I'm sorry if my joke stirred up some rough feelings. It wasn't intended to be anything more than a light-hearted poke at how difficult us nerds have it procreation-wise.
I hear ya. The question isn't about whether or not there are people who will go out of their way to avoid spending money, it's whether or not the number of people is very big. There's this industry-wide suggestion that a downloaded game equals a lost sale. I've yet to see anything that actually supports that. Well, I take that back. There was one number that I thought raised a few eyebrows. This isn't exact, mind you, but it was something like 800,000 DS's were sold in Korea and 200,000 units of software. Piracy? Even I'd admit that's a strong possibility. So why don't we have a number like that in the US?
Well, I'll tell you this: We wouldn't be in this economic problem right now if large numbers of people were penny pinchers. Heck, look at the success of Starbucks. $3 for a cup of coffee that even the place that changes my oil gives away for free? Oil changes!! I actually know how to change my oil, but I never do. It's just $20 away! Okay okay, I'm getting anecdotal here, but hopefully you catch my meaning. For all we know lots of people pirate games, that keeps them excited about playing, so they go buy other games. Provable? No. But consider how singles were popular for a long time, singles of songs played all the time on the radio. This is, mind you, after it became trivial to record radio transmissions.
I may be thinking on larger scale than you are, and I apologize if that's creating some unnecessary drama for you. The FA basically says that Nintendo launched the DSi to fight piracy. Frankly, I do not believe that. I think they released it because of virtual console sales on the Wii. That's the whole BFD of that system and why the lack of a GBA port isn't causing a frantic waving of torches and pitchforks.
Isn't the point of something like "Semester at Sea" to immerse yourself in the program, and become involved deeply in the studies and the people you're traveling with?
What you're wanting to do is like ordering escargot in a French restaurant and smothering them in ketchup.
He wants a little email, not to jack into the Matrix.
Seriously, do you have any info on who zooms in or out how often and why?
That's one of the features that made me an Opera zealot. Fairly regularly I'll scale up a page so ppl around my desk can easily read it. I also sometimes scale down a page because an image is too big to fit it. (Or I just plain want to use a smaller window.)
I sometimes wish I had a mouse for each hand so I can do the zooming and rearranging that the iPhone's multi-touch supports. I'm ready for resolution independence.
You keep confusing two threats. The threat of "blowing up an airplane" is trivial: the risk to you in flying is less than the risk of driving to the airport, and the TSA does no better job of protecting you from this than the pre-TSA security did.
There is no confusion. Crashing a plane into a building == terrorism. Blowing up a plane in mid-flight == terrorism. You don't need to crash planes into buildings to cause effects that exceed just the loss of life. Make air-travel scary again and the economy's going to tank, again.
The threat of "hijacking an airplane" is more serious, but that is the sort of tactic that only works once.
Wrong. Only works 'once' for a period of time. You cannot remember the details of 9-11 a mere 7 years later, you cannot expect the rest of the world to.
Far more important than the above: the TSA is a constitutional abomination. Admittedly, we gave up the 4th amendment for the War on Drugs(TM), but this is far more outrageous in its scope. Liberty really is more important than security, and the TSA doesn't even improve security, it just makes makes people who haven't thought about the issues feel better.
Agreed.
Your life will be better if you stop living in fear.
You're right, ignorance is bliss. Now how about suggesting a practical solution instead of one that trips over its own logic? "What we're doing now is creating a target! So let's drop our guard and expand the list of potential targets!"
You could take care of the Stereo and Mic by using an external USB sound card. (You may even enjoy better recording quality since the hardware's so far away from the mobo... YMMV.) Mouse and KB? Wireless. Honestly I don't see why you'd need more than four, and I'm assuming the ethernet is a must have as it often is.
Also wireless keyboards and mice use some kind of battery. Which has a bad habit of dying at the worst time.
Are you saying this from experience or are you saying it because you've had a walkman run down while sitting on a bus or something? I've been wireless for over a year, know people that have gone far longer, and batteries are something none of us are griping about. I suppose in a worst case scenario you could have a cheapy wired mouse ready to go. Honestly, though, the 'innportune failure' isn't typically a sudden stop. My Mac, for example, gives me a warning that the battery's going. My Logitech MX Revolution has a battery indicator that lights up every time I move the mouse. My girlfriend's Microsoft KB and Mouse, they start to get flakey, but still usable. Besides all that, I've yet to work in an office enviornment that wasn't stocked to the gills with batteries.
Being able to go in your office/cube slide in or drop in your laptop. Turn it on and use the regular keyboard, mouse, and monitor is a very good thing.
