You'll see that the comments made by the Chinese government were only in regards to the Chinese internet community, and that the "purification" referred to making it easier to administer and develop the financial potential of the Chinese internet. This entire post is sensationalistic nonsense that glosses over the more boring bits of reality in order to make a mountain over a molehill.
I moved from a "sprawled" small college town in America to Osaka, Japan, and even without the change in diet, the change in lifestyle has caused me to lose weight. Things are too convenient to warrant wasting effort on private transportation; if it's not within easy biking distance, then there's a busstop or train station nearby to fix you up.
Of course, I finally got a motorcycle, which has greatly reduced my spending on public transportation, but I still end up using my bicycle for anything within 20 minutes (which is almost everything.)
While you're absolutely right that it's nice, if not vital, for software to play nice with the system, Linux (the underlying OS) should be responsible for keeping the software from running amok, and the developer pay the penalty when their software doesn't perform the way users expect. It's not the Debian's team job, and it shouldn't be. Distributions are one of the biggest hurdles in Linux adoption - everybody has their way of doing things, and they believe that their way is "right." Unfortunately, projecting one's personal ideas of rightness on others has never been the best formula for making friends.
Linspire's particular advantage is in believing that "right" is trying to find a way to lure the most users possible to their distro by making it friendly and easy-to-use. Users shouldn't have to worry about dependencies; they shouldn't have to ever even see a message warning them about it, worry about having to resolve it, or worst of all, have a package refuse to install because of "unresolvable conflicts." Solving this involves research, which means time, which means that most people would just as soon spend the money on Windows or OSX and call it good. They work, they rarely tell you that you're missing something, and if they are, they usually provide an easy path towards finding the software you need, which also usually installs without complaint.
Sure, a high-end user may want the option to continue using a particular version of a particular library, and damn the dependencies. That's what "more options" and "advanced" buttons are for. You need to build in user-selectable levels of complexity, rather than having the system dictate terms.
I don't think you really need to waste a lot of time on involved studies on this one. Someone who telecommutes, regardless of the reason, sends the message that while they care about the paycheck, they put where they live ahead of the company. They might do a good job, and there might be respect, but are you really going to promote somebody you know well via email versus somebody who comes into your office everyday?
Yeah. This phone might as well not exist for me, since I live in Japan, and I'd much rather have the screen on an iPod and not a phone. It makes it almost an anti-announcement, since there's no telling when this will be incorporated into the iPods.
Apple's released something very drool-worthy that nobody can use yet and will cost you a lot more than the actual phone service, assuming you're stuck in a two-year contract. Also, it completely misses the teenage market, since you're telling parents that they're going to be signing their kids up for Cingular in addition to getting them a music player.
I don't know; with the limited storage size, maybe Apple sees it as not being a competition problem at all.
Maybe they figured out that their low-level assembly code, already tailored to the Intel processor, could be married to their already existing OSX front-end code, thus making bringing it over to OSX relatively easy to do.
As for competition? Hardly. Premiere is already a mediocre program on Windows. I doubt it's going to suddenly get better just because it runs on OSX.
There are only four links listed on the site, and I doubt that any of them are organizations the average person has ever heard of. Their site is also very user-unfriendly to the uninitiated, which means they're doing a rather poor job of trying to spread the word to the masses, as it were. They list four players that will work with Theora, helpfully listed as "Binaries," and no explanation as to which is going to really fulfill their needs. In other words, you're forcing your users to do research in order to get things going, which doesn't exactly inspire someone who just came there looking for a way to watch the EU feeds. Better to stick with proprietary solutions that work out-of-the-box for 99% of your constituents. I'm not satisfied with that as a solution, either, but those wanting OSS to win are going to have to step up and make some effort to rally people to the cause. Redesigning the web site so that people will want to visit and find it helpful would be a good first step. Complaining about it on Slashdot is just preaching to the choir and doesn't solve anything.
This is definitely a must-see experience, and I envy the travelers who were lucky enough to witness something so rare. However, I'm less envious of the captain when he reaches harbor and realizes that sailing through 16km of pumice is hell on the bottom paint. He's going to have fun getting that repainted.;) (Of course, a REAL captain would just do it himself.)
Speaking from the experience of having lived on a sailboat for three years, and having painted the bottom in dry dock at least once.
Average thickness in this case is very misleading. If you were to say that 50% of Greenland was over 1500 meters tall, what the overall picture would be is that the other 50% of the ice sheet is melting and only a few mountain peaks were piling on ice. Isolated pockets building on extremely thick layers could through off the average in favor of thicker ice, when in fact the vast majority is melting away.
I find it more more annoying that Google insists that localized versions of Firefox automatically default to that locale's official language, and won't let you change this default no matter what. I live in Japan, and yes, I speak and read Japanese, but I'd prefer my searches not be limited by language. I have to click "search the entire web" every single time, which means searching twice. No other search engine has this built-in limitation.
