Has no one ever heard of affirmative action?
I've heard many of the arguments I'm reading here come from the lips of freshman college students, but really, I'd expect more informed views from/. readers. I know, stupid of me to do that...
Among many other uses, the government needs to know racial demographics so that they can try to make sure the government isn't discriminating. If we don't know how many blacks, whites, asians, native americans, etc. there are or where they're located (generally, not necessarily down to the address level) it makes it difficult to appropriate resources and make sure that things are distributed fairly. The sad part is that the paranoia surrounding the census generally tends to make those who need the services most less likely to fill out the census, thus skewing the picture even further.
Do you not understand the trickle down effect of this data? It's used to move funds around and to make decisions about who gets what out of the gov't coffers, or what's left over after all of the corporate payouts and military contracts anyway. Is there potential for abuse? Hells yes! Has it been abused? Of course! Is the census the answer to life, the universe and everything? No. But how can we have any hope of the government operating by and for the people if it has no clue who these people are?
Saying "just fill out the number of people, nothing else" is just bullshit and ignorance and it saddens me to see that posted on here as if it's something that should be taken as a serious and informed opinion. There are real problems to be discussed regarding the census and there are vast improvements to be made to it, but spreading FUD about what it is and what it's used for just takes as further away from discussing the real issues and does more harm than good.
I see where you're coming from here, trust me. Language is alive. It's a process more than a thing. When we criticize those for not using words correctly or for not using proper grammar we fail to see the dynamism inherent in language. In the end it's all about communicating a message, grammar and form be damned. But your argument is also self-defeating when it comes to any "serious" or academic quality work. While grammar and word meaning may change, the reason we have some kind of system is to control the chaos. If language moves _too_ quickly, no one can agree on what we mean by any statement. Read through a very technical scientific experiment in any discipline and you'll see that it doesn't use anywhere near conversational English. Words and terms are very carefully chosen and grammar is very tightly controlled in order to prevent confusion about the message one is trying to convey. In a peer-reviewed scientific journal there's no room to say "well, you just didn't understand me" or "i was just being sarcastic, didn't you see the smiley?". Also look to the speeches of politicians... If we can't understand how words are used to convey messages we may miss what they are saying below the surface. And that is probably the biggest point that this is missing. If these kids can't understand how to structure language on the surface, are they also missing a lot of the subtext? To me, that part is probably more important than proper grammar because you're at a huge loss if you can't process that. But most of these types of studies look simply at the surface. We be, like, in some serious trouble, if this be the case for da future, dig?:)
Of course, you could just as well claim the right to private property as inane and say that you have no innate right of ownership of the software in the first case. Isn't this why we're having so much trouble with the "reds" pirating goods? Most westerners assume that private property is an inalienable right similar to that of free speech, but that's just the status quo.
I have no problem facing things honestly. I steal because I cannot afford things. As one of the previous repliers posted, it would be very difficult for most of us to accrue skills in much needed software if we were to have to purchase it on our own. I wouldn't be in the position I am today if it weren't for pirated software. But let's make a real division between software stolen for personal use and that stolen for commercial use. For personal use, I may steal Photoshop to frack around or edit my personal pictures, but I make no profit off of it. The bigger worry for Adobe should be businesses making profit off of stolen software.
The problem I see with your argument is twofold. First, you assume that the current legal landscape is correct, or even if you do not you think that we should follow those laws regardless. Most pirates would argue that the laws are wrong and that they pirate as something of an act of civil disobedience. If Obama came on TV and said he passed a law that said "Thou shalt kill their neighbor" (while we're making inane arguments...) how many people do you think would kill their neighbors just because there was a law saying so? Well, copyright laws are similarly inane and even easier to break because they can be broken without your neighbor knowing about it. With personal, private property intact and no reasonable cause for search and seizure, most cases of copyright infringement almost come down to a matter of intellectual infringement. It's the data, not the medium, that they want to control.
Second, your analogy with squatting misses the mark. Squatters squat in abandoned places that no one else is using, not the private homes of individuals. A squatter in the piratic sense (I just made that word up) would be someone who picked up CDs or albums off the side of the road or maybe bought them used (another topic altogether). Pirates do not break into peoples houses to steal their CDs or burn copies of them, those are burglars. Piracy is about spreading data around... giving what you have in exchange for what others have (unless you're just leeching, which is generally frowned upon... who says there's no honour among thieves?).
