I know that World of Goo sold a copy that they would not have sold had it had DRM. I found out about that game from the article on Slashdot about them selling that game without DRM. So I downloaded it and tried it out on my work computer. When I saw that it was a cool game I got it for the Wii so that my wife can play it also. One sale completely due to me hearing about them not having DRM!
Unless it's actually a quote from the "Is it a good idea to microwave this" guys on Youtube. (Although I think they actually say the line about the mask and not the goggles.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewGkH-E_HWA
I think they get around any problems like the trial by jury by calling it an administrative fine. That's why you don't get points on your record also. And if you want to contest it, you have to first pay it. In my opinion they are completely illegal to put up and I will not participate in letting the government fleece the people.
It's all about the money. They don't want to get rid of the false positives. That would be less income for the city and the camera company.
In the Chicago suburbs there are red light camera going up every where. People will not make legal right turns on red any more because the cameras take your picture and you get the ticket. It is rediculous. It come from the fact that you can't see the traffic coming the other direction around the other cars stopped next to you on your direction. So you creep forward until you can see if it is safe to go. If you stop your car again past the white line the camera detects that as not stopping before the line and snaps the picture. Once you start going you have to keep going. That sounds much safer to me!!! (The previous statement was sarchastic, in case that was not apparent.)
And in the case of Roundup-resistance, what we're seeing in those super-weeds isn't just some freak other gene that also blocks Roundup, but basically a verbatim copy of Monsanto's gene. What we're seeing is horizontal gene transfer
If Monsanto sues farmers that end up having Monsanto's genes in their crops due to cross pollination and wins in court because they own the patent on those genes, then doesn't Monsanto own the same genes found in the super-weeds also? If Monsanto own the genes, then it stands that they own the super-weed also. Then it seems like they should be responsible for invading a farmer's fields with super-weeds when the farmer did not request them. So when is a farmer going to sue Monsanto for an invasive herbicide resistant super-weed that ruins their crops?
I'm sure execs over at Sony are losing sleep over the 8 guys on Slashdot who didn't buy one because of the DRM though.
I think that Sony's name is getting to be more of a liability than that. Slashdot and the technical people are one thing and there may be many of us that are avoiding Sony. But I know of several non-technical people that have started to notice how Sony likes to screw their customers over and have decided to stop buying Sony products. Sure, there are plenty of people that sleepwalk through like and buy what the commercials tell them to, but some people actually use their brain and they are starting to see the futility of buying Sony.
This explanation is completely wrong! Even if the propeller is spinning you can de-construct it's speed into the two components of downwind and perpendicular to the wind. The downwind speed is identical to the speed of the car since they are rigidly attached to each other. So if the car is travelling downwind faster that the speed of the wind then the propeller is also travelling down wind faster than the speed of the wind. It is simple!
I went to the site of Paradox Interactive to see what they have and I find that they made the Penumbra series. Those are nice games. Kind of a puzzle first person. Lots of eerie quiet sneaking. Not a lot of fighting. I guess I am a customer of them and didn't even know it. The games were very easy to download and install, so that is cool.
I know someone who has a Lexus that started revving the engine while he was getting onto an expressway. He said the brake pedal was stuck up and would not even allow him to press it down. If the computer is pushing the pedal up (for some sort of feedback or something) will it even detect that you are trying to brake for the fix to work? They have some serious issues and the floor mats are not a part of the problem.
Yeah, $20,000 might not be too much for a large company to spend on a Solidworks seat for an important project. But Solidworks likes to rape their customers. They have the ultimate upgrade treadmill. They make a new version every year. And once you open a drawing in the new version it saves it in that version, there is no going back or saving as an older version. At my company we work with customers who may not be on the latest version of Solidworks so the mechanical engineers have to have 3 or 4 versions of Solidworks installed on their computers and use the right one for each different project. Plus, that $20,000 is for one seat. Have more than one engineer, then the price multiplies very quickly.
I find it to be pretty buggy software also. It keeps loosing changes to drawings on the server. Some people open the drawing to see the latest version, while others get the previous version. It's a frackin' file server, it doesn't have multiple versions of the file, so Solidworks must be doing something fishy with the files, but it messes it up.
