I find your position easy to relate to. I've spent years being aware of the show, somewhat tempted to try it, but the number of season has always put me off. I've spent a large chunk of my life watching all the Stargate (among other series), so I knew that such number of seasons is a big commitment, particularly when I find it hard to relate to the older stuff.
But then when Season 5 started and all my sci-fi-watching friends were jumping around from happiness, I couldn't resist anymore. So I started at the rebooted Season 1. In retrospect that definitely was a good place to start. It's fairly new, so I could relate to it rather easily. Everything is explained as if it's the first time you see it, all characters and concepts are well introduced. Plus the series picks up the pace quite fast and as soon as you reach Season 2 and the Tenth Doctor (David Tennant) you will find out why he's one of the most popular doctors. Once I went through all the new seasons, ending with the end of Season 5, I suddenly had a lot of time to spare before Season 6 came along. And so I started exploring the original series, the first eight doctors.
Someone recommended to me to check out the Fourth Doctor and particularly to start with the episode the Ark of Truth and then watch the next few episodes. That was a great idea. I was introduced to the character in an interesting, but not too important episode, then suddenly I was watching one of the key origin episodes in which the Doctor is present at the creation of Daleks. After watching the series since reboot, this was really a big deal. Afterwards I watched a few episodes featuring other doctors. Eight Doctor is just a movie, which is easy to find. The others were a lot harder to track down.
It turned out that BBC has taped over a lot of their archive tapes, destroying many of the key episodes. That became the number one reason why I didn't try watching the whole series from the very beginning - a lot of it was missing. Amazon surprisingly features a decent collection of a few episodes in its videos on demand. I got a gift card for it when I was buying a textbook, so I tried it and in the end was quite pleased, as I found some episodes I couldn't find anywhere else.
And so watching the rebooted series and then picking up a few (often random) episodes from the original series worked out quite well. The new series provided a good foundation, so I could follow all of the old episodes...
It's time to let them know how bad of a move it was. Don't buy their games (even though no full cracks exist) - buy direct competition, scan the receipt and send it to them, explaining that this money was originally intended to go for their product.
I'm a long time Splinter Cell fan. I own all four PC versions and was looking forward to play Conviction. Criticism about making the genre more action packed aside - I was still looking forward to the game. Now I'm not going to buy it, because such DRM is just ridiculous. I'm going to buy Alpha Protocol and send Ubisoft my receipt.
On the contrary, everyone who has sufficient knowledge to understand the subject knows (and in this context prefers) these units. There is really no point in using kilograms in this context, unless you wanna account for the 11th grader creating a scale of mass...
I'm in University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and I feel like Linux is well supported here.
It goes without saying that one doesn't get the same level of support with setting up certain systems as they would with a PC or a Mac, but everything works fine, and all the essential programs (Remote Desktop access through an NX client, ssh, engineering programs (like MATLAB), VPNs) are available from school's servers in Linux versions, and there ARE detailed instructions on our web, describing how to ssh that even a user that doesn't know what bash is can follow successfully. About a third of all computer labs here are running Red Hat and all engineers are required to take introductory CS course which among others teaches the basics of using the terminal (stuff like file management, submitting work, creating/opening archives, etc).
So if you're an engineering student here, you have this nice intro and then because the system is all around you, people get used to working in it.
Oh and all online course materials are almost always available in multiple formats, but with the current support of MS Office files by Open Office, I'm not sure whether the opposite would really be an issue...
It's about convenience. Provided good internet connection you can get pretty much anything at any time of the day without leaving the warmth of your room. And the choice is enormous!
Yet another slashdot troll headline. A not unreasonable cooperative attempt by private companies to cut piracy with no government intervention whatsoever is an "attack on civil liberties."
Let's see if I have the basic dance correct: if a GOVERNMENT program comes out that attempts to curb piracy, then you scream and yell that privacy is a private matter between individual and rightsholder. If a PRIVATE progam is developed to combat piracy, even one with quite mild constraints like this one, we get bitching and whining that corportations are acting in place of government.
Here are the golden oldies we expect to see in this thread:
I trade my linux binaries via P2P (fine - then you should have no problem of rightsholders doing file-hash-based enforcement)
I learned about band X from P2p (fine - in which case if it makese economic sense for a company or band to release thusly, they will.. it's their decision to make)
piracy involves guys with eye patches. this is copyright infringement. actually, it's both. get thee to a dictionary.
yes, but they can't tell with absolute certainty who is using a given PC. absolute certainty is not a condition of law - reasonableness is.
It's not illegal if it hasn't been released in my country (anime, etc). NONSENSE.
P2P is fair use. No, it isn't. Especially in Britain, where the concept of fair use is much more restricted than in the USA (which *IS* an actual problem with the british system). But, don't worry - your 1.5 tb of movies and music isn't fair use ANYWHERE.
have i gotten the more obvious ones sorted?
