Verizon is also a bad guy who should be punished though. They hired as their agent this guy who assaults customers, and then they continued to retain him after he assaulted customers. Corporatoins are, and should be, responsible for the actions of their agents.
Your statement doesn't seem completely incompatible with his analogy.
Steam powered trains work even if society collapses, but are inefficient. Maglev trains are very efficient, but but would not work if society collapses.
In that sense, it is a little like if we kept rail tracks traditional so that we maintained backwards compatibility with steam trains.
In the end, it comes down to deciding the expectation value of the improvement of efficiency versus the loss of a last ditch safety net.
This is a news story about bringing Microsoft Office to business Symbian smartphones made by Nokia. Most of the E-Series referenced in the story have keyboards and look like Blackberries.
Just because all companies remain in business to make money does not mean that all companies are the same amount of evil, that's seeing things unnecessarily starkly.
Consider, for example, the difference between Alice's Slash and Burn Quick Profit Shop versus Bob's Sustainable Tourism Rain Forest Tours for different levels of responsibility in profit making corporations.
I don't know the numbers, but I would really venture to guess that the vast bulk of Windows sales occur at the OEM level, and that people who go out and buy upgrades for old computers are a small minority. If my guess is right, it doesn't really matter too much what Microsoft prices Windows 7 at.
I'm not sure about the PC world, but any applications that Apple installs are easily deleted in Mac OS X, you just drag the to the trash, and empty it. It's that simple. Microsoft is a convicted monopolist because they abused their position as the dominant OS manufacturer to force people to run IE, Apple may include lots and lots of applications on their software (and even automatically download or install them) but they have never forced you to use their application, and this is precisely why they are not a convicted monopolist whereas Microsoft is.
It's not a matter of being cute, it was a matter of improving on the logic of the game. There you were in a Madcat, the most iconic of all the mechs, with what were clearly two shoulders filled with missiles (or something that looked pretty close to them) and you were --- what? saying "Pay no attention to those things that look like missiles, they're REALLY a mix of lasers and machine guns" ?
Hah, I appreciate the sentiment, but in all fairness, this type of inconsistency has a lot historical precedent in Battletech. Take the original Marauder, just as iconic as the Madcat, and you clearly have a gigantic cannon mounted on its center torso. Under the game rules? Not so much, AC/5 mounted on right torso. Another example is the iconic Atlas. Massive AC/20? A tiny nub on its side. LRM/20? Totally not present. The designers of Battletech never let the pictures they had to work with get in the way of the game they wanted to make.
That standard loses a lot of very compelling usages of merging a GPS with internet access though. It's very nice how smart phone apps are able to do things like pull up the prices of all gas stations, and show them in a list for you to pick the best balance of distance and price.
Most (all?) smartphone GPS packages I have seen don't store the maps locally, but instead stream them from a central server over the cellular link. Hence, even using real GPS, the ones I have seen don't work outside of cell range, which is a huge downside.
Any so-called similar systems built from barebones notebooks you make are only similar in the sense of their specs maybe. Much more so than for desktops though, for laptops, things like build quality of the PC as a cohesive whole matters. Also, instead of having one stop for warranty matters, suddenly you now have to deal with each of your component makers. Same situation as for desktops, except that notebooks that are by nature portable break 100x more than desktops.
Any ordinary geek can put together a desktop, but it takes a pretty hardcore geek (more hardcore than any I know) to build their own notebook.
Here's a summary of their findings, because the one provided by Slashdot doesn't really do a good job in my opinion of describing it.
BitTorrent downloaders apparently fall into "communities" that have very similar downloading patterns. In light of this, they think that it would be possible for an argument to be made, that if one member of a community is downloading X, that the behavior can be imputed through guilt-by-association onto all other members of that community. Therefore, you wouldn't necessarily need evidence that a given member of a community actually engaged in the downloading, due to the high degree of correlation between community member downloads.
This strikes me as a bit of dubious reasoning from a legal standpoint, as just because you hang out with a bunch of mobsters all day, and there's a high correlation of that with committing theft, doesn't mean they can try you for robbery just through guilt-by-association without more evidence that you're a robber. Still, courts have made weird conclusions in the past simply because computers and the Internet are involved.
