Shouldn't the people living near the volcano be the ones to pay for monitoring the volcano? This is somewhat similar to the fact that New Orleans should probably be the one the pay for any measures they take to protect themselves from hurricanes.
Jindal's an idiot, but it doesn't change the fact that people need to assume some responsibility for themselves and their local community instead of always expecting the Federal government to take care of all of their problems. If they can't bother to pay for some detection service why should I bother to pay for it either? And if it's too costly to support locally, they probably shouldn't live there.
Climate Service is at least something that could be said to affect the entire nation and therefore at least be considered as a worthwhile federal program. Anything else probably shouldn't be.
I don't mean to disagree with you, as your point is very true and valid, but I believe that the notion of war and how it should be conducted has changed to the degree that it is completely impossible for the United States to win a war, but not for many of the reasons you state.
In the past, when countries or groups of people would go to war, they generally tended to decimate the loser to the extent that they no longer existed or were essentially enslaved. Look at the extent to which Rome and the Mongols destroyed their enemies. Some of them were completely wiped out. Cities were burned to the ground and no one really gave a damn if civilian casualties were inflicted. In some cases, inflicting heavy civilian casualties was a tactical goal.
Now we're so paralyzed with attempting to make war civilized that it's damned hard to conduct and effective war. Enemy combatants must be treated properly instead of outright enslaved or killed. Civilian casualties must be avoided completely if possible. The most effective ways of killing off the enemy are outright banned.
If the US really wanted to go to war with a country and win the war they could probably wipe another country off the map entirely within a few days. Of course this would involve what essentially amounts to genocide and given that I don't think we should have been in Iraq in the first place I'm glad that we haven't waged war to the extent of our abilities.
I suppose it's fitting that you've been modded funny considering that if anyone does actually go to jail for this it won't be anyone actually in charge or ultimately responsible. Rich people don't go to jail. If they do somehow end up in jail, it's not the jail you or I would end up in under similar charges.
The only real way to hurt these assholes is to completely boycott their company and products and tank their company. Of course that doesn't guarantee that they won't land on their feet, but anything else is just wishful thinking.
I don't want to burst your bubble, because I agree that toll roads generally suck, but if all roads were toll roads there would likely be no gas tax as the government wouldn't be involved in maintaining the roads. I think this would save at least $.50 per gallon depending upon your state. I think it's closer to $.70 in my state, but your mileage may very.
I don't mean to discredit what you say, but could you possibly give a better explanation of what's occurring and how it's related to global warming.
It seems that some times every event is a sure sign that X is occurring, whether or not there's actually any scientific proof behind it or not. It reminds me of whenever something happened it would be attributed to God, the gods, or some other deity supposedly controlling the fate of mankind depending on the time period.
I just don't want things to devolve to that point. I have no reason to doubt what you're saying, but could you provide some links that explain the science behind your comments or provide a more thorough explanation yourself. I don't mean to call you out as my own knowledge of climate science is largely non-existent, but I still tend to take statements without further explanation with a grain of salt.
You can most certainly buy the raid experience if you want to do so. In the previous expansion before our guild stopped raiding we had progressed the the point where the content was trivial for us to complete with a full raid.
We decided that it would be a good idea to start selling the dungeon loot that we largely no longer needed. There were always a few rare pieces or items that regular guild members still wanted that we wouldn't sell, but the majority of the loot was open for purchase. Unless a particular encounter was significantly challenging and a single person could cause the entire raid to wipe, we generally didn't have a problem with people participating in the encounter. There were even a few people who paid simply to be there for the experience and not specifically for some certain piece of loot.
Because we were the only guild on the server that was selling gear we could charge as much as we thought we could. Judging by the amount of demand we received, we were probably under charging despite the fact that we had so much revenue coming in as a guild that we couldn't possibly begin to spend all of it. As a result our guild members were no longer required to grind for gold as we simply financed everything at that point. Any consumables that you might need for a raid were provided by the guild. Repair costs were completely covered by the guild. We eventually reached the point where we decided to give our members large sums of gold to with as they pleased because the guild bank would be unable to hold much more.
There were also some people in our guild who were quite good at PvP. For a reasonable amount of gold they would invite you onto their arena team and attempt to carry you to a certain rating. They had sufficient gear and ability such that they could guarantee you a high enough rating to obtain all of the PvP items. I wasn't involved with this, but I knew someone who would power-level arena teams and he made somewhere around 50k gold from this. The most I recall our guild ever pulling in was around 200k in a single month.
The fact of the matter is that regardless of what kind of experience you want, it's likely that there's someone who's more than willing to provide it assuming you have the gold to pay for that experience. It's my understanding that the game is currently far less difficult in terms of raiding, so there's really no market for selling the loot from dungeons or at least the cost would be so low that it wouldn't be worth the trouble for a majority of guilds.
You are correct that people will take the path of least resistance. At the time I was playing, it was generally considered easiest to get rewards from PvP and the arena system. Regardless of how poorly a person played, they could eventually expect to receive the best PvP weapons. In the latest expansion the tables have apparently turned and raiding is the easiest way to acquire upgrades so people have largely eschewed the arena system in favor of raiding to obtain better items.