What about the part of the depend that's below the equilibrium price? All those users who wouldn't buy it for this price even if there were no downloads possible, and thus if they download the album, the business isn't actually losing profit? Surely in those cases there is no damage done. And actually the popularity arising from such an action (they tell their friends about the album)), it might actually prove beneficial for the business.
What we must all consider is whether the costs of fighting piracy aren't higher than the actual costs of piracy. There are some articles out there saying that the best solution for business is to ignore piracy. All in all, preventing P2P music downloads can actually reduce to amount of music sold legally, and isn't that the main motivation of those businesses?
Oh wait, actually it might not be. There is one thing more important that money, and that is power. These enormous corporations want to get control, just like a lot of government officials. In which case, yes, I'm going to oppose these laws.
'cause third time lucky - look at Sony. They tried once with Betamax (failed), twice with Laserdisc (failed), then got angry, bribed the competition and succeeded with Blue-ray.
I mean even statistically, it has to work one day, right?
...Piratebay.org - the tracker that brought you titles such as "All your music" and "mkv - HD without Blu-ray"... available NOW (764 seeds, 1132 leeches)
New things, at least in certain fields, are generally more complicated than the old things. The more complex it is, the more parts it has, the more can go wrong, the more maintenance it requires.
I've been to a nuclear research facility, here in Czech Republic, where they had two particle accelerators. One old Soviet one, which looked like an old-fashioned submarine, one new fancy one, which looked like it was stolen from CERN. When I asked the people working there why are they still using the old one, they seemed shocked and answered: "How can we NOT use it? It takes 10 minutes to stop it, put something new in and re-start. The new one takes 8 hours only to completely halt."
Maintenance is a similar thing. A spoon doesn't really need any, a solar-powered ultra-auto-feeder (with a 12W automatic mouth feeder) needs a lot..
After I saw a 6 year old brother of a friend complete Might and Magic 6 in English really shaped my opinion on this. Because this is Czech Republic, a country where everyone only speaks Czech and "tries" to learn English in schools, only rarely reaching a descent level...
That boy is now 12 and is way ahead of his English class
It managed to pick ads accurately even when I view a GPG encrypted emails through the web-interface - it gave links to proprietary PGP, some Fedora related sites and a page about encryption - all that from a standard header and encrypted text...
I recently bought ThinkPad R61, and although most of the hardware worked out of the box, I still after quite a few hours didn't get the wifi to work. Also, the fingerprint reader is a true nightmare - even after finding free Linux driver I find out that it's a bit different model and thus returns "USB device not found" every time I want to use it. That and oh, also the graphics driver doesn't seem to work so you have to force it to install a different driver that says it's incompatible with this model.
These problems wouldn't be as big if at lenovo.com at product support they offered more than 2 Linux patches...
If your company makes cars, the marginal cost - the cost of making one more - is still quite high.
If on the other hand you are selling your product on internet, the marginal cost of all your products, except for the first one, is practically zero.
Obviously however, the cost of the very first piece has ALL your costs in it, so you still need to sell a certain amount to breakeven, but if you apply basic rules of micro-economics (sell at the quantity at which marginal costs equal marginal revenue), you'll realize that you have division by zero going on - virtual goods don't obey the rules of physical goods, at least not all of them.
Do you think you, hypothetically as a band, can't make money by giving your music away for free, only profiting from concerts, t-shirts, DVDs and the fact that some of your fans will buy the album to support you, or to have some physical object to symbolize that they like the music, even though they have all this music in mp3 for quite some time at home?
Your fans are people who WON'T say nothing when deciding on the price, and rather than going out of business you might find yourself getting new fans with your attitude to this issue and actually getting more money, from music sales, from concerts, from t-shirts...
How much of the money goes to the actual artist? And how much goes to the label, to the retailer? Just go towards the needs of both, the customer and the artist, and you'll get things like the Radiohead album, or even better, open music.
What about a situation like EA Sport release? They take last years sports game, do minor graphical update, and market is as a new product? No wonder people aren't feeling bad for getting those for free. I know it's a game, not music, but same logic applies. Stealing bugs your conscience only when you feel sorry for the one you are stealing from, but my feeling for EA are somewhere else.
And besides, it's the old supply-demand law - no matter what the price is, unless it's zero, you are not gonna get as many people getting your album as you could. Free music is the best for the popularity, and guess what affects the sales of the merchandise and tickets to your shows?
And you also get people, actually trying to support you. I own a Year Zero album and as far as I remember, I never actually listened to the CD.
Slashdot Mirror
This topic is featured on the current SMBC comic!
I find your position easy to relate to. I've spent years being aware of the show, somewhat tempted to try it, but the number of season has always put me off. I've spent a large chunk of my life watching all the Stargate (among other series), so I knew that such number of seasons is a big commitment, particularly when I find it hard to relate to the older stuff.