For $20,000 / year I would hope they fix it, but they haven't yet for the last three years that I have seen these problems.
I say just crack it and don't give them the money as they don't deserve it.
I remember back when Google first decided to offer censored search in China they were questioned as to whether they were in keeping with their motto of not being evil. Some said that by cooperating with China at all they are participating in the evil being done. Others thought that it was better to offer some search to the people rather than none. People can still make use of a good quality search, and some illicit material will still be available since no filter is 100%.
Now they could just keep cooperating with the Chinese government to stay in business there. Most companies would probably do that rather than stand up for themselves and fight back. It helps themselves as much as it is a good thing to stand for.
They probably have many non-altruistic reasons for doing what they are doing. But I bet the thought of their image, or brand, and how it would look depending on what they do had an impact on what they decided. So by having the motto of "Don't be Evil", they actually become less evil. And if doing good things helps their image, and helps to make them money, then so-be-it. At least good things are being done rather than more of the status-quo of mostly evil.
Well the news that I listen to did explain what a pandemic is. So that word gave me no panic about some "Super Deadly Infection". Maybe people should stop listening to the sensationalist outlets.
See, that movie wasn't all that ridiculous. That is probably what happened. Some 'Zero Cool' dude must have hacked into the network and changed the channel!
As to good FPS games on the wii, I liked Resident Evil 4 a lot. And Metroid Prime 3 is really nice looking and has very smooth movement control. Medal of Honors Heroes 2 is also very cool with the motion control for some of the weapons.
At least with these cards, if you steal them (actually the correct term here) it is merely a shoplifting fine and not a life ruining lawsuit for copyright infringement. And you get the songs in mp3 format the same in the end.
At this point, for me at least, Sony is off the list of acceptable products. From their CD's with root kits, to mini-DV tapes recorded in professional grade camcorders that cannot be read in any other camcorder, their products will end up screwing you over somehow. They are way into lock-in and product degradation. They no longer care about making a good product that people will want to buy. They have the big name that is keeping them afloat as the common tech-illiterate will buy their stuff because they see the commercials and they are familiar with the name.
Let's say you turn off the lights for the router. Of course the method for turning the lights off would be the same place that all of the configuration settings for the router are, the web page interface. Then when you are having problems with your network and cannot use the internet or network shares or whatever, you can't look at the router and see what is going on. And then you can't even get to the router's web interface to turn the lights back on because your network is down. Then will see how happy you are that you turned the lights off.
This is a stupid thing to be complaining about. Just stick the extra things in the closet. The only stuff you need on the desk are the monitor, keyboard (and you need to know if caps-lock is on or not), mouse (no need for lights on that), and speakers (but the control pod can be hidden if it has lights, use Windows volume controls).
I use Wide Open West (Wow) for my cable tv and internet connection. I like them a lot compared to the Comcrap that I was using before I switched. Reboots of the cable modem were a multiple time a day event to reestablish a lost internet connection. After switching to Wow I never reboot the cable modem (ok, almost never, there is the occasional power outage or whatever). I was also pleasantly surprised with a phone call out of the blue telling me that they were increasing the speed of my internet connection from 4Gb/s to 6Gb/s with no change in price. I remember reading about Comcast doing a similar thing, but keeping the increase secret and only giving it to people that called up and asked for it.
In general I am very pleased with Wow's level of service and they way they seem to treat their customers. And I have never been told of any type of cap even when doing heavy bit torrenting. I have asked them about blocked ports, especially port 25, when setting up my own mail server and they told me that they do not block any ports or any type of traffic.
Yeah, but I bet the guy who invented the GPS system needs to know how to use an astrolabe to do a similar calculation for reading the GPS signals and figuring your location.
You can program some of the larger and more powerful micro-controllers with languages other than assembler. But even then there will be parts of the main routines, or O.S. if you want to call it that, that you may want to write in assembler just to get the speed and efficiency of assembler for. In particular things like interrupt routines and the low level routines for lighting a LED grid would be written in assembler.