And while we're on the topic... It seems to me that media is itself to blame to some extent. According to the theories put forth by memeticists (made that one up too), ideas can have a life of their own and want to be passed on. Add to that the wonderful work done by psychologists in ad companies to induce us to buy all their goods and it would seem to me that this current trend in pirating is a matter of them doing their jobs too well. As a consumerist society we're induced to always buy more more more. Have "The White Album" on LP and Cassette? Why not spring another $19.95 for it on CD? You say you have 1000 Dalmations on VHS? But I bet you've never seen it with the digital clarity that Blu-Ray can give you... People are induced to get more than they can ever actually obtain, so when the golden carrot of piracy is dangled in front of them, what do you expect?
The fact is that most people don't feel guilt for downloading MP3s from TPB. The powers that be have tried to induce such guilt with exorbitant lawsuits (Jammie anyone?) but the fact is that it's not going to work. Has the death penalty stopped murderers? Child rapists? Pot smokers? No. Punishment does not deter crime, even in the punished. The only thing that will change the current situation is a paradigm shift, a fundamental shift in the way we a) think about the consummation of goods, and/or b) the way these companies run their businesses and treat their clients. And I think that's kind of what the pirates are all hoping for... cultural change. Hmm, civil disobedience doesn't sound so absurd in that light as when I first mentioned it. I think I'll go steal something now!
I'm with you on that one... I used one of these at MacWorld a few years back and quickly fell in love with it. Asked the guy how much it was and just as quickly fell out of love with it...
Got this when it first came out and it blew my mind. Battlezone was cool and all, but this was the first 3D game with texture... well, ok, with color fill. It's not a lot to look at these days, but it soaked up many hours of my childhood running as fast as I could without getting eaten. I can still hear the music and sound effects without even watching the movie clip.
3D certainly wasn't common early on, but Wolfenstein certainly wasn't the first. They just did it better than most. Although Wolf made gave me motion sickness... I'd take Dungeon Master over Wolf any day.
I'm a lefty you insensitive clod!
This is just another of piece of the oppressive propaganda spread by the righty elite. Lefties have rights too, you bastards! Not only am I quicker at printing than cursive, but it is also much more readable... Part of this has to do with righty teachers not knowing how to teach a lefty (although, unlike when my dad was a kid, they actually let me write with my left hand...) but also because the cursive writing system has biases against lefties.
Lefties unite! Death to cursive writing!
I just checked. What he said is ABSOLUTELY CORRECT. Usenet is completely dead. Full of spam. Entirely worthless. Nothing to see here, people, so just move along... I wouldn't even bother checking it out for yourself as there's just nothing there worth looking for.
No, we shouldn't... But the tax on DVDs is bogus as well. The DVDs are to blame for making people fat? The food I might be able to understand. You can't go without eating food, and if you're poor and don't have a good choice of food at your local mega-mart (of which over 50% is most likely packaged crap) then a tax on junk food may make healthier foods seem a better buy. But DVDs and video games... let's call them a lifestyle choice. You don't need either to surivive, so if you're doing nothing but watching tv or playing games, you've chosen to do so. Should we also put a tax on internet service too since people sit on their butts all day reading/. and the like? How about raising income taxes for office workers who sit at their desks all day or schools teacher because they make kids sit in their desks...
I guess you've missed the KFC commercials in which the mother teaches her children that KFC makes better sense because to get the raw ingredients at the supermarket costs more. That commercial made me feel quite ill... I highly doubt that anyone is substituting an entire meal for 3 or 4 bags of chips. The concern is more that because they are working long hours and are poor, it's easier to just not cook and buy KFC every night, or cook something out of a box, such as a TV dinner, or 'instant' meals. Even the healthier of those are usually high in sodium and full of filler. A sedentary lifestyle is fine... if you don't eat too much. If you're sitting on your ass all day and not exercising much, you probably don't need 2,000 calories of chicken fat, high fructose corn syrup, and all the hydrogenated oils your heart can stand. I agree with you that the carrots would be the _better_ route to take, but the box of mac and cheese with gooey velveeta plasti-cheese is oh so much easier/better.
Exactly. If I work in any finance-related industry, my company most likely pays for the Wall Street Journal or I could easily expense such a subscription. Are they likely to do the same for the New York Post? I highly doubt it... Also, if I remember correctly, the WSJ is written at college reading level, the NYT at 12th grade level, and most other papers barely make it to junior high. That means the readership of the WSJ is more likely to be making a bigger salary and thus have the money to spend on a subscription. You'd have to be silly to think that the WSJ strategy will play out in "lesser" papers.
what about the work print copies out there? of course higher quality scans or original working copies are going to be more popular, just as high quality dvd rips are going to be more popular than shaky handi-cam copies of movies. the point is - taking these PDFs out of _legitimate_ distribution only hurts the _legitimate_ users of that product. There will be pirate copies of it up no matter what they do or who they sue. And let's just say that this does help with piracy for supplements and future published books... what about the books that are already being shared? They can't just change the version to make them obsolete... they're already there and they will be shared, there's no going back now. This is just a reactionary attempt to stop people from sharing the files, but as others have said, they're just shooting themselves in the foot with it. And you suggest they come out with a DRM laden copy? Yeah, let's see those sell... Even if i did buy a copy I'd do it just to not feel guilty about going straight to a torrent to get a copy without DRM. Sorry, but this is not the right move at all...