But then when Season 5 started and all my sci-fi-watching friends were jumping around from happiness, I couldn't resist anymore. So I started at the rebooted Season 1. In retrospect that definitely was a good place to start. It's fairly new, so I could relate to it rather easily. Everything is explained as if it's the first time you see it, all characters and concepts are well introduced. Plus the series picks up the pace quite fast and as soon as you reach Season 2 and the Tenth Doctor (David Tennant) you will find out why he's one of the most popular doctors. Once I went through all the new seasons, ending with the end of Season 5, I suddenly had a lot of time to spare before Season 6 came along. And so I started exploring the original series, the first eight doctors.
Someone recommended to me to check out the Fourth Doctor and particularly to start with the episode the Ark of Truth and then watch the next few episodes. That was a great idea. I was introduced to the character in an interesting, but not too important episode, then suddenly I was watching one of the key origin episodes in which the Doctor is present at the creation of Daleks. After watching the series since reboot, this was really a big deal. Afterwards I watched a few episodes featuring other doctors. Eight Doctor is just a movie, which is easy to find. The others were a lot harder to track down.
It turned out that BBC has taped over a lot of their archive tapes, destroying many of the key episodes. That became the number one reason why I didn't try watching the whole series from the very beginning - a lot of it was missing. Amazon surprisingly features a decent collection of a few episodes in its videos on demand. I got a gift card for it when I was buying a textbook, so I tried it and in the end was quite pleased, as I found some episodes I couldn't find anywhere else.
And so watching the rebooted series and then picking up a few (often random) episodes from the original series worked out quite well. The new series provided a good foundation, so I could follow all of the old episodes...
Wouldn't you prefer a good game of chess?
Also an important difference from Europe - Verizon and Sprint don't use SIM cards.
It's time to let them know how bad of a move it was. Don't buy their games (even though no full cracks exist) - buy direct competition, scan the receipt and send it to them, explaining that this money was originally intended to go for their product.
I'm a long time Splinter Cell fan. I own all four PC versions and was looking forward to play Conviction. Criticism about making the genre more action packed aside - I was still looking forward to the game. Now I'm not going to buy it, because such DRM is just ridiculous. I'm going to buy Alpha Protocol and send Ubisoft my receipt.
Either way the lawyers win!
On the contrary, everyone who has sufficient knowledge to understand the subject knows (and in this context prefers) these units. There is really no point in using kilograms in this context, unless you wanna account for the 11th grader creating a scale of mass...
I'm in University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and I feel like Linux is well supported here.
It goes without saying that one doesn't get the same level of support with setting up certain systems as they would with a PC or a Mac, but everything works fine, and all the essential programs (Remote Desktop access through an NX client, ssh, engineering programs (like MATLAB), VPNs) are available from school's servers in Linux versions, and there ARE detailed instructions on our web, describing how to ssh that even a user that doesn't know what bash is can follow successfully. About a third of all computer labs here are running Red Hat and all engineers are required to take introductory CS course which among others teaches the basics of using the terminal (stuff like file management, submitting work, creating/opening archives, etc).
So if you're an engineering student here, you have this nice intro and then because the system is all around you, people get used to working in it.
Oh and all online course materials are almost always available in multiple formats, but with the current support of MS Office files by Open Office, I'm not sure whether the opposite would really be an issue...
Resetting the human race? That's ROBOT talk!!
It's about convenience. Provided good internet connection you can get pretty much anything at any time of the day without leaving the warmth of your room. And the choice is enormous!
Yet another slashdot troll headline. A not unreasonable cooperative attempt by private companies to cut piracy with no government intervention whatsoever is an "attack on civil liberties."
Let's see if I have the basic dance correct: if a GOVERNMENT program comes out that attempts to curb piracy, then you scream and yell that privacy is a private matter between individual and rightsholder. If a PRIVATE progam is developed to combat piracy, even one with quite mild constraints like this one, we get bitching and whining that corportations are acting in place of government.
Here are the golden oldies we expect to see in this thread:
have i gotten the more obvious ones sorted?
What about the part of the depend that's below the equilibrium price? All those users who wouldn't buy it for this price even if there were no downloads possible, and thus if they download the album, the business isn't actually losing profit? Surely in those cases there is no damage done. And actually the popularity arising from such an action (they tell their friends about the album)), it might actually prove beneficial for the business.
:P
What we must all consider is whether the costs of fighting piracy aren't higher than the actual costs of piracy. There are some articles out there saying that the best solution for business is to ignore piracy. All in all, preventing P2P music downloads can actually reduce to amount of music sold legally, and isn't that the main motivation of those businesses?
Oh wait, actually it might not be. There is one thing more important that money, and that is power. These enormous corporations want to get control, just like a lot of government officials. In which case, yes, I'm going to oppose these laws.
