Totally off-topic, but hopefully Sirius is better than XM. I got my XM subscription this Xmas, and have decided in only two short weeks that XM seriously blows.
First, I find that it isn't "Ad free" like they say on their commercials. They regularly run commercials on several of the channels I've tried listening to. In addition, although they seem to be able to use the digital subcarrier to give the name of the station I am tuned to (Idoit designations such as "Fred", "Kiss", Boneyard"), they don't stream the artist/title like every FM station in my area does. Throw in the two facts that the DJ's rarely tell you who they just played, and the fact that they play a lot of songs/bands that aren't mainstream, and it can be very frustrating if you hear a song and want to check it out further. In addition, the "digital quality sound" is extremely inferior on my Bose system compared to the over-the-air FM stations. It sounds like most of the music is being played through a tin can.
All in all, I am very disappointed in the XM service, and probably will not renew when this subscription runs out.
When Robert Heinlein published Expanded Universe, he reprinted an old story of his called "Blowups Happen". In his forword to that story he noted how over blown the TMI incident was.
"RADIATION EXPOSURE"
Half-mile from the Three-Mile plant... 83 millirems
At the plant... 1,100 millirems
During heart catheterization for an angiogram... 45,000 millirems
~which I underwent 18 months ago. I feel fine.
R.A.H."
A passport does not "count for three" forms of ID. First, your birth certificate is not a form of ID, only proof of citizenship for the person named on the certificate. Your Social Security card is not a form of identification, only proof that the person named on the card has registered with the IRS and Social Security Administration. Your Passport is not a replacement for a driver's license, as you do not even need a driver's license to get a passport, and try whipping out your passport the next time you get pulled over for speeding. I also normally use my passport as a form of ID. I have never had a situation that called for two forms of ID, where they would accept the passport as more than one of those forms.
You are correct that a passport has "name, dob, sex, id number, image, address (also required to be physical " however, that address does not have to be verified. If you check the official U.S. passport site. You will see that you are required to bring proof of citizenship(Birth Certificate or Naturalization Certificate except under extraordinary circumstances), a valid picture ID (Driver's license, Government ID, or Military ID) with a picture in which you are recognizable, two photos, and the fee. When I got my passport a couple years ago it wasn't even mentioned that my permanent address on the form was different from my P.O. Box which was listed on my driver's license. On my latest driver's license, they did change it to my home address, but, since I don't have any "official" mail (bills, etc.) sent to my home address, they were content with the pile of junk mail with my name and home address on it. Amusingly, when I bought my new car recently, I had to take my second choice in lenders, because the first refused to accept my application without some "official mail" proving my residence. Even the (now proper) address on both my passport and driver's license was not acceptable to them.
Actually I think this may be deliberate to avoid Mori's Uncanny Valley. Since we have not yet advanced to the point where you can make the animation and response indistiguishable from a human, most AI researchers seem to have gone back to almost cartoonish interfaces, which people react to much better than an almost, but not quite right, photo realistic representation.
Speed increase is simple by swapping head-end equipment, or in reality just removing the software caps they have implemented on the high speed equipment they already have.
Reliability is mostly an issue with the lines, repeater, amplifiers, connections, etc. between the head-end and your house. I've dealt with running data over wide area CATV networks for over a decade, and I have to say they all have problems. If you live close to the head-end, or a major distribution hub, you can usually get pretty good service, mainly because an outage at that point means thousands of unhappy subscribers. If you live way down at the end of a trunk line, where a spotty amp only affects a dozen or so subscribers, you are SOL. Best to hope that a major new subdivision opens downstream of you so the company has to upgrade everything along the way.
A few years ago I bought a new house. My old one was in a service area of a company I don't work with regularly, and the service was so-so. My new home had really bad service when I moved in, but it was in the service area of the company I do the majority of my work with. I put a meter on my home connection, checked the bit error rate on the cable modem test circuit, called the service tech that maintains the commercial connections I usually run on. The next week, two of the amps and one of the routers on the trunk out to my place were replaced and my connection went rock solid. I was talking to my new neighbors a few weeks later about how nice my broadband connection was, and he said he'd tried it a year before, but got so frustrated that he cancelled it. I mentioned something about cable company maintenance and upgrading equipment all the time, so he might want to try it again.
Oh, I agree with you completely. As many others have stated, FISA, the founding orders and purpose of the NSA, etc., were all supposed to be aimed at foreign agents trying to damage America. It has been twisted to, completly illegally, investigate citizens. What the black vs. white crowd, seems glad to ignore is no one is saying citizens shouldn't be investigated. The fact is that we have a completly different mechanism and set of rules that must be followed by completely seperate agencies.
