But Battleship IBM has no reason to gun down that small IE vessel, since it is no threat to the Confederate State of Mainframes, which after all doesn't border on the Web line. The dreadful IE privateer is dealt with by Royal Expeditionary forces from other fleets, primarily consisiting of the many small and insiginificant but angry lego mercenaries from O.S.S. The frigates HMS Mozilla and HMS Opera, as well as the accompanying corvettes Firefox and Konqueror, are teaming up with that Man-O-War USS Safari, and they have currently locked down the privateer into a narrow bay, where it is so heavily bombarded that it's own holes are beginning to make her take in vast amounts of water. She _will_ be sunk, mark my words.
The current measure of the IBM admirals is to ensure that the job will be completed, so that the hunt for "General" W. bin G. III can finally result in his body dangling from the four corners of the country, with his head speared onto the capitol Obelisque. This can only be accomplished by disintegrating his Army of Windows. Although his troops are countless, the current warfare with bio agents and infiltrating spies is beginning to show significant result.
Re:Not hard to figure out why LoTR is #1.
on
Top 50 DVDs
·
· Score: 1
The oldies Fight Club and Seven also have four commentary tracks, plus dual luxury audio tracks.
The extra stuff on LotR isn't that good, it's a lot of crap with but a few worthwhile extras.
If people have money, they buy toys. Technology these days are mostly about toys. So, if the economy booms, people spend more, and companies sell more. What they sell goes in cycles. Currently, people have already bought a lot of computers, so this niche will rest for another year or two before there will be new, strong demand (caveat below). Cell phones are being switched more often, due to their lesser price and bundling with subscriptions, and also because there are more features coming out with new phones, 3G and camera phones being the latest. This is already a full-paced market.
Video cameras and digital cameras also enjoy a more constant demand, and the same goes for mp4 players. iPod will continue to sell well, and there are currently no competitors worth mentioning. As a side effect, there might be an increased demand for Apple branded computers, especially if they sell a basic cheapo-Mac with a small or no margin of profit. This _will_ cut into the Wintel monopoly, because of the iPod.
However, there are no other spin-offs due to the iPod. When the Web was unleashed, there was an ever increasing demand for content, and a whole array of side technologies arose. This market is now satisified, and can only grow at a moderate rate.
So, people will buy an iPod. They will love it. They will love the Mac with Mac OS X and the simplicity, usefulness and ease of use it has, saying bye-bye to Kansas (viruses, spy-ware, malfunction). They will discover iMovie and iPhoto, and they might consider buying digital cameras or video recorders. They will embrace the digital life-style offered by Apple, shunning the Microsoft version in progress. Vengeance is in progress.
This is bad news for Apple bashers, but good news for the rest of us.
Well, just bomb them into democracy. This worked in Vietnam, Korea and Iraq, so I guess another campaign of liberation and christening by our American friends will do the trick once more.
Or why not just use the water system? In theory, it could be workable. At least in the future. Dunno about it being affordable, but it sure is environementally clean using water transport...
Unfortunately, some Asian countries are more hospitable to the pirates than others, so policing it is a difficult job.
Most CD stores in China are pirate *only*. In these stores, you can't find a single legal CD. The only stores that sell genuine stuff are the malls, since they need to have a somewhat credible reputation. But even they carry pirated material occasionally.
I don't see how the **AA is going to police this... in the minds of the Chinese, there is no such thing as immaterial rights. Everything that can be copied will be copied and sold for profit.
Now, do we want **AA to do policing at all? Do we want America policing more than it already does? No, we don't...
Actually, using a recipe making crack with two less atoms/molecules (or two substitute atoms/molecules) is legal, since it is then no longer crack. It is a designer drug. Laws need to be precise about what to ban, otherwise they would have to ban chocolate, coffee and tea on some pretty blurred premises.
The same holds true to software. You really can't ban an algorithm or a method, and you can't make a simple enough algorithm or method copyrightable, at least not in a democracy. With a simple recipe, every geek can make his own P2P app, substituting something in the code to make it unique to him/her, without infringing, just using public domain ideas.
