Hell, yeah. If I was paying for it, I'd want rip-quality stuff, and a bunch of dedicated seeders so I can max out my line.
And frankly, they might as well leave the DRM off anyway, seeing as all those movies have already been pirated anyway.
I find it strange how people tend to think of TV as a necessity, like food, clothing or shelter. Supposedly, there are loads of families living in the US who can't afford daycare or health insurance but can afford a nice 21-incher. The article makes it sound like the aussies are experiencing some sort of "TV famine" and are willing to do ANYTHING to get their episodes. It makes it sound like they're being forced to use bittorrent, like villagers forced to eat rats during a siege or something. You can't blame people for stealing food when they're starving, right?
Wake up. TV isn't a necessity. Nobody NEEDS to watch Lost, or Idol, or any of that stuff. This whole thing is really more like prohibition. The governement has made copyright infringement illegal for real, justifiable reasons. However, nobody knows whether p2p actually hurts content producers. Furthermore, like having a drink, people are not really conditioned to think piracy is wrong, and hence you see a thriving "black market" run by swedes and russians and the like.
When content distributors (in Australia or anywhere else), hold a monopoly on content, you cannot buy a show unless they want to sell to you. In fact, the only reason they can afford NOT to release those shows in Australia is because they do hold a monopoly. In a free market, you never make more money by not selling product. But in a monopoly, you do.
The real problem with a restricted market is that it's suboptimal. Ayn Rand fans might wax lyrical about the virtues of free enterprise, but the fact of the matter is that monopolies just plain suck for everyone involved. When the FTC split up Standard Oil, stock prices jumped, and they actually made more money in the end. When media companies try to lock down their content as hard as possible (HDCP, AACS, CSS, WMV, pick your favorite ancronym) or when they refuse to distribute to a specific country, they are losing revenue and creating the perfect environment for piracy.
Piracy isn't exactly right, but it's quite appealing when it's more convenient than the legal alternative.
I don't know about that; I'd think that'd be a pretty cushy job. Sort of like being paid to check porn to see if it should be censored. Of course, it might get a little futile flagging episode after episode of naruto, just to see them come back again.
Actually, unless they can implement some kind of effective computerized filtering, they're never going to stop uploads; they'd have to hire an small army. Of course, I don't really see what the big deal is anyway; nobody who was serious about a show would watch it in low resolution on youtube; they'd either buy it or use P2P. If I was them, I'd try to cut my losses and recoup as much ad revenue as I could; that stuff is getting views, but ads are about as much as anyone would be willing to "pay" for it.
I'm also surprised they haven't tried any viral marketing stunts; the medium would be perfect for stirring up interest in new shows. Hell, it already does, but they're too stuck in the past to take advantage of it. I mean, we all heard about the publicity for the leaked 24 episodes -- if they could do something like that on purpose, along with a coordinated marketing flood on the "traditional" media, they could clean up.
Well, how do you think they uploaded it in the first place?
I admit, if I was doing it, I'd get it off bittorrent, but a lot of people don't actually have broadband, or want to risk a DMCA.
When I didn't have broadband, I recorded a lot of music off the radio. I had a script to start it at the right time, and start recording. I transferred a fair number of tapes the same way. For CDs it would be even easier: just write a script to play each track and record it to each file. It's not like you'd have to supervise it, or solder your own cables, or anything. Since it would be coming straight from your CD drive, you probably wouldn't even be able to tell it from the original.
Also, metadata for a CD has to be typed in by hand. Freedb can help with that, but a fair bit of the entries are screwed up, because the submitter didn't know what he was doing. I've also ripped a lot of CDs that freedb had no entries at all for. Likewise, I've downloaded music where the metadata was all crapped up. It's not like stuff magically appears on P2P; somebody has to break the copy protection, type in all the data, and upload it.
But yes, I do prefer to pirate stuff, anyway.
The ultimate key would be AACS-LA's Root Key. If they could find that one, hollywood would have to revoke everything. Every player in the world would stop playing new disks. If they had the balls to do it.
