I like to think there are three broad categories of people that we are talking about here.
1- People who will never buy the movie or go see it. These people can download all they want (or not) they will simply not pay the money for it.
2- People that would go buy the movie or go to the theatre unless they found a copy of it they could download, then they will be less likely to pay for it.
3- People who will go buy and see movies very often regardless if they have access to the downloads or are even offered free copies of them from their friends.
MPAA has nothing to worry about category 1, since they shouldn't expect any profit from them anyway. I am in that category. Same for software. Sure, I use Photoshop, but I could never afford to pay for it, even if I had the money I wouldn't buy it.
Some people fall in category 3. My brother, a film enthusiast is in that category. He will go buy the DVD to have it in his collection. This is the category what MPAA also doesn't have to worry about.
Now category 2 is what they raise all the fuss about. They represent the expected loss from piracy, and I don't think this category is that large compared to the other two categories.
Of course, this is an oversimplification, but it gives a general idea. Over time individuals will move between categories and change their behavior.
So I agree it is not theft, but because these studios expect such and such ammount from the movie and if they don't get it they say the pirates came and 'stole' it from them. If a director or producer did a lousy job and movie is a flop - blame the pirates. If people are sick of the same boring stuff and don't want to pay for it - blame the pirates. In other words they are an easy scape-goat. And they will get the law (makers/enforcers) to be on their side since they have all the money.
Why doesn't he move his website to some other country (except Christmas Island of course, although lokitorrent.cx would be a good url;) where nobody gives a crap about MPAA? Then he can accept donations to keep the website running and have extra to buy candy and ice-cream instead of paying for legal fees, which is a lot more expensive.
MPAA is fighting a loosing battle and are wasting their money. If a significat ammount of people don't think trading media is wrong then they'll find a way to do that. It is just like police and society, if everyone decided all of the sudden to go out to kill and pillage, there just won't be enough policemen around to stop them. But most people don't think that killing and pillaging is not right, that keeps the order not the fear or force of the police.
And I like MPAA's little adds in the movie theatres how they show this poor set designer who claims the pimply-faced hackers stole his money. Why don't they show the billionaire owners and executives of the studios? I can almost see the add:
[Sad marimba music in the background...] "Because of the wide-spread piracy the poor CEO of [insert name] studio won't be able to afford a Ferrari for his 16 year old daughter. Look what piracy has done! His daughter will be forced to drive a BMW now. How does that make you feel?"
So years after the fall of the Nazis we shoud forget the victims, and just move on with our happy lives? Well, the communists often were just as brutal and just as cruel as the Nazis, and finding and bringing the responsible to justice is important.
You don't seem to know families who disappeared overnight that were taken in cattle box cars to Siberian labor camps and died there. And you probably don't know about the Orthodox Christian priests that were tortured to death in the KGB interogation chambers, with their limbs cut off, teeth pulled with pliers and needles stuck under their nails. We are not talking about mild abuses of power, or some minor annoyances, but mass murder, torture and terror. And what happened afterwards? -Well, you would appreciate this - nothing! Many of those executioners, labor camp guards and members of secret services (KGB) nicely covered their tracks, burnt the archives, and are living a nice, happy life right among the victims and families that they once destroyed.
And I won't buy crap like "They just had to do it" or "That's how the times were." Some things are wrong no matter the times and the political regime.
I only wish they would treat the KGB collaborators like US and UN treats ex-Nazi collaborators. I don't feel it is unjust when once in a while they still find a Nazi labor camp guard and deport him, even if they are 80 years old.
Re:It is not about how much rocket costs..
on
Hondas in Space
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The fact is that the old Russian rockets with 60's electronics still work and reliably get people back and forth from space while shuttles stay grounded. You can still build stuff simple (not the same thing as cheap though!) and make it at the same time reliable, just need good engineers for that. I wouldn't say though that they built their stuff cheaply, at that time they probably funneled more resources into the space program than NASA, they just had a different design philosophy.
The same is true about the Kalashnikov, it was build simple and reliable because having it work in any conditions was essential. You can drag it though mud, snow and sand and it will still shoot. While at the same time the more modern M16 rifle would get jammed in the Vietnamese jungle.
But, I don't think that the analogy of Honda would work, because there is still a trade-off between cheap and reliable. The cost of having well-trained engineers and designers and testing does cost money.
If this sticker is attached to your penis it will automatically enlarge to enormous proportions.
