If the USA gets socialized medicine then where will Canadians go to get good health care instead of the meat grinder that is the Canadian health care system?
They will go to Canada. But I guess it depends, if they need a kidney they can always go to India or the Philippines and buy one from either naive victims or unwilling patients. The free market for medical care will always be available for the rich. And no there is no meat grinder here.
When the government steps in and starts dictating how much hospitals/doctors/etc can make then it's a disincentive to go to school a third of your life for that profession.
The government here already dictates how much doctors and nurses, etc get paid. On rare occasions there is grumbling, and in the end everybody settles. There is no shortage of doctors here. In some rural communities yes; but these communities can and often do offer incentives, like free housing for example.
And in the US there is HMO's, which from what I have heard, is a locked-in and rationed system of health care governed by the financial profits of insurance companies.
Also if we put cost caps on medication the same way that Canada does then our R&D will go down the tubes because the huge profit won't be available for the rare hit that decent drugs can be.
There is a healthy biotech industry in Canada. Companies can choose not to locate here, and companies can choose not to sell drugs to Canadians.
I work 80 hours a week, and live on a tight budget and spend a lot on health care, and my family gets great care.
I work 40 hours a week and have a shitty low paying job and I don't spend a lot on health care and my family gets great care.
Why the hell should someone who won't get off their ass to better their income and who spends all their income on things like lotto tickets, new cars, and big screen TV's drag down my health care so that I'm not "advantaged".
You are being presumptuous. I have never met anybody who wanted to "sit on their ass" and be poor. I certainly have never met anybody who is "poor" that owns luxury items like big screen TV's. In my province at least, the welfare system is rather rigorous. There are some working-class asshats here who think poor people are just ripping off the system. I have seen no statistics or evidence of this. If in fact they are doing it, then they will get caught. Bank records, net assets, job search history, etc. are all surveyed by the people responsible for rationing the money here.
This whole "fair" health care thing doesn't lift everyone up to great health care, it just drags everyone down to poor health care.
In the survey, people were asked to rate their health from poor to excellent, and 85 percent of Americans and 88 percent of Canadians reported that they were in good, very good or excellent health.
Although there is a slight (and I would argue insignificant advantage for the US): Americans were slightly more likely than Canadians to rate their health as excellent (26 percent compared to 24 percent).
And for uninsured Americans:
Among uninsured American respondents, 28 percent said the quality of the health care services they received was "excellent," 44 percent "good," and 28 percent "fair" or "poor."
Also:
Unmet medical needs during the past 12 months were reported by 13 percent of Americans and 11 percent
Your point is taken (and in regards to people who have acquired millionaire status, I was aware that many people do not fall into the stereotype). And being self-made does not necessarily correlate into being morally upright. I am also aware that people who build their careers up to CEO level generally have psychopathic personalities (which has been pointed out in The Corporation). And through courses in Management I have learned that people do not get promoted based on competence, but on their social networking (ass-kissing) abilities. I know this from personal experience as well.
The chapter in the book you referenced speaks of welders with their own businesses (for example). This is nice, but it does not make reference to their abilities to create poetry or great works of art, or there ability to create mathematical proofs.
For the others:
As a group, we are fairly well educated. Only about one in five are not college graduates. Many of us hold advanced degrees. Eighteen percent have master's degrees, 8 percent law degrees, 6 percent medical degrees, and 6 percent Ph.D.s. Well, most people who go to medical school are already born into (at the very least) upper middle class families. Ref: Getting Doctored (disclaimer: this is a PDF that appears to be just a sample page. I did however read the book; and so I list it as a reference for my point).
And so too, it is not surprising that these millionaires (in your referenced book) can
As a group, we believe that education is extremely important for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren. We spend heavily for the educations of our offspring. Also from your referenced book:
I am a tightwad...Oh, they made me another offer--to donate in my name the money I earned for my interview to my favorite charity. But I told them, "I am my favorite charity." And so it is with higher education in general; the richer you are (or your parents are), the more likely you will be to go on to higher education.
And yes I am aware that ordinary people with average incomes can accumulate great amounts of wealth through frugalness and the magic of compound interest. From a purely financial perspective this is fine, but it does not make these people biologically better than poor people (remember, you were talking about a biological evolutionary survival-of-the-fittest as being a positive for society's health care system). When I stated
Those at the economic apex of wealth I meant people like CEO's and those professionals who strive to higher levels within a corporation, and I was not thinking of middle-class people who built their wealth up over many years. At the very least I failed to elaborate on this. The point being that wealth (and in this case the ability to afford health care) does not correlate into being biologically superior, nor is it an imperative to being biologically superior. Those welder's who owned their own business may have had great investment advisors, but it doesn't mean they are either moral or intellectually or biologically superior. They may very well be asshats, but from what I have read; The Millionaire Next Door does not bring up these points.
