If you link to a web page that contains illegal content, you are abetting in a crime.
Lastly, and this really should be taken into consideration; RealNetworks were giving their software away for free, with an entirely reasonable business model financed in other ways. All they had to do was ensure their end-users liked it and found it useful. But instead they turned it into a sucky, monstrously bloated, intrusive piece of crap that people (and their computers) hated. They only have themselves to blame if users sought out an alternative.
The reality of the legal system is that your opinion of RealNetworks business model has nothing to do with the legal status of anything. If the judge feels that way, he may let it sway him within his range of legal options, but he still should not let it decide the legality / illegality of an action.
... your first problem seems to be that you are laboring under the delusion that life is (or is supposed to be) fair. Never was, and is not likely to become so before you or I die.
On the other hand, one should not let the existence of this state of unfairness become the excuse for not attempting to destroy it, for doing nothing to mitigate its effects, or, worse, for promoting it as a good.
At age 43, I have despaired of hope that I will make a significant change in the "state of fairness" for myself, or my children. I do attempt to deal with those immediately around me in a fair manner, but I'm not taking any significant hits to the family wealth by giving it away because it is unfair that others have less. No matter what your station in life, there are always others who have less, well, at least that's true for 99.9999999% of every Billion people.
I witnessed the results of Communism (a very fair sounding philosophy) in 1990 in East Germany, I don't think that version of fair was much good. In the 21 years since then, I have watched the United States plunge ever deeper into the "I've got mine, so screw you" philosophy of fairness, and, although I vote, and occasionally advocate on behalf of "fairness," I don't see my personal efforts making much of a difference.
In my opinion, crying about how unfair it all is doesn't do any good, but denying that a state of unfairness exists is even worse.
In these jobs I made $15,000 a year. Shouldn't I work even harder if I make $40,000 a year?
Um... No.
You should, however, provide more value to your employer, exercise a high demand skill that is in relatively low supply, create value, etc. People who ask "you want fries with that?" in exchange for $7 an hour should clue in that literally any idiot can do that, and if they want more, they are going to have to distinguish themselves somehow.
Of course, your first problem seems to be that you are laboring under the delusion that life is (or is supposed to be) fair. Never was, and is not likely to become so before you or I die.
Yes, the Russians do manned more reliably, but I've always felt that they were doing manned missions just for the sake of "being there" and not really trying to accomplish much beyond that. CNSA can hardly get credit for following 30 years behind and doing a small volume of missions using "borrowed" technology - per-capita, the Chinese citizens domestically launched into-space ratio is laughably small.
Just like several astronauts who died for mundane causes like a plane crash or auto accident are not listed on the space memorial wall.... even if those deaths happened during "training". Perhaps that may change some day.
Nearly perfect machines? Except for 40% of them blowing up and killing the entire crew, I suppose your right.
Compare this to the other nations around the world that have no space programs, it's not (always) because they don't care, it's because they know they couldn't pull it off even if they tried. NASA could be better, but I don't think there's a similar group on this planet that's better than NASA.
IANA NIMBY, but... it's a lot easier to get permission to operate nuclear power plants on the high seas than it is anywhere on land - how's that for ironic?
If I were running an Arctic drilling operation, I'd much rather sail up and start work right away - I'd like to have PLENTY of power to keep the workers warm - right away. I'd like to have a self-contained system that I know is working before I leave port. The added complexity of utilizing fossil fuels on site will increase the risk of spills and accidents- in an already hostile environment. Yes, nuclear accidents are bad (ref: K-19), but so are oil spills.
In 2009, Rosatom announced plans to send a fleet of floating nuclear power stations to the Arctic, where they could power deep-sea drilling for oil and gas.
There's so much wrong in that meme that I'm going to have to go lie down and hope I forget it happened.
Did you read that meme on/.? Using a computer? and internet connection? What percentage of the electricity used in operating (and manufacturing) those things was generated by Coal (which is usually worse than nuclear or oil for the environment.) Are you going to go lie down in an air-conditioned room?
If they don't use nuclear power to support the drilling operations, they'll likely use oil - the more nuclear power they use, the less oil they will have to use, the more oil to power your car, etc. and the longer before we all have to shut down our air-conditioners because electricity costs too much for the middle class to afford anymore.
