I don't buy $30 underwear, and it's pretty ludicrous to assume that's what the parent poster was talking about.
Uh, what would you consider "clothing and home items" if not underwear and laundry detergent? Even if he meant sweaters and furniture the point still stands. Many people (poor college students especially) will make do with an $80 desk from wal-mart rather than a $2000 computer workstation from Sharper Image.
As other posters have pointed out, if they can only afford goods at wal-mart, then they are indeed buying what they can afford.
I have no idea which "clothing and home items" the parent-poster was referring to, but if they are underwear and laundry detergent (or items like this) "don't buy it if you can't afford it" is not a viable option. Maybe you can afford a $400,000 home and drive a BMW but for many people when faced with the choice of paying $30 a pair for boxer shorts at the mall or a pack of 5 for $10 at wal-mart, they'll take wal-mart any day of the week.
This sounds pretty trollish, especially given this horse has been beaten to death on slashdot.. But I'll bite.
Let's take your hypothetical situation and modify it a bit. Let's say you publish out your novel in 1985 (long before WWW and P2P). Let's say I take your book to my local library, photocopy it, and distribute it to my church group. I've infringed on your right to control the distribution of your book, and on your right to receive royalties for the sale of the book, but I haven't stolen your book. Stealing would be if I took the manuscript before you published the book and locked it in my closet. Or if I walked into my local library and put your book under my jacket and walked out with it - then I have stolen it from the library (as they are no longer in posession of it).
For your book (or anything) to be stolen you have to no longer be in posession of it. If some distributes your work in a way you do not approve they have violated copyright laws and your right to compensation for your work, but they have NOT stolen from you. I'm not sure why this is such a difficult concept.
There was a guy that applied for a programming job. He wrote on his resume that he knew C++ and C since he heard about those classes in college. So naturally he figured that there must also be C+ language and wrote it into his resume. The HR looked at his resume and lo and behold.. he was hired.
Heh, that reminds me of one of the funniest resumes I've seen. At my first sysadmin job, a mom and pop startup ISP during the initial phase of the dot com explosion, one of the owners started getting sketchy as the mom and pop ISPs started going under or being aquired. At night he would send out resumes from the support PCs (using support@thisisp.com as his return email address). Every morning we would come in and find "thank you John Smith for submitting your resume" and an attached copy of his resume. In addition to the ridiculous salary requirements (over $1 million) and poor spelling and grammar, he'd list C, C++, VB, VB++, Java, Java++ and add a ++ to everything other language he had heard of just to be thorough. Needless to say right after that most of us left the company, and not long after they went under.
Well, as a human is made up of billions of individual units, centralled connected by electrical systems.....what are billions of individual humans, centrally connected by electrical systems?
Now that is a true incorporation. Or is it the face of (a) god?
Sounds like you either have read God's Debris, or need to.
Go to buzgilla.mozilla.org (you have to cut and paste it, links from slashdot will not work) and read over bug # 124026. Contribute your $100 if you wish. I can't believe with a bounty over 3 grand no one has delivered a solution yet..
What a good, original, idea! Tell you what, why don't we have, say, 13 of them (13's a nice number), and put them in different places across the world? That should help!
Dude, RTFA. I know your post was a knee-jerk reaction to the parent poster's incorrect assessment of the article, but either you didn't read the article or missed the entire point yourself.
Sclavos is WELL aware that there are 13 root servers. His point is pull them out of university basements and other poorly secured and poorly staffed facilities and give them to commercial entities who have more resources to protect them. I'm not going to debate on how good of an idea that is (or isn't), but that's what he is calling for.
Not a legal precedent obviously, but now that the RIAA is targeting college students for $50,000, couldn't those sued simply point to this settlement and cry foul? Obviously RIAA is trying to wipe the egg of its face over suing a 12 year old girl, and I think that should be used against them.
"Instead of heeding the "as-is" warning or using email to get in touch with you, he faxes EBay for your phone number, and now you're getting calls from the guy for tech support!"
A) Assuming you shipped it from your home address, he can get your phone number (not to mention a map to your house) much easier by typing the return address into Google or other online address lookup services.
B) If you provide your REAL home phone number to ANY site or company you sign up with you deserve what you get. Do what I do, pay $8/mo for a voice mail account with your local voicemail service and give that number out.. Check it once a week in case anything worth while shows up. Cancel your land line and get a cell phone for your personal calls. No telemarketers, no crazies from ebay calling you.
