To put it simply, they punished him (don't say that being fired isn't a very severe punishment) without a trial or due process. In my opinion his rights are being violated because of his activities in his free time. First off, I don't know of any company that will give people trials, and they went through the due process with management and HR.
Second, the supreme court has ruled that companies can regulate what their employees do in their free time as long as they can show that those activities effect the company. Corporate espionage could be considered a free time activity, since you can gather all the information you need during the course of a highly productive work day. CNN needs to retain the image of being unbiased, and having a loose cannon like this guy on their payroll seriously detracts from that aim.
Any writing? Really? Like "A loaf of bread and some milk"-writing? You seem to be overlooking the term "outlet," which would mean a place that disseminates the work for him (which blogspot would certainly qualify for). So no, the definition's not as wide ranging as you're trying to say it is.
Besides, he's writing a blog with a fairly wide audience for an ad-supported site. He knew all of this. While the line doesn't clearly apply to blogs, he either realized that his blog could have fallen under those guidelines or he deserves to be fired anyway.
We'll see if Bad Analogy Guy shows up to contest this one. I'm not that guy, but can I participate anyway?
This is like a man with two families, one where he's a drunk, abusive child molester, and one where he's living the American dream of owning a home, two car garage in the suburbs. When the upstanding wife finds out about the other family, she divorces him because she doesn't want him to tarnish his image.
Depending on whether you're Chez or not, you might want to switch which family fired him.
Let's not forget that he's confrontational, judgemental (mitt romney post) and just generally extreme in his opinions. He's funny and he's got a strong voice; there's no doubt he's a great writer. Unfortunately, he's preaching to a fringe group. Having someone like that on the staff of a news program that's supposed to remain unbiased and classy could seriously hurt their image.
You know, using a free web proxy to get around the filter is the sort of thing that can get you fired...and waiting in a bread line. Just an FYI since you obviously aren't connected to reality.
And if she had been a teacher, then that would be a valid argument against my point, but it's not. Teachers can get away with things that higher officials can't. For example, the school district that my younger siblings were attending started using a new reading program that was much less effective than the old one. The school board refused to change the program until the end of their contract with the manufacturer, which was several years. However, my younger brother's teacher knew that the program was less effective, so she taught that program side by side with the older, more effective program. It took more time, but it taught the children effectively.
However, and this is another example of what I was saying, it didn't matter in the long run what program they used for my little brother, because he'd learned to read in preschool from reading with the family and figuring it out himself (funny story: one day he insisted on reading a passage from a book that our family was reading together; we all thought there was no way he was going to be able to do it, but he surprised us all by reading it perfectly).
It's a minor setback; the tide is turning and in a few more years people will get ridiculed for even mentioning the possibility of teaching something other than evolution. In the meantime, the damage won't be that great.
But when society hits that point, what are you going to do with those ppl? Run through fields of flowers that are also edible and provide electricity before using your teleporter to get to the enterprise and travel at faster-than-light speeds to visit the multitude of sentient alien lifeforms that all look vaguely humanoid? Seriously, you're borrowing trouble from a future that may never happen. At no time in the foreseeable future will computers and robots be able to do all the menial tasks that humans can simply because humans can be reprogrammed in minutes (through a training video) and they don't have to be retooled (opposable thumbs are great).
The other harsh fact is that humans are more cost effective for the foreseeable future. Having a bunch of people standing around does nobody any good. If a robot gets to the point where it costs $10 up front and $1 / day to work a factory job and there are vast hordes of jobless people, then there will be a bunch of people who will take the job for $.50 a day and save the factory money.
The point of the matter is that you are seeing a future so distant that there are many things that can change that outcome. Maybe there's a limit to the ability of computers to perform tasks, maybe we'll have to use organic computers to be able to compete with the human brain, maybe there'll be a crisis that forces us to abandon the use of computers and robots (Foundation series or Dune). Even more likely, human nature and the cost effectiveness could easily prevent that future. The point is that we don't know, and you're looking for a solution to a non-existent problem.
I know what you mean. If they're going to teach the theory of evolution, they should they should at least teach that it's more than a theory!
But seriously, I don't see how this is that big of a deal. Everyone with a brain already realizes that evolution is true or that God has gone to great lengths to make it look true. Those who aren't going to believe in evolution for religious reasons are going to do that anyway.