Sure, I get that, especially if you take your laptop around. The whole dock concept pretty much died, though, when USB became ubiquitous. Back in the olden days you could get docks that had CD-ROMs, hard drives, PCI slots, you name it. Nowawadys that's just silly. Notebooks aren't far behind desktops in terms of graphic support. Hard drives and optical drives are a USB port away. Heck, LCDs on laptops have gotten advanced enough that monitors just aren't a BFD anymore. There's a point of diminishing returns here.
I didn't bother with a dock for my laptop. (Yes, they make one....) Instead I opted for the nicest screen I could get and two extra power supplies. One to keep at my office, one to carry in my bag. I really don't spend any significant amount of time plugging or unplugging the machine every day. I can just close the lid, let it go into suspend, and pick things up at home. Back at the height of dock-popularity, you actually had to go through an ejection procedure in Windows. I do not miss this. Both OSX and Windows can (usually) handle a missing USB device. But a dock? Well I dunno about the Mac side of it, but back in the day Windows often went into "oh shit!" mode whenever that large bit of hardware suddenly went missing. I remember the sales people in the company I worked at just got in the habit of shutting down the laptop whenever they wanted to undock it. Yick.
Maybe I'm actually a bit biased against docks for that reason. I don't know. I do understand your point, though, even if my personal experience doesn't quite measure up to it.
No one is ever going to be able to hijack an airliner and fly it into a target again, because the flight crews and passengers won't cooperate. It didn't even work later in the day on 9/11!
A year or two ago I would have believed you. However, it would appear that 9-11 is becoming a distant memory. You're not the first person I've run across here that remembers 9-11 as being the day that 3,000 people died but doesn't remember that it easily could have been 25,000. Richard Reid has been utterly forgotten. The economic disaster that caused has been forgotten. (I'll never cease to be amazed by that.) Honestly, it would not surprise me one little bit if in a couple of years from now people only remember that two buildings in NYC suddenly went missing. Never be able to hijack a plane? Never?! Bull-fucking-shit. Never in the next year? Two years? Five years? Sure, no problem believing that. But the memory's fading. give it a decade and they'll have no trouble doing it again.
But that's entirely academic. You see, the planes don't actually need to be hijacked. A whole 3 months after 9-11 there was an attempt to blow up an airliner via an explosive hidden in a shoe. I've referred to this already, the man's name was Richard Reid. Even at the height of 9-11 paranoia, he managed to get on a plane and attempt to detonate a device. The people on the plane were saved only by his incompetence. Here's a fun thought: What would happen to the U.S. if there was one blown-up plane a month?
An ordinary pre-911 metal detector protects us against any real threat...
Yeah, it stopped the 19 hijackers and Richard Reid....
Worse, the long security lines at many airports are better targets than airplanes: more people gathered together, and no security at that point.
That doesn't have the same effect as the wreckage of a plane. Besides, it's a good deal harder to kill as many people in a situation like that than it is when the plane's in flight.
There *is* a solution to security that doesn't involve wasteful (and seriously damaging to our rights) security checkpoints: human intelligence (hire people to infiltrate the terrorist organizations). 9/11 was not a failure of airport security, but a failure of HUMINT, caused directly by both underfunding and Carter's stupid rule that we should hire nefarious people as spys (does that make sense to anyone?). Real security experts know this, but the TSA is a jobs program now, so we'll never be shed of it.
As an addition to security, I think that'd be great. As a replacement? Sorry man, I'm not sold. I get what you're saying, but when the only line of defense is the gov't finding out about it.. *sigh* I'm sorry but even with 'nefarious spies' I just don't see that being reliably effective. I have no hard feelings about you thinking less of me for that, but that's just handing extremists an exploit to use.
Do you honestly, seriously believe that a terrorist will be able to use that tactic ever again?
Yes. Look at how succesful it was. There are still ripples of it today.
Do you honestly, seriously believe that the post-911 airport security did anything to make terrorism harder?
Yes. Everybody's so frickin jumpy about every little thing I doubt they find themselves with much opportunity they're willing to try to exploit.
Even if you imagine that airport security were somehow effective, it's a ridiculous waste of resources to pick one of 1000 targets and spend 10 or 100 times as much hardening it at the expense of all the other targets.
I agree. Unfortunately what you're saying is entirely unhelpful. There is just bitching there, no solution. I don't know the answer, either. If we leave ourselves vulnerable, we seriously risk another attack. If we tighten things up, we do the terrorists' jobs for them. Nobody wants to be responsible for a repeat of the tragedy. I know I wouldn't.
