It's called capitalist marketing. Welcome to the show. Popcorn?;) Popcorn is only included in the Deluxe package. Would you like to upgrade now or continue with the Standard package? Don't worry, we'll keep asking until you upgrade.
Actually thinking nationally is better than a Carl Sagan / Gene Roddenbury "space program for all mankind" approach in another way too - because it is based on competition there is less chance of it stopping completely.
You can see it happening a bit now. Once China starts to go to the moon it's likely that the US will go there too, because they are scared of the Chinese having some sort of high ground advantage. But if space exploration was purely rational and scientific it's possible it would get stuck, since it's hard to justify going back to the moon.
And if you're not going to do that you end up with the sort of space program we have now aimed purely at launching satellites. I read somewhere Helium 3 mining on the moon might be economic and I think someone should send a probe to Europa to burrow into the ice and see if there are alien fish swimming in the ocean. But things like that require infrastructure and budgets and Nasa has atrophied to the point where they both take a long time.
In Europe we have Pay As You Go SIMs. You buy one for say $30 and it comes with $25 worth of credit and often some bundled text messages. When you run out, you buy a voucher and top it up. The killer thing is that you only pay for calls, there is no monthly fee. Originally calls were more expensive, but competition has forced down prices. And if you have an unlocked phone which cost a bit more than locked ones but are usually available, when you go abroad you just buy a local SIM and avoid roaming charges.
In fact if you read industry internal stuff you find phrases like this http://www.ovum.com/news/euronews.asp?id=4326
It is likely the increase of prepaid customers contributed to the decline in data ARPU, which was lower year-on-year at 74 Euros (annual figure). ARPU is "Average Revenue Per User". So Pre Pay is cheaper. From the perspective of the telcos, sometimes it is disasterously so
http://www.fin24.co.za/articles/default/display_article.aspx?ArticleId=1518-24_2220175
Vodacom said in a statement that it is the group's policy to disconnect inactive prepaid SIM cards after seven months without a revenue generating activity on the Vodacom network. So the ARPU for some pre paid customers was literally zero. Presumably there's some cost to keeping them connected, so Vodafone was making a loss.
You should give it a snappier name like Serial ATA Networking, or SATAN. Lots of interesting logo possibilities in that, and it'll be funny watching 'technology evangelist' types stutter, sweat and mumble when they give PowerPoint presentations to born again potential customers.
Russia is quite possibly sliding back into autocracy so it's important for the US to be able to launch things into space without involving them. The Shuttle has been used to launch defense stuff as well as far as I know, and you can't be absolutely sure that relations with Russia will stay friendly enough that it is possible to use Russian rockets for that.
I can't really see the problem actually - at worst it's just a bit of welfare for US rocket scientists, at best it means that the US has a backup in case Orion has teething trouble and relations with Russia deteriorate. Neither of which is not impossible.
Why can't you learn to play nice - never watched Sesame Street? Or do they promote kicking your neighbour rather than sharing on Sesame Street these days? I'm a bit out of touch. The world isn't Sesame Street. There are no mass murderering dictators in Sesame Street. It's an artificial evironment where pure altruism works. The real world isn't like that - there's a tiny minority that regards playing nice as a sign of weakness, but unfortunately they control a few soon to be nuclear states.
Mind you, I suppose Sesame Street morality is a pretty good approximation of how you should behave, since you're unlikely to have to deal with Kim Jong Il type psychopaths in day to day life since they get locked up. Maybe it's like Newtonian mechanics is a good approximation of the physics so long as you're not near a black hole or close to the Big Bang.
Why? He made a valid point. Yeah I know. I just think it's funny when someone managed to find some inconsistency in local conventional wisdom. E.g. most people round here would think worrying about which nation makes the best rockets is a bit nationalistic. Which is odd incidentally, because if there's a war between the US and some rogue state, being far ahead in rocketry should allow the US to shoot down incoming missiles and despatch a shitload back to win the war with few US casualties. Plus if US politicians know their voters are safe from foreign missiles, they can continue to behave in the assertive way we're all accustomed to, and I think that's just funny to watch.
But when it comes to OOXML vs ODF people regard it as almost a religious issue even though in practice OOXML will probably end up as a defacto standard and be more widely deployed than ODF regardless of what we or the ISO committee say on their relative merits
His post linked the two things together, hence the +1.