We must petition Washington immediately to reroute our troops coming home from Iraq and send them to occupy Norway. This is obviously a ploy to destroy our internet access, therefore putting our economy in even more peril. Dozens of cable companies have already shown us the evidence that P2P networks will destroy the internet. Obviously the Pirate Bay trial didn't come soon enough, Norway's public broadcasting has now become infected by these insidious thieves trying to cripple the broadcasting industry and the internet in one go!
This experiment is about the teleportation of qubits, not to be confused with the 1982 experiment involving the teleportation of Q*bert, wherein, after falling off the bottom of his pyramidal cubes, the protaganist would teleport back to the top of said pyramid.
Methinks you've never read the works of Stanley Milgram or Phillip Zimbardo... Or you're being too much of an idealist about the realities of the human mind.
I very much like your idea about fast-food advertisements. I don't think the burgers in the ads are even edible most of the time (lots of plastic or other things you really wouldn't want to eat) although I regret that I don't have a source/reference handy.
Most car commercials nowadays don't even have real cars in them. Misrepresenting a product is one thing, but most of these adverts don't even contain the real product they're advertising. Some food commercials actually use real cooked food, but it's made by a professional food photographer in their kitchen and made to look like the ideal food product. anyone who believes that WYSIWYG when it comes to advertising really needs to hone their critical thinking skills... But then again, I probably wouldn't be so enticed to go to Wendy's if I saw a real employee putting together a real burger.
Slashdot Mirror
That's very true... but if you're developing a google maps mashup site you would need to develop maps using the static API, doubling your work...
Or it's a PA Semi PA6T that's virtualizing ARM... http://www.macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/apples_a4_actually_a_pa_semi_soc_thats_currently_virtualizing_arm/
The iPad is NOT powered by an ARM processor.
...from a previous semiconductor acquisition.
As the engadget article in this slashdot summary says: http://slashdot.org/story/10/01/27/1849207/Apples-iPad-Out-In-the-Open
iPad powered by custom 1GHz Apple A4 chip!
Has no one ever heard of affirmative action? I've heard many of the arguments I'm reading here come from the lips of freshman college students, but really, I'd expect more informed views from /. readers. I know, stupid of me to do that...
Among many other uses, the government needs to know racial demographics so that they can try to make sure the government isn't discriminating. If we don't know how many blacks, whites, asians, native americans, etc. there are or where they're located (generally, not necessarily down to the address level) it makes it difficult to appropriate resources and make sure that things are distributed fairly. The sad part is that the paranoia surrounding the census generally tends to make those who need the services most less likely to fill out the census, thus skewing the picture even further.
Do you not understand the trickle down effect of this data? It's used to move funds around and to make decisions about who gets what out of the gov't coffers, or what's left over after all of the corporate payouts and military contracts anyway. Is there potential for abuse? Hells yes! Has it been abused? Of course! Is the census the answer to life, the universe and everything? No. But how can we have any hope of the government operating by and for the people if it has no clue who these people are?
Saying "just fill out the number of people, nothing else" is just bullshit and ignorance and it saddens me to see that posted on here as if it's something that should be taken as a serious and informed opinion. There are real problems to be discussed regarding the census and there are vast improvements to be made to it, but spreading FUD about what it is and what it's used for just takes as further away from discussing the real issues and does more harm than good.
I see where you're coming from here, trust me. Language is alive. It's a process more than a thing. When we criticize those for not using words correctly or for not using proper grammar we fail to see the dynamism inherent in language. In the end it's all about communicating a message, grammar and form be damned. But your argument is also self-defeating when it comes to any "serious" or academic quality work. While grammar and word meaning may change, the reason we have some kind of system is to control the chaos. If language moves _too_ quickly, no one can agree on what we mean by any statement. Read through a very technical scientific experiment in any discipline and you'll see that it doesn't use anywhere near conversational English. Words and terms are very carefully chosen and grammar is very tightly controlled in order to prevent confusion about the message one is trying to convey. In a peer-reviewed scientific journal there's no room to say "well, you just didn't understand me" or "i was just being sarcastic, didn't you see the smiley?". Also look to the speeches of politicians... If we can't understand how words are used to convey messages we may miss what they are saying below the surface. And that is probably the biggest point that this is missing. If these kids can't understand how to structure language on the surface, are they also missing a lot of the subtext? To me, that part is probably more important than proper grammar because you're at a huge loss if you can't process that. But most of these types of studies look simply at the surface. We be, like, in some serious trouble, if this be the case for da future, dig? :)
i doubt that.
