Actually, they can announce sales when they are sitting on store shelves, as long as those stores aren't part of the same corporate entity as is announcing sales. If the phones were sold to AT&T stores and are sitting on the shelves of the AT&T stores, Apple can count them as sold. If they are sitting on the shelves of Apple stores, then it depends on the corporate relationship between Apple stores and Apple itself (which I do not know, and don't care enough to look up).
Also explains politicians, NO, it explains the people who vote for those politicians. "Gee, Senator Whizbang says that he is all for a law that says xyz. He must be the guy I should vote for." Senator Whizbang has been a Senator for 36 years and has voted against every law that says xyz.
It doesn't really take that many people if they are willing to do what it takes. Go to Township meetings, pay attention to who your Township Supervisors are (and vote against the bad ones), pay attention to who the County Supervisors are (again, vote against the bad ones), pay attention to how your state representative votes and let him/her know when you don't like it, etc, etc. If you do this it will make a difference.
Of course, every time they make it easier to vote, they make it harder to change things. The less effort you have to make register and vote, the more likely that people who aren't paying any attention to anything other than the sound bites just before an election will vote. The more of those people who vote, the harder it is for the people who are paying attention to what is going on to change things.
I wasn't talking about the honest workers either. Give it a little thought, if you were a dishonest employee, how much money would it take to be worth the effort and risk to rip off your employer? If you aren't smart enough to do a decent risk/reward analysis (I'm lumping effort in with risk, even though for many people effort is a more important part of the equation), how likely is it that you are smart enough to get away with anything. Every couple of years there is a case where someone does something like this and they get $100,000 to $500,000. They get caught and they tell the press, "It was so easy." But it wasn't so easy, they got caught. $500,000 is chump change in the US economy, so it doesn't do all that much damage. It's a real pain for the people whose info was used to get that $500,000, but for the most part even for them the negative impact is in the work it takes to contact all the different organizations involved and make sure that the record indicates that someone else actually did all that stuff.
Indeed good grief. I saw an article some time ago noting that some Southern California gangs were infiltrating girlfriends into various financial processing institutions to steal credit card information, banking info, and so on. Even into the DMV. So there's certainly low-level activity. At one company I worked at, a crook got a job in the accounting department and somehow stole all the HR data, and some of that was used to get credit cards. How long before serious organized crime runs multiple active efforts for this? And how many Web commerce sites do criminal background checks on IT personnel? The reason that this doesn't happen to a greater extent is because people can do math. The problem is that you can't steal enough to be worth more than keeping the job. There are still some people who do it, but most people who can get jobs giving them access to that information realize that the (risk+effort)/reward ratio of stealing that information is a lot higher than the (risk+effort)/reward ratio of just being a good employee.
Amazon doesn't have stores. Amazon is like the distributor that the brick and mortar store gets most of its books from. The publisher ships to the distributor. The publisher ships to Amazon. The distributor ships to the brick and mortar bookstore. Amazon ships to the customer. In those situations where Amazon uses a distributor, the distributor ships directly to the customer, so the shipping chain is the same either way.
You do know that the brick and mortar bookstore had to pay to have the book shipped to their store, don't you? You don't pay for shipping there. Yes, the price to ship the book is higher than the price of shipping the same book to a bookstore (along with hundreds of other books), but it still costs money. Oh, BTW, most brick and mortar bookstores get most of their books from distributors not directly from publishers (I used to be the book buyer for a large independent bookstore), which means that brick and mortar bookstores are at the same place in the shipping chain as the Amazon customer.
I would agree that when geeks use the word "gaming" they usually mean either video games or pencil and paper RPG's, but this is the first time where I have seen someone mean both to the exclusion of other uses of the word gaming. So, using gaming to refer to both video games and pencil and paper RPG's, but not other games, in the same context is a usage I have never run across before.
I cannot think of any reason why a list of "gaming" which includes both Pong and Pencil and Paper RPG's should not also include board games and card games. Pong has more in common with Dutch Blitz (a card game that involves reaction speed) than it does with D&D or other Pencil and Paper RPG's.
Firstly, as I posted elsewhere, all music recorded today is recorded digitally using either 16bit or 24bit recorders.
Oh please: that is simply not true.
16bit or 24 bit "recorders"??? Checking... yes, you said recorders. And it's a plus 4 insightful mod. Hey kids! Thanks for the reminder that slashdot is not where you go for informed pro audio discussion.
So, are you trying to say that it is inaccurate to call a device used to record sound a "recorder"?
Older humans work very hard on teaching very young humans about religion, to make sure they believe in it when they grow older and continue the cycle.