For now, their software and idea mostly seems like a neat proof-of-concept. Until someone actually tries to deploy this legal argument in a court somewhere, I don't think I'll be losing too much sleep over this. Might be worthwhile for someone in a totalitarian regime that for some reason needs to be downloading over BitTorrent, but I don't know how realistic a concern that really is.
I haven't seen much evidence for the idea that public companies are significantly more susceptible to rot than private companies. This makes me think that big company rot probably has little to do with fund managers and professional board members, but rather they are just a demographic that is easy to hate and scapegoat.
Private companies that reach a certain size seem to have just as much danger of bureaucratic rot, and I also don't see much evidence for the idea that this is because of management professionals or buddies of insiders that are brought on board. If so, you would see companies that are run by management professionals being outcompeted in the marketplace by those that are not. In fact, the opposite seems to be true, contrary to what many people on Slashdot seem to believe. Technology companies are often started by scientists and engineers, but after a while they get too ungainly without management direction from people who are trained or talented in management as opposed to science and engineering.
I think the real problem is just that running a big organization is hard, and once it gets big, there are certain inherent problems such as agency problems on the part of employees.
Your theory that it's all marketing is interesting, but without facts to back it up, I don't see any reason to suppose it's the case.
We are currently seeing the biggest expansion of marketing of green features and emphasis on green cars from a societal point of view in history. You would think this would be causing people to want to go green.
Instead, what we've seen is that as soon as gas prices declined, Americans went right back to buying the big SUVs that they seem to tend to buy.
Source: Wall Street Journal http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123776430557508813.html "Last summer, when gas cost $4 a gallon, buyers snapped up small cars so fast that dealers couldn't keep them in stock. Now, with gas prices half that level, almost 500,000 fuel-thrifty models are piled up unsold around the country."
It seems like it's mainly cost that's a motivator on the green car versus SUV debate for the American public. As soon as the cost factor is removed, people go back to driving SUVs. Sure, it's possible to say this is just because they're brain-washed by marketing, but what evidence is there for that (especially in light of the decline in small car sales during a time of increased green marketing)?
You say that turning a real battle into an FPS is "the worst kind of disrespect for the hell those soldiers lived through." If the soldiers involved in the battle want to be in the game as themselves, are you suggesting that they are being disrespectful to themselves? They are being disrespectful to other soldiers who were there as well?
Just off the top of my head, the use case defense might be for people that want to transcode DVDs that they already own to an electronic format, they can just use the scanner on their own DVDs and the "transcoding" is done automatically in the background and arrives in the next few hours.
Furthermore, no one here has been convicted of anything. Therefore, even naked pictures that at the end of the day are non-pornographic are likely subject to charges of pornography, so that it can be determined whether they are pornographic. And when it comes to playing hardball and offering unfair settlements on trumped up charges, just having a charge with some level of plausibility is probably enough to get most people to the table in order to talk settlement.
The question remains, however, if any significant portion of The Pirate Bay's users will decide to fork over 5 per month solely to remain anonymous. It seems more likely that the majority either won't care, or will simply start looking for lesser-known torrent trackers to use.
I don't get this blurb from the headline. Seems to me like this service wouldn't be mainly targeted at users accessing torrent trackers. This is anonymity for the Internet in general, and torrent trackers are only one small part of that.
Furthermore, I'm not familiar with any case so far that is based on turning over the logs from a website to get the users. I don't think that would present a strong enough case that someone is sharing, which is what they've been getting people on. Instead, they've been snooping the actual upload traffic from people by requesting downloads based on everything I've been seeing.
Slashdot Mirror
Verizon is also a bad guy who should be punished though. They hired as their agent this guy who assaults customers, and then they continued to retain him after he assaulted customers. Corporatoins are, and should be, responsible for the actions of their agents.
There would seem to be many parallels between this SoftBank you speak of and AT&T.
Your statement doesn't seem completely incompatible with his analogy.
