For people like us, yes, scifi is at-home reading, but a lot of children aren't as inspired as we apparently were. They don't read on their own unless there's an incentive. If a teacher gets a kid to read a book, especially the first part in a series, it may inspire that kid to keep reading the series on their own. Maybe after they've finished that series, they can pick up another one and be hooked for life. If they never have an incentive to pick up that first book, though, you will never know what the kid would have done. Let them get a few bonus points for reading entertaining scifi. If it's enough to get a kid reading, it's worth it.
Before Mythbusters, people thought of science as boring. Some nerdy guy with glasses and a white lab coat looking at some complex thing setup on a table and marking notes on paper. Boy, what kid WOULDN'T want to get in on THAT action! Man, I bet that guy gets all the chicks.
Enter Mythbusters. It's not great science, but it's helping change society's idea of what science is. When science is fun and exciting, it's a lot easier to catch the attention of children and bring more people into the field.
Scientific discovery and use of the scientific method may be beautiful, but it's dull. Nobody will watch a show where the premise is as boring to the average person as real science. With Mythbusters, I know I'm probably getting an explosion out of it, America is entertained by what they consider science, and I'm ok with that.
No, I don't think she would.
Cud-chewing cows tend to freeze under any sort of stressful situation, such as having their own work to do, and they ask for help from others so that they may maintain their cud-chewing way of life. Anything above and beyond their normal day completely destroys the cow's ability to do anything at all. As sad as it is, there's this whole group of people who are completely helpless outside their little cage. Hand them a crisis and they'll fall apart.
People have already looked at it from a geeky point of view. The biggest problem there is that Joe Retard knows nothing about cell phones or signal numbers. If you tried to explain it, he would still be confused by the fact he can still make calls when he has a negative signal. The bars indicator lets the average idiot understand they're in a bad signal area and can expect a call to not go through or to drop. More bars = more gooder. That's easy enough for them to grasp, and they don't care what witchcraft determines what's a 3 bar signal and what's a 4 bar signal.
Remember, Apple's having to explain to everybody, not just the curious or technical elite. It's like one of us trying to explain to someone why the 25 browser toolbars they have slows their internet to a crawl. More bars on your internet is bad, more bars on your cell phone is good.
Re:Talk about getting your facts right!
on
Tetraktys
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· Score: 1
There's even one by Dan Brown himself called Digital Fortress published in 1998.
It's probably nowhere near as in-depth and probably crazy inaccurate, but it was a pretty good read.
I think my favorite lesson would have to be "When faced with a dragon, keep in mind that you don't have to outrun the dragon, you just have to outrun the rest of your party."
No, no, no, no, no!
A thousand times, NO!
If something is bricked, that means broked forever. If you brick something, you have to send it off to have internals replaced, not to have some tech stick in a CD and magically fix it. If you have the hardware and knowledge to replace the internals yourself, it's still bricked until you replace the internals.
Still I wonder if the enforcement costs outweigh the profit per sale, not counting lost customers.
It doesn't. It just checks the IP range you're connecting from for what country it belongs to. Nice little function added to the authentication process, and your enforcement is automated. Might not be 100% reliable, but meh, that's what customer support staff are for. Give them a way to verify someone's range was blocked improperly, and a way to fix it, and you're done.
About the lost customers, not sure what you mean here. Valve made their money from the distributor selling the Thai copies, and some of the people have also bought copies playable from their country of residence. Valve has made more money at the cost of a little bad press. With how just about everyone's been going nuts over the Orange Box, I'd say they'll come out ok and have learned a lesson or two. Sure, they might piss off some people who won't buy Peggle or some other game now... but chances are when Episode 3 comes out someday, the crack addicts will be back waiting for their fix.
Actually, it's more like selling a car in Thailand that only runs on Thai fuel. All Valve did was say something like "We're going to sell this product to you guys at a price you can afford, but you'll only be able to play it from Poorland. 'Cause you're poor. But hey, you'll have Team Fortress 2 and Portal without the guilt of rampant piracy." ISN'T THIS WHAT WE'VE BEEN WANTING ALL ALONG? A game company that "gets it" that not all places can pay the same prices for a given product. So they take the necessary steps to prevent people from buying the cheap version and playing it in LessPoorland. This protects their revenue stream and allows them to bring the game to places where it otherwise would be pirated. And hey, the Thai people get to play on legit servers. Valve makes back development costs from us, makes a little extra change from Thailand and Russia, and hey, just maybe they will have made enough to justify a Portal 2.
And for those whining about us not getting it for the cheap price, SUCK IT UP! We're Americans! We're USED to this kind of treatment. I'm looking at you, Wal-Mart.
Where did I mention marijuana? Oh yeah... I didn't. Congratulations on completely missing my point. There are more drugs out there than just marijuana, and several of them are illegal for legitimate reasons.
