Your CRT monitor according to some studies shows it can cause brain damage and short term memory problems due to the radiation.
This is just silly. Why, many of us here on Slashdot have been using them every day for years now... some for decades! And when you look at the fine group we have assembled here, I'm sure you won't find any evidence of brain damage or short-term... ah... wait a sec, now. What were we talking about again? No, of course I remember... heh. Just give me a few moments to review some polaroids and these notes that I've written on my skin, and I'll comment further.
... to me, it's the infrastructure of this project that's more notable than the price they plan to charge. I really wish we had more of this kind of stuff going on in the states. Other places like Japan have been doing "bigger, better" broadband for a while now, and the excuse over here was that Japan was such a small area, so it was easier to implement. But now, look at India.
That's quite reasonable for minor copyright infringement. If this dude was doing it for profit then he's no different in motivation to the corporations you're ranting about.
Understandable, but that's a different crime. That would be counterfeiting. In this article it says the conviction was for copyright infringement, specifically distribution over the internet. Now, you could argue that leading an entire warez group is on a larger scale than Joe Average sharing a movie with a P2P app, and I would agree. But I still think the punishments for ALL of these things are much too harsh.
(And yes, I'm aware that ONE of the linked articles does in fact mention CD copiers and counterfeiting. However, none of the others do, and even the one that DOES mention it doesn't make it clear who was doing the counterfeiting. One article seems to make it clear that Desir only distributed files over the net. Again, the conviction was for copyright infringement.)
Most of you are just throwing around "numbers of years in prison" as if they mean nothing at all. The maximum sentence this guy could receive is 15 years. Don't you have any concept of just how LONG that is? 15 years ago, it was 1989. Think about where you were in 1989 and everything you've done between now and then. Now imagine it ALL WIPED OUT, instead spent in a cell. And not because you killed or raped someone. No. Because you committed "copyright infringement".
Now does the punishment really fit the crime?
Others of you say if we disagree with the penalty, we should lobby our congressmen. This is laughable. If you're not a sizable organization, namely one with a lot of money, you're not going to get to DO any lobbying. And that's the problem here. The system is currently set up completely in favor of the big corps. Due to the money they have, they can influence the laws to favor maximum profitability for them, rather than what's best for the entire country. They can also scare almost anyone out of doing something, whether it's an illegal activity or not, simply with the threat of an expensive lawsuit. And this is without even getting into the ridiculous patent issues - again, because they have the money, they can afford to use a good chunk of it snapping up questionable patents and then trying to profit from them later (again, usually via "scare" lawsuits, and not from actually defending the patents).
But... I'm going off on something else now. The point is: I don't argue against copyright infringement being illegal. What I argue is that it should be no more severe than a misdemeanor.
I think you missed the part where he said not all of his staff is accounted for. Or the part where he said he is contributing to the relief efforts. Instead, you picked out the most irrelevant part of what was said, and went with that. Good work.
Sites that list legal torrents...
on
Examining Bittorrent
·
· Score: 5, Informative
There are also sites that list legal torrents, try File Soup or Legal
Torrents for example. These are just two that I remember offhand, I'm sure there are many others as well. Remember, BitTorrent, like any other P2P application, has plenty of legitimate uses. Don't get sucked in by the *AA propaganda machine (not directed towards the parent, just saying that in general).
Whether or not there are any investigations against BitTorrent USERS for trading illegal files (of which there is no evidence at all yet... there is only evidence of them going after tracker sites, which makes much more sense anyway), that does not mean you avoid BitTorrent completely. That's the whole point of P2P. It has uses that are legit, and uses that aren't. By all means, keep using BitTorrent for legit uses anytime you want.
To me, the parent sounds more like someone who is actually trying to scare people away in general, not someone trying to be helpful.
... you may not be aware how lucrative this kind of thing can be. I have little doubt this purchase is an investment, and this person will likely make a profit in the end.