Ironically, Yahoo! is the search engine of choice in Japan, and doesn't discriminate against language. Also, their results are often better than Google's.
No, we have mindless binge drinkers and general idiots. However, we satisfy ourselves by suing each other, and nobody has to get spied on.
How does putting up a camera make things better? You get the knowledge that somebody else is watching them be a drunken idiot? And then somebody tells them they're being naughty? That's progress?
If they were the kind of people who payed attention or cared, they wouldn't be the way they are in the first place. As usual, the only people who get hurt are the ones who aren't causing the problem.
Spend countless messages arguing over the physics of ice in a glass of water, while leaving out important details such as the fact that the South Pole will be affected as well as the North Pole, thus making the point moot? Always glad to be of service.:)
Only if you fail to take Antarctica and Greenland into account. They point out that the Arctic will be free of ice, but this doesn't mean that the Antarctic is going to stay the way it is. Melt Antarctica, and the waters will rise.
I agree. If everybody involved at the time the song was created is long dead and gone, then current claimants to the rights are just full of crap. What's even worse is the idea that you can "arrange" someone else's work and get credit for it, thus securing the copyright. There's no justifiable reason that "Happy Birthday" should be under copyright, but there it is.
Would have worked better if the other place was giving away the food they'd stolen from the original restaurant, huh? That's where the material vs. immaterial comparison breaks down; copy a song, and you still have the original left over. Take somebody's sandwich, and they know they're missing their lunch.
However, musicians can be legally contracted (and often are.) They expect to be paid. However, if people are stealing their music, the record companies do not pay them regardless; they say too bad, suck it. That's where the restaurant employees make out like bandits.
It's supply and demand. If my product is in high demand and people are willing to pay my price, then it doesn't make me a bad person if I become wealthy because of it. However, saying "fuck you" to somebody for doing well for themselves is just sour grapes. Whether you buy a CD or you buy a concert ticket, you get exactly the same thing - the music, and the experience of listening to it. A copy from a friend is no way the same as a copy from a record label. You don't get the nice CD, liner notes, etc. You don't get the knowledge that you are (hopefully, in some way, after the label is done bleeding them dry), paying the musicians in appreciation of their work. You assume that their salaries are big, because that's how the media portrays them. To be fair, most label-signed musicians usually make the big bucks from the concerts. However, it all starts with selling their CDs; this encourages the labels to promote and advertise them. They may be evil, but they're a very useful evil. Until we get to the point where do-it-yourself advertising and distribution is just as effective, we're stuck with it. Since musicians are usually not trained in advertising, graphic design and web programming, I'd say we have a long way to go.
It is if you keep the free copy in lieu of buying a copy directly from the musician or distributor. If you take a copy of, say, a movie that I made, copy it and watch it, you've stolen it. When you watch it at the theater, you pay. When you watch it on TV, you pay (through advertising.) If there is no revenue from the presentation, then you're getting something for free. This is only okay if the people who've invested their time, money and effort don't mind you doing so.
I have no problem with people sharing movies in their home. I have a real problem with them sharing them with a million perfect strangers who might have otherwise gone to the theater or waited for it to come out on TV. I also appreciate the plight of people in other countries frustrated because they want to see something from abroad that isn't being distributed in their home country (I'm one of those people: I live in Japan and can't get some of my favorite shows here, period.)
If you still say it isn't stealing, then perhaps "freeloader" or "leech" would be more appropriate. I think you'll find those kinds of people aren't any more socially appreciated, though. Look at it this way: if you have a job at a restaurant as a waiter, and no customers come in that day because someplace else is giving away food for free, do you still expect to get paid?
So you're saying that you could get ten million people to invest ten dollars, sight unseen, into a movie, for the eventual hope that they'll possibly like it? Do you think a business model like that would genuinely fly? We have enough trouble just getting people to donate money to people who really need it, let alone to people who just want to create entertainment/art/whatever. The entire idea is completely against human nature.
Didn't they cover this theory in "A Beautiful Mind?" If everyone tries to be number one, everybody loses? Sounds like Sony and Microsoft need to take some basic economics courses.
A Japanese student visa forbids you to work, although I believe you're allowed to have a part-time job outside of the semester (although I could be wrong.) More info here: http://www.mofa.go.jp/j_info/visit/visa/04.html
This guy was basically self-employed, so needed a completely different visa.
The article is published by the Daily Mainichi, so I wouldn't worry about checking the original Japanes for accuracy.
Slashdot Mirror
You'll see that the comments made by the Chinese government were only in regards to the Chinese internet community, and that the "purification" referred to making it easier to administer and develop the financial potential of the Chinese internet. This entire post is sensationalistic nonsense that glosses over the more boring bits of reality in order to make a mountain over a molehill.