And in any case, the average deaths per year from terrorism remains statistically insignificant.
It's also a very narrow view of the situation. 9-11 was far more than just the deaths of 3,000 people. If you seriously want to propose dropping the 'War on Terror', you have to address that. (And boy would I be happy if you succeeded.)
Once a week? 98? Are you on crack? You do realize that when Windows 98 first came out, Microsoft themselves recommended that it be rebooted every 8 hours of use to limit the chances of it sporadically exploding while you were in the middle of something, right?
Once a week in 98 is far closer to reality than once a week in XP.
Until the danger of terrorism is larger than the danger in drviing to the airport, why ar we wasting our time with this nonsense?
There were 40,000 car deaths in United States in 2007. The WTC had 25,000 people inside the buildings when the first plane hit and often had as many as 50,000 on any given day. That's the WTC alone, never mind the Pentagon and presumably the White House. That also doesn't count the wide-spread economic impact of 9-11 since apparently the final death count is all that matters. We were very lucky that 9-11 only claimed 3,000 lives. The potential could easily have exceeded U.S. traffic deaths.
Never mind that you dying in a car crash will not tank the economy.
Perfect example. Both take about the same time. One searches the entire internet and usually returns a good result on the first page. The other searches a tiny fraction of the data, and works terribly unless you use the exact terms unique to the page you want.
Slashdot Mirror
Please someone fix the damn economy for crissakes.
Ah, okay. I'll start coding that right away.
...I'm not dead. See? I'm posting on Slashdot.
Yeah but like a poor marksman you keep... missing... the.... ... .... target.
I'm sorry if my joke stirred up some rough feelings. It wasn't intended to be anything more than a light-hearted poke at how difficult us nerds have it procreation-wise.
I hear ya. The question isn't about whether or not there are people who will go out of their way to avoid spending money, it's whether or not the number of people is very big. There's this industry-wide suggestion that a downloaded game equals a lost sale. I've yet to see anything that actually supports that. Well, I take that back. There was one number that I thought raised a few eyebrows. This isn't exact, mind you, but it was something like 800,000 DS's were sold in Korea and 200,000 units of software. Piracy? Even I'd admit that's a strong possibility. So why don't we have a number like that in the US?
Well, I'll tell you this: We wouldn't be in this economic problem right now if large numbers of people were penny pinchers. Heck, look at the success of Starbucks. $3 for a cup of coffee that even the place that changes my oil gives away for free? Oil changes!! I actually know how to change my oil, but I never do. It's just $20 away! Okay okay, I'm getting anecdotal here, but hopefully you catch my meaning. For all we know lots of people pirate games, that keeps them excited about playing, so they go buy other games. Provable? No. But consider how singles were popular for a long time, singles of songs played all the time on the radio. This is, mind you, after it became trivial to record radio transmissions.
I may be thinking on larger scale than you are, and I apologize if that's creating some unnecessary drama for you. The FA basically says that Nintendo launched the DSi to fight piracy. Frankly, I do not believe that. I think they released it because of virtual console sales on the Wii. That's the whole BFD of that system and why the lack of a GBA port isn't causing a frantic waving of torches and pitchforks.
Which sort of leaves out the obvious. People are cheap, and given the choice between having something for money or for free, many opt for free.
Okay. So let's see the income graph that is the inverse of the piracy graph.
Let me rephrase that: What it is used for other than piracy?
Legit DVD rips. Not everything that comes from DVD ripping software goes straight to the internet.
Pfft. Fuck streaming, it is always crappy.
Generalizations always suck.
Isn't the point of something like "Semester at Sea" to immerse yourself in the program, and become involved deeply in the studies and the people you're traveling with?
What you're wanting to do is like ordering escargot in a French restaurant and smothering them in ketchup.
He wants a little email, not to jack into the Matrix.
This is completely OT, just answering the question in his sig:
Can I have my userpage back?
http://slashdot.org/~mobby_6kl/comments
Over half the world population has been able to create life for some time. Aren't you all a little late to the party? -_-
Aren't you be glad that you'd finally be able to create life without the services of a woman?
Then what? One of them transforms into a telescope when you threaten it with the shotgun?
Well, Perceptor might if you aimed at his.... cripes, I can't believe I have a girlfriend.
Seriously, do you have any info on who zooms in or out how often and why?
That's one of the features that made me an Opera zealot. Fairly regularly I'll scale up a page so ppl around my desk can easily read it. I also sometimes scale down a page because an image is too big to fit it. (Or I just plain want to use a smaller window.)