I have yet to see anyone on such a caffeine rush that they lose control and bust down doors. I'm not saying it's impossible, but unlikely enough that I haven't heard of it.
Should someone be allowed access to an amount of steroids that would cause them to go into a berserk rage? No.
Because, if it were truly dangerous to human life, then humans would avoid it the same way we avoid other poisons and strong hallucinogens.
You were doing so well right up until you crossed this line... at the beginning of your post. *sigh*
Not like drugs are ever laced with anything... and you completely dismiss the fact that a lot of people actually ARE taking poisons. Some people avoid these things, but others actively seek them out.
I'm not pro- or anti-drug. I think people should be allowed to do whatever the hell they want as long as it does not potentially impact me. Should someone be allowed to smoke up as long as they do it in private and stay in private until the effects have worn off? Yes. Should someone be allowed to take something that will drive them into a rage and potentially cause them to break into my home? Hell no. Should someone be allowed to drive while intoxicated? HELL no.
Keep me (and others) out of it, and do whatever you want.
lolz.
This is complete manure. The goal was to have, I believe, 95% of handsets E911 capable by a certain date. Most carriers just won't activate them because it moves the attainment in the wrong direction.
You wouldn't happen to have Alltel service, would you? I've heard them try to BS a customer about it just like this, claiming a huge fine if they activate it. That's what got me curious in the first place.
The overwhelming majority of people using cars use them to break the speed limit and everyone who questions that is missing a couple cogs in their brain.
GREAT ARGUMENT! The overwhelming majority of people using [insert random tool here] use them to [insert bad thing that can be done by tool here] and everyone who questions that is missing a couple cogs in their brain.
The overwhelming majority of people using rules of order use them to block anything important from happening in meetings and everyone who questions that is missing a couple cogs in their brain. This is BRILLIANT! Forget those legitimate uses! Bring on the sweeping generalizations!
One thing I've seen lately is local stations putting on more and more local talent. Local bands haven't been signed yet and submit their work directly to the station for airplay just to get their names and music out there. Instead of paying insane royalties for the privilege of advertising the RIAA's latest load of crap, the national stuff may be shoved into a show on weekends with local bands who appreciate the exposure becoming the main line-up. Would be nice to have something other than CDs to listen to on the way to and from work.
It turns your license into a debit card with photo ID. Sounds neat, and considering most clerks that are supposed to ask to see a license for debit/credit usage never do, it may reduce fraudulent charges. The only downside is more clerks seeing your address, date of birth, etc.
It's not for me, but I can see where some people would like this. One less card to carry around and potentially lose.
Keep in mind that there are currently two tiers of EVDO in use. Base EVDO tends to run about 300-500kbps. EVDO Rev. A looks closer to what you claimed. For those of us unprivileged who are not covered by Sprint's Rev. A network, it's not such a huge jump from EDGE.
Quit whining and start testing then.
It's all fine and dandy to blame the lack of QA, but step up and do your part. Or you can always just sit back and whine like a Windows user. It's your choice: help make it better, or expect things to go wrong.
By default, a Blackberry is wiped after the 10th incorrect password. An administrator may be able to change the number of attempts, but I've never tried it myself so I can't say for certain.
There's a real easy solution to this. If you pay for your download, the company sends you an envelope with lyrics, script, popup of the band/movie cast, stickers, whatever. Put the same stuff in the hard copy of the media.
Some people are going to argue that it will raise prices for productions. That it may, but if you keep the prices pretty close to where they are now and accept lower profits, you'll still keep your strong sales even when your "content" is available online. The solution is to add in something so that the consumer doesn't feel like they're just buying the music/movie, and it has to be something that people will actually want, so no cheesing out by just adding in an extra picture or two. Make it worth having.
Just because something is in a DRMed form does not make it suddenly never public domain, and if you were to crack the DRM on something that was in the public domain I doubt there's a court in the land that would convict you, or a record company in the land that would sue you.
Are you referring to the USA or Canada? Because if it's USA, you know better than to think something will become public domain here. (Yes, I'm being sarcastic)
I don't know enough about the Canadian legal system or their legal history to be able to comment, but based on US history, I think you're wrong on thinking nobody would sue you, and as long as that somebody is important enough, they will bend reality to their whims and win.
It's not that they have no value. The executive has gotten to the point where they have an overgrown sense of entitlement. They feel that the muffins should be seen as complimentary. It's a gift because of how powerful the executives have become.
It's ridiculous, but some people really do feel this way. Some people need to be brought back to reality.
This is a great idea. Unfortunately, the only people likely to find this are those that already know the need for exceptions to DRM laws. I hope the Canadians pass this along to their legislators and that someone actually bothers to read the blog.