Finally, individual teachers have a lot of leeway in what they teach; science teachers will teach evolution with the certainty that they feel it's due, no matter what guidelines have been set down.
Voice recognition software coupled with intelligent filtering can easily bring that number down to 1% or lower. Besides, the USSR did a pretty good chance of spying on everyone all the time. Set up a website where people can download snippets of audio and flag it as suspected terrorist; if it is, they get $40! Make it so that too many false positives disqualifies them in the future, do some redundancy, and you've got yourself a system where you can easily get 10% of the population involved in spying on each other.
Outside of string theory and MOND, what is there that's a serious contender? There are fringe theories, and they could be correct, but that doesn't change the fact that there's a lot of certainty out there for dark matter.
I'm going to have to disagree with you there. The PS3 is certainly seeing inflated sales from being a bluray player, but you're going to have to make the argument that this marginalizes the numbers. Look at the sales of Devil May Cry 4 and you can see that they're roughly proportional to the install base of the two systems, ie the ratio of PS3 DMC 4 sales to XBox DMC4 sales is close to the ratio of XBox machines to PS3 machines.
Next, you're argument that 87% bought the system for watching movies isn't accurate, since the article doesn't claim they only watch movies, just that they had watched movies. Since they've offered free movies with the PS3 for most of its lifespan so far, most people who bought one for any reason have probably watched a blu ray movie on it.
To sum up, your argument relies on the supposition that buying the PS3 for one reason means that you're not going to use it for other reasons. This is silly.
How do you overstate the certainty of dark matter? Last I read, the only serious alternatives were that there's more interstellar dust than we thought (improbable considering the observations of the bending of light), modifications to the theory of gravity (few supporters, unlikely, especially with said observations), and string theory.
you used game sales in your chart, not device sales. You also used a single week of game sales as a metric, which is kinda dumb I was using the total install numbers on hardware, which is on the front page. I was also linking to the site in general, so I apologize for the miscommunication.
That being said, the chart you linked to shows more installed PS3's for the time since they were launched, but it doesn't change the fact that the XBox has more systems sold. Does it look like the XBox may fail in the future? Yes, but that's only a prediction. For right now, it's not a failure, it's doing quite well.
My point isn't that Microsoft won't tank in the future, it's that predictions of any sort are going to have a chance to fail, and even if the prediction's true, Microsoft's doing extremely well and can live off of its momentum for a long time yet. Celebrating their passing is premature at best.
As demonstrated by their refusal to use it? The Supreme Court is probably the most easily abused of the three branches, it's true, but you've got to remember that there are still checks and balances. The president can refuse to execute a ruling (technically it's illegal, but it's been done), Congress can rewrite the law in a way that gets around the ruling, and they can even start the process of amending the constitution.
Looking from a purely constitutional perspective, the supreme court is also the branch that has abused its power the least imho. Congress routinely enacts laws that are only constitutional if justified by the "general welfare" clause of the preamble, not any part of the actual constitution. The president can send troops anywhere to fight that he wants without a declaration of war, and this president has outright ignored several parts of the constitution.
So, while I am a strong believer that the supreme court has had its share of overreaching rulings that weren't strictly constitutional, I think that pales in comparison to the abuses that the other branches have managed to pull off.
You're absolutely right. I'm sure that the XBox360's higher install number and sales rate that keeps pace with the PS3 are all just a backwards sign of it's utter failure. With the rate that Windows is losing ground to Linux, it'll only be another 30 years before it's no longer the dominant player! Windows Mobile also being the dominant player in that field is a fluke, I'm sure, and it's going to fail soon. When you take those factors into account, they've only got a few decades of ridiculous power and profits! THEY'RE DOOMED!!!!
That is, unless they break into a new market or do just about anything else that keeps the status quo. Also, since Firefox hasn't cut IE's install rate to below 50%, the terms "embarrass" and "decimate" might be premature, although decimate does technically apply.
Of course the whole point is that people can use this to share any kind of media with pretty much anyone It could also be used (and correct me if I'm wrong here, i'm going way out on a limb) for being able to play your music on any device that you want to. Incompatibilities have killed my (legally bought) media before, and that's what I'd use this software for. If I wanted to freely share my any kind of media with anyone else, I'd just download it with limewire or bittorrent.