I sometimes wish I had a mouse for each hand so I can do the zooming and rearranging that the iPhone's multi-touch supports. I'm ready for resolution independence.
I missed the part where those forums and your e-mail wouldn't work at the Library.
I don't get why you think making it more difficult for them to find work will get them off of Unemployment faster.
Seriously? People are too lazy to go to the unemployment office? Why am I paying taxes again?
Lazy is not a synonymn of 'efficient'. Assuming you went to a public school, I'm wondering why I'm paying taxes.
You keep confusing two threats. The threat of "blowing up an airplane" is trivial: the risk to you in flying is less than the risk of driving to the airport, and the TSA does no better job of protecting you from this than the pre-TSA security did.
There is no confusion. Crashing a plane into a building == terrorism. Blowing up a plane in mid-flight == terrorism. You don't need to crash planes into buildings to cause effects that exceed just the loss of life. Make air-travel scary again and the economy's going to tank, again.
The threat of "hijacking an airplane" is more serious, but that is the sort of tactic that only works once.
Wrong. Only works 'once' for a period of time. You cannot remember the details of 9-11 a mere 7 years later, you cannot expect the rest of the world to.
Far more important than the above: the TSA is a constitutional abomination. Admittedly, we gave up the 4th amendment for the War on Drugs(TM), but this is far more outrageous in its scope. Liberty really is more important than security, and the TSA doesn't even improve security, it just makes makes people who haven't thought about the issues feel better.
Agreed.
Your life will be better if you stop living in fear.
You're right, ignorance is bliss. Now how about suggesting a practical solution instead of one that trips over its own logic? "What we're doing now is creating a target! So let's drop our guard and expand the list of potential targets!"
warranty *poof!* gone
Wrong. With all the legitimate things to complain about with regards to Apple, I don't understand why people have to make shit up.
You could take care of the Stereo and Mic by using an external USB sound card. (You may even enjoy better recording quality since the hardware's so far away from the mobo... YMMV.) Mouse and KB? Wireless. Honestly I don't see why you'd need more than four, and I'm assuming the ethernet is a must have as it often is.
Also wireless keyboards and mice use some kind of battery. Which has a bad habit of dying at the worst time.
Are you saying this from experience or are you saying it because you've had a walkman run down while sitting on a bus or something? I've been wireless for over a year, know people that have gone far longer, and batteries are something none of us are griping about. I suppose in a worst case scenario you could have a cheapy wired mouse ready to go. Honestly, though, the 'innportune failure' isn't typically a sudden stop. My Mac, for example, gives me a warning that the battery's going. My Logitech MX Revolution has a battery indicator that lights up every time I move the mouse. My girlfriend's Microsoft KB and Mouse, they start to get flakey, but still usable. Besides all that, I've yet to work in an office enviornment that wasn't stocked to the gills with batteries.
Being able to go in your office/cube slide in or drop in your laptop. Turn it on and use the regular keyboard, mouse, and monitor is a very good thing.
Sure, I get that, especially if you take your laptop around. The whole dock concept pretty much died, though, when USB became ubiquitous. Back in the olden days you could get docks that had CD-ROMs, hard drives, PCI slots, you name it. Nowawadys that's just silly. Notebooks aren't far behind desktops in terms of graphic support. Hard drives and optical drives are a USB port away. Heck, LCDs on laptops have gotten advanced enough that monitors just aren't a BFD anymore. There's a point of diminishing returns here.
I didn't bother with a dock for my laptop. (Yes, they make one....) Instead I opted for the nicest screen I could get and two extra power supplies. One to keep at my office, one to carry in my bag. I really don't spend any significant amount of time plugging or unplugging the machine every day. I can just close the lid, let it go into suspend, and pick things up at home. Back at the height of dock-popularity, you actually had to go through an ejection procedure in Windows. I do not miss this. Both OSX and Windows can (usually) handle a missing USB device. But a dock? Well I dunno about the Mac side of it, but back in the day Windows often went into "oh shit!" mode whenever that large bit of hardware suddenly went missing. I remember the sales people in the company I worked at just got in the habit of shutting down the laptop whenever they wanted to undock it. Yick.
Maybe I'm actually a bit biased against docks for that reason. I don't know. I do understand your point, though, even if my personal experience doesn't quite measure up to it.
No one is ever going to be able to hijack an airliner and fly it into a target again, because the flight crews and passengers won't cooperate. It didn't even work later in the day on 9/11!