Maybe if we'd had something like this before the DMCA, we could have made it a little less restrictive. (No way in hell the **AAs would have let it die)
I agree. Advertisements have gotten far too obtrusive. If you want to advertise something, put it in the breaks that are built into every show. Don't put something across the sides or bottom of the screen to distract me in the middle of the show. That's just going to make me want to find a copy of the show without the ads.
If people are pushed toward downloading ad-free copies of a show, then nobody watches the ads, the advertisers stop advertising, and the ad revenue for the cable co goes to crap. It's in their best interests to make the advertisements interesting and unobtrusive. They make money, they keep us happy, and we keep watching.
The downside to doing something like this is that you can get someone fired for just doing their job to the best of their ability, especially if it's a commercial callcenter where the reps are scored on the number of calls they make every hour and how many of those are "successful" calls. Personally, I really don't think that matters too much for the political stuff, but I've never done that kind of work, so I really can't say.
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For people like us, yes, scifi is at-home reading, but a lot of children aren't as inspired as we apparently were. They don't read on their own unless there's an incentive. If a teacher gets a kid to read a book, especially the first part in a series, it may inspire that kid to keep reading the series on their own. Maybe after they've finished that series, they can pick up another one and be hooked for life. If they never have an incentive to pick up that first book, though, you will never know what the kid would have done. Let them get a few bonus points for reading entertaining scifi. If it's enough to get a kid reading, it's worth it.
Before Mythbusters, people thought of science as boring. Some nerdy guy with glasses and a white lab coat looking at some complex thing setup on a table and marking notes on paper. Boy, what kid WOULDN'T want to get in on THAT action! Man, I bet that guy gets all the chicks.
Enter Mythbusters. It's not great science, but it's helping change society's idea of what science is. When science is fun and exciting, it's a lot easier to catch the attention of children and bring more people into the field.
Scientific discovery and use of the scientific method may be beautiful, but it's dull. Nobody will watch a show where the premise is as boring to the average person as real science. With Mythbusters, I know I'm probably getting an explosion out of it, America is entertained by what they consider science, and I'm ok with that.
No, I don't think she would. Cud-chewing cows tend to freeze under any sort of stressful situation, such as having their own work to do, and they ask for help from others so that they may maintain their cud-chewing way of life. Anything above and beyond their normal day completely destroys the cow's ability to do anything at all. As sad as it is, there's this whole group of people who are completely helpless outside their little cage. Hand them a crisis and they'll fall apart.
People have already looked at it from a geeky point of view. The biggest problem there is that Joe Retard knows nothing about cell phones or signal numbers. If you tried to explain it, he would still be confused by the fact he can still make calls when he has a negative signal. The bars indicator lets the average idiot understand they're in a bad signal area and can expect a call to not go through or to drop. More bars = more gooder. That's easy enough for them to grasp, and they don't care what witchcraft determines what's a 3 bar signal and what's a 4 bar signal.
Remember, Apple's having to explain to everybody, not just the curious or technical elite. It's like one of us trying to explain to someone why the 25 browser toolbars they have slows their internet to a crawl. More bars on your internet is bad, more bars on your cell phone is good.
There's even one by Dan Brown himself called Digital Fortress published in 1998. It's probably nowhere near as in-depth and probably crazy inaccurate, but it was a pretty good read.
I think my favorite lesson would have to be "When faced with a dragon, keep in mind that you don't have to outrun the dragon, you just have to outrun the rest of your party."
This has served me well.
No, no, no, no, no!
A thousand times, NO!
If something is bricked, that means broked forever. If you brick something, you have to send it off to have internals replaced, not to have some tech stick in a CD and magically fix it. If you have the hardware and knowledge to replace the internals yourself, it's still bricked until you replace the internals.
About the lost customers, not sure what you mean here. Valve made their money from the distributor selling the Thai copies, and some of the people have also bought copies playable from their country of residence. Valve has made more money at the cost of a little bad press. With how just about everyone's been going nuts over the Orange Box, I'd say they'll come out ok and have learned a lesson or two. Sure, they might piss off some people who won't buy Peggle or some other game now... but chances are when Episode 3 comes out someday, the crack addicts will be back waiting for their fix.
Actually, it's more like selling a car in Thailand that only runs on Thai fuel. All Valve did was say something like "We're going to sell this product to you guys at a price you can afford, but you'll only be able to play it from Poorland. 'Cause you're poor. But hey, you'll have Team Fortress 2 and Portal without the guilt of rampant piracy." ISN'T THIS WHAT WE'VE BEEN WANTING ALL ALONG? A game company that "gets it" that not all places can pay the same prices for a given product. So they take the necessary steps to prevent people from buying the cheap version and playing it in LessPoorland. This protects their revenue stream and allows them to bring the game to places where it otherwise would be pirated. And hey, the Thai people get to play on legit servers. Valve makes back development costs from us, makes a little extra change from Thailand and Russia, and hey, just maybe they will have made enough to justify a Portal 2.
