I can see complaining about the cost of this law, the effectiveness of it, or even if it is redundant but censorship? Just what liberties are being taken away by labeling?
Suppose I want to release a violent video game and I don't want to label it. It doesn't matter why I don't want to label it -- perhaps I have artistic motivations. The government in New York says I am not allowed to sell my art to other people in New York. That is definitely a violation of the first amendment (as applied to the state of New York by the fourteenth amendment). There is no need to make a slippery slope argument because the first amendment is a large brick wall built at the top of the slope ("Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech").
I am insulted by the way you just lumped all stereotypes together as if they were all the same. Stereotypes are all different and nuanced, and they each deserve individual consideration.
Except this is the exact opposite. There already is a law that restricts the freedom of the cable companies to deal with their customers. The MPAA is trying to get the law relaxed so that cable companies can provide this service on their terms. You might not like what the MPAA is trying to do, but this is certainly not a case where someone is pushing for *more* power in the hands of the government.
I stopped expecting good service from companies a long time ago. The consumers have spoken and we seem to want it cheap and who cares about anything else. The sad thing is that it is getting increasingly difficult to find places where I can pay more for better service. These days I just consider it a bonus if I get good support or a good buying/owning experience in general.
For a more specific answer, I actually had a very good experience returning my Xbox 360 to Microsoft (twice). Almost no time on hold, no hassle on the phone, quick turnaround on the repair/replacement. It sucks that the hardware is flaky, but I'm not really pissed about it since it wasn't a big headache. Just goes to show that a good support experience can actually help make up for a bad product.
Oh, and no. I've never had a good support experience with Dell or HP (I've owned laptops from both). If something goes wrong I just try and fix it myself. You can get replacement parts if you spend a little time calling suppliers into one of them caves and sells you the part even though you are not an "authorized reseller." This approach is annoying and time consuming, but it's way better than sitting through the standard help desk script several times before finally being elevated to someone who may be able to help you.
My guess is they'll troll through YouTube and BitTorrent looking for copyrighted stuff, taking a hash of it, and comparing stuff you download against the list of copyrighted hashes.
Or maybe they will just do what they do on Vista. A while back my wife played some Chopin on the piano in our home and recorded the performance using Audacity. Later, she tried to burn that recording to a CD in Vista. Turns out Vista doesn't allow you to burn a CD of copyrighted music. Copyrighted? WTF? I think she ended up using iTunes to burn the CD.
Yeah, we need a young(er) action star for this role. Let's go over our options:
Colleague in Peril: MacGyver! That bomb is going to explode in 10 seconds!
Shia LeBeouf: (Freezes with that "this can't be happening" sort of expression on his face)
Bomb explodes. Everyone dies.
Colleague in Peril: MacGyver! That bomb is going to explode in 10 seconds!
Will Smith: Aw Hell No! (walks away)
Bomb explodes. Everyone dies.
Colleague in Peril: MacGyver! That bomb is going to explode in 10 seconds!
Matt Damon: So...what...we....need...to...do..is...
Bomb explodes. Everyone dies.
I totally agree with this. Once there is a chink in the armor of the first amendment, then that weakness can be exploited to restrict any sort of expression. Personally, I think all expression should be protected, including slander, false advertising, and incitement. We shouldn't have laws that restrict our freedom just because people will believe everything that they hear. Maybe if we didn't have these sorts of laws, then people would be a little more critical about what they choose to believe.
I don't think the law infringes on anybody's right to expression. The law is only related to falsifying e-mail transmission info. So if the guy bought a domain name and set up a smtp server and spammed from his domain and his server using a connection that he pays for, he wouldn't be breaking the law. It is reasonable to have laws like this to protect the defrauded service providers who were essentially duped into sending this guy's spam.
As an aside, I see his paradox along the lines of creationism - after all, we can't prove that something doesn't exist. Only that it does.
Sorry to nitpick, but I find it necessary to correct this argument any time I hear it. You can prove that something doesn't exist by assuming the existence of that something and then deriving a contradiction. For example, if it is given that nobody lives at the North Pole, then I can conlude that Santa Claus doesn't exist in the way that he is conventionally defined. Of course, then one would simply argue that Santa Claus may exist in some unknown form. At that point, the claim is meaningless since it is equivalent to no claim at all.
This is a terrific advance in the field of cramming. I'm looking forward to seeing their presentation at the Cramming and Stuffing conference later this year.
Ain't an algorithm in the world that can predict, counteract, or eliminate stupid drivers. Math and logic do not apply to human behavior.