The file sharing community thus no longer needs to rely on a hefty übergeek providing them with complicated software. All that is needed is a common protocol, which can't be banned either. The **AA would have to target indivudual massive providers of illegal stuff in order to pursue their police state agenda.
Right, slashdotters see the low price on bandwidth, decide to go to India. Nevermind that they will hate many aspects of the local culture. Or that they will at best find a job for a monthly pay of a hundred bucks. Luckily, India is another former colony of the British Empire, so there won't be any language barriers.
There are also tons of pretty girls, but then again, the culture will fuck up the regular slashdotter's plans. Then again, slashdotters mostly don't get laid, so it may not be counted as a minus.
After just half a year, the regular slashdotter will probably miss the Patriot Act, Dick Cheney, Jack-in-the-Box, fraudulent ballots, terror hype, Dubya, his mother and his brother, and so return to his Homeland...
Re:This is a new trend
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Nah, it's been around for a decade, more or less. The only thing an interview proves is that the applicant is good at giving interviews, it doesn't say anything about his or her real skills or long-term endurance. It also shows that you are willing to suck a lot of dick and lick a lot of ass to get that particular job they're offering.
What you are saying is that 640 kB should be enough for everyone, or that since we have Microsoft Word we have reached a level of acceptability...
This is not so, since new codecs do so much more than conserve bandwidth (which is in itself a good purpose, considering the Slashdot effect and other congestions that will always occur on tah intarweb). Some of them DO have better quality per se than MPEG-2, and some of them DO scale enormously much better. MPEG-4 was developed for these and other reasons, and there is a tremendous need for such a codec, not least from a wireless perspecive.
Furthermore, it would be desirable to have a codec that can handle as many things as possible, rather than relying on a bunch of different codecs for different purposes.
Finally, I believe in standards rather than proprietary formats and codecs. DivX is fine, but it is a bastardized version of MPEG-4, and there are also many different implementations. Most of them generate errors in VLC, whereas I have yet to see a failing MPEG-4 video.
There are also the aspects of cross platform implementation (forget WMV9), simplicity, scalability and ingenuity in the architecture (why Quicktime was chosen as the MPEG-4 file architecture), and industry support (everyone but Redmond City supports MPEG-4). There.
Mother Nature hasn't got a will of Her own, and so decides nothing. She merely is, and She operates according to the initial conditions and the natural laws given to Her.
My friend, you are off-topic, since I was merely comparing these two events from an arts perspective. Which event was "worse" or "greater" or "zui niubi" doesn't matter when we are dealing with color, composition and originality.
Japanese (Chinese, Korean, Russian, Whatever) is of course installed on Mac OS X right out of the box, including professional fonts for viewing, and all Cocoa apps use Unicode natively (using clear and crisp anti-aliasing and perfect kerning via ATSUI). There is only one Mac OS X, not forty "regionalized" ones. That is why I love Mac OS X.
I guess you must be using Windows or something. Usually, you need to do some extra installs with that "operating system". The same is probably true for Linux, the operating system that aspires to kill off Mac OS X (?). Then you need to turn on a bunch of options to make it all look somewhat decent, although it will never look anywhere near what Mac OS X displays.
Mod me down all the fuck you want, it doesn't make me less right.
No matter how much money you toss in, you can't rival the Nobel Foundation. It's a matter of prestige. The Nobel prize has been around for more than 100 years.
This is China's constitution. It forbids detention of pregnant women or breastfeeding moms. It also forbids executing pregnant women. So, I guess pregnant women are above the law. Or at least special care is taken to make sure the third party, the baby, isn't hurt.
"In cities across China, women hustle porn on pedestrian overpasses and at tunnel entrances. Many are pregnant; others carry 1-year-olds, often rented for as little as a dollar a day. The babies are both props and shields: They enable buyers to immediately identify the sellers, and the women exploit a loophole in Chinese criminal law that allows for only a brief detainment of pregnant women or those with infants."