But this key is enough to decrypt any DVD currently on the market. Unlike before, you don't need a copy of windvd, you could write a standalone program for linux. Previous keys were specific to each movie, and you had to do a ram dump on windvd to find them.
The easiest thing would be to buy a CD player, and then re-record the music. There may be some way to play the cd "in hardware" on linux, and record straight from the CD in. I've never tried to circumvent that sort of thing, but I'm sure it can be done.
They were screwing with you. School administrators invented the word "arbitrary". After all, when you're a principal, everyone starts to look like a kid.
There's a lot of fud and confusion about the whole thing; but AFAIK, the current draft allows for that sort of thing. Admins can block ports, or throttle, or do QOS, or whatever. What they want to make illegal is blocking or prioritizing packets based on who they're from, who they're to, or content. There's a big difference. If I buy internet, I want the whole internet; I don't want to be blocked from accessing someone because they forgot to pay protection. And yes, they're not just prioritizing packets, they're actually blocking stuff like skype.
And I agree that port-based QOS would be a good thing, but only if I could control via a web interface or something. I'd want to be able to set my gaming ports for lower lag, and bittorrent up high.
But I don't think the free market is going to handle it in any reasonable amount of time; mainly because the market isn't free. The business is still regulated out to wazoo anyway; and many of those regulations block progress. The big fear is that telcos would use their monopoly to turn the internet into something like cable TV, where you buy "packages", and you can't buy anything alone. Actually, they already do this (some places you can't buy DSL without phone), but the doomsday scenario would be if they started charging you for websites. Want to visit youtube? Then you have to buy it as part of a "package" that includes myspace, digg, etc.
Though, none of this is going to matter when they release the new WiMax standard anyway. Gigabit isn't fast enough for everything, but it's fast enough for downloading linux, or gaming, or voice, or just about anything except high-quality video or an actual server. We might even get a real mesh, which would end those DMCA worries for good.
Your right, that sounds like a fucking screwed up game. Maybe if they made a game out of Elfen Lied, it would come close, but you'd have to be one hell of a sick fucker to play it.
Ah. Mr. Wooden Spoon. I still remember attending many of his speeches. He could be quite eloquent at times, and extremely persuasive.
Of course, for the kid in the article, this was just out of the question. He was bigger than his parents, and according to the article, he must have been a fucking psychopath, and would not have been affected by something like that anyway.
On the other hand, you never know how close you are to a major breakthrough if you don't push. For example, the ancient greeks could have invented the steam engine, but they just weren't interested. They had the reciprocating pump, but they didn't think to run steam through it. Of course, I don't know what they would have done with a steam engine. Also, the economic situation was sort of different, and they didn't have iron, but the fact remains that there was no technical reason preventing the industrial revolution from occurring 800 years earlier.
I never quite understood why people got so upset about goatse and tubgirl. Especially goatse. It's just this guy pulling open his you-know-what. What's the big deal?
And I seriously doubt many young kids would really understand it, much less be mentally scarred. Actually, kids can be pretty filthy-minded. My brother once stored tried to store his shit in ziplock baggies. That sort of thing is normal for kids. Shock at seeing goatse is more or less an adult thing.
Yes, you heard me right. I'm saying that obscenity is in the eye of the beholder. How does that saying go? "If your eye offends you, pluck it out."
They need to be taught about sex, yes, but not exposed to the intimate details.
If you don't, Mr. Goatse will.
Want another? Ever watch those dateline shows where they catch the would-be child molesters? If yes, did you notice that many of these men send the victim porn? Ever wonder why? Well, to desensitize them to sex and thus make them easier prey. Porn creates the mentality that casual sex is A-OK. Moral obligations aside, that's risky behaviour.
What do you mean? Tentacle rape is normal, isnt it???
Seriously, that one doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
Re:It may be time for me to make this choice soon.
on
From Bess to Worse
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· Score: 1
The other day, he entered ".com" into the browser at school, and the helpful search engine displayed Girls Gone Wild as a top hit. Needless to say, the school's filter blocked it.