At the time we started selling loot, gold was fairly easy to come by even without purchasing it from a gold farmer or spending a large amount of time grinding. Questing from level 60 to 70 provided several thousand gold which would get you close to purchasing an epic flying mount. There were also a plethora of daily quests available which would give you a few hundred gold assuming you completed as many daily quests as you were permitted. Most of these could be done with a group of people, greatly reducing the amount of time required to complete them. It was easily possible for a person to complete all of them in a few hours. Between that and selling any items you obtained or gaining money from tradeskills, it would probably take an average player two weeks to save up enough gold to purchase a piece of loot from our guild. If they spend time farming, it would take them considerably less time to get the gold together. I estimate that in terms of actual play time it would take about 25 hours (roughly 1 day) of time to acquire a pi
Eventually someone has to stand up to bullshit laws. A popular solution is to prevent them from being passed in the first place, but it seems as though it rarely works in the real world considering that politicians generally have little or no knowledge of the things which they seek to legislate.
Short of that, someone has to either get charged with the law and present a compelling argument of why the law is complete shit so that it gets tossed or lobby a congress critter to pass a new law overwriting the old one.
You're absolutely right that if I went to court over it, I would care a whole lot, but from society's point of view it's completely worth it. I suppose I could always get a complete shyster lawyer myself and countersue them for legal costs, emotional damages, etc.
It took a black woman to completely disregard a bullshit law and reap all the consequences associated with breaking that law in order to ignite the spark to fix that law and many of the other similarly crap discriminatory laws. Eventually there's going to be another person like Rosa Parks that gets sick of the shit we have to deal with and won't allow themselves to be bullied by the powers that be. With the shift in the attitudes of people it's only a matter of time before this happens. It's only a question of how long until the pot boils over.
Why bother upgrading to Vista at all. Just wait another two years or so until Windows 7 comes out and either upgrade machines at that time or purchase new machines which will come with Windows 7 installed.
If it would cost a lot to upgrade from XP to 7, then it's time to either switch to Linux or at least start talking about it so that Microsoft will help make the transition available for a more reasonable cost.
Considering that we're at a point where computational power is considered to be sufficient or in excess for normal, non-power users, in two years this should allow the government to purchase some low-end machines that have more than enough power to take care of the work that will probably be done on most of them.
If I've bought the CD I consider it well within my rights to make perfect lossless digital copies of the music so that I can put it on an portable music player or on a hard drive attached to a stereo system.
I might not necessary believe myself entitled to a lossless digital copy if I were to purchase a lossy MP3 digital copy of the song from some online music store.
I really don't care what that law says as I believe it's invalid and my consumer rights supersede what some companies, with enough money to lobby idiotic congress critters, decide my rights should be.
I'd consider it fair use for anyone who has a right to a digital copy of the file, to download that file regardless of who uploads that file to them.
If I've purchased the media on a physical device such as a CD, DVD, etc. or a digital copy of it from some media store that has been licensed to sell the media, I feel as though I have a right to digital copies so that I can make a backup copy in the event that the physical media is damaged an unable to playback or to ensure that the media can be used on different devices because DRM on the file would prevent me doing so otherwise.
There are probably a few finer points to my philosophy that could stand some fleshing out (e.g. does purchasing a DVD movie entitle me to a digital Blu-Ray/HDDVD copy with higher quality?) but it's probably not worth going into.
If we can accept that as fair use, then by extension P2P file sharing should only be illegal in the event that a person isn't entitled to own a digital copy of some work. It's not really much of a reach if you're willing to accept that my rights as a consumer trump any corporations rights to require me to purchase the same media over and over again and prevent me from enjoying in the way I want to do so.
Even though some people are going to abuse P2P systems and obtain material that they haven't rightfully paid for, that shouldn't be a reason to remove a system that works well for responsible users.
If only there were a similar piece of malware in direct competition with this particular trojan such that both would attempt to remove the other and successfully do so.
It is interesting how malware is adapting so that not only is it able to spread more quickly to a larger number of machines, but also that it's attempting to increase its lifespan by killing off other malware so that the host may not notice that it's infected. I wonder how long it will be until a particular program updates a virus definition list or something similar to remove all other competing malware programs as they come into existence. Also, how much better will the malware be at quickly patching machines against new zero-day exploits than actual virus scanning and prevention software?
I know you're being sarcastic, but realistically we're talking about a guy who made a business for himself. How many people can actually say that they've tried to do that? How many more can say they've succeeded at it?
I don't think that the type of business he was running should even come into consideration. It's probably not fair to judge you, but statistically speaking, you probably work for someone else much the same as I do. Most of us don't own and operate our own businesses, but I'd rather be poor and my own boss than pulling in six figures working for someone else. Right now, that's not something feasible for me, but I hope that I can get there some day. I think I'd really enjoy the freedom that owning my own business might afford me.
More specifically, the fact that he was in the gaming industry and actually ran his own store does give him more authority on the subject than you or I could possibly muster unless we're somehow related to the industry. I don't know about you, but I mostly just play games.