I think that's dead wrong.
It's actually pretty tough for our child sometimes, who we brought up to be caring and considerate of the feelings of others without the fear of a trip to hell if she isn't, when her friends invite her to go to Church with them. She goes along sometimes but afterwards, if there's a study group, she has to excuse herself because she doesn't know what to say or do. What to think even. She tells us that she pretends to pray so they other kids don't think she's a freak, but she really has no clue who she's meant to be praying to.
At least she won't go to hell for doing so, because there is no such thing of course. So, because it is dead wrong for parents to teach their belief systems to their children, so that the children will believe the same when they grow up, you are going to teach your daughter your belief system so she will believe that when she grows up? What are you doing that is different than other parents who teach their religion to their kids?
Well. It seems I won't be travelling to the US any time soon.
I wonder if customs officials are allowed to rummage through your luggage (well, of course they are, but bear with me), and when they find your diary, demand you to unlock it and then read it in detail.
And if they are, is it so everywhere in the world?
The answer to your question is yes, and if there are any countries where Customs does not have that authority, I have never heard of them. So, I guess you won't be travelling anywhere that you need to go through Customs?
I think there are possible solutions that would not be as susceptible to corruption. Personally, I think that eliminating patents for software and "business processes" would go a long way to fixing the problem without as much room for abuse. The reason to be worried about the potential for abuse before a law is passed is that once it is passed it is a lot harder to fix it. "Act in haste, repent at leisure."
This is different from the ID crowd, who apparently feel that 'God did it' means you actively refuse to even think about the rules. You know it would be good if you actually knew something about a position before you lampoon it. ID says that we can see signs that the universe (life in particular) was designed by an Intelligence, just like SETI can determine that a radio signal had an intelligent source or archaeologists can tell that an object was shaped by a human hand not by random natural forces.
So what this guy is suggesting is a subset of ID theory.
Who gets to decide that it is worth a bounty? Or do you propose that everyone who has a granted patent overturned has to pay? Or only if it is overturned as obvious?
I like the idea, but I foresee significant possibility for abuse.
UM, the OP wasn't being critical, or saying that Grandma was stupid. He was saying that Grandma was a completely different type of User than the target demographic of PC Mag. His point was that the target demographic for PC Mag is an experienced Windows user, probably a power user. The target market for the Walmart Linux PC is someone with a limited budget who just wants a computer to surf the web and send/receive email. He was saying that PC Mag is incapable of understanding Grandma as a computer user, not that Grandma would have a problem running Linux.
He said he prefered BSD to GPL because it would make it harder for someone to copy his software. Why use any Open Source license for software you don't want people to be able to copy, unless you are planning to incorporate existing Open Source software?
So, let me see if I got this right. You want to take software other people have written, that you get for free, make a couple of changes to it and sell it to other people. Then you want to make it so that they can't do to your software what you did to someone else's software?
Thank you, I thought there was a Supreme Court ruling which had defended the right to anonymity, but I did not remember ever seeing the exact ruling or the case which it came from.
IF TV is a major cause of obesity, then the Internet, computing and videogaming must be contributors too. Perhaps "sedentary lifestyle" would be a better description? Actually, not necessarily, as someone points out there are studies indicating that during tv watching behaviors which increase the chances of obesity go up and calories burned go down, even compared to just sitting there doing nothing. My guess as to the cause of the last is that unlike videogames, surfing the internet, or other computer activity, watching tv encourages one to suspend all mental activity.
What's to stop anyone at circuit city from just... putting illegal stuff on your machine and then calling the cops? Nothing, and if this guy's lawyer can convince a jury that that is a reasonable possibility, he can get them to find him not guilty based on reasonable doubt. Now, my question is, how reasonable is it to think in this case that someone at Circuit City did as you suggest?
Without knowing more about the situation I can't form appropriate judgment on what happened. My feeling is that unless someone can suggest a reason why the Circuit City guys might want to screw this guy, he should be convicted. On the other hand, unless the guy had this stuff in a folder labeled "porn" or some such in the root directory, the Circuit City techs are scumbags and everyone should seriously think about whether it is a good idea to take their computer to Circuit City for repair work.
What newspapers were you reading? Newspapers are generally so agenda driven that it is hard to have any idea what really happened in the stories they report.
The reason that a teacher that got fired can't find another job is because it is so hard to fire teachers. A study in New York State said that it cost over $175,000 to fire a teacher and if the teacher appealed the cost jumped to over $300,000. A year or so ago, I had a reference that gave the cost of firing teachers in various states throughout the country, but I can't find the link anymore.
