Well, you hit the nail squarely on the head. When we slashbots harp on about the evils of the RIAA, it's really mostly the Big Four (and their subsidiaries) that we're complaining about. And my point is precisely that "Only 4 RIAA members" is quite misleading when we're talking about the Big Four. Hence the question: at what point does that collusion become illegal?
NoScript solves a different problem, which is that you don't trust the site. What this aims to solve is the problem of knowing what the site itself considers trustworthy, so that you're not required to issue a blanket statement of distrust: If you trust the site, you can (supposedly) trust its own trust list.
Well, 2 out of 4 on attorney fees (with an appeal pending) doesn't seem all that a statistic from the RIAA's point of view (given the settlement amounts elsewhere), if the fees were the 100k and 60k (-ish) amounts I read. At this point suing random people chosen by educated guess seems like a viable strategy from an economic sense. At what point does the legal system say "enough is enough, give me something solid or cut this shit out"? Given that, from the case names, the RIAA itself isn't a party in any of them (the individual labels are), proving there's a RIAA-wide strategy of bringing spurious cases involves not only saying one individual entity is operating under such a strategy, but also that there is a concerted effort to make it happen. It seems a bit complex...
Lawyers are just like any other profession: There's a set of ethics attached, and some professionals can't sleep at night if they don't follow the spirit of those rules, whereas others don't give much of a damn and will just stick to the text of the rules if they have to.
Work on the software's architecture or design. Draw diagrams on how the pieces are to fit together and how data (and control) are to flow throughout the system. This lets you look at your project from a more abstract perspective and may make it easier to get motivated to code portions.
I find that this is seriously counter-productive actually: Designing is way too much fun. Instead, what I find helps is to have a solid sketch of the design (all but the loosest bits of the design/spec are going to get tossed out anyway, as soon as the real world catches up with them), and then start implementing concrete bits that you're sure you need. Once you have those bits working, you're going to want to test them. Wrap them in working prototype code that accomplishes the next higher level of functionality. Make that bit production quality, and test it with prototype code. Rinse and repeat until you either stumbled upon a finished application or the process gave you a sense of direction.
Yes, I'm sure the scientists who conducted never bothered to look up how audio is introduced to the brain. I'm sure you're much smarter and better learned on the subject matter compared with them, just like every other/. genius who manages in two seconds flat to come up with exactly why a study is flawed despite it being outside of their area of expertise.
And this, children, is how you make an ad hominem attack.
And plenty other more interesting things. But at the rate the CO2 is being collected, you're going to have to get quite creative to gather all that hydrogen in a non-polluting way.
Screw disposal. Even in terms of efficiency, this sucks. You produce 230 kJ of energy, generate x amount of carbon dioxide, then pump 50 kJ into making x go away. That means that mitigating one form of pollution from energy production lowers its efficiency by over 20%, which then implies a 20% increase in all other forms of pollution to keep energy parity.
Sure, you need to feed energy into the system (and something else chemical, since I don't think you're going to get any useful fuel out of carbon and oxygen). But perhaps it might be doable to grab that energy from sunlight, for example (mimicking photosynthesis).
As soon as I saw the headline I came to post basically what (I think) the OP meant. The problem with global warming isn't the warming per se. It' that you're (supposedly) fucking up the climate. There is a globe-wide system of cyclones and anticyclones, which are a major part of the complex dynamic system known as "climate". What is being suggested is wide deployment of a system that captures energy from that dynamic system, which will obviously translate into some effect on that system (I'm guessing a global slowdown, but I'm pretty sure something would happen). Present day wind power installations are minuscule at the planetary scale, and their effects are proportionately tiny, but at large scales, who knows?. When people seriously suggest world-wide installation of wind turbines under the unsaid implication that "It's Green!", I shit bricks.
Well, your post, and the post it was replying to, seemed to imply that downloading source files and rendering films yourself was a credible distribution system.
Oh, yes, I agree. It's a hack, and an ugly one at that. Using your SSN as authentication means depending entirely on the secrecy of a number you're liable to need to share on a semi-frequent basis -- security through (not enough) obscurity at its finest. But if you really have to be daft, at least you're not so daft that you're using something that can be algorithmically generated from other pieces of info.
Not to mention, movies can be made at any resolution almost, esp. cgi movies. Even using povray I can generate 6400x4800 res movies, and you know what? I don't need a dvd to same them. There is this universal storage device called a "hard drive".
According to this, Big Buck Bunny had an optimistic 1-2 CPU hours per frame. Let me know when serious home rendering of a CGI film can happen in a useful time span, because I won't be holding my breath waiting for it.
The argument wasn't ad hominem per se, but the way it was phrased left a sour taste in my mouth, feeling more like an attack on the OP's friends' credibility than an argument on the usage of e-mail.
You're still trying to convince people of this? I've told you before, it's obviously illegal (given evidence that the law was broken) to infringe on copyright, it's just not criminal.
From wikipedia: Illegal, or unlawful, is used to describe something that is prohibited or not authorized by law or, more generally, by rules specific to a particular situation (such as a game).
From Merriam Webster: : not according to or authorized by law : unlawful, illicit ; also : not sanctioned by official rules (as of a game)
Illegal means against the law. There is a copyright law, hence it's illegal to break it.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you hit the nail squarely on the head. When we slashbots harp on about the evils of the RIAA, it's really mostly the Big Four (and their subsidiaries) that we're complaining about. And my point is precisely that "Only 4 RIAA members" is quite misleading when we're talking about the Big Four. Hence the question: at what point does that collusion become illegal?
