What kind of fascist are you to tell sports teams which conditions they can put on the tickets they sell?
If you don't want to adhere to the conditions on the ticket, then don't buy it. But don't pretend that this is a liberty issue. It isn't. If you buy sports tickets then you agree to all sorts of things that are usually written on the ticket. Sometimes this includes a prohibition on resale.
Sports teams have their own reasons for pricing their tickets as they do and for wanting to prevent resales. Why should you be able to tell them how much to sell their good for and under what conditions it ought to be sold? The OP was commenting on MA law and a previous poster who seems to be saying that the law should not allow people to resell tickets for whatever the market will bear. At the end of his post, he explicitly states that he is fine with the team attaching whatever conditions they want to the sale of the tickets.
Poor Rush. He got caught with his big mouth flapping. And I'll bet you were incensed about the disrespect to General Betray-Us. But hey, that's different. Sorry, I have no respect or compassion for the fat windbag. He is now trapped by his own hypocrisy.
I'll bet if Rush were caught molesting a 3 year-old his defense would be it was taken out of context. Well, you know context is everything. In the case where Rush referred to "phony soldiers", Rush was talking to a caller who called in about a particular person who claimed to have been an Army Ranger in Iraq and witnessed atrocities. The person in question was never an Army Ranger, never in Iraq and never even completed basic training. So, there is significant difference between the "General Betray-Us" ad (which was composed and claimed that General Petraeus was lying to Congress, before he had testified) and Rush Limbaugh's "phony soldiers" comment. Whether you like Rush or Moveon.org, it is important to know the facts before reaching judgement.
A Shia country sponsoring a Sunni terrorist organisation? Really?
Yes, really. Ever hear the proverb, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend"? It applies here. The Iranians will give money and guns to anyone fighting the Americans and/or the current Iraqi government. The people fighting the current Iraqi government and the American forces in Iraq will take money and guns from whoever will give it to them. That's really not that hard to understand.
The deal between MS and Best Buy was not illegal, unless giving the credit card numbers used to purchase computers at Best Buy to MS was part of it (and then only if not getting customer consent was part of the deal too). The suit is over Best Buy supposedly giving a customers credit card number to MS without informing/getting the customers permission. That is what is illegal. The fact of the deal is what makes the crime subject to RICO. I agree with the Chamber of Commerce that RICO has become overly broad in its application, although I'm not sure which side of the line this particular suit is. On the one hand, the RICO laws were clearly not intended to apply to cases like this (I remember the situations that led to the laws being passed, it had to do with efforts by big time drug dealers to turn drug money into legitimate businesses). On the other hand, without the threat of treble damages, the kind of profit that a big company can make off of most people's inertia is too much for most companies to resist.
2. WindowsUpdate/MicrosoftUpdate w/ AutomaticUpdates disabled. Would not have received the silent updates. More work. More control over what patches are applied, and timing of such.
The problem is that this whole thing started with people who had Automatic Updates disabled noticing that low and behold their system had downloaded and installed an update http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=779. So, yes, they would have received these silent updates. So more work, but still no control over what patches are applied or the timing except in as much as Microsoft allows.
You can argue with the facts all you want, but they are still the facts and all your arguments are worthless.
His arguments aren't worthless, for two reason. The first and more important one is that he drew you out to expand on your original point and so clearly lay it out. I think you make a very good point. Additionally, people need to realize that voting bloc politics cannot try to address every problem with the current laws, it must pick one or two issues that tie together and focus on those. There have been groups that started out well, that failed to accomplish much because they forgot this basic principle.
I would add one point to your already well made argument, laws should be passed and applied at the most local level that they can practically be enforced. The fewer number of people it takes to effect the outcome of a vote the more likely that those who really understand what is at stake can change the outcome of the vote.
I really think your point about forming a voting bloc with others who all stay focused on a limited number of important issues is very insightful.