I'm not quite sure that I would agree with you. First of all, iTunes always gave you the option of buying on a per track basis whereas with a CD you either buy all of it or none of it. You could always buy the single on CD (if it was actually released as a single) but the price difference wasn't even in the same boat at that point.
Also, I don't know where you were buying your CD's but while iTunes was offering almost every CD for $10 (or $9.99 if you want to be exact) a lot of stores were pricing new CD's for $15 or more. Granted I didn't do a lot of shopping at online stores such as Amazon, but I'd be surprised if the markup for the brick and mortar was $5.
Also, until the Amazon music store started, there weren't any alternatives to get DRM-free music for a lot of bands. There were plenty of places to get music without DRM, but they were definitely limited as to which artists you could select. By the time Amazon entered the market, iTunes was fairly entrenched both in terms of marketshare and mindshare.
Let's also not forget that iTunes DRM was fairly easy to strip that everyone had the technology to do it at their fingertips without having to download any additional software or purchase any special hardware. I think that a few software programs will do it automatically without having to burn the tracks to CD, but if you really wanted the DRM gone, it was possible without having to resort to anything considered legally grey or outright illegal.
From my understanding, when iTunes initially started selling the DRM-free versions of songs, they were also encoded at a higher bit-rate. It wasn't pure lossless for the audiophiles, but it was a step up. Personally, I'm not even sure if I would be able to tell the difference between the two without having a good sound system, but then again I've never tried such an experiment.
I'm not sure whether or not the current upgrade also provides the music at the higher bit-rate, but assuming they were it may be worth the $.30 per track to upgrade so that you have a potentially better sound quality and complete freedom with your purchase.
Considering until Amazon opened shop there weren't any competitors that had iTunes' library and the option of being DRM free, what exactly were you expecting people to do? If they've already sunk money into the iTunes purchase it makes perfect sense to pay the extra amount to free your music (and maybe upgrade the quality if that's part of the deal) considering that no one else is selling those tracks DRM-free for $.30 each.
If most people were like me they would consider the original purchase entitling them the right to grab a DRM-free copy through some means or using other methods to break the DRM, but most people don't have the knowledge of how to do those things or share my set of beliefs.
For the longest time, the high prices of CDs really turned me away from buying new music. Lower prices and wide availability from stores such as Amazon and iTunes have gotten me back into it, though. Services such as last.fm and Pandora have also turned me on to new artists or new music that I probably wouldn't have discovered otherwise and have since purchased so that I can enjoy it at any time without any restrictions. I feel that I have more power as a music consumer now than at any time in my past. It's taken a while to get here and it's not completely perfect, but it's better than anything I've had in the past.
"Using the new Nitro Engine, for example, Safari executes JavaScript up to 30 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and more than 3 times faster than Firefox 3 based on performance in leading industry benchmark tests: iBench and SunSpider.
In addition to superior JavaScript performance, Safari offers top-flight HTML performance -- the best on any platform -- loading pages 3 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and almost 3 times faster than Firefox 3."
I'm not too familiar with either of these benchmarking programs, so I can't really pick at the results too much, but the actual claim is 'up to 30 times faster' which means that for some function it's 30 times faster, but for most it's probably not at that level of magnitude. It seems as though some of this important information was lost in the game of telephone that is internet news.
Also, I'm more interested in how it stacks up against Firefox, Opera, and Chrome. Comparing it to IE7 is a little bit like Ford comparing their new car to a horse and cart. No offense meant to the browser, but from every chart I've seen it's the bottom of the barrel in terms of speed.
I caught this article the other day and it seems like Windows Mobile 6.5 isn't anything to get excited about or a serious threat to any of the other mobile OS's.
Seems like more wishful thinking and promises from Microsoft. They're really not making any headway in this area and probably end up throwing more money into it than they'll get back out. Why don't they abandon some of their non-core businesses and find some uncharted areas to expand into instead of throwing money into non-profitable areas where they have no chance of gaining marketshare or mindshare?
This isn't anything new. I used to use facebook somewhat and posted a few things to it until I caught wind of their TOS. They essential claimed at least partial ownership of anything posted to their site at the time and I didn't feel as though it was a fair shake. I essentially stopped using it at that point.
My account is still active and every few months I check it and add anyone that I'd care to have contact information for. Essentially it's a glorified rolodex for me, with the added bonus that other people can find me. Personally, if I wanted to talk with someone I'd rather call them up and have a cup of coffee or a meal instead of sending little messages back and forth. Technology is a fairly big part of my life. I work with it, play with it, and use it for research. I don't really feel it should be a big part of my social life, however.
Maybe I'm just a luddite in that regard, but I prefer face to face meetings over anything else that we've developed over the last hundred years.
Until recently, most music in iTunes was DRM-encumbered, which more than likely turned a good number of people off from the service, especially if you didn't own an iPod. I'm not sure whether or not iTunes works in Linux either, but the Windows version may be working through Wine. That's probably enough to turn most/. readers away.
eMusic doesn't have the problems that iTunes has/had, but I don't think it has anywhere near the selection that's available on iTunes, at least if you like more mainstream types of music.