Also, works much better than viagra or cialis.
All you need to do is click this link to your bank and enter your credit card number, expiration data, social security and mother's maiden name.
Only then we will send you the magic sticker.
But that's not all, if you click within the next five seconds, we'll send you a second sticker, for your dog's cell phone absolutely free. That's right, two magic stickers for the price of one.
Still, not convinced? We'll throw in a Rolex watch replica and a free subscription to H.O.t.Pr.0.N.
That is true. That is one of the un-spoken genocides. Stalin was just as brutal and inhumane as Hitler yet most people in this country (US) have no idea about that, heck they probably think Stalin is just a brand of Vodka
Exactly, I am still waiting until digital can allow me do to what a 4x5 view camera does. I am not saying it might never happen but that day is not there yet I think. And besides, sometimes processing the film in the lab is more fun that using Photoshop.
I agree with you. I did faily well, because my mom motivated me. Not by telling me I need to do my homework but telling me that she couldn't do her homework when she was young and had to work on the farm. She was forced to quit school after the 7th grade so she could look after cows. Somehow she taught me that my school work is just as important as her or my father's job and the grades were like my salary. But I was never pressured to do homework, my parents were never on my case as to needing to do homework , or needing to become a doctor or lawer or some of those staple big money jobs.
Well another thing was, I had a minor speech impediment, not enough for me to become totally anti-social but enough to make me "uncool" to hang out with all the jocks and other "cool" people. I resented that at the time, now I thank God. All those people now live in a "van down by the river". Instead I hung out with nerds and talked about computer games, physics and chemistry. And I was actually excited to learn new stuff in school. I remember I couldn't wait to get to a new chapter in Physics, or I would look forward about learning about derivates and limits.
Well now I am a grad in Computer Science. I guess the advice I would give the highschool crowd is to worry less about wanting to fit in and hang out and make friend with smart people not popular. And I would tell parents to not badger and force their children to become something they don't want, instead incourage curiosity, learning, wonder about the world, imagination.
The idea of having many processing units in a personal workstation is not new. They thought that Moore's law was going to fail years ago and predicted that by now we would all have massively parallel machines at home on our desks. Well it turned out that Moore's law didn't fail and most importantly that many of the software algorithms are not easily parallelizable. So what if I can have 100 cells at home in my workstation. I could run SETI, weather or some other kind of simulation but I couldn't really play my video games much faster or have a more responsive user interface if I ever install Longhorn. I just can't think of too many programs run on home user's machines that would benefit form a parallel architecture.
Now if the can be made very fast and have only a few (2-8) coupled together...well,as it was said, that is what a nice Opteron machine does anyway nowadays.
Agree. It is just too late for them. They would have had to start before grade school. I think math and any subject that is based on it has to be learned pretty much incrementally. If some idea or concept is not learned at the right time it is very hard to move on and catch up. That is why I wish there was a trick to make children understand how important their schoolwork is even as early as grade school. It's not just counting apples it is counting apples so they later can count the number of elementary particles in a collider. The point is, education and parenting can mostly overcome many genetics predispositions.
Wel,l I ment "excel" not as being a genius like Gauss or Goedel, but just doing well at any university even at Harvard and Caltech. I never liked being told that I have "talent",or that somehow I am inherently smart, because the truth is I am not, I think I am average, but I am good at calculus, linear algebra, stats, and comp sci because I worked hard and I wanted to be good. I think people nowadays put too much emphasis on predispositions,genetics and nature and use it as an excuse for not doing well or brush off someone's achievement.
Agree with you. What the speaker said might be true and if true would mean that men are predisposed to doing better at math. He didn't say that there is no woman out there that can be good at math and all women might as well learn how to cook instead. Now that would have been a derogatory statement.
With diligence and work anyone male or female can excel at math. As you said there are physical differences and that cannot be ignored, it's not only a matter of having or not a penis but also having different concentrations of hormones and having a different brain wiring, that translate directly into having different predispositions.
At the risk of opening another can of worms (actually bait), it is interesting how this relates to the issue of homesexuality. Here the people from the same liberal and feminist camp will argue that homosexuality is innate, that people are biologically hard-wired one way or another. So they will claim that even individuals of the same gender, same race, can have such a inborn physical difference that makes them have different sexual orientation, while they cannot accept that very much more obvious physical and biological differences between males and females might pre-dispose each of them for doing better at various tasks. I am not saying whether one or another is the case, but just pointing out the inconsistency.
