Remove the cover while it's still plugged in and watch the reading head move back and forth while it is being accessed by the computer. It's a fun sight. Having cover removed will greatly shorten the life span and cause occasional reading errors, but it will continue to work for a little while more.
<SteamFiction>
Yea... you can't give your old toaster to people or sell it. That's just nasty. It would be like selling the house you lived in every day for the past five years. Why would you want to sell your old house? Ewww... everyone knows you're supposed to burn it to the ground and have the next people on the land build a brand new house.
Same with cars, you can't sell your old used car once you drive it out of the dealer's lot, the title has your name on it and it is non transferable. Nobody else would possibly want that car you farted in while driving on muddy streets. Only the car dealer has the right to sell cars to people.
Same with clothing, you can't give/sell/donate your old clothing because once you wear it, it is yours forever. If you die, you have to bury your entire wardrobe with you.
Software is a whole lot more personal than a house, a car, and clothing. Ewww, why would you want to install software that's already been installed on someone else's computer? That's nasty! Ewww.... that's just plain nasty.
</SteamFiction>
Now back to the shocking reality. Steam is so out of touch with reality. People can actually sell used houses and their used cars and even their old used clothing and if someone wants to give away or sell their old used toaster they very well can, and someone who is less fortunate who can't afford a brand new toaster can actually buy a used toaster and use it. A quick ebay search reveals dozens of used toasters for sale. Preventing people from selling their used software that they purchased is objectionable and unnatural at the least, possibly criminal.
Encyclopedias and Dictionaries are nothing but collection of facts. I remember contacting a dictionary company once trying to get them to give me a copy of their list of words in the English language, apparently even their list of words is copyrighted and I had to find other sources. This makes no sense but... does anything?
Here's a perfect example of a bull shit patent and they're using in this lawsuit:
-------------
Vehicle computer system with open platform architecture
A vehicle computer system has a housing sized to be mounted in a vehicle dashboard or other appropriate location. A computer is mounted within the housing and executes an open platform, multi-tasking operating system. The computer runs multiple applications on the operating system, including both vehicle-related applications (e.g., vehicle security application, vehicle diagnostics application, communications application, etc.) and non-vehicle-related applications (e.g., entertainment application, word processing, etc.). The applications may be supplied by the vehicle manufacturer and/or by the vehicle user.
-------------
This is filed on: Sep 10, 1999... as I read that, the only thing I could think of was: are you fucking serious? They think nobody had the idea of sticking a laptop into a car before this? Didn't police cars in the 90's come with computers mounted in the center console? I had a computer in my car before.
What's next? Somebody is going to patent wearing pants on your legs? How about a patent for heating up food on a curved metal object? How about a patent for producing light and heat by rapid exothermic oxidation. These assholes have turned patent system into bull shitting system. I for one will not stand up for bull shit. I hope the judge takes one look at this and revokes the said patents. I doubt that's going to happen though.
I paid $129 for a Nintendo DS ONLY because of R4DS card. I totally agree with what Aliquis is saying. Without the said card, Nintendo wouldn't get a single penny from me and I wouldn't even think about getting the stupid system. Over the years I bought several DS's in various colors, and encouraged friends and family to get them as well, and I even bought some DS games for my friend as a gift. So, how was the R4DS card bad for their business? It's bad enough they're wasting billions of dollars trying to keep people from copying stuff, but their growing obsession with piracy is starting to cost them big. I know their bread and butter is the console sales, but come on now.
What really grinds my gears about the whole piracy thing is all anti-piracy scams try to make it seem like piracy is costing them hell of a lot more than what it really is costing them... for example: the business software alliance says piracy costs business software makers about $30 billion annually, in reality, the pimply teenager in high school who downloaded pirated copy of Maya and Photoshop wasn't going to buy a copy in the first place, nor does he have the funds to do so. The true cost of piracy is:
1. money obtained in exchange for products illegally (this is what piracy REALLY is)
2. the money companies waste trying (unsuccessfully) to overcome piracy by making their products unusable
Let's face the facts, not every bum has money to buy crap, and it doesn't cost anyone a dime if they copy it. Nintendo and all others should stop going after card makers, and start going after people who pirate their stuff for profit. I look on Craigslist and I find a dozen people trying to pawn off these "lots of games for DS on a single cartridge" for a fraction of the actual cost of the games. Those people really are stealing Nintendo's revenue, they are the real pirates, but yet Nintendo's not doing didly squat about them, instead Nintendo is too busy going after people who they should instead be thanking.