Of course people have the option of going to the Amazon music store. MP3 downloads that will work on any player and no DRM. I've never used the service so I can't speak to how easy it is to use, but a quick check of the website suggests that the price tends to be a bit more reasonable than iTunes (there's a list of 'popular' songs that are selling for $.79) which is kind of nice.
Why people are still 'pirating' / 'stealing' music is beyond me. I suppose I don't mind it if people want to try before they buy, but both songs and albums are cheaper than they've been in over a decade. Maybe a good chunk of piracy is people who're just trying something out. The numbers only reflect downloads, not how many people downloaded it and then either deleted it or went on to purchase a legitimate copy.
I suppose the best way to prevent the piracy that the RIAA likes to complain about is to create a music store where music is sold at a reasonable price without DRM in a high quality format that works for almost everyone. They can completely remove the try before you buy folks from the equation by offering a DRM-encumbered version of the album that you can download free of charge and listen to as many times as you like for a limited number of days. If you like the album you can purchase it and the DRM disappears forever.
The only people who'll still bother with torrent sites are for the most part those people who never intended to purchase the music anyway. They can be left alone or litigated to hell for all I care.
Of course this makes entirely too much sense and the odds that we'll see it before the dinosaurs running the RIAA are completely incapable of thinking in modern terms. They're trying to hold on to a business model that doesn't make sense in today's world and are completely destroying their business while doing it.
If they wanted to remain in business and remain profitable they would open up a worldwide store similar to the one I outlined above. No more waiting for an album to be released months later in another part of the world and no more having to resort to downloading an album simply because it's not available in your country. Why this hasn't been done already is completely beyond me.
As much as I appreciate a try before I buy option, I'm not entirely sure that the success met here will translate into any kind of general result, data not being the plural of anecdote and all.
I tend to actually purchase more content now than I have in the past. Most of this has to do with actually having a decent paying job and disposable income, rather than being a poor high school or college student. Even now, however, I will tend to see if I can find a few episodes of a show available as a torrent or on some website that streams the show before I commit money towards it. Sometimes I find that I like the show and will go out and buy a season or so on DVD and other times I find out that I don't care anything for the show and won't purchase any of it.
Previously this was more legally grey but now that Hulu seems to offer popular shows a day or so after their original air date it's not that much of an issue. Then again, I don't use their service (It's not the advertisements, but mostly the fact that I need to register and completely resent having to do so), so I'm not overly knowledgeable about the variety of programming. In general, I think that the content providers are starting to realize that it's inevitable that the content is going to end up online, whether they like it or not and are starting to react to that.
In general though, I probably tend to purchase less than a third of what I preview online. Some of this is due to the fact that I can't purchase it even if I wanted to do so, but the vast majority of it isn't all that great or engaging. Personally I don't care whether or not people sample before making a purchase or time commitment. I do so all the time, but if you genuinely enjoy a TV show, music album, or movie, purchase it. The people who make that content require money from somewhere to continue to produce that content and I would feel dishonest consuming all of it without giving something back.
In short, exercise your freedoms but don't be a dick.
TFA (The Science News article) states 'instantly' and I can't actually read the academic paper (bugmenot doesn't seem to have a working login) but does anyone who's more familiar with this area know whether or not it's actually limited to the speed of light, or if we're actually seeing something that's capable of moving faster.
The article makes it sound as though it's instantaneous, but has this actually been measured to show that it's instantaneous or is the relatively short distance at which the "teleport" is performed only making it seem as though it were instantaneous? The implications of something like that are freaking sweet, but I don't really want to get my hopes up.
Why let something as silly as a little TOS stop you, when it's so utterly pointless and stupid given the ease of acquiring a copy of the video. No one is going to begrudge you for trying to be a better citizen. Except for the politicians perhaps.
For those curious about how to download videos from youtube, this site will give you an easy method of doing so.
Considering that the patents were granted back in 1994 and 1995, isn't 2009 a little bit late to be suing some of these companies considering how long they've been around. I'm not a lawyer, but isn't there some limited time window where you need to sue someone who's been infringing on your patent.
If not, doesn't the whole patent system become rather predatory whereby some companies do nothing but patent ideas and wait until someone else uses those patents (perhaps accidentally) and makes a significant amount of money from them before suing their pants off?
Is there anyone around more knowledgeable in patent law who might be able to explain things a little better? I tried checking on groklaw to see if there was any coverage there, but nothing has been posted yet.
The bandwidth is only a problem until we build bigger tubes. As much as we all like to bitch about internet here in the US, we're at least capable of increasing the bandwidth quite well. The real problem is dealing with the latency. With enough time and money we could easily push as much data as we could possibly want, but we can only push it so fast.
For some games it probably won't matter, but who'd want to use it for an FPS where regardless of how detailed your graphics are, even a tenth of a second lag is the difference between who lives and who dies? Until we can get around those limitations, I don't foresee the traditional setup changing much.
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Shouldn't the people living near the volcano be the ones to pay for monitoring the volcano? This is somewhat similar to the fact that New Orleans should probably be the one the pay for any measures they take to protect themselves from hurricanes.