Better nip that one in the bud as soon as you can. The next thing you know, he'll be doing XSS on myspace and get locked up for "hacking".
I can testify from experience that gnome users usually don't know what they're missing.
Yeah, at first, the simplicity is nice, and easy on the eyes. Actually, I was pretty happy with gnome itself when I was using it. The big thing that pissed me off was Nautilus. The icons were too big, the left bar was buggy, and there was no way of changing it. I also looked for a CVS plugin for nautilus, and couldn't find one. And, unlike a lot of people, who give up on an environment after messing with it for a couple of hours, I used gnome for six months. And I started out with gnome, so I was unprejudiced.
Then, I read the original "linus hates gnome" thread, and my brother and I thought, what the hell, let's try KDE.
The primary advantage to KDE, I found out, is not really configurability. In my opinion, the Gnome people are right, to some extent, that KDE has too many useless checkboxes. The advantages to KDE are:
1. You can set the toolbar icons smaller than gnome. That way they don't waste space. on small screens 2. KDE is a little more mature than gnome, a little more stable, a little more thought-out, and a little faster. 3. The dock in KDE doesn't have a hard-wired theme. 4. Better documentation. 5. More apps, for now.
But the real reason I switched to KDE was for Konqueror. The amount of features it has, really useful features that I actually use every day, is mind blowing. There is a big, big difference between this sort of thing and extra checkboxes. In konqueror, you can get a view of files such that larger files appear bigger on the screen, and the whole folder tree is displayed at once. This is incredibly useful for finding which files are eating your disk space. Also, in konqueror, you can split the view. This is a simple feature, but it improves usability loads, as you no longer need a ftp client. Konqueror also has tabs, which, unfortunately, you can't drag files between. Konqueror also has photo viewer, which reduces the need for yet another app that does exactly the same thing as a file manager anyway.
Nautilus, in contrast, is slow at drawing, wastes screen space, and doesn't have tabs. It does have those weird buttons at the top, which are a nice idea, but they should go all the way up to the root. nautilus also locks up if you try to open a big folder over ftp. Konqueror, on the other hand, has an unobtrusive progress bar for opening big folders, and a cancel button. i think it's that sort of touch that describes the difference between KDE and gnome; GNOME works, but KDE is more usable, and for me, it's easier to ignore the features I don't need than to deal with the slow and buggy. Yes, slow and buggy. That isn't true for most of gnome, but it is true for nautilus, and that's enough to kill gnome for me. I'm starting to suspect that nobody actually uses nautilus and that they all use the command line or konqueror instead.
But I agree that the design of gnome on the whole is rather elegant. For things like gnome terminal, they really do provide the most useful options right where you want them. For me, it was a shame to have to give up that. They've got something going, but their implementation lacks flexibility and polish. I'm not asking for configurability, I'm asking for flexibility. Either the gnome team has to unstiffen their necks and improve the interface a little, or KDE has to cut some of the fat. Supposedly, KDE 4 will improve usability and become more gnome-like, maybe this is the solution.
You're right about not having crap in the kernel, but wrong in general. This is a really good idea.
For example, look at fvwm. FVWM is a window manager with themes. By themes, this doesn't mean changing a few colors here or there, or the shape of the buttons. You can actually lay out all your menus, bars, and buttons. You can build a primitive desktop environment in it. The only problem is that it is incredibly difficult to do anything more than just having a few static buttons on the screen.
What KDE and gnome should do is open up the whole interface for scripting. Instead of just having a single bar at the bottom of the screen, with a menu that gets read from files, you should be able to configure the whole thing. Instead of having KDE as one massive blob, it should be possible to just use the dock, for example. Ideally, KDE shouldn't compete with gnome, there should just be competing file managers, and competing docks, and competing window managers.
my advice is, install aptitude. It's supposedly more modern than apt-get, and it's a little easier to use. to find stuff, do aptitude search. to install, do aptitude install. to get package details, aptitude show. and then, of course, update for update, and upgrade for upgrade. And with aptitude, the search actually works, unlike apt-get.
kubuntu was a piece of crap for me (maybe that was just the bugginess of edgy), so I switched to etch. etch was much worse in terms of hardware support, but they don't screw around and break KDE like they do with ubuntu.
