I've yet to hear any rap that I thought was listenable either, but Blind Guardian does metal music featuring Tolkien. I first ran across them as a recommendation of what to listen to while playing Angband.
In fact they'd be useless, because when you connect to their database the cd-keys you generated wouldn't be there. Get it? They don't check if the key is ok, they check if they made the key.
Yeah, I'll bet that would last around two seconds. Until some enterprising worm author writes a worm that starts spreading around/shifting authorization numbers from system to system, and Microsoft is forced to either shaft a large number of their customers or scrap the authorization scheme.
Seriously, I find that the release quality of pirated software is, in a surprising number of ways, depressingly higher quality than those from the original software company.
For example, take the standard conventions of putting software description in a standard location in a standard format, the (not completely standardized, but pretty close) practice of placing patches at a standard location on the CD, the practice of distributing software in standardized chunk sizes to provide for more recoverable transfers.
The pirates, competitive though they may be, do a better job of cooperating with each other and putting out "industry" conventions and sticking with them than all but a few software companies do. I still don't believe that the Windows world's equivalent to RPM is the godawful InstallShield -- argh.
Oh, and when there *is* a packaging mistake, the updates are generally quite prompt.
Applying copy-protection-disabling patches to a piece of software distributed by the large pirate groups is a more standardized and user-comfortable process than wading through the jungle of installers that the software companies out there put out.
Oh, and there are standardized (free) places that list and provide for download the latest cracks for various software, like gamecopyworld. While Linux has had Freshmeat (and a slew of advanced automated methods to check for updates and update software), and MacOS has had VersionTracker, Windows has had essentially nothing by way of centralized update information. Yet the pirates managed to pull it off.
Oh, and I've even seen stabs at PKI systems for ensuring integrity of distributed pirate software. While the Linux world enjoys this, the Windows world (aside from a few Microsoft-centralized systems limited to very small components of the Windows system) hasn't even seen a peep of interest from commercial vendors in providing this level of service.
Unfortunately most legal systems (American included) do not allow companies to "boobytrap" products.
Why is this unfortunate? I have no interest in living in a society with what amounts to a privatized judicial and law enforcement system.
I suspect that most of you don't either.
For example, suppose a car manufacturer produced cars that exploded when consistently driven above the speed limit. Well, that may well be justifiably smacking a criminal, but I don't really have any interest in letting private companies dispense whatever "justice" they feel like taking part in.
What if spyware had an EULA saying that you couldn't remove it, and it took malicious action if you tried to do so?
It seems nobody ever talks about the Northbridge, which, IMHO, will over-take the CPU, within a year, as the hottest component in a computer. If you take a year-old system, and put all the components (CPU/RAM) in a brand-new motherboard, you'll see the power consumption go up 10-20 watts.
A P4 can consume up to about 100 watts of power, which is significantly more than 10-20 watts.
You're just an amateur. Try multiplying your fees by a couple orders of magnitude, provide the same service, and then you can play with the real boys like these "Always On" people.
These companies are providing what is essentially a public service, Internet access. They should not interfere with the content/data itself. Period.
Unless it is more profitable to do so.
For example, cell providers could simply provide a data service instead of application service. $N for x MB of data (and maybe $M for y MB of real-time data), and the rest is up to you. That would produce a market in which many companies are trying to figure out how to build and sell the applications that consume the least amount of data. Instead, though, cell providers would prefer to be able to price discriminate based on application usage. So instead of being a data transport service, they retain their vertical monpoly.
I mean, if I could get away with it, I'd do it too. It's profitable.
Christianity does not achieve mass appeal by being rationally constructed. It does well because it exploits *irrationalities* in the psyche -- insecurity about what might happen in life can be alleviated by remembering that there's a big friendly dad up in the sky watching us, and that as long as we are a Nice Person, nothing that goes wrong really matters.
Now the burden becomes explaining why believing in God is a good idea (after all, what if "God" is really an evil being trying to get you to worship him, and following the Bible is *exactly* the wrong thing to do)? That story has as much to support it as the one you're going by. Sure, it's a little more complex, but if you were worried about Occam's Razor, you wouldn't have brought God into things at all, right?
Some people like to claim that it was created by Kablooie the Space Lizard, because they aren't too clear on the ideas behind evolution and they really like feeling like the favored flock of Kablooie.
I've always wondered why we normally hold people to a high standard of logical thought (or we may not -- but if they deviate from it and it causes problems, it's their fault) -- *except* when religion enters the picture, at which point people can run around waving theories that have the plausibility of The Great Kablooie Space Lizard causing eclipses, and it's okay and everyone else needs to carefully avoid offending their feelings by avoiding pointing out the the Book of Kablooie is self-contradictory, that the Kablooieists have pretty consistently been historically demonstrated wrong when they deviate from science, and that the entire story of Kablooie is just plain ridiculous.
That frusterates me. It's one of the few stumbling blocks in the way of simply expecting people to always advance human knowledge -- "Unless it contradicts the teachings of Kablooie!"
No. I will call out Microsoft in a moment when they are up to nasty tricks, but these two instances are not MS's fault.