Jindal's an idiot, but it doesn't change the fact that people need to assume some responsibility for themselves and their local community instead of always expecting the Federal government to take care of all of their problems. If they can't bother to pay for some detection service why should I bother to pay for it either? And if it's too costly to support locally, they probably shouldn't live there.
Climate Service is at least something that could be said to affect the entire nation and therefore at least be considered as a worthwhile federal program. Anything else probably shouldn't be.
I don't mean to disagree with you, as your point is very true and valid, but I believe that the notion of war and how it should be conducted has changed to the degree that it is completely impossible for the United States to win a war, but not for many of the reasons you state.
In the past, when countries or groups of people would go to war, they generally tended to decimate the loser to the extent that they no longer existed or were essentially enslaved. Look at the extent to which Rome and the Mongols destroyed their enemies. Some of them were completely wiped out. Cities were burned to the ground and no one really gave a damn if civilian casualties were inflicted. In some cases, inflicting heavy civilian casualties was a tactical goal.
Now we're so paralyzed with attempting to make war civilized that it's damned hard to conduct and effective war. Enemy combatants must be treated properly instead of outright enslaved or killed. Civilian casualties must be avoided completely if possible. The most effective ways of killing off the enemy are outright banned.
If the US really wanted to go to war with a country and win the war they could probably wipe another country off the map entirely within a few days. Of course this would involve what essentially amounts to genocide and given that I don't think we should have been in Iraq in the first place I'm glad that we haven't waged war to the extent of our abilities.
I suppose it's fitting that you've been modded funny considering that if anyone does actually go to jail for this it won't be anyone actually in charge or ultimately responsible. Rich people don't go to jail. If they do somehow end up in jail, it's not the jail you or I would end up in under similar charges.
The only real way to hurt these assholes is to completely boycott their company and products and tank their company. Of course that doesn't guarantee that they won't land on their feet, but anything else is just wishful thinking.
I don't want to burst your bubble, because I agree that toll roads generally suck, but if all roads were toll roads there would likely be no gas tax as the government wouldn't be involved in maintaining the roads. I think this would save at least $.50 per gallon depending upon your state. I think it's closer to $.70 in my state, but your mileage may very.
I don't mean to discredit what you say, but could you possibly give a better explanation of what's occurring and how it's related to global warming.
It seems that some times every event is a sure sign that X is occurring, whether or not there's actually any scientific proof behind it or not. It reminds me of whenever something happened it would be attributed to God, the gods, or some other deity supposedly controlling the fate of mankind depending on the time period.
I just don't want things to devolve to that point. I have no reason to doubt what you're saying, but could you provide some links that explain the science behind your comments or provide a more thorough explanation yourself. I don't mean to call you out as my own knowledge of climate science is largely non-existent, but I still tend to take statements without further explanation with a grain of salt.
You can most certainly buy the raid experience if you want to do so. In the previous expansion before our guild stopped raiding we had progressed the the point where the content was trivial for us to complete with a full raid.
We decided that it would be a good idea to start selling the dungeon loot that we largely no longer needed. There were always a few rare pieces or items that regular guild members still wanted that we wouldn't sell, but the majority of the loot was open for purchase. Unless a particular encounter was significantly challenging and a single person could cause the entire raid to wipe, we generally didn't have a problem with people participating in the encounter. There were even a few people who paid simply to be there for the experience and not specifically for some certain piece of loot.
Because we were the only guild on the server that was selling gear we could charge as much as we thought we could. Judging by the amount of demand we received, we were probably under charging despite the fact that we had so much revenue coming in as a guild that we couldn't possibly begin to spend all of it. As a result our guild members were no longer required to grind for gold as we simply financed everything at that point. Any consumables that you might need for a raid were provided by the guild. Repair costs were completely covered by the guild. We eventually reached the point where we decided to give our members large sums of gold to with as they pleased because the guild bank would be unable to hold much more.
There were also some people in our guild who were quite good at PvP. For a reasonable amount of gold they would invite you onto their arena team and attempt to carry you to a certain rating. They had sufficient gear and ability such that they could guarantee you a high enough rating to obtain all of the PvP items. I wasn't involved with this, but I knew someone who would power-level arena teams and he made somewhere around 50k gold from this. The most I recall our guild ever pulling in was around 200k in a single month.
The fact of the matter is that regardless of what kind of experience you want, it's likely that there's someone who's more than willing to provide it assuming you have the gold to pay for that experience. It's my understanding that the game is currently far less difficult in terms of raiding, so there's really no market for selling the loot from dungeons or at least the cost would be so low that it wouldn't be worth the trouble for a majority of guilds.
You are correct that people will take the path of least resistance. At the time I was playing, it was generally considered easiest to get rewards from PvP and the arena system. Regardless of how poorly a person played, they could eventually expect to receive the best PvP weapons. In the latest expansion the tables have apparently turned and raiding is the easiest way to acquire upgrades so people have largely eschewed the arena system in favor of raiding to obtain better items.
