Jesus H. Cheap-bastard Christ, I am sick unto fucking death of people suggesting that we have even more ads rammed down our throats to "defray" the cost of some inexpensive item that they don't want to pay for.
You people would have us live in a world of ebooks with embedded ads, streaming movies with embedded ads, streaming music with embedded ads, DVDs with unskippable ads, web-enabled phones with pushed ads. Enough, goddammit!
Let's put a stop to this bullshit idea of letting advertisers "help" promote something new before I have to worry about bringing my newborn son home from the hospital with "Brought to you by Mediconsult, Inc" tattooed on his ass.
Re:What is a "used" ebook?
on
RMS On eBooks
·
· Score: 1
"Everyone will be able to obtain a copy of almost any literature they like - its inevitable. The same with music."
You must not remember when the music industry explained that they had to charge $14.99 for a CD until there were enough players to create a market that would let them drop the price. What are you paying for CDs these days?
When the industry has an iron hold on the product, the price does not go down.
Re:RMS should stick to coding
on
RMS On eBooks
·
· Score: 2
There are limits to copyright law; fair use and first sale are but two. Stallman's essay -- and he is by no means the first to call attention to this -- points out that in the world of electronic publishing, the publisher can be given (and thanks to the as-yet non-overturned DMCA, has been given) the power to eliminate all the limitations and exceptions.
When I buy a book from a bookstore today, the seller has lost all control of the book (not its content). I can read the book anywhere I want, I can loan it to a friend, I can _give_ it to a friend, I can quote a compelling line or two in support of an original work of my own, and so forth. I can do pretty much anything I want that does not infringe (like photocopying the book for a friend or scanning it onto a Web page). That's the way it all works.
Electronic publication turns this on its ear. Suddenly access control ("Sir, we're a bookstore and not a library; if you want to read that book you'll have to pay for it") and use control ("I know you bought the book a year ago but if you want to read it again you'll have to pay me again") have become something that the publishers can accomplish with a single feature. Whether they use encryption, or an undocumented file format on a proprietary hardware device, or a key/password approach, or some combination of these and other technologies, it has become physically possible to stop people from accessing the content of their own material, bought and paid for.
What this all boils down to is that the publishing industry (books, musics, video, etc.) is facing the very real threat that a near-zero cost of reproduction poses to their businesses. Their solution has been to buy^H^H^Hlobby for laws that roll back centuries-old consumer protections. Many of us are not happy about that. I cannot support any method of content protection that rolls back the clock on consumer rights, or any law that protects that method. And you shouldn't either, no matter how cool it is to download the latest Stephen King offering onto your neatokeeno handheld eGadget.
Re:Oh my god, they're stealing knowledge!
on
RMS On eBooks
·
· Score: 1
"One final idea would be to release library versions of books that contain timely ads inside them. Updating these ads would not be overly-difficult with e-books. Consumers who want to read without looking at ads could buy a version of the book without ads."
No, no, a thousand times no! No more god-damned ads in stuff that is bought and paid for! Not pushed down onto cellphones, not plopped into electronic books, not threaded into A/V files with proprietary players. Never again.
Clue in, folks: the ads DO NOT KEEP YOUR PRICE DOWN. The guy selling you a video with ads for $20 is the same guy who five years ago sold you a video without ads for $20. Ads are nothing more than extra profit for the vendor and I call on all of you to join me in saying "No more."
It costs, uh, about 0.00000000000001 cents to make a copy of an eBook. Why would you fall for the myth that the ads are necessary to defray the costs of production? Newspapers and magazines, sure; electronic content, no way in hell.
(Especially when you consider that viewing purchased content via electronics gives the vendor the power to keep you from blowing past the ads like you do in the Sunday paper. Watched your Tarzan DVD with the ads in the "reserved" area recently?)
As much as I would like to think I'm a person with a certain amount of sophistication and a sense of humor well superior to the Farrelly Brothers', I can't help noticing (and getting a grin from) the fact that the smart toilet is from Matsushita.
"The sad truth appears that there just doesn't seem to be much to do with these satellites. They were poorly conceived in the first place."
Absolutely. No argument.
"Still, I support any effort to save them."
This is where the phrase "Throwing good money after bad" comes into play.