Now, pay special attention to these sections (emphasis mine):
a. Whoever for himself, or by his agents or assigns, mails or causes to be mailed any pandering advertisement which offers for sale matter which the addressee in his sole discretion believes to be erotically arousing or sexually provocative shall be subject to an order of the Postal Service to refrain from further mailings of such materials to designated addresses thereof.
...and...
Both the absoluteness of the citizen's right under 4009 and its finality are essential; what may not be provocative to one person may well be to another. In operative effect the power of the householder under the statute is unlimited; he may prohibit the mailing of a dry goods catalog because he objects to the contents or indeed the text of the language touting the merchandise. Congress provided this sweeping power not only to protect privacy but to avoid possible constitutional questions that might arise from vesting the power to make any discretionary evaluation of the material in a governmental official.
It is not up to the post office to decide that you can't get aroused by AOL CD's.. In a nutshell, what's offensive to you may be miles apart from what's offensive to me, so the Supreme Court decided it's not up to the postoffice to make the judgement call. If you deem it offensive, form 1500 applies.
I've used it successfully to stop CitiBank's incessant bombardment of "you're pre-approved" credit card offers (I was litterally getting 3 a day for a while). Try it, it works.
Answer: It's a movie.
His Answer: They put network addresses on all data points along the matrix and blah blah blah
Yeah, how depressing is it to know they're still using ipv4 (9.54.296.42 -- example in the article) in the future? Obviously the 296 octet gives it away as an invalid IP, but it's STILL an ipv4-style address.
I wouldn't exactly say "pins and needles" considering there have been a hundred and some odd missions and most of them haven't had any seriously dangerous problems. Just from an odds point of view, sending up one shuttle on one mission wouldn't be horribly risky.
I disagree... Sending up another shuttle mission before this catastrophe is investigated and explained would be reckless and would probably cause public outcry. I'd equate it to the concorde crash of 2000.. In over 30 years of service and thousands of flight hours the concorde only experienced one crash, so statistically it would appear safe to continue flying. However when human life is at stake you don't roll the dice, you analyze the problem and take steps to ensure it won't happen again. Think of the first shuttle flight after the challenger disaster.. As a nation we were a all holding our breath during that launch.
Think of all the plane crashes in the past 40 years. Are we going to stop flying because of them?
No, but when a crash happens we do everything we can to learn what caused it and take steps to see that it never happens again. The same will happen with the shuttle.
Which means that either the thermal protection system failed or it hit the atmosphere at the wrong angle due to a malfunction causing the pilot to be unable to control the shuttle or (highly unlikely) pilot error.
I think we can rule out pilot error.. As I understand it, the shuttle is under computer control until final approach, at which point control is handed over to the pilot for final and touchdown. So that leaves thermal protection malfunction (most likely), or if it was at an incorrect angle it would be due to the flight computers being programmed with incorrect data, or a problem with the flight computers and/or hydraulic control systems.
They'll be very lucky if they can find pieces of Columbia more than 300 mm (circa 12 inches) in size.:-(
I would have thought so, too, but CNN is showing a picture sent in by a viewer of a piece of some sort of metal that appears to be approximately 2 feet by 2 feet. Hopefully there are other largish pieces which they can use to reconstruct this disaster and prevent it from happening again.
The really sad thing is despite continuous warnings from NASA and news sources to keep away from debris, you know some jackass will put columbia debris on ebay before this is all over with. Hopefully the FBI will knock his door in 5 minutes after he posts it.
This is end of the a manned space program, at least for the short-term.
I totally agree with this, but now NASA will be in a VERY tough spot. ISS's Expedition Six crew which went up in November I think are scheduled to return sometime in April or May. I couldn't imagine NASA ungrounding the shuttle fleet by then.. This brings about a whole round of questions... How long CAN the Expedition Six crew stay on the ISS? Can the Russian space program possibly return the astronauts to earth? Will NASA be forced to temporarily unground one shuttle for the mission, keeping everyone on pins and needles during the entire flight? This is a say day for NASA, space exploration, and humandkind in general.
Now which books would you buy to trigger the "People who don't wear clothes..." link? I guess Amazon wouldn't give a damn about them because they're not going to buy anything.