NoScript solves a different problem, which is that you don't trust the site. What this aims to solve is the problem of knowing what the site itself considers trustworthy, so that you're not required to issue a blanket statement of distrust: If you trust the site, you can (supposedly) trust its own trust list.
Well, 2 out of 4 on attorney fees (with an appeal pending) doesn't seem all that a statistic from the RIAA's point of view (given the settlement amounts elsewhere), if the fees were the 100k and 60k (-ish) amounts I read. At this point suing random people chosen by educated guess seems like a viable strategy from an economic sense. At what point does the legal system say "enough is enough, give me something solid or cut this shit out"? Given that, from the case names, the RIAA itself isn't a party in any of them (the individual labels are), proving there's a RIAA-wide strategy of bringing spurious cases involves not only saying one individual entity is operating under such a strategy, but also that there is a concerted effort to make it happen. It seems a bit complex...
Real Men use ^H.
Honest question: Outside cases that settle, is getting attorney fees the rule, or were those cases exceptional?
Lawyers are just like any other profession: There's a set of ethics attached, and some professionals can't sleep at night if they don't follow the spirit of those rules, whereas others don't give much of a damn and will just stick to the text of the rules if they have to.
A tween with a 6-digit UID? When did you register? When you were 8?
Work on the software's architecture or design. Draw diagrams on how the pieces are to fit together and how data (and control) are to flow throughout the system. This lets you look at your project from a more abstract perspective and may make it easier to get motivated to code portions.
I find that this is seriously counter-productive actually: Designing is way too much fun. Instead, what I find helps is to have a solid sketch of the design (all but the loosest bits of the design/spec are going to get tossed out anyway, as soon as the real world catches up with them), and then start implementing concrete bits that you're sure you need. Once you have those bits working, you're going to want to test them. Wrap them in working prototype code that accomplishes the next higher level of functionality. Make that bit production quality, and test it with prototype code. Rinse and repeat until you either stumbled upon a finished application or the process gave you a sense of direction.
Yes, I'm sure the scientists who conducted never bothered to look up how audio is introduced to the brain. I'm sure you're much smarter and better learned on the subject matter compared with them, just like every other /. genius who manages in two seconds flat to come up with exactly why a study is flawed despite it being outside of their area of expertise.
And this, children, is how you make an ad hominem attack.
And plenty other more interesting things. But at the rate the CO2 is being collected, you're going to have to get quite creative to gather all that hydrogen in a non-polluting way.
D'oh
I meant plastic explosives. It's what we call a "pun".
Before sending people to read wikipedia again, read the posts they're replying to. The OP said his iPod was a 3rd or 4th gen mini.
Screw disposal. Even in terms of efficiency, this sucks. You produce 230 kJ of energy, generate x amount of carbon dioxide, then pump 50 kJ into making x go away. That means that mitigating one form of pollution from energy production lowers its efficiency by over 20%, which then implies a 20% increase in all other forms of pollution to keep energy parity.
Sure, you need to feed energy into the system (and something else chemical, since I don't think you're going to get any useful fuel out of carbon and oxygen). But perhaps it might be doable to grab that energy from sunlight, for example (mimicking photosynthesis).
It'd be so much more fun if you could turn it into C4 though.
As soon as I saw the headline I came to post basically what (I think) the OP meant. The problem with global warming isn't the warming per se. It' that you're (supposedly) fucking up the climate. There is a globe-wide system of cyclones and anticyclones, which are a major part of the complex dynamic system known as "climate". What is being suggested is wide deployment of a system that captures energy from that dynamic system, which will obviously translate into some effect on that system (I'm guessing a global slowdown, but I'm pretty sure something would happen). Present day wind power installations are minuscule at the planetary scale, and their effects are proportionately tiny, but at large scales, who knows?. When people seriously suggest world-wide installation of wind turbines under the unsaid implication that "It's Green!", I shit bricks.
Well, your post, and the post it was replying to, seemed to imply that downloading source files and rendering films yourself was a credible distribution system.
Oh, yes, I agree. It's a hack, and an ugly one at that. Using your SSN as authentication means depending entirely on the secrecy of a number you're liable to need to share on a semi-frequent basis -- security through (not enough) obscurity at its finest. But if you really have to be daft, at least you're not so daft that you're using something that can be algorithmically generated from other pieces of info.
Not to mention, movies can be made at any resolution almost, esp. cgi movies. Even using povray I can generate 6400x4800 res movies, and you know what? I don't need a dvd to same them. There is this universal storage device called a "hard drive".
According to this, Big Buck Bunny had an optimistic 1-2 CPU hours per frame. Let me know when serious home rendering of a CGI film can happen in a useful time span, because I won't be holding my breath waiting for it.
And what's infuriating is that the last four digits are the most important; the first 5 are determined based on time and place of birth.
Which is precisely why asking for the first five would be a completely ineffective to ascertain your identity.
That's a different discussion -- QuantumG was arguing about the legality of it.
The argument wasn't ad hominem per se, but the way it was phrased left a sour taste in my mouth, feeling more like an attack on the OP's friends' credibility than an argument on the usage of e-mail.
You're still trying to convince people of this? I've told you before, it's obviously illegal (given evidence that the law was broken) to infringe on copyright, it's just not criminal.
From wikipedia: Illegal, or unlawful, is used to describe something that is prohibited or not authorized by law or, more generally, by rules specific to a particular situation (such as a game).
From Merriam Webster: : not according to or authorized by law : unlawful, illicit ; also : not sanctioned by official rules (as of a game)
Illegal means against the law. There is a copyright law, hence it's illegal to break it.
What, you didn't have a nickname in college or highschool? I did, and my college nickname stuck to the point of being my /. handle.