I'm not very familiar with Project Entropia, but I played Ultima Online from the day it began in 1997 (I have since retired). After a few years I realized I knew so much about the "virtual economy" of the game that I could easily be making real money off it. So I began buying large accounts (again, for those unfamiliar... people would sell their entire game account when they stopped playing the game, including all of their characters and possessions). I would take the accounts apart piece by piece, sell things separately ingame to other players for gold, and convert the gold to cash by selling it on eBay. Of course, I never did anything on the scale of the $26K mentioned here... but for example, there was an account I bought for $1,000, many years ago. At the time, this amount seemed incredible to spend on something like this, and people thought I was crazy, but not after I showed them the $2,500 I got for selling everything from it separately.;) And it was fun, because I got to play the game while doing so.
Remember, these virtual items are a commodity just like anything else. They often take a lot of time and effort to get, and people will always be willing to pay for that.
TFA says they have added the same Windows Firewall as XPSP2. However, this is one issue that I can't see being NEARLY as big of a deal as it was for XP. XP has a much bigger percentage of novice users, many of whom had never even heard of a firewall until SP2. Win 2003 is, in general, used by people who would be aware of how to deal with such things and how to troubleshoot any problems that might occur.
Well, I may have gone a little overboard with my hatred of a few of those math classes... which were requirements for my major, or I would have definitely done as you suggested and dropped them.
Certainly, in other fields I DO care "how" it's done, so I shouldn't make it sound like I never would. Still, what I DON'T care to do, regardless of field, is to do things over and over the "hard" way (once I know how it's done), just for the sake of doing so. That is what I deem counter-productive. And, that is what those particular classes felt like to me.
That's why I think my original point is still valid. The tools we have - calculators, computers, search engines, and so on - they are just that. Tools. There's nothing wrong with using them to get the job done faster and more efficiently. It saves time and frustration, and offers a lower chance of error. And, you still have to apply other knowledge in order to do so anyway. I don't think these things make people "lazy" per se - each individual already either has that trait or doesn't, and will behave accordingly.
I think it's way too easy to open up a calculator, spreadsheet, web browser, [insert app here] to do things one should be able to do, or at least know how to do, by hand.
The flaw in your logic is that you still must be able to apply SOME knowledge in order to get the answer that you are looking for. Even if you don't know how the calculations work, you would still need to know why the calculations are important and what they can be applied to.
Sure, you can use a calculator or whatever to perform calculations on some numbers. But, are these just arbitrary calculations you are making? No, they are likely part of some larger problem. And you must know how these calculations fit into the problem, or what calculations to use in the first place. You still need to know the principles behind what you are doing. If you don't, a calculator (or other tool) will be useless to you, except in doing simple arbitrary tasks.
In this way, the tools we have available to us save us a lot of time, energy, and sometimes needless frustration.
I remember some of the more advanced math classes I took in college. A single problem could, at times, take more than 10 minutes of work to solve. And in that time, it was easy to make a small mistake somewhere, even if you were being careful, and ruin the entire thing. Or, you could insert the problem into a computer math program and have the answer in less than a second. Guaranteed correct, if you did not make a typo entering it. As far as I'm concerned, doing such a problem by hand is entirely counter-productive. And you know what? I'm not even sure I want to know HOW it's done. I just want to know why it's useful. I want to know how to apply it to something productive.
All of which could have been prevented, had you not decided to become a thieving criminal.
A fine troll. I'll be happy to feed you.
when you watch a show on TV you do so under the agreement to tolerate advertisements which is your form of payment for said product
I'm sorry, where can I view this agreement? My form of payment is my satellite bill. Originally, cable TV was created with NO advertisements. That was the whole point of paying for it. You could have your free TV with your antenna, and commercials... or you could pay for cable and have none. Many people today don't realize this, because they allowed ads to take over cable TV as well, without much resistance.
Think about it. Advertising used to be a way to support content that was either being given out for free (like radio, pre-cable TV), or sold very cheap (like a newspaper). Nowadays, people ignore this and allow advertising to penetrate everything in sight, even with things that are already quite expensive. This overcommercialization of everything is a big problem, but that's another debate entirely.
Now, tell me this. If I'm PAYING for cable/satellite, what exactly is unethical about downloading any shows I want online? Shows that I have legal access to normally anyway? You're actually saying that because I don't view the ads, that I'm somehow "stealing" the programming? This is ridiculous. I could just as easily mute the commercials and ignore them when watching a live broadcast. I could also TIVO the shows and skip the commercials... is that unethical too? Again, I made NO agreement to watch them. I'm paying for a content delivery service, not the production of these shows.
