Pain is where you find it, its certainly not everywhere in the human body. I had a stent put in my heart last week and the only anesthetic needed is a local in the groin where they feed the wire in.
I also have to inject myself in the stomach twice a day and there are some sites which will hurt and others which are completely painless. I just gently prod with the needle till i find a pain free spot and just let the needle sink in under its own weight.
I'd also rate dental pain as probably the worst pain in the male body , it's possible child birth might be more painful but we have no way of knowing. I believe cancer tops all other pain.
Getting my fingers and hands sliced up in an attempted mugging about the same as a wasp sting (a brief sharp pain). Heart attack is about the same as a tattoo but scary.
best pain killer has to be morphine not just for the pain relief but for the relaxed attitude , you just don't feel panic or fear. If I have a choice in how I die other than in my sleep it would be whilst under the influence of morphine.
I smoked for 30 years and quitting in the end was easy. In all that time I reckon I quit for a fortnight and I quit for 2 Months.
On the 18th of July at about 6:45 I had a coronary I was strong but unfit and thats when I smoked my last cigarette waiting for an Ambulance. I probably wouldn't have smoked it had I known what was going on.
Smoking narrows the arteries and that makes it easier for blood clots to lodge and block the arteries. If the artery is feeding the heart muscle then the starvation of oxygenated blood causes the heart muscle to die and in time be replaced by scar tissue. It never pumps so well again. If it gets badly damaged it can't pump and everything dies. The blood clots are created when fat deposited on your artery walls after years of crappy food tears maybe after doing something or nothing.
Strokes are similar , blockage of an artery taking oxygenated blood to the brain.
Cancer is a gamble and no one thinks they will lose so its not a reason to quit smoking the artery problem is.
I quit smoking by means of Niquitin patches and it was easy although I modified the program i changed the patches when I needed to change the patches it might be 12 hours or 48 hours I just let my body decide when it was low on nicotine. In a social situation where I was around other people smoking I put a fresh patch on and after a few minutes i got a reassuring itch where the patch was. other than that it was 4 weeks on high 2 weeks on medium and 2 weeks on low. That was pretty easy. I don't need a cigarette now , I want a cigarette some times but I know i would start again so I don't. I have a few spare patches so i can put one on if i really want the nicotine, I have done that once or twice.
I'm feeling good for quitting and its hopefully dropping the risks of another heart attack, even so the stats suggest 50% of survivors die in 6 - 8 years most of them in the first year. 30% died from the first heart attack. So I'm lucky already.
Everyone says I should quit smoking and nobody does because withdrawal turns us into grumpy nasty people, well the patches work I smoothly managed to quit, so having read this I hope you see that you can too.
Don't die younger than you have too try and avoid the first heart attack.
Do you really want to spend the last years of your life in an old farts' home, watching Coronation Street, waiting to die? Fuck that!
If that's your idea of "retirement", just pull the f*ing plug now and spare us your waste of oxygen.
Actually that's your idea of retirement, it certainly doesn't have to be that way and thats not just a question of money. It's not a bad thing to allow people to work beyond pensionable age if they wish too maybe volunteer work could be better than shifts in Macdonald's, finance shouldn't be the reason. Thats a key point at that age you should be able to decide what you want to do with your life and watching coronation st isn't an aim.
I've come close to dying twice this year I got out of hospital on Friday and the last thing I want is to die anytime soon. I have a lot more living to do yet. There is no good reason why I can't be doing pretty much the same range of activities in my 60's and beyond that I am capable of now. I'm a bit more focused on living and getting healthier knowing that I am only alive today thanks to modern medicine. Thirty years ago I would have died about 4 months ago.
Odds of my making it to retirement are a bit piss poor to be honest, however there is no reason to quit just yet.
Quit smoking eat less, fats especially , keep active mentally and physically and then you might get the choice of sitting in your slippers watching coronation st - you probably still wouldn't want to.
It's strange to me that 90% of the things we can buy to eat today damage us so that by the time we hit retirement age we are about ready to croak. You don't think about this till the damage is done usually but it doesn't have to be this way. It is possible to make healthier choices and thats whats going to save you from Coronation st.
When softer alternatives are prohibited, harder alternatives become more attractive (for example, why bootleg beer when you can bootleg harder alcohol). This leads to more people doing harder drugs.
That is the poorest argument ever , I sometimes speed in my car therefore now I do something illegal I may as well shoot people in the head. Well why not? I have no respect for the law.
The fact that many people are prepared to step over drug laws doesn't mean they will choose to take anything and everything. Just as well really. All drugs are not created equal and some are more harmful than others and people who use drugs realize this to a greater or lesser extent.
If you wanted to say that by making relatively harmless drugs available you increase the exposure to and availability of other drugs I could agree with that but there is a social difference between addicts and casual drug users, a casual drug user isn't generally willing to associate with someone who is likely to steal from them in order to feed a habit.
Well, that's exactly what's happening. Everyone who pays for works end up paying for the people who don't. The problem is that some people aren't happy paying such high prices for the sake of pirates.
That is fundamentally flawed. Things are not priced to recover an investment but to what the market will bare. The difference between me and j k rowling is that people will pay more often to read what she writes.
I've probably earned more per copy than J K Rowling with some things I have written but there really wasn't an alternative for the companies that needed my product.