Let's say that a female speaker, let's even assume the same Mrs. Hopkins that walked out because she was just so offended, would have said that there is evidence that females excel at languages and have much better innate verbal skills than men do. That would have been alright, any ofended men walking out would have been just regarded as a crazy, but in fact it is the same thing.
It is "ok" for the feminists to be different as long "different" somehow means "better". When liberal zealots promote equality and tolerance foaming at the mouth, they usually promote "equality as long as we are more equal than you" or "tolerance as long as that means you tolerate us". Nothing new, same type of activism that ultra-conservative zealots have on the other side just disguised as being somehow more "intellectual" or more "progressive".
That is the reason all those "get payed to click" schemes failed. I had written scripts to move and click my mouse mouse for a couple of those companies and was getting about $20 per month. The way I saw it I was just getting payed for the little script I wrote. The better and more intelligent the scipt was, the more I should be rewarded. I gave up when they started to pop up windows with specific instructions that had to be read and executed.
This COO we had loved the word 'leverage', sure enough, after 4 or 5 months since he has been in the company we were 'leveraging' everything, the web, the infrastructure, resourses. You name it - we could 'leverage' it. Then he sold the company to a competitor, which left 50% of employees on the street and moved on to a new adventure. I guess he 'leveraged' us after all. But that is a different story.
That's where RAID comes in. I am building a simple data acquisition system at work and it has to have a large capacity for storage and be reliable but have a low cost. I will get 2x 200GB drives for RAID-1 and a nice power supply + good cooling. Don't know which brands to choose for the drives. I used IBM at home and after 3 years I get some corruption once in a while, but I also have RAID-0 at home (good enough for games, web and email).
A while a ago I went looking for a video ram testing utility. The only one I was able to find was on this page created by this Russian guy at this website. (It's mostly in Russian though, which I speak).
There I looked around and found
this story about this utility called S2KCt used to supposedly cool some athlon processors by using the S2K bus disconnect instruction.
The guy writes how he simultaneously ran his utility that does a cpu burn-in and S2KCt and ended up with a burnt motherboard. He says his "converter" burnt. And he wasn't overclocking the machine at the time. He seems to know enough about heat management since he develops similar programs (see below on that). Then later, he says,using similar hardware he tried to test a later version of S2KCt and his motherboard died again.
So that is what I have recently heard about hardware being damaged by software. Also take note, since the author himself writes utilities that cool and stress the CPU he is not a totally unbiased source.
Any computer engineers who can validate the story ?
Slashdot Mirror
I like to think there are three broad categories of people that we are talking about here.
1- People who will never buy the movie or go see it. These people can download all they want (or not) they will simply not pay the money for it.
2- People that would go buy the movie or go to the theatre unless they found a copy of it they could download, then they will be less likely to pay for it.
3- People who will go buy and see movies very often regardless if they have access to the downloads or are even offered free copies of them from their friends.
MPAA has nothing to worry about category 1, since they shouldn't expect any profit from them anyway. I am in that category. Same for software. Sure, I use Photoshop, but I could never afford to pay for it, even if I had the money I wouldn't buy it.
Some people fall in category 3. My brother, a film enthusiast is in that category. He will go buy the DVD to have it in his collection. This is the category what MPAA also doesn't have to worry about.
Now category 2 is what they raise all the fuss about. They represent the expected loss from piracy, and I don't think this category is that large compared to the other two categories.
Of course, this is an oversimplification, but it gives a general idea. Over time individuals will move between categories and change their behavior.
So I agree it is not theft, but because these studios expect such and such ammount from the movie and if they don't get it they say the pirates came and 'stole' it from them. If a director or producer did a lousy job and movie is a flop - blame the pirates. If people are sick of the same boring stuff and don't want to pay for it - blame the pirates. In other words they are an easy scape-goat. And they will get the law (makers/enforcers) to be on their side since they have all the money.
Irony:1 You:0
In other news: North Korea announced it will cooperate with US and destroy its nuclear warheads as well as open access to inspectors from the West.
Why doesn't he move his website to some other country (except Christmas Island of course, although lokitorrent.cx would be a good url ;) where nobody gives a crap about MPAA? Then he can accept donations to keep the website running and have extra to buy candy and ice-cream instead of paying for legal fees, which is a lot more expensive.