Based on how expensive it is to fire a teacher, there is no way that someone is going to hire a person to teach who was so bad that another school district went through what it takes to fire a teacher.
Is it bad to download a few songs from an artist that you've heard of but never heard? I've done that several times.
I've also done "several" investigations of the spammers — using tools like whois and nslookup. I was not licensed to perform the investigations — in any state.
According to this grandma's counter-suit and — more importantly — to all the kudos she got from the Slashdot crowd, all of those spammers should have a good case against me...
I may understand (and even accept) the desire to keep tabs on gun-wielding private detectives like Dr. Watson or "Maltese Falcon"'s main character, but MediaSentry, no doubt, has never even set foot in Texas, all their "investigations" being limited to the Internet. Twisting the law in this fashion should be troubling... But hey, it is RIAA, so whoever sticks whatever up theirs is our hero...
What have you done with the information you got from your investigations? Did someone pay you to make those investigations? I don't know the Texas law on private investigators, but I believe the requirement for a license comes in when someone pays you to do the investigation on their behalf.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, they can announce sales when they are sitting on store shelves, as long as those stores aren't part of the same corporate entity as is announcing sales. If the phones were sold to AT&T stores and are sitting on the shelves of the AT&T stores, Apple can count them as sold. If they are sitting on the shelves of Apple stores, then it depends on the corporate relationship between Apple stores and Apple itself (which I do not know, and don't care enough to look up).
It doesn't really take that many people if they are willing to do what it takes. Go to Township meetings, pay attention to who your Township Supervisors are (and vote against the bad ones), pay attention to who the County Supervisors are (again, vote against the bad ones), pay attention to how your state representative votes and let him/her know when you don't like it, etc, etc. If you do this it will make a difference.
Of course, every time they make it easier to vote, they make it harder to change things. The less effort you have to make register and vote, the more likely that people who aren't paying any attention to anything other than the sound bites just before an election will vote. The more of those people who vote, the harder it is for the people who are paying attention to what is going on to change things.
I wasn't talking about the honest workers either. Give it a little thought, if you were a dishonest employee, how much money would it take to be worth the effort and risk to rip off your employer? If you aren't smart enough to do a decent risk/reward analysis (I'm lumping effort in with risk, even though for many people effort is a more important part of the equation), how likely is it that you are smart enough to get away with anything. Every couple of years there is a case where someone does something like this and they get $100,000 to $500,000. They get caught and they tell the press, "It was so easy." But it wasn't so easy, they got caught. $500,000 is chump change in the US economy, so it doesn't do all that much damage. It's a real pain for the people whose info was used to get that $500,000, but for the most part even for them the negative impact is in the work it takes to contact all the different organizations involved and make sure that the record indicates that someone else actually did all that stuff.
Amazon doesn't have stores. Amazon is like the distributor that the brick and mortar store gets most of its books from. The publisher ships to the distributor. The publisher ships to Amazon. The distributor ships to the brick and mortar bookstore. Amazon ships to the customer. In those situations where Amazon uses a distributor, the distributor ships directly to the customer, so the shipping chain is the same either way.
You do know that the brick and mortar bookstore had to pay to have the book shipped to their store, don't you? You don't pay for shipping there. Yes, the price to ship the book is higher than the price of shipping the same book to a bookstore (along with hundreds of other books), but it still costs money. Oh, BTW, most brick and mortar bookstores get most of their books from distributors not directly from publishers (I used to be the book buyer for a large independent bookstore), which means that brick and mortar bookstores are at the same place in the shipping chain as the Amazon customer.
I would agree that when geeks use the word "gaming" they usually mean either video games or pencil and paper RPG's, but this is the first time where I have seen someone mean both to the exclusion of other uses of the word gaming. So, using gaming to refer to both video games and pencil and paper RPG's, but not other games, in the same context is a usage I have never run across before.
I cannot think of any reason why a list of "gaming" which includes both Pong and Pencil and Paper RPG's should not also include board games and card games. Pong has more in common with Dutch Blitz (a card game that involves reaction speed) than it does with D&D or other Pencil and Paper RPG's.
If they put an open source license on the stuff you are working on, then you can take it with you, even if your employer never distributed it.
Oh please: that is simply not true.
16bit or 24 bit "recorders"??? Checking... yes, you said recorders. And it's a plus 4 insightful mod. Hey kids! Thanks for the reminder that slashdot is not where you go for informed pro audio discussion.
So, are you trying to say that it is inaccurate to call a device used to record sound a "recorder"?
I think that's dead wrong.