"Lindows" postdated "Windows" by quite a bit, and while I think that it was a rather clever and intuitive pun (a Linux distribution that looks like Windows), it's also a no-brainer that it's asking for a trademark infringement suit -- two OSes from different companies where the name differs by a single character...
And, frankly, Windows Vista will probably get more marketing dollars than MontaVista will. Which means that MontaVista is more likely to be the benificiary of any confusion -- in any event, the two are different enough products that I suspect people purchasing one would figure it out ahead of time.
So I can't really blame Microsoft in either case.
(Unless they expected lots of Win product vendors to come out with names like "fooVista" and "barVista" -- that might actually be to go after MontaVista, but I kind of doubt it.)
He's not joking, dude. The electric wheelchair people are scary -- first, they work hard to scam health insurers/Medicare to get them to buy unnecessary electric wheelchairs, and once people have one for a short period of time, they *have* to continue using it, and buying replacement parts from the vendor.
Many things don't need to be written in.. they are legal fictions that are perpetuated by the whole "literal" reading of the Constitution..At one point the supreme court tried to say slaves weren't people [and could NEVER BE] because the Constitution only counted 2/5 as "citizens". It's crazy literal readings like that that got us in the mess we're in!!! Things like segregation are directly against the constution, but because of "literal" reading we can't fix them with common sense. Segregation directly violated the state's prohibition of "royalty" but we can't extend that to title of "ignobility" [aka scarlet letters] when that's obviously the meaning.
I think you may be doing what you are condemning others for.
Slavery was most certainly not unconstitutional in the intent of the Founding Fathers. George Washington kept slaves, Thomas Jefferson kept slaves, James Madison kept slaves.
Except for the noise from all the libertarians on Slashdot, who to a man fervently believe that if we just eliminate all government oversight, the market will magically make everything better.
Whether you or I like it or not, our government needs money to operate, and the sale of intellectual property is one of our country's biggest industries.
That doesn't translate to the sale of entertainment IP, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, what we need is some nerdternative rock, or maybe some nerd age music.
I've yet to hear any rap that I thought was listenable either, but Blind Guardian does metal music featuring Tolkien. I first ran across them as a recommendation of what to listen to while playing Angband.
In fact they'd be useless, because when you connect to their database the cd-keys you generated wouldn't be there. Get it? They don't check if the key is ok, they check if they made the key.
Yeah, I'll bet that would last around two seconds. Until some enterprising worm author writes a worm that starts spreading around/shifting authorization numbers from system to system, and Microsoft is forced to either shaft a large number of their customers or scrap the authorization scheme.
Seriously, I find that the release quality of pirated software is, in a surprising number of ways, depressingly higher quality than those from the original software company.
For example, take the standard conventions of putting software description in a standard location in a standard format, the (not completely standardized, but pretty close) practice of placing patches at a standard location on the CD, the practice of distributing software in standardized chunk sizes to provide for more recoverable transfers.
The pirates, competitive though they may be, do a better job of cooperating with each other and putting out "industry" conventions and sticking with them than all but a few software companies do. I still don't believe that the Windows world's equivalent to RPM is the godawful InstallShield -- argh.
Oh, and when there *is* a packaging mistake, the updates are generally quite prompt.
Applying copy-protection-disabling patches to a piece of software distributed by the large pirate groups is a more standardized and user-comfortable process than wading through the jungle of installers that the software companies out there put out.
Oh, and there are standardized (free) places that list and provide for download the latest cracks for various software, like gamecopyworld. While Linux has had Freshmeat (and a slew of advanced automated methods to check for updates and update software), and MacOS has had VersionTracker, Windows has had essentially nothing by way of centralized update information. Yet the pirates managed to pull it off.
Oh, and I've even seen stabs at PKI systems for ensuring integrity of distributed pirate software. While the Linux world enjoys this, the Windows world (aside from a few Microsoft-centralized systems limited to very small components of the Windows system) hasn't even seen a peep of interest from commercial vendors in providing this level of service.
Anything that shoots me in the foot is not mundane.
I write software for a living, but I really don't care one way or the other whether someone shafted Microsoft or not.
Unfortunately most legal systems (American included) do not allow companies to "boobytrap" products.
Why is this unfortunate? I have no interest in living in a society with what amounts to a privatized judicial and law enforcement system.
I suspect that most of you don't either.
For example, suppose a car manufacturer produced cars that exploded when consistently driven above the speed limit. Well, that may well be justifiably smacking a criminal, but I don't really have any interest in letting private companies dispense whatever "justice" they feel like taking part in.
What if spyware had an EULA saying that you couldn't remove it, and it took malicious action if you tried to do so?
the user will be given the oppportunity to purchase a legitimate copy of the software for a discounted price, upon providing proof of purchase (!!)
They should also be given a click-to-install-Linux-instead option.
Yeah, if only we had taken pictures of the terrorists in the *US* before they blew themselves up so that we could...uh...make proper headstones?
It seems nobody ever talks about the Northbridge, which, IMHO, will over-take the CPU, within a year, as the hottest component in a computer. If you take a year-old system, and put all the components (CPU/RAM) in a brand-new motherboard, you'll see the power consumption go up 10-20 watts.