MPAA is fighting a loosing battle and are wasting their money. If a significat ammount of people don't think trading media is wrong then they'll find a way to do that. It is just like police and society, if everyone decided all of the sudden to go out to kill and pillage, there just won't be enough policemen around to stop them. But most people don't think that killing and pillaging is not right, that keeps the order not the fear or force of the police.
And I like MPAA's little adds in the movie theatres how they show this poor set designer who claims the pimply-faced hackers stole his money. Why don't they show the billionaire owners and executives of the studios? I can almost see the add:
[Sad marimba music in the background...]
"Because of the wide-spread piracy the poor CEO of [insert name] studio won't be able to afford a Ferrari for his 16 year old daughter. Look what piracy has done! His daughter will be forced to drive a BMW now. How does that make you feel?"
Note for Americans: Natrium=Na=Sodium
"Years after the fall of communism"...
So years after the fall of the Nazis we shoud forget the victims, and just move on with our happy lives? Well, the communists often were just as brutal and just as cruel as the Nazis, and finding and bringing the responsible to justice is important.
You don't seem to know families who disappeared overnight that were taken in cattle box cars to Siberian labor camps and died there. And you probably don't know about the Orthodox Christian priests that were tortured to death in the KGB interogation chambers, with their limbs cut off, teeth pulled with pliers and needles stuck under their nails. We are not talking about mild abuses of power, or some minor annoyances, but mass murder, torture and terror. And what happened afterwards? -Well, you would appreciate this - nothing! Many of those executioners, labor camp guards and members of secret services (KGB) nicely covered their tracks, burnt the archives, and are living a nice, happy life right among the victims and families that they once destroyed.
And I won't buy crap like "They just had to do it" or "That's how the times were." Some things are wrong no matter the times and the political regime.
I only wish they would treat the KGB collaborators like US and UN treats ex-Nazi collaborators. I don't feel it is unjust when once in a while they still find a Nazi labor camp guard and deport him, even if they are 80 years old.
The fact is that the old Russian rockets with 60's electronics still work and reliably get people back and forth from space while shuttles stay grounded. You can still build stuff simple (not the same thing as cheap though!) and make it at the same time reliable, just need good engineers for that. I wouldn't say though that they built their stuff cheaply, at that time they probably funneled more resources into the space program than NASA, they just had a different design philosophy.
The same is true about the Kalashnikov, it was build simple and reliable because having it work in any conditions was essential. You can drag it though mud, snow and sand and it will still shoot. While at the same time the more modern M16 rifle would get jammed in the Vietnamese jungle.
But, I don't think that the analogy of Honda would work, because there is still a trade-off between cheap and reliable. The cost of having well-trained engineers and designers and testing does cost money.
If this sticker is attached to your penis it will automatically enlarge to enormous proportions.
Also, works much better than viagra or cialis.
All you need to do is click this link to your bank and enter your credit card number, expiration data, social security and mother's maiden name.
Only then we will send you the magic sticker.
But that's not all, if you click within the next five seconds, we'll send you a second sticker, for your dog's cell phone absolutely free. That's right, two magic stickers for the price of one.
Still, not convinced? We'll throw in a Rolex watch replica and a free subscription to H.O.t.Pr.0.N.
killed some 115-120% percent of them. How is that possible, one would think after 100% there would be nobody left.
That is true. That is one of the un-spoken genocides. Stalin was just as brutal and inhumane as Hitler yet most people in this country (US) have no idea about that, heck they probably think Stalin is just a brand of Vodka
Exactly, I am still waiting until digital can allow me do to what a 4x5 view camera does. I am not saying it might never happen but that day is not there yet I think. And besides, sometimes processing the film in the lab is more fun that using Photoshop.
When will the average programmer be able to keep up? I am sure in India they are already teaching classes on this ;-)
...Just gotta move to India
Well another thing was, I had a minor speech impediment, not enough for me to become totally anti-social but enough to make me "uncool" to hang out with all the jocks and other "cool" people. I resented that at the time, now I thank God. All those people now live in a "van down by the river". Instead I hung out with nerds and talked about computer games, physics and chemistry. And I was actually excited to learn new stuff in school. I remember I couldn't wait to get to a new chapter in Physics, or I would look forward about learning about derivates and limits.
Well now I am a grad in Computer Science. I guess the advice I would give the highschool crowd is to worry less about wanting to fit in and hang out and make friend with smart people not popular. And I would tell parents to not badger and force their children to become something they don't want, instead incourage curiosity, learning, wonder about the world, imagination.
