"How does it affect anyone other than those who want to wear religious headgear in their photo[?]"
It doesn't, really, and to the best of my knowledge Austria isn't inundated with people demanding that Judeo-Christian Creationism be taught in public schools, so even the 'it's now slightly more official" argument doesn't mean much.
With that said, there is a massive movement in Europe to ban all sorts of religious headgear from being worn.The fact that an exception was just made for jesting Pastafarians means they must more strongly consider the implications of preventing entirely serious members of other religions from wearing their own. If he were French this would be somewhat more meaningful, but then they would probably forbid it.
YMMV, I suppose. I have a penchant for older games, and I've had no significant issues running anything on 7. Certainly nothing that was any harder than on XP.
I tend not to think of myself as a 1337 h4ckz0r, so aside from basic familiarity with how computers work and the willingness to try clicking around a bit, I haven't had to take extraordinary measures for anything.
Not sure it's for the paranoid so much as the people who do not conform to standard gender roles or titles.
if you don't know anyone for whom that is a legitimate concern, then it won't come up. I expect to see "other" selected on a fairly large number of friends.
7 is better than XP, and if anything Vista was hacked out because people were getting impatient waiting for 7. 7 is also better than Vista, of course, but I suspect that the reason people keep making that comparison is because you keep insisting it must be bad because Vista was bad.
Beyond that, yeah, you're probably right. I suspect Microsoft would very much like to continue being a part of the software market, even when that market moves toward devices based on architectures and user-interfaces other than the ones they established themselves. if you want to see that as sinister, go right ahead. Personally, I've spent the last decade watching Microsoft, and I find it hard to hold a grudge against them any more. Yes, they were abusive pricks for a long time, no they didn't get punished for it as harshly as I think they should have... but at this point their abuses are largely moot and they are more or less playing well with others. The market has opened up, and they're still doing quite well. if their product didn't have any strengths, that wouldn't be the case.
"here is no reason Windows 2000 couldn't have had these improvements, but it didn't get them"
Sure it did, they called it XP. Seriously though, the service packs introduced most of the upgrades, but in the manner of all things 2000 did so in a somewhat ad hoc and un-user friendly manner.
It was a minor theme and a bundle of, mostly minor, usability upgrades to Windows 2000, most of which could be worked around by a savvy user. Many people didn't like Windows 2000 because of a few, mostly minor, usability issues, most of which could be worked around by a savvy user.
If you're saying it would have been stupid for somebody to pay full price to move from 2000 to XP, you're right. The number of people who had any reason to do so, however, was fairly small, especially since 2000 was marketed as an enterprise product intended to replace the NT line, which saw virtually no use on consumer machines. The consumer counterpart to 2000 was actually ME, which was such a horrific mess in large part because they did a hack job trying to merge the popular-but-obsolete Win98 interface and use conventions onto the NT base. XP was, in truth, a merger of the two product lines, wherein they moved to the superior NT model, but provided a solid and reliable framework for home users to continue using DOS-based software and concepts, along with a level of polish and slickness that made low-confidence home users feel comfortable with the changes.
Similarly, Vista tried to move onto a new (and this time mostly untested) technology base, but preserve certain aspects of the then-antiquated XP experience, but did a hack job of it. Windows 7 provides a solid and reliable framework for handling XP-era software and concepts, along with a level of polish and slickness that made low-confidence home users feel comfortable with the changes. Gee, that sounds familiar... Anyway, Vista didn't have a business/enterprise version ship with it, something truer to the core of 7 but without the coddling niceties end-users expect from their computers. If it did, I would imagine it would still be fairly popular within the techie community, much like 2000 stayed with us long after the release of XP (I myself didn't bother switching over until Vista was in public testing).
Anyway, 8 looks like a new-and-improved to include the latest Internet stuff that all the kids are doing these days, which reminds me of what changed between 95 and 98. Basically, the UI got a significant upgrade and it added support for modern networking. 8 looks like it is adding inherent support for html5 and other post-90s web standards (out-of-the-box Flash support without any Adobe software?), touch screens, ADHD multi-tasking (I have enough trouble focusing on one thing at a time, how does anyone manage to have that many things going on in front of their face without losing track of everything?) and sundry other developments and expectations of the current generation of technology. I'll hold out cautious optimism that it won't suck, though I'm still giving it about 6 months to a year of release before I'll believe it's really ready for every day use by people who don't like to troubleshoot.