The rules state that forgeign suspects can be monitored and tracked on the whim of anyone in the agencies involved, and it is the job of their government to protect their rights.
Domestic suspects can only be tracked and monitored if their is a reasonable suspician they are doing something illegal so you can't legally just monitor everybody. You have to have a good (in a judges opinion) reason to suspect them. Then you can go off and do whatever you need to to gain proof on innocent or guilt, limited only by gauranteed Contitutional rights.
None of which are rational, or establish a legal basis for his actions.
Basically all your quotes (as well as most of what the Republican Party is publicly stating) is saying is there are big, bad uglies out there, but we can't tell you any specifics, because if we did, they would know we know about them. And we need to do whatever is possible to stop them from doing bad things to you, including us doing smaller bad thiings to you first. And anytime we do a bad thing to you, or your neighbor, just trust us that it was necessary, and don't bother with any of those oversight or checks and balances thingies.
Now, if he is not doing these wiretaps "just because", then why is there a problem with letting the court setup specifically to oversee the process know what is going on? As has been noted in several other posts, the arguement "If you're not doing anything wrong, why are you so concerned with hiding what you're doing," applies to the President as well as us unwashed masses.
err... I don't know about you, but "groups like Slashdot readers" are in RIAA's mind "prone" to trade copyrighted works on P2P networks, circumvent copy protection mechanisms in violation of the DMCA, use encryption to "hide" their communications, and possess skills which could potentially be used to "hack" into nuclear facilites and the utility infrastructure to cause untold damage to society.
Surely not every reader, and probably not 99%, but I'd like to suggest that maybe their readers' likelihood of participating in illegal ativites would be higher than your average person's? Sure, they might have a point on some of their crusades, but Slashdot readership (cheap joke, but I had to) is sort of considered a joke (at least where I'm from). I'm not saying that it's necesarrily right what the NSA may have (or more like definitely) did, but there is some sort of logic there. Slashdot may be a great organization, but it does attract the sort of radical viewpoints that can lead to that sort of activity.
So we definitely need to montior all electronic transmissions by visitors to the slashdot website. After all, the message we don't monitor may be the one that exposes the next DeCSS crack.
I frequently download a good movie and burn it to DVD after having just seen it in the theater. Then when it goes to official DVD, I buy the official copy, for the extended cuts, special features, etc. The movies I have done this for, and now have legal copies of, include: The Matrix, Chicago, The Princess Bride, All of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Episodes 4-6 of Star Wars, Batman Begins, all of the Harry Potter movies, and many others. In the case of LotR, I have my downloaded copies, the original release, and the extended release. I am currently enjoying my own copies of Narnia and Goblet of Fire, and have pre-ordered or am on the notification list to order both of them as soon as they come available.
In fact, if I was able to purchase the DVD on the way out of the theater, I would have bought all of these immediately after seeing the movie. Actually, there a lot of movies that I am jazzed about as I leave the theater and would probably buy the DVD, but by the time I get home I'm over it enough that it's not worth the time or effort to get a decent copy off of P2P, and by the time the DVD is released I've decided it's not worth the money, or I've forgotten about it. So the studios are actually losing a lot of my business by their delaying tactics.
And to answer your next question, the only 'pirate' material I have, video or audio, is material that is not currently available for purchase. If the rights holder is not willing to provide copies for purchase, especially in the case of some old music titles that are no longer available, I personally have no moral issues with downloading a copy for my own enjoyment.
Actually, I completely agree. The Narnia books have been favorites of mine since early childhood. You might even say they were my gateway into fantasy and sci-fi. And it was years after I had moved on from them that I even knew they were supposed to have a Christian corrolation. I still have a hard time seeing the direct correlation that C.S. Lewis said is there. Yet, in both the books and movies, the obvious 'fantastic' elements and magic are blatant. Once I was in High School, the deacons at our church were blathering about anti-D&D and how it was the Devil's work because of all the talk of magic and fantasy creatures, I walked into the church library and pulled The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe out of the Church library and started reading quotes out of it about Tumnus the faun, and talking beavers, and magic Turkish Delight. There were at least two special meetings of the Church elders discussing if they should/could ban C.S. Lewis works from the Church library. Somehow the arguement got swept under the covers, but the books stayed, and the deacons stopped argueing against pop culture, and shifted to a more pro-Christian message instead.
And, much like the Passion of the Christ, it shows glaring the massive double standard being applied. Violence, blood, and gore are bad and will scar and ruin our children... except for when it's an accurate reproduction of a Bible story. Magic, magical creatures, and fantasy worlds are evil and the devil trying to corrupt the children, unless it an accurate reproduction of a beloved Christian author's work.