The water buffalo in the Everglades were a pretty high priority, and they couldn't manage to capture them. I suppose they could have killed them eventually if they wanted, but they managed to roam free in the swamps for a long time.
In another vein, Osama Bin Laden was a pretty high priority... and the apes won't be trackable by the means that finally brought him down.
In this case it was a random product of a hand calculation adding the previous number to 1/2 of the 3rd previous number, with probable errors thrown in. The real answer you are looking for is likely 42.
The fact I completely deduced the entire movie within seconds of seeing the trailer for the first time
means that the writers have done their job well. Their job, being, to produce a movie that people will enjoy and pay to see, tell their friends to pay to see, rent from Netflix, buy on DVD, etc.
Sheeple like predictability. You are clearly not a sheeple - and therefore of no concern to the marketing department. Your opinions, regardless of how loudly you express them, will not change the profitability of the venture.
Haven't seen the movie, so can't spoil the ending for you, but with an age of maturity of 3 years, it doesn't take too long to expand from a population of 2 to thousands:
Year 1 : 2
Year 2 : 3
Year 3 : 4
Year 4 : 5
Year 5 : 7
Year 6 : 9
Year 7 : 12
Year 8 : 15
Year 9 : 19
Year 10 : 25
Year 11 : 32
Year 12 : 41
Year 13 : 53
Year 14 : 69
Year 15 : 89
Year 16 : 115
Year 17 : 149
Year 18 : 193
Year 19 : 250
Year 20 : 324
Year 21 : 420
Year 22 : 545
Year 23 : 707
Year 24 : 917
Year 25 : 1189
etc. of course, if they can interbreed with an existing population of apes and get the enhanced intelligence in even half the offspring, that jump-starts any curve like this.
Not sure how the writers handled this (poorly, I'd suspect), but there have been wild monkeys loose in the Ocala national forest for 70ish years since they were accidentally introduced there. If they could relocate or eradicate them without extensive collateral damage, they would have done it long ago. If the monkeys were a little more intelligent / ambitious, I'm sure they could spread from there.
Texas is big enough to have some pretty cruelly cold winter areas - even in Houston it gets nasty cold once in awhile, up in Amarillo, you're just a little puff of wind away from Saskatchewan.
There's the obvious problem, the Texas economy would (got to be a tank or toilet joke in here somewhere...) if people could fill up their pick up trucks and SUVs for free.
Unless you source is a mountain spring (not a creek!), you are almost certain to have to process it before use.
A great deal of Florida can still drink their groundwater (both shallow well and deeper aquifer) without treatment. Mind you, I'm talking about a great deal of land area, not the population. Most of the population lives on the coasts and has sucked so hard on those aquifers and diverted natural (swamp) water holding areas into drainage that they are now living over salt-water intruded aquifers. 50 years ago, you could pump fresh water from the ground right by the bays - if things keep going as they are in Florida, in 50 years, they'll have to desalinate all water pumped from the ground south of Orlando.
and politics - don't forget politics. S&P has decided that doing this will benefit them, so they did it. It's not based on any particular calculation, it might be justified by one, but in the end, S&P dinging the US credit rating is going to gain S&P some advantage, or at least they think it will.
As long as the West thinks they have the upper hand in cyber skills, it's kind of like the cat letting the mouse run around in the kitchen: study his moves - learn from what he's showing you he can do, and why kill him? He's not really eating that much, yet. Presumably, as long as the losses are trivial, policy will continue to be to study the attacks and develop counters, rather than crying foul and threatening open retaliation.
And, if the mice have a few of generations of children, that's hundreds of tasty snacks in the future...
Everything (computer language wise) is a good deal faster than when I was 12 - and also a good deal more muddled - then it was relatively simple, less than a dozen "languages" total, and they broke down into 3 categories: Assembly, Compiled (automagic writing of usually (at the time) non-optimal assembly), and Interpreted. For a given problem, you could usually count on a slowdown factor from Assembly of ~2 for compiled and ~50 for interpreted. For any significant project, you could also count on a code writing time speedup factor of 10 to 100 using a compiled or interpreted language vs Assembly. Today, it "feels" like there are hundreds of "languages" to choose from, and performance of the modern ones has been converging on both the execution speed and development time sides. The three traditional distinctions are mostly gone, and even hardcore assembly writers usually start with a high level language and then just tweak the important parts.
