No, I don't usually think about that stuff, like you could even tell what I 'know'. I hardly ever go to see live shows (only big shows I've been to are Radiohead, Franz Ferdinand, and the Kings of Leon), I prefer to spend my money on albums unless I really like a band and someone tells me that they're going to be playing (or in the case of the Kings of Leon, my sister got me a ticket for Christmas). I can listen to albums anytime, and I do, in the car, at work, at home in the bath, while playing games, whatever. Live shows generally aren't worth it for the amount of time that you get out of your ticket price, and the hassles you have to go through to get in/out of a venue, and the idiots you get throwing beer everywhere and stuff.
Anyway - you seem to make snap judgements about people, maybe you're not worth listening to, but I don't know much about you beyond that, so I couldn't possibly say.
In fact, the logic I heard (about 7 years ago now) was that most bands use tours to market albums, and that the only band in the world that is guaranteed to make a profit on a tour is U2. So beyond your snap judgements, I even feel that you are misinformed - unless I am, but the guy that told me this fact was very into his music, and is also a bright medical student. So far the only thing I know about you is that you like trolling and trying to put people down.
Dialup? What's it like living in 1997? Do you have those mini-skirt things? I used to envy all those in the US with their fancy cable/broadband connections, but now pretty much everyone in the UK has broadband. I understand that America is a big place and it's difficult to connect that last few percent of people out in the middle of nowhere, but I'd think the majority of peeps still have broadband? If you're on dialup you're not likely to be online much anyway, as well as having a dynamic IP, therefore you have a bit of security by obscurity anyway. Anyway, I'm not saying that there are no situations where CDs aren't more effective - in this case it is quite effective, but starting to argue that it's better to do this because it's better for the environment is just stupid.
The thing is that games are different each time you play them, so that isn't really a benchmark. The summary says that real games are slower than benchmarks.. I mean DUHHHH! Benchmarks are (or should be) on rails, with no user interaction to ensure that they're the same on each system. Over and above what the benchmarks do, games need to monitor user input and do AI for the enemies at the very least (probably some other obvious things that I'm missing out but those seem to be the main differences to me at the moment). Benchmarks can also get away with faking physics, whereas games usually have to calculate their physics in realtime. A benchmark isn't really meant to be an objective thing - just because your computer performs well in a benchmark doesn't mean it can do well in real terms, it's there for comparing aspects of your computer subjectively.
Using the classical/. method of car analogies, take the example of a drag racer that has been specifically setup to have a fast quarter mile time. When it comes to racing on a track or even everyday commuting, a drag racer is next to useless. Just because your vehicle/computer performs well in preset tests, does not mean that it is a good general purpose machine. These benchmarks test graphical prowess in a few specific areas - not full gameplaying ability.
Uh.. the summary mentions that the heat causes wax to expand, so I'd have thought the article does the same. But yes it means that the energy is stored as pressure rather than storing the heat (which I'd think would be grossly inefficient).
When it moves from cooler water to warmer areas, internal tubes of wax are heated up and expand, pushing out the gas in surrounding tanks and increasing its pressure. The compressed gas stores potential energy, like a squeezed spring, that can be used to power the vehicle
I'm not trying to be in the way, just saying how using your little crusade idea as an excuse to get content without paying for it is pathetic. I have no doubt that people will continue to do it though, people have always tried to dodge tax, steal and whatnot as long as the risk of being punished isn't very high. I download songs sometimes too, but only the ones that I wouldn't be buying the album for. I wasn't claiming that you were trying to sell the music either, just that you're getting something for free which society in general would consider worth some money. You're also harming yourself in the long run because you're giving the content creators an excuse to try and tighten copyright law, and if you do manage to share your files with everyone in the world, then only 1 copy of an album by your favourite band will ever be bought, and they won't have an incentive to release more albums. Sure they may love music, but if they can't afford to eat then they're going to have to get real jobs (still time to record alongside that, I have been in bands and recorded, but the process goes a lot slower if you can only record at weekends). Of course there should be limits on how you can 'privately copy files'. If you are copying money, how 'private' you are being doesn't make it any more legal. You really do need to grow up - or perhaps I should say just grow a brain that looks beyond your own interests and to society at large? I don't agree with the RIAA's tactics, or the amount of money that goes to the artists compared to the publishers. I hate the attitude that usually comes along with marketing types. I also think that those who think that all music should be free have no bearing on reality and are just being selfish. I can understand those that have no money and no other way of acquiring the music would be downloading illegally, but for those that can afford to buy their music, I think they should.
