A computer can calculate odds perfectly, which will lead it to beat a lot of human players with a poor grasp of probability, but poker is a game of limited information. Any player, a human or a computer, can only make decisions based on the information available to it. Humans can extract information from timing, betting patterns, position, etc. that's pretty tough for a computer to pick up on - not to mention the variety of physical information you can pick up in live games.
Nah. I had three drives die over the span of a year in my home PC. The first one lasted about 8 months, Maxtor replaced it with another that lasted one more month, and then they sent me a bigger one which lasted about 3 months. By then, the warranty was over, and I bought a Seagate instead (with a longer warranty).
Then there was the time a power outage caused both drives to fail in my server simultaneously... it'd been up and running for around a year with no problems. A little bad weather and boom, not only was my uptime ruined, but so was my data. And of course, this happened at precisely the time when I'd forgotten to make a recent backup.
Now, it probably wasn't a coincidence that both drives in the server and the first two drives at home were all the same model!
No, just because you can't log into the account doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Type "sudo sh" and enter your password - presto, you're running a shell as root. Exploit any service running as superuser and you can do the same thing.
Those are the least intrusive "extras" you'll find on any phone. Seriously, who cares if the phone has a calculator you don't want? If you don't want to use it, then don't use it. You'll soon forget that it's even there. (BTW, that "personal organizer" is just a contact list, and every phone has one.)
It's like looking at a Corolla, one of the most generic cars you can find, and complaining that it has that useless bi-level vent setting and those fancy-pants power windows, and "why is it so hard to find 'just a car' these days?"
That's what a law does. Any law, about anything. It does not a good argument make. It means the loss of freedom has to be justified. If you're going to pass a law that limits my freedom, it has to provide some kind of benefit.
You're saying you should have the right to do anything you want with something you do not own completely. No, I own my voice, my computer, and my CD burner. Completely.
What else is there, the number that I want to burn onto the CD? It makes no more sense to complain that I "do not own [the number] completely" than it does to complain that I don't own the word "complain" that I'm using in this very post. I don't need to "own" a word, whatever that might mean, in order to use it in a comment, and I don't need to "own" a number in order to write it onto a disc.
If you own 1% of a company, you don't get to make executive decisions on your own and you could very easily get shot down most of the time. Buying a DVD or a print of a painting is not entirely unlike buying stock. You get something (a licensed disc) but not the whole cow. That's OK, I don't want the whole cow. Just the disc, and the ability to use the equipment I've paid for and the body I was born with to learn and share whatever I might learn about the disc I've paid for, including such facts as what color it is, how much it weighs, and what sequence of bits is stored on it.
No you don't. You have physical access and capability. You do not have legal control. I'm holding cash. I have the equipment and ability to create reasonable copies of it. The law is asking me to give up that control. Do you see how absurd that argument is? Yes, because there's a tangible benefit to all of us from limiting the supply of cash, essentially the same benefit that's provided by trademarks. Copyright, on the other hand, restricts everyone's actions for little, if any, benefit.
You can do whatever you want with that knowledge as long as you don't become a competitor in a commercial sphere. That's a meaningless qualification when you realize that every form of distribution is considered commercial competition. If I give a copy of a CD to my friend, it doesn't matter that he never would've paid a dime for it if he had to buy it; copyright advocates still insist on counting it as a lost sale.
After the copyright expires (which I believe should be no longer than the greater of 15 years or until the artist's death, but that's beside the point), you can do absolutely anything you want with it. Great, so a song comes out today and I might be able to use it in interesting ways 50 or 60 years from now? What an insulting compromise. You may as well say "forever less a day".
Their freedom to have control over someone else's work? Hardly. No, their freedom to have control over their own actions and equipment. My computer is capable of copying CDs; preventing me from using it for that purpose takes control away from me. I am capable of reading a book aloud to an audience; preventing me from doing that is limiting my speech.
Artists always have control over their own work, and no one can take it away without literally robbing them. If record a song onto a tape, then you own that tape and you can do whatever you want with it - the only way to take that control away would be to take the tape away. What you're talking about is control not over your own stuff, but over other people's stuff.