Hmm, maybe this one? As you may expect, viewing that page doesn't bring up any apparel recommendations.:)
If I'm using a Tivo, the Tivo's recorded the commercial -- the cable company can't tell whether or not, on a subsequent viewing of the show, I fast forward through the commercial.
Actually, they (Tivo) can. Tivo has always stated they collect anonymous viewing statistics, and I've read that commercial skipping is among the statistics they collect. Assuming that's one of the statistics Tivo would be willing to sell, it would be trivial for them to say "of 58,000 tivo owners that recorded last week's farscape, 96% of them skipped or fast-forwarded through the commercials". Of course, it's probably in Tivo's best interest NOT to release those numbers.. It would only reinforce what network execs already suspect: tivo owners (generally) don't watch commercials. This is why Tivo is starting to test other methods of getting ads in front of you, such as pushing them down to your box in nightly updates and displaying them prominently on your Tivo Central menu. *For now* you still have the option of whether you want to watch or not, but how long before Tivo forces you to sit through at least one ad before watching something you've recorded? Not trying to sound conspiratorial, just food for thought.
Amazing article, it goes in real depth into the thinking of both Will Wright - the game's creator - and The Sims Online.
Agreed.. I was especially impressed by Wright's sense of responsibility for what he is about to unleash upon the world.. Do you think Steve Case ever stops to feel a twinge of guilt for the divorces AOL has caused, the newbie AOLers who've been credit card defrauded in chat rooms, the children (allegedly) kidnapped and/or molested after meeting someone in an AOL chatroom, etc, etc? Does he feel pride for the relationships AOL has created? Doubtful.. To Steve Case AOL is a means to an end - making money. To Will Wright, TSO is all about creating a safe and fun community - and more than that really, sort of a social experiment.
I know comparing AOL to TSO isn't really an apples to apples comparison, but for the most part the end goal is the same: to provide a (hopefully safe) online environment in which people interact.
... or in some cases I imagine it will have just as many people whose real lives fall apart because they're neglecting them maintain a virtual life in a virtual world.. Wright says in the article that although he expects to see real world marriages happen due to interactions in the Sims Online world, he expects that real world divorces will happen too.
I like the show, which is usually a death nell for any show on TV. It's going to be cancelled.
Haha, glad to see I'm not the only one this happens to. Of the new shows this year, here are the ones I like(d): MDs (on hiatus, will probably be cancelled), Push Nevada (cancelled before they even aired all of the episodes they PAID for), Fastlane (still on the air, but they're giving it Firefly's time slot, look for it to be cancelled by february), Firefly (future obviously in doubt), and lastly John Doe (haven't heard much about future direction for it).
Maybe I should do the world a favor and start liking crap like Dawson's creek, buffy, and american idol. blech.
Why bother? Why go through all this? Why not say "we're not interested" and let another network produce it?
Are they teasing geeks for fun? Are they frustrating people outta some weird deal with satan?
I'll offer an off-the-wall observation here: I think all of the networks have been caught off guard by CBS's sudden success in network programming. According to this, they currently have 11 of the top 20 shows. Now that the "reality-TV" and "rehashed-gameshow-TV" crazes have passed, I think networks are just throwing shit on the wall to see what sticks in an effort to topple CBS. I think they are as surprised as we are that so far, what's sticking is the boring family-oriented sitcom of the 80's ("my life with bonnie", "8 simple rules", "my wife & kids", "grounded for life", "bernie mac", etc, etc). After the simpsons debuted and the politically-incorrect dysfunctional family was thrust into the limelight, we found network TV saturated with those types of sitcoms, so it seems now the pendulum swings back the other way.
Everyone seems to say "FOX/ABC/NBC/CBS is only pulling this show because the network execs don't understand it". No, what the network execs understand is that nielson ratings directly affect advertising revenue. If a given show doesn't get them enough eyeballs to cover the costs of the show AND profit from it, they'll drop it like a Vietnamese whore.
Honestly, I'm surprised to see John Doe stay as long as it has. In my opinion it is one of the best new shows out this year, because it has an interesting backstory (or rather, the fact that no one really knows the backstory is interesting, to me), and it makes you think to follow the plot.