You seem to have answered your own question, and contradicted your original theme at the same time.
Yes, if you oversee me type in my security code, I would much rather you tell me you know it and that you are going to publish it, and then have you publish it, than have you walking around secretly knowing my code. If you tell me it is compromised, and will be made public you are 'darn'd tootin' I'm going to change it as soon as possible, and implement better procedures to keep it from leaking in the future.
Myself, just like any number of large corporations, will willingly proceed with standard operating procedures, in the lack of any information showing they are flawed. I, unlike many large and small corporations, will change those procedures when they are shown to be flawed. Many corporations and individuals will only change their methods when threatened with public disclosure of a vulnerability.
And if you think you are doing me a favor by keeping the fact that you have compromised me secret, because you are a trustworthy individual, think again. If you know a vulnerability, then the chances are that someone else will also discover it, and they may not have your lofty morals. And that applies to knowing where to procure nuclear materials, the national missle codes, or the frequency to my garage door opener. If you have found a leak to aquire the nuclear launch codes or secret encryption keys, I really do want you to tell people and publish them. Because if you found them then it is very likely that someone else has as well, and they need to be changed immediately, and the leak needs to be plugged.
So yes, there is information that needs to be kept between limited, responsible people. If at any time that information leaks beyond that group, then once the group is informed, the information needs to be published so that 1) we the people can be informed by the failure in public trust, and 2) it will force a review and change of security procedures.
I defy you to find any class of information, that once found vulnerable, should remain secret under this scenario. Even information that is in some way hard coded, i.e. the instructions on how to build a nuclear bomb, needs to be public, just so that we can implement proper security to keep it from happening. If I don't know that a certain left handed widget is critical to the assembly of such a device, then I don't know to be suspicious when I see one being delivered to the house next door. And no matter how good your security is, once someone has figured out how to do something, other smart people will be able to figure it out as well, you just won't know that it been re-invented, and you won't be looking for people doing it because you have 'secured' the information.
Which is fine, but meaningless. If the people complaining are not the copyright holders, but the syndicated licensees, then they have no business screaming about copyright violations.
But in fact, this group is complaining about violation of their copyright on their published web pages. Which is complete nonsense. As pointed out in other places, search engines do not reproduce content they index it and send people to the original source. What really has these folk's panties in a wad is that search engines have leveled the information distribution playing field. Before a publisher could target a relatively small and obscure niche market and keep it locked up to themselves because there just wasn't enough volume for more than a very limited number of information sources in that area. Now all of those markets, i.e. "Cat Fancy", "Dog Lovers", "Home & Garden", are being wiped out by all of the free information that people are willing to make available online. Ten years ago my Mom had a subscription to one of those cat magazines. Now she participates in two online forums and her and her cat both have blogs. *boggle**I created a monster*
Then you throw in the other side, mass media. Before, NYT could demand a subscription and earn money from exclusive and well written articles and stories. Now, there are enough licensees of Rueters, UPI, and AP that are willing to give those stories away in return for Ad impressions, and there are enough well written editorial and in depth, on-the-spot stories written by people living through the news event, that the NYT is becoming irrelevent.
Both of these situations are only possible because of search engines. I know that I'll find a story on one of the subscription based services I use that I want to share with friends. When I do, I do a quick google to find a non-subscription site with the same article and send that link so my friends and family, who are not interested in subscribing to new scientist, can still see the neat Saturn moon photos published for free by BBC, with essentially the same story. Or better, a link to the BBC story and the NASA picture site hosting all the latest pictures. I like new scientist because they do the work of scanning all the press releases and new publications and pointing out and summarizing the best/most interesting of them so I can quickly find the information that interests me, and do deeper research on those topics that the summary is insufficient for. Hmmm... sound a lot like what Google does for free on a wider scale. The only difference, and why I still have my subscription, is that Google is horrible at seperating the wheat from the chaff. The signal to noise ratio on Google is way too low. But at the same time, if I want to find information on Himalayan long-hairs, and pointers for dealing with hair-balls, instead of subscribing to an expensive specialty source that may or may not have an article dealing with my problem, a quick google will point me to a dozen or more possible sites that are willing to interact with me in near real-time, to not only solve my problem but point out other things that I should know or problems I can be on alert for.
The group in the story claiming that search engines will destroy the publication industry are the last of the buggy whip makers screaming that automobiles and paved roads will be the end of the leather industry. My advice to them... stop making whips and start making uphostlery and seat covers. Gee, the more I think about that analogy in this context the better I like it.
