Kazaa, Limewire, etc.!?!?!? No, I mean if they are banning the SALE of the games then doesn't that mean that they just told everyone to go to filesharing services and get it that way. Seems like the Australian government is promoting piracy with this attitude.
Funny, I never said I was justifying theft, only that I wouldn't download music by OR support artists who were against filesharing; maybe you should read again without your current belief system this time as you obviously didn't get the point and figured that what you thought you read was what I said....sorry to say it wasn't.
Also funny that the word "idiot" would be considered a troll/flamebait and no one modded you down. Oh, and it's "rIdiculous"...note the "i". Idiot.
So what you're really saying is that we should drill for more oil to maintain our current(and usually shallow) lifestyles, not find a better energy source to replace it?
"I bet you didn't know Maynard James Keenan of Tool is against illegal music piracy."
I sure didn't but now that I do that's one less artist that I'll be supporting with my money(or bother downloading his music either because that only gives him a new statistic to whine about "downloading is up but my CD sales are down"). That's my approach to this: support artists/software companies who aren't uptight about filesharing because otherwise it's much like paying traffic fines, each time you do it's equivalent to paying the officer to harass you for something retarded. In that particular instance you face jail time but that costs the government money and makes them that much less capable of repeating it especially if people unite to do this enmass ala civil disobedience but Keenan can't do anything except NOT make money if I refuse to listen to his music, buy his CD's, go to his shows, buy t-shirts, etc. and I don't download his crap either. If that's done enmass, Keenan goes broke and that's one less loser artist to complain about a problem that mostly exists in their mind.
Thanks for that site. I'll use it to spread the truth. Kinda hard to convince someone when MY understanding of the words was last updated when I was in 7th grade science class about 25 years ago.
Has anyone tried actually educating people about the differences between "theory" and "hypothesis"? People are usually thinking of a hypothesis when they refer to a theory.
Theory - 1. A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena.
Hypothesis - 1. A tentative explanation for an observation, phenomenon, or scientific problem that can be tested by further investigation.
There is a definition of "theory" that means what they think it means but that's not the same definition that science uses.
"Have you ever been punished for something you didn't do? You NEVER forget it, and you NEVER forgive either. It eats at you till you can find some way of revenge. I'll prove.... (most likely that I can do something really bad and get away with it, to balance out the unfair punishment.)"
I know EXACTLY what you are saying. Basically, the above is a recipe for sociopathic behavior. Having been in the wrong place at the wrong time, I got punished for things I never did and eventually I got really, really good at staying aware of what was going on so I wouldn't get in trouble AND doing really nasty things without being caught, repeatedly. Didn't make me a better person, made me a better "criminal" kinda like how putting marijuana dealers in maximum security makes them excellent murderers, thieves, rapists, etc.
I guess some of you guys aren't aware of "sundown towns". Sundown towns are/were towns where there were laws, sometimes written, that said "Ni gg er, don't let the sun go down on you in this town".(I'm not a racist, just quoting what most actually said so you can understand the effect it gave) The thing is, none of these towns were in the South, they were in the northern states and the reasoning from the South is "why would I make my maid/gardener/etc. leave town?"
I'm not gonna claim to be all knowledgeable on the subject as I just heard about this a few months ago on Active Voice Radio(scroll about 2/3 down and there is an audio clip of the interview..VERY enlightening), the author's site is: James Loewen Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism. Anyway, all that "the North was against slavery and racism" bit is a huge crock o' crap; geographic location had little-to-nothing to do with an individual's attitudes on the subject.
From TFA: "for a fee that Warner says will be similar to the cost of a DVD"
It doesn't look like they're planning on passing any of the savings on to the real distributors/consumers, that was my point. And as has been stated repeatedly, if the prices are not going to be reduced I'd rather just buy the DVD and save my bandwidth(upload and download) for things that profit me as an individual. They need to pass on some form of secondary gain here and SIGNIFICANLTY cheaper pricing or free movies in exchange for sharing your bandwidth are the first two that come to mind.