You don't have any rights by default--it's someone's private property. If it were really "private", I wouldn't know about it in the first place! A song that's been broadcast on the radio is public, just like that 09 F9 number became public the moment it was posted to the internet. You can't take a number back out of someone's head once you've told them what it is, so if you choose to tell them what it is, you have to live with the consequences.
If you didn't get the kind of control you wanted or felt was worth the agreed price, you should have purchased elsewhere. Funny how you're only willing to apply that logic to consumers. I mean, I'd say that if an artist doesn't sell as many CDs as he hoped, that means he should have come up with a better payment arrangement in the first place.
But there's nothing wrong with artists specifying the terms and extent of control they're offering for a particular price. It doesn't step on anyone else's *right* to do anything. It's their work, plain and simple. Their terms. Exactly... if by "their work" you mean the time and effort they spend creating or performing something. They can put whatever conditions they want on that. If someone doesn't even want to take his guitar out of the case until he's got a $10,000 check in his pocket, that's his right.
But his rights stop there. He doesn't own the vibrations in the air that come out when he picks the strings, he doesn't own the sequence of notes that someone in the audience memorizes while listening to that performance, and he doesn't own the sounds that the audience member produces at home later that night with his own guitar and uploads to YouTube.
No one is ceding control of anything. They're failing to gain commercial control over it. I already have control, commercial and otherwise, over my own actions and equipment. Copyright asks me to give that control up for someone else's benefit.
You can write as much fan fiction as you want about $TV_SHOW as long as you keep it to yourself. You can think whatever you want. Well, artists can have as much control as they want over the information they produce, as long as they keep it to themselves. But once again, you're only willing to apply that logic to the peasants.
Copyright does nothing to prevent your proposition. Correct. My objection to copyright isn't based on that proposition. I was simply pointing out that your "art co-op" doesn't rely on copyright.
That doesn't mean that people should be forced to give up everything. No one would be forced to give up anything. If you don't want people to listen to your song, then keep it private or don't record it in the first place.
Taking away copyright is like forcing those other two thirds to pave the road, knowing full well that they're paying 50% more than what's fair. Not at all! The only thing those two thirds would be "forced" to do is consider how much it's worth to live on a paved road. If the cost of paving is greater than the benefit they'll receive, then they can choose to keep living on a dirt road.
Similarly, if living in a world with one more Ashlee Simpson album isn't worth $5 to me, then I won't give Ashlee Simpson $5 to record another album. I will, however, happily give $25 to a band I like, because living in a world with one more of their albums is worth that to me. It doesn't matter whether anyone else gets to hear it for free, because I'm not the kind of jealous prick who cries foul when people who value something less are able to get it for a lower price.
However, I don't believe that artists should be forced to cede control to the nonpaying masses under any circumstance. Neither do I. If they don't want other people to have control--by which I assume you mean the ability to enjoy and share the work--then they can keep their creations to themselves. But if you choose to give your work to strangers, you're voluntarily giving up that control.
If someone creates a painting and wants to sell it in toto exclusively, that should be their right as the sole owner and creator. The problem is, that's fundamentally incompatible with everyone else's right to learn and share information that they come across in their daily lives. You're asking everyone else to cede control of their minds, mouths, hands, computers, and CD burners to these artists. And as far as I can tell, the only thing they get in return is an opportunity to cede their money as well: to buy copies that they're still only allowed to use in specific, limited ways.
Copyright protections allow for a "art co-op" to form so that normal people can enjoy it in their homes without spending more than they spent on their car (or possibly their home, in some cases). Copyright isn't necessary for that. You can start an "art co-op" simply by finding an artist, getting a quote on some new piece of work that interests you, and getting your friends to pitch in to hire him. Once he's done, everyone gets access to it whether they paid or not.
The artist is happy because he's been paid for his work. You and the other contributors are happy because you got what you paid for (you wouldn't have paid if you didn't think it was a fair price). Everyone else is happy because they get access to this new work at no cost, and they can do whatever they want with it.