A P4 can consume up to about 100 watts of power, which is significantly more than 10-20 watts.
You're just an amateur. Try multiplying your fees by a couple orders of magnitude, provide the same service, and then you can play with the real boys like these "Always On" people.
[rolls eyes]
These companies are providing what is essentially a public service, Internet access. They should not interfere with the content/data itself. Period.
Unless it is more profitable to do so.
For example, cell providers could simply provide a data service instead of application service. $N for x MB of data (and maybe $M for y MB of real-time data), and the rest is up to you. That would produce a market in which many companies are trying to figure out how to build and sell the applications that consume the least amount of data. Instead, though, cell providers would prefer to be able to price discriminate based on application usage. So instead of being a data transport service, they retain their vertical monpoly.
I mean, if I could get away with it, I'd do it too. It's profitable.
Thank you -- this lines up fairly well with what I've tended to decide on.
Is this personal analysis, or are you aware of sources that analyze the sociology of religion in such a way? I'd certainly like to read them, if so.
Christianity does not achieve mass appeal by being rationally constructed. It does well because it exploits *irrationalities* in the psyche -- insecurity about what might happen in life can be alleviated by remembering that there's a big friendly dad up in the sky watching us, and that as long as we are a Nice Person, nothing that goes wrong really matters.
Okay, we both agree that God is not science.
Now the burden becomes explaining why believing in God is a good idea (after all, what if "God" is really an evil being trying to get you to worship him, and following the Bible is *exactly* the wrong thing to do)? That story has as much to support it as the one you're going by. Sure, it's a little more complex, but if you were worried about Occam's Razor, you wouldn't have brought God into things at all, right?
Morality evolved.
Some people like to claim that it was created by Kablooie the Space Lizard, because they aren't too clear on the ideas behind evolution and they really like feeling like the favored flock of Kablooie.
I've always wondered why we normally hold people to a high standard of logical thought (or we may not -- but if they deviate from it and it causes problems, it's their fault) -- *except* when religion enters the picture, at which point people can run around waving theories that have the plausibility of The Great Kablooie Space Lizard causing eclipses, and it's okay and everyone else needs to carefully avoid offending their feelings by avoiding pointing out the the Book of Kablooie is self-contradictory, that the Kablooieists have pretty consistently been historically demonstrated wrong when they deviate from science, and that the entire story of Kablooie is just plain ridiculous.
That frusterates me. It's one of the few stumbling blocks in the way of simply expecting people to always advance human knowledge -- "Unless it contradicts the teachings of Kablooie!"
No. I will call out Microsoft in a moment when they are up to nasty tricks, but these two instances are not MS's fault.
"Lindows" postdated "Windows" by quite a bit, and while I think that it was a rather clever and intuitive pun (a Linux distribution that looks like Windows), it's also a no-brainer that it's asking for a trademark infringement suit -- two OSes from different companies where the name differs by a single character...
And, frankly, Windows Vista will probably get more marketing dollars than MontaVista will. Which means that MontaVista is more likely to be the benificiary of any confusion -- in any event, the two are different enough products that I suspect people purchasing one would figure it out ahead of time.
So I can't really blame Microsoft in either case.
(Unless they expected lots of Win product vendors to come out with names like "fooVista" and "barVista" -- that might actually be to go after MontaVista, but I kind of doubt it.)
Not being in msi form hinders the corporate adoption of firefox greatly.
I dunno
He's not joking, dude. The electric wheelchair people are scary -- first, they work hard to scam health insurers/Medicare to get them to buy unnecessary electric wheelchairs, and once people have one for a short period of time, they *have* to continue using it, and buying replacement parts from the vendor.
Muscles grow on consisten application of resistance....
Oh, I don't know. I'm guessing that the first time someone gets a cramp, there's going to be an awfully muscle-stressing situation produced.
There's a reason drug dealers use cash and law-abiding people don't.
George Orwell is spinning in his grave.
Many things don't need to be written in.. they are legal fictions that are perpetuated by the whole "literal" reading of the Constitution..At one point the supreme court tried to say slaves weren't people [and could NEVER BE] because the Constitution only counted 2/5 as "citizens". It's crazy literal readings like that that got us in the mess we're in!!! Things like segregation are directly against the constution, but because of "literal" reading we can't fix them with common sense. Segregation directly violated the state's prohibition of "royalty" but we can't extend that to title of "ignobility" [aka scarlet letters] when that's obviously the meaning.
I think you may be doing what you are condemning others for.
Slavery was most certainly not unconstitutional in the intent of the Founding Fathers. George Washington kept slaves, Thomas Jefferson kept slaves, James Madison kept slaves.
That was Bill Clinton.
(Complete and utter silence)
Except for the noise from all the libertarians on Slashdot, who to a man fervently believe that if we just eliminate all government oversight, the market will magically make everything better.
Whether you or I like it or not, our government needs money to operate, and the sale of intellectual property is one of our country's biggest industries.
That doesn't translate to the sale of entertainment IP, though.