I feel like I should give the example of Elizabethan theater. There were virtually no copy protections, and plays were routinely copied by competing troupes without compensation. Not only did this give us Shakespeare, perhaps the greatest literary figure in the history of the English language, but drove enormous innovation in terms of the technical aspects of theater: staging, writing, producing, casting, marketing, set/prop use, stage and facility construction, acting style, pacing, format, stage direction... it all saw drastic change in a highly competitive market with virtually no protections for copyright, trademark, patent etc.
Not only did a lack of protection fail to stop content creators, it arguably led to one of the largest shifts in literature and art, across one of the shortest periods in time, in human history.
Pretty much sinks the "we need to have strong, eternal copyrights to protect artists so they will create things" argument entirely.
I don't believe that there would be. Car manufacturing requires a huge amount of capital. There is also an expectation of quality and a trust relationship between customers and manufacturers. The only people who would be getting information they don't already have would be people not currently involved in the industry: it's no secret to Toyota how a Honda works, and neither is confounding GM either. They can already copy each other quite effectively, and frequently do, but instead they put quite a bit of effort into explicitly differentiating their products. In fact, there are semi-generic automobiles on the market already: Geo was explicitly in the business of building designs by other companies and selling them at a discount.
I think if the auto manufacturers were to release all of their design documents to the open, not much would really change. A few start-ups might be able to swing enough capital to start building knock-offs, but ultimately I doubt it would be chaos, and I doubt they would even be such a bad thing: more competition means more of capitalism functioning as intended. We'd be more likely to see see lower prices for consumers, innovative manufacturing technologies and ideas, improvements in vehicle safety and an increase in consumer choice. Now that you bring this up, I actually think it's a great idea that should be implemented immediately.
To give a computer analogy (my apologies, but I can't really make a car analogy here... I hope you can see why): there is very little to prevent HP from making a computer model identical to a Dell model, and one can argue that they already HAVE effectively identical models on the market, nor is there much of anything to prevent a guy doing so in his basement... yet it doesn't happen, because HP wants to sell computers that are different from Dell, dell wants to sell computers that are different from HP, and the guy in his basement wants to look at porn... er... no, wait... he wants to build a computer to the specs he decides.
More likely they would require such libraries to purchase a different version of the book licensed for them to do so. A different version costing several times the normal retail version, which has in the fine print on the copyright page language indicating that the library can legally do that.
"we can say that the christian god cannot possibly exist if he's claimed to be omnipotent, omni-present, and omni-benevolent."
Depends on your definition of "omni-potent." If you define it such that it implies power transcending and sort of human comprehension, power which is completely unbounded by time or causality, power which by its very existence renders human observation irrelevant - then no, not really. Belief in a so-defined being would, however, make it challenging to engage in any sort of discourse or meaningful thought process on the subject.
The easier part to discredit is that such a being would have any use for a messiah. It hardly seems omni-benevolent to base eternal reward and punishment on something so arbitrary as whether one believed in the right claimant of apotheosis for a being that could, by definition, monitor every thought and deed a person has and reward or punish core morality. If the Christian God matches the description that Christians give, then their God and belief system are so severely lacking internal consistency that it fails to be an adequate explanation for much of anything... let alone everything.
The Secret service got involved because it's their jurisdiction: computer crimes. As for raping his rights... I'm not really convinced that he was within his rights to take closeup photos of people without their consent or even knowledge then very publicly post them.
If anyone in the store gave him permission to do this with the full knowledge of his plan, I would imagine that this person is going to lose their job... so if you're looking for a crap job in NYC, I'd keep an eye on the Apple Store.
The other day I saw a Honda ad with music by MC Chris.
They Might Be Giants have also had some success with that end of things ("Boss of Me" was the theme song for Malcolm in the Middle), and even when they were on a major-ish label they were careful to maintain the rights to their music.
Jonathan Coulton is, well, Jonathan Coulton. He not only doesn't have a label, he went and CC licensed his music. It does not appear to have hurt his ability to license songs for video games.
Apparently one doesn't need a major label or high-powered producer to get into that part of the biz.