That was the question I asked myself actually. Why would I want to help WB in the distribution if I'm PAYING them for the movie too? Now if they gave me a free gigabyte of download for every 2 I upload, then I'd consider their service. I guess they think that we like the P2P idea enough that we'll pay regular prices just to use it!?!? Their reasoning here is beyond me.
I was at a 2600 Magazine meeting back in 1993 and was talking with some FBI agents, who were actually semi-knowledgeable suprisingly, about how they had found some holes in BIOS code that was big enough to fit a virus into and how it had already been accomplished. I checked into it a bit and the BIOS they described had like 120 bytes of writeable memory which was more than enough for the foundations of a virus.
Don't suppose anyone bothered reading the update on TFA. I states that it is a patent *application*. Another poster pointed out they were trying to trademark the emoticon, not patent it. I haven't checked into this yet but that's far more likely to succeed.
Well for non-laptop keyboards you can seriously just take it in the shower and spray it off. You have to give it at LEAST 24 hours to dry though. The water won't hurt anything as long as there is no power. This will probably not work with wireless keyboards or the like as they have much more electronics and possibly backup batteries, etc.
How do you "just deal with" recurring nightmares, waking up in a cold sweat no less than 5 times a week, flashbacks, feelings of impending doom, or wanting to smash someone's head in if they make loud sudden noises even if they're just children playing, and many other completely uncontrollable events? Even worse, if you're like me and you don't even discover you have PTSD until 12 years after the event and "just dealing with it" isn't an option any more...how do you cope? If you're such an advanced psychologist that you can make one of these seemingly half-witted, oversimplistic Dr. Phil-esque statements, then please tell me how you "just deal with it" cause I'll be happy to let you go through what I went through, which since it wasn't rape or war it is easily reproduced, to prove your point. Skip that, let someone rape you.
You need to meet my sister and her brother-in-law as well as a former friend of mine. My sister had a corrupted system and upon hearing that she lost her "valuable" bookmark file, I told her specifically not to touch the damn thing. Guess what, she did...and she let her brother-in-law get online and browse for a while...so when I got to the scene to recover data...there was nothing to recover...no bookmark file, none of her email, her Mozilla profile..all of it gone.
Then there's my former friend who got a notice from Win95 that he was running out of hard disk space, so he dropped into DOS and started deleting files...randomly...system files. He had no install disk for 95 so the system was hosed.
And I've known a few people who have done a "deltree c:\windows" which wouldn't mean too much these days except it was when the desktop was in the windows directory tree and, you guessed it, a bunch of valuable data was on their desktop.
Now you might mean that they won't harm the HARDWARE if they do that but if they'd been working for a corporation and had done that..they'd be homeless.
I confess, I ran a helpdesk and I have discovered that there are no books that will ever teach anyone who isn't already knowledgeable about computers. It's pessimistic but as real as it gets.
This is the conclusion I have come to: When it comes to computers, if a user is going to buy/use almost ANY piece of equipment or software then they need a license/permit in the same regard you need a license/permit to use a car. If you have a permit, then you can use this equipment only if a licensed user is guiding/helping you. I saw this as necessary when people would install firewalls without understanding how they work and the user would click on the "deny all" button just once and the little idiots would promptly call my helpdesk expecting one of my employees to help them get back online which, depending on the client's awareness could take several days if they didn't know what the firewall's tasktray icon, etc. looked like. This was especially common with many of the "Internet Security Suites"...ZA, NAV, MAV. Or the wireless routers that people would buy and upon hooking them up, leave it wide open so anyone could connect.
Local libraries already give free classes on computers so I'd put more funding into the libraries to give the classes/tests. Tests could be taken first so the skilled wouldn't have to be sitting in class wasting time and money. And enforcing it should be easy enough; equip every computer, etc. with smartcard readers or biometrics. Get caught leaving your card in a system so that someone who doesn't have a license could play unattended and that person causes problems, like getting infected with a virus and spreading it, and your license is revoked in realtime and they idiot would forfeit their chance of ever getting one, so it'd keep it very honest because nobody is gonna risk losing their right to use a computer because Uncle Joe wants to browse porn sites with his pants down.