She did not say 18% body fat. She said 18.1 BMI -- which is your body mass index. The quick equation for BMI to body fat is Adult Body Fat % = (1.20 x BMI) + (0.23 x Age) - (10.8 x gender) - 5.4, where male is 1 and female is 0. Assuming an age of 25, her body fat is around 22% You can't get body fat percentage from BMI. There is no connection between the two. BMI is a weight to height relationship. Since muscle weighs more than fat, the mre muscular you are, the worse your BMI. In 2000 (the March before Gladiator came out), every one of the players on all four teams in the NCAA's Final Four (basketball) were overweight according to BMI, none of them had a body fat percentage over 10%. The reason I remember that it was the March after Gladiator came out is that the same list mentioned that Russell Crowe was obese according to BMI and that was right after Gladiator was released. There was a whole list of other actors who were noted for being fit and muscular (but not Arnie bulked), who were, also, either overweight or obese according to BMI measurement.
From most standings, bloggers are to journalists as chiropractors are to doctors. Wow, you either have a unusually high opinion(for slashdot) of chiropractors or an unusually low opinion of doctors.
It has been a few years (late 90's) since I worked retail. However, I worked for a retailer that for various reasons people forgot that they had purchased things from with their credit card. The customer would get their bill and see a charge from our store on it. They would call the credit card company and contest the charge. The credit card company would send us a letter asking for the signed receipt for charge against Credit card # xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx (where the x's were the number on the card) from such and such date. If we did not send it to them within a given amount of time, they would issue a credit to the customer and charge us the amount that we had received against that card. SO, at that point a retailer did need a copy of the customer's credit card # for at least two months after the purchase.
I can give plenty of rational reasons for my behaviour...
1) Why I don't rape women: Because I know that doing so would hurt them. And that would make them more likely to desire bad things happening to me. And the more people that desire bad things happening to me, the more likely bad things will happen to me. And I don't want bad things to happen to me. I gain next to nothing, I stand a very good chance of losing a lot. This "idea" has been so ingrained in to me, that the very idea of rape is abhorrent and sickening to me - which is how I consider myself to be "against the idea of rape". But I don't fool myself about the rationale behind this idea.
2) Why I don't murder: See #1, but generally the families/friends/society of the person rather than the person themselves.
3) Why I don't steal: See #1, but it's more "inconvenience" than "hurt" - the end result is the same though.
4) Why I don't (lots of other things): See #1
Get the idea?
That is not "ethical" behavior. Ethical behavior is the willingness to do something that makes your life more difficult simply because it is the right thing to do (this is not quite the same thing as "selflessness"). From what you said, I take it that you do not believe that there is such a thing. Which makes the argument that without religion there can be no ethical behavior (at least by my understanding of the definition of "ethics").
This is a simplification of my point, but I don't have time to make it more clearly right now (something came up aand I have to log off).
No, my point is that if Africa is such a mess just because of colonialism, why isn't India? You still haven't given a reason why all of Africa has become poorer since colonialism ended and India has become wealthier. I would suggest that the reason is that Africa and wealthy nations have accepted the idea that Africans are bot able to fix what is wrong in Africa, while India has aggressively rejected the solutions that wealthy nations sought to implement and acted to solve its problems itself. You seem to think that Africans are not able to determine their own destiny.
You comment as if India was a unified culture/country when the British colonized it. The British turned India into a single country. It wasn't one when they arrived. Or are you saying that Africa would be better off if it had been turned into a single country by the colonial powers? If your point is that Africa is bigger than India, why aren't at least some parts of Africa comparable to India?
Nations? You mean the arbitrarily made boundaries made with a rule by whities so that many different tribes with different languages, that had been killing each other for millenniums are now called a 'nation' are supposed to work?
You think it should work as good as the Iraq 'Nation'?
Yeah, you're right. I mean look how bad that turned out for India.
At some point you have to take responsibility for yourself. The African nations have been getting progressively worse off since the end of colonialism. It is time to stop excusing bad government in Africa because of what the colonial powers did. The problems in Africa today are a product of bad governments. Much of Asia was colonial as well and doesn't suffer to the same degree that Africa does. If the cause of Africa's problems is colonialism, why is India wealthier today than it was when it was a colony, but Africa is poorer? BTW the article you link expresses a similar sentiment to the post that you are replying to: it is time for the First World (Europe and the US) to stop thinking that it has the duty or the ability to solve Africa's problems; the only ones with the ability to solve Africa's problems are Africans. At least that is what the wrap up of the article reads like to me.