Crazy mixed up world we live in and thanks for reading my 2 cents if you made it this far.
Walmart, Radio Shack or a battery store is not the place you should go to have your watch battery replaced if you have a high quality watch. I made that mistake, brought a nice watch to the local Battery Plus store and they replaced the battery but they didn't reseal it properly. The watch that had lasted 6 years on the same battery died within a month after the battery replacement (water inside).
You can have the manufacturer replace the battery but they will charge you an arm and a leg and take a long time. The other good option is to go to a jeweler that sells good watches and know what they're doing, they will be able to replace the battery and reseal the watch properly. I went there to replace the battery
I found the same model watch, the model is discontinued, so I purchased an old-stock and of course the battery in it was about 10 years old so it was dead, I brought it to the jeweler, and got the battery replaced, and it's been working great for the past 4 years.
I too remember the bitmapped alien sitting on the bitmapped toilet in the movie theater in the first level of Duke Nukem 3D. It's toilet humor that fits well into Duke Nukem 3D world which has a much thinner atmosphere as it is a lighthearted game as evidenced by pigs dressed like cops and the main protagonist has an endless supply of cliche one liners peppered with profanity that he dispenses generously throughout the game as he is kicking and butchering comical aliens.
As amusing as it may be to some, an alien sitting on a toilet would be completely out of place in F.E.A.R. as this game tries to establish a much thicker atmosphere. Aliens caught in comical situations would just dilute it.
Yea about that... they discovered Article 1 Section 8 apparently had a small typo:
"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries"
was really meant to spell out:
"To promote wealth of a few by securing for nearly unlimited times to license holders the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries"
The credit for the discovery of this minor typo goes to Disney and Bono.
It's really overpriced. At the heart of it all, this is is just a Waverunner with the output hooked up into a hose and attached to a directional output and some valves. A Waverunner can already produce a water jet with enough thrust to easily lift a person. Considering that you can get a top of the line 200HP Waverunner for about $20K (and you just need the motor/pump parts for this), what justifies the extra $100000 they're asking for this device?
Hmm... This gives me an idea... what if you put the motor/pump on a stand-alone floating platform, and drag it along with you instead of having to require a separate boat/driver to carry it around behind you? For $100000 you can even make the platform smart enough so it can follow the jet packer so he doesn't feel it dragging. I think that would be worth the money and it would be a lot more fun.
You only got 1 thing right in that whole thing:
Copyright applies to a work and its derivatives, so yea, if you buy a book, you can't make a movie based on that book without the licence holder's permission.
You buy a copy of something, you have the legal right to do whatever you want with it, except sell copies of it. Suppose you bought a book: you can read it on the train, read it on the toilet, read it while eating, read it while hanging upside down from a tree in Bangladesh if you like, and you can even burn the book, throw it away or sell it to some idiot walking down the street for a nickel. You can make a book that is a parody of that book. These are all legal things you can do. What's not legal? Photocopy the book and sell, that's not legal. You also can't read it out loud in a public place (public performance). The same exact rights apply to music, software, movies.
Since this stuff is so easy to copy now days, you don't need to be actually selling the extra copies to be infringing copyright, giving them away now also counts as infringement somehow. Originally it didn't. Now they even try to push it as far as saying using more than one copy at a time is also infringing. The question becomes what if you have a DVD player hooked up to two TVs using a splitter... does that infringe because it's making two copies when playing? IANAL and glad because the law is retarded.
To infringe on copyright is to make illegal copy.
Illegal copy is not what you create when you coerce the software to do what it wasn't meant to do. You just end up with the same software that can do more than intended. Copyright/DMCA does not apply as you haven't made any extra copies of anything (let alone distribute).
You can already get a Python, Ruby, Perl, a C compiler, and an IDE and source control on Windows. Visual C++ 2008 Express is one of the most advanced IDE's out there and it's free. everything else is also easy to obtain as a bunch of free downloads.
