And those who won't pay for it won't pay for it. So those people will never be your customers whether you stop them from getting the product or not.
I think the point is that if there is rampant piracy, then there is demand that is not fulfilled by current distribution methods. Some of those pirates will *never* pay for it, no matter what. So they will always pirate it and you can't really stop them. But excluding that lot, then you have a population that *would* pay for it if it was in a form, or at a price point, they desired.
So find that form and/or price point and expand your market. Sure, that certain group will still pirate it, but who cares? They're going to do it no matter what, and it's not lost sales because they were never going to pay in the first place.
hmmm... I'm thinking more along the lines of some kind of lcd tech that is reflective or not depending on the charge applied... but yeah, that might work.
yeah. actually, I was thinking something more disguised as a mantel top mirror. My wife (I know, I know, shock horror, on slashdot!) likes big heavy gilt framed mirrors over the fireplace. If it could be a tv in disguise, perfect.
Plus, having the panel above the fireplace helps with the "dual-focus room" problem. Getting a decent arrangement of furniture that allows pleasant viewing of both the fireplace *and* the panel is a royal PITA and frankly (in my house) just doesn't work. Putting the panel above the fireplace is perfect. What I really want, though, is a panel that looks like a mirror when it's not on. I'm sure they're out there, I just haven't looked.
oh, and/. will be starting a new topic -- Home Decorating. The graphic will be Martha Stewart in prison orange.
No No No, all of you are wrong. George Carlin put it best when he said (paraphrasing) "Dirt is just stuff that's in the wrong place." When it's in a flower pot, it's potting soil, when it's in the compost pile it's, well, compost, or at least on the way there. When it's falling off your shoes onto the couch it's dirt. Get that dirt out of here!
Likewise, I tell my kids that "weeds" are just "plants" that are growing somewhere someone doesn't want them. We all like dandelions, so when the neighbors complain about the weeds, I say, what, you mean that grass there?
If we had one hundred developers working on one project rather than one hundred projects by one developer each, then we'd see much better quality software. I disagree. What you get with 100 developers working on 100 projects is 100 developers working on projects that they are passionate about, really care about and are committed to. That yields much better code than 100 people working on a project that 1 developer cares about.
Completely orthagonal to the whole stupid debate over base10/base2 gi(bi|ga)bytes or whatever....
I really hate this trend. A corporation loses a case and the punishment is that consumers get to spend more money with them. I fully believe that they will at least break even if not make money on this settlement. WTF. They should be forced to refund everyone who bought one of these players an amount equivalent to the proportion of storage space the "lost".
I'm a class action settlement "Winner" in my business and my prize? I get 20% off products that are outside my usual purchase contract with the company. How lame is that! They get to keep charging me the same ripoff prices as before *and* I get to spend more money with them. And if I mess up filling out the little coupons, then they are invalid, no recourse. </rant>
Frequently, it seems, also anecdotally, that accidents that a sober person probably couldn't have avoided will get blamed on DWI because one of the drivers blew over the limit.
We had an accident just outside our apartment years ago. A cop was speeding up a one way street, lights and sirens full on and blew the red light without slowing. This was in a dense urban area with little visibility around corners. He collided with the poor guys driving the cross street on the green light. They had been drinking and were arrested for DWI and reckless driving, failing to yield to an officer etc etc etc. The fact is, though, the cop blew the light without even slowing. No one could have avoided that accident, sober or not. They got screwed.
The point is, just because someone has been drinking and is involved in an accident doesn't mean their drinking was the cause of the accident. Correlation is not causation.
Note that I'm not advocating drinking and driving. I'm merely advocating sane rational approaches to the problem.
As a bar owner, let me tell you this is a bad idea. We already come under serious scrutiny and those of us that do a *good* job are still subject to random crap that's not our fault.
Here's the scenario. Patron has been drinking elsewhere, comes in to our bar and doesn't actually drink anything, doesn't turn over keys and leaves. (This actually happens a lot). Then gets pulled for DWI. Who gets blamed? Me. Sure, I may be able to sort it out eventually, but I'll essentially have to *prove* that he didn't drink in my bar or that we didn't turn over the keys improperly etc.