But, in the words of Dennis Miller, those are just my opinions, I could be wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't buy $30 underwear, and it's pretty ludicrous to assume that's what the parent poster was talking about.
Uh, what would you consider "clothing and home items" if not underwear and laundry detergent? Even if he meant sweaters and furniture the point still stands. Many people (poor college students especially) will make do with an $80 desk from wal-mart rather than a $2000 computer workstation from Sharper Image.
As other posters have pointed out, if they can only afford goods at wal-mart, then they are indeed buying what they can afford.
Don't but(sic) it if you can't afford it.
I have no idea which "clothing and home items" the parent-poster was referring to, but if they are underwear and laundry detergent (or items like this) "don't buy it if you can't afford it" is not a viable option. Maybe you can afford a $400,000 home and drive a BMW but for many people when faced with the choice of paying $30 a pair for boxer shorts at the mall or a pack of 5 for $10 at wal-mart, they'll take wal-mart any day of the week.
Or play like a tourist. Does the FBI call all those people, too?
If the tourist wears a turban and is named Muhammed you bet they do.
Let's take your hypothetical situation and modify it a bit. Let's say you publish out your novel in 1985 (long before WWW and P2P). Let's say I take your book to my local library, photocopy it, and distribute it to my church group. I've infringed on your right to control the distribution of your book, and on your right to receive royalties for the sale of the book, but I haven't stolen your book. Stealing would be if I took the manuscript before you published the book and locked it in my closet. Or if I walked into my local library and put your book under my jacket and walked out with it - then I have stolen it from the library (as they are no longer in posession of it).
For your book (or anything) to be stolen you have to no longer be in posession of it. If some distributes your work in a way you do not approve they have violated copyright laws and your right to compensation for your work, but they have NOT stolen from you. I'm not sure why this is such a difficult concept.
I misread it as unimportium, which seems to fit for these type of elements.
There was a guy that applied for a programming job. He wrote on his resume that he knew C++ and C since he heard about those classes in college. So naturally he figured that there must also be C+ language and wrote it into his resume. The HR looked at his resume and lo and behold .. he was hired.
Heh, that reminds me of one of the funniest resumes I've seen. At my first sysadmin job, a mom and pop startup ISP during the initial phase of the dot com explosion, one of the owners started getting sketchy as the mom and pop ISPs started going under or being aquired. At night he would send out resumes from the support PCs (using support@thisisp.com as his return email address). Every morning we would come in and find "thank you John Smith for submitting your resume" and an attached copy of his resume. In addition to the ridiculous salary requirements (over $1 million) and poor spelling and grammar, he'd list C, C++, VB, VB++, Java, Java++ and add a ++ to everything other language he had heard of just to be thorough. Needless to say right after that most of us left the company, and not long after they went under.
Well, as a human is made up of billions of individual units, centralled connected by electrical systems.....what are billions of individual humans, centrally connected by electrical systems?
Now that is a true incorporation. Or is it the face of (a) god?
Sounds like you either have read God's Debris, or need to.
Shayne
Not only that, but according to anandtech, BTX will be taking over case/mobo/power supply architecture during 2004. Better get a new case and PS too.
What a good, original, idea! Tell you what, why don't we have, say, 13 of them (13's a nice number), and put them in different places across the world? That should help!
Dude, RTFA. I know your post was a knee-jerk reaction to the parent poster's incorrect assessment of the article, but either you didn't read the article or missed the entire point yourself.
Sclavos is WELL aware that there are 13 root servers. His point is pull them out of university basements and other poorly secured and poorly staffed facilities and give them to commercial entities who have more resources to protect them. I'm not going to debate on how good of an idea that is (or isn't), but that's what he is calling for.
Shayne
Shayne
Not a legal precedent obviously, but now that the RIAA is targeting college students for $50,000, couldn't those sued simply point to this settlement and cry foul? Obviously RIAA is trying to wipe the egg of its face over suing a 12 year old girl, and I think that should be used against them.
A) Assuming you shipped it from your home address, he can get your phone number (not to mention a map to your house) much easier by typing the return address into Google or other online address lookup services.
B) If you provide your REAL home phone number to ANY site or company you sign up with you deserve what you get. Do what I do, pay $8/mo for a voice mail account with your local voicemail service and give that number out.. Check it once a week in case anything worth while shows up. Cancel your land line and get a cell phone for your personal calls. No telemarketers, no crazies from ebay calling you.
