3. Mention that penalties for pirating software are more expensive than buying it in the first place.
4. Install Open Office instead, see if people notice.
5. Threaten to inform Microsoft/BSA.
6. Draft your letter to the company owners, but instead talk about how 'Open Office saves money' without mentioning your PHB's stupid plan to pirate Windows.
7. Go over your bosses's head and tell the owners what he's up to.
I'm sure other people will give you options as well. You obviously have principles, don't let your work overrule them.
How is this insensitive clod modded up?
on
Censoring a Number
·
· Score: 1
When expressing something as a factor of prime numbers, intelligent people use the p^n notation. Instead of saying that 64=2*2*2*2*2*2, you say 64=2^6. Besides, the parent's point is that censoring numbers is stupid- and, by extension, people who advocate censoring numbers are stupid.
Most of the world doesn't have software patents. Thus, AT&T can only sue you for violating their patent if they are in a country that respect software patents in the first place.
Because if the souless, for profit corporations offer a better product for a lower price than the nice, happy non-profit organizations, that means the corporations are doing more to help the public good than the charities are. How could that not be an important question? Non-profits that don't provide better services than corporations are a waste of time and money.
I've heard that companies plan, design, and release new processors based on Moore's Law. In other words, if it doesn't keep up with Moore's Law it's discarded, if it goes faster than Moore's Law its release is delayed (giving them more time to fine-tune it and get their manufacturing lines ready). If this is the case, then it could be hindering developement in new ways of processing (that have a payoff that takes more than 3 years to develop) and we might even be able to beat Moore's Law rather than follow it. Of course, Moore's Law is awesome enough as it is, I don't feel the need to complain about how it takes two whole years to double the effectiveness of my hardware.
If you can't find the thing that you want (at reasonable prices), you settle for the next best thing. If I couldn't get a Wii I would seriously consider an Xbox360. It's not like a Wii is the only console with fun games on it.
And I'm glad to see that Vlad Fedorov has joined him, so that they can continue their eternal flamewar from Wikipedia onto/.. Locked in eternal struggle, they shall continue until the end of all things.
Who needs shades of grey? With Thailand, you can put pimps pushing 8-year olds, oppressive military dictatorships, and anti-open source people together! Finally, something to hate for everyone!
From what I understand, the smartest animals (That is, an intelligent, trained-for-years chimp/dolphin/parrot instead of your average chimp/dolphin/parrot) are on par with an average 2-year old human in terms of intelligence. This means that you can't give the animals any rights that you couldn't give a two-year old. (i.e. you can't kill or torture them, but they can't enter contracts or be considered fully responsible for their actions).
Oh, and I am aware this article is potentially an April Fool's joke. It's still something interesting to discuss.
I'm guessing you grew up in the South- I don't think anyone north of the Mason-Dixie line would call U.S. soldiers stationed at Fort Sumter 'foreigners'. The Civil War was a big mess, and saying that it was fought over the State's right to seperate doesn't really give any clue as to why the states wanted to seperate. Saying that it was fought over slavery is at least as accurate- it's technically correct, but only gives part of the picture. The Civil War was started by a slaveholding south that felt increasingly alienated from its neighbors in the north- especially since the North was now powerful enough to elect a president that wasn't even on most of the Southern ballots. The South realized that if it stayed in the Union its way of life would slowly disapear- the North would make it hard (if not impossible) for slavery to expand, and without that expansion the South felt Slavery would surely die, and with it, their way of life. The South separated to protect their own interests, especially their interests with regards to slavery.
Saying the Civil War was fought over 'the states' rights to separate' is like saying that WWI was fought over the Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. The trigger for a war is rarely the cause of a war- it's just the straw that pushes the countries over the edge, or gives them the excuse they need to fight.
The problem, of course, is that when you have millions of people fighting over something, some of them are fighting for different reasons. It's very hard for people to grasp, but there it is. Also, if I remember my history right, South Carolina seceded after Lincon was elected, but before he was president (and it looks like Wikipedia also disagrees with you).
As near as I can tell (and it looks like I know more about it than you) the Civil War was fought because the South wanted to preserve the rights of its states and it way of life (read: slavery) and the North wanted a whole country, not just part of it. The North wasn't fighting to end slavery, it was fighting to maintain a unified, powerful country (but that doesn't sound nearly as heroic). Partway through the war, though, they realized that by freeing slaves they could gain additional troops and destroy southern morale. (Lincoln was also anti-slavery, but he didn't want to alienate the South completely at first).