Besides, if we make it like it's a special club that only an experienced few can join, everyone just might suddenly have the willpower to take some of those classes, just like we did with drivers' education classes in high school. If it's treated like anyone, no matter how dumb they are, can get and use one then they will not treat these machines with the respect that they deserve/demand much in the way that anyone can have a child and thusly we have lots of problems with child abuse, neglect, etc.
Let it be known I'm against government regulation for the most part but it's typically the idiots who escalate the problems with virii, etc. I mean how many times have you heard "I got an attachment from someone and I wasn't expecting it. When I tried to open it a window popped up and then nothing. That's not why the ISP cut off my service claiming I was sending spam email is it?". Why should they be allowed to waste a company's money for "tech support" that more closely resembles idiot support? After another generation, this won't be an issue as computers will be a part of everything and most of the idiots will be dead(most of our problem clients were in their 70's) but for now..we should let this make some tax dollars that can be used to, say, put muni-wifi in cities, etc. and get these people an education or off the damn internet.
And just so you will know how bad it can be, here's a little ditty...it really happened to me.
I'm trying to get a woman who is using Win98 back online and the easiest solution was looking like powering all the way down, turning the cable modem off and then turning everything back on. This is how it sounded:
"Ok, I need you to go to your start button on your desktop and power down your computer"
2 seconds goes by.
"It's off."
Thinking she pressed the sleep button I said,
"That was quick, ok, can you turn it back on for me"
2 more seconds
"It's back on"
Knowing that the computer cannot possibly come OUT of sleep mode that quickly I slowly and step-by-step walk her through the shutdown procedure, I hear the logoff tune and we get her back
Benjamin Franklin has always been at the top of my list of true heroes, even Einstein doesn't compare. No one in this day remotely compares to him as has been pointed out in the parent. He inspires the inventor and the revolutionary in me and I wish that people thought more of him than the fact he's on the 100 dollar bill. We should all take a good look at what he did, take one little piece of that and try our best to create that in our lives. For instance, he used to print revolutionary literature, so maybe we could do the same; printers are everywhere these days, and there are great topics that the general public should know about such as common law or that juries can judge the law, not just the accused or a million other topics. Ben would approve, I believe.
Not really. Raytracing is a bunch of complex calculations to be certain but unlike cryptography, the result isn't already known so you'd have to determine if you got the correct answer or one of the trillions of incorrect ones. In other words, it's great for factoring where you have answer X and you want to know which two prime numbers were multiplied to get it as it will compute all the possibilities simultaneously "until" the answer is found, but in raytracing you don't have the answer beforehand and so nothing to test to see if you got the correct answer.
Think of it as a way to weed the hundreds of trillions of wrong answers out in equations and leave you with the one good one.
The reasoning is because a quantum cpu does all of its calculations at the exact same instant. This is great for cryptography, well at least cracking it, because it would need only one iteration of an algorithm to extract a key. For Doom, this would be pointless as each computation doesn't require trillions of billions of iterations to get a single answer like, say, where a player is on the map or a pixel on the screen.
Yeah, back in 1994 or so a friend showed me some printing he had done with a dot matrix printer and then he made me listen to the thing as it printed it. Heavy metal is what I heard...well the rhythms were heavy metal...not the actual sound.
This is probably very off topic but...
There was a joke going around in the mid-1990's that was about what you would have to do to a Cray supercomputer to convert it into an IBM PC. It involved taking most of the extra terminals and putting them in an infinite loop and disabling extra CPU's, etc. It was really quite funny(to a geek anyway). Problem is, as it is always, I had the only copy I've seen in ages stored on a hard drive that went bad the day before I was scheduled to back it up so I have no recollection of the exact text. It was the 90's..backup wasn't cheap for anything over 100mb and I had GB's to do..floppies were not the answer..heh. Anyway, I don't suppose anyone knows where the text to that is? I've searched with no luck.