Shayne
Unless you use the AOL CD as an artificial vagina, you won't get far with that application.
Wrong! Go read this page. Go ahead, I'll wait.
Now, pay special attention to these sections (emphasis mine):
a. Whoever for himself, or by his agents or assigns, mails or causes to be mailed any pandering advertisement which offers for sale matter which the addressee in his sole discretion believes to be erotically arousing or sexually provocative shall be subject to an order of the Postal Service to refrain from further mailings of such materials to designated addresses thereof.
...and...
Both the absoluteness of the citizen's right under 4009 and its finality are essential; what may not be provocative to one person may well be to another. In operative effect the power of the householder under the statute is unlimited; he may prohibit the mailing of a dry goods catalog because he objects to the contents or indeed the text of the language touting the merchandise. Congress provided this sweeping power not only to protect privacy but to avoid possible constitutional questions that might arise from vesting the power to make any discretionary evaluation of the material in a governmental official.
It is not up to the post office to decide that you can't get aroused by AOL CD's.. In a nutshell, what's offensive to you may be miles apart from what's offensive to me, so the Supreme Court decided it's not up to the postoffice to make the judgement call. If you deem it offensive, form 1500 applies.
I've used it successfully to stop CitiBank's incessant bombardment of "you're pre-approved" credit card offers (I was litterally getting 3 a day for a while). Try it, it works.
Shayne
His Answer: They put network addresses on all data points along the matrix and blah blah blah
Yeah, how depressing is it to know they're still using ipv4 (9.54.296.42 -- example in the article) in the future? Obviously the 296 octet gives it away as an invalid IP, but it's STILL an ipv4-style address.
Guess IPv4 is here to stay for a while.
Shayne
I wouldn't exactly say "pins and needles" considering there have been a hundred and some odd missions and most of them haven't had any seriously dangerous problems. Just from an odds point of view, sending up one shuttle on one mission wouldn't be horribly risky.
I disagree... Sending up another shuttle mission before this catastrophe is investigated and explained would be reckless and would probably cause public outcry. I'd equate it to the concorde crash of 2000.. In over 30 years of service and thousands of flight hours the concorde only experienced one crash, so statistically it would appear safe to continue flying. However when human life is at stake you don't roll the dice, you analyze the problem and take steps to ensure it won't happen again. Think of the first shuttle flight after the challenger disaster.. As a nation we were a all holding our breath during that launch.
Think of all the plane crashes in the past 40 years. Are we going to stop flying because of them?
No, but when a crash happens we do everything we can to learn what caused it and take steps to see that it never happens again. The same will happen with the shuttle.
Shayne
Which means that either the thermal protection system failed or it hit the atmosphere at the wrong angle due to a malfunction causing the pilot to be unable to control the shuttle or (highly unlikely) pilot error.
I think we can rule out pilot error.. As I understand it, the shuttle is under computer control until final approach, at which point control is handed over to the pilot for final and touchdown. So that leaves thermal protection malfunction (most likely), or if it was at an incorrect angle it would be due to the flight computers being programmed with incorrect data, or a problem with the flight computers and/or hydraulic control systems.
Shayne
They'll be very lucky if they can find pieces of Columbia more than 300 mm (circa 12 inches) in size. :-(
I would have thought so, too, but CNN is showing a picture sent in by a viewer of a piece of some sort of metal that appears to be approximately 2 feet by 2 feet. Hopefully there are other largish pieces which they can use to reconstruct this disaster and prevent it from happening again.
The really sad thing is despite continuous warnings from NASA and news sources to keep away from debris, you know some jackass will put columbia debris on ebay before this is all over with. Hopefully the FBI will knock his door in 5 minutes after he posts it.
Shayne
This is end of the a manned space program, at least for the short-term.
I totally agree with this, but now NASA will be in a VERY tough spot. ISS's Expedition Six crew which went up in November I think are scheduled to return sometime in April or May. I couldn't imagine NASA ungrounding the shuttle fleet by then.. This brings about a whole round of questions... How long CAN the Expedition Six crew stay on the ISS? Can the Russian space program possibly return the astronauts to earth? Will NASA be forced to temporarily unground one shuttle for the mission, keeping everyone on pins and needles during the entire flight? This is a say day for NASA, space exploration, and humandkind in general.
