Comment Re:So... (Score 1) 305
Luckily more and more of your countrymen don't agree with you...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtaE1b7ozIU
I've also met some very cool soccer fans from the US here in South Africa
Luckily more and more of your countrymen don't agree with you...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtaE1b7ozIU
I've also met some very cool soccer fans from the US here in South Africa
I've been following the bid process for SKA for quite a few years. As far as I can tell South Africa (together with its other Southern African partners) have a clear advantage over Australia (now together with NZ)
There are a few reasons for this:
1. The passing of the South Africa's Astronomy Geographic Advantage Act in 2007 declares almost the whole of the Northern Cape province (an area about 1.5 times that of the UK) into an astronomy advantage area. Amongst other things it means that light pollution will be limited and that the whole area will eventually be turned into a radio quiet zone.
2. Much of the technology used in South Africa's pilot program (MeerKAT) will be directly useable in SKA. By comparison, the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder project has much less tech that will be useable in SKA without major redesign and modification.
3. Price. From the start keeping the price down was a very high priority goal for the SA bid. E.g. they developed a new process to manufacture the dishes that is much cheaper than conventional methods. Now, after the credit crunch where many scientific budgets are getting cut, this strategy is paying off.
Disclaimer 1: I am a South African and therefore far from neutral
Disclaimer 2: The last time I read extensively on this is more than six months ago, so if there were significant developments recently then I might not be aware of them
From where I stand it seems that the DS is so insanely popular (almost 110 million units sold to date) exactly because its games are so easy to pirate, not in spite of it.
Its not like the games aren't selling either - close to 450 million DS games sold so far
Amen to that!
I hate CGI Yoda almost as much as I loved the original puppet version.
Just ran out of mod points, so I'll rather add this:
Somewhere the public perception of copyright (and other IP rights) went from "a time limited incentive to encourage the creation of novel content" to "content creators have the right to get paid in perpetuity".
Because of the technological and legal environment of the 20th century it was possible for content creators and distributors to make insane amounts of money for a very limited amount of work.
That created the idea that they have some god-given right to get paid for absolutely everything that ever gets done with their content or anything that is derived from it. That has not been the case for most of history and it will almost certainly not be the case in the future
When looking at where else all those unlicensed users would go if they didn't become legal Windows users, Apple doesn't really come into it much.
Well put. This actually happened to me recently.
My home PC had a volume licensed version of XP on it that I got from the company I worked for a few years back. Suddenly, about a month ago, my Windows Genuine Advantage started failing and my PC started nagging me about it the whole time.
I have used Linux a lot in the past but I've never had it installed as the main OS on my primary PC.
This incident was the last bit of motivation that I needed to switch to Linux. I have now been running Kubuntu 8.10 for two weeks and I love it. I can't think of any reason to switch back.
No amount of careful planning will ever replace dumb luck.