Yeah, I had 138972 way back when. That was back in college when I was changing service providers every year to get the good dial-up deals. Way before hotmail, etc. generic email acounts, so every time I changed providers, I ended up with a new email address. When my old 386 finally died and I moved to a Pentium, I installed the ICQ client, but couldn't remember my password because it had been so long since I typed it in. And of course the password recovery was to an old email account that I hadn't had access to in a year or more...
Actually, the point with Oklahoma Oil isn't because the field is exhausted. Those wells are capable of pumping just as much oil in just as short a time as the ones in UAE. The difference is the $50 per week wages for oil field workers there and the $30-$50 an hour wages here for comparable jobs. The Hubbert and peak oil projections are all about that the world will be incapable no matter the technological advancement or at any price, to produce as much oil as we consume. Hubbert published his report in 1949. Think about what was being predicted about computer technology in 1949. ENIAC was 3 years old. Even as late as 1977 the head of DEC was quoted as saying that no one would even need a computer in the home. Could Ford in the 1930's have envisioned what is possible with the new GT40? And the current cababilities that we use every day to recover oil today, let alone the possibilities of tomorrow, weren't even dreamed of in Hubbert's day. The peak oil Hubberdites are a lot like the fanatical believers in Atlantis. One author writes something that sounds good when applied to a limited scope and kept within the context of the writings, but it then gets taken over and expanded upon, by people with not as much understanding, and/or a specific agenda to push, and it takes on a life of its own.
As for the global warming/cooling, this article summarizes some of the thoughts along the lines of what I presented above. A quick google search will lead you to much more in depth analysis. There is a study, not mentioned in that article and I can't find it right now, that showed this effect occuring in eastern China by all of the smoke being produced inland and blown over the coast, also a smaller study about similar effects from the burning in the Amazon.
I firmly believe that the rise we are currently seeing is indeed the start of an accelerating trend. One that human activity has very little impact on, or if any, has been slowing the rise thus far by emitting clouds of smoke thus keeping temperatures artificially low. Now that we are cleaning up our soot emissions the CO2, and natural process that drive the climate, are regaining their direction. As you noted, we are woefully unprepared for such an event. I would say that we desperately need to start preparing, clearing the low lying areas, etc., but I'm realist enough to know that there is no feasable way to get the huge fraction of the human race that lives on coast lines to change their residence prior to a devastating catastrophy.
As to your comments about peak oil, read the literature more closely and in depth. Yes, oil execs and employees have started falling all over themselves to validate peak oil theories, but apparently, only because they suddenly realized that the peak oil nuts were their best friends. If the oil monopoly (removing Hussein took out the major producer who was not part of the Saudi, Kuwait, Exxon, Shell, Chevron cartel. Russia was broken up to let the cartel take over production there, next in line is Chavez in Venzuela) can convince the world that we have reached peak oil production then they have an indisputable excuse for maintaining higher prices and vastly higher profits. The peak oil advocates love to point out that oil production is down worldwide in recent years. but isn't it interesting that in fact it is down by almost the same percentage at every cartel field world wide. These fields are not connected and shouldn't be suddenly linked in their very close decreases in output capacity. Especially since peak oil states that we can not increase production, not that it will decrease and everyone, including the peak oil fanatics, is very quick to reassure their investors that they have plenty of in ground reserves for X number of years. I propose that this is evidence of global collaboration to set and maintain a specific level of output, regardless of the capacity that could be acheived if it were maximized. In fact, if you research the geophysical scientific papers on new sources and increasing recovery from old sources or souces that were previously inaccessible, you find that not only is there more oil available and accesible today than there ever has been before, but there is far more oil than than we have ever used combined. I would post links to these, but strangely all of the pages I had bookmarked over the last 10 years have disappeared or been replaced by peak oil pages. However, you can find some clue in the investmentbrochures and independentscientificreports. Now undoubtably these new sources and recovery techniques will cost more, so we have seen the last of cheap oil, monopoly or not.
I became interested in the science and economics of this because of my family's oil wells in west Oklahoma. In the late 60's and early 70's, during U.S. peak production, our 16 wells were producing approx. $200,000 in royalties per month. By the late 80's they were producing about $13,000 per quarter. Basically the oil company explained that, at that time, it cost $32 per barrel to produce from Oklahoma wells, and $6 per barrel to import from the middle east. So all of the wells were placed in maintenance mode, which is basically just enough pumped to lubricate the mechanicals, and at that rate the holding tanks were only emptied once per quarter, instead of weekly or twice weekly. When my mom sold th
Slashdot Mirror
To add to your conundrum, in the spirit of the thread, if you had used Flamebait, then you could have gone to jail.
queue bad In Soviet America jokes here....