Anyway, my point is that your son is at least as informed about the issue as you are. Wikipedia has some good article about it, and there should be plenty of books at your local library.
I have some (very small) amount sympathy for the students, but for the most part I see TurnitIn.com as providing a useful service, and would be annoyed if it was crushed by copyright law. They only provide the student's works to a customer of TurnitIn if there is a match, so it's not like the student's work is going to be abused. In fact, unless they were planning on selling their work to other students, they shouldn't be harmed by TurnitIn at all.
I am annoyed by how everyone in the U.S. seems to think that if they wrote it, no one else should be able to read it, listen to it, discuss it, or reference it without giving them a share of the money.
P.S. The 'do not archive' student has a stronger case, and TurnitIn should remove her paper from their database.
Life isn't like 24- cops don't torture random people until they get confessions out of them. Furthermore, they usually don't engage in SWAT-style raids of criminals unless they are suspected of something serious- rape, murder, drug dealing, etc. You are right that the GP is stupid, but your explanation is poor and sensationalist (i.e. stupid in a different way).
What the GP doesn't seem to get is that raiding someone's home because they stole some mp3s is like raiding someone's home because they swiped some candybars from the drug store. It's worse than a waste of everyone's time, it's also a net loss to everyone- the candy is worth far less than the door they just broke getting into the house, and violent entry is always risky to the police officers and the poor sap they are busting. The penalties for downloading mp3's should be even lower than the penalties for stealing candy, since I'm doing less harm. A minor fine (such as paying off the RIAA) is reasonable, being tossed in jail is not.
Or perhaps the GP does realize this, and is using sarcasm to make a point, or is trolling for idiots. If so, we both fell for it.
Like most people, I sometimes go over the speed limit while driving to work (sometimes by as much as 10 miles per hour!) I'm sure that if the Federal Government started arresting people for speeding, most people (myself included) would speed a lot less.
Of course, any elected official trying to 'crack down on speeding' by tossing speeders in jail wouldn't last long in office. When you give ridiculous punishments for minor offenses, you just breed contempt for the law (not to mention annoy everyone but special interest groups).
I would like to point out that:
1. Yahoo! email is the largest email provider on the web.
2. Yahoo! email has been around since 1997, Gmail has been open since 2007 (though the Beta started in 2004). This means that people have been using Yahoo! longer than you've been trolling on slashdot.
I'm not going to claim that it's the best email ever, just that it doesn't deserve Gmail fanboys snickering at people who use it. It's worked for me for 7 years now, which is a whole lot longer than I've been trolling on/.
It doesn't include moving to electric transportation exactly- it's just an extrapolation of our current electricity using trends. If we start using far more electricity than the model suggests (perhaps by using electric flying cars) then it would last a much smaller time, say 50 years. Then we would need to spend a couple of months each year digging up more uranium.
A console generation becomes 'current gen' once:
1. It makes up the majority of the install base or
2. People are talking about the 'next gen', turning the former 'next gen' into the 'current gen'.
1. Yes, it is silly- but it's also very hard to meet initial demand for a game console. Very few consoles don't sell out at launch.
2. Actually, if the competition stays sold out, that is actually quite bad for Sony- it means that customers are buying every unit the competition makes. Remember, a console that doesn't sell still cost Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo money to produce, so it's a net loss for them.
Gold and silver have bounced up and down relative to the dollar. Diamonds (i'm betting) will even go down in price with time since they can be synthesized (unlike gold which cannot). As the synthesis techinques get better I expect Diamonds (and other precious stones) to get cheaper and cheaper. Saying that commodities 'always go up' is like saying 'stocks always go up'.
With a name like 'spammeister' I'm sure you're an honest, reliable gentleman. However, I'm not stupid enough to post my password on a public forum! Just email me your physical address at kill.all.spammers@gmail.com (or post it here) and I'll send you my password via 'snail mail'. It will come in a special, unmarked package with no return address, so make sure that you open it when you get it!