Steam powered trains work even if society collapses, but are inefficient. Maglev trains are very efficient, but but would not work if society collapses.
In that sense, it is a little like if we kept rail tracks traditional so that we maintained backwards compatibility with steam trains.
In the end, it comes down to deciding the expectation value of the improvement of efficiency versus the loss of a last ditch safety net.
Nobody got fired for buying WordPerfect either.
This is a news story about bringing Microsoft Office to business Symbian smartphones made by Nokia. Most of the E-Series referenced in the story have keyboards and look like Blackberries.
This is not about your average T9 cellphone.
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/even_ceo_cant_figure_out_how
I'm not normally a huge Onion fan, but this article is so spot-on, it brings a smile to my face every time I think of it.
Just because all companies remain in business to make money does not mean that all companies are the same amount of evil, that's seeing things unnecessarily starkly.
Consider, for example, the difference between Alice's Slash and Burn Quick Profit Shop versus Bob's Sustainable Tourism Rain Forest Tours for different levels of responsibility in profit making corporations.
I don't know the numbers, but I would really venture to guess that the vast bulk of Windows sales occur at the OEM level, and that people who go out and buy upgrades for old computers are a small minority. If my guess is right, it doesn't really matter too much what Microsoft prices Windows 7 at.
Yep, the EU is a paradise totally immune to special-interest lobbying.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Directive
Oh, and by the way, what prompted this rant that managed to get modded up despite being completely unrelated to the parent?
I'm not sure about the PC world, but any applications that Apple installs are easily deleted in Mac OS X, you just drag the to the trash, and empty it. It's that simple. Microsoft is a convicted monopolist because they abused their position as the dominant OS manufacturer to force people to run IE, Apple may include lots and lots of applications on their software (and even automatically download or install them) but they have never forced you to use their application, and this is precisely why they are not a convicted monopolist whereas Microsoft is.
How about when Apple stuck Safari in as an "update" to iTunes?
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/22/1536250
Sure, you can uninstall it, but that was a pretty damn sleazy move to try and force Safari on people.
It's not a matter of being cute, it was a matter of improving on the logic of the game. There you were in a Madcat, the most iconic of all the mechs, with what were clearly two shoulders filled with missiles (or something that looked pretty close to them) and you were --- what? saying "Pay no attention to those things that look like missiles, they're REALLY a mix of lasers and machine guns" ?
Hah, I appreciate the sentiment, but in all fairness, this type of inconsistency has a lot historical precedent in Battletech. Take the original Marauder, just as iconic as the Madcat, and you clearly have a gigantic cannon mounted on its center torso. Under the game rules? Not so much, AC/5 mounted on right torso. Another example is the iconic Atlas. Massive AC/20? A tiny nub on its side. LRM/20? Totally not present. The designers of Battletech never let the pictures they had to work with get in the way of the game they wanted to make.
It'll actually take up more space, but it'll run lighter.
That standard loses a lot of very compelling usages of merging a GPS with internet access though. It's very nice how smart phone apps are able to do things like pull up the prices of all gas stations, and show them in a list for you to pick the best balance of distance and price.
Most (all?) smartphone GPS packages I have seen don't store the maps locally, but instead stream them from a central server over the cellular link. Hence, even using real GPS, the ones I have seen don't work outside of cell range, which is a huge downside.
But in this case there's no allegation these are collectible coins, they are still in circulation.
So if the price of nickel or copper were to shoot up, would you owe more in taxes if you were paid with those denomination coins than in bills?
Any so-called similar systems built from barebones notebooks you make are only similar in the sense of their specs maybe. Much more so than for desktops though, for laptops, things like build quality of the PC as a cohesive whole matters. Also, instead of having one stop for warranty matters, suddenly you now have to deal with each of your component makers. Same situation as for desktops, except that notebooks that are by nature portable break 100x more than desktops.
Any ordinary geek can put together a desktop, but it takes a pretty hardcore geek (more hardcore than any I know) to build their own notebook.
Here's a summary of their findings, because the one provided by Slashdot doesn't really do a good job in my opinion of describing it.
