And for that matter, do you really have a problem paying for the schools? You really want all the children around you to be both uneducated and completely idle? You want how many otherwise productive people to have to spend all day at home engaged in child care?
If Microsoft is to be an "incorporated person" then it should pay taxes at the same rate you do. 9.5%, right?
It is absolutely absurd to suggest that Microsoft and its shareholders should profit from their employees use of the public infrastructure (not to mention the direct business uses of the roads; shipping CDs, etc.) without paying for it's upkeep.
Suggesting that Amazon has a monopoly on paper book sales and is abusing that monopoly to unfairly make publishers accept lower prices for their e-books is... absurd.
Except that Amazon has nothing even near a monopoly on books, whether electronic, paper, or audio. There are many other online vendors that would jump at the chance to have a major product line Amazon doesn't.
Regardless, Amazon is absolutely right to negotiate with the price-gouging publishers any way they see fit, using any leverage they can. The publishers are trying to use their exclusive rights to the books; why shouldn't Amazon use their exclusive rights to their store? They are not harming the market, or keeping anything from being sold.
because their objections are based on ideology, not science.
From where I sit, it's the people putting arbitrary "corrections" into the programs to make them come out the way they want and refusing to accept any articles that don't toe the party line into their "peer reviewed journals" who look like religious zealots, and the soi-disant "deniers" are the ones who are trying to do things in a proper scientific manner..
Except that the corrections aren't arbitrary, and you don't know what you're talking about.
Do you even know what flux correction or parametrization is?
Despite the fact that spousal abusers are just as likely to be women and that the abused are just as likely to be men
Citation needed.
I fully suspect you are pulling this out of your ass, especially since there are tons of studies directly contradicting you. In fact, you are off by a massive margin; 85% of the victims of relationship violence are women.
You're still not answering the big question that every copyright proponent can't even seem to see: "Why should anyone care about your "right" (cough) to monopolize a bunch of ones and zeros that are easily and almost freely copied anymore? How do we, the consumers, benefit from paying you any mind or respect, let alone money?"
If "piracy" (cough) means you can't make money with what you're doing, why haven't you found a new business model? If you are profiting, why are you complaining? Simply, the technological paradigm has moved on, and new methodologies will, and are starting to already, supplant the old. Look at the advance of open source, from operating systems to games, the burgeoning creative commons movements... even good copyleft documentaries and films have been released recently.
Stop standing in the middle of auto traffic screaming about your suffering buggy whip sales. For your own sake.
One group that remains unconcerned in the face of possible prosecution is the administrators of The Pirate Bay. Last November, Peter Sunde told Ars that, should charges come, he's sure of a legal victory. "I'm quite confident we're gonna win and I was expecting this to happen," he said. "[Swedish prosecutor Håkan] Roswall is also a very biased man, so I'm glad to take it to court instead of letting him dig around my personal life for no apparent reason. Actually, it's kinda funny."
This just about says it all. The IFPI is fairly clearly not on the right side of Swedish law here. But, then, why is this happening? Ah, TFA goes on!
The antipathy towards copyright enforcement extends far beyond the Pirate Party in Sweden. Seven members of the Swedish Parliament from the free-market friendly Moderate Party (which is a member of the governing coalition) recently penned an op-ed piece in a Swedish tabloid calling for the complete decriminalization of file-sharing. "Decriminalizing all non-commercial file sharing and forcing the market to adapt is not just the best solution," the MPs wrote. "It's the only solution, unless we want an ever more extensive control of what citizens do on the Internet."
and
Sunde also accused Roswall of having a vendetta against The Pirate Bay. "The prosecutor decided before the raid that he was going to charge us," Sunde said. "He has until the last of January to press charges."
Ah, enlightening. Apparently not only is the IFPI swimming against the political views of almost all of Sweden, but they are running out of time, too. Thus, the prosecutor is still continuing, despite the magnitude of his earlier failure; it's the last chance, for him, and his backers, to justify their actions. It reeks of desperation, and probably won't get them very far.