Under your thinking J K should have slashed the cost of her books once she made her first million since that was enough but she didn't because its never enough!
Piracy gives an alternative to the official product with interesting results. The pirated version might be of inferior quality however often its a superior product due to lack of drm and other copyright devices. (when Securerom complains that the genuine commercial disk in your drive is a fake and refuses to run the game you paid for, the pirated version is better).
Piracy does not raise the cost of anything for the consumer, but it does reduce the profitability of particular items per unit. Piracy may increase demand and create a market for some items or the complete opposite (where exclusivity sets the price).
Piracy can have positive local effects reducing imports or flow of cash outside the economy. Unless the saved money is hoarded and not spent, some where else comes out ahead. If there is no money to be hoarded only the commercial producer loses some profitability on a product (as the price needs to be set lower to maintain some commercial demand, although legitimate competing products will help set the price too).
Piracy can often increase the exposure and popularity of a product. A recent article on Slashdot showed an iPhone Game 'suffering' with 80 percent piracy however the Game was in the top 100 of apps bein sold in the iphone store of the thousands of apps available. That game is successful commercially and probably piracy made it popular. How many developers would take greater piracy if it meant greater commercial success? How many sales are lost by treating the customer poorly with DRM restrictions?
Even in commercial situations with draconian oversight where piracy isn't an option FOSS can replace some commercial software and keep the price down.
Piracy may well be a factor in setting the price but that price is lower not higher.
Retaliation is a threat that many people have faced and some have paid for with their lives. If you feel strongly enough then stand up and be counted.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989 have a read of that page and consider the bravery of the people who stood up for what they believed in, there are plenty of examples around the world where people have stood up to be counted in spite of the cost to themselves.
I'm sure there are a good proportion of people who signed that petition who are willing to stand up and be counted and nothing anyone can say will change their mind.
I don't agree with their aims, but they can stand up for their views and the rest of us can choose privately to support them or not.
For me I believe in love and it doesn't discriminate and I am happy for same sex couples to have the same rights as mixed couples. I don't care some homophobic idiot might get upset at me because of it. And no I'm not gay I'm straight.
What does wind me up are the homophobes and bigots who want to spread poison and not be identified.
You did tremendous things with the Amiga (wasn't the 3000 largely your design?) and you should still be proud of your part in the Amiga, although it must hurt the under appreciated engineering and mis selling or not selling that went on with commodore escom and the rest.
I guess amiga's are a bit like vintage cars and steam trains , no real use these days but they have their enthusiasts. It was something special to us and it didn't matter which version. The costs were wrong one of commodores biggest failings an inability to generate sales after selling you a system. People loved the amiga but apart from convincing friends to buy, users struggled to bring in any money for commodore.
The amiga made the most of its hardware and its hardware is well understood, perhaps Linux or BSD might benefit from a reference platform or 3 of well understood and well documented hardware. The Linux ability to run on almost anything is a weakness as well as a strength there is nothing to sell , nothing to hold up and say this is a Linux box.
Linux is probably the successor to Amiga OS as its the users and developers that set the environment. Amiga and Linux are both about having fun. Windows is work.
Sorry to sound like a rabid fan but the amiga was like that. Being an ex amiga user is like being an exsmoker still want to smoke from time to time.
Amigas were special and brought out an unmatched enthusiasm, the atari st users were never so devoted. I guess announcements like this just rub salt into an old wound, It was a painful breakup we didn't want to move on but we had too. PC's are such soulless boxes nobody misses a PC when it dies.
For those of you who have no connection with the Amiga beyond playing a few games (of which there were thousands) Dave Haynie was perhaps the top engineer at commodore after jay miner designing the aga chipset which powered the a1200 cd32 and a4000 and designing the a3000 and the zorro III bus.
Real people made Amiga's , faceless corporations make PC's
I'm a little puzzled, I think we are perhaps divided by a common language. My contacts list is a list of known email contacts with names and associated email address stored within my email program. I remember my friend and families names not their email address so when I want to email them I use their name and the software offers the email address associated with them.
If there are two or more people you email I would consider that a list , perhaps a short one of contacts. I think you must be pretty rare as someone who uses the Internet and doesn't ever use email to communicate with friends or family.
I think you might have thought I meant a list of people I mass mail junk to, no I don't do that. However I hope you can see that the list of peoples email addresses stored on my email account could be used as a destination for phishing spam. This would perhaps be taken at face value coming from a trusted source.
Disclaimer: This post is NOT a pitch to buy my damn book. It will never sell enough to make me another penny. But I want people to at least look at the tools proposed in it, and give them a shot at breaking the logjam in the popular debate. Steal the book, borrow it, check it out from a library, scan the damn thing and post the PDF on the Internet*, I don't care! Just get the ideas out there, because...
* Even though my publisher has now explicitly told me they will do no more marketing for me--I'm on my own--I'm still not willing to risk a breach of contract (and the return of my advance) by posting such a file myself. That said, if someone "comes across" such a posting, please send me the URL via gregcraven.org, so I can refer others to it.;-)
This reveals a few insights.
The Author has no commercial interest in his book once it's published when demand is relatively low.