Unless they can show that they have been using the name in trade, he'd probably win. Well, provided he could afford legal representation throughout the many lawsuits and appeals, that is. Most likely they would offer an out of court settlement wherein he receives an undisclosed sum of money and they get the trademark.
Yeah, it looks more like the flying ambulance from Firefly. For that matter, it looks like a lot of sci-fi flying vehicles that aren't Star Wars landspeeders... including Star Wars airspeeders such as the ones used on Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back.
The Best Buy salesman probably isn't lying, or even entirely incorrect, he most likely just doesn't know why. Mega-pixels are purely a measurement of resolution, it tells you how many pixels make up the photo you just took, nothing more, nothing less. A more expensive camera will (generally) have a higher quality lens that gives better focus, sharper image quality (not the pixels themselves, they're digital... the reproduction of a real, analog, event that the photo depicts), better (optical!) zoom, better color receptors, better low-light operation, etc.
Frankly, megapixel inflation is a scam. It increases both the cost of the camera AND the file size of the photos, often with little or no benefit to the user. Once we hit about 8mp, it stopped mattering for the majority of people, who just post pictures on Facebook or make 4x6 prints and maybe run out an 8x10 print once in a blue moon and never really show their work beyond friends and family. At the sizes most people interact with photos, any more than that is going to be invisible, even with cropping.
For a casual, amateur user, you probably are better off paying a bit extra and getting a low-medium end Canon/Nikon/Sony/insert-your-own-favorite-here, but not going crazy and getting a D-SLR or some-such extravagance. 10mp is generally more than enough, and spare yourself the gimmicky bells and whistles...do you really need the camera to detect when you smile, rather than just setting a timer?
I do put in one caveat: bird-watchers and enthusiastic sport-parents may want to splurge on the high-zoom models. 100x optical zoom is practically useless for kids' birthday parties, but if you want to see the sweat on Jimmy's face when he rounds 3rd, or capture the plumage details on that Appalachian Horn-Blower (I have no idea if that's a real bird), it might come in handy. You also should consider a tripod, or at least a monopod, because at that level of zoom you will definitely need it.
I used to sell cameras non-commission and run a low-end photo-printing studio in a big-box. My thought was that I wanted them to come back and get prints, since only the lab sales were actually relevant to my hours or pay, but the only way I could get them to do so was if they were actually happy with the sales service. Admittedly, I also did a tidy business in extended warranties, though I wasn't very pushy about them and ours were less bad than most of the competition (about 50% or less of the price, identical service and coverage through the same 3rd party vendor). The lab sales increased a bit, too.
The details vary, but anyone with particularly strong feelings on the difference between the two terms almost certainly is both a geek and a nerd, however you wish to define them.
Speaking of which... Olivia Munn is apparently vapid and unfunny on her own. Her book is simply awful. Plus, if she had a copy editor, they should be summarily executed... the occasional error in a block of text is one thing, but that's just ridiculous. They had blatant grammar and spelling errors in CHAPTER HEADINGS of all things, and I'm not talking about "its" vs. "it's" stuff, I mean things that any modern word processor would cover with so much green and red you would think it's Christmas. Most of the book is just awkward sexual anecdotes blatantly intended to fuel the fantasies of socially inept fanboys.
Even the photos (oh, yeah, halfway through it turns into a photo album of her in mediocre cosplay... classy!) lack any sort of flair or wit, let alone originality. It's almost as if, upon reading what crap her writing is, they realized that they needed to reinforce the "hot chick" angle or everyone else might catch on too, but they couldn't be arsed to do it in a way that made it something other than a random interlude. There is no context or explanation, they didn't even have the good sense to put them in a separate chapter, they just slapped them in the middle of an anecdote and continued it twenty pages later; with most chapters coming in at 5 pages or less, that's more than a little stupid.
tl:dr don't bother with reading olivia Munn's book. Don't even bother looking at the photos. It's total crap.
Slashdot Mirror
"How does it affect anyone other than those who want to wear religious headgear in their photo[?]"
It doesn't, really, and to the best of my knowledge Austria isn't inundated with people demanding that Judeo-Christian Creationism be taught in public schools, so even the 'it's now slightly more official" argument doesn't mean much.