Also, from what I can see, the majority of Apple fanatics don't even know or care about computer programming. They just want something shiny that's easy to use, and that's what Apple is. It just works.
"the long-standing barrier between the game maker and game player that was set up to protect the profitability of projects is crumbling."
This article is wrong in so many ways. The long standing barrier? There's no barrier between game designers an gamers, in most cases the game designers are gamers themselves, in addition there are in house testers (dedicated gamers) to play the game at different stages and give feedback. And then there are the open source games, and indy games made by gamers for gamers. New York Times is out of touch with reality when it comes to computer games.
What Peaker is saying would only be true if the satellite was being dropped from the sky from a stand still. It would probably heat up a bit and get damaged because it was not made to withstand such forces, but it would not burn up.
The creepy guy sitting behind you on the train reading your book over your shoulder is breaking federal copyright law? Or is that your fault for enjoying your book in a public place where it could be considered a public performance?
How would you download Firefox on a new computer without Internet Explorer? The first thing I do with a fresh install of Windows is start Internet Explorer and download a real browser.
Outer space aready has penty of black hoes, and white dwarfs. Other demographics need representation too, and it comes in form of this white space.
(My keyboard is missing the key that comes after k.)
The muzzle velocity of a pistol is about 300 m/s.
Sniper rifle is about 900 m/s.
Satellites in Low Earth Orbit travel at about 8000m/s.
It seems all you need to do is put some sand in orbit in opposite direction for a nice head-on collision with devastating results.
Slashdot Mirror
Remove the cover while it's still plugged in and watch the reading head move back and forth while it is being accessed by the computer. It's a fun sight. Having cover removed will greatly shorten the life span and cause occasional reading errors, but it will continue to work for a little while more.
If you get bored, you can make a hard drive speaker: http://www.instructables.com/id/Hard-Drive-Speaker-System/
What's this tesla turbine thing? http://www.instructables.com/id/Tesla-turbine-from-old-hard-drives-and-minimal-too/
So many fun things to do with old hard drives.
"That'd be like wrapping up and presenting the toaster you've used every morning for the past year."
Does Steam really say that? Holy crap they do: https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?p_faqid=549#gifts-whatare
<SteamFiction>
Yea... you can't give your old toaster to people or sell it. That's just nasty. It would be like selling the house you lived in every day for the past five years. Why would you want to sell your old house? Ewww... everyone knows you're supposed to burn it to the ground and have the next people on the land build a brand new house.
Same with cars, you can't sell your old used car once you drive it out of the dealer's lot, the title has your name on it and it is non transferable. Nobody else would possibly want that car you farted in while driving on muddy streets. Only the car dealer has the right to sell cars to people.
Same with clothing, you can't give/sell/donate your old clothing because once you wear it, it is yours forever. If you die, you have to bury your entire wardrobe with you.
Software is a whole lot more personal than a house, a car, and clothing. Ewww, why would you want to install software that's already been installed on someone else's computer? That's nasty! Ewww.... that's just plain nasty.
</SteamFiction>
Now back to the shocking reality. Steam is so out of touch with reality.
People can actually sell used houses and their used cars and even their old used clothing and if someone wants to give away or sell their old used toaster they very well can, and someone who is less fortunate who can't afford a brand new toaster can actually buy a used toaster and use it. A quick ebay search reveals dozens of used toasters for sale. Preventing people from selling their used software that they purchased is objectionable and unnatural at the least, possibly criminal.
Encyclopedias and Dictionaries are nothing but collection of facts. I remember contacting a dictionary company once trying to get them to give me a copy of their list of words in the English language, apparently even their list of words is copyrighted and I had to find other sources. This makes no sense but... does anything?
Here's a perfect example of a bull shit patent and they're using in this lawsuit:
-------------
Vehicle computer system with open platform architecture
A vehicle computer system has a housing sized to be mounted in a vehicle dashboard or other appropriate location. A computer is mounted within the housing and executes an open platform, multi-tasking operating system. The computer runs multiple applications on the operating system, including both vehicle-related applications (e.g., vehicle security application, vehicle diagnostics application, communications application, etc.) and non-vehicle-related applications (e.g., entertainment application, word processing, etc.). The applications may be supplied by the vehicle manufacturer and/or by the vehicle user.