BitTorrent downloaders apparently fall into "communities" that have very similar downloading patterns. In light of this, they think that it would be possible for an argument to be made, that if one member of a community is downloading X, that the behavior can be imputed through guilt-by-association onto all other members of that community. Therefore, you wouldn't necessarily need evidence that a given member of a community actually engaged in the downloading, due to the high degree of correlation between community member downloads.
This strikes me as a bit of dubious reasoning from a legal standpoint, as just because you hang out with a bunch of mobsters all day, and there's a high correlation of that with committing theft, doesn't mean they can try you for robbery just through guilt-by-association without more evidence that you're a robber. Still, courts have made weird conclusions in the past simply because computers and the Internet are involved.
For now, their software and idea mostly seems like a neat proof-of-concept. Until someone actually tries to deploy this legal argument in a court somewhere, I don't think I'll be losing too much sleep over this. Might be worthwhile for someone in a totalitarian regime that for some reason needs to be downloading over BitTorrent, but I don't know how realistic a concern that really is.
I haven't seen much evidence for the idea that public companies are significantly more susceptible to rot than private companies. This makes me think that big company rot probably has little to do with fund managers and professional board members, but rather they are just a demographic that is easy to hate and scapegoat.
Private companies that reach a certain size seem to have just as much danger of bureaucratic rot, and I also don't see much evidence for the idea that this is because of management professionals or buddies of insiders that are brought on board. If so, you would see companies that are run by management professionals being outcompeted in the marketplace by those that are not. In fact, the opposite seems to be true, contrary to what many people on Slashdot seem to believe. Technology companies are often started by scientists and engineers, but after a while they get too ungainly without management direction from people who are trained or talented in management as opposed to science and engineering.
I think the real problem is just that running a big organization is hard, and once it gets big, there are certain inherent problems such as agency problems on the part of employees.
Your theory that it's all marketing is interesting, but without facts to back it up, I don't see any reason to suppose it's the case.
We are currently seeing the biggest expansion of marketing of green features and emphasis on green cars from a societal point of view in history. You would think this would be causing people to want to go green.
Instead, what we've seen is that as soon as gas prices declined, Americans went right back to buying the big SUVs that they seem to tend to buy.
Source: Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123776430557508813.html
"Last summer, when gas cost $4 a gallon, buyers snapped up small cars so fast that dealers couldn't keep them in stock. Now, with gas prices half that level, almost 500,000 fuel-thrifty models are piled up unsold around the country."
It seems like it's mainly cost that's a motivator on the green car versus SUV debate for the American public. As soon as the cost factor is removed, people go back to driving SUVs. Sure, it's possible to say this is just because they're brain-washed by marketing, but what evidence is there for that (especially in light of the decline in small car sales during a time of increased green marketing)?
You say that turning a real battle into an FPS is "the worst kind of disrespect for the hell those soldiers lived through." If the soldiers involved in the battle want to be in the game as themselves, are you suggesting that they are being disrespectful to themselves? They are being disrespectful to other soldiers who were there as well?
Except that a group of these soldiers are the ones who wanted the game to be made.
Just off the top of my head, the use case defense might be for people that want to transcode DVDs that they already own to an electronic format, they can just use the scanner on their own DVDs and the "transcoding" is done automatically in the background and arrives in the next few hours.
Furthermore, no one here has been convicted of anything. Therefore, even naked pictures that at the end of the day are non-pornographic are likely subject to charges of pornography, so that it can be determined whether they are pornographic. And when it comes to playing hardball and offering unfair settlements on trumped up charges, just having a charge with some level of plausibility is probably enough to get most people to the table in order to talk settlement.
Maybe child molestation or corruption of a minor would be better fits.
I don't get this blurb from the headline. Seems to me like this service wouldn't be mainly targeted at users accessing torrent trackers. This is anonymity for the Internet in general, and torrent trackers are only one small part of that.
Furthermore, I'm not familiar with any case so far that is based on turning over the logs from a website to get the users. I don't think that would present a strong enough case that someone is sharing, which is what they've been getting people on. Instead, they've been snooping the actual upload traffic from people by requesting downloads based on everything I've been seeing.