At the time we started selling loot, gold was fairly easy to come by even without purchasing it from a gold farmer or spending a large amount of time grinding. Questing from level 60 to 70 provided several thousand gold which would get you close to purchasing an epic flying mount. There were also a plethora of daily quests available which would give you a few hundred gold assuming you completed as many daily quests as you were permitted. Most of these could be done with a group of people, greatly reducing the amount of time required to complete them. It was easily possible for a person to complete all of them in a few hours. Between that and selling any items you obtained or gaining money from tradeskills, it would probably take an average player two weeks to save up enough gold to purchase a piece of loot from our guild. If they spend time farming, it would take them considerably less time to get the gold together. I estimate that in terms of actual play time it would take about 25 hours (roughly 1 day) of time to acquire a pi
Eventually someone has to stand up to bullshit laws. A popular solution is to prevent them from being passed in the first place, but it seems as though it rarely works in the real world considering that politicians generally have little or no knowledge of the things which they seek to legislate.
Short of that, someone has to either get charged with the law and present a compelling argument of why the law is complete shit so that it gets tossed or lobby a congress critter to pass a new law overwriting the old one.
You're absolutely right that if I went to court over it, I would care a whole lot, but from society's point of view it's completely worth it. I suppose I could always get a complete shyster lawyer myself and countersue them for legal costs, emotional damages, etc.
It took a black woman to completely disregard a bullshit law and reap all the consequences associated with breaking that law in order to ignite the spark to fix that law and many of the other similarly crap discriminatory laws. Eventually there's going to be another person like Rosa Parks that gets sick of the shit we have to deal with and won't allow themselves to be bullied by the powers that be. With the shift in the attitudes of people it's only a matter of time before this happens. It's only a question of how long until the pot boils over.
Why bother upgrading to Vista at all. Just wait another two years or so until Windows 7 comes out and either upgrade machines at that time or purchase new machines which will come with Windows 7 installed.
If it would cost a lot to upgrade from XP to 7, then it's time to either switch to Linux or at least start talking about it so that Microsoft will help make the transition available for a more reasonable cost.
Considering that we're at a point where computational power is considered to be sufficient or in excess for normal, non-power users, in two years this should allow the government to purchase some low-end machines that have more than enough power to take care of the work that will probably be done on most of them.
If I've bought the CD I consider it well within my rights to make perfect lossless digital copies of the music so that I can put it on an portable music player or on a hard drive attached to a stereo system.
I might not necessary believe myself entitled to a lossless digital copy if I were to purchase a lossy MP3 digital copy of the song from some online music store.
I really don't care what that law says as I believe it's invalid and my consumer rights supersede what some companies, with enough money to lobby idiotic congress critters, decide my rights should be.
Maybe they were stoned when they wrote the blog posts?
I'd consider it fair use for anyone who has a right to a digital copy of the file, to download that file regardless of who uploads that file to them.
If I've purchased the media on a physical device such as a CD, DVD, etc. or a digital copy of it from some media store that has been licensed to sell the media, I feel as though I have a right to digital copies so that I can make a backup copy in the event that the physical media is damaged an unable to playback or to ensure that the media can be used on different devices because DRM on the file would prevent me doing so otherwise.
There are probably a few finer points to my philosophy that could stand some fleshing out (e.g. does purchasing a DVD movie entitle me to a digital Blu-Ray/HDDVD copy with higher quality?) but it's probably not worth going into.
If we can accept that as fair use, then by extension P2P file sharing should only be illegal in the event that a person isn't entitled to own a digital copy of some work. It's not really much of a reach if you're willing to accept that my rights as a consumer trump any corporations rights to require me to purchase the same media over and over again and prevent me from enjoying in the way I want to do so.
Even though some people are going to abuse P2P systems and obtain material that they haven't rightfully paid for, that shouldn't be a reason to remove a system that works well for responsible users.
If only there were a similar piece of malware in direct competition with this particular trojan such that both would attempt to remove the other and successfully do so.
It is interesting how malware is adapting so that not only is it able to spread more quickly to a larger number of machines, but also that it's attempting to increase its lifespan by killing off other malware so that the host may not notice that it's infected. I wonder how long it will be until a particular program updates a virus definition list or something similar to remove all other competing malware programs as they come into existence. Also, how much better will the malware be at quickly patching machines against new zero-day exploits than actual virus scanning and prevention software?
I know you're being sarcastic, but realistically we're talking about a guy who made a business for himself. How many people can actually say that they've tried to do that? How many more can say they've succeeded at it?
I don't think that the type of business he was running should even come into consideration. It's probably not fair to judge you, but statistically speaking, you probably work for someone else much the same as I do. Most of us don't own and operate our own businesses, but I'd rather be poor and my own boss than pulling in six figures working for someone else. Right now, that's not something feasible for me, but I hope that I can get there some day. I think I'd really enjoy the freedom that owning my own business might afford me.
More specifically, the fact that he was in the gaming industry and actually ran his own store does give him more authority on the subject than you or I could possibly muster unless we're somehow related to the industry. I don't know about you, but I mostly just play games.