-------------
This is filed on: Sep 10, 1999... as I read that, the only thing I could think of was: are you fucking serious? They think nobody had the idea of sticking a laptop into a car before this? Didn't police cars in the 90's come with computers mounted in the center console? I had a computer in my car before.
What's next? Somebody is going to patent wearing pants on your legs? How about a patent for heating up food on a curved metal object? How about a patent for producing light and heat by rapid exothermic oxidation. These assholes have turned patent system into bull shitting system. I for one will not stand up for bull shit. I hope the judge takes one look at this and revokes the said patents. I doubt that's going to happen though.
I paid $129 for a Nintendo DS ONLY because of R4DS card. I totally agree with what Aliquis is saying. Without the said card, Nintendo wouldn't get a single penny from me and I wouldn't even think about getting the stupid system. Over the years I bought several DS's in various colors, and encouraged friends and family to get them as well, and I even bought some DS games for my friend as a gift. So, how was the R4DS card bad for their business? It's bad enough they're wasting billions of dollars trying to keep people from copying stuff, but their growing obsession with piracy is starting to cost them big. I know their bread and butter is the console sales, but come on now.
What really grinds my gears about the whole piracy thing is all anti-piracy scams try to make it seem like piracy is costing them hell of a lot more than what it really is costing them... for example: the business software alliance says piracy costs business software makers about $30 billion annually, in reality, the pimply teenager in high school who downloaded pirated copy of Maya and Photoshop wasn't going to buy a copy in the first place, nor does he have the funds to do so. The true cost of piracy is:
1. money obtained in exchange for products illegally (this is what piracy REALLY is)
2. the money companies waste trying (unsuccessfully) to overcome piracy by making their products unusable
Let's face the facts, not every bum has money to buy crap, and it doesn't cost anyone a dime if they copy it. Nintendo and all others should stop going after card makers, and start going after people who pirate their stuff for profit. I look on Craigslist and I find a dozen people trying to pawn off these "lots of games for DS on a single cartridge" for a fraction of the actual cost of the games. Those people really are stealing Nintendo's revenue, they are the real pirates, but yet Nintendo's not doing didly squat about them, instead Nintendo is too busy going after people who they should instead be thanking.
Crazy mixed up world we live in and thanks for reading my 2 cents if you made it this far.
Why is this marked funny? It's no joke, it's absolutely true that time is relative to our point of view.
In every country there's always going to be a starving part of the population. It's called anorexia.
"it's not quite as good as Photoshop"
Photoshop: $500
Sumo-Paint: $0
Value = Quality / Price
Sumo-Paint = infinite value.
Nice flash program.
Walmart, Radio Shack or a battery store is not the place you should go to have your watch battery replaced if you have a high quality watch. I made that mistake, brought a nice watch to the local Battery Plus store and they replaced the battery but they didn't reseal it properly. The watch that had lasted 6 years on the same battery died within a month after the battery replacement (water inside).
You can have the manufacturer replace the battery but they will charge you an arm and a leg and take a long time. The other good option is to go to a jeweler that sells good watches and know what they're doing, they will be able to replace the battery and reseal the watch properly. I went there to replace the battery
I found the same model watch, the model is discontinued, so I purchased an old-stock and of course the battery in it was about 10 years old so it was dead, I brought it to the jeweler, and got the battery replaced, and it's been working great for the past 4 years.
I too remember the bitmapped alien sitting on the bitmapped toilet in the movie theater in the first level of Duke Nukem 3D. It's toilet humor that fits well into Duke Nukem 3D world which has a much thinner atmosphere as it is a lighthearted game as evidenced by pigs dressed like cops and the main protagonist has an endless supply of cliche one liners peppered with profanity that he dispenses generously throughout the game as he is kicking and butchering comical aliens.
As amusing as it may be to some, an alien sitting on a toilet would be completely out of place in F.E.A.R. as this game tries to establish a much thicker atmosphere. Aliens caught in comical situations would just dilute it.
Nope, that's the whole idea of a casino... suckering people into thinking they stand a chance.