The Publisher also has very little interest in a book once the print run is done either really. (The investment has been spent the books produced and distributed)
The Ebook might stimulate demand for the book enough to make another print run commercially viable which would benefit the publisher and the author.
It seems reasonable to conclude that for relatively obscure publications piracy is harmless and might even raise interest enough to make something commercially viable again.
The commercial case for books is quite interesting a physical book has a minimum price it can be produced for, a discount book store may sell below this price but really its only just above recycling the paper as scrap.
Once its an ebook the value is harder to determine, amazon seem to set the price at just below the paperback price. It could be profitable at 10 cents instead of say $10 but would that price generate 100x the sales (probably not).
It's easy to think that there is a limited demand for things to read but then consider the internet has a huge supply of things to read (not books) and billions of readers. The reader question e-paper or lcd screen shows that the lcd screen is acceptable, most of us read on one.
It makes me wonder why are pirated ebooks relatively uncommon, and if they were would it be a good thing?
Thanks for the tip about revo it did the trick. However the game was unplayable largely due to problems with direct X I believe.
I was interested to see how it would perform under wine so I tried it on a similar spec system running ubuntu (actually slower processor) surprisingly it ran very well, I plan to try it back on the original laptop after installing ubuntu on a second partition.
Windows and Linux have advantages and disadvantages and it is really a combination of the task in hand and the experience of the user. Your inclination would be to use Windows where mine would be to use Linux.
For me Linux offers me greater freedom to run and use what I like without any guilty pirated software. For you Linux doesn't allow you to use your broadcom wireless card or your lexmark printer. As it happens Broadcom cards work fine under Linux but require a little bit of software from broadcom.
Lexmark printers don't tend to be supported but they tend to be expensive to run with overpriced ink cartridges and in my experience unreliable. I prefer my Samsung Lazer printer which has been extremely economical over the last few years or for color my HP inkjet with built in Scanner. The Scanner can be shared over my lan with linux even for windows clients.
Linux can be useful doing things beyond the capabilities and restrictions of windows and they can compliment each other.
problem here is when your account gets hacked your contacts list gets emailed and your contacts get phished. I had two emails the other week supposed to be sent from friends account to see if i was blocked on msn by them. first thing it wanted was my hotmail account and password.
I'm not stupid enough to fall for that but I know people (obviously) who are and might trust an email which appears to come from someone they trust.
The problem with the registry is its huge and full of unrelated things. Here is a typical problem, championship manager 2010 from Eidos someone tried to install it on a laptop but something went wrong and now the Eidos folder which had the championshipmanager folder has been deleted so the installer should be able to run and create a fresh install. shouldnt it?
well it can't, when it runs it offers the options remove or reinstall, Remove does nothing and reinstall does nothing.
Since the installer doesn't offer install as an option there is obviously something remaining on the system that was created outside the program files folder and somewhere in the registry must be some key values related to this game.
In addition to this there is an install of championship manager 2008 which may have similar but unrelated keys. so the options are try and hack around in the registry trying to delete the keys from the botched install and hope this doesn't break anything else or alternatively reinstall windows and all the other software on the system.
If you can come up with a third option which solves this problem I will be glad to hear it.
Funny thing is that game does run under wine on Linux.
This is just one example of the registry being a pain there are countless others. The quick and easy answer with windows is format and reinstall generally losing some data in the process.
The really annoying thing is that this turd of a game cost 35 and of course being software can't be returned.
If apple made porn movies, maybe an apple and a trident ect might make the association between apple and porn or the sex industry.
Trouble is that both marks are inspired by the apple in the garden of eden and the tree of knowledge. Apple like it because they make computers bringing knowledge to people. Porn well obviously carnal knowledge.
Really as an old testament story the apple is part of religious symbolism and these apple based symbols are both derivative and both symbols can stand.
A more interesting question does steve jobs see himself as the creator of apple so is he symbolically god or the devil?
Well anything that gets the kids reading has to be a good thing right ?
Seriously major piracy of books would be a good thing. Not enough people read books on a regular basis wide spread piracy would increase the number of readers and as good authors attract fans they will attract sales as well.
It is practically impossible to get a feel for a book casually. Sure some bookshops are inviting, most are not, but such a small percentage of people frequent them.
So really anything which brings more people into reading has to be a good thing.
pretty much nails why long term tracking is a waste of effort on the part of advertisers and an annoyance at the least for users.
If you are searching for cat related products then thats when to advertise to you. I can't think of any reason why you would want cat related products when searching or browsing other information.
besides some search terms might be ambiguous and lead to completely wrong results if they take into account past searches.
Google seems to get a better handle on what I want from a search the results i get from my computer seem to be closer to what i want than if i use someone elses especially someone who doesn't share my interests. I wonder if it makes a difference if I sign into my gmail account?
I'm diabetic take metformin and had a heart attack 3 months ago (heart attacks are likely for diabetics).
now what am I going to die of? I've already done well not dying of my heart attack 30% of people who have a first heart attack die from it.
Does metformin reduce the incidence of cancer or does diabetes and its complications kill you before cancer arrives?
well with my dodgy heart and sticky blood how unlucky would i have to be to get cancer as well. Thing is its pretty much self inflicted eating junky food with too much fat and smoking.