Yeah, that's about right. I may be jaded, but sex and violence on TV isn't really that big a deal. I know they've got loads of studies about TV making kids more violent, but it's pretty obvious that this is just science with an agenda, like that study that wine was good for heart disease. Oh, sure, in certain circumstances, it might, possibly, maybe, have an affect, but the real purpose of the study is psychological, as humans seem unable to understand extremely small probabilities (which is why they do things like buy lottery tickets).
No, it's not really about the kids. It's totally political. The peaceniks deem violence unnatural, and would prefer that nobody watched it. The neocons deem sex unnatural, and would prefer that nobody watched it. Children don't have anything to do with it.
Of course, I've probably already been corrupted by watching too much anime. Heaven forbid that we might actually see realistic blood smears, dismembered limbs, or some boobies. Ironically, because gore is frowned upon, we get crap like Lord of the Rings that is practically bloodless and depicts killing as clean and noble.
Oh, and torture is real. Bitching about seeing it on tv is just sticking your head in the sand. Actually, I think that's what a lot of this is. Ironically, most of the really brutal anime I've seen (Elfen Lied, for example, or Shadow Star), is about how evil people can be, and how killing and torturing everything in your way doesn't really accomplish anything. But there isn't a snowball's chance in hell of that airing over here.
And Tom and Jerry doesn't even count as violence; that's just slapstick. And, yeah, it would be pretty bad if everything was watered-down crap. Oh, wait, guess what most of TV is? Thank God for unrated, unregulated bittorrent. Too bad it's illegal.
You know, I hear a lot of crap about how horrible wikipedia is. Guess what: For many topics, it's the best source of quick info out there. I use it at least as much as mathworld, and I'm not the only one. It's not good to base your whole paper on a wikipedia article, but that isn't what wikipedia is for.
And I hope you know that Shakespeare actually was "faggy".
That sort of thing is my number one pet peeve: fiction that tries to regurgitate some kind of political propaganda. I see that everywhere; there's a ton of fantasy that has an extremely obvious environmentalist agenda. Now, I am not opposed to environmentalism. Furthermore, that sort of thing would probably have been fresh and innovative anout 40 years ago. It's just, at this point,/everybody/ has already heard about the fricken trees, and you don't accomplish anything by covering it in a veneer of elves and dragons.
Or, take the other example: Left Behind. I started reading it because I thought it was going to be a dark apocalyptic sci-fi. Instead, they spend the entire series rehashing fundamentalist christian dogma. They cranked out twelve bloody books of the crap, when the same thing can be (and has been) said in a 5 minute speech.
The problem, of course, happens when writers or game designers substitute regurgitated, redundant groupthink for plot. Controversy is okay. Something that presents a new, in-depth argument for something is also okay. Asking open-ended questions to make the player actually think is the best, in my opinion. But if it's the same crap I hear everyday on the news, there's a serious lack of thought going into that storyline.
If you aren't going to write your own story, there are much better sources to rip off. You could rip off a true story. You could rip off a folk tale. You could rip off shakespeare; people think it's a good thing. You could rip off famous philosophers; just take a famous paradox, come up with an analogy, and work through the analysis. That's what sci-fi is. But if you rip off BBC/FOX/whatever, you have a serious problem thinking for yourself.
Well, theoretically, it is incredibly unlikely to last longer than a tiny fraction of a second. Also, these things have very little mass, so they would not be able to attract much of anything. Of course, part of the reason they are trying to form them is to verify their theory.
On the other hand, it would be incredibly cool. The thing would fall right down to the center of the earth and "suck the insides" right out. I don't know how fast death would be for a tiny black hole like that, but it would be fun to see how everyone would behave if they knew the end of the world was inevitable. And unlike a nuclear war, there would be no hope for survivors unless they escaped into space.