I disagree. I think you call "stupidity" is what some might refer to as "selfishness." This property is very predictable in people and it allows us to construct pretty good models of human behavior. It doesn't do us any good to complain about human nature and wish that people were nicer/smarter/etc. However, it is very valuable to try to identify those situations in which predictable human selfishness ends up making everyone worse off. In game theory we would say that these scenarios have sub-optimal equilibria. Hopefully, if we encounter such a situation in our traffic, we would be able to change the rules slightly in order to make the equilibria optimal.
So I was looking at the last picture on that site and I decided it wasn't realistic because the man's face didn't contain enough blemishes. Then I realized that when you see a close-up photograph of a person in a magazine, the picture is modified to remove blemishes. People have gotten used to looking at modified photographs of people and accepting that they are real. So maybe fooling people isn't so hard because our notion of "real" has been distorted anyway. All you have to do to make something look "realistic" is to make it look like the modified, idealized, and simplified notion of reality that we have all been conditioned to believe.
This sort of thing would never fly at a sufficiently large company. Once you get to a certain size, the pressure to "standardize" becomes too strong to resist. I suppose this is reasonable, because the licensing, support, etc. is much cheaper this way. Oh, and arguing that individual choice makes workers more productive is useless: productivity can't be easily measured -- therefore it doesn't exist.
Re:Artists should make the most money, not the lab
on
Must a CD Cost $15.99?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Sorry, the person who risks his own money should get more reward than everyone else. In this case, the record labels pay to produce records that may not make any money. The artists risk nothing. In more familiar terms, the artists are employees and they don't get to make the rules. If they don't like their deal, they can try to negotiate a better one or take out a loan and produce their next album themselves.
The burden of risk is the most expensive thing thing in the economy. It is more expensive than talent, education, good looks, and everything else. In my opinion, the system is broken if the people taking the risks don't get the most reward.
I don't see why we should assume that games are going to get a lot bigger. The biggest thing on the disc is usually pre-rendered cutscenes, and HD-video requires a lot of space, of course. But if consoles are more powerful, then there will be more in-engine cutscenes which require very little space.
We've heard Kojima say that MGS4 can barely fit on a Blu-Ray disk This doesn't surprise me. The last MGS I played was MGS 2. I'm pretty sure I spent more time watching cutscenes than actually playing the game. Kojima should just start making movies.
Re:Talk Like A Physicist Day
on
Happy Pi Day
·
· Score: 1
The remainder of this comment contains a proof that today is not talk like a physicist day. We begin with the formal definition of the date of talk like a physicist day from the referenced article:
When is the Talk Like A Physicist Day?
March 14th. 2008+n, where n is an integer and n > 0.
We need to prove that there does not exist n>0 such that March 14th 2008+n = March 14th 2008 (i.e. "today"). Proof by contradiction: assume there exists n>0 as described above and choose any such n. So March 14th 2008+n = March 14th 2008. Subtract March 14th 2008 from both sides of the equation and we are left with n=0. The conclusion that n=0 contradicts our earlier conclusion that n>0. So our assumption was false, and there does not exist n>0 such that March 14th 2008+n = March 14th 2008. That is, today is not talk like a physicist day.
It is important to note that I am not talking like a physicist because, as shown above, today is not talk like a physicist day. I am talking like a mathematician because I am, in fact, a mathematician. The proof of this assertion is trivial and omitted for simplicity.
I think this case is very different because of the intent. An adult having sex with a minor is a crime, and attempting to commit a crime or conspiracy to commit a crime is often a crime as well. However, I don't think it is a crime to try to convince someone to commit suicide. If this adult had been deceiving this child in order to lure her out to a secluded spot and kill her, then that, of course, would be a crime. The difference is the illegal *act* that the person is attempting to accomplish as a result of this online deception.
Slashdot Mirror
Suppose I want to release a violent video game and I don't want to label it. It doesn't matter why I don't want to label it -- perhaps I have artistic motivations. The government in New York says I am not allowed to sell my art to other people in New York. That is definitely a violation of the first amendment (as applied to the state of New York by the fourteenth amendment). There is no need to make a slippery slope argument because the first amendment is a large brick wall built at the top of the slope ("Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech").
Except this is the exact opposite. There already is a law that restricts the freedom of the cable companies to deal with their customers. The MPAA is trying to get the law relaxed so that cable companies can provide this service on their terms. You might not like what the MPAA is trying to do, but this is certainly not a case where someone is pushing for *more* power in the hands of the government.
