For a typical user, a better analogy would be: Enjoying the web without Javascript is like having sex while wearing a condom made of inch-thick rubber.
I tend to agree, but there's some devil's advocate arguments that need to be made here
Firstly and most importantly, percentages of population, even overwhelming majority, do not make an action moral. The legislated murder of an innocent person would only affect ~0.00000032% of the population, but it would not be a correct thing to do. Increased tax rates on incomes above $1,000,000 may be [I believe they are] justifiable, but the small number of people affected is not the justification
You start with a number of filing households with various incomes, but then switch to count of persons. Stick to one or the other, otherwise it looks like a textbook statistics lie. I realize that the easily available data from the different sources doesn't match up in units of measure, but that's still an important thing to address.
I was under the impression that the term 'slashvertisement' referred to:
a slashdot story
linking to a singular post from a company or interest group
which is written primarily to be persuasive on a certain matter
especially for the sale of product or services from that company/interest group
Alternatively, it could refer to a vague, sensational story, meant to drive traffic to a blog.
In either case, the story was submitted by the owner of the landing page, with intent of some sort of personal gain
the link points to a free, open-source project(*), which has a parody of advertisement encouraging its use. The only product one would need to purchase, if convinced either by said 'advertisement' or the slashdot posting, is a certain toy rocket-launcher, unassociated with the company behind the FOSS project.
how is this a slashvertisement?
(*) All the source code is freely available online, there is no indication of desire to charge for or limit use of the code, and it's built as an extension to the FOSS project 'Jenkins'. That said, no license is explicitly given. I could be incorrect about the project being FOSS
The need will become ever greater as the trend of moving away from tape towards snapshots and replicas accelerates. Do you seriously think Google backs up to tape? Or Amazon? Or any cloud provider? They don't! They just keep two to thee copies of everything, and hope that none of their thousands of administrators ever cracks and does the equivalent of "rm -rf *" on the entire cloud all at once!
To protect your information from these unusual bugs, we also back it up to tape. Since the tapes are offline, they’re protected from such software bugs.
As an experiment - have you tried adding a small sign reminding people of what should be obvious - "please don't take the flowers"?
Some people don't naturally think outside themselves, or into the future. This isn't *necessarily* bad, but those people do have a responsibility to compensate. Of course, many don't.
A reminder forces them to at least consider the possibility that it's not a good idea to take the flowers
Ok, one thing I have to respond to - WiFi, cordless phones, and all that jazz would have pretty much the same problems even if microwaves didn't exist.
The point of WiFi is that it was sold as a low-power, consumer-grade device in unregulated space (because of the microwave ovens, of course). So, home users didn't have to get any sort of licensing to operate the radios.
Say, hypothetically, there was some other, consumer-open, unregulated spectrum space, not clobbered by microwave ovens. In addition to WiFi, EVERY OTHER consumer wireless device would flock to that space, and you'd have the same trampling problems.
"Photosynthesis efficiency varies from 0.1% to 8%."
Only in sunlight driven systems, just FYI, following the stated source. In targeted wavelength systems, this is absolutely nowhere near the case.
Grandparent's post is about solar->electric cells. At some point, you have to start at the sun. What's the point of discussing targeted wavelength systems here? "Only in sunlight driven systems" . . . isn't every solar panel "only sunlight driven" ?
"... Yes, but that's meaningless to most people..." inside the United States.
Seriously... miles? In 2010? You know there's less than 350 million of you, right? How about you take one of those trillion dollars you spend on being the world police and catch up with the rest of world by switching to metric.
Parent wasn't claiming it was meaningless because of units. It's a Very Large Number (VLN). At some point, numbers of such scale are pretty much meaningless, without comparison. It's very large in either measurement system.
I was aware of something similar, where missionaries would baptize people without really explaining what they were doing, so as to get their numbers up. (Baptisms per month are tracked, and depending on the location, a certain average may be expected)
I'd be really dissapointed if these guys got sued.
The only thing they're doing is scanning twitter for foursquare addresses, and prepending an "I'm out of the house".
They aren't publishing information that wasn't already public, or even aggregating it in new and creative ways. They're just recontextualizing posts people are already putting online!
TV 4:29 - Almost entirely negative, I suspect; surely the overwhelming advertisements alone cancel out any benefits the few educational shows.
What benefits of educational shows? I made the mistake of watching an "educational" show on the Discovery Channel, on the Nazca lines.
About 15 minutes in, the host claimed he had shown dousing to be viable. About 45 minutes in, he was taking low-grade hallucinogenics. Not to worry, though, he's being "Supervised by an experienced shaman"
(The hallucinogenics, by the way, didn't end up telling him anything about the Nazca lines. In his own words)
Well, it depends, though. Some people attribute the success of Linux to GPL. (see here, 3rd or 4th question) Obviously, the success of F/OSS isn't entirely due to Linux, but I'd wager it's helped more than not.