Yes, there are 66 satellites up there going around and around, and yes, billions of dollars were spent in getting them there. BUT: they can't cover their own costs. Suppose this multimillion-dollar fundraiser succeeds and they stay up there a bit longer. Then what? The cash is spent and we need to de-orbit these moneypits. Are you now going to hold another "Save Iridium" campaign? You should, because now you've got an even greater investment in the satellites (where investment is defined as money pissed down the rathole and never coming back). And then again? And again?
There comes a time when you have to cut your losses. Iridium was a bad idea, poorly conceived and technologically inferior. The features and capabilities that the satellites can deliver are unfit for any purpose that will generate revenues sufficient to offset operational costs. To pour money into this failed idea because the satellites are up there is as foolish as putting them up there in the first place. Every dollar spent on a "Save Iridium" campaign is a dollar _not_ spent on something that might work. Consider that.
If you only read one of the posted comments, make it 162 (from 5 library associations). It's 39 pages, but this document slices right to the heart of the matter: that DMCA was intended to distinguish between access and use, but the technological measures combine the two. Those of you/us trying to have our electeds take another stab at moving copyright law into the Digital Age would be well advised to incorporate many of the points made in the associations' comment.
The nuclear powers are all signatories to a treaty banning above-ground testing. No one has conducted an above-ground/atmospheric test in over 30 years. Even if the current moratorium ends, you don't have to worry about an AGT.
As for the non-signatories...well, if any of them builds a nuke, it's going to be fired to prove to whomever that such a device exists -- and in that case, your computers-beat-tests desire is not going to be met anyway.
I don't consider N-body particle simulations to be "nuclear simulations." Being at Los Alamos, I consider "nuclear simulations" to be weapons modeling. If that's a difference in terminology, my apologies. I will stand by this statement: no Beowulf clusters are used at Los Alamos for nuclear weapons modeling, nor to the best of my knowledge at Lawrence Livermore.
As for whether I have ever worked on distributed code, that'd be a "yes".
As for the broken home page, yeah, I should probably change my/. userprefs to reflect the fact that I took that down.
Where exactly are these nuclear simulations being run on Beowulfs? We aren't doing it in Los Alamos' X Division and I don't know anyone at Livermore's A or B Divisions doing it...could it be that you don't know what you're talking about?
Jim, speaking for himself.
Re:Once in a blue moon, the System works
on
Victory in Holland
·
· Score: 1
Before the Web, children could go to a library and look at things their parents considered unsuitable. "Huckleberry Finn", "Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret", "The Nat Turner Diaries", "Mein Kampf", Madonna's "Sex". All these books have been and will continue to be under fire for not having the right presentation of ideas.
But public libraries are just that: public. Just as parents have to accept the fact that their kids might hear "motherfucker" on Main Street, they have to accept the fact that those kids might see a Mapplethorpe whip-in-ass photo in the library. If you try to keep it off the monitors, they'll just look in the books.
Hmmm. Maybe filtering software isn't such a bad idea...
It is human nature for us to become "set in our ways" as we age...the elderly individual who remains open to new experiences (Thai food in Kansas, skydiving, wearing T-shirts in public) is a rare individual indeed. Everyone knows the cantankerous duffer who has seemingly devoted his sunset days to lamentations that things are no longer as they were in his day, that the youth are lazy and disrespectful, and that the music the kids are listening to is just a bunch of loud racket.
At a time when technology is rebuilding our society seemingly overnight, it is worth observing that many of our largest and most pervasive societal organizations (Hollywood, Congress, transnational megacorporations) are run by elderly men who have _demonstrated_ their hesitation to embrace the change. Think about how much the simple utility of e-mail has altered our day-to-day living, how useful it is for keeping in touch -- and then ponder the recent story on just how few Congressmen read their email, much less respond to it.
I'm baffled by the story contributor's reference to Valenti as a baby boomer, but the fact that he has revealed himself to be one of the herd who wants little more from age than the opportunity to cling to the world he knew -- and, let us not forget, has run for over 30 years -- is worth mentioning.
"I can think of only one application of anything geek related in this and that is the use of computers and various graphics programs to create the commercials. Aside from that everything else is just bad."
Yadda, yadda, yadda, all in the ever-so-familiar tone of the "I don't watch your lowly television for I am Above That" geek.