As regards publically funded broadcasters... the BBC is one of those oddities. In principle, I'm normally against obligatory funding such as this - but it's actually having a very, very positive effect. Well if you like the BBC, I think you should be free to choose to pay for it. I personally can't stand them. They never give any viewpoint far access except their unique brand of public school educated whiny left wingery any airtime at all, despite the fact that most people vote for parties comfortably to the right of this viewpoint. E.g. it's hard to imagine most Conservative voters are happy with the BBC's editorial line, and a lot of Labour supporters are pretty annoyed with it to now.
The BBC, for all its faults when it kowtowed to the Blair administration, is a very positive thing both in the UK and abroad. Hmm, as I recall Giligan was actually caught repeating the conspiracy theories he talked about at work without bothering to do any realy journalism to support them. He found some Walter Mitty character who tended to spout conspiracy theories and probably embellished them a bit himself afterwards.
It's tabloid journalism of the worst sort - he wanted a conspiracy theory left the bar long enough to meet a source who would confirm it but as wikipedia says "As he [Kelly] was not a member of the Joint Intelligence Committee which had drawn up the dossier, and did not have any dealings with 10 Downing Street, Dr Kelly could not have known directly of any input by Alastair Campbell into the dossier and, for that reason, Campbell wanted Kelly's identity revealed in order to refute Gilligan's story."
When challenged he just edited his notes to fit his story - his palmtop contained two copies of the notes, the later one 'sexed up' to make it sound like the government knew it was lying. He also lied about the nature of his source - he claimed it was someone who was on the JIC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Gilligan#Dr_David_Kelly
The Inquiry could not establish exactly what had transpired at the meeting between Gilligan and Kelly as Gilligan took notes using a palmtop computer. Two versions of the notes were found, only one of which mentioned Alastair Campbell. His source didn't say the things he quoted him as saying, and couldn't have known them for sure even if he had of. Gilligan knew this, but tried to hide behind source anonymity, and frankly karma whoring. Most of his colleagues suspected the government was lying, so if he claimed they were he wouldn't be questioned to closely.
The whole thing really shows why I hate the BBC 1) It's a political monoculture where only one viewpoint is represented 2) The journalists are damn lazy - they know so long as they report things that fit this viewpoint, they don't need to do any real work
Compare Woodward and Bernstein's journalism to Gilligans. They didn't assume they knew what was going on before they did the research, they discovered it and they also got people to go on the record to corroborate it.
Blair should have abolished the license fee back when when he had the chance. I don't mind if private news organisations have crap standards because I can just not buy their products. But if the BBC has crap standards then I still have to pay the license fee.
Our judges were split, but the majority opinion found that
"A script Googling for relevant cartoons could plausibly search for strings from the summary like "bees" but it's unlikely it would be smart enough to infer the objects flying round Grumbles in the last frame are bees. Please note that advances in image processing, Cyc like databases and/or Google indexing may cause post like this to fail a Turing test in the near future as the information from the inference becomes available in machine accessible format"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_United_Kingdom
TV broadcasts over the internet are also a grey area, according to Ofcom,[13] which in future might make fees based on television ownership redundant. A Green Paper from the Department for Culture, Media and Sports included suggestions of "either a compulsory levy on all households or even on ownership of PCs as well as TVs".[14] TV Licensing have stated that any device (such as a mobile phone) receiving broadcasts at the same time as they appear on TV requires a licence.[15] Publicly funded broadcasters now seem a bit less attractive, right?
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2003/ukpga_20030021_en_34#pt4-l1g363
A television receiver must not be installed or used unless the installation and use of the receiver is authorised by a licence under this Part. There have been cases of people who only watch satellite TV and have been prosecuted for not buying a license, as this site warns you -
http://ezinearticles.com/?What-Is-The-Future-Of-Satellite-TV-Vis-A-Vis-Internet-Television?&id=596933
For instance, If you are in the UK and you have equipment that is capable of receiving TV signals then the law states you must pay for a TV license. If you read the rest of the act, there's loads of draconian stuff like the government having the right to search your house to check if you lied about not having a TV. And if anyone sells you a TV and you pay by credit card, they have to tell the government your address so they can tell you to buy a license.
I don't know if you are the same guy I had been arguing with previously, but, if so, I would like to apologize for any rudeness in my responses.
No, I'm not. But don't worry about rudeness. That guy was a mindless shill for Big Music and will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
My original post was that Fair Use would protect the encoding of audio CDs into MP3 form. I'm not sure if I specified that it was for personal use, and involved transferring the contents from a legally obtained CD, but I was not arguing about the distribution of the files. As for the conversion itself, it looks like that would be analogous to the first two points.
Yeah, it does seem that this is the case.
