This is a nice try, and it almost succeeds at making a valid point, but as someone who knows how to get a reaction I have to say that you are only babbling this way to get attention.
Sure, the "liberals" hide behind very skecthy notions of what "market forces" are, and they may even have "Stalinist" tendencies when it comes to certain things. But the real Stalinism lies not in the promotion of less concentrated ownership but rather it comes from the natural tendency of corporations to homogenize and unify public thought and entertainment.
I'd be the first to agree that the FCC and other government bodies were a bad idea, and should never have been involved in the early days of radio. They history behind those organizations boils down (essentially) to the Fed wanting to impose some "order" on the "chaos" that the early radio frequencies were (proponents of the notion that "the internet can't be regulated" would do well to check into the history of radio, especially in urban areas, prior to the institution of federal controls).
Now, it's easy to say "If consumers prefer the content provided by less concentrated ownership, then large conglomerates will naturally fail due to competition. If the inverse is true, conglomerates will succeed, but only because this is the choice made by individual listeners" and get the response you want, because it's obvious that concentration is happening. Therefore, your argument would hold that it *must be a good thing.* What this fails to take into account is the large numbers of people who have, in the past ten years, decided that radio sucks. And there are plenty of them.
There are plenty of ill side effects of concentration of media ownership that I could go into, but I won't. I've already wasted plenty of time I could've spent drinking beer to reply to this already. Selah.
In the days of VHS, there was a difference between tapes that you rented and tapes that you bought, as I recall. If you went out to the video shop and rented some movies, then you would likely sit through three to five "upcoming features" trailers (as time went on, they were advertising things other than films as well) before the "Feature Presentation" was to begin.
And, that to me is fine. After all, it's a rental and they do have the "right" to attempt to get my attention about upcoming films, right? Sure, that's no biggie. But, those ads were never present on VHS tapes that were purchased (naturally, we're not talking "Previously viewed" purchases from that same video store).
And that's also the way it should be. After all, this isn't a tape/DVD that you'll be watching once or twice this weekend and taking back. You'll be watching this thing maybe once a month for the next ten years, and losing lots of time watching the crummy previews (likely for movies that you also bought later on). That's just unacceptable.
Skippable or not, ads at the *front* of a DVD are an affront to the purchasing public. Sure, put those ads in, but do it in the same manner you might put in the bonus features, in a menu option. Why is this so hard for the movie moguls to do?
But, more importantly, why is this sort of bad behavior on the part of Hollywood less vilified by the public?
Sadly, I too use IE most of the time. Mostly because my box simply doesn't handle the newer Mozilla based browsers well. (If anyone has any 72-pin chips lying around, you can get in touch with me, seriously).
Where was i? Oh, yea, I think that Mozilla is a superior browser, it's more (what's that buzzword?) robust than IE and it seemingly does things right. But even phoenix is a little slow to load for me, and although I am about to check out the Beonex Communicator, I don't have much faith it'll run any better.
Which brings me, finally, to the point of this post. Developers have always been forgetful of the simple fact that not every one in the world gets a new computer, or even an upgrade, every six months. It's nice to see a "lite" browser, but only if it's really light and not just "requires only a Pentium3/64MB RAM" - that's not light at all for me, or about two-thirds of the people I know. We use older machines because we either love them or can't afford anything new and shiny.
And if none of this makes sense, blame the alcohol my liver's still dealing with.
Re:But, did you know the net is only for commerce?
on
Dow vs. Parody
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Um, no. The above quotations are from DOW Ethics.com, which is obviously one of the parody sites.
I say obviously, because I do not for one hot second think that anyone here can or should defend DOW Chemical in this matter. Yes, The Onion is an obvious parody, but not because of the disclaimers or the site design, but because of the content. And don't pull out your tired and elitist "Joe Average" arguments, because Joe Average is probably not surfing the DOW chemical websites anyway. Those sites are for investors and business types and if they aren't smart enough to tell when they are being had, well, fuck 'em.