Interestingly enough, (and yes, this does indicate my age more than a bit) my first gaming experience and my first real nerd experience were one and the same: Doom.
Getting that bitch running on 8 megs of ram was a trial, but it taught me alot about the system I was using. And as for the gaming... haha, I can remember being genuinely terrified the first time I played after midnight with headphones on.
Sometimes I wonder if the current crop of gamers coming up is missing out, not having to shoehorn their games into the minimum specs the way had to be done back around Doom and before. Of course, I'm sure there are some old saltdogs on here that'd say the same thing about me....
Because intelligence is good for society, wheras strength isn't. Ah, classic geek arrogance. Try telling the farmer that produces your food, the dockworker that ships your gadgets, or the construction worker that built your office that strength has no societal benefit. Even a muscle-bound peon who's contributions you disdain so haughtily will be smart enough to laugh at you.
The comments so far seem to focus on whether or not Microsoft has enough moral high-ground to complain about Google's practices, but that misses one very important point: one monopoly does *NOT* equal another. Even if Google expands it's share of the advertising market to 85% or more, making their base numerically equivalent to Microsoft's, we're still talking about two very different things, for a couple of reasons.
First of all, the barriers to entry in the advertising market are remarkably lower than that in operation Systems. Competition isn't nearly as locked out; anyone with a server, technical knowledge, and a method for paying out can offer ads to sites. Also, advertising targets, unlike operating system users, don't need to be previously experienced with an ad before they can view it; it's provider neutral to the target. It's simply impossible to have the kind of entrenchment that Windows does with simple advertising.
Secondly, opportunities to leverage an advertising monopoly in a such a way to limit customer (or consumer) choice are far more limited. Microsoft's problem isn't their success; it's their use of that success to force IE and WMP on people. In the advertising market, it's going to be much harder to abuse a monopoly. The worst they could realistically try to do is cross-promote a monetary system like paypal... and convincing ad buyers to hook their whole systems to their ads is going to be a much harder sell than getting people to use bundled IE ever was.
People shouldn't be all up in arms about this, not until Google actually manages to do something very shady, something that might not even be possible.
A little over a month ago, the wiki page for Marvin Perry was nominated for deletion, based on multiple claims of "not notable." This is despite the fact that Perry has held at least 11 major titles in kickboxing, spread out amongst several large sanctioning bodies, some of them international. He is, simply, a true paragon in the field.
It ended up being even more absurd than that; in the course of the discussion, even after a slew of citations were noted, it was charged that kickboxing itself was not mainstream enough for inclusion in Wikipedia, that several international publications were either biased or fictional, and that the short length of the article made it deletion worthy in and of itself.
Something is obviously going wrong over at Wikipedia, and it seems like a coterie of users and admins are attempting to delete large swaths of material not within their immediate scope of knowledge, and they are using the notability standards to do it. A revision of that policy will probably serve the project well.
Have you actually seen what she was wearing? It does not look like a little light up name tag. It looks like what C4 with a firing pin in it looks like in the movies. She is indeed lucky she was not shot.
What are you talking about? That picture is of her hoodie, when turned INSIDE OUT. To those at the airport, it looked like an LCD star with a rectangular bulge behind it.
Are you really suggesting that people are lucky not to be shot for having bulges in their clothing?
And that, right there, is why I won't buy from Apple. Ever. If a vendor wants to lock me into their hardware, they'd damn well better be locked into dealing with my questions and complaints openly and honestly.
Are people really to blame if they are not given the same opportunities as others?
What if someone is born into an underfunded, crime-ridden, and academically poor school district? Are they still at fault when their education doesn't take, or they feel no need to press on in a terrible learning environment? What about the cost that unequal access to health care can have on a family's future chances of success, or what if someone has to immediately find work in the 14-16 age range to help support their family?
This is the sick thing about the conservative mindset towards poverty and it's effects; no matter what the circumstances of someone's life, circumstances they have no control over, it is irrelevant in the face of the cry of "personal responsibility!" Utter rubbish. Yes, you can point to a few examples of people succeed no matter what obstacles are placed in their path. However, this is anecdotal and statistically irrelevant. It is much easier to point to hundreds of thousands of examples of wealthy children being given more opportunities and resources to succeed, and then, shockingly, succeeding.