As for the bit about the owner having the right to use "protection technology", I am a little confused about what "straight dope" is trying to say. Does that mean that the content provider can't be sued for having the technology, or does that mean that we do not have the right to circumvent the technology? The first interpretation sounds like the view of the law prior to the DMCA, while the second interpretation sounds like the post-DMCA view.
I think after the Audio Home Recording Act the former (which is what the Straight Dope is talking about) and after the DMCA the later. Which incidentally means that you don't have the right to break CSS to rip DVDs to AVI (or to watch them on Linux for that matter) but the company that makes the DVD does have the right to encrypt it with CSS.
Or someone on a domain at work. Most of the time users didn't have admin rights unless they needed them.
Or her geek nephew, if he run as a limited user for security purposes. The idea was that you used an Admin account for installing and a User account for everything else. It was possible from NT 4 onwards, but lots of software made it hard. I actually tried it for a while with XP but gave up.
I doubt Popper would classify the society portrayed in Starship Troopers open, it seems like a modern version of Sparta.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparta#State_organization
Not all inhabitants of the Spartan state were considered to be citizens (part of Demos). Only the ones that had followed the military training, called the agoge, were eligible. However, usually the only people eligible to receive the agoge were Spartiates, or people who could trace their ancestry to the original inhabitants of the city although there were two exceptions. Trophimoi or "foster sons" were foreign students invited to study. Xenophon sent his two sons to Sparta for their education as trophimoi. The other exception was that sons of helots could be enrolled as syntrophoi if a Spartiate formally adopted him and paid his way. If a syntrophoi did exceptionally well in training he might be sponsored to become a Spartiate himself.
Others in the state were the perioeci, who can be described as civilians, and helots who were the state owned serfs that made up 90 percent of the population. Due to the fact that descendants of non-Spartan citizens were not able to follow the agoge, and Spartans could lose their citizenship if they couldn't afford to pay the expenses of the agoge, the actual number of the Spartan citizens was constantly reduced, known as oliganthropia. Or maybe Plato's Republic with Heinlein as a Philospher King.
It's the rise of militarised, highly unequal societies like this that lead to the dark ages and everything valuable we have today including science and democracy comes from Athens, not Sparta. So it's not completely unfair that Verhoeven parodied Heinlein's ideas as fascist.
"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened."
The fact that comes from a rival franchise just makes it funnier.
In fact I'm sure Mr. Rasczak would explain the morality of dealing with alien enemies of the State, especially ones that are numerous but low tech and and rely on suicide attacks and indiscriminately targetting civillians;-)
"Some say US foreign policy has encouraged militancy in the Middle East and a live and let live policy would have been preferable" "I'm from New York and I say KILL EM ALL!"
this article uncovers the modivation behind the rootkit project... Rootkit Open Sourced (link to http://fohootville.myminicity.com/ ) Link in parent is some sort of datamining site
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But the Shuttle has launched military stuff hasn't it? Maybe they need it to get heavy loads to low earth orbit.
I used a Fujitsu Siemens ultraportable for ages and that had a 20GB drive and a 1Ghz processor with XP. So yeah, 16GB is fine in an ultraportable.
Yeah PayPal, I'm looking at you.
And they only work in microSD slots that support SDHC
Actually thinking nationally is better than a Carl Sagan / Gene Roddenbury "space program for all mankind" approach in another way too - because it is based on competition there is less chance of it stopping completely.
You can see it happening a bit now. Once China starts to go to the moon it's likely that the US will go there too, because they are scared of the Chinese having some sort of high ground advantage. But if space exploration was purely rational and scientific it's possible it would get stuck, since it's hard to justify going back to the moon.
And if you're not going to do that you end up with the sort of space program we have now aimed purely at launching satellites. I read somewhere Helium 3 mining on the moon might be economic and I think someone should send a probe to Europa to burrow into the ice and see if there are alien fish swimming in the ocean. But things like that require infrastructure and budgets and Nasa has atrophied to the point where they both take a long time.
In fact if you read industry internal stuff you find phrases like this
http://www.ovum.com/news/euronews.asp?id=4326 It is likely the increase of prepaid customers contributed to the decline in data ARPU, which was lower year-on-year at 74 Euros (annual figure). ARPU is "Average Revenue Per User". So Pre Pay is cheaper. From the perspective of the telcos, sometimes it is disasterously so
http://www.fin24.co.za/articles/default/display_article.aspx?ArticleId=1518-24_2220175 Vodacom said in a statement that it is the group's policy to disconnect inactive prepaid SIM cards after seven months without a revenue generating activity on the Vodacom network. So the ARPU for some pre paid customers was literally zero. Presumably there's some cost to keeping them connected, so Vodafone was making a loss.
