Ok, maybe I'm being dense here, but does piracy of in-theater movies _really_ hurt the industry? I mean, are there really people out there who are downloading movies INSTEAD of going to theaters?
I can certainly understand anti-piracy efforts aimed at curbing DVD-ripping -- that's combatting people who don't want to pay $15 or whatever to buy a DVD -- same kind of people who pirate software, me thinks.
But are there really that many people who will download a current-run movie INSTEAD of going to see it in a theater? Again, I certainly understand the allure of "having" one of those movies on your home PC (I mean, it's so 3r33t), but the experience of seeing a movie on the big-screen -- in true quality, with real sound, etc. -- isn't replacable. And if people think it is, well, then they're idiots AND cheapskates.
I'm with ya man....I think it's really annoying to use, and I'd never pay for the service.
BUT -- I think it's _extremely_ popular among the busines community, especially in industries where walkie-talkies or standard radios are used regularly. So think messenger services, taxis/limos, tow-trucks, etc.
Peter Jones scored a record 123,372 in Solitare during his 10am conference call this morning. His boss congratulated him with a slap on head and a hearty "stop goofing off, jerkoff."
Precisely....and that's part of the point. SWG is supposed to be set in the Star Wars universe, not in America / Washington D.C. / Afghanistan 2003. You probably wouldn't find someone named "Bill Clinton" in the Star Wars universe
Just pick a name that fits the theme -- that's all Sony is asking.
Interesting point, actually. I keep pretty regular tabs on the BMW message boards, and when the new M3 came out there was a rash of break-ins -- but few actual thefts. It seems there was a "bug" with the car in that if a thief popped out a certain part of the driver's door, the alarm wouldn't go off. They'd then hop in and check the glovebox in the hopes that the new driver had forgotten to remove the "emergency" valet key from it's home in the user's manual. So basically a lot of people came home to find broken doors and "roughed up" cars.
The other thing, especailly in a place like NYC, is the miserable flatbed truck. There are so many friggin' tow trucks running around this city, nobody would even bat an eye if they saw a flatbed loading a new BMW up. Snap, zoom, and off they go with your car....no hotwiring even necessary.
I'm now a longtime MailWasher user and it's fantastic. What I like most about it is that it itself is a lightning-fast POP3 client, so it acts as a pre-filter of sorts....it will login to your pop account, download the headers (or the whole message if you want), use its nifty spamfighting tools, and mark spam as spam. You then click "Process Mail" and it nukes and bounces everything, leaving your Outlook inbox fresh and clean to download only the good stuff.
I originally found MailWasher because I was looking for a simple little POP preview app, so I could see new mails as they came in rather than obsessively clicking on send/receive every 2 seconds in Outlook.
I should note that the CNN articles makes the following mention:
The dieting mice consumed 40 percent less food than mice eating normally and lost nearly half their body weight (49 percent) in the experiment, while the fasting mice weighed only a little less than mice eating normally.
Which is particularly interesting... basically the mice got healthier, but didn't necessarily lose weight.
Anyway, I think it's an interesting development, but honestly I'm going to wait until they finish the study on humans before I agree that's it's a genuinely good technique. Too many times have we seen similar "mice did this" studies only to find no similar effect in humans.
I'm afraid I didn't see the article (and a quick search didn't turn it up), but I have to say I'm deeply skeptical.
I've never heard a good nutritionalist, fitness trainer, or doctor ever suggest that not-eating-then-gorging was good for you. Simply put, it's not natural -- we weren't designed to operate that way, and there are TONS of people who are in perfect shape, who have lost lots of weight, and who are very healthy who don't follow that type of eating schedule.
Now, that all being said, I have to admit that I subscribed to your method when I was in college, and it worked damn well. I was 195lbs when I got to school and decided I no longer wanted to be the pudgy kid, so I basically stopped eating, started running, and dropped like 40 pounds in two months. Fast results, but I never ate and that wasn't a healthy way of doing it.
Considering I loved food (and still do), I find that my current method of 4 - 6 meals / day + excercise keeps me very happy. I'm right at my ideal weight, eat tons, have a huge appetite, yet don't gain weight when I eat steak for three days in a row (ok, don't gain MUCH weight...).
I've also cut down to eating no more than twice a day, in addition to that I fast at least one day a week. I've also started to excercise quite a bit (running, or swimming most often)..
This is the one part of your "crash diet" that I'm going to strongly advise against, based on my own experience and the advise of others.