Poverty is most certainly a self-propagating cycle and it must be viewed as such. Providing equal opportunities, the "level playing field" other aspects of the conservative ideology like to discuss, is an exercise best left to the whole of society.
The parent's arguement above is absolutely the correct one; global economic dynamics are as far from a zero-sum game as one can get, and there is most certainly a net benefit to the U.S. economy that comes from "off-shoring."
Slashdot Mirror
Spiders can check every image referenced from any myspace.com html against a fingerprint match with a blacklist of images.
Someone's still got to generate that blacklist...
and every time a customer gets it their shop to resell his game, it's the occasion to sell him goodies, accessories and useless insurances.
Or other, sometimes even new, games...
And for that matter, do you really have a problem paying for the schools? You really want all the children around you to be both uneducated and completely idle? You want how many otherwise productive people to have to spend all day at home engaged in child care?
Are you nuts?
If Microsoft is to be an "incorporated person" then it should pay taxes at the same rate you do. 9.5%, right?
It is absolutely absurd to suggest that Microsoft and its shareholders should profit from their employees use of the public infrastructure (not to mention the direct business uses of the roads; shipping CDs, etc.) without paying for it's upkeep.
Suggesting that Amazon has a monopoly on paper book sales and is abusing that monopoly to unfairly make publishers accept lower prices for their e-books is... absurd.
Except that Amazon has nothing even near a monopoly on books, whether electronic, paper, or audio. There are many other online vendors that would jump at the chance to have a major product line Amazon doesn't.
Regardless, Amazon is absolutely right to negotiate with the price-gouging publishers any way they see fit, using any leverage they can. The publishers are trying to use their exclusive rights to the books; why shouldn't Amazon use their exclusive rights to their store? They are not harming the market, or keeping anything from being sold.
because their objections are based on ideology, not science.
From where I sit, it's the people putting arbitrary "corrections" into the programs to make them come out the way they want and refusing to accept any articles that don't toe the party line into their "peer reviewed journals" who look like religious zealots, and the soi-disant "deniers" are the ones who are trying to do things in a proper scientific manner..
Except that the corrections aren't arbitrary, and you don't know what you're talking about.
Do you even know what flux correction or parametrization is?
Despite the fact that spousal abusers are just as likely to be women and that the abused are just as likely to be men
Citation needed.
I fully suspect you are pulling this out of your ass, especially since there are tons of studies directly contradicting you. In fact, you are off by a massive margin; 85% of the victims of relationship violence are women.
Here are some starter links: http://www.abanet.org/domviol/statistics.html
You're still not answering the big question that every copyright proponent can't even seem to see: "Why should anyone care about your "right" (cough) to monopolize a bunch of ones and zeros that are easily and almost freely copied anymore? How do we, the consumers, benefit from paying you any mind or respect, let alone money?"
If "piracy" (cough) means you can't make money with what you're doing, why haven't you found a new business model? If you are profiting, why are you complaining? Simply, the technological paradigm has moved on, and new methodologies will, and are starting to already, supplant the old. Look at the advance of open source, from operating systems to games, the burgeoning creative commons movements... even good copyleft documentaries and films have been released recently.
Stop standing in the middle of auto traffic screaming about your suffering buggy whip sales. For your own sake.
andAh, enlightening. Apparently not only is the IFPI swimming against the political views of almost all of Sweden, but they are running out of time, too. Thus, the prosecutor is still continuing, despite the magnitude of his earlier failure; it's the last chance, for him, and his backers, to justify their actions. It reeks of desperation, and probably won't get them very far.
Interestingly enough, (and yes, this does indicate my age more than a bit) my first gaming experience and my first real nerd experience were one and the same: Doom.
Getting that bitch running on 8 megs of ram was a trial, but it taught me alot about the system I was using. And as for the gaming... haha, I can remember being genuinely terrified the first time I played after midnight with headphones on.