Nope, it's not a file sharing site. Whoever had the reasoning that since it had links it could be used for file sharing needs to realize that only put every website on the planet on the **AA's hitlist with such a sweeping generalization. Having A building block of file sharing doesn't remotely equate to file sharing. BTW, they do a good job of keeping the 12 year olds off of MySpace, wish they could do that here nearly as well.
For the longest time I was wondering who this Mao Zedung/Zedong character was and then it hit me...somebody's misspelling Mao Tse Tung. Is this in the new textbooks on history or is this just another case of how some idiot's inability to research snowballed into thousands of idiots not researching either? Of course, I could be one of those idiots but googling Mao Tse Tung gave Zedong as the secondary and possibly improper spelling.
Slashdot Mirror
Kazaa, Limewire, etc.!?!?!? No, I mean if they are banning the SALE of the games then doesn't that mean that they just told everyone to go to filesharing services and get it that way. Seems like the Australian government is promoting piracy with this attitude.
Also funny that the word "idiot" would be considered a troll/flamebait and no one modded you down. Oh, and it's "rIdiculous"...note the "i". Idiot.
So what you're really saying is that we should drill for more oil to maintain our current(and usually shallow) lifestyles, not find a better energy source to replace it?
I sure didn't but now that I do that's one less artist that I'll be supporting with my money(or bother downloading his music either because that only gives him a new statistic to whine about "downloading is up but my CD sales are down"). That's my approach to this: support artists/software companies who aren't uptight about filesharing because otherwise it's much like paying traffic fines, each time you do it's equivalent to paying the officer to harass you for something retarded. In that particular instance you face jail time but that costs the government money and makes them that much less capable of repeating it especially if people unite to do this enmass ala civil disobedience but Keenan can't do anything except NOT make money if I refuse to listen to his music, buy his CD's, go to his shows, buy t-shirts, etc. and I don't download his crap either. If that's done enmass, Keenan goes broke and that's one less loser artist to complain about a problem that mostly exists in their mind.
Thanks for that site. I'll use it to spread the truth. Kinda hard to convince someone when MY understanding of the words was last updated when I was in 7th grade science class about 25 years ago.
Theory - 1. A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena.
Hypothesis - 1. A tentative explanation for an observation, phenomenon, or scientific problem that can be tested by further investigation.
There is a definition of "theory" that means what they think it means but that's not the same definition that science uses.
I know EXACTLY what you are saying. Basically, the above is a recipe for sociopathic behavior. Having been in the wrong place at the wrong time, I got punished for things I never did and eventually I got really, really good at staying aware of what was going on so I wouldn't get in trouble AND doing really nasty things without being caught, repeatedly. Didn't make me a better person, made me a better "criminal" kinda like how putting marijuana dealers in maximum security makes them excellent murderers, thieves, rapists, etc.
I'm not gonna claim to be all knowledgeable on the subject as I just heard about this a few months ago on Active Voice Radio(scroll about 2/3 down and there is an audio clip of the interview..VERY enlightening), the author's site is: James Loewen Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism. Anyway, all that "the North was against slavery and racism" bit is a huge crock o' crap; geographic location had little-to-nothing to do with an individual's attitudes on the subject.
If you RTFA, they are planning on selling it at close to the same cost of a DVD. That was in the summary. So what were you saying again?
It doesn't look like they're planning on passing any of the savings on to the real distributors/consumers, that was my point. And as has been stated repeatedly, if the prices are not going to be reduced I'd rather just buy the DVD and save my bandwidth(upload and download) for things that profit me as an individual. They need to pass on some form of secondary gain here and SIGNIFICANLTY cheaper pricing or free movies in exchange for sharing your bandwidth are the first two that come to mind.
That was the question I asked myself actually. Why would I want to help WB in the distribution if I'm PAYING them for the movie too? Now if they gave me a free gigabyte of download for every 2 I upload, then I'd consider their service. I guess they think that we like the P2P idea enough that we'll pay regular prices just to use it!?!? Their reasoning here is beyond me.