By your reasoning, it's unethical to read a magazine or newspaper and not read every single ad in the publication. This is laughable.
Now, if people are NOT paying for TV in any form, and are still going on the net and downloading shows, maybe you could have an argument then. I still don't think so, though, because TV forces you to buy a large package consisting of many channels you don't want and will never watch, just to get the few channels and programs you DO want. THAT'S unethical. But that's big media as usual...
Then you no longer have to travel all the way there every time something needs fixing. Well... unless it's their net connection;)
The lure of hunting?
on
Internet Hunting
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I'm not intending to troll, but I don't get the lure of hunting at all. The animals stand no chance. The hardest part is finding something - after that, if you have reasonable aim, you will surely kill it. I think all hunters should have to fight the animals with hand-to-hand combat. Give the animal a chance to do some damage in return.
Oh, and hunters should have to always make use of the meat/hides/fur/whatever in some way. I mean if you're going to run around in the woods and pick off mostly defenseless animals with rifles, at least make some use of them, eh? Otherwise it's just a waste.
With this new system though, you don't even have to go out in the woods and find an animal. You just wait for one to appear on your monitor. And you don't have to have great aim, really... you just click. That's not hunting, it's pointless slaughter.
The disk drives (1541 and 1581) were notorious for getting out of alignment.
There was actually a small BASIC program written to help "knock" it
back into alignment. You can see it on this
page, near the bottom.
Slashdot Mirror
Similarly, we need a firebug to go around lighting people's houses on fire to show how having smoke detectors should be a high priority.
Forget a firebug, we need a firefox!
(ducks)
Your CRT monitor according to some studies shows it can cause brain damage and short term memory problems due to the radiation.
This is just silly. Why, many of us here on Slashdot have been using them every day for years now... some for decades! And when you look at the fine group we have assembled here, I'm sure you won't find any evidence of brain damage or short-term... ah... wait a sec, now. What were we talking about again? No, of course I remember... heh. Just give me a few moments to review some polaroids and these notes that I've written on my skin, and I'll comment further.
... to me, it's the infrastructure of this project that's more notable than the price they plan to charge. I really wish we had more of this kind of stuff going on in the states. Other places like Japan have been doing "bigger, better" broadband for a while now, and the excuse over here was that Japan was such a small area, so it was easier to implement. But now, look at India.
... could the first post get modded redundant.
Oh no! They aren't going to go after Jeri Ellsworth, are they? She can hide out at my place!
Jeri! You read Slashdot, right? Send me a message. In the meantime, I'll go get our, uh.. I mean YOUR bed ready!
How many college students move back to the small town because its "home"?
This is Slashdot! How many of us ever LEFT?
That's quite reasonable for minor copyright infringement. If this dude was doing it for profit then he's no different in motivation to the corporations you're ranting about.
Understandable, but that's a different crime. That would be counterfeiting. In this article it says the conviction was for copyright infringement, specifically distribution over the internet. Now, you could argue that leading an entire warez group is on a larger scale than Joe Average sharing a movie with a P2P app, and I would agree. But I still think the punishments for ALL of these things are much too harsh.
(And yes, I'm aware that ONE of the linked articles does in fact mention CD copiers and counterfeiting. However, none of the others do, and even the one that DOES mention it doesn't make it clear who was doing the counterfeiting. One article seems to make it clear that Desir only distributed files over the net. Again, the conviction was for copyright infringement.)
... I really don't know where to begin with you.
Most of you are just throwing around "numbers of years in prison" as if they mean nothing at all. The maximum sentence this guy could receive is 15 years. Don't you have any concept of just how LONG that is? 15 years ago, it was 1989. Think about where you were in 1989 and everything you've done between now and then. Now imagine it ALL WIPED OUT, instead spent in a cell. And not because you killed or raped someone. No. Because you committed "copyright infringement".
Now does the punishment really fit the crime?