Praise Jesus for the rich people! Without them how would we ever survive?
I have no problem facing things honestly. I steal because I cannot afford things. As one of the previous repliers posted, it would be very difficult for most of us to accrue skills in much needed software if we were to have to purchase it on our own. I wouldn't be in the position I am today if it weren't for pirated software. But let's make a real division between software stolen for personal use and that stolen for commercial use. For personal use, I may steal Photoshop to frack around or edit my personal pictures, but I make no profit off of it. The bigger worry for Adobe should be businesses making profit off of stolen software.
The problem I see with your argument is twofold. First, you assume that the current legal landscape is correct, or even if you do not you think that we should follow those laws regardless. Most pirates would argue that the laws are wrong and that they pirate as something of an act of civil disobedience. If Obama came on TV and said he passed a law that said "Thou shalt kill their neighbor" (while we're making inane arguments...) how many people do you think would kill their neighbors just because there was a law saying so? Well, copyright laws are similarly inane and even easier to break because they can be broken without your neighbor knowing about it. With personal, private property intact and no reasonable cause for search and seizure, most cases of copyright infringement almost come down to a matter of intellectual infringement. It's the data, not the medium, that they want to control.
Second, your analogy with squatting misses the mark. Squatters squat in abandoned places that no one else is using, not the private homes of individuals. A squatter in the piratic sense (I just made that word up) would be someone who picked up CDs or albums off the side of the road or maybe bought them used (another topic altogether). Pirates do not break into peoples houses to steal their CDs or burn copies of them, those are burglars. Piracy is about spreading data around... giving what you have in exchange for what others have (unless you're just leeching, which is generally frowned upon... who says there's no honour among thieves?).
And while we're on the topic... It seems to me that media is itself to blame to some extent. According to the theories put forth by memeticists (made that one up too), ideas can have a life of their own and want to be passed on. Add to that the wonderful work done by psychologists in ad companies to induce us to buy all their goods and it would seem to me that this current trend in pirating is a matter of them doing their jobs too well. As a consumerist society we're induced to always buy more more more. Have "The White Album" on LP and Cassette? Why not spring another $19.95 for it on CD? You say you have 1000 Dalmations on VHS? But I bet you've never seen it with the digital clarity that Blu-Ray can give you... People are induced to get more than they can ever actually obtain, so when the golden carrot of piracy is dangled in front of them, what do you expect?
The fact is that most people don't feel guilt for downloading MP3s from TPB. The powers that be have tried to induce such guilt with exorbitant lawsuits (Jammie anyone?) but the fact is that it's not going to work. Has the death penalty stopped murderers? Child rapists? Pot smokers? No. Punishment does not deter crime, even in the punished. The only thing that will change the current situation is a paradigm shift, a fundamental shift in the way we a) think about the consummation of goods, and/or b) the way these companies run their businesses and treat their clients. And I think that's kind of what the pirates are all hoping for... cultural change. Hmm, civil disobedience doesn't sound so absurd in that light as when I first mentioned it. I think I'll go steal something now!
My sentiments exactly.
- Run Internet Exploder (starts-up then crashes five minutes later)
I concede. I confess. Only windows can run Internet Exploder effectively.
As if using Windows wasn't punishment enough!
I'm with you on that one... I used one of these at MacWorld a few years back and quickly fell in love with it. Asked the guy how much it was and just as quickly fell out of love with it...
Got this when it first came out and it blew my mind. Battlezone was cool and all, but this was the first 3D game with texture... well, ok, with color fill. It's not a lot to look at these days, but it soaked up many hours of my childhood running as fast as I could without getting eaten. I can still hear the music and sound effects without even watching the movie clip. 3D certainly wasn't common early on, but Wolfenstein certainly wasn't the first. They just did it better than most. Although Wolf made gave me motion sickness... I'd take Dungeon Master over Wolf any day.
1992 called. They want their argument back.
I'm a lefty you insensitive clod! This is just another of piece of the oppressive propaganda spread by the righty elite. Lefties have rights too, you bastards! Not only am I quicker at printing than cursive, but it is also much more readable... Part of this has to do with righty teachers not knowing how to teach a lefty (although, unlike when my dad was a kid, they actually let me write with my left hand...) but also because the cursive writing system has biases against lefties. Lefties unite! Death to cursive writing!