I moved from a "sprawled" small college town in America to Osaka, Japan, and even without the change in diet, the change in lifestyle has caused me to lose weight. Things are too convenient to warrant wasting effort on private transportation; if it's not within easy biking distance, then there's a busstop or train station nearby to fix you up.
Of course, I finally got a motorcycle, which has greatly reduced my spending on public transportation, but I still end up using my bicycle for anything within 20 minutes (which is almost everything.)
While you're absolutely right that it's nice, if not vital, for software to play nice with the system, Linux (the underlying OS) should be responsible for keeping the software from running amok, and the developer pay the penalty when their software doesn't perform the way users expect. It's not the Debian's team job, and it shouldn't be. Distributions are one of the biggest hurdles in Linux adoption - everybody has their way of doing things, and they believe that their way is "right." Unfortunately, projecting one's personal ideas of rightness on others has never been the best formula for making friends.
Linspire's particular advantage is in believing that "right" is trying to find a way to lure the most users possible to their distro by making it friendly and easy-to-use. Users shouldn't have to worry about dependencies; they shouldn't have to ever even see a message warning them about it, worry about having to resolve it, or worst of all, have a package refuse to install because of "unresolvable conflicts." Solving this involves research, which means time, which means that most people would just as soon spend the money on Windows or OSX and call it good. They work, they rarely tell you that you're missing something, and if they are, they usually provide an easy path towards finding the software you need, which also usually installs without complaint.
Sure, a high-end user may want the option to continue using a particular version of a particular library, and damn the dependencies. That's what "more options" and "advanced" buttons are for. You need to build in user-selectable levels of complexity, rather than having the system dictate terms.
I don't think you really need to waste a lot of time on involved studies on this one. Someone who telecommutes, regardless of the reason, sends the message that while they care about the paycheck, they put where they live ahead of the company. They might do a good job, and there might be respect, but are you really going to promote somebody you know well via email versus somebody who comes into your office everyday?
Yeah. This phone might as well not exist for me, since I live in Japan, and I'd much rather have the screen on an iPod and not a phone. It makes it almost an anti-announcement, since there's no telling when this will be incorporated into the iPods.
Apple's released something very drool-worthy that nobody can use yet and will cost you a lot more than the actual phone service, assuming you're stuck in a two-year contract. Also, it completely misses the teenage market, since you're telling parents that they're going to be signing their kids up for Cingular in addition to getting them a music player.
I don't know; with the limited storage size, maybe Apple sees it as not being a competition problem at all.
Maybe they figured out that their low-level assembly code, already tailored to the Intel processor, could be married to their already existing OSX front-end code, thus making bringing it over to OSX relatively easy to do.
As for competition? Hardly. Premiere is already a mediocre program on Windows. I doubt it's going to suddenly get better just because it runs on OSX.
There are only four links listed on the site, and I doubt that any of them are organizations the average person has ever heard of. Their site is also very user-unfriendly to the uninitiated, which means they're doing a rather poor job of trying to spread the word to the masses, as it were. They list four players that will work with Theora, helpfully listed as "Binaries," and no explanation as to which is going to really fulfill their needs. In other words, you're forcing your users to do research in order to get things going, which doesn't exactly inspire someone who just came there looking for a way to watch the EU feeds. Better to stick with proprietary solutions that work out-of-the-box for 99% of your constituents. I'm not satisfied with that as a solution, either, but those wanting OSS to win are going to have to step up and make some effort to rally people to the cause. Redesigning the web site so that people will want to visit and find it helpful would be a good first step. Complaining about it on Slashdot is just preaching to the choir and doesn't solve anything.
This is definitely a must-see experience, and I envy the travelers who were lucky enough to witness something so rare. However, I'm less envious of the captain when he reaches harbor and realizes that sailing through 16km of pumice is hell on the bottom paint. He's going to have fun getting that repainted. ;) (Of course, a REAL captain would just do it himself.)
Speaking from the experience of having lived on a sailboat for three years, and having painted the bottom in dry dock at least once.
Average thickness in this case is very misleading. If you were to say that 50% of Greenland was over 1500 meters tall, what the overall picture would be is that the other 50% of the ice sheet is melting and only a few mountain peaks were piling on ice. Isolated pockets building on extremely thick layers could through off the average in favor of thicker ice, when in fact the vast majority is melting away.
I find it more more annoying that Google insists that localized versions of Firefox automatically default to that locale's official language, and won't let you change this default no matter what. I live in Japan, and yes, I speak and read Japanese, but I'd prefer my searches not be limited by language. I have to click "search the entire web" every single time, which means searching twice. No other search engine has this built-in limitation.
Ironically, Yahoo! is the search engine of choice in Japan, and doesn't discriminate against language. Also, their results are often better than Google's.
No, we have mindless binge drinkers and general idiots. However, we satisfy ourselves by suing each other, and nobody has to get spied on.