Smoking has been surprisingly easy to quit with niquitin clear , nicorette isn't very effective. smoking narrows arteries and makes your heart work harder enough to help a clot block an artery.
Eat better , don't smoke you will live longer and better.
It's how an ad is targeted that really matters and when.
If I type in a search in Google or any other search engine I'm willing to be served ads related to my current search. It also makes sense to have adverts relating to that search on any website i click on as a result of that search.
What everyone objects to is ads tailored to by tracking past web sites visited. At the very least it might not be the same user. Parents don't want targeting by a profile based on their kids interests for example.
Cars are developed for different markets and perhaps American car manufacturers did work together to standardize the controls. The rest of the world seems to have been less organised.
Thats really quite a lousy analogy, manual shift cars are easy to pick up and usually have a little diagram where the gears are. It's far more complicated figuring out where the headlight and foglight switches are, which stick is used for indicators and which for wipers.
The accidentally selecting a wrong gear problem isn't as bad as you seem to think as using a clutch you progressively bring the clutch up to biting point where the car will try to move in one direction or the other. If its incorrect you depress the clutch and pick another gear. Usually failure to locate reverse results in nothing happening or possibly engaging 4th from a stand still which is likely to stall the engine rather than move the car.
The problem used to be with automatic cars you could easily get in the situation of putting it in reverse instead of park, these days a standard pattern has been adapted making that error unlikely.
Making Linux like Windows but not windows is pretty much doomed to failure there is always going to be something different or impossible or absent e.g iTunes isn't on Linux and likely will never be. Selling linux as windows but free is always going to lead to disappointed users. Some things can be better when you adapt to the new interface, some worse I don't like linux file requester dialogues for example in kde or gnome maybe its because when i select to save i expect the dialogue to be ready to take the file name i want the file to have. I dislike Windows in general but the file requesters are better than most alternatives.
thats a really bad example the reality is search in google for firefox and get directed to a download page which detects your operating system and region/ language and offers up a button which says click here to install firefox (appropriate version) but also offers a link to other versions if you require them.
you really can't get easier than that.
There is likely to be a warning that installing this might not be a good idea. which tends to suggest it isn't harmful. Strangely most malware sites really really want you to think installing the malware is essential for your pc's well being and practically begs to save you from disaster.
well it would be nice if you could run moblin in a vm. Nice too, if someone would realise that the weekly build is a bit overdue its not august anymore. The vmware image seems to have disappeared all links point to a page which has a live edition. which doesn't run in a vm, (apparently moblins gui cant run in a vm thanks for pointing it out on the download page , whoops you didn't).
First bug with moblin gettin it up and running on the platform its intended for.
not many reports on bugzilla implies few bugs or few users.
A good battery costs more than a cheap 4 cell. With roughly equivalent systems there would be a significant price hike on a system with a good to excellent battery and most people just don't use them for much more than keeping systems powered up while changing rooms.
Any manufacturer who puts out a system with a bigger battery than they need too will lose sales to cheaper systems. Its that simple. Most people have laptops because they are self contained not because they can run on battery power. Unfortunately most places you might take a laptop without a power outlet you don't because the battery will run out far too quickly.
Myself I have an Inverter which I use for loads of different devices and a big battery pack, trickle charged by a solar panel in my car. Saves getting in the situation where you discharge the car battery too far and can't get the engine to turn over.
old friend of mine has recently lost most of her sight , she can't use her PC any more because of it. Her husband told me there is an operation which would restore her sight if she is operated on within the next three weeks, (about two weeks now it was about a week ago he told me). trouble is they don't have insurance, its not counted as a medical emergency and if medicaid will cover it , it normally takes 3 months or so to get the go ahead by which time it will be too late.
so yes she isn't dying because of a lack of medical care but blind instead.
As a European who gets the medical care I need when I need it regardless of my ability to pay, that is shocking. About her only chance now is if there is someone reading this, willing to pay for her surgery, I'd be more than willing to help this happen but somehow i doubt it will.
almost but not quite true, you can legally watch programs via the bbc iplayer for example without a license as it isn't a live broadcast.
Although living at a UK address on the database you will receive threatening letters and visits if you don't have a license.
The license today is lunacy, back in the 1940's and 50's when a TV wasn't a fixture in every house the license made sense. Today its used to criminalize the very poor.
A sensible and fair alternative would be to collect the fee via income tax adjusting the tax allowance as needed to collect the revenue. This would reduce the cost of collecting the fee, and put an end to prosecuting poor people for not having enough money. Pensioners would benefit too.
The daft thing is you can watch the bbc around europe with a fta satellite box and a dish pointing at 28.2 East. Here in ireland you can subscribe to sky and get most of the same packages you would have in the UK along with RTE the Irish broadcaster. Unsubscribe from sky and take the card out and you get the core fta channels you would have in the UK.
iPlayer is blocked to non uk ip addresses and perhaps scrambling the tv guide would be a small inconvenience to watchers of the BBC outside the UK.
Slashdot Mirror
Pain is where you find it, its certainly not everywhere in the human body.
I had a stent put in my heart last week and the only anesthetic needed is a local in the groin where they feed the wire in.
I also have to inject myself in the stomach twice a day and there are some sites which will hurt and others which are completely painless. I just gently prod with the needle till i find a pain free spot and just let the needle sink in under its own weight.