Now if the can be made very fast and have only a few (2-8) coupled together...well,as it was said, that is what a nice Opteron machine does anyway nowadays.
That is one of the best analogies I've heard about the idea behind quantum superposition and how it would work with factorization.
Was I the only one who read that as "German P0rnographic Industry"
Agree. It is just too late for them. They would have had to start before grade school. I think math and any subject that is based on it has to be learned pretty much incrementally. If some idea or concept is not learned at the right time it is very hard to move on and catch up. That is why I wish there was a trick to make children understand how important their schoolwork is even as early as grade school. It's not just counting apples it is counting apples so they later can count the number of elementary particles in a collider. The point is, education and parenting can mostly overcome many genetics predispositions.
Wel,l I ment "excel" not as being a genius like Gauss or Goedel, but just doing well at any university even at Harvard and Caltech. I never liked being told that I have "talent",or that somehow I am inherently smart, because the truth is I am not, I think I am average, but I am good at calculus, linear algebra, stats, and comp sci because I worked hard and I wanted to be good. I think people nowadays put too much emphasis on predispositions,genetics and nature and use it as an excuse for not doing well or brush off someone's achievement.
Agree with you. What the speaker said might be true and if true would mean that men are predisposed to doing better at math. He didn't say that there is no woman out there that can be good at math and all women might as well learn how to cook instead. Now that would have been a derogatory statement.
With diligence and work anyone male or female can excel at math. As you said there are physical differences and that cannot be ignored, it's not only a matter of having or not a penis but also having different concentrations of hormones and having a different brain wiring, that translate directly into having different predispositions.
At the risk of opening another can of worms (actually bait), it is interesting how this relates to the issue of homesexuality. Here the people from the same liberal and feminist camp will argue that homosexuality is innate, that people are biologically hard-wired one way or another. So they will claim that even individuals of the same gender, same race, can have such a inborn physical difference that makes them have different sexual orientation, while they cannot accept that very much more obvious physical and biological differences between males and females might pre-dispose each of them for doing better at various tasks. I am not saying whether one or another is the case, but just pointing out the inconsistency.
Let's say that a female speaker, let's even assume the same Mrs. Hopkins that walked out because she was just so offended, would have said that there is evidence that females excel at languages and have much better innate verbal skills than men do. That would have been alright, any ofended men walking out would have been just regarded as a crazy, but in fact it is the same thing.
It is "ok" for the feminists to be different as long "different" somehow means "better". When liberal zealots promote equality and tolerance foaming at the mouth, they usually promote "equality as long as we are more equal than you" or "tolerance as long as that means you tolerate us". Nothing new, same type of activism that ultra-conservative zealots have on the other side just disguised as being somehow more "intellectual" or more "progressive".
That is the reason all those "get payed to click" schemes failed. I had written scripts to move and click my mouse mouse for a couple of those companies and was getting about $20 per month. The way I saw it I was just getting payed for the little script I wrote. The better and more intelligent the scipt was, the more I should be rewarded. I gave up when they started to pop up windows with specific instructions that had to be read and executed.
This COO we had loved the word 'leverage', sure enough, after 4 or 5 months since he has been in the company we were 'leveraging' everything, the web, the infrastructure, resourses. You name it - we could 'leverage' it. Then he sold the company to a competitor, which left 50% of employees on the street and moved on to a new adventure. I guess he 'leveraged' us after all. But that is a different story.
That's where RAID comes in. I am building a simple data acquisition system at work and it has to have a large capacity for storage and be reliable but have a low cost. I will get 2x 200GB drives for RAID-1 and a nice power supply + good cooling. Don't know which brands to choose for the drives. I used IBM at home and after 3 years I get some corruption once in a while, but I also have RAID-0 at home (good enough for games, web and email).
There I looked around and found this story about this utility called S2KCt used to supposedly cool some athlon processors by using the S2K bus disconnect instruction.
The guy writes how he simultaneously ran his utility that does a cpu burn-in and S2KCt and ended up with a burnt motherboard. He says his "converter" burnt. And he wasn't overclocking the machine at the time. He seems to know enough about heat management since he develops similar programs (see below on that). Then later, he says,using similar hardware he tried to test a later version of S2KCt and his motherboard died again.
So that is what I have recently heard about hardware being damaged by software. Also take note, since the author himself writes utilities that cool and stress the CPU he is not a totally unbiased source.Any computer engineers who can validate the story ?