Junior high was years ago, bub; get over being pantsed on a daily basis, already.
Which, without a doubt, was Agillion.com's ad showing a bunch of schmucks atonally singing "We are the Champions".
I want to make several points here. First, did Brian May recently lose all his money in a Ponzi scheme, or were all these ads done by companies that hire a guy who likes Queen? Second, those of you who haven't read Salon's article on the Name Game (look it up, I'm not yer librarian) need to do so, and then you can join me in snickering as we all think about how much the boobs at Agillion paid for that name.
Well, let's see. Microsoft has taken enough money for 3 copies of Windows (one 3.1, one 95, and one 98) from me; that's around $300. By their own licensing terms I can't sell those 3 copies to anyone else; the third-party who was acting as Microsoft's strongarm agent refused to refund my money as per the wording of the agreement...
I'd say that for anyone who was ever screwed by Microsoft taking their money was altogether right and proper. My only regret is that I don't live close enough to California to have joined in the screwing.
"i just don't see why people bother posting if they know nothing about what they are talking about."
Because there are many others who won't know that the posters are talking out of their asses and therefore said posters will look enclued. The fact that most of us are too "courteous" to jump in and say "Hey folks: this guy doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground" just makes it propagate. I typically alternate on/. between laughing and raging at the people who present themselves as future Nobel laureates when their statements then reveal that at most they read an article in Time without understanding it.
My personal favorites are the ones that start out essentially stating "I don't know shit about this topic but my older brother took high school chemistry and he says blahblahblah." Shutcher holes if you have nothing to offer.
Pluck the mote out of your eye, Tau -- Little Boy hit Hiroshima; Fat Man hit Nagasaki.
As for the energy/mass calculation you provide; that's correct but irrelevant in most cases. In most cases, your primary interest is in releasing a large amount of energy There and you have a ready way of moving a large mass from Here to There.
Slashdot Mirror
Jesus H. Cheap-bastard Christ, I am sick unto fucking death of people suggesting that we have even more ads rammed down our throats to "defray" the cost of some inexpensive item that they don't want to pay for.
You people would have us live in a world of ebooks with embedded ads, streaming movies with embedded ads, streaming music with embedded ads, DVDs with unskippable ads, web-enabled phones with pushed ads. Enough, goddammit!
Let's put a stop to this bullshit idea of letting advertisers "help" promote something new before I have to worry about bringing my newborn son home from the hospital with "Brought to you by Mediconsult, Inc" tattooed on his ass.
"Everyone will be able to obtain a copy of almost any literature they like - its inevitable. The same with music."
You must not remember when the music industry explained that they had to charge $14.99 for a CD until there were enough players to create a market that would let them drop the price. What are you paying for CDs these days?
When the industry has an iron hold on the product, the price does not go down.
There are limits to copyright law; fair use and first sale are but two. Stallman's essay -- and he is by no means the first to call attention to this -- points out that in the world of electronic publishing, the publisher can be given (and thanks to the as-yet non-overturned DMCA, has been given) the power to eliminate all the limitations and exceptions.
When I buy a book from a bookstore today, the seller has lost all control of the book (not its content). I can read the book anywhere I want, I can loan it to a friend, I can _give_ it to a friend, I can quote a compelling line or two in support of an original work of my own, and so forth. I can do pretty much anything I want that does not infringe (like photocopying the book for a friend or scanning it onto a Web page). That's the way it all works.
Electronic publication turns this on its ear. Suddenly access control ("Sir, we're a bookstore and not a library; if you want to read that book you'll have to pay for it") and use control ("I know you bought the book a year ago but if you want to read it again you'll have to pay me again") have become something that the publishers can accomplish with a single feature. Whether they use encryption, or an undocumented file format on a proprietary hardware device, or a key/password approach, or some combination of these and other technologies, it has become physically possible to stop people from accessing the content of their own material, bought and paid for.
What this all boils down to is that the publishing industry (books, musics, video, etc.) is facing the very real threat that a near-zero cost of reproduction poses to their businesses. Their solution has been to buy^H^H^Hlobby for laws that roll back centuries-old consumer protections. Many of us are not happy about that. I cannot support any method of content protection that rolls back the clock on consumer rights, or any law that protects that method. And you shouldn't either, no matter how cool it is to download the latest Stephen King offering onto your neatokeeno handheld eGadget.