Totally off-topic, but hopefully Sirius is better than XM. I got my XM subscription this Xmas, and have decided in only two short weeks that XM seriously blows.
First, I find that it isn't "Ad free" like they say on their commercials. They regularly run commercials on several of the channels I've tried listening to. In addition, although they seem to be able to use the digital subcarrier to give the name of the station I am tuned to (Idoit designations such as "Fred", "Kiss", Boneyard"), they don't stream the artist/title like every FM station in my area does. Throw in the two facts that the DJ's rarely tell you who they just played, and the fact that they play a lot of songs/bands that aren't mainstream, and it can be very frustrating if you hear a song and want to check it out further. In addition, the "digital quality sound" is extremely inferior on my Bose system compared to the over-the-air FM stations. It sounds like most of the music is being played through a tin can.
All in all, I am very disappointed in the XM service, and probably will not renew when this subscription runs out.
When Robert Heinlein published Expanded Universe, he reprinted an old story of his called "Blowups Happen". In his forword to that story he noted how over blown the TMI incident was.
"RADIATION EXPOSURE"
Half-mile from the Three-Mile plant
At the plant
During heart catheterization for an angiogram
~which I underwent 18 months ago. I feel fine.
R.A.H."
Umm... filling my 24 gallon tank with $2.33/gallon gasoline every 380 miles already does that quite nicely, thank you.
Well, you not entirely wrong, just mostly.
A passport does not "count for three" forms of ID. First, your birth certificate is not a form of ID, only proof of citizenship for the person named on the certificate. Your Social Security card is not a form of identification, only proof that the person named on the card has registered with the IRS and Social Security Administration. Your Passport is not a replacement for a driver's license, as you do not even need a driver's license to get a passport, and try whipping out your passport the next time you get pulled over for speeding. I also normally use my passport as a form of ID. I have never had a situation that called for two forms of ID, where they would accept the passport as more than one of those forms.
You are correct that a passport has "name, dob, sex, id number, image, address (also required to be physical " however, that address does not have to be verified. If you check the official U.S. passport site. You will see that you are required to bring proof of citizenship(Birth Certificate or Naturalization Certificate except under extraordinary circumstances), a valid picture ID (Driver's license, Government ID, or Military ID) with a picture in which you are recognizable, two photos, and the fee. When I got my passport a couple years ago it wasn't even mentioned that my permanent address on the form was different from my P.O. Box which was listed on my driver's license. On my latest driver's license, they did change it to my home address, but, since I don't have any "official" mail (bills, etc.) sent to my home address, they were content with the pile of junk mail with my name and home address on it. Amusingly, when I bought my new car recently, I had to take my second choice in lenders, because the first refused to accept my application without some "official mail" proving my residence. Even the (now proper) address on both my passport and driver's license was not acceptable to them.
That's the tech I'll use in my robot... my girl robot.
Actually I think this may be deliberate to avoid Mori's Uncanny Valley. Since we have not yet advanced to the point where you can make the animation and response indistiguishable from a human, most AI researchers seem to have gone back to almost cartoonish interfaces, which people react to much better than an almost, but not quite right, photo realistic representation.
Two totally unrelated issues.
Speed increase is simple by swapping head-end equipment, or in reality just removing the software caps they have implemented on the high speed equipment they already have.
Reliability is mostly an issue with the lines, repeater, amplifiers, connections, etc. between the head-end and your house. I've dealt with running data over wide area CATV networks for over a decade, and I have to say they all have problems. If you live close to the head-end, or a major distribution hub, you can usually get pretty good service, mainly because an outage at that point means thousands of unhappy subscribers. If you live way down at the end of a trunk line, where a spotty amp only affects a dozen or so subscribers, you are SOL. Best to hope that a major new subdivision opens downstream of you so the company has to upgrade everything along the way.
A few years ago I bought a new house. My old one was in a service area of a company I don't work with regularly, and the service was so-so. My new home had really bad service when I moved in, but it was in the service area of the company I do the majority of my work with. I put a meter on my home connection, checked the bit error rate on the cable modem test circuit, called the service tech that maintains the commercial connections I usually run on. The next week, two of the amps and one of the routers on the trunk out to my place were replaced and my connection went rock solid. I was talking to my new neighbors a few weeks later about how nice my broadband connection was, and he said he'd tried it a year before, but got so frustrated that he cancelled it. I mentioned something about cable company maintenance and upgrading equipment all the time, so he might want to try it again.
You say that like it's a good thing.
Oh, I agree with you completely. As many others have stated, FISA, the founding orders and purpose of the NSA, etc., were all supposed to be aimed at foreign agents trying to damage America. It has been twisted to, completly illegally, investigate citizens. What the black vs. white crowd, seems glad to ignore is no one is saying citizens shouldn't be investigated. The fact is that we have a completly different mechanism and set of rules that must be followed by completely seperate agencies.