The most common mistake people make when they see this idea is to think that you're providing some kind of "charity" by paying for a work that others will be able to enjoy for free. But that's not the case at all: you're paying because the creation of this work is worth something to you. You know that if it doesn't get funded, it won't get made, and you're willing to pay some amount to live in a world where this work exists. It's like a group of neighbors pooling their money to repave the road: even if the cranky old guy at the end of the road doesn't pay, and he gets to enjoy the paved road for free, the other neighbors are still getting their money's worth.
Well, I bought my Wii in January (retail store, no extra markup, just an hour of driving around to find a store that wasn't sold out), but I probably would've gotten an Xbox 360 instead if it'd been available for the same price.
The iPhone has so much more storage, syncs so much more easily with your music and movies, I guess you haven't looked at non-Apple phones lately. My phone uses microSD cards and costs $50. For what it costs to buy an iPhone, I could get over 40 gigabytes of storage, and copying files onto it is as simple as dragging stuff in Explorer (or if I wanted to sync, I could do it with WMP).
The unreleased song and the in-house version of a movie are still "public" if they were downloaded from public sites. The breach of privacy came when someone stole the band's master tapes or ripped the screener; once it's uploaded to the internet, it's no longer private.
As for where to draw the line with regard to privacy, I'd say that if you can come up with a list of the specific people who have permission to access something, then you can legitimately call it private. If you couldn't come up with such a list, then it's not private, because you've willingly released it to an unknown number of people who you can't track down. That's essentially the same rule that the Interactive Fiction Competition uses to disqualify games that have been been "previously released", while still allowing beta testers and co-authors to have access to games before they're submitted.
Yes, you're missing something. The point is, you're buying less gas but paying the same total amount, because it's sold by volume, and the same volume holds fewer molecules of gas when it's warmer.
You're right that this reduces the range of your vehicle and causes you to hit the gas station more often, but it also makes driving more expensive overall. At $3 a gallon, it costs $30 to fill up your 10-gallon tank each time, no matter how dense the gas is. If it's 1% less dense than it should be, then you're spending 1% more to drive the same number of miles, because you have to fill your tank 1% more often.
Fuel injectors can compensate for the gas in your tank getting hotter, and adjust themselves to deliver the same number of molecules of gas to the engine at any temperature. But they can't change the fact that you were charged for more molecules than you actually put into the tank.
Now, I was smart enough to understand what it was that I was feeling and why, and thus I didn't lash out at those people, but the irrational anger was there. Is it really "irrational"? I mean, isn't it true that the people who're willing to spend $600 on an iPhone (when it still requires a 2-year contract, doesn't support 3G or development, etc.) are, to some extent, preventing those deal-breakers from getting fixed? Just like the people who pay $2 for a ringtone are keeping ringtone prices ridiculously high, and the people who buy Avril Lavigne CDs are keeping the music industry focused on easily marketable crap.
I've never seen one of these in use on the west coast of the US. Sounds kind of strange - why shouldn't you be able to take a shopping cart outside? Do you just have to eat all your groceries at the store, or only buy as much as you can carry at one time?
When your quaint little untested drug can prevent HIV and herpes, along with the risk of permanent infertility from chlamydia, you go ahead and give me a ring. Until then, I and many others like me will rely on the ONLY way to prevent all of the above + HPV. Which is... what? A chastity belt? I mean, you can't seriously believe that telling kids not to have sex will actually keep them from doing it. Statistics have shown that it doesn't work.
In any case, railing against the HPV vaccine is ridiculous. It's like urging people not to wear seat belts, because the only way to prevent all injuries from car accidents is to avoid cars entirely. The fact is, most of us will ride in a car at some point in our lives, and we'd better know how to keep ourselves as safe as possible when that happens.
Your daughter will have sex at some point in her life. Maybe you'll get lucky and she'll wait till she's married, but what are you going to say if, for example, her husband cheats on her and she gets HPV from him? Blame him all you want, but that isn't going to cure her HPV. Or maybe you won't get so lucky, and god forbid, she'll get raped on the way to school. All the preaching in the world won't help there.