If you really want to stop drunk driving, improve mass transit and cab service and pull someone's license for 5 years the very first time they get popped (and convicted!) of DWI. Make sure the rules about what constitutes DWI have some relation to whether the person is actually impaired instead of an arbitrarily low BAC number.
The last DWI fatality that happened in my hometown was a 15 year old kid who was mowed down while walking home (on the sidewalk). Tragic. We had a DWI accident here the other day at about 6:30 AM. What cops are out watching for DWI at 6:30 on a Tuesday morning? none.
It's a matter of allocating resources and priorities. The reality is that there is no way to catch all drunk drivers. It's a fruitless effort.
The best solutions are to continue the public awareness campaigns, and use extremely heavy punishments for offenders as deterent. I'm all for revoking licenses on a first offense etc.
But the laws about what constitutes DWI needs to be changed. The reality is that alcohol affects us all differently. I suspect many people aren't even remotely affected at 0.08 BAC. Some people function just fine at levels significantly higher than that. (I am not qualified to make the previous statements, they're just my opinion) Currently, it's being used as a bludgeon to keep people in line.
Although they can be arbitrarily "failed" by unscrupulous officers, a roadside sobriety test (head back, touch your nose, etc) is, in my opinion, a better method of determining whether someone is impaired or not. It doesn't really matter what someone's BAC is, if they still have control of their faculties, can observe and react properly, then they aren't impaired. Having said that, it's pretty hard to come up with a good comprehensive roadside sobriety test -- I sure can't recite the alphabet backwards with any skill at all whether sober or not, but I can walk a line while sleeping...
I had a lengthy conversation with a MADD representative one day. She was calling to solicit contributions. I spent probably twenty minutes with her debating their position on alcohol in general and their "mission creep".
She was essentially irrational about it. I pointed out that possession and consumption of alcohol was (generally) not illegal. She went off on a tangent about how drugs and alcohol kill children. I pointed out that she was calling as a representative of MADD and was, in theory, attempting to prevent drunk driving, not drinking in general. The conversation quickly meandered back over to a general anti-alcohol rant.
Eventually I told her that I had no respect for an organization that claims to fight drunk driving, a laudable effort, but is actually a bunch of teetotalling prohibitionists. They've never called back.:)
And where does the carbon in ethanol come from? If it's ethanol made from corn or other plants, then it comes from... the atmosphere... carbon-neutral.
This cyano-bacteria... I don't know, but probably from the atmosphere as well.
So yes, he'd likely get his 455. Though I prefer this.
I hate to point this out, but if you're standing in a pot-hole, you are lower than you'd be standing on the road around it. While it's true you only have to shift your weight to the foot outside the pothole, unless you plan to spend the rest of the day walking with your knees bent, you're going to have to raise that weight at some point. I suppose you could defer that weight raising until you find a downward slope and allow your legs to transition down while your body stays at the same level, but that's really only good for physical comedy bits...
All I can say, entirely anecdotally, about the USPS, is that it rocks. I get (sometimes) less than 24 hour delivery times in my metro area for 41 cents and I never have to leave my basement. That's just fantastic!
And to be more specific, they are all different ways of shoving TV, and thus advertising, at you. Excepting the Robot, which is for remote-controlling your TV... after consideration, the only one that's not about somehow getting TV to you is the Face Bank. I'm pretty sure my kids would like the face bank, but would be disappointed that it didn't also provide TV.
Is this the limit of cool gadgetry now, more ways to show you TV (typically on absurdly small screens)? I just don't get it.
which includes the relevant quote
It's Freedom that counts folks[...] and a response to it:
..."freedom" [is] nice and everything, but without needed features or functions, you don't have jack. which I take to being a backwards way of implying that freedom somehow limits the availability of features and functions. This is of course absurd, I don't know maybe I'm misunderstanding the poster.