"One final idea would be to release library versions of books that contain timely ads inside them. Updating these ads would not be overly-difficult with e-books. Consumers who want to read without looking at ads could buy a version of the book without ads."
No, no, a thousand times no! No more god-damned ads in stuff that is bought and paid for! Not pushed down onto cellphones, not plopped into electronic books, not threaded into A/V files with proprietary players. Never again.
Clue in, folks: the ads DO NOT KEEP YOUR PRICE DOWN. The guy selling you a video with ads for $20 is the same guy who five years ago sold you a video without ads for $20. Ads are nothing more than extra profit for the vendor and I call on all of you to join me in saying "No more."
It costs, uh, about 0.00000000000001 cents to make a copy of an eBook. Why would you fall for the myth that the ads are necessary to defray the costs of production? Newspapers and magazines, sure; electronic content, no way in hell.
(Especially when you consider that viewing purchased content via electronics gives the vendor the power to keep you from blowing past the ads like you do in the Sunday paper. Watched your Tarzan DVD with the ads in the "reserved" area recently?)
As much as I would like to think I'm a person with a certain amount of sophistication and a sense of humor well superior to the Farrelly Brothers', I can't help noticing (and getting a grin from) the fact that the smart toilet is from Matsushita.
"The sad truth appears that there just doesn't seem to be much to do with these satellites. They were poorly conceived in the first place."
Absolutely. No argument.
"Still, I support any effort to save them."
This is where the phrase "Throwing good money after bad" comes into play.
Yes, there are 66 satellites up there going around and around, and yes, billions of dollars were spent in getting them there. BUT: they can't cover their own costs. Suppose this multimillion-dollar fundraiser succeeds and they stay up there a bit longer. Then what? The cash is spent and we need to de-orbit these moneypits. Are you now going to hold another "Save Iridium" campaign? You should, because now you've got an even greater investment in the satellites (where investment is defined as money pissed down the rathole and never coming back). And then again? And again?
There comes a time when you have to cut your losses. Iridium was a bad idea, poorly conceived and technologically inferior. The features and capabilities that the satellites can deliver are unfit for any purpose that will generate revenues sufficient to offset operational costs. To pour money into this failed idea because the satellites are up there is as foolish as putting them up there in the first place. Every dollar spent on a "Save Iridium" campaign is a dollar _not_ spent on something that might work. Consider that.
I think it's past time for the USPTO to reinstate its requirement that patent applications be submitted with working models.
If you only read one of the posted comments, make it 162 (from 5 library associations). It's 39 pages, but this document slices right to the heart of the matter: that DMCA was intended to distinguish between access and use, but the technological measures combine the two. Those of you/us trying to have our electeds take another stab at moving copyright law into the Digital Age would be well advised to incorporate many of the points made in the associations' comment.
The nuclear powers are all signatories to a treaty banning above-ground testing. No one has conducted an above-ground/atmospheric test in over 30 years. Even if the current moratorium ends, you don't have to worry about an AGT.
As for the non-signatories...well, if any of them builds a nuke, it's going to be fired to prove to whomever that such a device exists -- and in that case, your computers-beat-tests desire is not going to be met anyway.
I don't consider N-body particle simulations to be "nuclear simulations." Being at Los Alamos, I consider "nuclear simulations" to be weapons modeling. If that's a difference in terminology, my apologies. I will stand by this statement: no Beowulf clusters are used at Los Alamos for nuclear weapons modeling, nor to the best of my knowledge at Lawrence Livermore.
/. userprefs to reflect the fact that I took that down.
As for whether I have ever worked on distributed code, that'd be a "yes".
As for the broken home page, yeah, I should probably change my
Where exactly are these nuclear simulations being run on Beowulfs? We aren't doing it in Los Alamos' X Division and I don't know anyone at Livermore's A or B Divisions doing it...could it be that you don't know what you're talking about?
Jim, speaking for himself.
Before the Web, children could go to a library and look at things their parents considered unsuitable. "Huckleberry Finn", "Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret", "The Nat Turner Diaries", "Mein Kampf", Madonna's "Sex". All these books have been and will continue to be under fire for not having the right presentation of ideas.