So why don't you just go ahead and shut your self-righteous fucking pie hole and let the grownups talk. With an attitude like that, I'm guessing you aren't one of them.
The posted was correcting the technologies involved, but it does nto change the fact that said technologies are still not widespread. AFAIK, Verizon has rolled out, or is rolling out, EVDO in every area they cover, and Sprint's coverage is pretty widespread too. See the map I linked at evdomaps.com. No, you won't be able to surf the web at 2 Mbps in the middle of the forest, but it's available around cities and highways.
I'd rather rely on WiFi for faster browsing but then have a far wider range of data access. Well, why not have it both ways? A CDMA iPhone could use WiFi in the hotspots, EVDO on the highway and in the city away from a hotspot, and degrade to 1xRTT out in the sticks. (1xRTT is slower than EDGE, but it's still better than dialup.)
Buy the phone from eBay or from any store - I believe carriers will unlock phones for you if they come locked and you pay full price, and independent stores are likely to have unlocked phones on hand. I don't know about month to month postpaid accounts, but I know you can buy prepaid SIMs. Here is a site that sells them (at seemingly ridiculous prices), but you can probably get them from a Cingular or T-Mobile store too.
I dunno what the big deal is. In the US, you buy a phone and you're signing a 1 or 2 year contract, that is the norm here. Not quite. The norm in the US is that when you sign a 2 year contract at the time you buy your phone, you get a big discount on the phone. I paid $50 for my phone, but if I'd bought it without a contract, it would've been a few hundred. To have to sign a contract and still pay $500 for the iPhone is nothing but extortion.
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You can take poker out of that list.
A computer can calculate odds perfectly, which will lead it to beat a lot of human players with a poor grasp of probability, but poker is a game of limited information. Any player, a human or a computer, can only make decisions based on the information available to it. Humans can extract information from timing, betting patterns, position, etc. that's pretty tough for a computer to pick up on - not to mention the variety of physical information you can pick up in live games.
The server was on a UPS, and no other components in the computer were damaged.
Nah. I had three drives die over the span of a year in my home PC. The first one lasted about 8 months, Maxtor replaced it with another that lasted one more month, and then they sent me a bigger one which lasted about 3 months. By then, the warranty was over, and I bought a Seagate instead (with a longer warranty).
Then there was the time a power outage caused both drives to fail in my server simultaneously... it'd been up and running for around a year with no problems. A little bad weather and boom, not only was my uptime ruined, but so was my data. And of course, this happened at precisely the time when I'd forgotten to make a recent backup.
Now, it probably wasn't a coincidence that both drives in the server and the first two drives at home were all the same model!
No, just because you can't log into the account doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Type "sudo sh" and enter your password - presto, you're running a shell as root. Exploit any service running as superuser and you can do the same thing.
Those are the least intrusive "extras" you'll find on any phone. Seriously, who cares if the phone has a calculator you don't want? If you don't want to use it, then don't use it. You'll soon forget that it's even there. (BTW, that "personal organizer" is just a contact list, and every phone has one.)
It's like looking at a Corolla, one of the most generic cars you can find, and complaining that it has that useless bi-level vent setting and those fancy-pants power windows, and "why is it so hard to find 'just a car' these days?"
None of mine ever do. Where do you live, a 1940's detective novel?
A university in Pullman... oh, you mean Wazzu? No one just calls it "Washington State".