How do you propose to make inefficiency illegal exactly? All OSes provide patches. Microsoft weren't even going to do an SP3 and it's good that they are still releasing updates (can't believe I'm defending MS there...). Releasing the updates on CD ROM is wasting oil and probably a lot more energy than it takes to download the patches (have no idea how much electricity either process uses, but the amount of plastic we waste is incredible). What you said sounds like it could be a joke, but for some reason you seem serious. For the sake of humanity, will someone pass an anthropology law making stupidity illegal?
1) What 'content makers'?
2) Actually I think it is illegal to share music files with your friends. I doubt you will ever have 'millions' of friends either. I'm talking about real friends, not the ones who are leeching off of your files.
3) Authors do in fact have a right to stop you from copying their work.. it's called.. wait for it.. copyright! Sure they're not allowed to stop communications, but you're not talking about communicating, you're talking about making copies of something which originally cost someone money to produce, and which they released as a product to be bought, not as freeware. The idea that having the ability to copy something makes it legal to break copyright is ludicrous. Just because you have a photocopier doesn't mean you can start your own publishing company publishing other people's books, magazines or newspapers, or start printing money for yourself. Grow up.
4) Publish means to make public. Putting up a torrent is making that file public. Again, grow up. I'm happy to pay for my music. I wish that more went to the artist rather than the publisher, but it's the artist's choice which publisher they go with. There are some good ones out there, though not enough. Self publication is also a decent option these days as legal downloading gains acceptance.
"Hello. We are in your datacentre. Pay us 1 million dollars to or we will delete all of your encryption keys. Oh, and can you tell me your administrator password too, please?"
I would have thought that it would be pretty easy to algorithmically decide what is legal in a lot of cases (as long as you can decide on a firm value or set of values for certain ambiguous words), but a lack of evidence - either physical evidence, or trying to judge the true intentions and mental state of the defendant - means we have to bring in a human element. When you have to start trying to force interpretations on a law, then the person is probably guilty of something, and it's just all your fancy lawyers trying to get them out of trouble by not following the actual spirit in which the law was made, with people getting off lightly on technical grounds or whatever. I am not a lawyer, and of course that's just my opinion.
True. It's much more convenient to use cracked copies of games rather than take the CDs with you everywhere in case you feel like playing them on your laptop at your friend's house/whatever. Note: I do buy all my games, but I like to download the 'No CD' versions so that I can keep the original CDs/DVDs in good condition, and so that I dont have to swap out friggin game CDs to watch a DVD. Games should not need the disc after installation. Hopefully I'm not being hypocritical because I'm happy to use plastic discs to store my movies on for the moment. The difference is that I only tend to use each DVD about once every 2 years on average, whereas my game discs would get months of use at a time if I didn't have a NoCD version.
Your analogy is slightly off. Even from just reading the summary you can see that this is like a locksmith with a list of criminals who subscribe to his mailing list. The locksmith works out the vulnerabilities in your security (most houses are pathetically insecure via lockpicking anyway, if you really want into a house it's not gonna be hard to get in), then lets these criminals know them, but refuses to let you yourself know what the vulnerability is. He doesn't demand payment from you - he refuses to give you the information for any price, because you almost certainly won't pay as much as all his other clients. Because you have millions of houses, with millions of [currency]s worth of currency.
For some reason when I first read the summary I was thinking of this company's clients as benign, but a second reading made me rethink:P
I'm aware of those, we have distinct cultural differences even in a country as small as Scotland, plenty of local dialects and even another language. As far as farmland goes, I usually find it extremely ugly and boring. I saw the vast prairies in Canada. Crazy, but still boring. I already know about the Amish, didn't know what Appalachia was, but after looking it up it again doesn't sound like something that would interest me. Maybe I'm just closed minded, but I'd be more interested in the culture of places like Egypt, India, China, Japan and so on. Even in America with its influx of immigrants, the culture doesn't vary very much from that in the UK. Sure there are some differences, but not enough to make it interesting to me.