As for porn videos... no, you can't see them in the stores, for the same reason you can't see the prostitution going on in many of the "meirongyuan" (beauty parlors). You need to ask what you want!
As far as I know, porn is delivered also outside the internet, for instance in form of magazines. And no, you don't have to be literate to read those magazines... in fact, pregnant women are standing all over the country side selling those lewd magazines and video tapes. Pregnant women, because they can by law not be detained for this minor crime.
Oh, don't get me wrong. China is a dictatorship with less freedom than in the West (there's of course no total freedom anywhere). So, it is illegal to challenge, in any way, this dictatorship, on the internet and elsewhere.
But the notion that you can't surf porn or illegal stuff in China, or even news sites and informative web pages, is just a myth. I can't get to BBC from my DSL connection in Shanghai, but then again, I never used BBC in the past, so... besides from that, I see no difference from surfing in my home country Sweden (a Western country, where the corporate tele oligarchy made the underground site flashback.se disappear for years).
China can try as hard as they want to tighten the control, but for obvious reasons it won't work (with less than the entire Internet becoming useless).
No proxies. It is not illegal to surf porn or stuff about Falun gong in China. What is illegal is setting up commercial porn sites within China (or dealing with commercial porn in general - your home made porn is legal). It is also illegal to challenge the ruling party, for instance by setting up Falun gong web sites within China. Everything else is legal, and if it isn't, nobody gives a shit anyway (you will find porn behind the desk in any video rental shop in China).
75% of the kids in China learn about sex through web porn. This is in concordance with the rest of the world. Go figure.
The Chinese authorities are very ambivalent about porn. That is why they do some obligatory censoring and let the majority sip through.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll have one of those Kahoona Iceburgers. Fries with that, please. Easy on the ice, though.
But Battleship IBM has no reason to gun down that small IE vessel, since it is no threat to the Confederate State of Mainframes, which after all doesn't border on the Web line. The dreadful IE privateer is dealt with by Royal Expeditionary forces from other fleets, primarily consisiting of the many small and insiginificant but angry lego mercenaries from O.S.S. The frigates HMS Mozilla and HMS Opera, as well as the accompanying corvettes Firefox and Konqueror, are teaming up with that Man-O-War USS Safari, and they have currently locked down the privateer into a narrow bay, where it is so heavily bombarded that it's own holes are beginning to make her take in vast amounts of water. She _will_ be sunk, mark my words.
The current measure of the IBM admirals is to ensure that the job will be completed, so that the hunt for "General" W. bin G. III can finally result in his body dangling from the four corners of the country, with his head speared onto the capitol Obelisque. This can only be accomplished by disintegrating his Army of Windows. Although his troops are countless, the current warfare with bio agents and infiltrating spies is beginning to show significant result.
The oldies Fight Club and Seven also have four commentary tracks, plus dual luxury audio tracks.
The extra stuff on LotR isn't that good, it's a lot of crap with but a few worthwhile extras.
If people have money, they buy toys. Technology these days are mostly about toys. So, if the economy booms, people spend more, and companies sell more. What they sell goes in cycles. Currently, people have already bought a lot of computers, so this niche will rest for another year or two before there will be new, strong demand (caveat below). Cell phones are being switched more often, due to their lesser price and bundling with subscriptions, and also because there are more features coming out with new phones, 3G and camera phones being the latest. This is already a full-paced market.
Video cameras and digital cameras also enjoy a more constant demand, and the same goes for mp4 players. iPod will continue to sell well, and there are currently no competitors worth mentioning. As a side effect, there might be an increased demand for Apple branded computers, especially if they sell a basic cheapo-Mac with a small or no margin of profit. This _will_ cut into the Wintel monopoly, because of the iPod.
However, there are no other spin-offs due to the iPod. When the Web was unleashed, there was an ever increasing demand for content, and a whole array of side technologies arose. This market is now satisified, and can only grow at a moderate rate.