What else is there, the number that I want to burn onto the CD? It makes no more sense to complain that I "do not own [the number] completely" than it does to complain that I don't own the word "complain" that I'm using in this very post. I don't need to "own" a word, whatever that might mean, in order to use it in a comment, and I don't need to "own" a number in order to write it onto a disc. If you own 1% of a company, you don't get to make executive decisions on your own and you could very easily get shot down most of the time. Buying a DVD or a print of a painting is not entirely unlike buying stock. You get something (a licensed disc) but not the whole cow. That's OK, I don't want the whole cow. Just the disc, and the ability to use the equipment I've paid for and the body I was born with to learn and share whatever I might learn about the disc I've paid for, including such facts as what color it is, how much it weighs, and what sequence of bits is stored on it. No you don't. You have physical access and capability. You do not have legal control. I'm holding cash. I have the equipment and ability to create reasonable copies of it. The law is asking me to give up that control. Do you see how absurd that argument is? Yes, because there's a tangible benefit to all of us from limiting the supply of cash, essentially the same benefit that's provided by trademarks. Copyright, on the other hand, restricts everyone's actions for little, if any, benefit. You can do whatever you want with that knowledge as long as you don't become a competitor in a commercial sphere. That's a meaningless qualification when you realize that every form of distribution is considered commercial competition. If I give a copy of a CD to my friend, it doesn't matter that he never would've paid a dime for it if he had to buy it; copyright advocates still insist on counting it as a lost sale. After the copyright expires (which I believe should be no longer than the greater of 15 years or until the artist's death, but that's beside the point), you can do absolutely anything you want with it. Great, so a song comes out today and I might be able to use it in interesting ways 50 or 60 years from now? What an insulting compromise. You may as well say "forever less a day".
BitTorrent has already been providing universal access to IP since 2001. Nice try, IBM!
Artists always have control over their own work, and no one can take it away without literally robbing them. If record a song onto a tape, then you own that tape and you can do whatever you want with it - the only way to take that control away would be to take the tape away. What you're talking about is control not over your own stuff, but over other people's stuff. You don't have any rights by default--it's someone's private property. If it were really "private", I wouldn't know about it in the first place! A song that's been broadcast on the radio is public, just like that 09 F9 number became public the moment it was posted to the internet. You can't take a number back out of someone's head once you've told them what it is, so if you choose to tell them what it is, you have to live with the consequences. If you didn't get the kind of control you wanted or felt was worth the agreed price, you should have purchased elsewhere. Funny how you're only willing to apply that logic to consumers. I mean, I'd say that if an artist doesn't sell as many CDs as he hoped, that means he should have come up with a better payment arrangement in the first place. But there's nothing wrong with artists specifying the terms and extent of control they're offering for a particular price. It doesn't step on anyone else's *right* to do anything. It's their work, plain and simple. Their terms. Exactly... if by "their work" you mean the time and effort they spend creating or performing something. They can put whatever conditions they want on that. If someone doesn't even want to take his guitar out of the case until he's got a $10,000 check in his pocket, that's his right.
But his rights stop there. He doesn't own the vibrations in the air that come out when he picks the strings, he doesn't own the sequence of notes that someone in the audience memorizes while listening to that performance, and he doesn't own the sounds that the audience member produces at home later that night with his own guitar and uploads to YouTube. No one is ceding control of anything. They're failing to gain commercial control over it. I already have control, commercial and otherwise, over my own actions and equipment. Copyright asks me to give that control up for someone else's benefit. You can write as much fan fiction as you want about $TV_SHOW as long as you keep it to yourself. You can think whatever you want. Well, artists can have as much control as they want over the information they produce, as long as they keep it to themselves. But once again, you're only willing to apply that logic to the peasants.
Similarly, if living in a world with one more Ashlee Simpson album isn't worth $5 to me, then I won't give Ashlee Simpson $5 to record another album. I will, however, happily give $25 to a band I like, because living in a world with one more of their albums is worth that to me. It doesn't matter whether anyone else gets to hear it for free, because I'm not the kind of jealous prick who cries foul when people who value something less are able to get it for a lower price. However, I don't believe that artists should be forced to cede control to the nonpaying masses under any circumstance. Neither do I. If they don't want other people to have control--by which I assume you mean the ability to enjoy and share the work--then they can keep their creations to themselves. But if you choose to give your work to strangers, you're voluntarily giving up that control. If someone creates a painting and wants to sell it in toto exclusively, that should be their right as the sole owner and creator. The problem is, that's fundamentally incompatible with everyone else's right to learn and share information that they come across in their daily lives. You're asking everyone else to cede control of their minds, mouths, hands, computers, and CD burners to these artists. And as far as I can tell, the only thing they get in return is an opportunity to cede their money as well: to buy copies that they're still only allowed to use in specific, limited ways.