These are very strange times we live in today, and strange times call for strange measures. Yes, the parody people took some extreme steps (ripping off corporate design, registering similar domain names) but that's what it might take to get attention. And it certainly did get some attention, now didn't it? How many of you would even be thinking about the policies and procedures of DOW chemicals today if it weren't for this story? Probably three of you. Certainly not me, I'm nursing a headache from lack of sleep.
OK, so now it makes a little more sense. But, here's the thing. I just don't buy that at all.
If you've ever looked at the ads in a Sunday paper, and maybe this is not the case everywhere - and maybe I'm just straining at gnats to come to this conclusion - then you will notice that a lot of companies who are supposedly in "competition" seem to be acting in a coordinated fashion.
It seems to be that Best Buy and Circuit City run the exact same sales on alternating weeks. One week, hard drives go down at BB while CC runs a sale on monitors. The next week, it's reversed. And the prices are almost always exactly the same. Of course, I don't have a whole lot of empirical data to back this up, just recollections of reading these ad circulars pretty religiously for several months.
The same is seemingly true of Wal-Marts/K-Marts/Targets of the world. They run pretty much the same deals at the same times (or within a week or two). That's not really competition, that's more like price fixing in my mind. Can we file a class-action suit against these companies or at least a complaint with one of the Federal agencies and force an investigation into sales practices? Or, would this idea also get lost in 21st Century America's more-or-less apathy and/or ignorance?
Unless I am missing something here, which is just about as likely as snow falling outside right now (oh, crap, it *is*), why would corporations be uptight about their sales info getting pushed out to a wider audience? Isn't this exactly what their advertisements are supposed to do?
I think maybe this shows that the people who run/are our economy here in the States are just deranged. Now, if the site took straight files from websites, that might constitute a violation (albeit a very minor and sketchy one at best). And, if they posted this information well before the company's in question had officially released the info, that might also be serious. But I can't tell from either FatWallet post when these ads were published or, to be honest, what all the whoo-ha is in this brouhaha.
I think there is no HHG6. Adams wrote Mostly Harmless with a pretty solid ending. Everyone dies back on Earth. I remember (although my memory is prone to odd lapses) that he said that he finished MH that way because he was quite sick of people wanting him to continue the storyline.
At any rate, this is a rotten way to start the day. I suppose I'll have to dig out that leather bound edition of the first four novels and thumb through it for awhile....
"it's too much to explain, let me sum up..."
Inigo Montoya
First off, I'd like to say that I still find everything2 to be the most entertaining, inventive, dynamic and interactive website that I have been on in, um, years. Secondly, I'd also like to say that it is the most maddening, infuriating, asinine and convoluted thing ever created.
This discussion seems to have brought out the absolute worst in everyone (except you, OOG, you have no bad parts to my knowledge). And it might bring out the worst in me, which isn't hard - I try to show my worst side to the collective Every Single Day. That's one of my functions. Don't Sweat It, K? But the back and forth bickerings about who's right and who's wrong are just stupid and pointless. As I've said before and will say again (in the next hundred words or so), E2 is not *your* playground or house or website. It's a privately owned site and the private owners are looking for a certain level of fun mixed with a certain level of CONTENT.
Are there problems with posts simply being deleted? Um, yes and no. Some people here would have you believe that there is some conspiracy among editors and gods to dictate what is and is not on the system. Wow. Holy poop. You mean they get to dictate what goes on their own damn website? Wow, what a concept and such.
The simple fact is that everything is not primarily a site for discussion, but for dissemination. And I will be the first to admit that there is no factual information in "I will REMOVE the fucking toilet seat if you don't shut up," just as there is no information in the (now deceased, I believe) node "cat vomit." That's life. Why does one live while the other dies?
People like it. That's why.
The toilet node is funny. Period. It deserves every single upvote is has gotten. I can't remember how I voted on it, but probably down (sorry moJoe). How can I say it's funny and still downvote it? Well, because sometimes I feel like being that way. It's my style and, just like e2, you haven't got any reason to believe that you can change it.