I think you were thinking of quantum cryptography. A one-time pad is only as strong as the random number generator used to create it. American cryptanalysts were able to break russian diplomatic communications from the cold war because they used a crappy random number generator.
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Hell, yeah. If I was paying for it, I'd want rip-quality stuff, and a bunch of dedicated seeders so I can max out my line. And frankly, they might as well leave the DRM off anyway, seeing as all those movies have already been pirated anyway.
I find it strange how people tend to think of TV as a necessity, like food, clothing or shelter. Supposedly, there are loads of families living in the US who can't afford daycare or health insurance but can afford a nice 21-incher. The article makes it sound like the aussies are experiencing some sort of "TV famine" and are willing to do ANYTHING to get their episodes. It makes it sound like they're being forced to use bittorrent, like villagers forced to eat rats during a siege or something. You can't blame people for stealing food when they're starving, right?
Wake up. TV isn't a necessity. Nobody NEEDS to watch Lost, or Idol, or any of that stuff. This whole thing is really more like prohibition. The governement has made copyright infringement illegal for real, justifiable reasons. However, nobody knows whether p2p actually hurts content producers. Furthermore, like having a drink, people are not really conditioned to think piracy is wrong, and hence you see a thriving "black market" run by swedes and russians and the like.
When content distributors (in Australia or anywhere else), hold a monopoly on content, you cannot buy a show unless they want to sell to you. In fact, the only reason they can afford NOT to release those shows in Australia is because they do hold a monopoly. In a free market, you never make more money by not selling product. But in a monopoly, you do.
The real problem with a restricted market is that it's suboptimal. Ayn Rand fans might wax lyrical about the virtues of free enterprise, but the fact of the matter is that monopolies just plain suck for everyone involved. When the FTC split up Standard Oil, stock prices jumped, and they actually made more money in the end. When media companies try to lock down their content as hard as possible (HDCP, AACS, CSS, WMV, pick your favorite ancronym) or when they refuse to distribute to a specific country, they are losing revenue and creating the perfect environment for piracy.
Piracy isn't exactly right, but it's quite appealing when it's more convenient than the legal alternative.
I don't know about that; I'd think that'd be a pretty cushy job. Sort of like being paid to check porn to see if it should be censored. Of course, it might get a little futile flagging episode after episode of naruto, just to see them come back again.
Actually, unless they can implement some kind of effective computerized filtering, they're never going to stop uploads; they'd have to hire an small army. Of course, I don't really see what the big deal is anyway; nobody who was serious about a show would watch it in low resolution on youtube; they'd either buy it or use P2P. If I was them, I'd try to cut my losses and recoup as much ad revenue as I could; that stuff is getting views, but ads are about as much as anyone would be willing to "pay" for it.
I'm also surprised they haven't tried any viral marketing stunts; the medium would be perfect for stirring up interest in new shows. Hell, it already does, but they're too stuck in the past to take advantage of it. I mean, we all heard about the publicity for the leaked 24 episodes -- if they could do something like that on purpose, along with a coordinated marketing flood on the "traditional" media, they could clean up.
All these n00bs talking about installing something on 64 megs crack me up. When I was a boy, I ran windows 3.1 on my TI-83 -- and was grateful, too!
It's been ten whole years, and MY install hasn't even finished downloading yet, you insensitive clod!
Well, how do you think they uploaded it in the first place? I admit, if I was doing it, I'd get it off bittorrent, but a lot of people don't actually have broadband, or want to risk a DMCA. When I didn't have broadband, I recorded a lot of music off the radio. I had a script to start it at the right time, and start recording. I transferred a fair number of tapes the same way. For CDs it would be even easier: just write a script to play each track and record it to each file. It's not like you'd have to supervise it, or solder your own cables, or anything. Since it would be coming straight from your CD drive, you probably wouldn't even be able to tell it from the original. Also, metadata for a CD has to be typed in by hand. Freedb can help with that, but a fair bit of the entries are screwed up, because the submitter didn't know what he was doing. I've also ripped a lot of CDs that freedb had no entries at all for. Likewise, I've downloaded music where the metadata was all crapped up. It's not like stuff magically appears on P2P; somebody has to break the copy protection, type in all the data, and upload it. But yes, I do prefer to pirate stuff, anyway.
