With the exception of the absolutely completely f9(^*(%'n useless screen on the GBA, I've been very impressed with Nintendo game machines.
What is wrong with the screen of the GBA? is it that it does not have a back light?, I believe it was an issue with battery time, in order to make it usable with 2 AA batteries they had to avoid using a backlight. I bought a second hand GBA some time ago and installed the afterburner light, it is really bright and clear. Nowadays I got a Ninendo DS which seems more fragile than the GBA. I got one of the original gameboy bricks and it is still working (the last time I checked it at my mom's house) the gba is similarly tough but the DS seems a bit more fragile. Now the PSP really seems as if it is going to break in any moment, specially the screen, which is a fact I like about the DS, as the screens are hidden when you are not using it, the most that can happen is that it gets scratched in the outside.
Well duh, he is the president not the king, any candidate who tells you he will abolish whatever law you dont like is lying. Just some days ago I read a comment in slashdot that said that the problem with Americans is that they think they are electing a king when they are electing the president.
Maybe that is why you got the guy you got in the White Castle^WHouse now. If he or anyone is president then the most they can do is actively oppose marijuana laws. Bush might oppose privacy laws, but that does not make it right for him to spy on you (or it should not... but hey, it seems people get so used to that).
BTW, I have no preference in who wins the election. If I needed to choose one I would go for Obama, because he is black. The reason is that IMHO any kind of change is good and greater the change the better. That way you will get used to *changes* and will be easier to keep changing until you get what you really want.
s, copying retail software does do real harm and IS real theft by any rational standard of law
No, copying retail software is not theft by any standard law. That is why you need lawyers to work cases because people like you can not understand the difference between two unlawful (but completely different) activities. In fact, the illegal actions that can be done with retail software are several. One is unauthorized use, another is unauthorized distribution and another may be unathorized copying. All those are related to copyright violation, which is not theft.
Mistaking theft with copyright violation is like mistaking house breaking and entering to illegal subletting, both are unlawful and one of them does not makes you lose anything,
if someone can take my paycheck, and leave me with exactly every cent in that paycheck, then they are welcome to it and I invite everyone to do the same.
You will do that only once. After everyone has taken a copy of your paycheck and you go to cash it somewhere else and they cash it with beans, I am sure the next check you get you wont be so happy to share it with others.
Screw the artists, screw their members. Really, what do you need to develop an album these days? you can go to any private recording studio and have some recording sessions and get out with your sound files. You could also pay for the masterisation and post production.
After that you only need to make a page were you sell your music. You may even sell your music in the same web page of your band (wow!). Really, I do not know how many groups would make lots of money if they just contracted some X web developer to install osCommerce with some file-buy module + paypal. They could sell all the music they wanted and they will get 100% of the royalties.
God, artists are being screwed because they want. The bad guys in the record industry exist because there is demand for them.
And if you want "advertizing" go buy some adwords in google, upload your music to Last.FM and maybe Pandora. It is not that there are no options, but people do not *want* to try them.
I know because my brother is a musician (his group just released a CD with 5 songs, available on MixUp [the largest music chain in Mexico]). I have been telling him about Last.FM, web based distribution and whatnot... the only thing they achieved is to make the album available at iTunes (and only because the guy who published the disc told them he will upload it there).
You want to get screwed with grrrrrrrreat contracts and promised fame and fortune? go ahead!
It's a troll, and definitely NSFW. Lol, you should specify that you are talking about another comment. For a moment I thought you were talking about the article link so i hurried to click when I read "deffinitely NSFW"... unfortunately it is slashdotted, and as I started reading the other comments, I realized you were talking about the last measure troll
I think you dont really understood the point that the guy made. The problem is not that someone is interested in you or your information now. I know lots of information is pubclicly available when you send it via mail or generally through the internet. However if at this time you are of no interest to the bad guys then they wont be logging your activities. The issue is if you save such activities in a public-third party server (such as google or microsoft or yahoo or whatever), even if you stop using them the minute your government start jailing people that does not bend over, they will be able to get all the information you saved over there (i.e., google complying with China policies, Yahoo giving away information about an account, if they bend over China, why wouldn't they bend over the USA or any other more powerful country?).