I just checked. What he said is ABSOLUTELY CORRECT. Usenet is completely dead. Full of spam. Entirely worthless. Nothing to see here, people, so just move along... I wouldn't even bother checking it out for yourself as there's just nothing there worth looking for.
Opera's new Foaming Action Bubbles will clear away all that sticky residue from inside your intertubes that builds up after years of looking at pron.
No, we shouldn't... But the tax on DVDs is bogus as well. The DVDs are to blame for making people fat? The food I might be able to understand. You can't go without eating food, and if you're poor and don't have a good choice of food at your local mega-mart (of which over 50% is most likely packaged crap) then a tax on junk food may make healthier foods seem a better buy. But DVDs and video games... let's call them a lifestyle choice. You don't need either to surivive, so if you're doing nothing but watching tv or playing games, you've chosen to do so. Should we also put a tax on internet service too since people sit on their butts all day reading /. and the like? How about raising income taxes for office workers who sit at their desks all day or schools teacher because they make kids sit in their desks...
I guess you've missed the KFC commercials in which the mother teaches her children that KFC makes better sense because to get the raw ingredients at the supermarket costs more. That commercial made me feel quite ill... I highly doubt that anyone is substituting an entire meal for 3 or 4 bags of chips. The concern is more that because they are working long hours and are poor, it's easier to just not cook and buy KFC every night, or cook something out of a box, such as a TV dinner, or 'instant' meals. Even the healthier of those are usually high in sodium and full of filler. A sedentary lifestyle is fine... if you don't eat too much. If you're sitting on your ass all day and not exercising much, you probably don't need 2,000 calories of chicken fat, high fructose corn syrup, and all the hydrogenated oils your heart can stand. I agree with you that the carrots would be the _better_ route to take, but the box of mac and cheese with gooey velveeta plasti-cheese is oh so much easier/better.
Exactly. If I work in any finance-related industry, my company most likely pays for the Wall Street Journal or I could easily expense such a subscription. Are they likely to do the same for the New York Post? I highly doubt it... Also, if I remember correctly, the WSJ is written at college reading level, the NYT at 12th grade level, and most other papers barely make it to junior high. That means the readership of the WSJ is more likely to be making a bigger salary and thus have the money to spend on a subscription. You'd have to be silly to think that the WSJ strategy will play out in "lesser" papers.
what about the work print copies out there? of course higher quality scans or original working copies are going to be more popular, just as high quality dvd rips are going to be more popular than shaky handi-cam copies of movies. the point is - taking these PDFs out of _legitimate_ distribution only hurts the _legitimate_ users of that product. There will be pirate copies of it up no matter what they do or who they sue. And let's just say that this does help with piracy for supplements and future published books... what about the books that are already being shared? They can't just change the version to make them obsolete... they're already there and they will be shared, there's no going back now. This is just a reactionary attempt to stop people from sharing the files, but as others have said, they're just shooting themselves in the foot with it. And you suggest they come out with a DRM laden copy? Yeah, let's see those sell... Even if i did buy a copy I'd do it just to not feel guilty about going straight to a torrent to get a copy without DRM. Sorry, but this is not the right move at all...
We must petition Washington immediately to reroute our troops coming home from Iraq and send them to occupy Norway. This is obviously a ploy to destroy our internet access, therefore putting our economy in even more peril. Dozens of cable companies have already shown us the evidence that P2P networks will destroy the internet. Obviously the Pirate Bay trial didn't come soon enough, Norway's public broadcasting has now become infected by these insidious thieves trying to cripple the broadcasting industry and the internet in one go!
This experiment is about the teleportation of qubits, not to be confused with the 1982 experiment involving the teleportation of Q*bert, wherein, after falling off the bottom of his pyramidal cubes, the protaganist would teleport back to the top of said pyramid.
Methinks you've never read the works of Stanley Milgram or Phillip Zimbardo... Or you're being too much of an idealist about the realities of the human mind.
I very much like your idea about fast-food advertisements. I don't think the burgers in the ads are even edible most of the time (lots of plastic or other things you really wouldn't want to eat) although I regret that I don't have a source/reference handy.
Most car commercials nowadays don't even have real cars in them. Misrepresenting a product is one thing, but most of these adverts don't even contain the real product they're advertising. Some food commercials actually use real cooked food, but it's made by a professional food photographer in their kitchen and made to look like the ideal food product. anyone who believes that WYSIWYG when it comes to advertising really needs to hone their critical thinking skills... But then again, I probably wouldn't be so enticed to go to Wendy's if I saw a real employee putting together a real burger.