I'd also rate dental pain as probably the worst pain in the male body , it's possible child birth might be more painful but we have no way of knowing. I believe cancer tops all other pain.
Getting my fingers and hands sliced up in an attempted mugging about the same as a wasp sting (a brief sharp pain). Heart attack is about the same as a tattoo but scary.
best pain killer has to be morphine not just for the pain relief but for the relaxed attitude , you just don't feel panic or fear. If I have a choice in how I die other than in my sleep it would be whilst under the influence of morphine.
I smoked for 30 years and quitting in the end was easy. In all that time I reckon I quit for a fortnight and I quit for 2 Months.
On the 18th of July at about 6:45 I had a coronary I was strong but unfit and thats when I smoked my last cigarette waiting for an Ambulance. I probably wouldn't have smoked it had I known what was going on.
Smoking narrows the arteries and that makes it easier for blood clots to lodge and block the arteries. If the artery is feeding the heart muscle then the starvation of oxygenated blood causes the heart muscle to die and in time be replaced by scar tissue. It never pumps so well again. If it gets badly damaged it can't pump and everything dies. The blood clots are created when fat deposited on your artery walls after years of crappy food tears maybe after doing something or nothing.
Strokes are similar , blockage of an artery taking oxygenated blood to the brain.
Cancer is a gamble and no one thinks they will lose so its not a reason to quit smoking the artery problem is.
I quit smoking by means of Niquitin patches and it was easy although I modified the program i changed the patches when I needed to change the patches it might be 12 hours or 48 hours I just let my body decide when it was low on nicotine. In a social situation where I was around other people smoking I put a fresh patch on and after a few minutes i got a reassuring itch where the patch was. other than that it was 4 weeks on high 2 weeks on medium and 2 weeks on low. That was pretty easy. I don't need a cigarette now , I want a cigarette some times but I know i would start again so I don't. I have a few spare patches so i can put one on if i really want the nicotine, I have done that once or twice.
I'm feeling good for quitting and its hopefully dropping the risks of another heart attack, even so the stats suggest 50% of survivors die in 6 - 8 years most of them in the first year. 30% died from the first heart attack. So I'm lucky already.
Everyone says I should quit smoking and nobody does because withdrawal turns us into grumpy nasty people, well the patches work I smoothly managed to quit, so having read this I hope you see that you can too.
Don't die younger than you have too try and avoid the first heart attack.
Do you really want to spend the last years of your life in an old farts' home, watching Coronation Street, waiting to die? Fuck that!
If that's your idea of "retirement", just pull the f*ing plug now and spare us your waste of oxygen.
Actually that's your idea of retirement, it certainly doesn't have to be that way and thats not just a question of money. It's not a bad thing to allow people to work beyond pensionable age if they wish too maybe volunteer work could be better than shifts in Macdonald's, finance shouldn't be the reason. Thats a key point at that age you should be able to decide what you want to do with your life and watching coronation st isn't an aim.
I've come close to dying twice this year I got out of hospital on Friday and the last thing I want is to die anytime soon. I have a lot more living to do yet. There is no good reason why I can't be doing pretty much the same range of activities in my 60's and beyond that I am capable of now. I'm a bit more focused on living and getting healthier knowing that I am only alive today thanks to modern medicine. Thirty years ago I would have died about 4 months ago.
Odds of my making it to retirement are a bit piss poor to be honest, however there is no reason to quit just yet.
Quit smoking eat less, fats especially , keep active mentally and physically and then you might get the choice of sitting in your slippers watching coronation st - you probably still wouldn't want to.
It's strange to me that 90% of the things we can buy to eat today damage us so that by the time we hit retirement age we are about ready to croak. You don't think about this till the damage is done usually but it doesn't have to be this way. It is possible to make healthier choices and thats whats going to save you from Coronation st.
When softer alternatives are prohibited, harder alternatives become more attractive (for example, why bootleg beer when you can bootleg harder alcohol). This leads to more people doing harder drugs.
That is the poorest argument ever , I sometimes speed in my car therefore now I do something illegal I may as well shoot people in the head. Well why not? I have no respect for the law.
The fact that many people are prepared to step over drug laws doesn't mean they will choose to take anything and everything. Just as well really. All drugs are not created equal and some are more harmful than others and people who use drugs realize this to a greater or lesser extent.
If you wanted to say that by making relatively harmless drugs available you increase the exposure to and availability of other drugs I could agree with that but there is a social difference between addicts and casual drug users, a casual drug user isn't generally willing to associate with someone who is likely to steal from them in order to feed a habit.
Well, that's exactly what's happening. Everyone who pays for works end up paying for the people who don't. The problem is that some people aren't happy paying such high prices for the sake of pirates.
That is fundamentally flawed. Things are not priced to recover an investment but to what the market will bare.
The difference between me and j k rowling is that people will pay more often to read what she writes.
I've probably earned more per copy than J K Rowling with some things I have written but there really wasn't an alternative for the companies that needed my product.
Under your thinking J K should have slashed the cost of her books once she made her first million since that was enough but she didn't because its never enough!
Piracy gives an alternative to the official product with interesting results. The pirated version might be of inferior quality however often its a superior product due to lack of drm and other copyright devices. (when Securerom complains that the genuine commercial disk in your drive is a fake and refuses to run the game you paid for, the pirated version is better).