When I was 6 my dad explained perpetual motion to me, my other idea was to generate electricity with a wheel but also push the wheel with the power it generated, but obviously it would lose energy overall due to friction. Thinking back on it, my magnet idea would have worked, but few years ago on/. I read how loads of people make perpetual motion machines with magnets. They do in fact 'work'. But they're not doing anything magical, the energy provided is from the magnetic force, which takes more energy to create than you get out of it. Renewable sources of energy are a much more worthwhile field to explore and make inventions. What this guy has done with his life is ridiculous. He lost his wife and kid for a concept that is known to be false, and there is not going to be a happy ending.
The only confusing bit in the article is how the professor at the university considers it novel how the magnet creates acceleration from the position that it's in (though to me it seems pretty obvious as I said, I though up a wheel that is kept in motion by using magnets at a young age). The rest of it reads as a sad tale of obsession - the guy has ruined his life over nothing (in fact something that he clearly says he does not understand, which shows he must have a pretty low level of intelligence, though the article doesn't give much detail on the device). In my opinion it would have been much more valuable to look after his family. My dad was a pretty smart guy but I wish he'd spent more time with us - he died unexpectedly when he was 42 and I was 17, and it made me radically rethink my attitude on learning, study and so on, it was just 6 weeks before I started University. Anyway, he was always studying and learning, for example I found a 'teach yourself Hebrew' book next to his bed after he died, but then I was like what was the point? All the work that he did (and I have his job now, except I usually keep my coding and work restricted to working hours) just kept him from spending time being a husband and a father. I respect those that dedicate their lives to their work, but even more I respect those that put in all the hard work involved in keeping a happy family, bringing up your kids in a happy and positive environment. Being an inventor is piss easy compared to that. Learning is a noble pastime, but it has to be balanced with other things, as does everything in life.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I don't usually think about that stuff, like you could even tell what I 'know'. I hardly ever go to see live shows (only big shows I've been to are Radiohead, Franz Ferdinand, and the Kings of Leon), I prefer to spend my money on albums unless I really like a band and someone tells me that they're going to be playing (or in the case of the Kings of Leon, my sister got me a ticket for Christmas). I can listen to albums anytime, and I do, in the car, at work, at home in the bath, while playing games, whatever. Live shows generally aren't worth it for the amount of time that you get out of your ticket price, and the hassles you have to go through to get in/out of a venue, and the idiots you get throwing beer everywhere and stuff.
Anyway - you seem to make snap judgements about people, maybe you're not worth listening to, but I don't know much about you beyond that, so I couldn't possibly say.
In fact, the logic I heard (about 7 years ago now) was that most bands use tours to market albums, and that the only band in the world that is guaranteed to make a profit on a tour is U2. So beyond your snap judgements, I even feel that you are misinformed - unless I am, but the guy that told me this fact was very into his music, and is also a bright medical student. So far the only thing I know about you is that you like trolling and trying to put people down.
It does if they can't prove that those transactions were illegal.
Note: I do not condone illegal file sharing. Well, most of the time.
Meh, it was a poor attempt. Call me when Teh Lol of teh Ringz0rz comes out.
I don't really see why a director should get a piece of that action, not like he wrote the story or anything..? What a greedy industry :o
Scary stuff. I guess I wasn't aware just quite how many zombies there are doing their master's bidding. Sad how things have got to this stage.
Dialup? What's it like living in 1997? Do you have those mini-skirt things? I used to envy all those in the US with their fancy cable/broadband connections, but now pretty much everyone in the UK has broadband. I understand that America is a big place and it's difficult to connect that last few percent of people out in the middle of nowhere, but I'd think the majority of peeps still have broadband? If you're on dialup you're not likely to be online much anyway, as well as having a dynamic IP, therefore you have a bit of security by obscurity anyway. Anyway, I'm not saying that there are no situations where CDs aren't more effective - in this case it is quite effective, but starting to argue that it's better to do this because it's better for the environment is just stupid.
The thing is that games are different each time you play them, so that isn't really a benchmark. The summary says that real games are slower than benchmarks.. I mean DUHHHH! Benchmarks are (or should be) on rails, with no user interaction to ensure that they're the same on each system. Over and above what the benchmarks do, games need to monitor user input and do AI for the enemies at the very least (probably some other obvious things that I'm missing out but those seem to be the main differences to me at the moment). Benchmarks can also get away with faking physics, whereas games usually have to calculate their physics in realtime. A benchmark isn't really meant to be an objective thing - just because your computer performs well in a benchmark doesn't mean it can do well in real terms, it's there for comparing aspects of your computer subjectively.