The rules state that forgeign suspects can be monitored and tracked on the whim of anyone in the agencies involved, and it is the job of their government to protect their rights.
Domestic suspects can only be tracked and monitored if their is a reasonable suspician they are doing something illegal so you can't legally just monitor everybody. You have to have a good (in a judges opinion) reason to suspect them. Then you can go off and do whatever you need to to gain proof on innocent or guilt, limited only by gauranteed Contitutional rights.
None of which are rational, or establish a legal basis for his actions.
Basically all your quotes (as well as most of what the Republican Party is publicly stating) is saying is there are big, bad uglies out there, but we can't tell you any specifics, because if we did, they would know we know about them. And we need to do whatever is possible to stop them from doing bad things to you, including us doing smaller bad thiings to you first. And anytime we do a bad thing to you, or your neighbor, just trust us that it was necessary, and don't bother with any of those oversight or checks and balances thingies.
You are perfectly reasonable.
Now, if he is not doing these wiretaps "just because", then why is there a problem with letting the court setup specifically to oversee the process know what is going on? As has been noted in several other posts, the arguement "If you're not doing anything wrong, why are you so concerned with hiding what you're doing," applies to the President as well as us unwashed masses.
Actually it's the PETA nuts that need to grow a spine. Notice they only throw paint on old ladies in furs, not on bikers and their leathers?
err
Surely not every reader, and probably not 99%, but I'd like to suggest that maybe their readers' likelihood of participating in illegal ativites would be higher than your average person's? Sure, they might have a point on some of their crusades, but Slashdot readership (cheap joke, but I had to) is sort of considered a joke (at least where I'm from). I'm not saying that it's necesarrily right what the NSA may have (or more like definitely) did, but there is some sort of logic there. Slashdot may be a great organization, but it does attract the sort of radical viewpoints that can lead to that sort of activity.
So we definitely need to montior all electronic transmissions by visitors to the slashdot website. After all, the message we don't monitor may be the one that exposes the next DeCSS crack.
Your, alias, your post, and your sig... way too funny when taken together. Thanks for the belly laugh.
Personal testimony, that good enough?
I frequently download a good movie and burn it to DVD after having just seen it in the theater. Then when it goes to official DVD, I buy the official copy, for the extended cuts, special features, etc. The movies I have done this for, and now have legal copies of, include: The Matrix, Chicago, The Princess Bride, All of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Episodes 4-6 of Star Wars, Batman Begins, all of the Harry Potter movies, and many others. In the case of LotR, I have my downloaded copies, the original release, and the extended release. I am currently enjoying my own copies of Narnia and Goblet of Fire, and have pre-ordered or am on the notification list to order both of them as soon as they come available.
In fact, if I was able to purchase the DVD on the way out of the theater, I would have bought all of these immediately after seeing the movie. Actually, there a lot of movies that I am jazzed about as I leave the theater and would probably buy the DVD, but by the time I get home I'm over it enough that it's not worth the time or effort to get a decent copy off of P2P, and by the time the DVD is released I've decided it's not worth the money, or I've forgotten about it. So the studios are actually losing a lot of my business by their delaying tactics.
And to answer your next question, the only 'pirate' material I have, video or audio, is material that is not currently available for purchase. If the rights holder is not willing to provide copies for purchase, especially in the case of some old music titles that are no longer available, I personally have no moral issues with downloading a copy for my own enjoyment.
Why, oh why, did I waste all my mod points today on other threads?
Yeah, but the sharks are gonna have frikkin laser beams.
Actually, I completely agree. The Narnia books have been favorites of mine since early childhood. You might even say they were my gateway into fantasy and sci-fi. And it was years after I had moved on from them that I even knew they were supposed to have a Christian corrolation. I still have a hard time seeing the direct correlation that C.S. Lewis said is there. Yet, in both the books and movies, the obvious 'fantastic' elements and magic are blatant. Once I was in High School, the deacons at our church were blathering about anti-D&D and how it was the Devil's work because of all the talk of magic and fantasy creatures, I walked into the church library and pulled The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe out of the Church library and started reading quotes out of it about Tumnus the faun, and talking beavers, and magic Turkish Delight. There were at least two special meetings of the Church elders discussing if they should/could ban C.S. Lewis works from the Church library. Somehow the arguement got swept under the covers, but the books stayed, and the deacons stopped argueing against pop culture, and shifted to a more pro-Christian message instead.