It's actually pretty tough for our child sometimes, who we brought up to be caring and considerate of the feelings of others without the fear of a trip to hell if she isn't, when her friends invite her to go to Church with them. She goes along sometimes but afterwards, if there's a study group, she has to excuse herself because she doesn't know what to say or do. What to think even. She tells us that she pretends to pray so they other kids don't think she's a freak, but she really has no clue who she's meant to be praying to.
At least she won't go to hell for doing so, because there is no such thing of course. So, because it is dead wrong for parents to teach their belief systems to their children, so that the children will believe the same when they grow up, you are going to teach your daughter your belief system so she will believe that when she grows up? What are you doing that is different than other parents who teach their religion to their kids?
Well. It seems I won't be travelling to the US any time soon.
I wonder if customs officials are allowed to rummage through your luggage (well, of course they are, but bear with me), and when they find your diary, demand you to unlock it and then read it in detail.
And if they are, is it so everywhere in the world?
The answer to your question is yes, and if there are any countries where Customs does not have that authority, I have never heard of them. So, I guess you won't be travelling anywhere that you need to go through Customs?I think there are possible solutions that would not be as susceptible to corruption. Personally, I think that eliminating patents for software and "business processes" would go a long way to fixing the problem without as much room for abuse. The reason to be worried about the potential for abuse before a law is passed is that once it is passed it is a lot harder to fix it. "Act in haste, repent at leisure."
This is different from the ID crowd, who apparently feel that 'God did it' means you actively refuse to even think about the rules. You know it would be good if you actually knew something about a position before you lampoon it. ID says that we can see signs that the universe (life in particular) was designed by an Intelligence, just like SETI can determine that a radio signal had an intelligent source or archaeologists can tell that an object was shaped by a human hand not by random natural forces.
So what this guy is suggesting is a subset of ID theory.
Who gets to decide that it is worth a bounty? Or do you propose that everyone who has a granted patent overturned has to pay? Or only if it is overturned as obvious?
I like the idea, but I foresee significant possibility for abuse.
UM, the OP wasn't being critical, or saying that Grandma was stupid. He was saying that Grandma was a completely different type of User than the target demographic of PC Mag. His point was that the target demographic for PC Mag is an experienced Windows user, probably a power user. The target market for the Walmart Linux PC is someone with a limited budget who just wants a computer to surf the web and send/receive email. He was saying that PC Mag is incapable of understanding Grandma as a computer user, not that Grandma would have a problem running Linux.
He said he prefered BSD to GPL because it would make it harder for someone to copy his software. Why use any Open Source license for software you don't want people to be able to copy, unless you are planning to incorporate existing Open Source software?
So, let me see if I got this right. You want to take software other people have written, that you get for free, make a couple of changes to it and sell it to other people. Then you want to make it so that they can't do to your software what you did to someone else's software?
Thank you, I thought there was a Supreme Court ruling which had defended the right to anonymity, but I did not remember ever seeing the exact ruling or the case which it came from.
Without knowing more about the situation I can't form appropriate judgment on what happened. My feeling is that unless someone can suggest a reason why the Circuit City guys might want to screw this guy, he should be convicted. On the other hand, unless the guy had this stuff in a folder labeled "porn" or some such in the root directory, the Circuit City techs are scumbags and everyone should seriously think about whether it is a good idea to take their computer to Circuit City for repair work.
What newspapers were you reading? Newspapers are generally so agenda driven that it is hard to have any idea what really happened in the stories they report.
The reason that a teacher that got fired can't find another job is because it is so hard to fire teachers. A study in New York State said that it cost over $175,000 to fire a teacher and if the teacher appealed the cost jumped to over $300,000. A year or so ago, I had a reference that gave the cost of firing teachers in various states throughout the country, but I can't find the link anymore.
Based on how expensive it is to fire a teacher, there is no way that someone is going to hire a person to teach who was so bad that another school district went through what it takes to fire a teacher.
I've also done "several" investigations of the spammers — using tools like whois and nslookup. I was not licensed to perform the investigations — in any state.
According to this grandma's counter-suit and — more importantly — to all the kudos she got from the Slashdot crowd, all of those spammers should have a good case against me...
I may understand (and even accept) the desire to keep tabs on gun-wielding private detectives like Dr. Watson or "Maltese Falcon"'s main character, but MediaSentry, no doubt, has never even set foot in Texas, all their "investigations" being limited to the Internet. Twisting the law in this fashion should be troubling... But hey, it is RIAA, so whoever sticks whatever up theirs is our hero...
What have you done with the information you got from your investigations? Did someone pay you to make those investigations? I don't know the Texas law on private investigators, but I believe the requirement for a license comes in when someone pays you to do the investigation on their behalf.