To the extent that we do not convert to this better system, we are to blame, not spammers.
What is "this better system" you would like us to convert to? A little more detail would be helpful, I was unaware of an alternative email system.
I think a study asked a bunch of questions about the internet to people to look for correlations and what they found was striking:
90% of people who think spam should be "eliminated some time in the future" have bought something on line. Does that make ANY sense whatsoever? You hate getting ads in your email, but you're all so eager to buy on line?
Gimme a break!
I buy things online, but I never buy things in response to unsolicited email. For example, I buy things from Amazon. From time to time Amazon sends me email telling me about things they think I might be interested in. This is not spam, I signed up for them to send it to me. If I decide I no longer want to receive it, I can go to Amazon and ask them to stop sending it and they will. I get email from several other vendors that I have done business with. In every case there was a check box to mark (or in most cases unmark if I didn't want) to indicate that I want them to send me notifications of products they think I might be interested in.
The article doesn't actually say that the judge would not allow the redacted information. The article says that the documents "suggest" that the Judge refused to allow him to present the argument that there was retaliation. In addition, the Judge was going to require him to take the stand if he wanted to use the "classified defense". This sounds to me as if the judge was saying that if Nacchio wanted to claim as his defense that he thought things were better than his staff thought because of classified info he had access to that they didn't, Nacchio was going to have to get up on the stand. It reads to me like Nacchio didn't want to get up on the stand because he knew he couldn't defend that claim without perjuring himself.
Do I believe that is really what was going on? I haven't got the foggiest idea, but that reading of the facts is just as probable as retaliation by the government. Either one or both is possible. Neither is demonstrated by the facts presented in the article.
While you might get some injury from a seatbelt, it certainly beats getting killed by a frontal crash at 120 KPH (whether you cause it or not). Seat belts were eventually required by law because manufacturers found it too expensive to put them in cars, well, the law fixed that.
The law didn't "fix" anything. The law didn't make it cheaper to put seat belts in cars, it just made it so that you could no longer buy a less expensive car without one. The law raised the prices of cars. When they had a choice, many people were not willing to pay the extra price for the additional safety that seat belts provide. Air bags are worse. When the law mandating airbags was passed, airbags decreased your odds of being killed in a car accident, but increased your odds of being crippled for the rest of your life (many of those people whose lives were saved by airbags, suffered lasting injury instead). So the best excuse for mandating seat belts "I don't want to have to take care of you because you didn't wear a seatbelt" didn't apply to airbags. Airbags, at that time, actually increased the likelihood that society would need to foot the bill for your care going forward after an accident.
"From 1986 to 1991, several manufacturers created Macintosh clones" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_clone
These were before the officially licensed Macintosh clones. As I said, I remember thinking that if Apple would officially sanction them and sell the Mac OS to them, Apple could have displaced Microsoft. The official clone program was started in 1995.
Apple clearly rejected the idea of selling their operating system separately a long time ago. In the late 80's there were at least two companies that made Mac clones. Apple refused to sell them the operating system and sued them out of business for copyright infringement.
That is a valid question and certainly part of the debate. Many of the opponents of embryonic stem cell research would say that the difference is that one is an accident victim, the other a murder victim.
I don't know anyone who opposes stem cell research in general. I have not even heard of anyone who opposes stem cell research in general. The only thing I have heard is opposition to killing people in order to heal other people. That is how those who oppose embryonic stem cell research see the situation. They view human embryos as human. Therefore they consider embryonic stem cell research to be comparable to the medical research done by the Nazis (in particular Dr Mengele). You may disagree with their view of human embryos as human, but it does not advance the discussion to mis characterize them as the "NO MEDDLIN' WITH GOD'S WORK" crowd. If we are ever going to make any progress on divisive issues, we need to address where we disagree. If you don't believe that human embryos are deserving of the same legal protections as post natal humans, let's have that discussion.