Others of you say if we disagree with the penalty, we should lobby our congressmen. This is laughable. If you're not a sizable organization, namely one with a lot of money, you're not going to get to DO any lobbying. And that's the problem here. The system is currently set up completely in favor of the big corps. Due to the money they have, they can influence the laws to favor maximum profitability for them, rather than what's best for the entire country. They can also scare almost anyone out of doing something, whether it's an illegal activity or not, simply with the threat of an expensive lawsuit. And this is without even getting into the ridiculous patent issues - again, because they have the money, they can afford to use a good chunk of it snapping up questionable patents and then trying to profit from them later (again, usually via "scare" lawsuits, and not from actually defending the patents).
But... I'm going off on something else now. The point is: I don't argue against copyright infringement being illegal. What I argue is that it should be no more severe than a misdemeanor.
I think you missed the part where he said not all of his staff is accounted for. Or the part where he said he is contributing to the relief efforts. Instead, you picked out the most irrelevant part of what was said, and went with that. Good work.
There are also sites that list legal torrents, try File Soup or Legal Torrents for example. These are just two that I remember offhand, I'm sure there are many others as well. Remember, BitTorrent, like any other P2P application, has plenty of legitimate uses. Don't get sucked in by the *AA propaganda machine (not directed towards the parent, just saying that in general).
Whether or not there are any investigations against BitTorrent USERS for trading illegal files (of which there is no evidence at all yet... there is only evidence of them going after tracker sites, which makes much more sense anyway), that does not mean you avoid BitTorrent completely. That's the whole point of P2P. It has uses that are legit, and uses that aren't. By all means, keep using BitTorrent for legit uses anytime you want.
To me, the parent sounds more like someone who is actually trying to scare people away in general, not someone trying to be helpful.
Come on, you know you were curious! Here's the author, Clio Cresswell.
... you may not be aware how lucrative this kind of thing can be. I have little doubt this purchase is an investment, and this person will likely make a profit in the end.
;) And it was fun, because I got to play the game while doing so.
I'm not very familiar with Project Entropia, but I played Ultima Online from the day it began in 1997 (I have since retired). After a few years I realized I knew so much about the "virtual economy" of the game that I could easily be making real money off it. So I began buying large accounts (again, for those unfamiliar... people would sell their entire game account when they stopped playing the game, including all of their characters and possessions). I would take the accounts apart piece by piece, sell things separately ingame to other players for gold, and convert the gold to cash by selling it on eBay. Of course, I never did anything on the scale of the $26K mentioned here... but for example, there was an account I bought for $1,000, many years ago. At the time, this amount seemed incredible to spend on something like this, and people thought I was crazy, but not after I showed them the $2,500 I got for selling everything from it separately.
Remember, these virtual items are a commodity just like anything else. They often take a lot of time and effort to get, and people will always be willing to pay for that.
I refuse to install Adblock on ethical grounds.
If only those people serving up the distracting, intrusive, and sometimes downright hostile web advertisements had your sense of ethics.
But since they don't, I'll stick with Adblock.
TFA says they have added the same Windows Firewall as XPSP2. However, this is one issue that I can't see being NEARLY as big of a deal as it was for XP. XP has a much bigger percentage of novice users, many of whom had never even heard of a firewall until SP2. Win 2003 is, in general, used by people who would be aware of how to deal with such things and how to troubleshoot any problems that might occur.
SP1st post!!
Well, I may have gone a little overboard with my hatred of a few of those math classes... which were requirements for my major, or I would have definitely done as you suggested and dropped them.
Certainly, in other fields I DO care "how" it's done, so I shouldn't make it sound like I never would. Still, what I DON'T care to do, regardless of field, is to do things over and over the "hard" way (once I know how it's done), just for the sake of doing so. That is what I deem counter-productive. And, that is what those particular classes felt like to me.
That's why I think my original point is still valid. The tools we have - calculators, computers, search engines, and so on - they are just that. Tools. There's nothing wrong with using them to get the job done faster and more efficiently. It saves time and frustration, and offers a lower chance of error. And, you still have to apply other knowledge in order to do so anyway. I don't think these things make people "lazy" per se - each individual already either has that trait or doesn't, and will behave accordingly.