The ultimate key would be AACS-LA's Root Key. If they could find that one, hollywood would have to revoke everything. Every player in the world would stop playing new disks. If they had the balls to do it.
But this key is enough to decrypt any DVD currently on the market. Unlike before, you don't need a copy of windvd, you could write a standalone program for linux. Previous keys were specific to each movie, and you had to do a ram dump on windvd to find them.
The easiest thing would be to buy a CD player, and then re-record the music. There may be some way to play the cd "in hardware" on linux, and record straight from the CD in. I've never tried to circumvent that sort of thing, but I'm sure it can be done.
They were screwing with you. School administrators invented the word "arbitrary". After all, when you're a principal, everyone starts to look like a kid.
There's a lot of fud and confusion about the whole thing; but AFAIK, the current draft allows for that sort of thing. Admins can block ports, or throttle, or do QOS, or whatever. What they want to make illegal is blocking or prioritizing packets based on who they're from, who they're to, or content. There's a big difference. If I buy internet, I want the whole internet; I don't want to be blocked from accessing someone because they forgot to pay protection. And yes, they're not just prioritizing packets, they're actually blocking stuff like skype.
And I agree that port-based QOS would be a good thing, but only if I could control via a web interface or something. I'd want to be able to set my gaming ports for lower lag, and bittorrent up high.
But I don't think the free market is going to handle it in any reasonable amount of time; mainly because the market isn't free. The business is still regulated out to wazoo anyway; and many of those regulations block progress. The big fear is that telcos would use their monopoly to turn the internet into something like cable TV, where you buy "packages", and you can't buy anything alone. Actually, they already do this (some places you can't buy DSL without phone), but the doomsday scenario would be if they started charging you for websites. Want to visit youtube? Then you have to buy it as part of a "package" that includes myspace, digg, etc.
Though, none of this is going to matter when they release the new WiMax standard anyway. Gigabit isn't fast enough for everything, but it's fast enough for downloading linux, or gaming, or voice, or just about anything except high-quality video or an actual server. We might even get a real mesh, which would end those DMCA worries for good.
Your right, that sounds like a fucking screwed up game. Maybe if they made a game out of Elfen Lied, it would come close, but you'd have to be one hell of a sick fucker to play it.
Ah. Mr. Wooden Spoon. I still remember attending many of his speeches. He could be quite eloquent at times, and extremely persuasive.
Of course, for the kid in the article, this was just out of the question. He was bigger than his parents, and according to the article, he must have been a fucking psychopath, and would not have been affected by something like that anyway.
On the other hand, you never know how close you are to a major breakthrough if you don't push. For example, the ancient greeks could have invented the steam engine, but they just weren't interested. They had the reciprocating pump, but they didn't think to run steam through it. Of course, I don't know what they would have done with a steam engine. Also, the economic situation was sort of different, and they didn't have iron, but the fact remains that there was no technical reason preventing the industrial revolution from occurring 800 years earlier.
I never quite understood why people got so upset about goatse and tubgirl. Especially goatse. It's just this guy pulling open his you-know-what. What's the big deal?
And I seriously doubt many young kids would really understand it, much less be mentally scarred. Actually, kids can be pretty filthy-minded. My brother once stored tried to store his shit in ziplock baggies. That sort of thing is normal for kids. Shock at seeing goatse is more or less an adult thing.
Yes, you heard me right. I'm saying that obscenity is in the eye of the beholder. How does that saying go? "If your eye offends you, pluck it out."
Seriously, that one doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
I can testify from experience that gnome users usually don't know what they're missing.