My original idea (long lost in this thread already, and poorly articulated originally) was that I agreed that without needed features and functions, you don't have jack. But with freedom (as in software freedom, just to be clear) a lack of f&f is easily remedied. Further, once those f&f are realized, anything more is mere fluff or glitz and really unnecessary. I don't disagree that it's nice, but wholly unnecessary. Many people would trade freedom for the aesthetic niceties, and I just don't get that.
I know that not everyone finds a need for greater freedom and that's fine, for them. For me, sure I don't need the elevator source code to operate the elevator. But when the elevator is broken, I want the source code so I can fix it. Or when the elevator doesn't function in some way I want (like sliding down the hall to my front door) then I want to be able to add that feature. To expand on that, when talking about software freedom and proprietary software, I disagree that the freedom level need to be only minimal. I agree that for the vast majority of people it has no practical impact, but that doesn't change the fact that proprietary software can be an albatross. As the user of that software, one is forced to: live with the broken software working around it as best they can; beg and plead for features to be added or changed to suit them with little hope of recourse; hope for continued support after something is EOL'd etc. With greatly increasing numbers of computer users who don't have a clue how to code, it becomes even more important for free software to be available so that those users can turn to others besides the original authors to implement features they want or need.
Anecdote warning: my wife has more than once asked me to implement something she wants in software. She couldn't code her way out of a paper bag, and doesn't care to learn. But she thinks its really cool that I, or someone, anyone who can code, could make things work for her just the way she wants. That's what software freedom gives us. So this freedom that seems to only really matter to a very small set of hippie coders really does have broader implications, at least for those who know and understand it.
dang. I can feel my beard growing as I type this...
Umm..../me reads back your post
I actually agree with a lot of what you've said, though this has drifted considerably from my original, horribly articulated thought. Suffice it to say that I think pink hammers are cool. You are right, there is more baggage (for me and many others) in these tools called computers. But I think it's important to keep a certain perspective and every once in a while remind ourselves that they are just tools for a particular job. Sometimes that job is fun stuff and aesthetics are certainly important then, but other times certain aesthetic niceties are intrusive, distracting and detract from real productivity (I'm thinking of gnome putting new terminals right on top of the currently focused one -- downright stupid; or silly compiz wobbly window frames -- fun, but not productive).
But freedom as a feature is the only feature that allows all the other features too (except non-freedom, if that's a feature, maybe it's a bug?;-P).
I have no doubts that my sensibilities do not extend to the general populace. But I view a computer as a tool and nothing more. A fun tool, but a tool.
Once you get the features and functions you *need* then the rest is crap. period. that is, of course, just my opinion.
To imply, as I think GGP did, that freedom somehow prevents one from having needed features and functions is absurd. The implication is that freedom somehow precludes featureful functionally complete software. That's so beyond absurd I don't know where to start.
As far as glitz goes, I guess some people feel a need for things to be pretty in order for them to be able to use it. If that's what it really takes, more power to them, I guess. But I don't see many people complaining that their hammer is not particularly attractive. meh.;-)
without needed features or functions, you don't have jack emphasis mine. True, without needed features/functions you don't have jack. But once you get needed features and functions the rest is fluff. GP is right, it really is about the freedom. I routinely throw away all sorts of glitz for pure functionality. When it comes down to it, most of teh shiny just gets in the way. I want the freedom to eliminate the extra crap and focus on my work. If I don't have the freedom to throw that stuff away, then I don't have freedom at all and I suffer..02
Frankly, I am dumbfounded why it's difficult to list the multiple peoples it takes to make a brilliant discovery... because that introduces uncertainty into history and that promotes thought...
I guess it's obvious that I'm reading "Lies my teacher told me" at the moment.
But what is the advantage to learning how to fix nitrogen if there is already sufficient amounts around? Clearly, the amount that is fix(ated?) by lightning (and other non-biological processes??) is not sufficient to to support the kinds of nitrogen level needed for serious eukaryotic developement. At least that's how I read it... reiterating that I'm not a biologist, just curious.
And it's not clear to me at all that only nitrogen fixing bacteria thrived when the molybdenum levels were low. It seems to me like maybe the availability of molybdenum spurred a development of nitrogen fixers as it aided their process. So maybe it was mostly nitrogen fixers around, but they weren't doing very well because of a lack of molybdenum? I don't know.