I have refrained (as much as possible, and it isn't much) from ever getting into the politics of what is and isn't good content for the site. Personally, I think that everything, even cat vomit, belongs there (if only for a time, more about that later). But, I am not a god or an editor. I have never asked for, nor have I ever been approached with, those powers. It isn't my house, and I try to be respectful and not break nate's and bones' stuff. Just like you don't want someone coming over to your place and smuding up your CDs (er, renaming your mp3s?) they don't want The Usual Gang of Idiots from mucking up the database.
And it is a database. You go there, and enter something in the search bar. Not only is there information (hopefully) in a writeup, but also links to related stuff below those writeups (softlinks). People bitch about the softlinks, too - and that's almost a whole new thread. But for the most part the stuff worth seeing will not be linked to the toilet node, nor to the node linked to all others, nor to "My fascinatingly detailed teen angst bullshit daylog."
The stuff that is poop will wither and die as surely as the stuff that is good shall remain.
And I think that the trolls and the bad writers and the rest should be allowed to come in and write. Let them clutter things up. Let their writeups get voted into oblivion and then removed. Let them bitch and moan and write nasty things about it on the usenet.
Looking back on this, I think I ought to post this as AC. But I don't think it would matter one way or another. Most people already know how I feel about all this. Just user search me and find out. I've got 900+ of them million nodes. And while I still feel that I've gotten away with too much crap, and some days I even question my existence as a user on the site, I'll return tomorrow and add a little sunshine to someone's life. And in the end, that's what matters. If you are having fun and it's not at anyone's expense, then you should be there. If you are a troll, at least be entertaining. Hell, you might even decide it's not worth trolling and post something halfway useful...it's been known to happen.
I'll be the first to admit that I have been suckered by a troll here and there before. But I like to think that I have learned from my mistakes and that I am a better "noder" and a better "person" for the experience.
Fartknockers, I am terribly off topic here. But, it is 2 am in my neck of the woods and work is fast approaching. I've lost all notion of what the hell I was even posting this for. I suppose I might be guilty of just trying to get my two cents in (sideways, at that:) but hell, slashdot is optimized for rambling idiots, right?
Oh yes. The summary I mentioned up there. Everything is not for everybody, but then, what is? Maybe the best part about it (remember this from the early days of HTML and the Internet?) is the fact that if you don't like it, you can go out and make your own damn website. So there.
BTW, political correctness is the bane of our society.
Funny thing...I wasn't being "politically" correct. Merely "inclusive," which is sort of an egalitarian thing to do, you see.
If all persons in Congress were either male or female, I'd use gender specific terms. If all were white or black or purple, I might even use those terms. If they were all fat bastards, I'd say that too....
The RIAA may be playing with numbers a bit, but in a way that everyone who does finances plays with numbers.
Fer instance, when the gov't announces that they are cutting spending to something (let's say, *cough* the military), what they are really doing is cutting back on what the projected increase was supposed to be. So, instead of a 10 billion dollar increase, they get only 8 billion, and the press reports this as a 2 billion cutback.
RIAA uses it the same way, I'd wager. "Well, he lost 2 billion dollars..." No, you just didn't clear the goals you set for yourself, and as Lazarus noted, you can't prove Napster had anything to do with it.....
This is a nice idea, but keep in mind that just about every biz in the States has a cute 800 number that spells out some amalgamation of their company name.
The solution might be to just tell WIPO to shove it or tell companies to stop acting like nineteenth century assholes.
I've defended Katz before, but I must say that this time he's gone too far:
Not only is he babbling on a toping that has already been done to death in the media, but one that has also been covered on Daytime Trash Talk Shows. And Larry King, probably.
Naw - you are still begging. Paying a ten dollar fee for access is far cheaper than 15-17 bucks a disc.
My point is that unless he is on a 28.8 or something, he should just shut up. Delete the crap files that show up and move on. It won't kill you.
I never found Napster all that fantastic anyways. At least, not the specifics. Most of what's on there comes from college kids today and - sorry - Korn Bisquik Spears and the Funky Lopez Posse don't do it for me. Give me some fucking lounge music or good reggae.
You are kidding right? Beggars can't be choosers, after all.