If you get into the smaller, cheaper micro-controllers, like Microchip's PIC controllers, you will probably always be using assembler. But the job of a smaller micro-controller is simpler, it is more of a customized piece of circuitry for your circuit, rather than a full-fledged computer. A motor controller for reading the pulse-width generated signals from an RC controller to operate a large DC motor for a battle robot is a good example of a small micro-controller that does a simple but important job. Assembler runs fast and does the simple job of reading the input signal and generating the output signal better than any higher level language could handle it.
Right. That is the true problem that I see with the cloning. Lets assume that there are no harmful effects from eating cloned meat. Even though Dolly the sheep died prematurely and seemed at birth to be as old as the sheep she was cloned from.
What about the genetic diversity in the food supply. We are currently at risk of losing the bananas we eat, the Cavendish, because there is no diversity in their genes. They are being affected by a fungus. This fungus is a variant of a previous strain of a fungus that wiped out the Gros Michel banana. These bananas were supposedly sweeter and tastier than the Cavendish that we have now.
If something were to happen like this to our beef supply, it would be much more devastating than losing our bananas.
Actually cracking a dongle probably isn't any harder than cracking a regular serial key or cd check system. I have used, err not me, I don't pirate, my friend, yeah that's right a friend of mine has used a pirated copy of software in which there was a crack to suppress the dongle checking code in the program. If the code that checks the dongle is skipped, or given the correct response, then the program can work. Of course more complicated dongles might actually decrypt part of the program before it can be run, but even those can probaby be cracked in only software and no physical dongle copy need be made.
They want to keep the documents out of court because they say they are confidential. Well what about my internet traffic that was intended to be confidential also. They had no problem sending that to the NSA. I say they loose any right they might have had to confidentiality. What is good for the goose is good for the gander!
Prayer is more about changing the person doing the praying, than about bringing changes to world events.
Actually, if prayer is anything like meditation, then it can affect people other than the ones doing the praying.
There was an experiment done in Washington D.C. back in the summer of 1993 where 4000 people participated in Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi programs for two months. They calculated from previous, smaller exeriments what the effect would be and how many people would be needed. The police department said that it would take a snow storm to create the drop in crime that the study was predicting. At the end of the study, the police department became co-authors of the results. They seemed to show that people can have an affect on the world around them. They ended up hitting a 25% drop in violent crime during those two months. And that is comparing the crime rates from the last 5 years and accounting for temperature changes.
Slashdot Mirror
I know that World of Goo sold a copy that they would not have sold had it had DRM. I found out about that game from the article on Slashdot about them selling that game without DRM. So I downloaded it and tried it out on my work computer. When I saw that it was a cool game I got it for the Wii so that my wife can play it also. One sale completely due to me hearing about them not having DRM!
Unless it's actually a quote from the "Is it a good idea to microwave this" guys on Youtube. (Although I think they actually say the line about the mask and not the goggles.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewGkH-E_HWA
I think they get around any problems like the trial by jury by calling it an administrative fine. That's why you don't get points on your record also. And if you want to contest it, you have to first pay it. In my opinion they are completely illegal to put up and I will not participate in letting the government fleece the people.
It's all about the money. They don't want to get rid of the false positives. That would be less income for the city and the camera company.
In the Chicago suburbs there are red light camera going up every where. People will not make legal right turns on red any more because the cameras take your picture and you get the ticket. It is rediculous. It come from the fact that you can't see the traffic coming the other direction around the other cars stopped next to you on your direction. So you creep forward until you can see if it is safe to go. If you stop your car again past the white line the camera detects that as not stopping before the line and snaps the picture. Once you start going you have to keep going. That sounds much safer to me!!! (The previous statement was sarchastic, in case that was not apparent.)
And in the case of Roundup-resistance, what we're seeing in those super-weeds isn't just some freak other gene that also blocks Roundup, but basically a verbatim copy of Monsanto's gene. What we're seeing is horizontal gene transfer
If Monsanto sues farmers that end up having Monsanto's genes in their crops due to cross pollination and wins in court because they own the patent on those genes, then doesn't Monsanto own the same genes found in the super-weeds also? If Monsanto own the genes, then it stands that they own the super-weed also. Then it seems like they should be responsible for invading a farmer's fields with super-weeds when the farmer did not request them. So when is a farmer going to sue Monsanto for an invasive herbicide resistant super-weed that ruins their crops?
Who learns it backwards, and why?