From TFA:
Knoll was perplexed by the fact that eukaryotes didn't dominate the world until around 0.7 billion years ago, even though they seemed to have evolved before 2.7 billion years ago. in other words, they appear to have been just lying around for 2 billion years.
Slashdot Mirror
And those who won't pay for it won't pay for it. So those people will never be your customers whether you stop them from getting the product or not.
I think the point is that if there is rampant piracy, then there is demand that is not fulfilled by current distribution methods. Some of those pirates will *never* pay for it, no matter what. So they will always pirate it and you can't really stop them. But excluding that lot, then you have a population that *would* pay for it if it was in a form, or at a price point, they desired.
So find that form and/or price point and expand your market. Sure, that certain group will still pirate it, but who cares? They're going to do it no matter what, and it's not lost sales because they were never going to pay in the first place.
hmmm... I'm thinking more along the lines of some kind of lcd tech that is reflective or not depending on the charge applied... but yeah, that might work.
yeah. actually, I was thinking something more disguised as a mantel top mirror. My wife (I know, I know, shock horror, on slashdot!) likes big heavy gilt framed mirrors over the fireplace. If it could be a tv in disguise, perfect.
Plus, having the panel above the fireplace helps with the "dual-focus room" problem. Getting a decent arrangement of furniture that allows pleasant viewing of both the fireplace *and* the panel is a royal PITA and frankly (in my house) just doesn't work. Putting the panel above the fireplace is perfect. What I really want, though, is a panel that looks like a mirror when it's not on. I'm sure they're out there, I just haven't looked.
/. will be starting a new topic -- Home Decorating. The graphic will be Martha Stewart in prison orange.
oh, and
No No No, all of you are wrong. George Carlin put it best when he said (paraphrasing) "Dirt is just stuff that's in the wrong place." When it's in a flower pot, it's potting soil, when it's in the compost pile it's, well, compost, or at least on the way there. When it's falling off your shoes onto the couch it's dirt. Get that dirt out of here!
Likewise, I tell my kids that "weeds" are just "plants" that are growing somewhere someone doesn't want them. We all like dandelions, so when the neighbors complain about the weeds, I say, what, you mean that grass there?
Wow, my cs education must be working... I could actually understand that thing!
Great read, thanks.
Completely orthagonal to the whole stupid debate over base10/base2 gi(bi|ga)bytes or whatever....
I really hate this trend. A corporation loses a case and the punishment is that consumers get to spend more money with them. I fully believe that they will at least break even if not make money on this settlement. WTF. They should be forced to refund everyone who bought one of these players an amount equivalent to the proportion of storage space the "lost".
I'm a class action settlement "Winner" in my business and my prize? I get 20% off products that are outside my usual purchase contract with the company. How lame is that! They get to keep charging me the same ripoff prices as before *and* I get to spend more money with them. And if I mess up filling out the little coupons, then they are invalid, no recourse. </rant>
meh. my 53hp will do that no problem. of course, the vehicle only weighs 370 pounds... and only has two wheels...
but maybe that's the point. If cars had less mass, then you wouldn't need all that honking horsepower to make high speed merges.
Frequently, it seems, also anecdotally, that accidents that a sober person probably couldn't have avoided will get blamed on DWI because one of the drivers blew over the limit.
We had an accident just outside our apartment years ago. A cop was speeding up a one way street, lights and sirens full on and blew the red light without slowing. This was in a dense urban area with little visibility around corners. He collided with the poor guys driving the cross street on the green light. They had been drinking and were arrested for DWI and reckless driving, failing to yield to an officer etc etc etc. The fact is, though, the cop blew the light without even slowing. No one could have avoided that accident, sober or not. They got screwed.
The point is, just because someone has been drinking and is involved in an accident doesn't mean their drinking was the cause of the accident. Correlation is not causation.
Note that I'm not advocating drinking and driving. I'm merely advocating sane rational approaches to the problem.