I know the filename thing can be a total pain, that is the one point I will give you. But I won't give you any points for not being able to look at the filesize and be able to guess that it is the complete song.
After all, the Corel Linux CD is $4.99(us) at BestBuy.
No, really. It is, I saw it not more than an hour ago. Almost bought it, too - except that Mandrake and Win98 together have conspired to turn my poor little box into heaps of plastic (anyone have spare 72-pin memory chips lying around? i could use an upgrade...)
A school can restrict any non-university related person from being anywhere on the grounds.
But, in the case of students, it's a little harder. The way that they enforce this is to not get caught up in whether or not they are trying to restrict speech, but whether or not the speech is in a place that could cause problems for other students. There's a whole set of case law about this, from people who protested at malls, etc etc.
And it's legal. They can't restrict what you say, but they sure as hell can restrict where you are standing when you say it.
By the fact that while Mac prices are dropping *almost* to levels I can afford, it seems that Apple no longer has the option of configuring a custom G4 anymore.
Not long ago you could go into the Store section of their site and choose to beef up a machine with more memory, larger hard drives, better monitors - but now you only get choices for software and peripherals like digital cams. What gives?
I guess the only way this relates to the topic at hand is that the only time I look at Apple is when something new is about to come out and I can afford the old stuff. I am really in the mood to run a LinuxPPC/MacOS machine.
I work for for a medical-related education center, and I can tell you that hospitals have been *anxious* about this for over a year now. They know that these regs are serious and that any infraction will mean some hefty fines.
The problem is that very few organizations are really ready. While hospitals are probably the most ready, it's only the ones with a top-notch IT staff that think they'll make it. As for your local general practitioner's office: Forget It. These people have little idea the law was passed, much less that it's going into effect. If I had the background in CS/Security, I would seriously think about starting a company to *specialize* in HIPPA regulations. The public health industry will pay big bucks to make sure they don't run afoul of these laws....
Examples:
If a fed walks into a doctor's office, or a hospital and can walk up to a machine that's on a network and/or has access to any health or billing record, that's a fine. A big one. How many nurses/doctors do you think will logout or secure their terminals everytime they have to walk down the hall?
Fax machines? Ever screwed up and sent your office's lunch order to a vendor? Or, vice-versa? Doing that with a patient's file will get you slapped.
Telemedicine? Absolutely a biggie. If someone who isn't supposed to be viewing a consultation through a teleconference system, people are in trouble....
Now, the good news is that these laws won't fully go into effect for a few months, and it's very hard to see right now what priority the incoming Bush Jr. Administration will put on these regulations....
Slashdot Mirror
This is a nice try, and it almost succeeds at making a valid point, but as someone who knows how to get a reaction I have to say that you are only babbling this way to get attention.
Sure, the "liberals" hide behind very skecthy notions of what "market forces" are, and they may even have "Stalinist" tendencies when it comes to certain things. But the real Stalinism lies not in the promotion of less concentrated ownership but rather it comes from the natural tendency of corporations to homogenize and unify public thought and entertainment.
I'd be the first to agree that the FCC and other government bodies were a bad idea, and should never have been involved in the early days of radio. They history behind those organizations boils down (essentially) to the Fed wanting to impose some "order" on the "chaos" that the early radio frequencies were (proponents of the notion that "the internet can't be regulated" would do well to check into the history of radio, especially in urban areas, prior to the institution of federal controls).
Now, it's easy to say "If consumers prefer the content provided by less concentrated ownership, then large conglomerates will naturally fail due to competition. If the inverse is true, conglomerates will succeed, but only because this is the choice made by individual listeners" and get the response you want, because it's obvious that concentration is happening. Therefore, your argument would hold that it *must be a good thing.* What this fails to take into account is the large numbers of people who have, in the past ten years, decided that radio sucks. And there are plenty of them.
There are plenty of ill side effects of concentration of media ownership that I could go into, but I won't. I've already wasted plenty of time I could've spent drinking beer to reply to this already. Selah.
Duplicate posts are designed to drive just enough people mad that slashdot ceases to be stupid.