As others have pointed out, the GPL isn't a EULA at all, it's an agreement as to how you'll use the source of the software and how you'll redistribute the software. Whereas the commission about EULA's said that people can't access them beforehand, they're burdensome, and they're not understandable by someone without a law degree, the GPL is widely available. It's not burdensome, since it's less restrictive than the norm of not giving the source and especially since it doesn't apply to the end user. It's easily understood by those without a law degree and analysis can be found in many places.
Yeah, but the way to fix that flaw would be to set up a system where two people or corporations or what have you can make a legally binding agreement or covenant. If these mythical things were to exist, then the inventor would be able to use that to make sure that the company pays him if they decide to use his idea.
Even then, let's say that there are three companies in this particular market. The first one hears his idea, tells him to go screw himself and then implements it anyway, laughing the whole time. The inventor goes to the second company, who does the same thing. The inventor goes to the third company, who sees a market with two other competitors either selling or about to sell this same product. They can tell the inventor to go screw himself, or they can give the inventor a sum that, if it is actually that good, is paltry compared to the profits from being the only player in the market; as a bonus, they get to stick it to their two competitors because they have the patent.
What if you have the greatest idea since sliced bread, but to implement it, you'd have to invest a ton of money, more money than you could raise or any sensible investor would give you? First, the idea was that you could get a patent just like normal right now, but to enforce it you'd need a working product.
In this instance, if you have this great idea and can't get the money any other way, what's the use of the patent you have currently? All it's doing is stopping others from making the best thing since sliced bread while you'll never be able to do so. If you were to approach one of the corporations that would profit from your invention, work out a licensing deal with the company so that they can use the patent and nobody else can.
This is in your best interest since you'll get the money to develop the invention and you will, presumably, be getting large amounts of money for it. It's in the corporation's best interest since they have a monopoly for a while. It's in the economy's best interest because the person with enough talent to come up with the idea in the first place now has the money and the leisure to come up with more ideas while schoolteachers can show their students how all they need are brains and creativity to make it in this country.
And now that pretty much everyone realizes our economy is treading water before a recession...Sometimes a band aid is better than a hastily planned and thus ill-conceived surgery Something is better than nothing, and a small, quick fix is better than a large, bad one. However, in an economy that's teetering on the edge of recession (if not already in it), it seems like a good idea to kill patent trolls as best they can. It doesn't even have to be much; make it so that the company has to have a viable product on the market to be able to sue for infringement and limit the licensing fees to the time that the product was on the market. Quick, simple fix that makes it so that a company has to at least be investing something into the economy when they enforce the patent.
Probably the worst thing about this fiasco is that, by creating this law, they're admitting that there's a problem with the patent system, but not fixing it. If congress were to have plans to enact real patent reform, but they want to get this done first so banks don't have to wait, that'd be reasonable. Instead, we have a congress that's only going to do anything this time because it's affecting a rich industry.
How can adblock possibly work against this? If your ISP wants to, they can make those text ads appear inline with the text of the article, or make the image or flash look like it's coming from the site you're hitting instead of wherever it really came from. Adblock relies on knowing where the content came from in the first place, and if your ISP's lying to your browser, it's going to get harder by orders of magnitude.
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Second, the supreme court has ruled that companies can regulate what their employees do in their free time as long as they can show that those activities effect the company. Corporate espionage could be considered a free time activity, since you can gather all the information you need during the course of a highly productive work day. CNN needs to retain the image of being unbiased, and having a loose cannon like this guy on their payroll seriously detracts from that aim.
Besides, he's writing a blog with a fairly wide audience for an ad-supported site. He knew all of this. While the line doesn't clearly apply to blogs, he either realized that his blog could have fallen under those guidelines or he deserves to be fired anyway.
This is like a man with two families, one where he's a drunk, abusive child molester, and one where he's living the American dream of owning a home, two car garage in the suburbs. When the upstanding wife finds out about the other family, she divorces him because she doesn't want him to tarnish his image.
Depending on whether you're Chez or not, you might want to switch which family fired him.
Let's not forget that he's confrontational, judgemental (mitt romney post) and just generally extreme in his opinions. He's funny and he's got a strong voice; there's no doubt he's a great writer. Unfortunately, he's preaching to a fringe group. Having someone like that on the staff of a news program that's supposed to remain unbiased and classy could seriously hurt their image.