I think it's way too easy to open up a calculator, spreadsheet, web browser, [insert app here] to do things one should be able to do, or at least know how to do, by hand.
The flaw in your logic is that you still must be able to apply SOME knowledge in order to get the answer that you are looking for. Even if you don't know how the calculations work, you would still need to know why the calculations are important and what they can be applied to.
Sure, you can use a calculator or whatever to perform calculations on some numbers. But, are these just arbitrary calculations you are making? No, they are likely part of some larger problem. And you must know how these calculations fit into the problem, or what calculations to use in the first place. You still need to know the principles behind what you are doing. If you don't, a calculator (or other tool) will be useless to you, except in doing simple arbitrary tasks.
In this way, the tools we have available to us save us a lot of time, energy, and sometimes needless frustration.
I remember some of the more advanced math classes I took in college. A single problem could, at times, take more than 10 minutes of work to solve. And in that time, it was easy to make a small mistake somewhere, even if you were being careful, and ruin the entire thing. Or, you could insert the problem into a computer math program and have the answer in less than a second. Guaranteed correct, if you did not make a typo entering it. As far as I'm concerned, doing such a problem by hand is entirely counter-productive. And you know what? I'm not even sure I want to know HOW it's done. I just want to know why it's useful. I want to know how to apply it to something productive.
All of which could have been prevented, had you not decided to become a thieving criminal.
A fine troll. I'll be happy to feed you.
when you watch a show on TV you do so under the agreement to tolerate advertisements which is your form of payment for said product
I'm sorry, where can I view this agreement? My form of payment is my satellite bill. Originally, cable TV was created with NO advertisements. That was the whole point of paying for it. You could have your free TV with your antenna, and commercials... or you could pay for cable and have none. Many people today don't realize this, because they allowed ads to take over cable TV as well, without much resistance.
Think about it. Advertising used to be a way to support content that was either being given out for free (like radio, pre-cable TV), or sold very cheap (like a newspaper). Nowadays, people ignore this and allow advertising to penetrate everything in sight, even with things that are already quite expensive. This overcommercialization of everything is a big problem, but that's another debate entirely.
Now, tell me this. If I'm PAYING for cable/satellite, what exactly is unethical about downloading any shows I want online? Shows that I have legal access to normally anyway? You're actually saying that because I don't view the ads, that I'm somehow "stealing" the programming? This is ridiculous. I could just as easily mute the commercials and ignore them when watching a live broadcast. I could also TIVO the shows and skip the commercials... is that unethical too? Again, I made NO agreement to watch them. I'm paying for a content delivery service, not the production of these shows.
By your reasoning, it's unethical to read a magazine or newspaper and not read every single ad in the publication. This is laughable.
Now, if people are NOT paying for TV in any form, and are still going on the net and downloading shows, maybe you could have an argument then. I still don't think so, though, because TV forces you to buy a large package consisting of many channels you don't want and will never watch, just to get the few channels and programs you DO want. THAT'S unethical. But that's big media as usual...
Then you no longer have to travel all the way there every time something needs fixing. Well... unless it's their net connection ;)
I'm not intending to troll, but I don't get the lure of hunting at all. The animals stand no chance. The hardest part is finding something - after that, if you have reasonable aim, you will surely kill it. I think all hunters should have to fight the animals with hand-to-hand combat. Give the animal a chance to do some damage in return.
Oh, and hunters should have to always make use of the meat/hides/fur/whatever in some way. I mean if you're going to run around in the woods and pick off mostly defenseless animals with rifles, at least make some use of them, eh? Otherwise it's just a waste.
With this new system though, you don't even have to go out in the woods and find an animal. You just wait for one to appear on your monitor. And you don't have to have great aim, really... you just click. That's not hunting, it's pointless slaughter.
resuming their position behind Samus
I'm sorry, but that just puts all sorts of naughty ideas into my head!
Samples are great but if every idiot starts sampling everything
;)
Every idiot already does. I mean, just listen to the radio.
He stole human remains from my driveway last night! Tell your friends!!
The disk drives (1541 and 1581) were notorious for getting out of alignment. There was actually a small BASIC program written to help "knock" it back into alignment. You can see it on this page, near the bottom.