And for those whining about us not getting it for the cheap price, SUCK IT UP! We're Americans! We're USED to this kind of treatment. I'm looking at you, Wal-Mart.
I have yet to see anyone on such a caffeine rush that they lose control and bust down doors. I'm not saying it's impossible, but unlikely enough that I haven't heard of it.
Should someone be allowed access to an amount of steroids that would cause them to go into a berserk rage? No.
You were doing so well right up until you crossed this line... at the beginning of your post. *sigh*
Not like drugs are ever laced with anything... and you completely dismiss the fact that a lot of people actually ARE taking poisons. Some people avoid these things, but others actively seek them out.
I'm not pro- or anti-drug. I think people should be allowed to do whatever the hell they want as long as it does not potentially impact me. Should someone be allowed to smoke up as long as they do it in private and stay in private until the effects have worn off? Yes. Should someone be allowed to take something that will drive them into a rage and potentially cause them to break into my home? Hell no. Should someone be allowed to drive while intoxicated? HELL no.
Keep me (and others) out of it, and do whatever you want.
You wouldn't happen to have Alltel service, would you? I've heard them try to BS a customer about it just like this, claiming a huge fine if they activate it. That's what got me curious in the first place.
The overwhelming majority of people using cars use them to break the speed limit and everyone who questions that is missing a couple cogs in their brain.
GREAT ARGUMENT! The overwhelming majority of people using [insert random tool here] use them to [insert bad thing that can be done by tool here] and everyone who questions that is missing a couple cogs in their brain.
The overwhelming majority of people using rules of order use them to block anything important from happening in meetings and everyone who questions that is missing a couple cogs in their brain. This is BRILLIANT! Forget those legitimate uses! Bring on the sweeping generalizations!
One thing I've seen lately is local stations putting on more and more local talent. Local bands haven't been signed yet and submit their work directly to the station for airplay just to get their names and music out there. Instead of paying insane royalties for the privilege of advertising the RIAA's latest load of crap, the national stuff may be shoved into a show on weekends with local bands who appreciate the exposure becoming the main line-up. Would be nice to have something other than CDs to listen to on the way to and from work.
It's not for me, but I can see where some people would like this. One less card to carry around and potentially lose.
Keep in mind that there are currently two tiers of EVDO in use. Base EVDO tends to run about 300-500kbps. EVDO Rev. A looks closer to what you claimed. For those of us unprivileged who are not covered by Sprint's Rev. A network, it's not such a huge jump from EDGE.
Quit whining and start testing then.
It's all fine and dandy to blame the lack of QA, but step up and do your part. Or you can always just sit back and whine like a Windows user. It's your choice: help make it better, or expect things to go wrong.
They do. It's called LARP and Airsoft. :)
By default, a Blackberry is wiped after the 10th incorrect password. An administrator may be able to change the number of attempts, but I've never tried it myself so I can't say for certain.
There's a real easy solution to this. If you pay for your download, the company sends you an envelope with lyrics, script, popup of the band/movie cast, stickers, whatever. Put the same stuff in the hard copy of the media.
Some people are going to argue that it will raise prices for productions. That it may, but if you keep the prices pretty close to where they are now and accept lower profits, you'll still keep your strong sales even when your "content" is available online. The solution is to add in something so that the consumer doesn't feel like they're just buying the music/movie, and it has to be something that people will actually want, so no cheesing out by just adding in an extra picture or two. Make it worth having.
I don't know enough about the Canadian legal system or their legal history to be able to comment, but based on US history, I think you're wrong on thinking nobody would sue you, and as long as that somebody is important enough, they will bend reality to their whims and win.
It's ridiculous, but some people really do feel this way. Some people need to be brought back to reality.
This is a great idea. Unfortunately, the only people likely to find this are those that already know the need for exceptions to DRM laws. I hope the Canadians pass this along to their legislators and that someone actually bothers to read the blog.
Maybe if we'd had something like this before the DMCA, we could have made it a little less restrictive. (No way in hell the **AAs would have let it die)
I agree. Advertisements have gotten far too obtrusive. If you want to advertise something, put it in the breaks that are built into every show. Don't put something across the sides or bottom of the screen to distract me in the middle of the show. That's just going to make me want to find a copy of the show without the ads.
If people are pushed toward downloading ad-free copies of a show, then nobody watches the ads, the advertisers stop advertising, and the ad revenue for the cable co goes to crap. It's in their best interests to make the advertisements interesting and unobtrusive. They make money, they keep us happy, and we keep watching.
The downside to doing something like this is that you can get someone fired for just doing their job to the best of their ability, especially if it's a commercial callcenter where the reps are scored on the number of calls they make every hour and how many of those are "successful" calls. Personally, I really don't think that matters too much for the political stuff, but I've never done that kind of work, so I really can't say.