Yea about that... they discovered Article 1 Section 8 apparently had a small typo:
"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries"
was really meant to spell out:
"To promote wealth of a few by securing for nearly unlimited times to license holders the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries"
The credit for the discovery of this minor typo goes to Disney and Bono.
It's really overpriced. At the heart of it all, this is is just a Waverunner with the output hooked up into a hose and attached to a directional output and some valves. A Waverunner can already produce a water jet with enough thrust to easily lift a person. Considering that you can get a top of the line 200HP Waverunner for about $20K (and you just need the motor/pump parts for this), what justifies the extra $100000 they're asking for this device?
Hmm... This gives me an idea... what if you put the motor/pump on a stand-alone floating platform, and drag it along with you instead of having to require a separate boat/driver to carry it around behind you? For $100000 you can even make the platform smart enough so it can follow the jet packer so he doesn't feel it dragging. I think that would be worth the money and it would be a lot more fun.
You only got 1 thing right in that whole thing:
Copyright applies to a work and its derivatives, so yea, if you buy a book, you can't make a movie based on that book without the licence holder's permission.
You buy a copy of something, you have the legal right to do whatever you want with it, except sell copies of it. Suppose you bought a book: you can read it on the train, read it on the toilet, read it while eating, read it while hanging upside down from a tree in Bangladesh if you like, and you can even burn the book, throw it away or sell it to some idiot walking down the street for a nickel. You can make a book that is a parody of that book. These are all legal things you can do. What's not legal? Photocopy the book and sell, that's not legal. You also can't read it out loud in a public place (public performance). The same exact rights apply to music, software, movies.
Since this stuff is so easy to copy now days, you don't need to be actually selling the extra copies to be infringing copyright, giving them away now also counts as infringement somehow. Originally it didn't. Now they even try to push it as far as saying using more than one copy at a time is also infringing. The question becomes what if you have a DVD player hooked up to two TVs using a splitter... does that infringe because it's making two copies when playing? IANAL and glad because the law is retarded.
To infringe on copyright is to make illegal copy. Illegal copy is not what you create when you coerce the software to do what it wasn't meant to do. You just end up with the same software that can do more than intended. Copyright/DMCA does not apply as you haven't made any extra copies of anything (let alone distribute).
IANAL, but this makes sense, no?
You can already get a Python, Ruby, Perl, a C compiler, and an IDE and source control on Windows. Visual C++ 2008 Express is one of the most advanced IDE's out there and it's free. everything else is also easy to obtain as a bunch of free downloads.
Also, from what I can see, the majority of Apple fanatics don't even know or care about computer programming. They just want something shiny that's easy to use, and that's what Apple is. It just works.
"the long-standing barrier between the game maker and game player that was set up to protect the profitability of projects is crumbling."
This article is wrong in so many ways. The long standing barrier? There's no barrier between game designers an gamers, in most cases the game designers are gamers themselves, in addition there are in house testers (dedicated gamers) to play the game at different stages and give feedback. And then there are the open source games, and indy games made by gamers for gamers. New York Times is out of touch with reality when it comes to computer games.
http://spring.clan-sy.com/
What Peaker is saying would only be true if the satellite was being dropped from the sky from a stand still. It would probably heat up a bit and get damaged because it was not made to withstand such forces, but it would not burn up.
The creepy guy sitting behind you on the train reading your book over your shoulder is breaking federal copyright law? Or is that your fault for enjoying your book in a public place where it could be considered a public performance?
How would you download Firefox on a new computer without Internet Explorer? The first thing I do with a fresh install of Windows is start Internet Explorer and download a real browser.
Outer space aready has penty of black hoes, and white dwarfs. Other demographics need representation too, and it comes in form of this white space. (My keyboard is missing the key that comes after k.)
The muzzle velocity of a pistol is about 300 m/s.
Sniper rifle is about 900 m/s.
Satellites in Low Earth Orbit travel at about 8000m/s.
It seems all you need to do is put some sand in orbit in opposite direction for a nice head-on collision with devastating results.
Telemarketers! I look forward to ISS crew having to screen their calls to prevent annoying junk peddlers.
Also, I would think Alaskans are far less likely to go around looting stores and shooting at rescue workers during an emergency.