I was at a 2600 Magazine meeting back in 1993 and was talking with some FBI agents, who were actually semi-knowledgeable suprisingly, about how they had found some holes in BIOS code that was big enough to fit a virus into and how it had already been accomplished. I checked into it a bit and the BIOS they described had like 120 bytes of writeable memory which was more than enough for the foundations of a virus.
Don't suppose anyone bothered reading the update on TFA. I states that it is a patent *application*. Another poster pointed out they were trying to trademark the emoticon, not patent it. I haven't checked into this yet but that's far more likely to succeed.
Well for non-laptop keyboards you can seriously just take it in the shower and spray it off. You have to give it at LEAST 24 hours to dry though. The water won't hurt anything as long as there is no power. This will probably not work with wireless keyboards or the like as they have much more electronics and possibly backup batteries, etc.
How do you "just deal with" recurring nightmares, waking up in a cold sweat no less than 5 times a week, flashbacks, feelings of impending doom, or wanting to smash someone's head in if they make loud sudden noises even if they're just children playing, and many other completely uncontrollable events? Even worse, if you're like me and you don't even discover you have PTSD until 12 years after the event and "just dealing with it" isn't an option any more...how do you cope? If you're such an advanced psychologist that you can make one of these seemingly half-witted, oversimplistic Dr. Phil-esque statements, then please tell me how you "just deal with it" cause I'll be happy to let you go through what I went through, which since it wasn't rape or war it is easily reproduced, to prove your point. Skip that, let someone rape you.
Then there's my former friend who got a notice from Win95 that he was running out of hard disk space, so he dropped into DOS and started deleting files...randomly...system files. He had no install disk for 95 so the system was hosed.
And I've known a few people who have done a "deltree c:\windows" which wouldn't mean too much these days except it was when the desktop was in the windows directory tree and, you guessed it, a bunch of valuable data was on their desktop.
Now you might mean that they won't harm the HARDWARE if they do that but if they'd been working for a corporation and had done that..they'd be homeless.
This is the conclusion I have come to: When it comes to computers, if a user is going to buy/use almost ANY piece of equipment or software then they need a license/permit in the same regard you need a license/permit to use a car. If you have a permit, then you can use this equipment only if a licensed user is guiding/helping you. I saw this as necessary when people would install firewalls without understanding how they work and the user would click on the "deny all" button just once and the little idiots would promptly call my helpdesk expecting one of my employees to help them get back online which, depending on the client's awareness could take several days if they didn't know what the firewall's tasktray icon, etc. looked like. This was especially common with many of the "Internet Security Suites"...ZA, NAV, MAV. Or the wireless routers that people would buy and upon hooking them up, leave it wide open so anyone could connect.
Local libraries already give free classes on computers so I'd put more funding into the libraries to give the classes/tests. Tests could be taken first so the skilled wouldn't have to be sitting in class wasting time and money. And enforcing it should be easy enough; equip every computer, etc. with smartcard readers or biometrics. Get caught leaving your card in a system so that someone who doesn't have a license could play unattended and that person causes problems, like getting infected with a virus and spreading it, and your license is revoked in realtime and they idiot would forfeit their chance of ever getting one, so it'd keep it very honest because nobody is gonna risk losing their right to use a computer because Uncle Joe wants to browse porn sites with his pants down.
Besides, if we make it like it's a special club that only an experienced few can join, everyone just might suddenly have the willpower to take some of those classes, just like we did with drivers' education classes in high school. If it's treated like anyone, no matter how dumb they are, can get and use one then they will not treat these machines with the respect that they deserve/demand much in the way that anyone can have a child and thusly we have lots of problems with child abuse, neglect, etc.
Let it be known I'm against government regulation for the most part but it's typically the idiots who escalate the problems with virii, etc. I mean how many times have you heard "I got an attachment from someone and I wasn't expecting it. When I tried to open it a window popped up and then nothing. That's not why the ISP cut off my service claiming I was sending spam email is it?". Why should they be allowed to waste a company's money for "tech support" that more closely resembles idiot support? After another generation, this won't be an issue as computers will be a part of everything and most of the idiots will be dead(most of our problem clients were in their 70's) but for now..we should let this make some tax dollars that can be used to, say, put muni-wifi in cities, etc. and get these people an education or off the damn internet.