Piracy does not raise the cost of anything for the consumer, but it does reduce the profitability of particular items per unit. Piracy may increase demand and create a market for some items or the complete opposite (where exclusivity sets the price).
Piracy can have positive local effects reducing imports or flow of cash outside the economy. Unless the saved money is hoarded and not spent, some where else comes out ahead. If there is no money to be hoarded only the commercial producer loses some profitability on a product (as the price needs to be set lower to maintain some commercial demand, although legitimate competing products will help set the price too).
Piracy can often increase the exposure and popularity of a product.
A recent article on Slashdot showed an iPhone Game 'suffering' with 80 percent piracy however the Game was in the top 100 of apps bein sold in the iphone store of the thousands of apps available. That game is successful commercially and probably piracy made it popular.
How many developers would take greater piracy if it meant greater commercial success? How many sales are lost by treating the customer poorly with DRM restrictions?
Even in commercial situations with draconian oversight where piracy isn't an option FOSS can replace some commercial software and keep the price down.
Piracy may well be a factor in setting the price but that price is lower not higher.
Retaliation is a threat that many people have faced and some have paid for with their lives. If you feel strongly enough then stand up and be counted.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989 have a read of that page and consider the bravery of the people who stood up for what they believed in, there are plenty of examples around the world where people have stood up to be counted in spite of the cost to themselves.
I'm sure there are a good proportion of people who signed that petition who are willing to stand up and be counted and nothing anyone can say will change their mind.
I don't agree with their aims, but they can stand up for their views and the rest of us can choose privately to support them or not.
For me I believe in love and it doesn't discriminate and I am happy for same sex couples to have the same rights as mixed couples. I don't care some homophobic idiot might get upset at me because of it. And no I'm not gay I'm straight.
What does wind me up are the homophobes and bigots who want to spread poison and not be identified.
You did tremendous things with the Amiga (wasn't the 3000 largely your design?) and you should still be proud of your part in the Amiga, although it must hurt the under appreciated engineering and mis selling or not selling that went on with commodore escom and the rest.
I guess amiga's are a bit like vintage cars and steam trains , no real use these days but they have their enthusiasts. It was something special to us and it didn't matter which version. The costs were wrong one of commodores biggest failings an inability to generate sales after selling you a system. People loved the amiga but apart from convincing friends to buy, users struggled to bring in any money for commodore.
The amiga made the most of its hardware and its hardware is well understood, perhaps Linux or BSD might benefit from a reference platform or 3 of well understood and well documented hardware. The Linux ability to run on almost anything is a weakness as well as a strength there is nothing to sell , nothing to hold up and say this is a Linux box.
Linux is probably the successor to Amiga OS as its the users and developers that set the environment. Amiga and Linux are both about having fun. Windows is work.
Sorry to sound like a rabid fan but the amiga was like that. Being an ex amiga user is like being an exsmoker still want to smoke from time to time.
Amigas were special and brought out an unmatched enthusiasm, the atari st users were never so devoted.
I guess announcements like this just rub salt into an old wound, It was a painful breakup we didn't want to move on but we had too. PC's are such soulless boxes nobody misses a PC when it dies.
For those of you who have no connection with the Amiga beyond playing a few games (of which there were thousands) Dave Haynie was perhaps the top engineer at commodore after jay miner designing the aga chipset which powered the a1200 cd32 and a4000 and designing the a3000 and the zorro III bus.
Real people made Amiga's , faceless corporations make PC's
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_haynie
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Miner
I'm a little puzzled, I think we are perhaps divided by a common language. My contacts list is a list of known email contacts with names and associated email address stored within my email program. I remember my friend and families names not their email address so when I want to email them I use their name and the software offers the email address associated with them.
If there are two or more people you email I would consider that a list , perhaps a short one of contacts.
I think you must be pretty rare as someone who uses the Internet and doesn't ever use email to communicate with friends or family.
I think you might have thought I meant a list of people I mass mail junk to, no I don't do that. However I hope you can see that the list of peoples email addresses stored on my email account could be used as a destination for phishing spam. This would perhaps be taken at face value coming from a trusted source.
From the link provided
Disclaimer: This post is NOT a pitch to buy my damn book. It will never sell enough to make me another penny. But I want people to at least look at the tools proposed in it, and give them a shot at breaking the logjam in the popular debate. Steal the book, borrow it, check it out from a library, scan the damn thing and post the PDF on the Internet*, I don't care! Just get the ideas out there, because ...
* Even though my publisher has now explicitly told me they will do no more marketing for me--I'm on my own--I'm still not willing to risk a breach of contract (and the return of my advance) by posting such a file myself. That said, if someone "comes across" such a posting, please send me the URL via gregcraven.org, so I can refer others to it. ;-)
This reveals a few insights.
The Author has no commercial interest in his book once it's published when demand is relatively low.
The Publisher also has very little interest in a book once the print run is done either really.
(The investment has been spent the books produced and distributed)
The Ebook might stimulate demand for the book enough to make another print run commercially viable which would benefit the publisher and the author.
It seems reasonable to conclude that for relatively obscure publications piracy is harmless and might even raise interest enough to make something commercially viable again.