I learned it backwards while sitting on the school bus for over an hour. In one day I had it down, and still do. zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcba
I'm sure execs over at Sony are losing sleep over the 8 guys on Slashdot who didn't buy one because of the DRM though.
I think that Sony's name is getting to be more of a liability than that. Slashdot and the technical people are one thing and there may be many of us that are avoiding Sony. But I know of several non-technical people that have started to notice how Sony likes to screw their customers over and have decided to stop buying Sony products. Sure, there are plenty of people that sleepwalk through like and buy what the commercials tell them to, but some people actually use their brain and they are starting to see the futility of buying Sony.
This explanation is completely wrong! Even if the propeller is spinning you can de-construct it's speed into the two components of downwind and perpendicular to the wind. The downwind speed is identical to the speed of the car since they are rigidly attached to each other. So if the car is travelling downwind faster that the speed of the wind then the propeller is also travelling down wind faster than the speed of the wind. It is simple!
I went to the site of Paradox Interactive to see what they have and I find that they made the Penumbra series. Those are nice games. Kind of a puzzle first person. Lots of eerie quiet sneaking. Not a lot of fighting. I guess I am a customer of them and didn't even know it. The games were very easy to download and install, so that is cool.
I know someone who has a Lexus that started revving the engine while he was getting onto an expressway. He said the brake pedal was stuck up and would not even allow him to press it down. If the computer is pushing the pedal up (for some sort of feedback or something) will it even detect that you are trying to brake for the fix to work? They have some serious issues and the floor mats are not a part of the problem.
Yeah, $20,000 might not be too much for a large company to spend on a Solidworks seat for an important project. But Solidworks likes to rape their customers. They have the ultimate upgrade treadmill. They make a new version every year. And once you open a drawing in the new version it saves it in that version, there is no going back or saving as an older version. At my company we work with customers who may not be on the latest version of Solidworks so the mechanical engineers have to have 3 or 4 versions of Solidworks installed on their computers and use the right one for each different project. Plus, that $20,000 is for one seat. Have more than one engineer, then the price multiplies very quickly.
I find it to be pretty buggy software also. It keeps loosing changes to drawings on the server. Some people open the drawing to see the latest version, while others get the previous version. It's a frackin' file server, it doesn't have multiple versions of the file, so Solidworks must be doing something fishy with the files, but it messes it up.
For $20,000 / year I would hope they fix it, but they haven't yet for the last three years that I have seen these problems.
I say just crack it and don't give them the money as they don't deserve it.
I remember back when Google first decided to offer censored search in China they were questioned as to whether they were in keeping with their motto of not being evil. Some said that by cooperating with China at all they are participating in the evil being done. Others thought that it was better to offer some search to the people rather than none. People can still make use of a good quality search, and some illicit material will still be available since no filter is 100%.
Now they could just keep cooperating with the Chinese government to stay in business there. Most companies would probably do that rather than stand up for themselves and fight back. It helps themselves as much as it is a good thing to stand for.
They probably have many non-altruistic reasons for doing what they are doing. But I bet the thought of their image, or brand, and how it would look depending on what they do had an impact on what they decided. So by having the motto of "Don't be Evil", they actually become less evil. And if doing good things helps their image, and helps to make them money, then so-be-it. At least good things are being done rather than more of the status-quo of mostly evil.
Hurray Google!
Well the news that I listen to did explain what a pandemic is. So that word gave me no panic about some "Super Deadly Infection". Maybe people should stop listening to the sensationalist outlets.
See, that movie wasn't all that ridiculous. That is probably what happened. Some 'Zero Cool' dude must have hacked into the network and changed the channel!
As to good FPS games on the wii, I liked Resident Evil 4 a lot. And Metroid Prime 3 is really nice looking and has very smooth movement control. Medal of Honors Heroes 2 is also very cool with the motion control for some of the weapons.
At least with these cards, if you steal them (actually the correct term here) it is merely a shoplifting fine and not a life ruining lawsuit for copyright infringement. And you get the songs in mp3 format the same in the end.