I got a first person account of that, my grandmother went to the USA in the 70s or 80s maybe, and she forgot to handle a small paper when she went out. Ten years later, a cousing went to the USA for vacation and when she was returning they stopped her and asked her where was my grandmother hiding in the USA, they were sure she had illegaly stayed (of course she had not, she lived in Mexico). How did they know she was the granmother of my cousing... we do not know.
usly, is there anyone who doesn't think this is either a precursor to military action, or a direct attack on Iran's about-to-launch Euro-based oil market?
Can anyone please blame it in some way to George Bush?
I have used web based email service sine hotmail 1995 or so. I have gone into hotmail, linuxmail, latinmail, hotmail again and lastly gmail. I have never found client based mail systems (like outlook or thunderbird or eudora, or whatever) useful as you have to actually configure and do lots of things just to check your inbox.
That being said, some months ago I was talking with an American guy who is working in my office (he is doing his second PhD in London and working here part time) and he told me that the reason he does not have one of those web mail accounts is not for what they do *now* for the information, but because you do not know what they can do in the future. Once your information is public, it remains public forever. And you may think it is not public giving it to any of those companies, but it really is, the only thing that makes it non public is that nobody cares about it. But if in the future you had some issue that made *someone* important care about you, I am pretty shure they will find means to obtain that information.
I keep using gmail to this date, but I am really sure the American government has plenty of information about me by now. Fortunately, I plan to keep out of the USA and keep in a country where they have no real place of invading.
Yeah, but you're just one guy. If it works for the vast majority, then that *does* cut it.
Only maybe within the slashdot crowd. The fact is that for the majority of people it does not cut it, Microsoft Windows or Apple OSX achieve what GP poster is saying.
There are two problems I see with Linux now, one is this late-drivers issue (it happened with modems, cameras, usb and now wireless) that prevents users from being able to use their hardware in their computer. The second problem is what someone called "incomplete drivers", and it refers to the fact that because of the nature of "scratch an itch" of open source, developers sometimes create a driver that "just works" in the sense that the developer stops programming the driver when it achieves a specific functionality. The result is that you can not do in Linux everything you can do in Windows with your hardware.
I too have the same philosophy as GP, I do not care who people blame (it is easy to play the blame game and throw the ball to another person), the hard fact is that Linux does not cut it in some conditions, and I use whatever solves my problems. Past are my University days of being idealist and having time to hack and crack (as disassembling and removing the protection of programs). Now I just want computers to work and work fine.
The fact is that, if you *only* read slashdot and it's comment you will get very, very biased. The majority of the people commonly commenting here are hardcore Open source and linux fans. The ones that are neutral or pro any other technology just do not comment here (just look at what happens each time Miguel de Icaza tries to comment here). Several people participating in slashdot think in black and white terms, if it is not their way then it is worng.
However, if you take a look at other news outlets, or any other places where technology is discussed you will realize the "real" place of Open Source. I am not saying that it is not useful. It is useful indeed, I have a lot of interest in participating in Open Source software. However, that is why you see this incredible difference between the world of the people in slashdot and the world of say the CEOs and the world according to the I.T managers. And the world according to the "normal" people. It is just that in slashdot you just see one face of the dice.
This has always been Microsoft's way. They bought "Word" and (depending on how you interpret it) they bought "Dos".
Exactly what I thought, this is what Microsoft knows how to do best. They bought DOS (CP/M QDOS), they bought SQL Server, they bought powerpoint (forethought), Fox, Sourcesafe, Visio, etc... among LOTS of other companies.
Microsoft does is not a "software" company per-se, it is a technology company which objective is to buy out the competition. They are just doing what they know to do best!
I have a question, isn't Python a programming language? if it is true then what does backwards compatibility means? I mean, if it is going to have different syntax or sentence construction then it is another language, and I think they should not call it Python. It is like C++ and C# or logo/Starlogo/Netlogo they are different languages which have some common features, but are completely different things.