You should give it a snappier name like Serial ATA Networking, or SATAN. Lots of interesting logo possibilities in that, and it'll be funny watching 'technology evangelist' types stutter, sweat and mumble when they give PowerPoint presentations to born again potential customers.
Russia is quite possibly sliding back into autocracy so it's important for the US to be able to launch things into space without involving them. The Shuttle has been used to launch defense stuff as well as far as I know, and you can't be absolutely sure that relations with Russia will stay friendly enough that it is possible to use Russian rockets for that.
I can't really see the problem actually - at worst it's just a bit of welfare for US rocket scientists, at best it means that the US has a backup in case Orion has teething trouble and relations with Russia deteriorate. Neither of which is not impossible.
Mind you, I suppose Sesame Street morality is a pretty good approximation of how you should behave, since you're unlikely to have to deal with Kim Jong Il type psychopaths in day to day life since they get locked up. Maybe it's like Newtonian mechanics is a good approximation of the physics so long as you're not near a black hole or close to the Big Bang.
But don't use it to guide your foreign policy.
But when it comes to OOXML vs ODF people regard it as almost a religious issue even though in practice OOXML will probably end up as a defacto standard and be more widely deployed than ODF regardless of what we or the ISO committee say on their relative merits
His post linked the two things together, hence the +1.
You can still run Win32 apps on Win64.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WOW64
It's quite efficient too
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1857484,00.asp
It's tabloid journalism of the worst sort - he wanted a conspiracy theory left the bar long enough to meet a source who would confirm it but as wikipedia says "As he [Kelly] was not a member of the Joint Intelligence Committee which had drawn up the dossier, and did not have any dealings with 10 Downing Street, Dr Kelly could not have known directly of any input by Alastair Campbell into the dossier and, for that reason, Campbell wanted Kelly's identity revealed in order to refute Gilligan's story."
When challenged he just edited his notes to fit his story - his palmtop contained two copies of the notes, the later one 'sexed up' to make it sound like the government knew it was lying. He also lied about the nature of his source - he claimed it was someone who was on the JIC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Gilligan#Dr_David_Kelly The Inquiry could not establish exactly what had transpired at the meeting between Gilligan and Kelly as Gilligan took notes using a palmtop computer. Two versions of the notes were found, only one of which mentioned Alastair Campbell. His source didn't say the things he quoted him as saying, and couldn't have known them for sure even if he had of. Gilligan knew this, but tried to hide behind source anonymity, and frankly karma whoring. Most of his colleagues suspected the government was lying, so if he claimed they were he wouldn't be questioned to closely.
The whole thing really shows why I hate the BBC
1) It's a political monoculture where only one viewpoint is represented
2) The journalists are damn lazy - they know so long as they report things that fit this viewpoint, they don't need to do any real work
Compare Woodward and Bernstein's journalism to Gilligans. They didn't assume they knew what was going on before they did the research, they discovered it and they also got people to go on the record to corroborate it.
Blair should have abolished the license fee back when when he had the chance. I don't mind if private news organisations have crap standards because I can just not buy their products. But if the BBC has crap standards then I still have to pay the license fee.
Congratulations you have passed a Turing test!
Our judges were split, but the majority opinion found that
"A script Googling for relevant cartoons could plausibly search for strings from the summary like "bees" but it's unlikely it would be smart enough to infer the objects flying round Grumbles in the last frame are bees. Please note that advances in image processing, Cyc like databases and/or Google indexing may cause post like this to fail a Turing test in the near future as the information from the inference becomes available in machine accessible format"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_United_Kingdom TV broadcasts over the internet are also a grey area, according to Ofcom,[13] which in future might make fees based on television ownership redundant. A Green Paper from the Department for Culture, Media and Sports included suggestions of "either a compulsory levy on all households or even on ownership of PCs as well as TVs".[14] TV Licensing have stated that any device (such as a mobile phone) receiving broadcasts at the same time as they appear on TV requires a licence.[15] Publicly funded broadcasters now seem a bit less attractive, right?