If.NET floats your boat, stay with it - it's not evil or lame. I have stayed away from it because skills developed for it don't cross well to embedded / Linux / Mac - the "speed" thing is mostly irrelevant today, unless you're in a $10/copy embedded system with 64K of RAM running at 4MHz, on 0.1mW of power.
But, still, JIT is the very same thing that 1982 TRS-80 BASIC did when you ran a program - the main improvement in.NET and modern Java is that they only do the JIT step once and cache the "native code" that everybody is so gaga for, but it's still at run-time. If the byte-code were portable to anything but Windows, I might be impressed, but, then, I've been waiting to be impressed by Java for nearly 15 years...
The one thing that has impressed me for performance + portability + ease of implementation is Qt. It's not the end-all, but it serves very well as a robust library of convenience routines, is more (easily and gracefully) portable than anything else I have ever seen, and the C/C++ skills that I keep sharp while using it are also very useful in other environments.
On the downside, when I go looking for a job, they aren't as plentiful as.NET positions - but the higher paying ones tend to be easier to find.
If you take into account entertainers the make more then most government employees, it's no where near 100 1.
A mediocre juggler can make 6 figures.
If this were true, more guidance counselors would be recommending juggling as a career path. It takes more than being a mediocre juggler, you need to be a mediocre juggler who is also... wait for it... entertaining, and also committed to pursuing the career in entertainment. Not everybody with that skill can be gainfully employed doing it.
Why aren't they being paid an INCREDIBLE amount, equivalent to at least, I dunno, an entertainer?
Start with the fact that there are hundreds of Government employees for every (highly paid) entertainer.
You can continue with the risk vs reward aspect where most entertainer wannabes are out there waiting tables, painting houses and mowing lawns while they wait for their "Terry Fator" moment to happen, and they're more likely to win the lottery playing once a week than they are to ever get his lucky break, regardless of how talented they are.
Java /.Net / BASIC are all interpreted languages - BASIC was a great learning tool, when I was 12. I assume Java and.NET serve similar (and different) purposes today.
Whenever I start a significant project, I ask myself: "Am I going to regret my choice of platform before this is over?" - if what you are doing doesn't need the ultimate in speed, power, and portability - then.NET may well be your best choice.
Enough of what I do does require every last bit of speed, or portability between platforms, that I have stayed away from interpreted languages - and if you get familiar enough with C++, it's not really any easier to work with a "managed environment," not enough easier to justify keeping proficiency up in both languages at once.
Slashdot Mirror
If you link to a web page that contains illegal content, you are abetting in a crime.
Lastly, and this really should be taken into consideration; RealNetworks were giving their software away for free, with an entirely reasonable business model financed in other ways. All they had to do was ensure their end-users liked it and found it useful. But instead they turned it into a sucky, monstrously bloated, intrusive piece of crap that people (and their computers) hated. They only have themselves to blame if users sought out an alternative.
The reality of the legal system is that your opinion of RealNetworks business model has nothing to do with the legal status of anything. If the judge feels that way, he may let it sway him within his range of legal options, but he still should not let it decide the legality / illegality of an action.
On the other hand, one should not let the existence of this state of unfairness become the excuse for not attempting to destroy it, for doing nothing to mitigate its effects, or, worse, for promoting it as a good.
At age 43, I have despaired of hope that I will make a significant change in the "state of fairness" for myself, or my children. I do attempt to deal with those immediately around me in a fair manner, but I'm not taking any significant hits to the family wealth by giving it away because it is unfair that others have less. No matter what your station in life, there are always others who have less, well, at least that's true for 99.9999999% of every Billion people.
I witnessed the results of Communism (a very fair sounding philosophy) in 1990 in East Germany, I don't think that version of fair was much good. In the 21 years since then, I have watched the United States plunge ever deeper into the "I've got mine, so screw you" philosophy of fairness, and, although I vote, and occasionally advocate on behalf of "fairness," I don't see my personal efforts making much of a difference.
In my opinion, crying about how unfair it all is doesn't do any good, but denying that a state of unfairness exists is even worse.
In these jobs I made $15,000 a year. Shouldn't I work even harder if I make $40,000 a year?
Um... No.
You should, however, provide more value to your employer, exercise a high demand skill that is in relatively low supply, create value, etc. People who ask "you want fries with that?" in exchange for $7 an hour should clue in that literally any idiot can do that, and if they want more, they are going to have to distinguish themselves somehow.
