Quake3World

LOL

Hah

awesome

digital copies of physical property to be just as valuable as the original

lol no, it isn't even remotely about that. it's about your claimed property rights vis-a-vis disposing of your property (physical, digital, whatever) in whatever way you see fit, vs their claimed property rights expressed as trying to control the manner in which you do that

lol, saw that posted on slashdot and came here to post a link to it as well

It also reminds me of this:

I've always wondered why the Fahrenheit system of temperature is still in use, his scale makes absolutely no sense at all.

According to a letter Fahrenheit wrote to his friend Herman Boerhaave,[11] his scale was built on the work of Ole Rømer, whom he had met earlier. In Rømer's scale, brine freezes at zero, water freezes and melts at 7.5 degrees, body temperature is 22.5, and water boils at 60 degrees. Fahrenheit multiplied each value by four in order to eliminate fractions and increase the granularity of the scale. He then re-calibrated his scale using the melting point of ice and normal human body temperature (which were at 30 and 90 degrees); he adjusted the scale so that the melting point of ice would be 32 degrees and body temperature 96 degrees, so that 64 intervals would separate the two, allowing him to mark degree lines on his instruments by simply bisecting the interval six times (since 64 is 2 to the sixth power).

Really, what? That's just making numbers up so that they're psychologically pleasing to a mathematical mind, what an idiot.

i like the initial reasoning; multiply by four to remove fractions.
because as we know, temperture increases by full degrees exclusively.

that's how maths was done in the olden/pre-industry days - i remember having imperial measurements and old british currency (when we had shillings, ha'pennies and guineas and a pound was worth 8.69 mackerel if the moon was in pisces or something) explained to me by a pensioner and it did make a sort of sense. things were far more about cash transactions and real world applications back then, so there were all sorts of rules that someone who might not even be able to count past their fingers/read could apply to determine the size/value of a thing.

the same pensioner told me about some guy (maybe called 'white'?) who came up with the idea of standardising sizes for things like threads and gears, something that must have held back the creation of machines for ages. there was some uproar at the time because he'd based them on fractions of an inch rather than the more accepted wisdom of the length of a child's finger or the width of a donkey's nipple.

4days wrote:the more accepted wisdom of the length of a child's finger or the width of a donkey's nipple.

Buy Ass Fudge and get Clubcard points!

Eraser wrote:lol, saw that posted on slashdot and came here to post a link to it as well

It also reminds me of this:

actually mister high and might year month day sorts better. Just sayin.

Its how they do it japan. Makes sense for sorting, but not for practical relevance.