These clips may or may not fall under 'Fair use' depending on the laws of the country that distributed the games. Generally you can take clips from other shows for the purposes of discussing/ criticizing/ commenting on them, so I would agree with that point- but these clips on YouTube don't have discussion or comments- they are just a rip from another show. Fair Use doesn't typically cover that in the U.S.
Of the 20 most viewed clips, 10 are non- U.S. soccer games (may or may not be infringing, depending on copyright law and permissions in home country) 1 is a U.S. Basketball game (probably infringing) 1 is a Comedy Central clip (infringing) 3 are from NBC, 3 are user-created, and 2 seem like Japanese newscasts. So of the top 20, we have 2 infringing, 12 maybe infringing, and 6 legal. In the top 10, though, we have 1 infringing, the 6 legal, and 3 probables (the japanese newscasts and one sports clip).
So based on this totally non-statistically sound survey, it seems like YouTube gets a third to a half of its traffic from clearly legitimate content, and the rest of it is users ripping off someone else's clips/movies without consent (but might still be legal, depending on the country). Also, only 10% of the content seems to comes from Viacom (the two obvious infringements) so YouTube doesn't seem to depend on Viacom specifically.
Arthur C. Clarke wrote that 'any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'. Thus, there can be no easy classification between 'sci-fi' and 'fantasy'- especailly since many novels/games/movies intentionally straddle that line by having both technology and magic. For instance, Star Wars has technology, but also has 'magic' in the form of Jedi. Star Trek isn't any better, as it has telepaths, gods, etc. Even classic works like 'Dune' have prescience and Mentats, which are little better than Jedi are.
Also, having a technobabble explaination for how spaceships go faster than light, how telepathy works, or how force fields work is barely better than saying 'a wizard did it'.
There is no real difference between the two, both of them imagine a world that is different than our own, and the good ones tell a interesting, compelling story regarding how people act in that world (with implications to our own world). And don't think that something being 'Sci-fi' makes it any better fantasy- you can tell a great story (or a lame one) in either medium.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Threaten to quit if they don't comply.
2. Quit.
3. Mention that penalties for pirating software are more expensive than buying it in the first place.
4. Install Open Office instead, see if people notice.
5. Threaten to inform Microsoft/BSA.
6. Draft your letter to the company owners, but instead talk about how 'Open Office saves money' without mentioning your PHB's stupid plan to pirate Windows.
7. Go over your bosses's head and tell the owners what he's up to.
I'm sure other people will give you options as well. You obviously have principles, don't let your work overrule them.
When expressing something as a factor of prime numbers, intelligent people use the p^n notation. Instead of saying that 64=2*2*2*2*2*2, you say 64=2^6. Besides, the parent's point is that censoring numbers is stupid- and, by extension, people who advocate censoring numbers are stupid.
Most of the world doesn't have software patents. Thus, AT&T can only sue you for violating their patent if they are in a country that respect software patents in the first place.
Because if the souless, for profit corporations offer a better product for a lower price than the nice, happy non-profit organizations, that means the corporations are doing more to help the public good than the charities are. How could that not be an important question? Non-profits that don't provide better services than corporations are a waste of time and money.
I've heard that companies plan, design, and release new processors based on Moore's Law. In other words, if it doesn't keep up with Moore's Law it's discarded, if it goes faster than Moore's Law its release is delayed (giving them more time to fine-tune it and get their manufacturing lines ready). If this is the case, then it could be hindering developement in new ways of processing (that have a payoff that takes more than 3 years to develop) and we might even be able to beat Moore's Law rather than follow it. Of course, Moore's Law is awesome enough as it is, I don't feel the need to complain about how it takes two whole years to double the effectiveness of my hardware.
If you can't find the thing that you want (at reasonable prices), you settle for the next best thing. If I couldn't get a Wii I would seriously consider an Xbox360. It's not like a Wii is the only console with fun games on it.
And I'm glad to see that Vlad Fedorov has joined him, so that they can continue their eternal flamewar from Wikipedia onto /.. Locked in eternal struggle, they shall continue until the end of all things.
Who needs shades of grey? With Thailand, you can put pimps pushing 8-year olds, oppressive military dictatorships, and anti-open source people together! Finally, something to hate for everyone!