The other issue is, isn't Python 2.0 an open source language (open specification and whatever), if that is true then i believe there is no problem of staying behind because even if the current maintainers start their new improved Python (Python++) a new community around Python can be created. It is like saying that C++ was going to mean the end of C99
So the correct thing to say is, "quick someone make a torrent and upload it ot TPB".
This might be akin to WindowsUE which is IMHO one of the best releases of Windows XP. Legality aside (you might or might not have a license to run whatever software is there, or you might or might not buy it after installing it), I am really sorry the creator of WindowsUE had to remove his page, fortunately I've got one of the last releases (and I am sure they are still in a torrent).
Although some of us played the not-as-expensive Tente alternative. It was really cool. I think that it is still possible to buy generic sets of Tente for a quite affordable price these days:)
Of course, the quality of Tente made me maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad, because each time you sticked one piece, another would drop at the other side of your creation. grrrr
Just imagine the number of slashdot heads that exploded when they realized that they had to choose between a format backed up by Mycrosoft and one by Sony... some have solved it by staying with DVD, but those hardcore geeks that *need* the last technology will have a real hard time here:)
Oh ok, granted, lets forgive all the murders and torture that the Catholic church have done, apparently they have changed their sadomasochism tastes to pedophilia , is 2005 recent enough for you?.
I do not know about you but I prefer 100 times that some rich guy gets defrauded of thousands of dollars for some courses than a innocent child being molested and destroy his complete life. Usually, the first one at least HAS A CHOICE.
The real problem is in the churches, in contrast with the religions. The church of scientology is who is doing all that shit, similarly, other churches in the world try to take advantage of the religion (ideals) they represent.
Yea ya ya yadda yadda.. Catholic church did some bad things in the 1500's - we know.
But, it's matured. No longer, and not for a long time, has a Catholic church or it's leaders promoted hate, tried to censor, or sued people for talking against them. The Catholic church these days is a very decent organization. You don't have to believe everything they teach, and in most cases, that's OK with the church. The vast majority of people that follow the bible do NOT take it word for word.
Not for a long time? If you believe more than 300 years (about the length of duration of the spanish inquisition) is not a long time then Scientology hasn't done anything.
And if we take your position, then Scientology is also no longer a bad religion, you know, they specifically stated that the acts of infiltration were made by some individuals, and that, after they renamed the Guardian Office to the OSA, they stated "we do not do that anymore". That is not more or less credible than the pope saying they do not use the iron lady anymore...
The only reason why Scientology is being nasty and other churches are not is because the other churches do not have enough power to do it. Scientology is doing that to the USA, whereas other type of churches are controlling people from the middle east, for example. Of course, the problem is not religions but churches. In fact, some of the beliefs in which Scientology is based (some of the dianectics) are quite good, however the church is using them to control all these people. Similarly to all other religions; their principles are good, but it is the churches which try to profit from the use of such beliefs and the ignorance of the people.
I am all for living in peace, not killing each other, not being bad, being in peace with yourself, communicating with each other. However, even hough these are the principles taught by many religions, the churches end using them to gather some kind of advantage.
Churches don't tend to steal documents from governments to erase negative things about their founders like Scientologists did during Operation Snow White [wikipedia.org][wikipedia]. Nor do they tend to try to frame people for various crimes (see operation freakout) or go after anyone who says anything bad about them with a pack of lawyers.
AH! of course not, what churches usually do is to torture, kill and silence whoever opposes their views and gospel.
Really, I know scientology is a crazy corporation profiting from the desperation of the people but it is pretty much innocent compared to what other religions have done.
Slashdot Mirror
With the exception of the absolutely completely f9(^*(%'n useless screen on the GBA, I've been very impressed with Nintendo game machines.