The commercial case for books is quite interesting a physical book has a minimum price it can be produced for, a discount book store may sell below this price but really its only just above recycling the paper as scrap.
Once its an ebook the value is harder to determine, amazon seem to set the price at just below the paperback price. It could be profitable at 10 cents instead of say $10 but would that price generate 100x the sales (probably not).
It's easy to think that there is a limited demand for things to read but then consider the internet has a huge supply of things to read (not books) and billions of readers. The reader question e-paper or lcd screen shows that the lcd screen is acceptable, most of us read on one.
It makes me wonder why are pirated ebooks relatively uncommon, and if they were would it be a good thing?
Thanks for the tip about revo it did the trick.
However the game was unplayable largely due to problems with direct X I believe.
I was interested to see how it would perform under wine so I tried it on a similar spec system running ubuntu (actually slower processor) surprisingly it ran very well, I plan to try it back on the original laptop after installing ubuntu on a second partition.
Windows and Linux have advantages and disadvantages and it is really a combination of the task in hand and the experience of the user. Your inclination would be to use Windows where mine would be to use Linux.
For me Linux offers me greater freedom to run and use what I like without any guilty pirated software.
For you Linux doesn't allow you to use your broadcom wireless card or your lexmark printer.
As it happens Broadcom cards work fine under Linux but require a little bit of software from broadcom.
Lexmark printers don't tend to be supported but they tend to be expensive to run with overpriced ink cartridges and in my experience unreliable. I prefer my Samsung Lazer printer which has been extremely economical over the last few years or for color my HP inkjet with built in Scanner. The Scanner can be shared over my lan with linux even for windows clients.
Linux can be useful doing things beyond the capabilities and restrictions of windows and they can compliment each other.
problem here is when your account gets hacked your contacts list gets emailed and your contacts get phished. I had two emails the other week supposed to be sent from friends account to see if i was blocked on msn by them. first thing it wanted was my hotmail account and password.
I'm not stupid enough to fall for that but I know people (obviously) who are and might trust an email which appears to come from someone they trust.
The problem with the registry is its huge and full of unrelated things.
Here is a typical problem, championship manager 2010 from Eidos someone tried to install it on a laptop but something went wrong and now the Eidos folder which had the championshipmanager folder has been deleted so the installer should be able to run and create a fresh install. shouldnt it?
well it can't, when it runs it offers the options remove or reinstall, Remove does nothing and reinstall does nothing.
Since the installer doesn't offer install as an option there is obviously something remaining on the system that was created outside the program files folder and somewhere in the registry must be some key values related to this game.
In addition to this there is an install of championship manager 2008 which may have similar but unrelated keys.
so the options are try and hack around in the registry trying to delete the keys from the botched install and hope this doesn't break anything else or alternatively reinstall windows and all the other software on the system.
If you can come up with a third option which solves this problem I will be glad to hear it.
Funny thing is that game does run under wine on Linux.
This is just one example of the registry being a pain there are countless others. The quick and easy answer with windows is format and reinstall generally losing some data in the process.
The really annoying thing is that this turd of a game cost 35 and of course being software can't be returned.
If apple made porn movies, maybe an apple and a trident ect might make the association between apple and porn or the sex industry.
Trouble is that both marks are inspired by the apple in the garden of eden and the tree of knowledge. Apple like it because they make computers bringing knowledge to people. Porn well obviously carnal knowledge.
Really as an old testament story the apple is part of religious symbolism and these apple based symbols are both derivative and both symbols can stand.
A more interesting question does steve jobs see himself as the creator of apple so is he symbolically god or the devil?
Maybe Apple should have complained about this image from 1981 http://cover7.cduniverse.com/MuzeAudioArt/Large/56/762956.jpg that apple logo is quite iconic.
Well anything that gets the kids reading has to be a good thing right ?
Seriously major piracy of books would be a good thing. Not enough people read books on a regular basis wide spread piracy would increase the number of readers and as good authors attract fans they will attract sales as well.
It is practically impossible to get a feel for a book casually. Sure some bookshops are inviting, most are not, but such a small percentage of people frequent them.
So really anything which brings more people into reading has to be a good thing.
pretty much nails why long term tracking is a waste of effort on the part of advertisers and an annoyance at the least for users.
If you are searching for cat related products then thats when to advertise to you. I can't think of any reason why you would want cat related products when searching or browsing other information.
besides some search terms might be ambiguous and lead to completely wrong results if they take into account past searches.
Google seems to get a better handle on what I want from a search the results i get from my computer seem to be closer to what i want than if i use someone elses especially someone who doesn't share my interests.
I wonder if it makes a difference if I sign into my gmail account?
I'm diabetic take metformin and had a heart attack 3 months ago (heart attacks are likely for diabetics).
now what am I going to die of? I've already done well not dying of my heart attack 30% of people who have a first heart attack die from it.
Does metformin reduce the incidence of cancer or does diabetes and its complications kill you before cancer arrives?
well with my dodgy heart and sticky blood how unlucky would i have to be to get cancer as well.
Thing is its pretty much self inflicted eating junky food with too much fat and smoking.
Smoking has been surprisingly easy to quit with niquitin clear , nicorette isn't very effective.
smoking narrows arteries and makes your heart work harder enough to help a clot block an artery.