You know, using a free web proxy to get around the filter is the sort of thing that can get you fired...and waiting in a bread line. Just an FYI since you obviously aren't connected to reality.
It was actually sarcasm. If you read other parts of the thread, I mention that we've observed dark matter. Sorry for the inconvenience.
And if she had been a teacher, then that would be a valid argument against my point, but it's not. Teachers can get away with things that higher officials can't. For example, the school district that my younger siblings were attending started using a new reading program that was much less effective than the old one. The school board refused to change the program until the end of their contract with the manufacturer, which was several years. However, my younger brother's teacher knew that the program was less effective, so she taught that program side by side with the older, more effective program. It took more time, but it taught the children effectively.
However, and this is another example of what I was saying, it didn't matter in the long run what program they used for my little brother, because he'd learned to read in preschool from reading with the family and figuring it out himself (funny story: one day he insisted on reading a passage from a book that our family was reading together; we all thought there was no way he was going to be able to do it, but he surprised us all by reading it perfectly).
It's a minor setback; the tide is turning and in a few more years people will get ridiculed for even mentioning the possibility of teaching something other than evolution. In the meantime, the damage won't be that great.
The other harsh fact is that humans are more cost effective for the foreseeable future. Having a bunch of people standing around does nobody any good. If a robot gets to the point where it costs $10 up front and $1 / day to work a factory job and there are vast hordes of jobless people, then there will be a bunch of people who will take the job for $.50 a day and save the factory money.
The point of the matter is that you are seeing a future so distant that there are many things that can change that outcome. Maybe there's a limit to the ability of computers to perform tasks, maybe we'll have to use organic computers to be able to compete with the human brain, maybe there'll be a crisis that forces us to abandon the use of computers and robots (Foundation series or Dune). Even more likely, human nature and the cost effectiveness could easily prevent that future. The point is that we don't know, and you're looking for a solution to a non-existent problem.
I know what you mean. If they're going to teach the theory of evolution, they should they should at least teach that it's more than a theory!
But seriously, I don't see how this is that big of a deal. Everyone with a brain already realizes that evolution is true or that God has gone to great lengths to make it look true. Those who aren't going to believe in evolution for religious reasons are going to do that anyway.
Finally, individual teachers have a lot of leeway in what they teach; science teachers will teach evolution with the certainty that they feel it's due, no matter what guidelines have been set down.
Yeah, now if only they had observed dark matter, that would be a real breakthrough.
Voice recognition software coupled with intelligent filtering can easily bring that number down to 1% or lower. Besides, the USSR did a pretty good chance of spying on everyone all the time. Set up a website where people can download snippets of audio and flag it as suspected terrorist; if it is, they get $40! Make it so that too many false positives disqualifies them in the future, do some redundancy, and you've got yourself a system where you can easily get 10% of the population involved in spying on each other.
Isn't technology great?
Outside of string theory and MOND, what is there that's a serious contender? There are fringe theories, and they could be correct, but that doesn't change the fact that there's a lot of certainty out there for dark matter.
I'm going to have to disagree with you there. The PS3 is certainly seeing inflated sales from being a bluray player, but you're going to have to make the argument that this marginalizes the numbers. Look at the sales of Devil May Cry 4 and you can see that they're roughly proportional to the install base of the two systems, ie the ratio of PS3 DMC 4 sales to XBox DMC4 sales is close to the ratio of XBox machines to PS3 machines.
Next, you're argument that 87% bought the system for watching movies isn't accurate, since the article doesn't claim they only watch movies, just that they had watched movies. Since they've offered free movies with the PS3 for most of its lifespan so far, most people who bought one for any reason have probably watched a blu ray movie on it.
To sum up, your argument relies on the supposition that buying the PS3 for one reason means that you're not going to use it for other reasons. This is silly.
How do you overstate the certainty of dark matter? Last I read, the only serious alternatives were that there's more interstellar dust than we thought (improbable considering the observations of the bending of light), modifications to the theory of gravity (few supporters, unlikely, especially with said observations), and string theory.
That being said, the chart you linked to shows more installed PS3's for the time since they were launched, but it doesn't change the fact that the XBox has more systems sold. Does it look like the XBox may fail in the future? Yes, but that's only a prediction. For right now, it's not a failure, it's doing quite well.