So, people will buy an iPod. They will love it. They will love the Mac with Mac OS X and the simplicity, usefulness and ease of use it has, saying bye-bye to Kansas (viruses, spy-ware, malfunction). They will discover iMovie and iPhoto, and they might consider buying digital cameras or video recorders. They will embrace the digital life-style offered by Apple, shunning the Microsoft version in progress. Vengeance is in progress.
This is bad news for Apple bashers, but good news for the rest of us.
Well, just bomb them into democracy. This worked in Vietnam, Korea and Iraq, so I guess another campaign of liberation and christening by our American friends will do the trick once more.
This is planted, just to get more attraction to the event. You don't know Mr. Jobs very well, do you?
Rumors, law suits, cancellations, more rumors... it all adds up to an exciting climax.
Or why not just use the water system? In theory, it could be workable. At least in the future. Dunno about it being affordable, but it sure is environementally clean using water transport...
Most CD stores in China are pirate *only*. In these stores, you can't find a single legal CD. The only stores that sell genuine stuff are the malls, since they need to have a somewhat credible reputation. But even they carry pirated material occasionally.
I don't see how the **AA is going to police this... in the minds of the Chinese, there is no such thing as immaterial rights. Everything that can be copied will be copied and sold for profit.
Now, do we want **AA to do policing at all? Do we want America policing more than it already does? No, we don't...
Actually, using a recipe making crack with two less atoms/molecules (or two substitute atoms/molecules) is legal, since it is then no longer crack. It is a designer drug. Laws need to be precise about what to ban, otherwise they would have to ban chocolate, coffee and tea on some pretty blurred premises.
The same holds true to software. You really can't ban an algorithm or a method, and you can't make a simple enough algorithm or method copyrightable, at least not in a democracy. With a simple recipe, every geek can make his own P2P app, substituting something in the code to make it unique to him/her, without infringing, just using public domain ideas.
The file sharing community thus no longer needs to rely on a hefty übergeek providing them with complicated software. All that is needed is a common protocol, which can't be banned either. The **AA would have to target indivudual massive providers of illegal stuff in order to pursue their police state agenda.
Right, slashdotters see the low price on bandwidth, decide to go to India. Nevermind that they will hate many aspects of the local culture. Or that they will at best find a job for a monthly pay of a hundred bucks. Luckily, India is another former colony of the British Empire, so there won't be any language barriers.
There are also tons of pretty girls, but then again, the culture will fuck up the regular slashdotter's plans. Then again, slashdotters mostly don't get laid, so it may not be counted as a minus.
After just half a year, the regular slashdotter will probably miss the Patriot Act, Dick Cheney, Jack-in-the-Box, fraudulent ballots, terror hype, Dubya, his mother and his brother, and so return to his Homeland...
Nah, it's been around for a decade, more or less. The only thing an interview proves is that the applicant is good at giving interviews, it doesn't say anything about his or her real skills or long-term endurance. It also shows that you are willing to suck a lot of dick and lick a lot of ass to get that particular job they're offering.
What you are saying is that 640 kB should be enough for everyone, or that since we have Microsoft Word we have reached a level of acceptability...
This is not so, since new codecs do so much more than conserve bandwidth (which is in itself a good purpose, considering the Slashdot effect and other congestions that will always occur on tah intarweb). Some of them DO have better quality per se than MPEG-2, and some of them DO scale enormously much better. MPEG-4 was developed for these and other reasons, and there is a tremendous need for such a codec, not least from a wireless perspecive.
Furthermore, it would be desirable to have a codec that can handle as many things as possible, rather than relying on a bunch of different codecs for different purposes.
Finally, I believe in standards rather than proprietary formats and codecs. DivX is fine, but it is a bastardized version of MPEG-4, and there are also many different implementations. Most of them generate errors in VLC, whereas I have yet to see a failing MPEG-4 video.
There are also the aspects of cross platform implementation (forget WMV9), simplicity, scalability and ingenuity in the architecture (why Quicktime was chosen as the MPEG-4 file architecture), and industry support (everyone but Redmond City supports MPEG-4). There.