Yeah, at first, the simplicity is nice, and easy on the eyes. Actually, I was pretty happy with gnome itself when I was using it. The big thing that pissed me off was Nautilus. The icons were too big, the left bar was buggy, and there was no way of changing it. I also looked for a CVS plugin for nautilus, and couldn't find one. And, unlike a lot of people, who give up on an environment after messing with it for a couple of hours, I used gnome for six months. And I started out with gnome, so I was unprejudiced.
Then, I read the original "linus hates gnome" thread, and my brother and I thought, what the hell, let's try KDE.
The primary advantage to KDE, I found out, is not really configurability. In my opinion, the Gnome people are right, to some extent, that KDE has too many useless checkboxes. The advantages to KDE are:
1. You can set the toolbar icons smaller than gnome. That way they don't waste space. on small screens
2. KDE is a little more mature than gnome, a little more stable, a little more thought-out, and a little faster.
3. The dock in KDE doesn't have a hard-wired theme.
4. Better documentation.
5. More apps, for now.
But the real reason I switched to KDE was for Konqueror. The amount of features it has, really useful features that I actually use every day, is mind blowing. There is a big, big difference between this sort of thing and extra checkboxes. In konqueror, you can get a view of files such that larger files appear bigger on the screen, and the whole folder tree is displayed at once. This is incredibly useful for finding which files are eating your disk space. Also, in konqueror, you can split the view. This is a simple feature, but it improves usability loads, as you no longer need a ftp client. Konqueror also has tabs, which, unfortunately, you can't drag files between. Konqueror also has photo viewer, which reduces the need for yet another app that does exactly the same thing as a file manager anyway.
Nautilus, in contrast, is slow at drawing, wastes screen space, and doesn't have tabs. It does have those weird buttons at the top, which are a nice idea, but they should go all the way up to the root. nautilus also locks up if you try to open a big folder over ftp. Konqueror, on the other hand, has an unobtrusive progress bar for opening big folders, and a cancel button. i think it's that sort of touch that describes the difference between KDE and gnome; GNOME works, but KDE is more usable, and for me, it's easier to ignore the features I don't need than to deal with the slow and buggy. Yes, slow and buggy. That isn't true for most of gnome, but it is true for nautilus, and that's enough to kill gnome for me. I'm starting to suspect that nobody actually uses nautilus and that they all use the command line or konqueror instead.
But I agree that the design of gnome on the whole is rather elegant. For things like gnome terminal, they really do provide the most useful options right where you want them. For me, it was a shame to have to give up that. They've got something going, but their implementation lacks flexibility and polish. I'm not asking for configurability, I'm asking for flexibility. Either the gnome team has to unstiffen their necks and improve the interface a little, or KDE has to cut some of the fat. Supposedly, KDE 4 will improve usability and become more gnome-like, maybe this is the solution.
You're right about not having crap in the kernel, but wrong in general. This is a really good idea.
For example, look at fvwm. FVWM is a window manager with themes. By themes, this doesn't mean changing a few colors here or there, or the shape of the buttons. You can actually lay out all your menus, bars, and buttons. You can build a primitive desktop environment in it. The only problem is that it is incredibly difficult to do anything more than just having a few static buttons on the screen.
What KDE and gnome should do is open up the whole interface for scripting. Instead of just having a single bar at the bottom of the screen, with a menu that gets read from files, you should be able to configure the whole thing. Instead of having KDE as one massive blob, it should be possible to just use the dock, for example. Ideally, KDE shouldn't compete with gnome, there should just be competing file managers, and competing docks, and competing window managers.
my advice is, install aptitude. It's supposedly more modern than apt-get, and it's a little easier to use. to find stuff, do aptitude search. to install, do aptitude install. to get package details, aptitude show. and then, of course, update for update, and upgrade for upgrade. And with aptitude, the search actually works, unlike apt-get. kubuntu was a piece of crap for me (maybe that was just the bugginess of edgy), so I switched to etch. etch was much worse in terms of hardware support, but they don't screw around and break KDE like they do with ubuntu.