Sometimes I wonder if the current crop of gamers coming up is missing out, not having to shoehorn their games into the minimum specs the way had to be done back around Doom and before. Of course, I'm sure there are some old saltdogs on here that'd say the same thing about me....
The comments so far seem to focus on whether or not Microsoft has enough moral high-ground to complain about Google's practices, but that misses one very important point: one monopoly does *NOT* equal another. Even if Google expands it's share of the advertising market to 85% or more, making their base numerically equivalent to Microsoft's, we're still talking about two very different things, for a couple of reasons.
First of all, the barriers to entry in the advertising market are remarkably lower than that in operation Systems. Competition isn't nearly as locked out; anyone with a server, technical knowledge, and a method for paying out can offer ads to sites. Also, advertising targets, unlike operating system users, don't need to be previously experienced with an ad before they can view it; it's provider neutral to the target. It's simply impossible to have the kind of entrenchment that Windows does with simple advertising.
Secondly, opportunities to leverage an advertising monopoly in a such a way to limit customer (or consumer) choice are far more limited. Microsoft's problem isn't their success; it's their use of that success to force IE and WMP on people. In the advertising market, it's going to be much harder to abuse a monopoly. The worst they could realistically try to do is cross-promote a monetary system like paypal... and convincing ad buyers to hook their whole systems to their ads is going to be a much harder sell than getting people to use bundled IE ever was.
People shouldn't be all up in arms about this, not until Google actually manages to do something very shady, something that might not even be possible.
A little over a month ago, the wiki page for Marvin Perry was nominated for deletion, based on multiple claims of "not notable." This is despite the fact that Perry has held at least 11 major titles in kickboxing, spread out amongst several large sanctioning bodies, some of them international. He is, simply, a true paragon in the field.
It ended up being even more absurd than that; in the course of the discussion, even after a slew of citations were noted, it was charged that kickboxing itself was not mainstream enough for inclusion in Wikipedia, that several international publications were either biased or fictional, and that the short length of the article made it deletion worthy in and of itself.
Something is obviously going wrong over at Wikipedia, and it seems like a coterie of users and admins are attempting to delete large swaths of material not within their immediate scope of knowledge, and they are using the notability standards to do it. A revision of that policy will probably serve the project well.
Are you really suggesting that people are lucky not to be shot for having bulges in their clothing?
This news couldn't have come at a better time, what with torrentspy's recent legal woes...
Is the definition of perjury taken from the Oath of Office? No.
You're right; it was really simple to find out Plame's occupation. All you had to do was ask Libby. ;-)
And that, right there, is why I won't buy from Apple. Ever. If a vendor wants to lock me into their hardware, they'd damn well better be locked into dealing with my questions and complaints openly and honestly.
Are people really to blame if they are not given the same opportunities as others?
What if someone is born into an underfunded, crime-ridden, and academically poor school district? Are they still at fault when their education doesn't take, or they feel no need to press on in a terrible learning environment? What about the cost that unequal access to health care can have on a family's future chances of success, or what if someone has to immediately find work in the 14-16 age range to help support their family?
This is the sick thing about the conservative mindset towards poverty and it's effects; no matter what the circumstances of someone's life, circumstances they have no control over, it is irrelevant in the face of the cry of "personal responsibility!" Utter rubbish. Yes, you can point to a few examples of people succeed no matter what obstacles are placed in their path. However, this is anecdotal and statistically irrelevant. It is much easier to point to hundreds of thousands of examples of wealthy children being given more opportunities and resources to succeed, and then, shockingly, succeeding.
Poverty is most certainly a self-propagating cycle and it must be viewed as such. Providing equal opportunities, the "level playing field" other aspects of the conservative ideology like to discuss, is an exercise best left to the whole of society.
The parent's arguement above is absolutely the correct one; global economic dynamics are as far from a zero-sum game as one can get, and there is most certainly a net benefit to the U.S. economy that comes from "off-shoring."