I'm not quite sure that I would agree with you. First of all, iTunes always gave you the option of buying on a per track basis whereas with a CD you either buy all of it or none of it. You could always buy the single on CD (if it was actually released as a single) but the price difference wasn't even in the same boat at that point.
Also, I don't know where you were buying your CD's but while iTunes was offering almost every CD for $10 (or $9.99 if you want to be exact) a lot of stores were pricing new CD's for $15 or more. Granted I didn't do a lot of shopping at online stores such as Amazon, but I'd be surprised if the markup for the brick and mortar was $5.
Also, until the Amazon music store started, there weren't any alternatives to get DRM-free music for a lot of bands. There were plenty of places to get music without DRM, but they were definitely limited as to which artists you could select. By the time Amazon entered the market, iTunes was fairly entrenched both in terms of marketshare and mindshare.
Let's also not forget that iTunes DRM was fairly easy to strip that everyone had the technology to do it at their fingertips without having to download any additional software or purchase any special hardware. I think that a few software programs will do it automatically without having to burn the tracks to CD, but if you really wanted the DRM gone, it was possible without having to resort to anything considered legally grey or outright illegal.
From my understanding, when iTunes initially started selling the DRM-free versions of songs, they were also encoded at a higher bit-rate. It wasn't pure lossless for the audiophiles, but it was a step up. Personally, I'm not even sure if I would be able to tell the difference between the two without having a good sound system, but then again I've never tried such an experiment.
I'm not sure whether or not the current upgrade also provides the music at the higher bit-rate, but assuming they were it may be worth the $.30 per track to upgrade so that you have a potentially better sound quality and complete freedom with your purchase.
Considering until Amazon opened shop there weren't any competitors that had iTunes' library and the option of being DRM free, what exactly were you expecting people to do? If they've already sunk money into the iTunes purchase it makes perfect sense to pay the extra amount to free your music (and maybe upgrade the quality if that's part of the deal) considering that no one else is selling those tracks DRM-free for $.30 each.
If most people were like me they would consider the original purchase entitling them the right to grab a DRM-free copy through some means or using other methods to break the DRM, but most people don't have the knowledge of how to do those things or share my set of beliefs.
For the longest time, the high prices of CDs really turned me away from buying new music. Lower prices and wide availability from stores such as Amazon and iTunes have gotten me back into it, though. Services such as last.fm and Pandora have also turned me on to new artists or new music that I probably wouldn't have discovered otherwise and have since purchased so that I can enjoy it at any time without any restrictions. I feel that I have more power as a music consumer now than at any time in my past. It's taken a while to get here and it's not completely perfect, but it's better than anything I've had in the past.
Here's the actual claims from Apple's website:
"Using the new Nitro Engine, for example, Safari executes JavaScript up to 30 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and more than 3 times faster than Firefox 3 based on performance in leading industry benchmark tests: iBench and SunSpider.
In addition to superior JavaScript performance, Safari offers top-flight HTML performance -- the best on any platform -- loading pages 3 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and almost 3 times faster than Firefox 3."
I'm not too familiar with either of these benchmarking programs, so I can't really pick at the results too much, but the actual claim is 'up to 30 times faster' which means that for some function it's 30 times faster, but for most it's probably not at that level of magnitude. It seems as though some of this important information was lost in the game of telephone that is internet news.
Also, I'm more interested in how it stacks up against Firefox, Opera, and Chrome. Comparing it to IE7 is a little bit like Ford comparing their new car to a horse and cart. No offense meant to the browser, but from every chart I've seen it's the bottom of the barrel in terms of speed.
I caught this article the other day and it seems like Windows Mobile 6.5 isn't anything to get excited about or a serious threat to any of the other mobile OS's. Seems like more wishful thinking and promises from Microsoft. They're really not making any headway in this area and probably end up throwing more money into it than they'll get back out. Why don't they abandon some of their non-core businesses and find some uncharted areas to expand into instead of throwing money into non-profitable areas where they have no chance of gaining marketshare or mindshare?
This isn't anything new. I used to use facebook somewhat and posted a few things to it until I caught wind of their TOS. They essential claimed at least partial ownership of anything posted to their site at the time and I didn't feel as though it was a fair shake. I essentially stopped using it at that point.
My account is still active and every few months I check it and add anyone that I'd care to have contact information for. Essentially it's a glorified rolodex for me, with the added bonus that other people can find me. Personally, if I wanted to talk with someone I'd rather call them up and have a cup of coffee or a meal instead of sending little messages back and forth. Technology is a fairly big part of my life. I work with it, play with it, and use it for research. I don't really feel it should be a big part of my social life, however.
Maybe I'm just a luddite in that regard, but I prefer face to face meetings over anything else that we've developed over the last hundred years.
I think Tycho said something like that once.
"Stallman's goal is to get the software industry to the point where the automobile industry is today."
In horrible financial troubles and looking for a government bailout?
I kid, I kid.
Until recently, most music in iTunes was DRM-encumbered, which more than likely turned a good number of people off from the service, especially if you didn't own an iPod. I'm not sure whether or not iTunes works in Linux either, but the Windows version may be working through Wine. That's probably enough to turn most /. readers away.
eMusic doesn't have the problems that iTunes has/had, but I don't think it has anywhere near the selection that's available on iTunes, at least if you like more mainstream types of music.