What is wrong with the screen of the GBA? is it that it does not have a back light?, I believe it was an issue with battery time, in order to make it usable with 2 AA batteries they had to avoid using a backlight. I bought a second hand GBA some time ago and installed the afterburner light, it is really bright and clear. Nowadays I got a Ninendo DS which seems more fragile than the GBA. I got one of the original gameboy bricks and it is still working (the last time I checked it at my mom's house) the gba is similarly tough but the DS seems a bit more fragile. Now the PSP really seems as if it is going to break in any moment, specially the screen, which is a fact I like about the DS, as the screens are hidden when you are not using it, the most that can happen is that it gets scratched in the outside.
Well duh, he is the president not the king, any candidate who tells you he will abolish whatever law you dont like is lying. Just some days ago I read a comment in slashdot that said that the problem with Americans is that they think they are electing a king when they are electing the president.
Maybe that is why you got the guy you got in the White Castle^WHouse now. If he or anyone is president then the most they can do is actively oppose marijuana laws. Bush might oppose privacy laws, but that does not make it right for him to spy on you (or it should not... but hey, it seems people get so used to that).
BTW, I have no preference in who wins the election. If I needed to choose one I would go for Obama, because he is black. The reason is that IMHO any kind of change is good and greater the change the better. That way you will get used to *changes* and will be easier to keep changing until you get what you really want.
I'm overwhelmed by RP's insight and commitment to these issues, and can't wait to subscribe to his newsletter.
There, fixed it for you.
s, copying retail software does do real harm and IS real theft by any rational standard of law
No, copying retail software is not theft by any standard law. That is why you need lawyers to work cases because people like you can not understand the difference between two unlawful (but completely different) activities. In fact, the illegal actions that can be done with retail software are several. One is unauthorized use, another is unauthorized distribution and another may be unathorized copying. All those are related to copyright violation, which is not theft.
Mistaking theft with copyright violation is like mistaking house breaking and entering to illegal subletting, both are unlawful and one of them does not makes you lose anything,
if someone can take my paycheck, and leave me with exactly every cent in that paycheck, then they are welcome to it and I invite everyone to do the same.
You will do that only once. After everyone has taken a copy of your paycheck and you go to cash it somewhere else and they cash it with beans, I am sure the next check you get you wont be so happy to share it with others.
Screw the artists, screw their members. Really, what do you need to develop an album these days? you can go to any private recording studio and have some recording sessions and get out with your sound files. You could also pay for the masterisation and post production.
After that you only need to make a page were you sell your music. You may even sell your music in the same web page of your band (wow!). Really, I do not know how many groups would make lots of money if they just contracted some X web developer to install osCommerce with some file-buy module + paypal. They could sell all the music they wanted and they will get 100% of the royalties.
God, artists are being screwed because they want. The bad guys in the record industry exist because there is demand for them.
And if you want "advertizing" go buy some adwords in google, upload your music to Last.FM and maybe Pandora. It is not that there are no options, but people do not *want* to try them.
I know because my brother is a musician (his group just released a CD with 5 songs, available on MixUp [the largest music chain in Mexico]). I have been telling him about Last.FM, web based distribution and whatnot... the only thing they achieved is to make the album available at iTunes (and only because the guy who published the disc told them he will upload it there).
You want to get screwed with grrrrrrrreat contracts and promised fame and fortune? go ahead!
It's a troll, and definitely NSFW.
Lol, you should specify that you are talking about another comment. For a moment I thought you were talking about the article link so i hurried to click when I read "deffinitely NSFW"... unfortunately it is slashdotted, and as I started reading the other comments, I realized you were talking about the last measure troll
Just take a look at the current branding
MSN Hotmail, MSN Messenger, etc. I am sure it would be MSN Yahoo! or Microsoft Yahoo!
I think you dont really understood the point that the guy made. The problem is not that someone is interested in you or your information now. I know lots of information is pubclicly available when you send it via mail or generally through the internet. However if at this time you are of no interest to the bad guys then they wont be logging your activities. The issue is if you save such activities in a public-third party server (such as google or microsoft or yahoo or whatever), even if you stop using them the minute your government start jailing people that does not bend over, they will be able to get all the information you saved over there (i.e., google complying with China policies, Yahoo giving away information about an account, if they bend over China, why wouldn't they bend over the USA or any other more powerful country?).