/. method of car analogies, take the example of a drag racer that has been specifically setup to have a fast quarter mile time. When it comes to racing on a track or even everyday commuting, a drag racer is next to useless. Just because your vehicle/computer performs well in preset tests, does not mean that it is a good general purpose machine. These benchmarks test graphical prowess in a few specific areas - not full gameplaying ability.
Using the classical
When it moves from cooler water to warmer areas, internal tubes of wax are heated up and expand, pushing out the gas in surrounding tanks and increasing its pressure. The compressed gas stores potential energy, like a squeezed spring, that can be used to power the vehicle
I'm not trying to be in the way, just saying how using your little crusade idea as an excuse to get content without paying for it is pathetic. I have no doubt that people will continue to do it though, people have always tried to dodge tax, steal and whatnot as long as the risk of being punished isn't very high. I download songs sometimes too, but only the ones that I wouldn't be buying the album for. I wasn't claiming that you were trying to sell the music either, just that you're getting something for free which society in general would consider worth some money. You're also harming yourself in the long run because you're giving the content creators an excuse to try and tighten copyright law, and if you do manage to share your files with everyone in the world, then only 1 copy of an album by your favourite band will ever be bought, and they won't have an incentive to release more albums. Sure they may love music, but if they can't afford to eat then they're going to have to get real jobs (still time to record alongside that, I have been in bands and recorded, but the process goes a lot slower if you can only record at weekends). Of course there should be limits on how you can 'privately copy files'. If you are copying money, how 'private' you are being doesn't make it any more legal. You really do need to grow up - or perhaps I should say just grow a brain that looks beyond your own interests and to society at large? I don't agree with the RIAA's tactics, or the amount of money that goes to the artists compared to the publishers. I hate the attitude that usually comes along with marketing types. I also think that those who think that all music should be free have no bearing on reality and are just being selfish. I can understand those that have no money and no other way of acquiring the music would be downloading illegally, but for those that can afford to buy their music, I think they should.
Huh? Not if you're a female thinking of a friend. And I hardly think most people would have imagined themself sodomising the goatse guy. NT.
How do you propose to make inefficiency illegal exactly? All OSes provide patches. Microsoft weren't even going to do an SP3 and it's good that they are still releasing updates (can't believe I'm defending MS there...). Releasing the updates on CD ROM is wasting oil and probably a lot more energy than it takes to download the patches (have no idea how much electricity either process uses, but the amount of plastic we waste is incredible). What you said sounds like it could be a joke, but for some reason you seem serious. For the sake of humanity, will someone pass an anthropology law making stupidity illegal?
1) What 'content makers'? 2) Actually I think it is illegal to share music files with your friends. I doubt you will ever have 'millions' of friends either. I'm talking about real friends, not the ones who are leeching off of your files.
3) Authors do in fact have a right to stop you from copying their work.. it's called.. wait for it.. copyright! Sure they're not allowed to stop communications, but you're not talking about communicating, you're talking about making copies of something which originally cost someone money to produce, and which they released as a product to be bought, not as freeware. The idea that having the ability to copy something makes it legal to break copyright is ludicrous. Just because you have a photocopier doesn't mean you can start your own publishing company publishing other people's books, magazines or newspapers, or start printing money for yourself. Grow up. 4) Publish means to make public. Putting up a torrent is making that file public. Again, grow up. I'm happy to pay for my music. I wish that more went to the artist rather than the publisher, but it's the artist's choice which publisher they go with. There are some good ones out there, though not enough. Self publication is also a decent option these days as legal downloading gains acceptance.
I think it would be more likely that Bush would be taking up one in that case.
that was meant to say "to [insert account number here]". Stupid HTML strippers always spoiling the party.
"Hello. We are in your datacentre. Pay us 1 million dollars to or we will delete all of your encryption keys. Oh, and can you tell me your administrator password too, please?"
"and what is thing that was plugged in between the keyboard and my computer?"