If there's one "magic" thing I discovered over the past few years, it's that fasting is the absolute worst way to get in better shape. Yes, it's counter-intuitive, but in reality when you fast (i.e. starve yourself) you're telling your body that food is scarce and to go into "famine mode". When the body is in this condition, metabolism slows, hunger decreases, and you can only eat two times a day and not even notice it.
The key is that metabolism slows -- so you're not going to burn calories even remotely as fast as you would if you ate properly, and your excercise is basically non-productive. Yes, you'll lose weight, but that's because of brute force -- 500 calories a day is dangerously little.
What you should be doing is eating 4 - 6 small meals a day, or as some people put it, "keep a steady stream of fuel on the fire". I'm not saying to stop eating healthy foods or low-calorie foods, but space them out throughout the day (every 2 - 3 hours).
What you'll find is amazing: You'll double (or triple) your food intake, you'll get stronger (your excervise will be more productive), and you'll lose weight faster.
Oh man do I wish that were true. Here in New York, that's the price of decent health coverage for one employee for TWO MONTHS. One month if you're talking about family coverage. Bleh.
99% of the GUI apps I use (that require saving, as per your example) still let me press Ctl-S instead of mousing.
In fact, I find that most of my GUI work is done using keyboard commands (Alt-D in a web browser is one of my greatest discoveries)... it's the rare app that doesn't have those keyboard shortcuts that piss me off...
And I'm not kidding either. The streets of Manhattan are so thick with yellow cabs that it rarely takes more than a wink or a nod for them to pull over.
It's gotten to the point where cabbies will see me walking out of my building a block away, honk their horn a few times to get my attention, and then I can respond with - literally - a tilt of the head or a slight shake and they're off.
So in NYC, this isn't going to do much good most of the time.
HOWEVER -- there are those insane times (i.e. shift changes, rain, randomly) when there are no cabbies anywhere. Perhaps then?
I haven't seen it mentioned here, but I use ProNIC Host, and I've been nothing but happy with them. Of course, I use a basic little $10.95 / month plan (100MB storage, 7GB transfer, 50 Emails) but they have lots more at very competitive prices.
They also have all the "standard" bells and whistles, which includes:
-- POP3, SMTP, FTP, Webmail -- Cpanel / GUI-based control panel -- SpamAssasin -- PHP+MySQL, Perl, Python -- phpBB, Invision, PHP-Nuke pre-installed for you -- Several shopping carts pre-installed -- SSL
The advantages of this type of system go above and beyond actual battlefield situational awareness -- this type of system dramatically improves the ability of the forces to train for battle too.
I'd always wondered how exactly the military "war games"... I imagine in the old days it was a lot more macro-level simulations ("Sir, our forces our meeting resistance in the North, what would you like to do?").
With a system like this, commanders are able to train on the same hardware and UI as they would in a real battle -- all they need to do is replace the live feed with a simulated feed, and bingo -- instant low-level war-game.
With our infantry training on how to aim and shoot and our commanders using a system like this to command them, it's no wonder we have the best-prepared military in the world.
but there are other factors that define "race" besides skin color -- though you will indeed find many (East) Indians with very dark skin, you'll also find they have naturally straight / curly hair, unlike African/-Americans.
...that this spells the end of SpintPCS. For years their service has been steadily getting worse (or steadly staying the same while others have gotten better?).
Every single person I know who uses Sprint complains about their service. Why do they keep it? Because nobody (myself included) wants to lose their number.
Their coverage is crap and they're the only major PCS provider that, for some crazy reason, has chosen to ignore the top and most popular handset providers in the world (Motorola, Nokia, Ericsson) and instead sell only crappy, cheap, Korean phones (Kyocera, LG, Samsung, Sanyo) that everyone hates.
I, for one, am extremely excited about number portability....time to force the bad companies to shape up or ship out.
Did anyone else notice the sheet number of alliterations the author of the first article used? I think someone wishes he weren't a science reporter....
Astronomers have tracked the long-sought source of brilliant beams that bounce across galaxies from super-dense spinning star...
...helps illuminate one of the most exotic environments ever perceived...
...a pulsar spews sprays of radio waves...
...A supernova marks the farewell flicker...
...expelling a great belch that spits the stellar shell into space...
Could somone explain to me why the warez kiddies are (were) on DALnet in the first place after all this time?
IIRC, the last time I checked out a DCC channel, it seemed like the most inefficient and slowest possible way to transfer files amongst people... you had to wait in line for hours to get a DCC "slot", and when you did, the server usually transferred to you at 56k modem speed.