In the US, if I run a retail establishment and play music that my customers can hear, I must pay a "performance" fee. It doesn't matter if I play the radio or some other source of music. The exception to this is if I sell the music. If I sell CD's or Audio tapes and play those, I don't have to pay the fee. I worked for two stores(one a national chain) that carried CD's for just this purpose. The sales volume of the CD's wasn't high enough to justify carrying them, but because we had them for sale, we could play them in the store and not have to pay the fee. I don't know if the fees were actually high enough that we saved any money, but it saved a lot of hassle in keeping track of the info that was needed to properly keep track of the info that you were supposed to report to the fee collection board.
Now those who control the U.S. and U.K. governments are planning to
start a war with Iran, another oil-rich country. Yeah and the amazing thing, these guys were able to get the President of Iran to declare war against the US and UK so that they can go to war and claim that Iran started it.
In May of 2006, the President of Iran sent a letter to President Bush that contained text almost identical to the text that an early Shiite Muslim leader sent to a neighboring government shortly before launching an attack. Various Islamic Mullahs have pointed to the historical letter as a model of proper Islamic declaration of war (convert or we will destroy you).
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't want to adhere to the conditions on the ticket, then don't buy it. But don't pretend that this is a liberty issue. It isn't. If you buy sports tickets then you agree to all sorts of things that are usually written on the ticket. Sometimes this includes a prohibition on resale.
Sports teams have their own reasons for pricing their tickets as they do and for wanting to prevent resales. Why should you be able to tell them how much to sell their good for and under what conditions it ought to be sold? The OP was commenting on MA law and a previous poster who seems to be saying that the law should not allow people to resell tickets for whatever the market will bear. At the end of his post, he explicitly states that he is fine with the team attaching whatever conditions they want to the sale of the tickets.
I'll bet if Rush were caught molesting a 3 year-old his defense would be it was taken out of context.
Well, you know context is everything. In the case where Rush referred to "phony soldiers", Rush was talking to a caller who called in about a particular person who claimed to have been an Army Ranger in Iraq and witnessed atrocities. The person in question was never an Army Ranger, never in Iraq and never even completed basic training. So, there is significant difference between the "General Betray-Us" ad (which was composed and claimed that General Petraeus was lying to Congress, before he had testified) and Rush Limbaugh's "phony soldiers" comment. Whether you like Rush or Moveon.org, it is important to know the facts before reaching judgement.
Actually, the Clinton's beat him to it by a few years.
Yes, really. Ever hear the proverb, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend"? It applies here. The Iranians will give money and guns to anyone fighting the Americans and/or the current Iraqi government. The people fighting the current Iraqi government and the American forces in Iraq will take money and guns from whoever will give it to them. That's really not that hard to understand.
The deal between MS and Best Buy was not illegal, unless giving the credit card numbers used to purchase computers at Best Buy to MS was part of it (and then only if not getting customer consent was part of the deal too). The suit is over Best Buy supposedly giving a customers credit card number to MS without informing/getting the customers permission. That is what is illegal. The fact of the deal is what makes the crime subject to RICO. I agree with the Chamber of Commerce that RICO has become overly broad in its application, although I'm not sure which side of the line this particular suit is. On the one hand, the RICO laws were clearly not intended to apply to cases like this (I remember the situations that led to the laws being passed, it had to do with efforts by big time drug dealers to turn drug money into legitimate businesses). On the other hand, without the threat of treble damages, the kind of profit that a big company can make off of most people's inertia is too much for most companies to resist.
2. WindowsUpdate/MicrosoftUpdate w/ AutomaticUpdates disabled. Would not have received the silent updates. More work. More control over what patches are applied, and timing of such.
The problem is that this whole thing started with people who had Automatic Updates disabled noticing that low and behold their system had downloaded and installed an update http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=779. So, yes, they would have received these silent updates. So more work, but still no control over what patches are applied or the timing except in as much as Microsoft allows.
His arguments aren't worthless, for two reason. The first and more important one is that he drew you out to expand on your original point and so clearly lay it out. I think you make a very good point. Additionally, people need to realize that voting bloc politics cannot try to address every problem with the current laws, it must pick one or two issues that tie together and focus on those. There have been groups that started out well, that failed to accomplish much because they forgot this basic principle.