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2003/ukpga_20030021_en_34#pt4-l1g363 A television receiver must not be installed or used unless the installation and use of the receiver is authorised by a licence under this Part. There have been cases of people who only watch satellite TV and have been prosecuted for not buying a license, as this site warns you -
http://ezinearticles.com/?What-Is-The-Future-Of-Satellite-TV-Vis-A-Vis-Internet-Television?&id=596933 For instance, If you are in the UK and you have equipment that is capable of receiving TV signals then the law states you must pay for a TV license. If you read the rest of the act, there's loads of draconian stuff like the government having the right to search your house to check if you lied about not having a TV. And if anyone sells you a TV and you pay by credit card, they have to tell the government your address so they can tell you to buy a license.
Here at some stats for OS usage
http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2007/December/os.php
How would you react if someone said
"I'd be bothered for real if my government wasted taxpayer money pandering to the 5% who can't access a machine using Windows"
Or more to the point
"I'd be bothered for real if my government wasted taxpayer money pandering to the <1% who can't access a machine using Windows or Mac OS"
I don't know if you are the same guy I had been arguing with previously, but, if so, I would like to apologize for any rudeness in my responses.
No, I'm not. But don't worry about rudeness. That guy was a mindless shill for Big Music and will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
My original post was that Fair Use would protect the encoding of audio CDs into MP3 form. I'm not sure if I specified that it was for personal use, and involved transferring the contents from a legally obtained CD, but I was not arguing about the distribution of the files. As for the conversion itself, it looks like that would be analogous to the first two points.
Yeah, it does seem that this is the case.
As for the bit about the owner having the right to use "protection technology", I am a little confused about what "straight dope" is trying to say. Does that mean that the content provider can't be sued for having the technology, or does that mean that we do not have the right to circumvent the technology? The first interpretation sounds like the view of the law prior to the DMCA, while the second interpretation sounds like the post-DMCA view.
I think after the Audio Home Recording Act the former (which is what the Straight Dope is talking about) and after the DMCA the later. Which incidentally means that you don't have the right to break CSS to rip DVDs to AVI (or to watch them on Linux for that matter) but the company that makes the DVD does have the right to encrypt it with CSS.
Or someone on a domain at work. Most of the time users didn't have admin rights unless they needed them.
Or her geek nephew, if he run as a limited user for security purposes. The idea was that you used an Admin account for installing and a User account for everything else. It was possible from NT 4 onwards, but lots of software made it hard. I actually tried it for a while with XP but gave up.
Except that it parodies the novel, something Heinlein fans have trouble admitting.
The novel had a number of very powerful messages regarding social structure
Have you read this by any chance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Society_and_its_Enemies
I doubt Popper would classify the society portrayed in Starship Troopers open, it seems like a modern version of Sparta.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparta#State_organization Not all inhabitants of the Spartan state were considered to be citizens (part of Demos). Only the ones that had followed the military training, called the agoge, were eligible. However, usually the only people eligible to receive the agoge were Spartiates, or people who could trace their ancestry to the original inhabitants of the city although there were two exceptions. Trophimoi or "foster sons" were foreign students invited to study. Xenophon sent his two sons to Sparta for their education as trophimoi. The other exception was that sons of helots could be enrolled as syntrophoi if a Spartiate formally adopted him and paid his way. If a syntrophoi did exceptionally well in training he might be sponsored to become a Spartiate himself.
Others in the state were the perioeci, who can be described as civilians, and helots who were the state owned serfs that made up 90 percent of the population. Due to the fact that descendants of non-Spartan citizens were not able to follow the agoge, and Spartans could lose their citizenship if they couldn't afford to pay the expenses of the agoge, the actual number of the Spartan citizens was constantly reduced, known as oliganthropia. Or maybe Plato's Republic with Heinlein as a Philospher King.
It's the rise of militarised, highly unequal societies like this that lead to the dark ages and everything valuable we have today including science and democracy comes from Athens, not Sparta. So it's not completely unfair that Verhoeven parodied Heinlein's ideas as fascist.
"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened."
The fact that comes from a rival franchise just makes it funnier.
I wasn't responding to your post, I replied to this one
;-)
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=390868&cid=21723276
I don't disagree with this post
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=390868&cid=21723180
In fact I'm sure Mr. Rasczak would explain the morality of dealing with alien enemies of the State, especially ones that are numerous but low tech and and rely on suicide attacks and indiscriminately targetting civillians
"Some say US foreign policy has encouraged militancy in the Middle East and a live and let live policy would have been preferable"
"I'm from New York and I say KILL EM ALL!"
Only on the Internet could a preference for one game console architecture bring responses like that.
http://www.phdcc.com/shellrun/autorun.htm
And actually from the same link - In Windows NT4, 2000 and XP systems, only Administrators and Power Users can use AutoRun.
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