As a bar owner, let me tell you this is a bad idea. We already come under serious scrutiny and those of us that do a *good* job are still subject to random crap that's not our fault.
Here's the scenario. Patron has been drinking elsewhere, comes in to our bar and doesn't actually drink anything, doesn't turn over keys and leaves. (This actually happens a lot). Then gets pulled for DWI. Who gets blamed? Me. Sure, I may be able to sort it out eventually, but I'll essentially have to *prove* that he didn't drink in my bar or that we didn't turn over the keys improperly etc.
If you really want to stop drunk driving, improve mass transit and cab service and pull someone's license for 5 years the very first time they get popped (and convicted!) of DWI. Make sure the rules about what constitutes DWI have some relation to whether the person is actually impaired instead of an arbitrarily low BAC number.
It's a matter of allocating resources and priorities. The reality is that there is no way to catch all drunk drivers. It's a fruitless effort.
The best solutions are to continue the public awareness campaigns, and use extremely heavy punishments for offenders as deterent. I'm all for revoking licenses on a first offense etc.
But the laws about what constitutes DWI needs to be changed. The reality is that alcohol affects us all differently. I suspect many people aren't even remotely affected at 0.08 BAC. Some people function just fine at levels significantly higher than that. (I am not qualified to make the previous statements, they're just my opinion) Currently, it's being used as a bludgeon to keep people in line.
Although they can be arbitrarily "failed" by unscrupulous officers, a roadside sobriety test (head back, touch your nose, etc) is, in my opinion, a better method of determining whether someone is impaired or not. It doesn't really matter what someone's BAC is, if they still have control of their faculties, can observe and react properly, then they aren't impaired. Having said that, it's pretty hard to come up with a good comprehensive roadside sobriety test -- I sure can't recite the alphabet backwards with any skill at all whether sober or not, but I can walk a line while sleeping...
I had a lengthy conversation with a MADD representative one day. She was calling to solicit contributions. I spent probably twenty minutes with her debating their position on alcohol in general and their "mission creep".
:)
She was essentially irrational about it. I pointed out that possession and consumption of alcohol was (generally) not illegal. She went off on a tangent about how drugs and alcohol kill children. I pointed out that she was calling as a representative of MADD and was, in theory, attempting to prevent drunk driving, not drinking in general. The conversation quickly meandered back over to a general anti-alcohol rant.
Eventually I told her that I had no respect for an organization that claims to fight drunk driving, a laudable effort, but is actually a bunch of teetotalling prohibitionists. They've never called back.
Where's the bandaid?
I don't know about your world, but in my world, we don't measure energy in dollars.
And, production costs always come down as scale goes up. I'm not advocating for or against this stuff, just pointing out the obvious.
And where does the carbon in ethanol come from? If it's ethanol made from corn or other plants, then it comes from... the atmosphere... carbon-neutral.
This cyano-bacteria... I don't know, but probably from the atmosphere as well.
So yes, he'd likely get his 455. Though I prefer this.
I hate to point this out, but if you're standing in a pot-hole, you are lower than you'd be standing on the road around it. While it's true you only have to shift your weight to the foot outside the pothole, unless you plan to spend the rest of the day walking with your knees bent, you're going to have to raise that weight at some point. I suppose you could defer that weight raising until you find a downward slope and allow your legs to transition down while your body stays at the same level, but that's really only good for physical comedy bits...
All I can say, entirely anecdotally, about the USPS, is that it rocks. I get (sometimes) less than 24 hour delivery times in my metro area for 41 cents and I never have to leave my basement. That's just fantastic!
And to be more specific, they are all different ways of shoving TV, and thus advertising, at you. Excepting the Robot, which is for remote-controlling your TV... after consideration, the only one that's not about somehow getting TV to you is the Face Bank. I'm pretty sure my kids would like the face bank, but would be disappointed that it didn't also provide TV.
Is this the limit of cool gadgetry now, more ways to show you TV (typically on absurdly small screens)? I just don't get it.
Oh, and get off my lawn!