The artist is happy because he's been paid for his work. You and the other contributors are happy because you got what you paid for (you wouldn't have paid if you didn't think it was a fair price). Everyone else is happy because they get access to this new work at no cost, and they can do whatever they want with it.
The most common mistake people make when they see this idea is to think that you're providing some kind of "charity" by paying for a work that others will be able to enjoy for free. But that's not the case at all: you're paying because the creation of this work is worth something to you. You know that if it doesn't get funded, it won't get made, and you're willing to pay some amount to live in a world where this work exists. It's like a group of neighbors pooling their money to repave the road: even if the cranky old guy at the end of the road doesn't pay, and he gets to enjoy the paved road for free, the other neighbors are still getting their money's worth.
Well, I bought my Wii in January (retail store, no extra markup, just an hour of driving around to find a store that wasn't sold out), but I probably would've gotten an Xbox 360 instead if it'd been available for the same price.
The unreleased song and the in-house version of a movie are still "public" if they were downloaded from public sites. The breach of privacy came when someone stole the band's master tapes or ripped the screener; once it's uploaded to the internet, it's no longer private.
As for where to draw the line with regard to privacy, I'd say that if you can come up with a list of the specific people who have permission to access something, then you can legitimately call it private. If you couldn't come up with such a list, then it's not private, because you've willingly released it to an unknown number of people who you can't track down. That's essentially the same rule that the Interactive Fiction Competition uses to disqualify games that have been been "previously released", while still allowing beta testers and co-authors to have access to games before they're submitted.
Yes, you're missing something. The point is, you're buying less gas but paying the same total amount, because it's sold by volume, and the same volume holds fewer molecules of gas when it's warmer.
You're right that this reduces the range of your vehicle and causes you to hit the gas station more often, but it also makes driving more expensive overall. At $3 a gallon, it costs $30 to fill up your 10-gallon tank each time, no matter how dense the gas is. If it's 1% less dense than it should be, then you're spending 1% more to drive the same number of miles, because you have to fill your tank 1% more often.
Fuel injectors can compensate for the gas in your tank getting hotter, and adjust themselves to deliver the same number of molecules of gas to the engine at any temperature. But they can't change the fact that you were charged for more molecules than you actually put into the tank.
Of course. First you get the money, then you get the power. And then you get the women.
I've never seen one of these in use on the west coast of the US. Sounds kind of strange - why shouldn't you be able to take a shopping cart outside? Do you just have to eat all your groceries at the store, or only buy as much as you can carry at one time?
Every computer already has a little bit of hardware to read keyboard input installed for trojan writers to use. It's called a keyboard.
In any case, railing against the HPV vaccine is ridiculous. It's like urging people not to wear seat belts, because the only way to prevent all injuries from car accidents is to avoid cars entirely. The fact is, most of us will ride in a car at some point in our lives, and we'd better know how to keep ourselves as safe as possible when that happens.
Your daughter will have sex at some point in her life. Maybe you'll get lucky and she'll wait till she's married, but what are you going to say if, for example, her husband cheats on her and she gets HPV from him? Blame him all you want, but that isn't going to cure her HPV. Or maybe you won't get so lucky, and god forbid, she'll get raped on the way to school. All the preaching in the world won't help there. So why don't you just go ahead and shut your self-righteous fucking pie hole and let the grownups talk. With an attitude like that, I'm guessing you aren't one of them.
EVDO is 3G, and it's available across the US. And my EVDO phone's battery lasts a lot longer than 45 minutes.
The US is 3G ready - it's Cingular/AT&T and T-Mobile who aren't.
Buy the phone from eBay or from any store - I believe carriers will unlock phones for you if they come locked and you pay full price, and independent stores are likely to have unlocked phones on hand. I don't know about month to month postpaid accounts, but I know you can buy prepaid SIMs. Here is a site that sells them (at seemingly ridiculous prices), but you can probably get them from a Cingular or T-Mobile store too.