And just so you will know how bad it can be, here's a little ditty...it really happened to me.
I'm trying to get a woman who is using Win98 back online and the easiest solution was looking like powering all the way down, turning the cable modem off and then turning everything back on. This is how it sounded:
"Ok, I need you to go to your start button on your desktop and power down your computer"
2 seconds goes by.
"It's off."
Thinking she pressed the sleep button I said,
"That was quick, ok, can you turn it back on for me"
2 more seconds
"It's back on"
Knowing that the computer cannot possibly come OUT of sleep mode that quickly I slowly and step-by-step walk her through the shutdown procedure, I hear the logoff tune and we get her back
Benjamin Franklin has always been at the top of my list of true heroes, even Einstein doesn't compare. No one in this day remotely compares to him as has been pointed out in the parent. He inspires the inventor and the revolutionary in me and I wish that people thought more of him than the fact he's on the 100 dollar bill. We should all take a good look at what he did, take one little piece of that and try our best to create that in our lives. For instance, he used to print revolutionary literature, so maybe we could do the same; printers are everywhere these days, and there are great topics that the general public should know about such as common law or that juries can judge the law, not just the accused or a million other topics. Ben would approve, I believe.
Not really. Raytracing is a bunch of complex calculations to be certain but unlike cryptography, the result isn't already known so you'd have to determine if you got the correct answer or one of the trillions of incorrect ones. In other words, it's great for factoring where you have answer X and you want to know which two prime numbers were multiplied to get it as it will compute all the possibilities simultaneously "until" the answer is found, but in raytracing you don't have the answer beforehand and so nothing to test to see if you got the correct answer.
Think of it as a way to weed the hundreds of trillions of wrong answers out in equations and leave you with the one good one.
The reasoning is because a quantum cpu does all of its calculations at the exact same instant. This is great for cryptography, well at least cracking it, because it would need only one iteration of an algorithm to extract a key. For Doom, this would be pointless as each computation doesn't require trillions of billions of iterations to get a single answer like, say, where a player is on the map or a pixel on the screen.
Yeah, back in 1994 or so a friend showed me some printing he had done with a dot matrix printer and then he made me listen to the thing as it printed it. Heavy metal is what I heard...well the rhythms were heavy metal...not the actual sound.
This is probably very off topic but...
There was a joke going around in the mid-1990's that was about what you would have to do to a Cray supercomputer to convert it into an IBM PC. It involved taking most of the extra terminals and putting them in an infinite loop and disabling extra CPU's, etc. It was really quite funny(to a geek anyway). Problem is, as it is always, I had the only copy I've seen in ages stored on a hard drive that went bad the day before I was scheduled to back it up so I have no recollection of the exact text. It was the 90's..backup wasn't cheap for anything over 100mb and I had GB's to do..floppies were not the answer..heh. Anyway, I don't suppose anyone knows where the text to that is? I've searched with no luck.
Nope, it's not a file sharing site. Whoever had the reasoning that since it had links it could be used for file sharing needs to realize that only put every website on the planet on the **AA's hitlist with such a sweeping generalization. Having A building block of file sharing doesn't remotely equate to file sharing. BTW, they do a good job of keeping the 12 year olds off of MySpace, wish they could do that here nearly as well.
This is OT but I quote your sig...
"And now for a little taste of that old computer-generated swagger."
Art of Noise/Max Headroom fan?
For the longest time I was wondering who this Mao Zedung/Zedong character was and then it hit me...somebody's misspelling Mao Tse Tung. Is this in the new textbooks on history or is this just another case of how some idiot's inability to research snowballed into thousands of idiots not researching either? Of course, I could be one of those idiots but googling Mao Tse Tung gave Zedong as the secondary and possibly improper spelling.