Of course, your first problem seems to be that you are laboring under the delusion that life is (or is supposed to be) fair. Never was, and is not likely to become so before you or I die.
Yes, the Russians do manned more reliably, but I've always felt that they were doing manned missions just for the sake of "being there" and not really trying to accomplish much beyond that. CNSA can hardly get credit for following 30 years behind and doing a small volume of missions using "borrowed" technology - per-capita, the Chinese citizens domestically launched into-space ratio is laughably small.
Just like several astronauts who died for mundane causes like a plane crash or auto accident are not listed on the space memorial wall.... even if those deaths happened during "training". Perhaps that may change some day.
Everybody dies.
Nearly perfect machines? Except for 40% of them blowing up and killing the entire crew, I suppose your right.
Compare this to the other nations around the world that have no space programs, it's not (always) because they don't care, it's because they know they couldn't pull it off even if they tried. NASA could be better, but I don't think there's a similar group on this planet that's better than NASA.
IANA NIMBY, but... it's a lot easier to get permission to operate nuclear power plants on the high seas than it is anywhere on land - how's that for ironic?
If I were running an Arctic drilling operation, I'd much rather sail up and start work right away - I'd like to have PLENTY of power to keep the workers warm - right away. I'd like to have a self-contained system that I know is working before I leave port. The added complexity of utilizing fossil fuels on site will increase the risk of spills and accidents- in an already hostile environment. Yes, nuclear accidents are bad (ref: K-19), but so are oil spills.
From TFA:
In 2009, Rosatom announced plans to send a fleet of floating nuclear power stations to the Arctic, where they could power deep-sea drilling for oil and gas.
There's so much wrong in that meme that I'm going to have to go lie down and hope I forget it happened.
Did you read that meme on /.? Using a computer? and internet connection? What percentage of the electricity used in operating (and manufacturing) those things was generated by Coal (which is usually worse than nuclear or oil for the environment.) Are you going to go lie down in an air-conditioned room?
If they don't use nuclear power to support the drilling operations, they'll likely use oil - the more nuclear power they use, the less oil they will have to use, the more oil to power your car, etc. and the longer before we all have to shut down our air-conditioners because electricity costs too much for the middle class to afford anymore.
The water buffalo in the Everglades were a pretty high priority, and they couldn't manage to capture them. I suppose they could have killed them eventually if they wanted, but they managed to roam free in the swamps for a long time.
In another vein, Osama Bin Laden was a pretty high priority... and the apes won't be trackable by the means that finally brought him down.
In this case it was a random product of a hand calculation adding the previous number to 1/2 of the 3rd previous number, with probable errors thrown in. The real answer you are looking for is likely 42.
The fact I completely deduced the entire movie within seconds of seeing the trailer for the first time
means that the writers have done their job well. Their job, being, to produce a movie that people will enjoy and pay to see, tell their friends to pay to see, rent from Netflix, buy on DVD, etc.
Sheeple like predictability. You are clearly not a sheeple - and therefore of no concern to the marketing department. Your opinions, regardless of how loudly you express them, will not change the profitability of the venture.
Haven't seen the movie, so can't spoil the ending for you, but with an age of maturity of 3 years, it doesn't take too long to expand from a population of 2 to thousands:
etc. of course, if they can interbreed with an existing population of apes and get the enhanced intelligence in even half the offspring, that jump-starts any curve like this.
Not sure how the writers handled this (poorly, I'd suspect), but there have been wild monkeys loose in the Ocala national forest for 70ish years since they were accidentally introduced there. If they could relocate or eradicate them without extensive collateral damage, they would have done it long ago. If the monkeys were a little more intelligent / ambitious, I'm sure they could spread from there.
Texas is big enough to have some pretty cruelly cold winter areas - even in Houston it gets nasty cold once in awhile, up in Amarillo, you're just a little puff of wind away from Saskatchewan.
Fill up the car, no cost.
There's the obvious problem, the Texas economy would (got to be a tank or toilet joke in here somewhere...) if people could fill up their pick up trucks and SUVs for free.
How do they handle inorganic pharmaceuticals like Lithium?
Unless you source is a mountain spring (not a creek!), you are almost certain to have to process it before use.