And, much like the Passion of the Christ, it shows glaring the massive double standard being applied. Violence, blood, and gore are bad and will scar and ruin our children... except for when it's an accurate reproduction of a Bible story. Magic, magical creatures, and fantasy worlds are evil and the devil trying to corrupt the children, unless it an accurate reproduction of a beloved Christian author's work.
You seem to have answered your own question, and contradicted your original theme at the same time.
Yes, if you oversee me type in my security code, I would much rather you tell me you know it and that you are going to publish it, and then have you publish it, than have you walking around secretly knowing my code. If you tell me it is compromised, and will be made public you are 'darn'd tootin' I'm going to change it as soon as possible, and implement better procedures to keep it from leaking in the future.
Myself, just like any number of large corporations, will willingly proceed with standard operating procedures, in the lack of any information showing they are flawed. I, unlike many large and small corporations, will change those procedures when they are shown to be flawed. Many corporations and individuals will only change their methods when threatened with public disclosure of a vulnerability.
And if you think you are doing me a favor by keeping the fact that you have compromised me secret, because you are a trustworthy individual, think again. If you know a vulnerability, then the chances are that someone else will also discover it, and they may not have your lofty morals. And that applies to knowing where to procure nuclear materials, the national missle codes, or the frequency to my garage door opener. If you have found a leak to aquire the nuclear launch codes or secret encryption keys, I really do want you to tell people and publish them. Because if you found them then it is very likely that someone else has as well, and they need to be changed immediately, and the leak needs to be plugged.
So yes, there is information that needs to be kept between limited, responsible people. If at any time that information leaks beyond that group, then once the group is informed, the information needs to be published so that 1) we the people can be informed by the failure in public trust, and 2) it will force a review and change of security procedures.
I defy you to find any class of information, that once found vulnerable, should remain secret under this scenario. Even information that is in some way hard coded, i.e. the instructions on how to build a nuclear bomb, needs to be public, just so that we can implement proper security to keep it from happening. If I don't know that a certain left handed widget is critical to the assembly of such a device, then I don't know to be suspicious when I see one being delivered to the house next door. And no matter how good your security is, once someone has figured out how to do something, other smart people will be able to figure it out as well, you just won't know that it been re-invented, and you won't be looking for people doing it because you have 'secured' the information.
Which is fine, but meaningless. If the people complaining are not the copyright holders, but the syndicated licensees, then they have no business screaming about copyright violations.
But in fact, this group is complaining about violation of their copyright on their published web pages. Which is complete nonsense. As pointed out in other places, search engines do not reproduce content they index it and send people to the original source. What really has these folk's panties in a wad is that search engines have leveled the information distribution playing field. Before a publisher could target a relatively small and obscure niche market and keep it locked up to themselves because there just wasn't enough volume for more than a very limited number of information sources in that area. Now all of those markets, i.e. "Cat Fancy", "Dog Lovers", "Home & Garden", are being wiped out by all of the free information that people are willing to make available online. Ten years ago my Mom had a subscription to one of those cat magazines. Now she participates in two online forums and her and her cat both have blogs. *boggle**I created a monster*
Then you throw in the other side, mass media. Before, NYT could demand a subscription and earn money from exclusive and well written articles and stories. Now, there are enough licensees of Rueters, UPI, and AP that are willing to give those stories away in return for Ad impressions, and there are enough well written editorial and in depth, on-the-spot stories written by people living through the news event, that the NYT is becoming irrelevent.
Both of these situations are only possible because of search engines. I know that I'll find a story on one of the subscription based services I use that I want to share with friends. When I do, I do a quick google to find a non-subscription site with the same article and send that link so my friends and family, who are not interested in subscribing to new scientist, can still see the neat Saturn moon photos published for free by BBC, with essentially the same story. Or better, a link to the BBC story and the NASA picture site hosting all the latest pictures. I like new scientist because they do the work of scanning all the press releases and new publications and pointing out and summarizing the best/most interesting of them so I can quickly find the information that interests me, and do deeper research on those topics that the summary is insufficient for. Hmmm... sound a lot like what Google does for free on a wider scale. The only difference, and why I still have my subscription, is that Google is horrible at seperating the wheat from the chaff. The signal to noise ratio on Google is way too low. But at the same time, if I want to find information on Himalayan long-hairs, and pointers for dealing with hair-balls, instead of subscribing to an expensive specialty source that may or may not have an article dealing with my problem, a quick google will point me to a dozen or more possible sites that are willing to interact with me in near real-time, to not only solve my problem but point out other things that I should know or problems I can be on alert for.
The group in the story claiming that search engines will destroy the publication industry are the last of the buggy whip makers screaming that automobiles and paved roads will be the end of the leather industry. My advice to them... stop making whips and start making uphostlery and seat covers. Gee, the more I think about that analogy in this context the better I like it.