Mother Nature hasn't got a will of Her own, and so decides nothing. She merely is, and She operates according to the initial conditions and the natural laws given to Her.
My friend, you are off-topic, since I was merely comparing these two events from an arts perspective. Which event was "worse" or "greater" or "zui niubi" doesn't matter when we are dealing with color, composition and originality.
Don't get me wrong, but this is beautiful stuff. It could almost challenge 9/11 for the title of Ultimate Art Exhibition.
No, you just adher to the W3C standard. There's no need to take IE into consideration. Doing so would severly cripple web developing.
Japanese (Chinese, Korean, Russian, Whatever) is of course installed on Mac OS X right out of the box, including professional fonts for viewing, and all Cocoa apps use Unicode natively (using clear and crisp anti-aliasing and perfect kerning via ATSUI). There is only one Mac OS X, not forty "regionalized" ones. That is why I love Mac OS X.
I guess you must be using Windows or something. Usually, you need to do some extra installs with that "operating system". The same is probably true for Linux, the operating system that aspires to kill off Mac OS X (?). Then you need to turn on a bunch of options to make it all look somewhat decent, although it will never look anywhere near what Mac OS X displays.
Mod me down all the fuck you want, it doesn't make me less right.
For the rest of the world Holland and The Netherlands are exactly equivalent.
You mean like the American original of the Bible? Or Walt's original story "Snow White"?
No matter how much money you toss in, you can't rival the Nobel Foundation. It's a matter of prestige. The Nobel prize has been around for more than 100 years.
This is China's constitution. It forbids detention of pregnant women or breastfeeding moms. It also forbids executing pregnant women. So, I guess pregnant women are above the law. Or at least special care is taken to make sure the third party, the baby, isn't hurt.
Link: http://www.aegis.com/news/lt/2004/LT040818.html
"In cities across China, women hustle porn on pedestrian overpasses and at tunnel entrances. Many are pregnant; others carry 1-year-olds, often rented for as little as a dollar a day. The babies are both props and shields: They enable buyers to immediately identify the sellers, and the women exploit a loophole in Chinese criminal law that allows for only a brief detainment of pregnant women or those with infants."
As for porn videos... no, you can't see them in the stores, for the same reason you can't see the prostitution going on in many of the "meirongyuan" (beauty parlors). You need to ask what you want!
As far as I know, porn is delivered also outside the internet, for instance in form of magazines. And no, you don't have to be literate to read those magazines... in fact, pregnant women are standing all over the country side selling those lewd magazines and video tapes. Pregnant women, because they can by law not be detained for this minor crime.
e nt_1461373.htm
Regarding netizens and their porn usage:
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-05/10/cont
Oh, don't get me wrong. China is a dictatorship with less freedom than in the West (there's of course no total freedom anywhere). So, it is illegal to challenge, in any way, this dictatorship, on the internet and elsewhere.
But the notion that you can't surf porn or illegal stuff in China, or even news sites and informative web pages, is just a myth. I can't get to BBC from my DSL connection in Shanghai, but then again, I never used BBC in the past, so... besides from that, I see no difference from surfing in my home country Sweden (a Western country, where the corporate tele oligarchy made the underground site flashback.se disappear for years).
China can try as hard as they want to tighten the control, but for obvious reasons it won't work (with less than the entire Internet becoming useless).
No proxies. It is not illegal to surf porn or stuff about Falun gong in China. What is illegal is setting up commercial porn sites within China (or dealing with commercial porn in general - your home made porn is legal). It is also illegal to challenge the ruling party, for instance by setting up Falun gong web sites within China. Everything else is legal, and if it isn't, nobody gives a shit anyway (you will find porn behind the desk in any video rental shop in China).
75% of the kids in China learn about sex through web porn. This is in concordance with the rest of the world. Go figure.
The Chinese authorities are very ambivalent about porn. That is why they do some obligatory censoring and let the majority sip through.
Oh, you can access porn and "subversive documents" all you want in China. I do it everyday.