I would add one point to your already well made argument, laws should be passed and applied at the most local level that they can practically be enforced. The fewer number of people it takes to effect the outcome of a vote the more likely that those who really understand what is at stake can change the outcome of the vote.
I really think your point about forming a voting bloc with others who all stay focused on a limited number of important issues is very insightful.
It has been a few years (late 90's) since I worked retail. However, I worked for a retailer that for various reasons people forgot that they had purchased things from with their credit card. The customer would get their bill and see a charge from our store on it. They would call the credit card company and contest the charge. The credit card company would send us a letter asking for the signed receipt for charge against Credit card # xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx (where the x's were the number on the card) from such and such date. If we did not send it to them within a given amount of time, they would issue a credit to the customer and charge us the amount that we had received against that card. SO, at that point a retailer did need a copy of the customer's credit card # for at least two months after the purchase.
I can give plenty of rational reasons for my behaviour...
1) Why I don't rape women: Because I know that doing so would hurt them. And that would make them more likely to desire bad things happening to me. And the more people that desire bad things happening to me, the more likely bad things will happen to me. And I don't want bad things to happen to me. I gain next to nothing, I stand a very good chance of losing a lot. This "idea" has been so ingrained in to me, that the very idea of rape is abhorrent and sickening to me - which is how I consider myself to be "against the idea of rape". But I don't fool myself about the rationale behind this idea.
2) Why I don't murder: See #1, but generally the families/friends/society of the person rather than the person themselves.
3) Why I don't steal: See #1, but it's more "inconvenience" than "hurt" - the end result is the same though.
4) Why I don't (lots of other things): See #1
Get the idea?
That is not "ethical" behavior. Ethical behavior is the willingness to do something that makes your life more difficult simply because it is the right thing to do (this is not quite the same thing as "selflessness"). From what you said, I take it that you do not believe that there is such a thing. Which makes the argument that without religion there can be no ethical behavior (at least by my understanding of the definition of "ethics").This is a simplification of my point, but I don't have time to make it more clearly right now (something came up aand I have to log off).
No, my point is that if Africa is such a mess just because of colonialism, why isn't India? You still haven't given a reason why all of Africa has become poorer since colonialism ended and India has become wealthier. I would suggest that the reason is that Africa and wealthy nations have accepted the idea that Africans are bot able to fix what is wrong in Africa, while India has aggressively rejected the solutions that wealthy nations sought to implement and acted to solve its problems itself. You seem to think that Africans are not able to determine their own destiny.
So, your saying that all of Africa was at the hunter-gatherer stage when it was colonized?
You comment as if India was a unified culture/country when the British colonized it. The British turned India into a single country. It wasn't one when they arrived. Or are you saying that Africa would be better off if it had been turned into a single country by the colonial powers? If your point is that Africa is bigger than India, why aren't at least some parts of Africa comparable to India?
You think it should work as good as the Iraq 'Nation'?
Yeah, you're right. I mean look how bad that turned out for India.
At some point you have to take responsibility for yourself. The African nations have been getting progressively worse off since the end of colonialism. It is time to stop excusing bad government in Africa because of what the colonial powers did. The problems in Africa today are a product of bad governments. Much of Asia was colonial as well and doesn't suffer to the same degree that Africa does. If the cause of Africa's problems is colonialism, why is India wealthier today than it was when it was a colony, but Africa is poorer? BTW the article you link expresses a similar sentiment to the post that you are replying to: it is time for the First World (Europe and the US) to stop thinking that it has the duty or the ability to solve Africa's problems; the only ones with the ability to solve Africa's problems are Africans. At least that is what the wrap up of the article reads like to me.
What is "this better system" you would like us to convert to? A little more detail would be helpful, I was unaware of an alternative email system.
I think a study asked a bunch of questions about the internet to people to look for correlations and what they found was striking:
90% of people who think spam should be "eliminated some time in the future" have bought something on line. Does that make ANY sense whatsoever? You hate getting ads in your email, but you're all so eager to buy on line?