Linux might have thrived just as much under a different license, but that's not what happened. But beyond speculation, can you really argue that one anti-copyright-lawyer-shark rock would have worked better than another?
also:
Later, a full-force Bear Patrol is on watch. Homer watches proudly.
Homer: Not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol must be working like a
charm. Lisa: That's spacious reasoning, Dad. Homer: Thank you, dear. Lisa: By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away. Homer: Oh, how does it work? Lisa: It doesn't work. Homer: Uh-huh. Lisa: It's just a stupid rock. Homer: Uh-huh. Lisa: But I don't see any tigers around, do you?
[Homer thinks of this, then pulls out some money] Homer: Lisa, I want to buy your rock.
[Lisa refuses at first, then takes the exchange]
The thing to remember, though, is that it was a survey of households, not users. You could easily have a scenario where one person owns a PC, the other a Mac, and neither use each other's computers.
Even by your definition of increased computer literacy, having multiple machines in the same household proves nothing.
Followup: since every nerd who's currently pissing and moaning about LAN play is going to buy Starcraft II anyway, why would you care?
I'm not going to buy "Starcraft II" anyway. I've introduced many people to "Starcraft" , using LAN play and spawn copies, some (but not all) of whom have gone on to purchase the full game.
If it doesn't have LAN play, I won't purchase (or pirate!) it.
Yes, I realize that someone will probably hack a bnetd, or offline LAN play, or whatever. I don't see why I should be paying 40+ USD for a software product that will require (illegitimate) 3rd party modifications to work the way I want.
(First off, I disagree with $1.92 million in damages. It's absolutely ridiculous, IMNSHO. I want to explain my point a bit further, though)
Wait, that doesn't make sense: the profit should be used up covering the fines for the compensatory damages (by definition!)
well, yes, and that works if and only if copyright infringement is always found out and prosecuted successfully.
Imagine, for a moment, punitive damages were small or nonexistent. I start a DVD pirating company, selling copied DVDs for $5 apiece.
I sell 100,000 each of two particular titles. my $5 is basically pure profit, because of the almost nonexistent cost of copying. If I don't get caught, that's, say, $450,000 per title profit for me. If I do get caught, I have to pay compensatory damages of $1,000,000. ($10/DVD).
The profits from one or two titles (in this example) completely offset the fines from getting caught for one.
So, as long as I only get caught for a third of my titles, I make a rather nice profit. While this example uses made-up numbers, the basic idea stands: Due to the low cost, and high profit potential, of copying copyrighted works, straight-up compensatory damages don't act as an effective deterrent
As a side note about 'only getting caught for 1/3rd". In the Thomas case, do you think she really uploaded only 24 files, ever? She quite likely had uploaded more than that, it's only the 24 songs she's caught for
Say Thomas had uploaded 100 songs, to 100 people, and somehow made $0.10 on each upload. (she didn't) The RIAA can prove 25 songs to 25 people (They can't). Straight compensation would be 25*25*$1, or $125. Her profits would be 100*100*$0.10, or $1000. A contrived example, yes, but it illustrates the idea. The expected value of for-profit piracy is a positive amount, without damages beyond straight compensatory.
THAT SAID,
the fundamental disconnect here is that Thomas's infringement WASN'T FOR PROFIT. In this situation, the law doesn't correctly account for reality
basically:
An Exxon oil tanker grounded, spilling oil and causing TONS of damage. Punitive damages were set at $2.5 billion, but reduced by quite a bit, to $500 million.
The argument presented there was that punitive damages should be at least in the same ballpark as compensatory damages. This is the same argument many people believe apply to the Thomas case, since if her punishment was proportional to actual damages caused, it would be significantly less.
Incidentally, there's a reason that there's such a high cap on punitive damages in infringement cases. If that weren't the case, large companies could attempt for-profit infringement, and even if they did get caught and had to pay damages based on actual damage, those fines would be largely covered by the profit made infringing!
So, without excessive punitive fines to make up for the ease of copying, in theory, willful for-profit copyright fraud would be much more attractive, because of it's positive expected value.
6. A plurality of exclamation marks containing sequences of non-exclamation mark printable characters
7. The method of claim 6, wherein the sequence of characters represent a mathematical function
8. The method of claim 7, wherein the mathematical function evaluates to a number that, when expressed in decimal form, is "1"
Slashdot Mirror
For a typical user, a better analogy would be: Enjoying the web without Javascript is like having sex while wearing a condom made of inch-thick rubber.
It prevents errors from being propagated?