Shayne
Now which books would you buy to trigger the "People who don't wear clothes..." link? I guess Amazon wouldn't give a damn about them because they're not going to buy anything.
Hmm, maybe this one? As you may expect, viewing that page doesn't bring up any apparel recommendations. :)
Shayne
If I'm using a Tivo, the Tivo's recorded the commercial -- the cable company can't tell whether or not, on a subsequent viewing of the show, I fast forward through the commercial.
Actually, they (Tivo) can. Tivo has always stated they collect anonymous viewing statistics, and I've read that commercial skipping is among the statistics they collect. Assuming that's one of the statistics Tivo would be willing to sell, it would be trivial for them to say "of 58,000 tivo owners that recorded last week's farscape, 96% of them skipped or fast-forwarded through the commercials". Of course, it's probably in Tivo's best interest NOT to release those numbers.. It would only reinforce what network execs already suspect: tivo owners (generally) don't watch commercials. This is why Tivo is starting to test other methods of getting ads in front of you, such as pushing them down to your box in nightly updates and displaying them prominently on your Tivo Central menu. *For now* you still have the option of whether you want to watch or not, but how long before Tivo forces you to sit through at least one ad before watching something you've recorded? Not trying to sound conspiratorial, just food for thought.
Shayne
Amazing article, it goes in real depth into the thinking of both Will Wright - the game's creator - and The Sims Online.
Agreed.. I was especially impressed by Wright's sense of responsibility for what he is about to unleash upon the world.. Do you think Steve Case ever stops to feel a twinge of guilt for the divorces AOL has caused, the newbie AOLers who've been credit card defrauded in chat rooms, the children (allegedly) kidnapped and/or molested after meeting someone in an AOL chatroom, etc, etc? Does he feel pride for the relationships AOL has created? Doubtful.. To Steve Case AOL is a means to an end - making money. To Will Wright, TSO is all about creating a safe and fun community - and more than that really, sort of a social experiment.
I know comparing AOL to TSO isn't really an apples to apples comparison, but for the most part the end goal is the same: to provide a (hopefully safe) online environment in which people interact.
Shayne
Shayne
I like the show, which is usually a death nell for any show on TV. It's going to be cancelled.
Haha, glad to see I'm not the only one this happens to. Of the new shows this year, here are the ones I like(d): MDs (on hiatus, will probably be cancelled), Push Nevada (cancelled before they even aired all of the episodes they PAID for), Fastlane (still on the air, but they're giving it Firefly's time slot, look for it to be cancelled by february), Firefly (future obviously in doubt), and lastly John Doe (haven't heard much about future direction for it).
Maybe I should do the world a favor and start liking crap like Dawson's creek, buffy, and american idol. blech.
Shayne
Why bother? Why go through all this? Why not say "we're not interested" and let another network produce it?
Are they teasing geeks for fun? Are they frustrating people outta some weird deal with satan?
I'll offer an off-the-wall observation here: I think all of the networks have been caught off guard by CBS's sudden success in network programming. According to this, they currently have 11 of the top 20 shows. Now that the "reality-TV" and "rehashed-gameshow-TV" crazes have passed, I think networks are just throwing shit on the wall to see what sticks in an effort to topple CBS. I think they are as surprised as we are that so far, what's sticking is the boring family-oriented sitcom of the 80's ("my life with bonnie", "8 simple rules", "my wife & kids", "grounded for life", "bernie mac", etc, etc). After the simpsons debuted and the politically-incorrect dysfunctional family was thrust into the limelight, we found network TV saturated with those types of sitcoms, so it seems now the pendulum swings back the other way.
Everyone seems to say "FOX/ABC/NBC/CBS is only pulling this show because the network execs don't understand it". No, what the network execs understand is that nielson ratings directly affect advertising revenue. If a given show doesn't get them enough eyeballs to cover the costs of the show AND profit from it, they'll drop it like a Vietnamese whore.
Honestly, I'm surprised to see John Doe stay as long as it has. In my opinion it is one of the best new shows out this year, because it has an interesting backstory (or rather, the fact that no one really knows the backstory is interesting, to me), and it makes you think to follow the plot.
But, in the words of Dennis Miller, those are just my opinions, I could be wrong.
Shayne