And by stupid, I don't mean the people *running* it.
In the days of VHS, there was a difference between tapes that you rented and tapes that you bought, as I recall. If you went out to the video shop and rented some movies, then you would likely sit through three to five "upcoming features" trailers (as time went on, they were advertising things other than films as well) before the "Feature Presentation" was to begin.
And, that to me is fine. After all, it's a rental and they do have the "right" to attempt to get my attention about upcoming films, right? Sure, that's no biggie. But, those ads were never present on VHS tapes that were purchased (naturally, we're not talking "Previously viewed" purchases from that same video store).
And that's also the way it should be. After all, this isn't a tape/DVD that you'll be watching once or twice this weekend and taking back. You'll be watching this thing maybe once a month for the next ten years, and losing lots of time watching the crummy previews (likely for movies that you also bought later on). That's just unacceptable.
Skippable or not, ads at the *front* of a DVD are an affront to the purchasing public. Sure, put those ads in, but do it in the same manner you might put in the bonus features, in a menu option. Why is this so hard for the movie moguls to do?
But, more importantly, why is this sort of bad behavior on the part of Hollywood less vilified by the public?
I'll stop here, before I digress....
Sadly, I too use IE most of the time. Mostly because my box simply doesn't handle the newer Mozilla based browsers well. (If anyone has any 72-pin chips lying around, you can get in touch with me, seriously).
Where was i? Oh, yea, I think that Mozilla is a superior browser, it's more (what's that buzzword?) robust than IE and it seemingly does things right. But even phoenix is a little slow to load for me, and although I am about to check out the Beonex Communicator, I don't have much faith it'll run any better.
Which brings me, finally, to the point of this post. Developers have always been forgetful of the simple fact that not every one in the world gets a new computer, or even an upgrade, every six months. It's nice to see a "lite" browser, but only if it's really light and not just "requires only a Pentium3/64MB RAM" - that's not light at all for me, or about two-thirds of the people I know. We use older machines because we either love them or can't afford anything new and shiny.
And if none of this makes sense, blame the alcohol my liver's still dealing with.
Um, no. The above quotations are from DOW Ethics.com, which is obviously one of the parody sites.
I say obviously, because I do not for one hot second think that anyone here can or should defend DOW Chemical in this matter. Yes, The Onion is an obvious parody, but not because of the disclaimers or the site design, but because of the content. And don't pull out your tired and elitist "Joe Average" arguments, because Joe Average is probably not surfing the DOW chemical websites anyway. Those sites are for investors and business types and if they aren't smart enough to tell when they are being had, well, fuck 'em.
These are very strange times we live in today, and strange times call for strange measures. Yes, the parody people took some extreme steps (ripping off corporate design, registering similar domain names) but that's what it might take to get attention. And it certainly did get some attention, now didn't it? How many of you would even be thinking about the policies and procedures of DOW chemicals today if it weren't for this story? Probably three of you. Certainly not me, I'm nursing a headache from lack of sleep.
OK, so now it makes a little more sense. But, here's the thing. I just don't buy that at all.
If you've ever looked at the ads in a Sunday paper, and maybe this is not the case everywhere - and maybe I'm just straining at gnats to come to this conclusion - then you will notice that a lot of companies who are supposedly in "competition" seem to be acting in a coordinated fashion.
It seems to be that Best Buy and Circuit City run the exact same sales on alternating weeks. One week, hard drives go down at BB while CC runs a sale on monitors. The next week, it's reversed. And the prices are almost always exactly the same. Of course, I don't have a whole lot of empirical data to back this up, just recollections of reading these ad circulars pretty religiously for several months.
The same is seemingly true of Wal-Marts/K-Marts/Targets of the world. They run pretty much the same deals at the same times (or within a week or two). That's not really competition, that's more like price fixing in my mind. Can we file a class-action suit against these companies or at least a complaint with one of the Federal agencies and force an investigation into sales practices? Or, would this idea also get lost in 21st Century America's more-or-less apathy and/or ignorance?