My point isn't that Microsoft won't tank in the future, it's that predictions of any sort are going to have a chance to fail, and even if the prediction's true, Microsoft's doing extremely well and can live off of its momentum for a long time yet. Celebrating their passing is premature at best.
As demonstrated by their refusal to use it? The Supreme Court is probably the most easily abused of the three branches, it's true, but you've got to remember that there are still checks and balances. The president can refuse to execute a ruling (technically it's illegal, but it's been done), Congress can rewrite the law in a way that gets around the ruling, and they can even start the process of amending the constitution.
Looking from a purely constitutional perspective, the supreme court is also the branch that has abused its power the least imho. Congress routinely enacts laws that are only constitutional if justified by the "general welfare" clause of the preamble, not any part of the actual constitution. The president can send troops anywhere to fight that he wants without a declaration of war, and this president has outright ignored several parts of the constitution.
So, while I am a strong believer that the supreme court has had its share of overreaching rulings that weren't strictly constitutional, I think that pales in comparison to the abuses that the other branches have managed to pull off.
You're absolutely right. I'm sure that the XBox360's higher install number and sales rate that keeps pace with the PS3 are all just a backwards sign of it's utter failure. With the rate that Windows is losing ground to Linux, it'll only be another 30 years before it's no longer the dominant player! Windows Mobile also being the dominant player in that field is a fluke, I'm sure, and it's going to fail soon. When you take those factors into account, they've only got a few decades of ridiculous power and profits! THEY'RE DOOMED!!!!
That is, unless they break into a new market or do just about anything else that keeps the status quo. Also, since Firefox hasn't cut IE's install rate to below 50%, the terms "embarrass" and "decimate" might be premature, although decimate does technically apply.
As others have pointed out, the GPL isn't a EULA at all, it's an agreement as to how you'll use the source of the software and how you'll redistribute the software. Whereas the commission about EULA's said that people can't access them beforehand, they're burdensome, and they're not understandable by someone without a law degree, the GPL is widely available. It's not burdensome, since it's less restrictive than the norm of not giving the source and especially since it doesn't apply to the end user. It's easily understood by those without a law degree and analysis can be found in many places.
Yeah, but the way to fix that flaw would be to set up a system where two people or corporations or what have you can make a legally binding agreement or covenant. If these mythical things were to exist, then the inventor would be able to use that to make sure that the company pays him if they decide to use his idea.
Even then, let's say that there are three companies in this particular market. The first one hears his idea, tells him to go screw himself and then implements it anyway, laughing the whole time. The inventor goes to the second company, who does the same thing. The inventor goes to the third company, who sees a market with two other competitors either selling or about to sell this same product. They can tell the inventor to go screw himself, or they can give the inventor a sum that, if it is actually that good, is paltry compared to the profits from being the only player in the market; as a bonus, they get to stick it to their two competitors because they have the patent.
In this instance, if you have this great idea and can't get the money any other way, what's the use of the patent you have currently? All it's doing is stopping others from making the best thing since sliced bread while you'll never be able to do so. If you were to approach one of the corporations that would profit from your invention, work out a licensing deal with the company so that they can use the patent and nobody else can.
This is in your best interest since you'll get the money to develop the invention and you will, presumably, be getting large amounts of money for it. It's in the corporation's best interest since they have a monopoly for a while. It's in the economy's best interest because the person with enough talent to come up with the idea in the first place now has the money and the leisure to come up with more ideas while schoolteachers can show their students how all they need are brains and creativity to make it in this country.
Probably the worst thing about this fiasco is that, by creating this law, they're admitting that there's a problem with the patent system, but not fixing it. If congress were to have plans to enact real patent reform, but they want to get this done first so banks don't have to wait, that'd be reasonable. Instead, we have a congress that's only going to do anything this time because it's affecting a rich industry.
How can adblock possibly work against this? If your ISP wants to, they can make those text ads appear inline with the text of the article, or make the image or flash look like it's coming from the site you're hitting instead of wherever it really came from. Adblock relies on knowing where the content came from in the first place, and if your ISP's lying to your browser, it's going to get harder by orders of magnitude.
Everybody likes horses and other farm animals, right?