:)
I don't even want to know what kind of activity you are involved in which makes you believe that the US government keeps a file on you
You do not have to do something really nasty to be tracked by the government, just Flying through (i.e, to go somewhere else) the USA will get you into their database.
I got a first person account of that, my grandmother went to the USA in the 70s or 80s maybe, and she forgot to handle a small paper when she went out. Ten years later, a cousing went to the USA for vacation and when she was returning they stopped her and asked her where was my grandmother hiding in the USA, they were sure she had illegaly stayed (of course she had not, she lived in Mexico). How did they know she was the granmother of my cousing... we do not know.
usly, is there anyone who doesn't think this is either a precursor to military action, or a direct attack on Iran's about-to-launch Euro-based oil market?
Can anyone please blame it in some way to George Bush?
(disc. I am anti-Bush)
I have used web based email service sine hotmail 1995 or so. I have gone into hotmail, linuxmail, latinmail, hotmail again and lastly gmail. I have never found client based mail systems (like outlook or thunderbird or eudora, or whatever) useful as you have to actually configure and do lots of things just to check your inbox.
That being said, some months ago I was talking with an American guy who is working in my office (he is doing his second PhD in London and working here part time) and he told me that the reason he does not have one of those web mail accounts is not for what they do *now* for the information, but because you do not know what they can do in the future. Once your information is public, it remains public forever. And you may think it is not public giving it to any of those companies, but it really is, the only thing that makes it non public is that nobody cares about it. But if in the future you had some issue that made *someone* important care about you, I am pretty shure they will find means to obtain that information.
I keep using gmail to this date, but I am really sure the American government has plenty of information about me by now. Fortunately, I plan to keep out of the USA and keep in a country where they have no real place of invading.
Yeah, but you're just one guy. If it works for the vast majority, then that *does* cut it.
Only maybe within the slashdot crowd. The fact is that for the majority of people it does not cut it, Microsoft Windows or Apple OSX achieve what GP poster is saying.
There are two problems I see with Linux now, one is this late-drivers issue (it happened with modems, cameras, usb and now wireless) that prevents users from being able to use their hardware in their computer. The second problem is what someone called "incomplete drivers", and it refers to the fact that because of the nature of "scratch an itch" of open source, developers sometimes create a driver that "just works" in the sense that the developer stops programming the driver when it achieves a specific functionality. The result is that you can not do in Linux everything you can do in Windows with your hardware.
I too have the same philosophy as GP, I do not care who people blame (it is easy to play the blame game and throw the ball to another person), the hard fact is that Linux does not cut it in some conditions, and I use whatever solves my problems. Past are my University days of being idealist and having time to hack and crack (as disassembling and removing the protection of programs). Now I just want computers to work and work fine.
The fact is that, if you *only* read slashdot and it's comment you will get very, very biased. The majority of the people commonly commenting here are hardcore Open source and linux fans. The ones that are neutral or pro any other technology just do not comment here (just look at what happens each time Miguel de Icaza tries to comment here). Several people participating in slashdot think in black and white terms, if it is not their way then it is worng.
However, if you take a look at other news outlets, or any other places where technology is discussed you will realize the "real" place of Open Source. I am not saying that it is not useful. It is useful indeed, I have a lot of interest in participating in Open Source software. However, that is why you see this incredible difference between the world of the people in slashdot and the world of say the CEOs and the world according to the I.T managers. And the world according to the "normal" people. It is just that in slashdot you just see one face of the dice.
This has always been Microsoft's way. They bought "Word" and (depending on how you interpret it) they bought "Dos".
Exactly what I thought, this is what Microsoft knows how to do best. They bought DOS (CP/M QDOS), they bought SQL Server, they bought powerpoint (forethought), Fox, Sourcesafe, Visio, etc... among LOTS of other companies.
Microsoft does is not a "software" company per-se, it is a technology company which objective is to buy out the competition. They are just doing what they know to do best!
I have a question, isn't Python a programming language? if it is true then what does backwards compatibility means? I mean, if it is going to have different syntax or sentence construction then it is another language, and I think they should not call it Python. It is like C++ and C# or logo /Starlogo/Netlogo they are different languages which have some common features, but are completely different things.