Oh, and as this is Slashdot, a reference to an appropriate xkcd comic is in order
'cause third time lucky - look at Sony. They tried once with Betamax (failed), twice with Laserdisc (failed), then got angry, bribed the competition and succeeded with Blue-ray.
I mean even statistically, it has to work one day, right?
"Just do it, I am e^x..."
...and e^x ran away.
and the first one said: "Well, I'll differentiate you in respect to y!"
Soundtrack available through...
...Piratebay.org - the tracker that brought you titles such as "All your music" and "mkv - HD without Blu-ray"...
available NOW (764 seeds, 1132 leeches)
New things, at least in certain fields, are generally more complicated than the old things. The more complex it is, the more parts it has, the more can go wrong, the more maintenance it requires.
I've been to a nuclear research facility, here in Czech Republic, where they had two particle accelerators. One old Soviet one, which looked like an old-fashioned submarine, one new fancy one, which looked like it was stolen from CERN. When I asked the people working there why are they still using the old one, they seemed shocked and answered: "How can we NOT use it? It takes 10 minutes to stop it, put something new in and re-start. The new one takes 8 hours only to completely halt."
Maintenance is a similar thing. A spoon doesn't really need any, a solar-powered ultra-auto-feeder (with a 12W automatic mouth feeder) needs a lot..
Isn't it obvious why he thinks so?
Open source has the advantage of patching up the holes.
In TETRIS however, when there are no holes, the line disappears...
Therefore well-patched open program will disappear immediately!
You can't argue the logic!!
After I saw a 6 year old brother of a friend complete Might and Magic 6 in English really shaped my opinion on this. Because this is Czech Republic, a country where everyone only speaks Czech and "tries" to learn English in schools, only rarely reaching a descent level...
That boy is now 12 and is way ahead of his English class
It managed to pick ads accurately even when I view a GPG encrypted emails through the web-interface - it gave links to proprietary PGP, some Fedora related sites and a page about encryption - all that from a standard header and encrypted text...
It's Prisoner's dilemma - if you know that others will for sure believe your lie and that they won't lie back, you benefit greatly...
Everything will balance out when they all learn to lie and distrust...
but do we REALLY want this with robots?
I'll tell you what - hardware support.
I recently bought ThinkPad R61, and although most of the hardware worked out of the box, I still after quite a few hours didn't get the wifi to work.
Also, the fingerprint reader is a true nightmare - even after finding free Linux driver I find out that it's a bit different model and thus returns "USB device not found" every time I want to use it.
That and oh, also the graphics driver doesn't seem to work so you have to force it to install a different driver that says it's incompatible with this model.
These problems wouldn't be as big if at lenovo.com at product support they offered more than 2 Linux patches...
Still they are more popular than if they would charging for their music..
If your company makes cars, the marginal cost - the cost of making one more - is still quite high.
If on the other hand you are selling your product on internet, the marginal cost of all your products, except for the first one, is practically zero.
Obviously however, the cost of the very first piece has ALL your costs in it, so you still need to sell a certain amount to breakeven, but if you apply basic rules of micro-economics (sell at the quantity at which marginal costs equal marginal revenue), you'll realize that you have division by zero going on - virtual goods don't obey the rules of physical goods, at least not all of them.
Do you think you, hypothetically as a band, can't make money by giving your music away for free, only profiting from concerts, t-shirts, DVDs and the fact that some of your fans will buy the album to support you, or to have some physical object to symbolize that they like the music, even though they have all this music in mp3 for quite some time at home?
Your fans are people who WON'T say nothing when deciding on the price, and rather than going out of business you might find yourself getting new fans with your attitude to this issue and actually getting more money, from music sales, from concerts, from t-shirts...
There was definitely a need for a change!
How much of the money goes to the actual artist? And how much goes to the label, to the retailer? Just go towards the needs of both, the customer and the artist, and you'll get things like the Radiohead album, or even better, open music.
What about a situation like EA Sport release? They take last years sports game, do minor graphical update, and market is as a new product? No wonder people aren't feeling bad for getting those for free. I know it's a game, not music, but same logic applies. Stealing bugs your conscience only when you feel sorry for the one you are stealing from, but my feeling for EA are somewhere else.
And besides, it's the old supply-demand law - no matter what the price is, unless it's zero, you are not gonna get as many people getting your album as you could. Free music is the best for the popularity, and guess what affects the sales of the merchandise and tickets to your shows?
And you also get people, actually trying to support you. I own a Year Zero album and as far as I remember, I never actually listened to the CD.
I have bad experience with mixing nitric acid with sulphuric acid.
Especially if you get glycerol involved...
I say better have a fake titanium ring than no hands. But then again, who never wanted to mix explosives?
According to our forefathers, the right to vote is worth your life.
So iPods are worth more than our lives?