little bit of the records revenues, plus the ability to gather stadiums full of people for their concerts for a few years. Without the copyright there would be less record revenues, but the artist could still make the money on concerts, so their cash flow would not suffer that much. And I don't care about the RIAA's cash flow. Jack Valenti and his gang are parasites that don't deserve a cent of my money, or yours. So the only thing that would change for the artists is that the artists would not be able to get a label to promote them on the promise of the recording money. They would have to either promote themselves using the internet (like indie artists do now), or pay some of their future concert revenue for promotion. Either way, it's a viable business model, both for the artists and for the promoters.
How can you make that argument based the number of lines written?
You are right, "lines written" is a far worse metric than "jobs dependent upon". Better yet, measure public good directly, as in "software that would not exist" were copyright not.
I suppose commercial commodity software would not be possible. You'd need someone to pay you to write an operating system and live off of it. like Sun pays their programmers ot work on Solaris. But the software would still get written. The only change you'd notice is that "Microsoft Windows" would probably be called "IBM Windows", or "IBM OS/2". And Bill Gates' paycheck would probably say IBM on it.
Since when is marijuana a problem?
I can't speak for your country, but here in the US marijuana becomes the problem the moment they find it on you.
Threatening to throw people in jail for sharing files is akin to say, huge sentences for selling marijuana.
I thought they still have huge sentences for selling marijuana. So, I suppose, they still think that solved that problem:-).
As intrusive as a bill like this might seem at first glance, it bothers me that there are those who think it's their God-given right to free music or movies simply because they're available to download.
As righteous as a bill like this may seem at the first glance, it bothers me that there are those who think that copyright is a God-given law, and not something some fat-walleted corporate assholes came up with fairly recently, around a 100 years ago. I really don't see any reason why copyright law shouldn't be abolished altogether. I doubt that a significant percentage of musicians, artists or computer programmers would suffer financially because of it. The only people who would loose profits are the RIAA labels, the commodity-software companies, book authors and song writers. Only the book authors and song writers have my simpathy, so I would just keep copyright for text only, just the way it used ot be before sound-recording devices ever appeared.
And don't give me the "starving artist" bullshit. Most musicians make lots more money off concerts than off recordings. And those that do could easily compensate by doing more concerts, and selling t-shirts or what-not. And commodity software is best done OSS-style anyways.
Now about software. Most software, line-count wise, written in the world, is custom software, written to order. Commodity software companies employ just a small percentage of all programmers. Try to think, of the software developers you know personally, how many would loose, or have to change, their jobs if the copyright law were abolished? I doubt it's more than 1%.
I suppose, without copyright, companies like microsoft would have to get payed by the hardware manufacturers, and would make a lot less money than they do now. But they make obscene amounts of money now, and I don't see why we should help them to do that by having copyright law.
Now, call me commie, mod me troll -1, and go pay your 10yr old sons $100,000 bail to get him out of jail where they put him for copying some stupid Britny Spears CD.
>I'm a big fan of mplayer, but there are many formats it wouldn't play if it weren't for the proprietary codecs.
I'm a big fan of MediaPlayer, but there are many proprietary formats that mplayer plays much better, including some M$ proprietary formats. By "plays much better" I mean seeks faster, jams less, zooms better, recovers from bad bits in the stream faster, etc. In other words, my impression was, there are a few formats that MediaPlayer won't play, and there are a few formats that mplayer won't play, but in general mplayer is better, and has fewer glitches. I was actually surprised to realize this, given that mplayer is an open-source application program, and OSS applications are usually catching up to commercial counterparts, especially where attention to detail goes.
I think the reason for lower OSS application quality is the different prioritization of the bug list. OSS developera fix the bugs (and implement features) in the order of being interesting. A simple to fix, obvious bug can take a long time to get to because there are other bugs that are more interesting and exciting to hunt down. An obvious feature may be missing from an application for a long time because the developer cares more about more innovative or more exciting features. There is nothing you can do about it, short of paying people money to actually get mundane stuff done.
Commercial software gets its bug lists prioritized by the customer service feedback. The bugs that cause the dumb-ass users the most grief get fixed first. Then, the next release deadline prevents the developers from fixing the really challenging bugs.
In Russia they DON'T PAY for software. It just doesnt make sense. Let me explain. Suppose you have these choices:
1. Pay hard-earned dollars for a limited version of software.
2. Get a full version for free.
The dollars you have to pay if you take option 1 are MUCH harder to earn in Russia than in any developed country. So, to be fair, for you Americans, multiply the price of the software by 10. Say, you'd have to pay $360 for the preview WinXP. Would you ever seriously consider NOT using a pirated XP pro instead? I don't think it would even occur to you. Besides, if you don't like downloading OS images from the internet, you can always go out and by a factory-cut CD full of latest versions of pretty much any software for about $5.
To sell anything in Russia M$ would have to really compete with pirates. They'd have to sell XP Pro for, say, 36 cents, not $36. Which is about what it's worth anyways.
How hard is it to code a fucking layout interpreter and display program?
Depends on what you mean by "fucking":-)
I just wonder what these politicians are smoking when they come up with these "solutions."
These politicians are simply doing what they can with what they got. What they got (laws) is inappropriate for solving technical problems, such as spam, kiddie porn, and spyware. Politicians don't understand it because they are stupid. They are not smoking anything. They are just stupid, which is quite a bit worse. If they weren't stupid they'd leave technical problems the hell alone, to be solved by technical means.
So, anyways, is anything I said above news to you?
You look for a love song
You look for a love song?? Ehm..
(not to mention they'll just repackage it and sell it as new)
I think not. I think, they'll tape it up and sell as "open box - customer return" at about 75% the price, reducing the price further until someone buys it. Which is sorta fair for LCDs with dead pixels.
Newegg can't do it, but they could put it up on eBay. I bet, even if Newegg doesn't do it, some places would. So, it's a safe bet most LCD monitors on eBay have dead pixels. So, I'm not buying an LCD monitor off eBay. DAMN IT, I'm so logical today!
...for pong is arcanoid. I'd love to see that mechanized:-)