With that said, there is a massive movement in Europe to ban all sorts of religious headgear from being worn.The fact that an exception was just made for jesting Pastafarians means they must more strongly consider the implications of preventing entirely serious members of other religions from wearing their own. If he were French this would be somewhat more meaningful, but then they would probably forbid it.
YMMV, I suppose. I have a penchant for older games, and I've had no significant issues running anything on 7. Certainly nothing that was any harder than on XP.
I tend not to think of myself as a 1337 h4ckz0r, so aside from basic familiarity with how computers work and the willingness to try clicking around a bit, I haven't had to take extraordinary measures for anything.
You can also opt not to use the service, which resolves all potential privacy issues it could cause.
Or you could use a pseudonym. I have friends with 3 or 4 of them that they use for various things.
Not sure it's for the paranoid so much as the people who do not conform to standard gender roles or titles.
if you don't know anyone for whom that is a legitimate concern, then it won't come up. I expect to see "other" selected on a fairly large number of friends.
My first installation of 7 was a dual-boot with XP. The 7 partition smoked it in terms of performance. Same exact hardware.
You're doing it wrong.
7 is better than XP, and if anything Vista was hacked out because people were getting impatient waiting for 7. 7 is also better than Vista, of course, but I suspect that the reason people keep making that comparison is because you keep insisting it must be bad because Vista was bad.
Beyond that, yeah, you're probably right. I suspect Microsoft would very much like to continue being a part of the software market, even when that market moves toward devices based on architectures and user-interfaces other than the ones they established themselves. if you want to see that as sinister, go right ahead. Personally, I've spent the last decade watching Microsoft, and I find it hard to hold a grudge against them any more. Yes, they were abusive pricks for a long time, no they didn't get punished for it as harshly as I think they should have... but at this point their abuses are largely moot and they are more or less playing well with others. The market has opened up, and they're still doing quite well. if their product didn't have any strengths, that wouldn't be the case.
"here is no reason Windows 2000 couldn't have had these improvements, but it didn't get them"
Sure it did, they called it XP. Seriously though, the service packs introduced most of the upgrades, but in the manner of all things 2000 did so in a somewhat ad hoc and un-user friendly manner.
It was a minor theme and a bundle of, mostly minor, usability upgrades to Windows 2000, most of which could be worked around by a savvy user. Many people didn't like Windows 2000 because of a few, mostly minor, usability issues, most of which could be worked around by a savvy user.
If you're saying it would have been stupid for somebody to pay full price to move from 2000 to XP, you're right. The number of people who had any reason to do so, however, was fairly small, especially since 2000 was marketed as an enterprise product intended to replace the NT line, which saw virtually no use on consumer machines. The consumer counterpart to 2000 was actually ME, which was such a horrific mess in large part because they did a hack job trying to merge the popular-but-obsolete Win98 interface and use conventions onto the NT base. XP was, in truth, a merger of the two product lines, wherein they moved to the superior NT model, but provided a solid and reliable framework for home users to continue using DOS-based software and concepts, along with a level of polish and slickness that made low-confidence home users feel comfortable with the changes.
Similarly, Vista tried to move onto a new (and this time mostly untested) technology base, but preserve certain aspects of the then-antiquated XP experience, but did a hack job of it. Windows 7 provides a solid and reliable framework for handling XP-era software and concepts, along with a level of polish and slickness that made low-confidence home users feel comfortable with the changes. Gee, that sounds familiar... Anyway, Vista didn't have a business/enterprise version ship with it, something truer to the core of 7 but without the coddling niceties end-users expect from their computers. If it did, I would imagine it would still be fairly popular within the techie community, much like 2000 stayed with us long after the release of XP (I myself didn't bother switching over until Vista was in public testing).
Anyway, 8 looks like a new-and-improved to include the latest Internet stuff that all the kids are doing these days, which reminds me of what changed between 95 and 98. Basically, the UI got a significant upgrade and it added support for modern networking. 8 looks like it is adding inherent support for html5 and other post-90s web standards (out-of-the-box Flash support without any Adobe software?), touch screens, ADHD multi-tasking (I have enough trouble focusing on one thing at a time, how does anyone manage to have that many things going on in front of their face without losing track of everything?) and sundry other developments and expectations of the current generation of technology. I'll hold out cautious optimism that it won't suck, though I'm still giving it about 6 months to a year of release before I'll believe it's really ready for every day use by people who don't like to troubleshoot.