But public libraries are just that: public. Just as parents have to accept the fact that their kids might hear "motherfucker" on Main Street, they have to accept the fact that those kids might see a Mapplethorpe whip-in-ass photo in the library. If you try to keep it off the monitors, they'll just look in the books.
Hmmm. Maybe filtering software isn't such a bad idea...
ObIGetIT: Bwaaahaaahaa!
It is human nature for us to become "set in our ways" as we age...the elderly individual who remains open to new experiences (Thai food in Kansas, skydiving, wearing T-shirts in public) is a rare individual indeed. Everyone knows the cantankerous duffer who has seemingly devoted his sunset days to lamentations that things are no longer as they were in his day, that the youth are lazy and disrespectful, and that the music the kids are listening to is just a bunch of loud racket.
At a time when technology is rebuilding our society seemingly overnight, it is worth observing that many of our largest and most pervasive societal organizations (Hollywood, Congress, transnational megacorporations) are run by elderly men who have _demonstrated_ their hesitation to embrace the change. Think about how much the simple utility of e-mail has altered our day-to-day living, how useful it is for keeping in touch -- and then ponder the recent story on just how few Congressmen read their email, much less respond to it.
I'm baffled by the story contributor's reference to Valenti as a baby boomer, but the fact that he has revealed himself to be one of the herd who wants little more from age than the opportunity to cling to the world he knew -- and, let us not forget, has run for over 30 years -- is worth mentioning.
"I can think of only one application of anything geek related in this and that is the use of computers and various graphics programs to create the commercials. Aside from that everything else is just bad."
Yadda, yadda, yadda, all in the ever-so-familiar tone of the "I don't watch your lowly television for I am Above That" geek.
Junior high was years ago, bub; get over being pantsed on a daily basis, already.
...it's time to start shitting on the Worst.
Which, without a doubt, was Agillion.com's ad showing a bunch of schmucks atonally singing "We are the Champions".
I want to make several points here. First, did Brian May recently lose all his money in a Ponzi scheme, or were all these ads done by companies that hire a guy who likes Queen? Second, those of you who haven't read Salon's article on the Name Game (look it up, I'm not yer librarian) need to do so, and then you can join me in snickering as we all think about how much the boobs at Agillion paid for that name.
The emphasis will come from your words, not the way you dress them up. Be sparing of markup.
\begin{boggle}
Dilbert creative? Please.
\end{boggle}
Well, let's see. Microsoft has taken enough money for 3 copies of Windows (one 3.1, one 95, and one 98) from me; that's around $300. By their own licensing terms I can't sell those 3 copies to anyone else; the third-party who was acting as Microsoft's strongarm agent refused to refund my money as per the wording of the agreement...
I'd say that for anyone who was ever screwed by Microsoft taking their money was altogether right and proper. My only regret is that I don't live close enough to California to have joined in the screwing.
Clinton did not avoid being impeached; he avoided being booted from office after said impeachment.
If you're going to insult someone by calling him a geek, quoting "The X-Files" may not be the ideal way of proving your superiority.
"i just don't see why people bother posting if they know nothing about what they are talking about."
/. between laughing and raging at the people who present themselves as future Nobel laureates when their statements then reveal that at most they read an article in Time without understanding it.
Because there are many others who won't know that the posters are talking out of their asses and therefore said posters will look enclued. The fact that most of us are too "courteous" to jump in and say "Hey folks: this guy doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground" just makes it propagate. I typically alternate on
My personal favorites are the ones that start out essentially stating "I don't know shit about this topic but my older brother took high school chemistry and he says blahblahblah." Shutcher holes if you have nothing to offer.
Pluck the mote out of your eye, Tau -- Little Boy hit Hiroshima; Fat Man hit Nagasaki.
As for the energy/mass calculation you provide; that's correct but irrelevant in most cases. In most cases, your primary interest is in releasing a large amount of energy There and you have a ready way of moving a large mass from Here to There.
That'd be "Pie Jesu Domine; dona eis requiem."
Sheesh.
"Not everyone who doesn't grok the 'net deserves our ridicule."
True. Everyone who uses the term 'grok' does, however.