Eat better , don't smoke you will live longer and better.
It's how an ad is targeted that really matters and when.
If I type in a search in Google or any other search engine I'm willing to be served ads related to my current search. It also makes sense to have adverts relating to that search on any website i click on as a result of that search.
What everyone objects to is ads tailored to by tracking past web sites visited. At the very least it might not be the same user. Parents don't want targeting by a profile based on their kids interests for example.
Never moves ?
mostly never moves perhaps.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed interesting page I think thats where I picked up on standardized shift patterns on automatic gear boxes.
Cars are developed for different markets and perhaps American car manufacturers did work together to standardize the controls. The rest of the world seems to have been less organised.
Thats really quite a lousy analogy, manual shift cars are easy to pick up and usually have a little diagram where the gears are. It's far more complicated figuring out where the headlight and foglight switches are, which stick is used for indicators and which for wipers.
The accidentally selecting a wrong gear problem isn't as bad as you seem to think as using a clutch you progressively bring the clutch up to biting point where the car will try to move in one direction or the other. If its incorrect you depress the clutch and pick another gear. Usually failure to locate reverse results in nothing happening or possibly engaging 4th from a stand still which is likely to stall the engine rather than move the car.
The problem used to be with automatic cars you could easily get in the situation of putting it in reverse instead of park, these days a standard pattern has been adapted making that error unlikely.
Making Linux like Windows but not windows is pretty much doomed to failure there is always going to be something different or impossible or absent e.g iTunes isn't on Linux and likely will never be. Selling linux as windows but free is always going to lead to disappointed users. Some things can be better when you adapt to the new interface, some worse I don't like linux file requester dialogues for example in kde or gnome maybe its because when i select to save i expect the dialogue to be ready to take the file name i want the file to have. I dislike Windows in general but the file requesters are better than most alternatives.
On the other hand that ribbon...
thats a really bad example the reality is search in google for firefox and get directed to a download page which detects your operating system and region/ language and offers up a button which says click here to install firefox (appropriate version) but also offers a link to other versions if you require them.
you really can't get easier than that.
There is likely to be a warning that installing this might not be a good idea.
which tends to suggest it isn't harmful. Strangely most malware sites really really want you to think installing the malware is essential for your pc's well being and practically begs to save you from disaster.
well it would be nice if you could run moblin in a vm. Nice too, if someone would realise that the weekly build is a bit overdue its not august anymore. The vmware image seems to have disappeared all links point to a page which has a live edition. which doesn't run in a vm, (apparently moblins gui cant run in a vm thanks for pointing it out on the download page , whoops you didn't).
First bug with moblin gettin it up and running on the platform its intended for.
not many reports on bugzilla implies few bugs or few users.
I think it may be the latter.
The ammonia taste is common with shark it occurs very quickly with dogfish for example if you don't skin them shortly after they die.
maybe your fresh fish isn't as fresh as you'd like it to be. buy it to cook it later the same day ideally.
price wins all the time.
A good battery costs more than a cheap 4 cell. With roughly equivalent systems there would be a significant price hike on a system with a good to excellent battery and most people just don't use them for much more than keeping systems powered up while changing rooms.
Any manufacturer who puts out a system with a bigger battery than they need too will lose sales to cheaper systems.
Its that simple. Most people have laptops because they are self contained not because they can run on battery power. Unfortunately most places you might take a laptop without a power outlet you don't because the battery will run out far too quickly.
Myself I have an Inverter which I use for loads of different devices and a big battery pack, trickle charged by a solar panel in my car. Saves getting in the situation where you discharge the car battery too far and can't get the engine to turn over.
old friend of mine has recently lost most of her sight , she can't use her PC any more because of it.
Her husband told me there is an operation which would restore her sight if she is operated on within the next three weeks, (about two weeks now it was about a week ago he told me). trouble is they don't have insurance, its not counted as a medical emergency and if medicaid will cover it , it normally takes 3 months or so to get the go ahead by which time it will be too late.
so yes she isn't dying because of a lack of medical care but blind instead.
As a European who gets the medical care I need when I need it regardless of my ability to pay, that is shocking.
About her only chance now is if there is someone reading this, willing to pay for her surgery, I'd be more than willing to help this happen but somehow i doubt it will.
almost but not quite true, you can legally watch programs via the bbc iplayer for example without a license as it isn't a live broadcast.
Although living at a UK address on the database you will receive threatening letters and visits if you don't have a license.
The license today is lunacy, back in the 1940's and 50's when a TV wasn't a fixture in every house the license made sense. Today its used to criminalize the very poor.
A sensible and fair alternative would be to collect the fee via income tax adjusting the tax allowance as needed to collect the revenue. This would reduce the cost of collecting the fee, and put an end to prosecuting poor people for not having enough money. Pensioners would benefit too.
The daft thing is you can watch the bbc around europe with a fta satellite box and a dish pointing at 28.2 East.
Here in ireland you can subscribe to sky and get most of the same packages you would have in the UK along with RTE the Irish broadcaster. Unsubscribe from sky and take the card out and you get the core fta channels you
would have in the UK.
iPlayer is blocked to non uk ip addresses and perhaps scrambling the tv guide would be a small inconvenience to watchers of the BBC outside the UK.