I feel like I should give the example of Elizabethan theater. There were virtually no copy protections, and plays were routinely copied by competing troupes without compensation. Not only did this give us Shakespeare, perhaps the greatest literary figure in the history of the English language, but drove enormous innovation in terms of the technical aspects of theater: staging, writing, producing, casting, marketing, set/prop use, stage and facility construction, acting style, pacing, format, stage direction... it all saw drastic change in a highly competitive market with virtually no protections for copyright, trademark, patent etc.
Not only did a lack of protection fail to stop content creators, it arguably led to one of the largest shifts in literature and art, across one of the shortest periods in time, in human history.
Pretty much sinks the "we need to have strong, eternal copyrights to protect artists so they will create things" argument entirely.
I don't believe that there would be. Car manufacturing requires a huge amount of capital. There is also an expectation of quality and a trust relationship between customers and manufacturers. The only people who would be getting information they don't already have would be people not currently involved in the industry: it's no secret to Toyota how a Honda works, and neither is confounding GM either. They can already copy each other quite effectively, and frequently do, but instead they put quite a bit of effort into explicitly differentiating their products. In fact, there are semi-generic automobiles on the market already: Geo was explicitly in the business of building designs by other companies and selling them at a discount.
I think if the auto manufacturers were to release all of their design documents to the open, not much would really change. A few start-ups might be able to swing enough capital to start building knock-offs, but ultimately I doubt it would be chaos, and I doubt they would even be such a bad thing: more competition means more of capitalism functioning as intended. We'd be more likely to see see lower prices for consumers, innovative manufacturing technologies and ideas, improvements in vehicle safety and an increase in consumer choice. Now that you bring this up, I actually think it's a great idea that should be implemented immediately.
To give a computer analogy (my apologies, but I can't really make a car analogy here... I hope you can see why): there is very little to prevent HP from making a computer model identical to a Dell model, and one can argue that they already HAVE effectively identical models on the market, nor is there much of anything to prevent a guy doing so in his basement... yet it doesn't happen, because HP wants to sell computers that are different from Dell, dell wants to sell computers that are different from HP, and the guy in his basement wants to look at porn... er... no, wait... he wants to build a computer to the specs he decides.
I assume Babylon 5's mission was to wring the last general interest in a sci-fi TV series...
More likely they would require such libraries to purchase a different version of the book licensed for them to do so. A different version costing several times the normal retail version, which has in the fine print on the copyright page language indicating that the library can legally do that.
Also, his children may have time heads. Whatever that is.
"we can say that the christian god cannot possibly exist if he's claimed to be omnipotent, omni-present, and omni-benevolent."
Depends on your definition of "omni-potent." If you define it such that it implies power transcending and sort of human comprehension, power which is completely unbounded by time or causality, power which by its very existence renders human observation irrelevant - then no, not really. Belief in a so-defined being would, however, make it challenging to engage in any sort of discourse or meaningful thought process on the subject.
The easier part to discredit is that such a being would have any use for a messiah. It hardly seems omni-benevolent to base eternal reward and punishment on something so arbitrary as whether one believed in the right claimant of apotheosis for a being that could, by definition, monitor every thought and deed a person has and reward or punish core morality. If the Christian God matches the description that Christians give, then their God and belief system are so severely lacking internal consistency that it fails to be an adequate explanation for much of anything... let alone everything.
The Secret service got involved because it's their jurisdiction: computer crimes. As for raping his rights... I'm not really convinced that he was within his rights to take closeup photos of people without their consent or even knowledge then very publicly post them.
If anyone in the store gave him permission to do this with the full knowledge of his plan, I would imagine that this person is going to lose their job... so if you're looking for a crap job in NYC, I'd keep an eye on the Apple Store.
The other day I saw a Honda ad with music by MC Chris.
They Might Be Giants have also had some success with that end of things ("Boss of Me" was the theme song for Malcolm in the Middle), and even when they were on a major-ish label they were careful to maintain the rights to their music.
Jonathan Coulton is, well, Jonathan Coulton. He not only doesn't have a label, he went and CC licensed his music. It does not appear to have hurt his ability to license songs for video games.
Apparently one doesn't need a major label or high-powered producer to get into that part of the biz.