Unless I am missing something here, which is just about as likely as snow falling outside right now (oh, crap, it *is*), why would corporations be uptight about their sales info getting pushed out to a wider audience? Isn't this exactly what their advertisements are supposed to do?
I think maybe this shows that the people who run/are our economy here in the States are just deranged. Now, if the site took straight files from websites, that might constitute a violation (albeit a very minor and sketchy one at best). And, if they posted this information well before the company's in question had officially released the info, that might also be serious. But I can't tell from either FatWallet post when these ads were published or, to be honest, what all the whoo-ha is in this brouhaha.
Unfortunately, when there is only one basket, there are suddenly many, many thieves.
Wasn't this the plot of that recent movie about the three really hot girls who work for Bill Murray, or Murray's wealthy sugar daddy?
No, really...wasn't this sort of thing the central plot point?
At any rate, this is a rotten way to start the day. I suppose I'll have to dig out that leather bound edition of the first four novels and thumb through it for awhile....
This discussion seems to have brought out the absolute worst in everyone (except you, OOG, you have no bad parts to my knowledge). And it might bring out the worst in me, which isn't hard - I try to show my worst side to the collective Every Single Day. That's one of my functions. Don't Sweat It, K? But the back and forth bickerings about who's right and who's wrong are just stupid and pointless. As I've said before and will say again (in the next hundred words or so), E2 is not *your* playground or house or website. It's a privately owned site and the private owners are looking for a certain level of fun mixed with a certain level of CONTENT.
Are there problems with posts simply being deleted? Um, yes and no. Some people here would have you believe that there is some conspiracy among editors and gods to dictate what is and is not on the system. Wow. Holy poop. You mean they get to dictate what goes on their own damn website? Wow, what a concept and such.
The simple fact is that everything is not primarily a site for discussion, but for dissemination. And I will be the first to admit that there is no factual information in "I will REMOVE the fucking toilet seat if you don't shut up," just as there is no information in the (now deceased, I believe) node "cat vomit." That's life. Why does one live while the other dies?
The toilet node is funny. Period. It deserves every single upvote is has gotten. I can't remember how I voted on it, but probably down (sorry moJoe). How can I say it's funny and still downvote it? Well, because sometimes I feel like being that way. It's my style and, just like e2, you haven't got any reason to believe that you can change it.I have refrained (as much as possible, and it isn't much) from ever getting into the politics of what is and isn't good content for the site. Personally, I think that everything, even cat vomit, belongs there (if only for a time, more about that later). But, I am not a god or an editor. I have never asked for, nor have I ever been approached with, those powers. It isn't my house, and I try to be respectful and not break nate's and bones' stuff. Just like you don't want someone coming over to your place and smuding up your CDs (er, renaming your mp3s?) they don't want The Usual Gang of Idiots from mucking up the database.
And it is a database. You go there, and enter something in the search bar. Not only is there information (hopefully) in a writeup, but also links to related stuff below those writeups (softlinks). People bitch about the softlinks, too - and that's almost a whole new thread. But for the most part the stuff worth seeing will not be linked to the toilet node, nor to the node linked to all others, nor to "My fascinatingly detailed teen angst bullshit daylog."
And I think that the trolls and the bad writers and the rest should be allowed to come in and write. Let them clutter things up. Let their writeups get voted into oblivion and then removed. Let them bitch and moan and write nasty things about it on the usenet.Looking back on this, I think I ought to post this as AC. But I don't think it would matter one way or another. Most people already know how I feel about all this. Just user search me and find out. I've got 900+ of them million nodes. And while I still feel that I've gotten away with too much crap, and some days I even question my existence as a user on the site, I'll return tomorrow and add a little sunshine to someone's life. And in the end, that's what matters. If you are having fun and it's not at anyone's expense, then you should be there. If you are a troll, at least be entertaining. Hell, you might even decide it's not worth trolling and post something halfway useful...it's been known to happen.
I'll be the first to admit that I have been suckered by a troll here and there before. But I like to think that I have learned from my mistakes and that I am a better "noder" and a better "person" for the experience.