A year or two ago I would have believed you. However, it would appear that 9-11 is becoming a distant memory. You're not the first person I've run across here that remembers 9-11 as being the day that 3,000 people died but doesn't remember that it easily could have been 25,000. Richard Reid has been utterly forgotten. The economic disaster that caused has been forgotten. (I'll never cease to be amazed by that.) Honestly, it would not surprise me one little bit if in a couple of years from now people only remember that two buildings in NYC suddenly went missing. Never be able to hijack a plane? Never?! Bull-fucking-shit. Never in the next year? Two years? Five years? Sure, no problem believing that. But the memory's fading. give it a decade and they'll have no trouble doing it again.
But that's entirely academic. You see, the planes don't actually need to be hijacked. A whole 3 months after 9-11 there was an attempt to blow up an airliner via an explosive hidden in a shoe. I've referred to this already, the man's name was Richard Reid. Even at the height of 9-11 paranoia, he managed to get on a plane and attempt to detonate a device. The people on the plane were saved only by his incompetence. Here's a fun thought: What would happen to the U.S. if there was one blown-up plane a month?
An ordinary pre-911 metal detector protects us against any real threat...
Yeah, it stopped the 19 hijackers and Richard Reid....
Worse, the long security lines at many airports are better targets than airplanes: more people gathered together, and no security at that point.
That doesn't have the same effect as the wreckage of a plane. Besides, it's a good deal harder to kill as many people in a situation like that than it is when the plane's in flight.
There *is* a solution to security that doesn't involve wasteful (and seriously damaging to our rights) security checkpoints: human intelligence (hire people to infiltrate the terrorist organizations). 9/11 was not a failure of airport security, but a failure of HUMINT, caused directly by both underfunding and Carter's stupid rule that we should hire nefarious people as spys (does that make sense to anyone?). Real security experts know this, but the TSA is a jobs program now, so we'll never be shed of it.
As an addition to security, I think that'd be great. As a replacement? Sorry man, I'm not sold. I get what you're saying, but when the only line of defense is the gov't finding out about it.. *sigh* I'm sorry but even with 'nefarious spies' I just don't see that being reliably effective. I have no hard feelings about you thinking less of me for that, but that's just handing extremists an exploit to use.
Do you honestly, seriously believe that a terrorist will be able to use that tactic ever again?
Yes. Look at how succesful it was. There are still ripples of it today.
Do you honestly, seriously believe that the post-911 airport security did anything to make terrorism harder?
Yes. Everybody's so frickin jumpy about every little thing I doubt they find themselves with much opportunity they're willing to try to exploit.
Even if you imagine that airport security were somehow effective, it's a ridiculous waste of resources to pick one of 1000 targets and spend 10 or 100 times as much hardening it at the expense of all the other targets.
I agree. Unfortunately what you're saying is entirely unhelpful. There is just bitching there, no solution. I don't know the answer, either. If we leave ourselves vulnerable, we seriously risk another attack. If we tighten things up, we do the terrorists' jobs for them. Nobody wants to be responsible for a repeat of the tragedy. I know I wouldn't.
And in any case, the average deaths per year from terrorism remains statistically insignificant.
It's also a very narrow view of the situation. 9-11 was far more than just the deaths of 3,000 people. If you seriously want to propose dropping the 'War on Terror', you have to address that. (And boy would I be happy if you succeeded.)
Once a week? 98? Are you on crack? You do realize that when Windows 98 first came out, Microsoft themselves recommended that it be rebooted every 8 hours of use to limit the chances of it sporadically exploding while you were in the middle of something, right?
Once a week in 98 is far closer to reality than once a week in XP.
"Win7 performs better than the other 2 OSs" In other words, it only crashes once a month, instead of once a week.
The article wasn't about Windows 2000 vs. 98 and 95.
Until the danger of terrorism is larger than the danger in drviing to the airport, why ar we wasting our time with this nonsense?
There were 40,000 car deaths in United States in 2007. The WTC had 25,000 people inside the buildings when the first plane hit and often had as many as 50,000 on any given day. That's the WTC alone, never mind the Pentagon and presumably the White House. That also doesn't count the wide-spread economic impact of 9-11 since apparently the final death count is all that matters. We were very lucky that 9-11 only claimed 3,000 lives. The potential could easily have exceeded U.S. traffic deaths.
Never mind that you dying in a car crash will not tank the economy.
Perfect example. Both take about the same time. One searches the entire internet and usually returns a good result on the first page. The other searches a tiny fraction of the data, and works terribly unless you use the exact terms unique to the page you want.
There ya go. Google costs you, but it's worth it.
Thank you for supporting my point.
Waiting for Windows 7 is like waiting for the new Ford Taurus to come out!
No kiddin. Let's go back to trivial updates to Mozilla making the front page.