From what I understand, the smartest animals (That is, an intelligent, trained-for-years chimp/dolphin/parrot instead of your average chimp/dolphin/parrot) are on par with an average 2-year old human in terms of intelligence. This means that you can't give the animals any rights that you couldn't give a two-year old. (i.e. you can't kill or torture them, but they can't enter contracts or be considered fully responsible for their actions).
Oh, and I am aware this article is potentially an April Fool's joke. It's still something interesting to discuss.
I'm guessing you grew up in the South- I don't think anyone north of the Mason-Dixie line would call U.S. soldiers stationed at Fort Sumter 'foreigners'. The Civil War was a big mess, and saying that it was fought over the State's right to seperate doesn't really give any clue as to why the states wanted to seperate. Saying that it was fought over slavery is at least as accurate- it's technically correct, but only gives part of the picture. The Civil War was started by a slaveholding south that felt increasingly alienated from its neighbors in the north- especially since the North was now powerful enough to elect a president that wasn't even on most of the Southern ballots. The South realized that if it stayed in the Union its way of life would slowly disapear- the North would make it hard (if not impossible) for slavery to expand, and without that expansion the South felt Slavery would surely die, and with it, their way of life. The South separated to protect their own interests, especially their interests with regards to slavery.
Saying the Civil War was fought over 'the states' rights to separate' is like saying that WWI was fought over the Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. The trigger for a war is rarely the cause of a war- it's just the straw that pushes the countries over the edge, or gives them the excuse they need to fight.
The problem, of course, is that when you have millions of people fighting over something, some of them are fighting for different reasons. It's very hard for people to grasp, but there it is. Also, if I remember my history right, South Carolina seceded after Lincon was elected, but before he was president (and it looks like Wikipedia also disagrees with you).
As near as I can tell (and it looks like I know more about it than you) the Civil War was fought because the South wanted to preserve the rights of its states and it way of life (read: slavery) and the North wanted a whole country, not just part of it. The North wasn't fighting to end slavery, it was fighting to maintain a unified, powerful country (but that doesn't sound nearly as heroic). Partway through the war, though, they realized that by freeing slaves they could gain additional troops and destroy southern morale. (Lincoln was also anti-slavery, but he didn't want to alienate the South completely at first).
Anyway, my point is that your son is at least as informed about the issue as you are. Wikipedia has some good article about it, and there should be plenty of books at your local library.
I have some (very small) amount sympathy for the students, but for the most part I see TurnitIn.com as providing a useful service, and would be annoyed if it was crushed by copyright law. They only provide the student's works to a customer of TurnitIn if there is a match, so it's not like the student's work is going to be abused. In fact, unless they were planning on selling their work to other students, they shouldn't be harmed by TurnitIn at all.
I am annoyed by how everyone in the U.S. seems to think that if they wrote it, no one else should be able to read it, listen to it, discuss it, or reference it without giving them a share of the money.
P.S. The 'do not archive' student has a stronger case, and TurnitIn should remove her paper from their database.
Life isn't like 24- cops don't torture random people until they get confessions out of them. Furthermore, they usually don't engage in SWAT-style raids of criminals unless they are suspected of something serious- rape, murder, drug dealing, etc. You are right that the GP is stupid, but your explanation is poor and sensationalist (i.e. stupid in a different way).
What the GP doesn't seem to get is that raiding someone's home because they stole some mp3s is like raiding someone's home because they swiped some candybars from the drug store. It's worse than a waste of everyone's time, it's also a net loss to everyone- the candy is worth far less than the door they just broke getting into the house, and violent entry is always risky to the police officers and the poor sap they are busting. The penalties for downloading mp3's should be even lower than the penalties for stealing candy, since I'm doing less harm. A minor fine (such as paying off the RIAA) is reasonable, being tossed in jail is not.
Or perhaps the GP does realize this, and is using sarcasm to make a point, or is trolling for idiots. If so, we both fell for it.
Like most people, I sometimes go over the speed limit while driving to work (sometimes by as much as 10 miles per hour!) I'm sure that if the Federal Government started arresting people for speeding, most people (myself included) would speed a lot less.
Of course, any elected official trying to 'crack down on speeding' by tossing speeders in jail wouldn't last long in office. When you give ridiculous punishments for minor offenses, you just breed contempt for the law (not to mention annoy everyone but special interest groups).