The other issue is, isn't Python 2.0 an open source language (open specification and whatever), if that is true then i believe there is no problem of staying behind because even if the current maintainers start their new improved Python (Python++) a new community around Python can be created. It is like saying that C++ was going to mean the end of C99
What do you expect from a country that spies on its citizens just to know if they watch TV...
The sollution is to sell GOOG like crazy now. The overvaluated stock will plumet in the next month or two... More if Yahoo accepts MS offer.
So the correct thing to say is,
"quick someone make a torrent and upload it ot TPB".
This might be akin to WindowsUE which is IMHO one of the best releases of Windows XP. Legality aside (you might or might not have a license to run whatever software is there, or you might or might not buy it after installing it), I am really sorry the creator of WindowsUE had to remove his page, fortunately I've got one of the last releases (and I am sure they are still in a torrent).
Although some of us played the not-as-expensive Tente alternative. It was really cool. I think that it is still possible to buy generic sets of Tente for a quite affordable price these days :)
Of course, the quality of Tente made me maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad, because each time you sticked one piece, another would drop at the other side of your creation. grrrr
You can not get more freedom than FreeNet. Yeah, everybody knows netcraft has confirmed that it is dying but it is still there :)
Just imagine the number of slashdot heads that exploded when they realized that they had to choose between a format backed up by Mycrosoft and one by Sony... some have solved it by staying with DVD, but those hardcore geeks that *need* the last technology will have a real hard time here :)
Oh ok, granted, lets forgive all the murders and torture that the Catholic church have done, apparently they have changed their sadomasochism tastes to pedophilia , is 2005 recent enough for you?.
I do not know about you but I prefer 100 times that some rich guy gets defrauded of thousands of dollars for some courses than a innocent child being molested and destroy his complete life. Usually, the first one at least HAS A CHOICE.
The real problem is in the churches, in contrast with the religions. The church of scientology is who is doing all that shit, similarly, other churches in the world try to take advantage of the religion (ideals) they represent.
Yea ya ya yadda yadda.. Catholic church did some bad things in the 1500's - we know.
But, it's matured. No longer, and not for a long time, has a Catholic church or it's leaders promoted hate, tried to censor, or sued people for talking against them. The Catholic church these days is a very decent organization. You don't have to believe everything they teach, and in most cases, that's OK with the church. The vast majority of people that follow the bible do NOT take it word for word.
Not for a long time? If you believe more than 300 years (about the length of duration of the spanish inquisition) is not a long time then Scientology hasn't done anything.
And if we take your position, then Scientology is also no longer a bad religion, you know, they specifically stated that the acts of infiltration were made by some individuals, and that, after they renamed the Guardian Office to the OSA, they stated "we do not do that anymore". That is not more or less credible than the pope saying they do not use the iron lady anymore...
The only reason why Scientology is being nasty and other churches are not is because the other churches do not have enough power to do it. Scientology is doing that to the USA, whereas other type of churches are controlling people from the middle east, for example. Of course, the problem is not religions but churches. In fact, some of the beliefs in which Scientology is based (some of the dianectics) are quite good, however the church is using them to control all these people. Similarly to all other religions; their principles are good, but it is the churches which try to profit from the use of such beliefs and the ignorance of the people.
I am all for living in peace, not killing each other, not being bad, being in peace with yourself, communicating with each other. However, even hough these are the principles taught by many religions, the churches end using them to gather some kind of advantage.
Churches don't tend to steal documents from governments to erase negative things about their founders like Scientologists did during Operation Snow White [wikipedia.org][wikipedia]. Nor do they tend to try to frame people for various crimes (see operation freakout) or go after anyone who says anything bad about them with a pack of lawyers.
AH! of course not, what churches usually do is to torture, kill and silence whoever opposes their views and gospel.
Really, I know scientology is a crazy corporation profiting from the desperation of the people but it is pretty much innocent compared to what other religions have done.
Can someone make a car analogy please?