Fartknockers, I am terribly off topic here. But, it is 2 am in my neck of the woods and work is fast approaching. I've lost all notion of what the hell I was even posting this for. I suppose I might be guilty of just trying to get my two cents in (sideways, at that :) but hell, slashdot is optimized for rambling idiots, right?
Oh yes. The summary I mentioned up there. Everything is not for everybody, but then, what is? Maybe the best part about it (remember this from the early days of HTML and the Internet?) is the fact that if you don't like it, you can go out and make your own damn website. So there.
(I'm only here at the moment, 'cause you guys is all flooding e2 - damn slashdot :)
Funny thing...I wasn't being "politically" correct. Merely "inclusive," which is sort of an egalitarian thing to do, you see.
If all persons in Congress were either male or female, I'd use gender specific terms. If all were white or black or purple, I might even use those terms. If they were all fat bastards, I'd say that too....
But they aren't, so I went for gender neutral.
Fer instance, when the gov't announces that they are cutting spending to something (let's say, *cough* the military), what they are really doing is cutting back on what the projected increase was supposed to be. So, instead of a 10 billion dollar increase, they get only 8 billion, and the press reports this as a 2 billion cutback.
RIAA uses it the same way, I'd wager. "Well, he lost 2 billion dollars..." No, you just didn't clear the goals you set for yourself, and as Lazarus noted, you can't prove Napster had anything to do with it.....
Oh, and by the way, Fuck You Very Much, RIAA.
The solution might be to just tell WIPO to shove it or tell companies to stop acting like nineteenth century assholes.
Not only is he babbling on a toping that has already been done to death in the media, but one that has also been covered on Daytime Trash Talk Shows. And Larry King, probably.
Ick. I feel dirty.
Someone, *cough*taco*cough,* should start calling them, as a member of the "press" - and ask them so pretty hard questions.
Outside of that, you could try talking to tech-savvy Congressmen and see if they won't start a move to reform the Office.
Outside of that, you could - ahhhh - ignore all these silly patents. Just like we ignore the Copyright Laws.
My point is that unless he is on a 28.8 or something, he should just shut up. Delete the crap files that show up and move on. It won't kill you.
I never found Napster all that fantastic anyways. At least, not the specifics. Most of what's on there comes from college kids today and - sorry - Korn Bisquik Spears and the Funky Lopez Posse don't do it for me. Give me some fucking lounge music or good reggae.
I know the filename thing can be a total pain, that is the one point I will give you. But I won't give you any points for not being able to look at the filesize and be able to guess that it is the complete song.
Or maybe I am just a bastard today.
No, really. It is, I saw it not more than an hour ago. Almost bought it, too - except that Mandrake and Win98 together have conspired to turn my poor little box into heaps of plastic (anyone have spare 72-pin memory chips lying around? i could use an upgrade...)
But, in the case of students, it's a little harder. The way that they enforce this is to not get caught up in whether or not they are trying to restrict speech, but whether or not the speech is in a place that could cause problems for other students. There's a whole set of case law about this, from people who protested at malls, etc etc.
And it's legal. They can't restrict what you say, but they sure as hell can restrict where you are standing when you say it.
Not that it invalidates any of the points made, though...
Not long ago you could go into the Store section of their site and choose to beef up a machine with more memory, larger hard drives, better monitors - but now you only get choices for software and peripherals like digital cams. What gives?
I guess the only way this relates to the topic at hand is that the only time I look at Apple is when something new is about to come out and I can afford the old stuff. I am really in the mood to run a LinuxPPC/MacOS machine.
The problem is that very few organizations are really ready. While hospitals are probably the most ready, it's only the ones with a top-notch IT staff that think they'll make it. As for your local general practitioner's office: Forget It. These people have little idea the law was passed, much less that it's going into effect. If I had the background in CS/Security, I would seriously think about starting a company to *specialize* in HIPPA regulations. The public health industry will pay big bucks to make sure they don't run afoul of these laws....
Examples:
Now, the good news is that these laws won't fully go into effect for a few months, and it's very hard to see right now what priority the incoming Bush Jr. Administration will put on these regulations....