At this point, for me at least, Sony is off the list of acceptable products. From their CD's with root kits, to mini-DV tapes recorded in professional grade camcorders that cannot be read in any other camcorder, their products will end up screwing you over somehow. They are way into lock-in and product degradation. They no longer care about making a good product that people will want to buy. They have the big name that is keeping them afloat as the common tech-illiterate will buy their stuff because they see the commercials and they are familiar with the name.
Let's say you turn off the lights for the router. Of course the method for turning the lights off would be the same place that all of the configuration settings for the router are, the web page interface. Then when you are having problems with your network and cannot use the internet or network shares or whatever, you can't look at the router and see what is going on. And then you can't even get to the router's web interface to turn the lights back on because your network is down. Then will see how happy you are that you turned the lights off.
This is a stupid thing to be complaining about. Just stick the extra things in the closet. The only stuff you need on the desk are the monitor, keyboard (and you need to know if caps-lock is on or not), mouse (no need for lights on that), and speakers (but the control pod can be hidden if it has lights, use Windows volume controls).
I use Wide Open West (Wow) for my cable tv and internet connection. I like them a lot compared to the Comcrap that I was using before I switched. Reboots of the cable modem were a multiple time a day event to reestablish a lost internet connection. After switching to Wow I never reboot the cable modem (ok, almost never, there is the occasional power outage or whatever). I was also pleasantly surprised with a phone call out of the blue telling me that they were increasing the speed of my internet connection from 4Gb/s to 6Gb/s with no change in price. I remember reading about Comcast doing a similar thing, but keeping the increase secret and only giving it to people that called up and asked for it.
In general I am very pleased with Wow's level of service and they way they seem to treat their customers. And I have never been told of any type of cap even when doing heavy bit torrenting. I have asked them about blocked ports, especially port 25, when setting up my own mail server and they told me that they do not block any ports or any type of traffic.
Yeah, but I bet the guy who invented the GPS system needs to know how to use an astrolabe to do a similar calculation for reading the GPS signals and figuring your location.
You can program some of the larger and more powerful micro-controllers with languages other than assembler. But even then there will be parts of the main routines, or O.S. if you want to call it that, that you may want to write in assembler just to get the speed and efficiency of assembler for. In particular things like interrupt routines and the low level routines for lighting a LED grid would be written in assembler.
If you get into the smaller, cheaper micro-controllers, like Microchip's PIC controllers, you will probably always be using assembler. But the job of a smaller micro-controller is simpler, it is more of a customized piece of circuitry for your circuit, rather than a full-fledged computer. A motor controller for reading the pulse-width generated signals from an RC controller to operate a large DC motor for a battle robot is a good example of a small micro-controller that does a simple but important job. Assembler runs fast and does the simple job of reading the input signal and generating the output signal better than any higher level language could handle it.
Actually cracking a dongle probably isn't any harder than cracking a regular serial key or cd check system. I have used, err not me, I don't pirate, my friend, yeah that's right a friend of mine has used a pirated copy of software in which there was a crack to suppress the dongle checking code in the program. If the code that checks the dongle is skipped, or given the correct response, then the program can work. Of course more complicated dongles might actually decrypt part of the program before it can be run, but even those can probaby be cracked in only software and no physical dongle copy need be made.
They want to keep the documents out of court because they say they are confidential. Well what about my internet traffic that was intended to be confidential also. They had no problem sending that to the NSA. I say they loose any right they might have had to confidentiality. What is good for the goose is good for the gander!
Prayer is more about changing the person doing the praying, than about bringing changes to world events.
Actually, if prayer is anything like meditation, then it can affect people other than the ones doing the praying.
There was an experiment done in Washington D.C. back in the summer of 1993 where 4000 people participated in Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi programs for two months. They calculated from previous, smaller exeriments what the effect would be and how many people would be needed. The police department said that it would take a snow storm to create the drop in crime that the study was predicting. At the end of the study, the police department became co-authors of the results. They seemed to show that people can have an affect on the world around them. They ended up hitting a 25% drop in violent crime during those two months. And that is comparing the crime rates from the last 5 years and accounting for temperature changes.
Results of the study.
Counter-argument to the first paper for the skeptics.
Rebuttle to the counter-argument stating what they felt was wrong about those claims.
Search on Google for "crime washington dc meditation experiment" for more sites with information on this experiment. It is interesting stuff.