Yeah, I had 138972 way back when. That was back in college when I was changing service providers every year to get the good dial-up deals. Way before hotmail, etc. generic email acounts, so every time I changed providers, I ended up with a new email address. When my old 386 finally died and I moved to a Pentium, I installed the ICQ client, but couldn't remember my password because it had been so long since I typed it in. And of course the password recovery was to an old email account that I hadn't had access to in a year or more...
I miss that number.
Actually, the point with Oklahoma Oil isn't because the field is exhausted. Those wells are capable of pumping just as much oil in just as short a time as the ones in UAE. The difference is the $50 per week wages for oil field workers there and the $30-$50 an hour wages here for comparable jobs. The Hubbert and peak oil projections are all about that the world will be incapable no matter the technological advancement or at any price, to produce as much oil as we consume. Hubbert published his report in 1949. Think about what was being predicted about computer technology in 1949. ENIAC was 3 years old. Even as late as 1977 the head of DEC was quoted as saying that no one would even need a computer in the home. Could Ford in the 1930's have envisioned what is possible with the new GT40? And the current cababilities that we use every day to recover oil today, let alone the possibilities of tomorrow, weren't even dreamed of in Hubbert's day. The peak oil Hubberdites are a lot like the fanatical believers in Atlantis. One author writes something that sounds good when applied to a limited scope and kept within the context of the writings, but it then gets taken over and expanded upon, by people with not as much understanding, and/or a specific agenda to push, and it takes on a life of its own.
As for the global warming/cooling, this article summarizes some of the thoughts along the lines of what I presented above. A quick google search will lead you to much more in depth analysis. There is a study, not mentioned in that article and I can't find it right now, that showed this effect occuring in eastern China by all of the smoke being produced inland and blown over the coast, also a smaller study about similar effects from the burning in the Amazon.
I firmly believe that the rise we are currently seeing is indeed the start of an accelerating trend. One that human activity has very little impact on, or if any, has been slowing the rise thus far by emitting clouds of smoke thus keeping temperatures artificially low. Now that we are cleaning up our soot emissions the CO2, and natural process that drive the climate, are regaining their direction. As you noted, we are woefully unprepared for such an event. I would say that we desperately need to start preparing, clearing the low lying areas, etc., but I'm realist enough to know that there is no feasable way to get the huge fraction of the human race that lives on coast lines to change their residence prior to a devastating catastrophy.
As to your comments about peak oil, read the literature more closely and in depth. Yes, oil execs and employees have started falling all over themselves to validate peak oil theories, but apparently, only because they suddenly realized that the peak oil nuts were their best friends. If the oil monopoly (removing Hussein took out the major producer who was not part of the Saudi, Kuwait, Exxon, Shell, Chevron cartel. Russia was broken up to let the cartel take over production there, next in line is Chavez in Venzuela) can convince the world that we have reached peak oil production then they have an indisputable excuse for maintaining higher prices and vastly higher profits. The peak oil advocates love to point out that oil production is down worldwide in recent years. but isn't it interesting that in fact it is down by almost the same percentage at every cartel field world wide. These fields are not connected and shouldn't be suddenly linked in their very close decreases in output capacity. Especially since peak oil states that we can not increase production, not that it will decrease and everyone, including the peak oil fanatics, is very quick to reassure their investors that they have plenty of in ground reserves for X number of years. I propose that this is evidence of global collaboration to set and maintain a specific level of output, regardless of the capacity that could be acheived if it were maximized. In fact, if you research the geophysical scientific papers on new sources and increasing recovery from old sources or souces that were previously inaccessible, you find that not only is there more oil available and accesible today than there ever has been before, but there is far more oil than than we have ever used combined. I would post links to these, but strangely all of the pages I had bookmarked over the last 10 years have disappeared or been replaced by peak oil pages. However, you can find some clue in the investment brochures and independent scientific reports. Now undoubtably these new sources and recovery techniques will cost more, so we have seen the last of cheap oil, monopoly or not.
I became interested in the science and economics of this because of my family's oil wells in west Oklahoma. In the late 60's and early 70's, during U.S. peak production, our 16 wells were producing approx. $200,000 in royalties per month. By the late 80's they were producing about $13,000 per quarter. Basically the oil company explained that, at that time, it cost $32 per barrel to produce from Oklahoma wells, and $6 per barrel to import from the middle east. So all of the wells were placed in maintenance mode, which is basically just enough pumped to lubricate the mechanicals, and at that rate the holding tanks were only emptied once per quarter, instead of weekly or twice weekly. When my mom sold th