Hasn't Kazaa/eMule/Overnet/etc. made the whole IRC file-sharing thing completely depreciated? I mean, sure, back when the only way to get warez was to have access to a private FTP site or a BBS, the public warez movement on IRC made sense... "bring the files to the masses!"... But now that there are clearly more efficient ways to move the bits around, it seems like a relic.
Are we talking about kiddie porn, then? And if so, good riddence!
nlh
Re:My Tetris Gnome plans finally come to fruition.
on
Tetris AI System
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I hear they have a very harsh anti-cheating policy there (i.e. they'll freeze all the money in your account and ban you if they even suspect you of cheating) but hey, it's still tetris for money.
...and the actual time it takes for a signal to travel that far are issues as well.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the signal travel at the same speed -- the speed of light -- in both wireless and wired mediums (air and copper)? RF is still RF...
I agree that drag racing -- as a driving sport -- isn't very interesting and doesn't require nearly as much skill as "real" racing (i.e. with turns).
However, if you look at drag racing from a different perspective, it makes more sense:
Drag racing is _much_ more about the cars and the engines than it is about the drivers. The whole point (and some drivers will deny this) is to remove driver skill as much as possible from the equation and just test the cars. It's benchmarking for cars, really....(heck, look at the 3dmark freaks on madonion.com as an interesting parallel)
Pardon my lack of knowledge of phased-array antenna technology, but does such a system now eliminate the requirement of a clear-facing southern view to get DirecTV access?
There are lots of people I know in lots of places (i.e. apartments) where they'd _love_ to get DirecTV and dump the cable monopoly, but simply can't because either their apartment faces the wrong direction, the landlord won't let them put a dish on the room, the building has a contract with another cable company, etc, etc.
I'm lucky because my apartment faces south-west, so I'm the envy among my TV-watching friends in that I can actually get DirecTV in Manhattan, but there are plenty of folks who aren't so lucky.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, maybe I'm being dense here, but does piracy of in-theater movies _really_ hurt the industry? I mean, are there really people out there who are downloading movies INSTEAD of going to theaters?
I can certainly understand anti-piracy efforts aimed at curbing DVD-ripping -- that's combatting people who don't want to pay $15 or whatever to buy a DVD -- same kind of people who pirate software, me thinks.
But are there really that many people who will download a current-run movie INSTEAD of going to see it in a theater? Again, I certainly understand the allure of "having" one of those movies on your home PC (I mean, it's so 3r33t), but the experience of seeing a movie on the big-screen -- in true quality, with real sound, etc. -- isn't replacable. And if people think it is, well, then they're idiots AND cheapskates.
Painting on a wall harms no-one.
Go read The Tipping Point or any other book that discusses the "broken window" theory of crime in cities, and see if you still believe that.
Unauthorized grafitti is an indication of lawlessness in a region and tends to make criminals feel more comfortable being criminals.
is not your friend. Ever.
I have bad news for you my friend:
SprintPCS Pushes Instant Voice Into Beta
I'm with ya man....I think it's really annoying to use, and I'd never pay for the service.
BUT -- I think it's _extremely_ popular among the busines community, especially in industries where walkie-talkies or standard radios are used regularly. So think messenger services, taxis/limos, tow-trucks, etc.
Peter Jones scored a record 123,372 in Solitare during his 10am conference call this morning. His boss congratulated him with a slap on head and a hearty "stop goofing off, jerkoff."
Precisely....and that's part of the point. SWG is supposed to be set in the Star Wars universe, not in America / Washington D.C. / Afghanistan 2003. You probably wouldn't find someone named "Bill Clinton" in the Star Wars universe
Just pick a name that fits the theme -- that's all Sony is asking.
Interesting point, actually. I keep pretty regular tabs on the BMW message boards, and when the new M3 came out there was a rash of break-ins -- but few actual thefts. It seems there was a "bug" with the car in that if a thief popped out a certain part of the driver's door, the alarm wouldn't go off. They'd then hop in and check the glovebox in the hopes that the new driver had forgotten to remove the "emergency" valet key from it's home in the user's manual. So basically a lot of people came home to find broken doors and "roughed up" cars.
The other thing, especailly in a place like NYC, is the miserable flatbed truck. There are so many friggin' tow trucks running around this city, nobody would even bat an eye if they saw a flatbed loading a new BMW up. Snap, zoom, and off they go with your car....no hotwiring even necessary.
Big ups for this one....
I'm now a longtime MailWasher user and it's fantastic. What I like most about it is that it itself is a lightning-fast POP3 client, so it acts as a pre-filter of sorts....it will login to your pop account, download the headers (or the whole message if you want), use its nifty spamfighting tools, and mark spam as spam. You then click "Process Mail" and it nukes and bounces everything, leaving your Outlook inbox fresh and clean to download only the good stuff.