I tend to agree, but there's some devil's advocate arguments that need to be made here
Firstly and most importantly, percentages of population, even overwhelming majority, do not make an action moral. The legislated murder of an innocent person would only affect ~0.00000032% of the population, but it would not be a correct thing to do. Increased tax rates on incomes above $1,000,000 may be [I believe they are] justifiable, but the small number of people affected is not the justification
You start with a number of filing households with various incomes, but then switch to count of persons. Stick to one or the other, otherwise it looks like a textbook statistics lie. I realize that the easily available data from the different sources doesn't match up in units of measure, but that's still an important thing to address.
I was under the impression that the term 'slashvertisement' referred to:
Alternatively, it could refer to a vague, sensational story, meant to drive traffic to a blog.
In either case, the story was submitted by the owner of the landing page, with intent of some sort of personal gain
the link points to a free, open-source project(*), which has a parody of advertisement encouraging its use. The only product one would need to purchase, if convinced either by said 'advertisement' or the slashdot posting, is a certain toy rocket-launcher, unassociated with the company behind the FOSS project.
how is this a slashvertisement?
(*) All the source code is freely available online, there is no indication of desire to charge for or limit use of the code, and it's built as an extension to the FOSS project 'Jenkins'. That said, no license is explicitly given. I could be incorrect about the project being FOSS
The need will become ever greater as the trend of moving away from tape towards snapshots and replicas accelerates. Do you seriously think Google backs up to tape? Or Amazon? Or any cloud provider? They don't! They just keep two to thee copies of everything, and hope that none of their thousands of administrators ever cracks and does the equivalent of "rm -rf *" on the entire cloud all at once!
actually . . .
To protect your information from these unusual bugs, we also back it up to tape. Since the tapes are offline, they’re protected from such software bugs.
As an experiment - have you tried adding a small sign reminding people of what should be obvious - "please don't take the flowers"?
Some people don't naturally think outside themselves, or into the future. This isn't *necessarily* bad, but those people do have a responsibility to compensate. Of course, many don't.
A reminder forces them to at least consider the possibility that it's not a good idea to take the flowers
Ok, one thing I have to respond to - WiFi, cordless phones, and all that jazz would have pretty much the same problems even if microwaves didn't exist.
The point of WiFi is that it was sold as a low-power, consumer-grade device in unregulated space (because of the microwave ovens, of course). So, home users didn't have to get any sort of licensing to operate the radios.
Say, hypothetically, there was some other, consumer-open, unregulated spectrum space, not clobbered by microwave ovens. In addition to WiFi, EVERY OTHER consumer wireless device would flock to that space, and you'd have the same trampling problems.
DDoS a website, and it goes down for a day. Spam fax machines, and someone has to pay for a lot of paper and ink.
"Photosynthesis efficiency varies from 0.1% to 8%."
Only in sunlight driven systems, just FYI, following the stated source. In targeted wavelength systems, this is absolutely nowhere near the case.
Grandparent's post is about solar->electric cells. At some point, you have to start at the sun. What's the point of discussing targeted wavelength systems here? "Only in sunlight driven systems" . . . isn't every solar panel "only sunlight driven" ?
"... Yes, but that's meaningless to most people ..." inside the United States.
Seriously... miles? In 2010? You know there's less than 350 million of you, right? How about you take one of those trillion dollars you spend on being the world police and catch up with the rest of world by switching to metric.
Parent wasn't claiming it was meaningless because of units. It's a Very Large Number (VLN). At some point, numbers of such scale are pretty much meaningless, without comparison. It's very large in either measurement system.
I was aware of something similar, where missionaries would baptize people without really explaining what they were doing, so as to get their numbers up. (Baptisms per month are tracked, and depending on the location, a certain average may be expected)
The only thing they're doing is scanning twitter for foursquare addresses, and prepending an "I'm out of the house".
They aren't publishing information that wasn't already public, or even aggregating it in new and creative ways. They're just recontextualizing posts people are already putting online!
I am serious! And don't call me shirly!
TV 4:29 - Almost entirely negative, I suspect; surely the overwhelming advertisements alone cancel out any benefits the few educational shows.
What benefits of educational shows? I made the mistake of watching an "educational" show on the Discovery Channel, on the Nazca lines.
About 15 minutes in, the host claimed he had shown dousing to be viable. About 45 minutes in, he was taking low-grade hallucinogenics. Not to worry, though, he's being "Supervised by an experienced shaman"
(The hallucinogenics, by the way, didn't end up telling him anything about the Nazca lines. In his own words)
Well, it depends, though. Some people attribute the success of Linux to GPL. (see here, 3rd or 4th question) Obviously, the success of F/OSS isn't entirely due to Linux, but I'd wager it's helped more than not.