Yeah, that's about right. I may be jaded, but sex and violence on TV isn't really that big a deal. I know they've got loads of studies about TV making kids more violent, but it's pretty obvious that this is just science with an agenda, like that study that wine was good for heart disease. Oh, sure, in certain circumstances, it might, possibly, maybe, have an affect, but the real purpose of the study is psychological, as humans seem unable to understand extremely small probabilities (which is why they do things like buy lottery tickets).
No, it's not really about the kids. It's totally political. The peaceniks deem violence unnatural, and would prefer that nobody watched it. The neocons deem sex unnatural, and would prefer that nobody watched it. Children don't have anything to do with it.
Of course, I've probably already been corrupted by watching too much anime. Heaven forbid that we might actually see realistic blood smears, dismembered limbs, or some boobies. Ironically, because gore is frowned upon, we get crap like Lord of the Rings that is practically bloodless and depicts killing as clean and noble.
Oh, and torture is real. Bitching about seeing it on tv is just sticking your head in the sand. Actually, I think that's what a lot of this is. Ironically, most of the really brutal anime I've seen (Elfen Lied, for example, or Shadow Star), is about how evil people can be, and how killing and torturing everything in your way doesn't really accomplish anything. But there isn't a snowball's chance in hell of that airing over here.
And Tom and Jerry doesn't even count as violence; that's just slapstick. And, yeah, it would be pretty bad if everything was watered-down crap. Oh, wait, guess what most of TV is? Thank God for unrated, unregulated bittorrent. Too bad it's illegal.
Heh, heh, heh. In soviet russia, quantum kittens kill you.
You know, I hear a lot of crap about how horrible wikipedia is. Guess what: For many topics, it's the best source of quick info out there. I use it at least as much as mathworld, and I'm not the only one. It's not good to base your whole paper on a wikipedia article, but that isn't what wikipedia is for.
And I hope you know that Shakespeare actually was "faggy".
Wow. You are a real voice of sanity.
/everybody/ has already heard about the fricken trees, and you don't accomplish anything by covering it in a veneer of elves and dragons.
That sort of thing is my number one pet peeve: fiction that tries to regurgitate some kind of political propaganda. I see that everywhere; there's a ton of fantasy that has an extremely obvious environmentalist agenda. Now, I am not opposed to environmentalism. Furthermore, that sort of thing would probably have been fresh and innovative anout 40 years ago. It's just, at this point,
Or, take the other example: Left Behind. I started reading it because I thought it was going to be a dark apocalyptic sci-fi. Instead, they spend the entire series rehashing fundamentalist christian dogma. They cranked out twelve bloody books of the crap, when the same thing can be (and has been) said in a 5 minute speech.
The problem, of course, happens when writers or game designers substitute regurgitated, redundant groupthink for plot. Controversy is okay. Something that presents a new, in-depth argument for something is also okay. Asking open-ended questions to make the player actually think is the best, in my opinion. But if it's the same crap I hear everyday on the news, there's a serious lack of thought going into that storyline.
If you aren't going to write your own story, there are much better sources to rip off. You could rip off a true story. You could rip off a folk tale. You could rip off shakespeare; people think it's a good thing. You could rip off famous philosophers; just take a famous paradox, come up with an analogy, and work through the analysis. That's what sci-fi is. But if you rip off BBC/FOX/whatever, you have a serious problem thinking for yourself.
Well, theoretically, it is incredibly unlikely to last longer than a tiny fraction of a second. Also, these things have very little mass, so they would not be able to attract much of anything. Of course, part of the reason they are trying to form them is to verify their theory.
On the other hand, it would be incredibly cool. The thing would fall right down to the center of the earth and "suck the insides" right out. I don't know how fast death would be for a tiny black hole like that, but it would be fun to see how everyone would behave if they knew the end of the world was inevitable. And unlike a nuclear war, there would be no hope for survivors unless they escaped into space.
I think you were thinking of quantum cryptography. A one-time pad is only as strong as the random number generator used to create it. American cryptanalysts were able to break russian diplomatic communications from the cold war because they used a crappy random number generator.