I would have thought that it would be pretty easy to algorithmically decide what is legal in a lot of cases (as long as you can decide on a firm value or set of values for certain ambiguous words), but a lack of evidence - either physical evidence, or trying to judge the true intentions and mental state of the defendant - means we have to bring in a human element. When you have to start trying to force interpretations on a law, then the person is probably guilty of something, and it's just all your fancy lawyers trying to get them out of trouble by not following the actual spirit in which the law was made, with people getting off lightly on technical grounds or whatever. I am not a lawyer, and of course that's just my opinion.
True. It's much more convenient to use cracked copies of games rather than take the CDs with you everywhere in case you feel like playing them on your laptop at your friend's house/whatever. Note: I do buy all my games, but I like to download the 'No CD' versions so that I can keep the original CDs/DVDs in good condition, and so that I dont have to swap out friggin game CDs to watch a DVD. Games should not need the disc after installation. Hopefully I'm not being hypocritical because I'm happy to use plastic discs to store my movies on for the moment. The difference is that I only tend to use each DVD about once every 2 years on average, whereas my game discs would get months of use at a time if I didn't have a NoCD version.
Smugness is when you're a smug git about it. Confidence is usually quieter and less abrasive.
Your analogy is slightly off. Even from just reading the summary you can see that this is like a locksmith with a list of criminals who subscribe to his mailing list. The locksmith works out the vulnerabilities in your security (most houses are pathetically insecure via lockpicking anyway, if you really want into a house it's not gonna be hard to get in), then lets these criminals know them, but refuses to let you yourself know what the vulnerability is. He doesn't demand payment from you - he refuses to give you the information for any price, because you almost certainly won't pay as much as all his other clients. Because you have millions of houses, with millions of [currency]s worth of currency.
:P
For some reason when I first read the summary I was thinking of this company's clients as benign, but a second reading made me rethink
I thought he was referring to Mork and Mindy
W00T PANTS!! Where's my Spiderman webslinger?!!
I'm aware of those, we have distinct cultural differences even in a country as small as Scotland, plenty of local dialects and even another language. As far as farmland goes, I usually find it extremely ugly and boring. I saw the vast prairies in Canada. Crazy, but still boring. I already know about the Amish, didn't know what Appalachia was, but after looking it up it again doesn't sound like something that would interest me. Maybe I'm just closed minded, but I'd be more interested in the culture of places like Egypt, India, China, Japan and so on. Even in America with its influx of immigrants, the culture doesn't vary very much from that in the UK. Sure there are some differences, but not enough to make it interesting to me.
If you live in Conspiracy World, yes they did. But there's no way of proving it.
When I was 6 my dad explained perpetual motion to me, my other idea was to generate electricity with a wheel but also push the wheel with the power it generated, but obviously it would lose energy overall due to friction. Thinking back on it, my magnet idea would have worked, but few years ago on /. I read how loads of people make perpetual motion machines with magnets. They do in fact 'work'. But they're not doing anything magical, the energy provided is from the magnetic force, which takes more energy to create than you get out of it. Renewable sources of energy are a much more worthwhile field to explore and make inventions. What this guy has done with his life is ridiculous. He lost his wife and kid for a concept that is known to be false, and there is not going to be a happy ending.
The only confusing bit in the article is how the professor at the university considers it novel how the magnet creates acceleration from the position that it's in (though to me it seems pretty obvious as I said, I though up a wheel that is kept in motion by using magnets at a young age). The rest of it reads as a sad tale of obsession - the guy has ruined his life over nothing (in fact something that he clearly says he does not understand, which shows he must have a pretty low level of intelligence, though the article doesn't give much detail on the device). In my opinion it would have been much more valuable to look after his family. My dad was a pretty smart guy but I wish he'd spent more time with us - he died unexpectedly when he was 42 and I was 17, and it made me radically rethink my attitude on learning, study and so on, it was just 6 weeks before I started University. Anyway, he was always studying and learning, for example I found a 'teach yourself Hebrew' book next to his bed after he died, but then I was like what was the point? All the work that he did (and I have his job now, except I usually keep my coding and work restricted to working hours) just kept him from spending time being a husband and a father. I respect those that dedicate their lives to their work, but even more I respect those that put in all the hard work involved in keeping a happy family, bringing up your kids in a happy and positive environment. Being an inventor is piss easy compared to that. Learning is a noble pastime, but it has to be balanced with other things, as does everything in life.