How does putting up a camera make things better? You get the knowledge that somebody else is watching them be a drunken idiot? And then somebody tells them they're being naughty? That's progress?
If they were the kind of people who payed attention or cared, they wouldn't be the way they are in the first place. As usual, the only people who get hurt are the ones who aren't causing the problem.
Spend countless messages arguing over the physics of ice in a glass of water, while leaving out important details such as the fact that the South Pole will be affected as well as the North Pole, thus making the point moot? Always glad to be of service. :)
This is true. But they do explain why the sea levels *will* rise, regardless of the physical displacement of ice floating in water.
Only if you fail to take Antarctica and Greenland into account. They point out that the Arctic will be free of ice, but this doesn't mean that the Antarctic is going to stay the way it is. Melt Antarctica, and the waters will rise.
Ive done acupuncture, and I can highly recommend it. The doctor combines it with physical therapy techniques, so you get a very robust treatment.
Depends on where you live. Here in Japan, broadband has already reached the necessary speed and reliability.
I agree. If everybody involved at the time the song was created is long dead and gone, then current claimants to the rights are just full of crap. What's even worse is the idea that you can "arrange" someone else's work and get credit for it, thus securing the copyright. There's no justifiable reason that "Happy Birthday" should be under copyright, but there it is.
Would have worked better if the other place was giving away the food they'd stolen from the original restaurant, huh? That's where the material vs. immaterial comparison breaks down; copy a song, and you still have the original left over. Take somebody's sandwich, and they know they're missing their lunch.
However, musicians can be legally contracted (and often are.) They expect to be paid. However, if people are stealing their music, the record companies do not pay them regardless; they say too bad, suck it. That's where the restaurant employees make out like bandits.
Good flame. Bad reasoning, but very flame-y.
It's supply and demand. If my product is in high demand and people are willing to pay my price, then it doesn't make me a bad person if I become wealthy because of it. However, saying "fuck you" to somebody for doing well for themselves is just sour grapes. Whether you buy a CD or you buy a concert ticket, you get exactly the same thing - the music, and the experience of listening to it. A copy from a friend is no way the same as a copy from a record label. You don't get the nice CD, liner notes, etc. You don't get the knowledge that you are (hopefully, in some way, after the label is done bleeding them dry), paying the musicians in appreciation of their work. You assume that their salaries are big, because that's how the media portrays them. To be fair, most label-signed musicians usually make the big bucks from the concerts. However, it all starts with selling their CDs; this encourages the labels to promote and advertise them. They may be evil, but they're a very useful evil. Until we get to the point where do-it-yourself advertising and distribution is just as effective, we're stuck with it. Since musicians are usually not trained in advertising, graphic design and web programming, I'd say we have a long way to go.
It is if you keep the free copy in lieu of buying a copy directly from the musician or distributor. If you take a copy of, say, a movie that I made, copy it and watch it, you've stolen it. When you watch it at the theater, you pay. When you watch it on TV, you pay (through advertising.) If there is no revenue from the presentation, then you're getting something for free. This is only okay if the people who've invested their time, money and effort don't mind you doing so.
I have no problem with people sharing movies in their home. I have a real problem with them sharing them with a million perfect strangers who might have otherwise gone to the theater or waited for it to come out on TV. I also appreciate the plight of people in other countries frustrated because they want to see something from abroad that isn't being distributed in their home country (I'm one of those people: I live in Japan and can't get some of my favorite shows here, period.)
If you still say it isn't stealing, then perhaps "freeloader" or "leech" would be more appropriate. I think you'll find those kinds of people aren't any more socially appreciated, though. Look at it this way: if you have a job at a restaurant as a waiter, and no customers come in that day because someplace else is giving away food for free, do you still expect to get paid?
So you're saying that you could get ten million people to invest ten dollars, sight unseen, into a movie, for the eventual hope that they'll possibly like it? Do you think a business model like that would genuinely fly? We have enough trouble just getting people to donate money to people who really need it, let alone to people who just want to create entertainment/art/whatever. The entire idea is completely against human nature.
When Google doesn't work (which it often does), I use Yahoo. I also tend to get better results depending on the search subject.
Didn't they cover this theory in "A Beautiful Mind?" If everyone tries to be number one, everybody loses? Sounds like Sony and Microsoft need to take some basic economics courses.
You're also assuming that all of those countries cooperate and unite in a concerted effort against the US. That's pretty unrealistic, too.
A Japanese student visa forbids you to work, although I believe you're allowed to have a part-time job outside of the semester (although I could be wrong.) More info here: http://www.mofa.go.jp/j_info/visit/visa/04.html
This guy was basically self-employed, so needed a completely different visa.
The article is published by the Daily Mainichi, so I wouldn't worry about checking the original Japanes for accuracy.