Gimme a break!
I buy things online, but I never buy things in response to unsolicited email. For example, I buy things from Amazon. From time to time Amazon sends me email telling me about things they think I might be interested in. This is not spam, I signed up for them to send it to me. If I decide I no longer want to receive it, I can go to Amazon and ask them to stop sending it and they will. I get email from several other vendors that I have done business with. In every case there was a check box to mark (or in most cases unmark if I didn't want) to indicate that I want them to send me notifications of products they think I might be interested in.
The article doesn't actually say that the judge would not allow the redacted information. The article says that the documents "suggest" that the Judge refused to allow him to present the argument that there was retaliation. In addition, the Judge was going to require him to take the stand if he wanted to use the "classified defense". This sounds to me as if the judge was saying that if Nacchio wanted to claim as his defense that he thought things were better than his staff thought because of classified info he had access to that they didn't, Nacchio was going to have to get up on the stand. It reads to me like Nacchio didn't want to get up on the stand because he knew he couldn't defend that claim without perjuring himself.
Do I believe that is really what was going on? I haven't got the foggiest idea, but that reading of the facts is just as probable as retaliation by the government. Either one or both is possible. Neither is demonstrated by the facts presented in the article.
The law didn't "fix" anything. The law didn't make it cheaper to put seat belts in cars, it just made it so that you could no longer buy a less expensive car without one. The law raised the prices of cars. When they had a choice, many people were not willing to pay the extra price for the additional safety that seat belts provide. Air bags are worse. When the law mandating airbags was passed, airbags decreased your odds of being killed in a car accident, but increased your odds of being crippled for the rest of your life (many of those people whose lives were saved by airbags, suffered lasting injury instead). So the best excuse for mandating seat belts "I don't want to have to take care of you because you didn't wear a seatbelt" didn't apply to airbags. Airbags, at that time, actually increased the likelihood that society would need to foot the bill for your care going forward after an accident.
"From 1986 to 1991, several manufacturers created Macintosh clones" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_clone These were before the officially licensed Macintosh clones. As I said, I remember thinking that if Apple would officially sanction them and sell the Mac OS to them, Apple could have displaced Microsoft. The official clone program was started in 1995.
Apple clearly rejected the idea of selling their operating system separately a long time ago. In the late 80's there were at least two companies that made Mac clones. Apple refused to sell them the operating system and sued them out of business for copyright infringement.
That is a valid question and certainly part of the debate. Many of the opponents of embryonic stem cell research would say that the difference is that one is an accident victim, the other a murder victim.
I don't know anyone who opposes stem cell research in general. I have not even heard of anyone who opposes stem cell research in general. The only thing I have heard is opposition to killing people in order to heal other people. That is how those who oppose embryonic stem cell research see the situation. They view human embryos as human. Therefore they consider embryonic stem cell research to be comparable to the medical research done by the Nazis (in particular Dr Mengele). You may disagree with their view of human embryos as human, but it does not advance the discussion to mis characterize them as the "NO MEDDLIN' WITH GOD'S WORK" crowd. If we are ever going to make any progress on divisive issues, we need to address where we disagree. If you don't believe that human embryos are deserving of the same legal protections as post natal humans, let's have that discussion.
In the US, if I run a retail establishment and play music that my customers can hear, I must pay a "performance" fee. It doesn't matter if I play the radio or some other source of music. The exception to this is if I sell the music. If I sell CD's or Audio tapes and play those, I don't have to pay the fee. I worked for two stores(one a national chain) that carried CD's for just this purpose. The sales volume of the CD's wasn't high enough to justify carrying them, but because we had them for sale, we could play them in the store and not have to pay the fee. I don't know if the fees were actually high enough that we saved any money, but it saved a lot of hassle in keeping track of the info that was needed to properly keep track of the info that you were supposed to report to the fee collection board.
In May of 2006, the President of Iran sent a letter to President Bush that contained text almost identical to the text that an early Shiite Muslim leader sent to a neighboring government shortly before launching an attack. Various Islamic Mullahs have pointed to the historical letter as a model of proper Islamic declaration of war (convert or we will destroy you).