I originally found MailWasher because I was looking for a simple little POP preview app, so I could see new mails as they came in rather than obsessively clicking on send/receive every 2 seconds in Outlook.
Interesting point on the naturalness of fasting....you do make a good point.
4 /2 9/fasting.ap/h ealth/special/f asting0502.html
... basically the mice got healthier, but didn't necessarily lose weight.
'Ol Google News turned up the story you were mentioning:
http://edition.cnn.com/2003/HEALTH/conditions/0
http://www.ajc.com/health/content/
I should note that the CNN articles makes the following mention:
The dieting mice consumed 40 percent less food than mice eating normally and lost nearly half their body weight (49 percent) in the experiment, while the fasting mice weighed only a little less than mice eating normally.
Which is particularly interesting
Anyway, I think it's an interesting development, but honestly I'm going to wait until they finish the study on humans before I agree that's it's a genuinely good technique. Too many times have we seen similar "mice did this" studies only to find no similar effect in humans.
I'm afraid I didn't see the article (and a quick search didn't turn it up), but I have to say I'm deeply skeptical.
I've never heard a good nutritionalist, fitness trainer, or doctor ever suggest that not-eating-then-gorging was good for you. Simply put, it's not natural -- we weren't designed to operate that way, and there are TONS of people who are in perfect shape, who have lost lots of weight, and who are very healthy who don't follow that type of eating schedule.
Now, that all being said, I have to admit that I subscribed to your method when I was in college, and it worked damn well. I was 195lbs when I got to school and decided I no longer wanted to be the pudgy kid, so I basically stopped eating, started running, and dropped like 40 pounds in two months. Fast results, but I never ate and that wasn't a healthy way of doing it.
Considering I loved food (and still do), I find that my current method of 4 - 6 meals / day + excercise keeps me very happy. I'm right at my ideal weight, eat tons, have a huge appetite, yet don't gain weight when I eat steak for three days in a row (ok, don't gain MUCH weight...).
--Noah
I've also cut down to eating no more than twice a day, in addition to that I fast at least one day a week. I've also started to excercise quite a bit (running, or swimming most often)..
This is the one part of your "crash diet" that I'm going to strongly advise against, based on my own experience and the advise of others.
If there's one "magic" thing I discovered over the past few years, it's that fasting is the absolute worst way to get in better shape. Yes, it's counter-intuitive, but in reality when you fast (i.e. starve yourself) you're telling your body that food is scarce and to go into "famine mode". When the body is in this condition, metabolism slows, hunger decreases, and you can only eat two times a day and not even notice it.
The key is that metabolism slows -- so you're not going to burn calories even remotely as fast as you would if you ate properly, and your excercise is basically non-productive. Yes, you'll lose weight, but that's because of brute force -- 500 calories a day is dangerously little.
What you should be doing is eating 4 - 6 small meals a day, or as some people put it, "keep a steady stream of fuel on the fire". I'm not saying to stop eating healthy foods or low-calorie foods, but space them out throughout the day (every 2 - 3 hours).
What you'll find is amazing: You'll double (or triple) your food intake, you'll get stronger (your excervise will be more productive), and you'll lose weight faster.
--noah
That's the price health coverage for one employee
Oh man do I wish that were true. Here in New York, that's the price of decent health coverage for one employee for TWO MONTHS. One month if you're talking about family coverage. Bleh.
99% of the GUI apps I use (that require saving, as per your example) still let me press Ctl-S instead of mousing.
... it's the rare app that doesn't have those keyboard shortcuts that piss me off...
In fact, I find that most of my GUI work is done using keyboard commands (Alt-D in a web browser is one of my greatest discoveries)
....cab drivers hail you!
And I'm not kidding either. The streets of Manhattan are so thick with yellow cabs that it rarely takes more than a wink or a nod for them to pull over.
It's gotten to the point where cabbies will see me walking out of my building a block away, honk their horn a few times to get my attention, and then I can respond with - literally - a tilt of the head or a slight shake and they're off.
So in NYC, this isn't going to do much good most of the time.
HOWEVER -- there are those insane times (i.e. shift changes, rain, randomly) when there are no cabbies anywhere. Perhaps then?
I haven't seen it mentioned here, but I use ProNIC Host, and I've been nothing but happy with them. Of course, I use a basic little $10.95 / month plan (100MB storage, 7GB transfer, 50 Emails) but they have lots more at very competitive prices.