A great deal of Florida can still drink their groundwater (both shallow well and deeper aquifer) without treatment. Mind you, I'm talking about a great deal of land area, not the population. Most of the population lives on the coasts and has sucked so hard on those aquifers and diverted natural (swamp) water holding areas into drainage that they are now living over salt-water intruded aquifers. 50 years ago, you could pump fresh water from the ground right by the bays - if things keep going as they are in Florida, in 50 years, they'll have to desalinate all water pumped from the ground south of Orlando.
plain old emotion
and politics - don't forget politics. S&P has decided that doing this will benefit them, so they did it. It's not based on any particular calculation, it might be justified by one, but in the end, S&P dinging the US credit rating is going to gain S&P some advantage, or at least they think it will.
As long as the West thinks they have the upper hand in cyber skills, it's kind of like the cat letting the mouse run around in the kitchen: study his moves - learn from what he's showing you he can do, and why kill him? He's not really eating that much, yet. Presumably, as long as the losses are trivial, policy will continue to be to study the attacks and develop counters, rather than crying foul and threatening open retaliation.
And, if the mice have a few of generations of children, that's hundreds of tasty snacks in the future...
Everything (computer language wise) is a good deal faster than when I was 12 - and also a good deal more muddled - then it was relatively simple, less than a dozen "languages" total, and they broke down into 3 categories: Assembly, Compiled (automagic writing of usually (at the time) non-optimal assembly), and Interpreted. For a given problem, you could usually count on a slowdown factor from Assembly of ~2 for compiled and ~50 for interpreted. For any significant project, you could also count on a code writing time speedup factor of 10 to 100 using a compiled or interpreted language vs Assembly. Today, it "feels" like there are hundreds of "languages" to choose from, and performance of the modern ones has been converging on both the execution speed and development time sides. The three traditional distinctions are mostly gone, and even hardcore assembly writers usually start with a high level language and then just tweak the important parts.
If .NET floats your boat, stay with it - it's not evil or lame. I have stayed away from it because skills developed for it don't cross well to embedded / Linux / Mac - the "speed" thing is mostly irrelevant today, unless you're in a $10/copy embedded system with 64K of RAM running at 4MHz, on 0.1mW of power.
But, still, JIT is the very same thing that 1982 TRS-80 BASIC did when you ran a program - the main improvement in .NET and modern Java is that they only do the JIT step once and cache the "native code" that everybody is so gaga for, but it's still at run-time. If the byte-code were portable to anything but Windows, I might be impressed, but, then, I've been waiting to be impressed by Java for nearly 15 years...
The one thing that has impressed me for performance + portability + ease of implementation is Qt. It's not the end-all, but it serves very well as a robust library of convenience routines, is more (easily and gracefully) portable than anything else I have ever seen, and the C/C++ skills that I keep sharp while using it are also very useful in other environments.
On the downside, when I go looking for a job, they aren't as plentiful as .NET positions - but the higher paying ones tend to be easier to find.
If you take into account entertainers the make more then most government employees, it's no where near 100 1.
A mediocre juggler can make 6 figures.
If this were true, more guidance counselors would be recommending juggling as a career path. It takes more than being a mediocre juggler, you need to be a mediocre juggler who is also ... wait for it ... entertaining, and also committed to pursuing the career in entertainment. Not everybody with that skill can be gainfully employed doing it.
Why aren't they being paid an INCREDIBLE amount, equivalent to at least, I dunno, an entertainer?
Start with the fact that there are hundreds of Government employees for every (highly paid) entertainer.
You can continue with the risk vs reward aspect where most entertainer wannabes are out there waiting tables, painting houses and mowing lawns while they wait for their "Terry Fator" moment to happen, and they're more likely to win the lottery playing once a week than they are to ever get his lucky break, regardless of how talented they are.
Compiled into "managed byte code" - always sounded interpreted to me.
Java / .Net / BASIC are all interpreted languages - BASIC was a great learning tool, when I was 12. I assume Java and .NET serve similar (and different) purposes today.
Whenever I start a significant project, I ask myself: "Am I going to regret my choice of platform before this is over?" - if what you are doing doesn't need the ultimate in speed, power, and portability - then .NET may well be your best choice.
Enough of what I do does require every last bit of speed, or portability between platforms, that I have stayed away from interpreted languages - and if you get familiar enough with C++, it's not really any easier to work with a "managed environment," not enough easier to justify keeping proficiency up in both languages at once.