Unless they can show that they have been using the name in trade, he'd probably win. Well, provided he could afford legal representation throughout the many lawsuits and appeals, that is. Most likely they would offer an out of court settlement wherein he receives an undisclosed sum of money and they get the trademark.
Yeah, it looks more like the flying ambulance from Firefly. For that matter, it looks like a lot of sci-fi flying vehicles that aren't Star Wars landspeeders... including Star Wars airspeeders such as the ones used on Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back.
Way to fail, whoever wrote the article/headline.
Slashdot must have gotten linked from Digg, and is now being slashdotted.
The Best Buy salesman probably isn't lying, or even entirely incorrect, he most likely just doesn't know why. Mega-pixels are purely a measurement of resolution, it tells you how many pixels make up the photo you just took, nothing more, nothing less. A more expensive camera will (generally) have a higher quality lens that gives better focus, sharper image quality (not the pixels themselves, they're digital... the reproduction of a real, analog, event that the photo depicts), better (optical!) zoom, better color receptors, better low-light operation, etc.
Frankly, megapixel inflation is a scam. It increases both the cost of the camera AND the file size of the photos, often with little or no benefit to the user. Once we hit about 8mp, it stopped mattering for the majority of people, who just post pictures on Facebook or make 4x6 prints and maybe run out an 8x10 print once in a blue moon and never really show their work beyond friends and family. At the sizes most people interact with photos, any more than that is going to be invisible, even with cropping.
For a casual, amateur user, you probably are better off paying a bit extra and getting a low-medium end Canon/Nikon/Sony/insert-your-own-favorite-here, but not going crazy and getting a D-SLR or some-such extravagance. 10mp is generally more than enough, and spare yourself the gimmicky bells and whistles...do you really need the camera to detect when you smile, rather than just setting a timer?
I do put in one caveat: bird-watchers and enthusiastic sport-parents may want to splurge on the high-zoom models. 100x optical zoom is practically useless for kids' birthday parties, but if you want to see the sweat on Jimmy's face when he rounds 3rd, or capture the plumage details on that Appalachian Horn-Blower (I have no idea if that's a real bird), it might come in handy. You also should consider a tripod, or at least a monopod, because at that level of zoom you will definitely need it.
I used to sell cameras non-commission and run a low-end photo-printing studio in a big-box. My thought was that I wanted them to come back and get prints, since only the lab sales were actually relevant to my hours or pay, but the only way I could get them to do so was if they were actually happy with the sales service. Admittedly, I also did a tidy business in extended warranties, though I wasn't very pushy about them and ours were less bad than most of the competition (about 50% or less of the price, identical service and coverage through the same 3rd party vendor). The lab sales increased a bit, too.
"The correct course of action is erasure"
Always I want to be with you, and make believe with you, and live in harmo... oh, wait, wrong Erasure.
At least one of the engines is GPL. Rybka is not. Ipso facto, there is copyright violation occurring.
I'm just baffled by the concept of having diversity in a group of one. That's simply not possible.
The details vary, but anyone with particularly strong feelings on the difference between the two terms almost certainly is both a geek and a nerd, however you wish to define them.
Speaking of which... Olivia Munn is apparently vapid and unfunny on her own. Her book is simply awful. Plus, if she had a copy editor, they should be summarily executed... the occasional error in a block of text is one thing, but that's just ridiculous. They had blatant grammar and spelling errors in CHAPTER HEADINGS of all things, and I'm not talking about "its" vs. "it's" stuff, I mean things that any modern word processor would cover with so much green and red you would think it's Christmas. Most of the book is just awkward sexual anecdotes blatantly intended to fuel the fantasies of socially inept fanboys.
Even the photos (oh, yeah, halfway through it turns into a photo album of her in mediocre cosplay... classy!) lack any sort of flair or wit, let alone originality. It's almost as if, upon reading what crap her writing is, they realized that they needed to reinforce the "hot chick" angle or everyone else might catch on too, but they couldn't be arsed to do it in a way that made it something other than a random interlude. There is no context or explanation, they didn't even have the good sense to put them in a separate chapter, they just slapped them in the middle of an anecdote and continued it twenty pages later; with most chapters coming in at 5 pages or less, that's more than a little stupid.
tl:dr don't bother with reading olivia Munn's book. Don't even bother looking at the photos. It's total crap.