I stopped expecting good service from companies a long time ago. The consumers have spoken and we seem to want it cheap and who cares about anything else. The sad thing is that it is getting increasingly difficult to find places where I can pay more for better service. These days I just consider it a bonus if I get good support or a good buying/owning experience in general.
For a more specific answer, I actually had a very good experience returning my Xbox 360 to Microsoft (twice). Almost no time on hold, no hassle on the phone, quick turnaround on the repair/replacement. It sucks that the hardware is flaky, but I'm not really pissed about it since it wasn't a big headache. Just goes to show that a good support experience can actually help make up for a bad product.
Oh, and no. I've never had a good support experience with Dell or HP (I've owned laptops from both). If something goes wrong I just try and fix it myself. You can get replacement parts if you spend a little time calling suppliers into one of them caves and sells you the part even though you are not an "authorized reseller." This approach is annoying and time consuming, but it's way better than sitting through the standard help desk script several times before finally being elevated to someone who may be able to help you.
Yeah, we need a young(er) action star for this role. Let's go over our options:
Colleague in Peril: MacGyver! That bomb is going to explode in 10 seconds!
Shia LeBeouf: (Freezes with that "this can't be happening" sort of expression on his face)
Bomb explodes. Everyone dies.
Colleague in Peril: MacGyver! That bomb is going to explode in 10 seconds!
Will Smith: Aw Hell No! (walks away)
Bomb explodes. Everyone dies.
Colleague in Peril: MacGyver! That bomb is going to explode in 10 seconds!
Matt Damon: So...what...we....need...to...do..is...
Bomb explodes. Everyone dies.
I totally agree with this. Once there is a chink in the armor of the first amendment, then that weakness can be exploited to restrict any sort of expression. Personally, I think all expression should be protected, including slander, false advertising, and incitement. We shouldn't have laws that restrict our freedom just because people will believe everything that they hear. Maybe if we didn't have these sorts of laws, then people would be a little more critical about what they choose to believe.
I don't think the law infringes on anybody's right to expression. The law is only related to falsifying e-mail transmission info. So if the guy bought a domain name and set up a smtp server and spammed from his domain and his server using a connection that he pays for, he wouldn't be breaking the law. It is reasonable to have laws like this to protect the defrauded service providers who were essentially duped into sending this guy's spam.
o Judge Ito
o Judge Seidlin
o Judge Judy
o JudgeNeal
Get back in your pigeonhole!!! Don't make me cut your salary in half!
There are much better technical solutions than that. For starters, we don't really need a human being to land an airliner in most cases.
Ripoff. These days you can get an entire home for $18,000.
This is a terrific advance in the field of cramming. I'm looking forward to seeing their presentation at the Cramming and Stuffing conference later this year.
So I was looking at the last picture on that site and I decided it wasn't realistic because the man's face didn't contain enough blemishes. Then I realized that when you see a close-up photograph of a person in a magazine, the picture is modified to remove blemishes. People have gotten used to looking at modified photographs of people and accepting that they are real. So maybe fooling people isn't so hard because our notion of "real" has been distorted anyway. All you have to do to make something look "realistic" is to make it look like the modified, idealized, and simplified notion of reality that we have all been conditioned to believe.
This sort of thing would never fly at a sufficiently large company. Once you get to a certain size, the pressure to "standardize" becomes too strong to resist. I suppose this is reasonable, because the licensing, support, etc. is much cheaper this way. Oh, and arguing that individual choice makes workers more productive is useless: productivity can't be easily measured -- therefore it doesn't exist.
Sorry, the person who risks his own money should get more reward than everyone else. In this case, the record labels pay to produce records that may not make any money. The artists risk nothing. In more familiar terms, the artists are employees and they don't get to make the rules. If they don't like their deal, they can try to negotiate a better one or take out a loan and produce their next album themselves.
The burden of risk is the most expensive thing thing in the economy. It is more expensive than talent, education, good looks, and everything else. In my opinion, the system is broken if the people taking the risks don't get the most reward.
It is important to note that I am not talking like a physicist because, as shown above, today is not talk like a physicist day. I am talking like a mathematician because I am, in fact, a mathematician. The proof of this assertion is trivial and omitted for simplicity.
That's simple: it's because Bob=Dave for sufficiently Bob-ish Dave.
I think this case is very different because of the intent. An adult having sex with a minor is a crime, and attempting to commit a crime or conspiracy to commit a crime is often a crime as well. However, I don't think it is a crime to try to convince someone to commit suicide. If this adult had been deceiving this child in order to lure her out to a secluded spot and kill her, then that, of course, would be a crime. The difference is the illegal *act* that the person is attempting to accomplish as a result of this online deception.