Of course people have the option of going to the Amazon music store. MP3 downloads that will work on any player and no DRM. I've never used the service so I can't speak to how easy it is to use, but a quick check of the website suggests that the price tends to be a bit more reasonable than iTunes (there's a list of 'popular' songs that are selling for $.79) which is kind of nice.
Why people are still 'pirating' / 'stealing' music is beyond me. I suppose I don't mind it if people want to try before they buy, but both songs and albums are cheaper than they've been in over a decade. Maybe a good chunk of piracy is people who're just trying something out. The numbers only reflect downloads, not how many people downloaded it and then either deleted it or went on to purchase a legitimate copy.
I suppose the best way to prevent the piracy that the RIAA likes to complain about is to create a music store where music is sold at a reasonable price without DRM in a high quality format that works for almost everyone. They can completely remove the try before you buy folks from the equation by offering a DRM-encumbered version of the album that you can download free of charge and listen to as many times as you like for a limited number of days. If you like the album you can purchase it and the DRM disappears forever.
The only people who'll still bother with torrent sites are for the most part those people who never intended to purchase the music anyway. They can be left alone or litigated to hell for all I care.
Of course this makes entirely too much sense and the odds that we'll see it before the dinosaurs running the RIAA are completely incapable of thinking in modern terms. They're trying to hold on to a business model that doesn't make sense in today's world and are completely destroying their business while doing it.
If they wanted to remain in business and remain profitable they would open up a worldwide store similar to the one I outlined above. No more waiting for an album to be released months later in another part of the world and no more having to resort to downloading an album simply because it's not available in your country. Why this hasn't been done already is completely beyond me.
As much as I appreciate a try before I buy option, I'm not entirely sure that the success met here will translate into any kind of general result, data not being the plural of anecdote and all.
I tend to actually purchase more content now than I have in the past. Most of this has to do with actually having a decent paying job and disposable income, rather than being a poor high school or college student. Even now, however, I will tend to see if I can find a few episodes of a show available as a torrent or on some website that streams the show before I commit money towards it. Sometimes I find that I like the show and will go out and buy a season or so on DVD and other times I find out that I don't care anything for the show and won't purchase any of it.
Previously this was more legally grey but now that Hulu seems to offer popular shows a day or so after their original air date it's not that much of an issue. Then again, I don't use their service (It's not the advertisements, but mostly the fact that I need to register and completely resent having to do so), so I'm not overly knowledgeable about the variety of programming. In general, I think that the content providers are starting to realize that it's inevitable that the content is going to end up online, whether they like it or not and are starting to react to that.
In general though, I probably tend to purchase less than a third of what I preview online. Some of this is due to the fact that I can't purchase it even if I wanted to do so, but the vast majority of it isn't all that great or engaging. Personally I don't care whether or not people sample before making a purchase or time commitment. I do so all the time, but if you genuinely enjoy a TV show, music album, or movie, purchase it. The people who make that content require money from somewhere to continue to produce that content and I would feel dishonest consuming all of it without giving something back.
In short, exercise your freedoms but don't be a dick.
TFA (The Science News article) states 'instantly' and I can't actually read the academic paper (bugmenot doesn't seem to have a working login) but does anyone who's more familiar with this area know whether or not it's actually limited to the speed of light, or if we're actually seeing something that's capable of moving faster.
The article makes it sound as though it's instantaneous, but has this actually been measured to show that it's instantaneous or is the relatively short distance at which the "teleport" is performed only making it seem as though it were instantaneous? The implications of something like that are freaking sweet, but I don't really want to get my hopes up.
Why let something as silly as a little TOS stop you, when it's so utterly pointless and stupid given the ease of acquiring a copy of the video. No one is going to begrudge you for trying to be a better citizen. Except for the politicians perhaps.
For those curious about how to download videos from youtube, this site will give you an easy method of doing so.
Considering that the patents were granted back in 1994 and 1995, isn't 2009 a little bit late to be suing some of these companies considering how long they've been around. I'm not a lawyer, but isn't there some limited time window where you need to sue someone who's been infringing on your patent.
If not, doesn't the whole patent system become rather predatory whereby some companies do nothing but patent ideas and wait until someone else uses those patents (perhaps accidentally) and makes a significant amount of money from them before suing their pants off?
Is there anyone around more knowledgeable in patent law who might be able to explain things a little better? I tried checking on groklaw to see if there was any coverage there, but nothing has been posted yet.
The bandwidth is only a problem until we build bigger tubes. As much as we all like to bitch about internet here in the US, we're at least capable of increasing the bandwidth quite well. The real problem is dealing with the latency. With enough time and money we could easily push as much data as we could possibly want, but we can only push it so fast.
For some games it probably won't matter, but who'd want to use it for an FPS where regardless of how detailed your graphics are, even a tenth of a second lag is the difference between who lives and who dies? Until we can get around those limitations, I don't foresee the traditional setup changing much.