I would like to point out that: /.
1. Yahoo! email is the largest email provider on the web.
2. Yahoo! email has been around since 1997, Gmail has been open since 2007 (though the Beta started in 2004). This means that people have been using Yahoo! longer than you've been trolling on slashdot.
I'm not going to claim that it's the best email ever, just that it doesn't deserve Gmail fanboys snickering at people who use it. It's worked for me for 7 years now, which is a whole lot longer than I've been trolling on
It doesn't include moving to electric transportation exactly- it's just an extrapolation of our current electricity using trends. If we start using far more electricity than the model suggests (perhaps by using electric flying cars) then it would last a much smaller time, say 50 years. Then we would need to spend a couple of months each year digging up more uranium.
A console generation becomes 'current gen' once:
1. It makes up the majority of the install base or
2. People are talking about the 'next gen', turning the former 'next gen' into the 'current gen'.
1. Yes, it is silly- but it's also very hard to meet initial demand for a game console. Very few consoles don't sell out at launch.
2. Actually, if the competition stays sold out, that is actually quite bad for Sony- it means that customers are buying every unit the competition makes. Remember, a console that doesn't sell still cost Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo money to produce, so it's a net loss for them.
I don't want to undercut Sony too much here- after all, they did sell an impressive number of consoles- but I feel the need to point out that:
1. They set the record because all the competition sold out.
2. They are in the market late; they have a long way to go to reach the Wii or XBox numbers.
Sony is getting what it needs to do well, though. If Sony wasn't able to move over 150,000 at launch I would have said they were screwed.
Gold and silver have bounced up and down relative to the dollar. Diamonds (i'm betting) will even go down in price with time since they can be synthesized (unlike gold which cannot). As the synthesis techinques get better I expect Diamonds (and other precious stones) to get cheaper and cheaper. Saying that commodities 'always go up' is like saying 'stocks always go up'.
With a name like 'spammeister' I'm sure you're an honest, reliable gentleman. However, I'm not stupid enough to post my password on a public forum! Just email me your physical address at kill.all.spammers@gmail.com (or post it here) and I'll send you my password via 'snail mail'. It will come in a special, unmarked package with no return address, so make sure that you open it when you get it!
These clips may or may not fall under 'Fair use' depending on the laws of the country that distributed the games. Generally you can take clips from other shows for the purposes of discussing/ criticizing/ commenting on them, so I would agree with that point- but these clips on YouTube don't have discussion or comments- they are just a rip from another show. Fair Use doesn't typically cover that in the U.S.
Of the 20 most viewed clips, 10 are non- U.S. soccer games (may or may not be infringing, depending on copyright law and permissions in home country) 1 is a U.S. Basketball game (probably infringing) 1 is a Comedy Central clip (infringing) 3 are from NBC, 3 are user-created, and 2 seem like Japanese newscasts. So of the top 20, we have 2 infringing, 12 maybe infringing, and 6 legal. In the top 10, though, we have 1 infringing, the 6 legal, and 3 probables (the japanese newscasts and one sports clip).
So based on this totally non-statistically sound survey, it seems like YouTube gets a third to a half of its traffic from clearly legitimate content, and the rest of it is users ripping off someone else's clips/movies without consent (but might still be legal, depending on the country). Also, only 10% of the content seems to comes from Viacom (the two obvious infringements) so YouTube doesn't seem to depend on Viacom specifically.
It comes from a Calvin & Hobbes cartoon.
Arthur C. Clarke wrote that 'any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'. Thus, there can be no easy classification between 'sci-fi' and 'fantasy'- especailly since many novels/games/movies intentionally straddle that line by having both technology and magic. For instance, Star Wars has technology, but also has 'magic' in the form of Jedi. Star Trek isn't any better, as it has telepaths, gods, etc. Even classic works like 'Dune' have prescience and Mentats, which are little better than Jedi are.
Also, having a technobabble explaination for how spaceships go faster than light, how telepathy works, or how force fields work is barely better than saying 'a wizard did it'.
There is no real difference between the two, both of them imagine a world that is different than our own, and the good ones tell a interesting, compelling story regarding how people act in that world (with implications to our own world). And don't think that something being 'Sci-fi' makes it any better fantasy- you can tell a great story (or a lame one) in either medium.