They also have all the "standard" bells and whistles, which includes:
-- POP3, SMTP, FTP, Webmail
-- Cpanel / GUI-based control panel
-- SpamAssasin
-- PHP+MySQL, Perl, Python
-- phpBB, Invision, PHP-Nuke pre-installed for you
-- Several shopping carts pre-installed
-- SSL
etc.
Very good guys, and very helpful.
--noah
The advantages of this type of system go above and beyond actual battlefield situational awareness -- this type of system dramatically improves the ability of the forces to train for battle too.
... I imagine in the old days it was a lot more macro-level simulations ("Sir, our forces our meeting resistance in the North, what would you like to do?").
;)
I'd always wondered how exactly the military "war games"
With a system like this, commanders are able to train on the same hardware and UI as they would in a real battle -- all they need to do is replace the live feed with a simulated feed, and bingo -- instant low-level war-game.
With our infantry training on how to aim and shoot and our commanders using a system like this to command them, it's no wonder we have the best-prepared military in the world.
Cooooool.
but there are other factors that define "race" besides skin color -- though you will indeed find many (East) Indians with very dark skin, you'll also find they have naturally straight / curly hair, unlike African/-Americans.
...that this spells the end of SpintPCS. For years their service has been steadily getting worse (or steadly staying the same while others have gotten better?).
Every single person I know who uses Sprint complains about their service. Why do they keep it? Because nobody (myself included) wants to lose their number.
Their coverage is crap and they're the only major PCS provider that, for some crazy reason, has chosen to ignore the top and most popular handset providers in the world (Motorola, Nokia, Ericsson) and instead sell only crappy, cheap, Korean phones (Kyocera, LG, Samsung, Sanyo) that everyone hates.
I, for one, am extremely excited about number portability....time to force the bad companies to shape up or ship out.
Did anyone else notice the sheet number of alliterations the author of the first article used? I think someone wishes he weren't a science reporter....
Astronomers have tracked the long-sought source of brilliant beams that bounce across galaxies from super-dense spinning star...
...helps illuminate one of the most exotic environments ever perceived...
...a pulsar spews sprays of radio waves...
...A supernova marks the farewell flicker...
...expelling a great belch that spits the stellar shell into space...
etc...
Could somone explain to me why the warez kiddies are (were) on DALnet in the first place after all this time?
... you had to wait in line for hours to get a DCC "slot", and when you did, the server usually transferred to you at 56k modem speed.
... "bring the files to the masses!" ... But now that there are clearly more efficient ways to move the bits around, it seems like a relic.
IIRC, the last time I checked out a DCC channel, it seemed like the most inefficient and slowest possible way to transfer files amongst people
Hasn't Kazaa/eMule/Overnet/etc. made the whole IRC file-sharing thing completely depreciated? I mean, sure, back when the only way to get warez was to have access to a private FTP site or a BBS, the public warez movement on IRC made sense
Are we talking about kiddie porn, then? And if so, good riddence!
nlh
Ah, but you see THIS time, there's an answer!
Stage 2: Play tetris for money
I hear they have a very harsh anti-cheating policy there (i.e. they'll freeze all the money in your account and ban you if they even suspect you of cheating) but hey, it's still tetris for money.
nlh
...and the actual time it takes for a signal to travel that far are issues as well.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the signal travel at the same speed -- the speed of light -- in both wireless and wired mediums (air and copper)? RF is still RF...
nlh
I agree that drag racing -- as a driving sport -- isn't very interesting and doesn't require nearly as much skill as "real" racing (i.e. with turns).
However, if you look at drag racing from a different perspective, it makes more sense:
Drag racing is _much_ more about the cars and the engines than it is about the drivers. The whole point (and some drivers will deny this) is to remove driver skill as much as possible from the equation and just test the cars. It's benchmarking for cars, really....(heck, look at the 3dmark freaks on madonion.com as an interesting parallel)
--noah
Pardon my lack of knowledge of phased-array antenna technology, but does such a system now eliminate the requirement of a clear-facing southern view to get DirecTV access?
There are lots of people I know in lots of places (i.e. apartments) where they'd _love_ to get DirecTV and dump the cable monopoly, but simply can't because either their apartment faces the wrong direction, the landlord won't let them put a dish on the room, the building has a contract with another cable company, etc, etc.
I'm lucky because my apartment faces south-west, so I'm the envy among my TV-watching friends in that I can actually get DirecTV in Manhattan, but there are plenty of folks who aren't so lucky.
So does this mean more access to DirecTV?
nlh