Linux might have thrived just as much under a different license, but that's not what happened. But beyond speculation, can you really argue that one anti-copyright-lawyer-shark rock would have worked better than another?
also:
Later, a full-force Bear Patrol is on watch. Homer watches proudly.
Homer: Not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol must be working like a charm.
Lisa: That's spacious reasoning, Dad.
Homer: Thank you, dear.
Lisa: By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.
Homer: Oh, how does it work?
Lisa: It doesn't work.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: It's just a stupid rock.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: But I don't see any tigers around, do you?
[Homer thinks of this, then pulls out some money]
Homer: Lisa, I want to buy your rock.
[Lisa refuses at first, then takes the exchange]
(http://www.snpp.com/episodes/3F20.html)
:D
The thing to remember, though, is that it was a survey of households, not users. You could easily have a scenario where one person owns a PC, the other a Mac, and neither use each other's computers.
Even by your definition of increased computer literacy, having multiple machines in the same household proves nothing.
Followup: since every nerd who's currently pissing and moaning about LAN play is going to buy Starcraft II anyway, why would you care?
I'm not going to buy "Starcraft II" anyway. I've introduced many people to "Starcraft" , using LAN play and spawn copies, some (but not all) of whom have gone on to purchase the full game.
If it doesn't have LAN play, I won't purchase (or pirate!) it.
Yes, I realize that someone will probably hack a bnetd, or offline LAN play, or whatever. I don't see why I should be paying 40+ USD for a software product that will require (illegitimate) 3rd party modifications to work the way I want.
You are not allowed to play this song because of licensing restrictions.
How sad, but true.
(First off, I disagree with $1.92 million in damages. It's absolutely ridiculous, IMNSHO. I want to explain my point a bit further, though)
Wait, that doesn't make sense: the profit should be used up covering the fines for the compensatory damages (by definition!)
well, yes, and that works if and only if copyright infringement is always found out and prosecuted successfully.
Imagine, for a moment, punitive damages were small or nonexistent. I start a DVD pirating company, selling copied DVDs for $5 apiece.
I sell 100,000 each of two particular titles. my $5 is basically pure profit, because of the almost nonexistent cost of copying. If I don't get caught, that's, say, $450,000 per title profit for me. If I do get caught, I have to pay compensatory damages of $1,000,000. ($10/DVD).
The profits from one or two titles (in this example) completely offset the fines from getting caught for one.
So, as long as I only get caught for a third of my titles, I make a rather nice profit. While this example uses made-up numbers, the basic idea stands: Due to the low cost, and high profit potential, of copying copyrighted works, straight-up compensatory damages don't act as an effective deterrent
As a side note about 'only getting caught for 1/3rd". In the Thomas case, do you think she really uploaded only 24 files, ever? She quite likely had uploaded more than that, it's only the 24 songs she's caught for
Say Thomas had uploaded 100 songs, to 100 people, and somehow made $0.10 on each upload. (she didn't) The RIAA can prove 25 songs to 25 people (They can't). Straight compensation would be 25*25*$1, or $125. Her profits would be 100*100*$0.10, or $1000. A contrived example, yes, but it illustrates the idea. The expected value of for-profit piracy is a positive amount, without damages beyond straight compensatory.
THAT SAID, the fundamental disconnect here is that Thomas's infringement WASN'T FOR PROFIT. In this situation, the law doesn't correctly account for reality
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Shipping_Co._v._Baker
basically: An Exxon oil tanker grounded, spilling oil and causing TONS of damage. Punitive damages were set at $2.5 billion, but reduced by quite a bit, to $500 million.
The argument presented there was that punitive damages should be at least in the same ballpark as compensatory damages. This is the same argument many people believe apply to the Thomas case, since if her punishment was proportional to actual damages caused, it would be significantly less.
Incidentally, there's a reason that there's such a high cap on punitive damages in infringement cases. If that weren't the case, large companies could attempt for-profit infringement, and even if they did get caught and had to pay damages based on actual damage, those fines would be largely covered by the profit made infringing!
So, without excessive punitive fines to make up for the ease of copying, in theory, willful for-profit copyright fraud would be much more attractive, because of it's positive expected value.
wooooooosh. :)
It's much more... sophisticated!
I Know it's not 3-D!
If I recall correctly, it also had a plaque that stated "Placed by the society of historical sticklers", or something to that effect.
#1 result is the parent comment. Fail.
Additional Claims:
6. A plurality of exclamation marks containing sequences of non-exclamation mark printable characters
7. The method of claim 6, wherein the sequence of characters represent a mathematical function
8. The method of claim 7, wherein the mathematical function evaluates to a number that, when expressed in decimal form, is "1"
What if the puppies know the location of the nukes? Jack Bauer says: "We don't have time for this!"