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=502036&cid=22887278
which includes the relevant quote It's Freedom that counts folks[...] and a response to it:
..."freedom" [is] nice and everything, but without needed features or functions, you don't have jack. which I take to being a backwards way of implying that freedom somehow limits the availability of features and functions. This is of course absurd, I don't know maybe I'm misunderstanding the poster.My original idea (long lost in this thread already, and poorly articulated originally) was that I agreed that without needed features and functions, you don't have jack. But with freedom (as in software freedom, just to be clear) a lack of f&f is easily remedied. Further, once those f&f are realized, anything more is mere fluff or glitz and really unnecessary. I don't disagree that it's nice, but wholly unnecessary. Many people would trade freedom for the aesthetic niceties, and I just don't get that.
I know that not everyone finds a need for greater freedom and that's fine, for them. For me, sure I don't need the elevator source code to operate the elevator. But when the elevator is broken, I want the source code so I can fix it. Or when the elevator doesn't function in some way I want (like sliding down the hall to my front door) then I want to be able to add that feature. To expand on that, when talking about software freedom and proprietary software, I disagree that the freedom level need to be only minimal. I agree that for the vast majority of people it has no practical impact, but that doesn't change the fact that proprietary software can be an albatross. As the user of that software, one is forced to: live with the broken software working around it as best they can; beg and plead for features to be added or changed to suit them with little hope of recourse; hope for continued support after something is EOL'd etc. With greatly increasing numbers of computer users who don't have a clue how to code, it becomes even more important for free software to be available so that those users can turn to others besides the original authors to implement features they want or need.
Anecdote warning: my wife has more than once asked me to implement something she wants in software. She couldn't code her way out of a paper bag, and doesn't care to learn. But she thinks its really cool that I, or someone, anyone who can code, could make things work for her just the way she wants. That's what software freedom gives us. So this freedom that seems to only really matter to a very small set of hippie coders really does have broader implications, at least for those who know and understand it.
dang. I can feel my beard growing as I type this...
Umm..../me reads back your post
I actually agree with a lot of what you've said, though this has drifted considerably from my original, horribly articulated thought. Suffice it to say that I think pink hammers are cool. You are right, there is more baggage (for me and many others) in these tools called computers. But I think it's important to keep a certain perspective and every once in a while remind ourselves that they are just tools for a particular job. Sometimes that job is fun stuff and aesthetics are certainly important then, but other times certain aesthetic niceties are intrusive, distracting and detract from real productivity (I'm thinking of gnome putting new terminals right on top of the currently focused one -- downright stupid; or silly compiz wobbly window frames -- fun, but not productive).
But freedom as a feature is the only feature that allows all the other features too (except non-freedom, if that's a feature, maybe it's a bug? ;-P).
;-)
I have no doubts that my sensibilities do not extend to the general populace. But I view a computer as a tool and nothing more. A fun tool, but a tool.
Once you get the features and functions you *need* then the rest is crap. period. that is, of course, just my opinion.
To imply, as I think GGP did, that freedom somehow prevents one from having needed features and functions is absurd. The implication is that freedom somehow precludes featureful functionally complete software. That's so beyond absurd I don't know where to start.
As far as glitz goes, I guess some people feel a need for things to be pretty in order for them to be able to use it. If that's what it really takes, more power to them, I guess. But I don't see many people complaining that their hammer is not particularly attractive. meh.
I guess it's obvious that I'm reading "Lies my teacher told me" at the moment.
This is interesting and thanks for it!
But what is the advantage to learning how to fix nitrogen if there is already sufficient amounts around? Clearly, the amount that is fix(ated?) by lightning (and other non-biological processes??) is not sufficient to to support the kinds of nitrogen level needed for serious eukaryotic developement. At least that's how I read it... reiterating that I'm not a biologist, just curious.
And it's not clear to me at all that only nitrogen fixing bacteria thrived when the molybdenum levels were low. It seems to me like maybe the availability of molybdenum spurred a development of nitrogen fixers as it aided their process. So maybe it was mostly nitrogen fixers around, but they weren't doing very well because of a lack of molybdenum? I don't know.
It's all pretty dang cool though!