Except that its the 'for profit' part that is the problem That is pretty much implicit as to what I was saying. I think universal health care like we have here in Canada would be the most fair and utilitarian solution. The main disadvantage is that the rich would not be as advantaged, like having faster access to non-emergency or non life-threatening care. The free market people can bitch all they want, but I know (and yep it's anecdotal) from personal experience (through many friends and relatives) that if people need (for example) cancer treatment, or therapy for a stroke; they will get it pronto and it won't be in some cheap third world style clinic. No it's not free; we pay for it through our taxes. But since everybody pays for it and there are no sales people or middlemen making money, it's overall cost is cheaper than it is in the US. It may not have the polish and shine that a CEO wanting health care would want, but it works. And yes universal health care is not directly on-topic so I was avoiding stating it explicitly.
Interesting perhaps, Insightful no. The evolution that you speak of involves economics as much as it does biology. Those at the economic apex of wealth get there through accidents of luck (e.g. born into wealth, gambling addict lucked-out on a lottery ticket, etc), gross illegal activity (e.g. bank robbers, mafia hit men), manipulation or dishonesty (sales people, CEOs, union-busters; like the asshats in the auto-industry hiring detectives to find any type of dirt on Ralph Nader when he lobbied for safety regulations for automobiles, or more recently Dick Cheney and Haliburton). Most people at the top don't mind this type of natural selection. Most people in the middle can live with it as long is it does not effect them (hypocrisy is a big theme of mine), and the people at the bottom get screwed as they always do. This type of natural selection only breeds lazy ideas and corruption.
Except that (given the current model of insurance and health care as a commodity rather than a human right) when you purchase and insurance policy they have every right as a business interested in making money to say: "Do you have any pre-existing medical condition or genetic predisposition to any significant medical illness?" If you say no when the answer is truly yes, you are violating your end of the contract. - The simple solution would be to outlaw such questions from being raised
- The more intelligent solution is to outlaw discrimination based on pre-existing medical conditions (thus destroying the business model of the insurance industry as it exists now in the US, which wouldn't be a bad thing). The point of the medical industry is to cure people. The point of the medical insurance industry is to make the most money possible. They are contradictory goals for which only legislation can facilitate a more rational change.
And a point from the article:
A bill that would ban genetic discrimination by insurers and employers -- and presumably make people feel safer about taking care of their health -- is stalled in the Senate. I will tell you that if insurers have this information then they will take steps to discriminate and obfuscate this discrimination as best they can. Like any other multi-billion dollar industry, these people are not fools or philanthropists; they will use creative accountants (think Enron), statisticians (think Ford Pinto), lawyers (just think, no explanation required), lobbyists, MBAs, etc to get what they want and minimize any adverse effects of their image.
Any legacy operating system is not a good idea for running on modern hardware because the driver support will be non-existent. This ironically enough was / (is?) Vista's main problem, along with some applications that were not specifically designed to run on Vista.
Built in virtualization would have probably been a better approach than what M$ has done thus far: trying to tweak Vista to support the most popular XP applications. I wonder how many people even bother to try and use the Compatibility Wizard.
I would suspect their is an amount of bloatware issues with Vista as well, like running Disk Defragmenter as a service, Aero, etc. I would suspect that there are probably many things that don't need to be running constantly. Some day I'll boot back into the Vista partition and check out all the services that are running.
CNN and other organisations need to toe the line otherwise they get poor responsiveness from the Pentagon, Whitehouse etc. Yes of course and you will also get the same rote and canned answers that have been vetted by PR staff. Nothing really inspirational or newsworthy here. We can get the same from any major news organization. Those who take calculated risks (like in the stock market or any other endeavor) are the ones who will reap the most rewards in the long run.
You argue that the Producer was being stupid for having a blog and that he should have realized the consequences. I disagree, I think this person probably did realize the consequences (he was in the news media after all), but may have under-estimated the banality of CNN executives and the more dubious nature of the Human Resource profession.
But; the idea behind the article is about what is fair and reasonable. I would argue that being fired for having a blog is not fair or reasonable, and in the end it merely damages CNN's reputation. For the average person that doesn't read Slashdot or doesn't read the referenced articles to Wikipedia entries (for example) then this will be a non-issue. So too, for the average person who watches CNN for their daily news fix; an employee's blog will hardly be relevant or noticeable unless it is specifically pointed out and made noticeable by CNN.
Whenever you mix business with idealism, the business side of the debate will always win. I noted one time a sign that was hanging in a company's sales department, "The buck stops here". If one wants truly objective news then it cannot come from a business nor any source that offers donations, because these sources of revenue will always provide a conflict of interest to the news that gets presented, and how that news is presented.
It is more for the audience to have the critical thinking skills to see through the biases of the news that is presented to them, and hopefully a rational compromise between the editors and the advertisers to present the news as fairly as possible. Unfortunately compromise itself takes critical thinking abilities into account, and more intellectual work than your average person either can or is willing to do. Compromise itself can water-down stories, but at least it is an attempt at fairness.
Wait, you're crediting a 40's-era propaganda campaign to Steve Jobs? Of course not. If you read my comment more carefully, and actually take the time to understand it, you will note that I was equating something that SJ said (in this case you can take this as being metaphorical, because I'm not going to take the time to look up SJ quotations) towards his charisma, and more specifically to the Reality Distortion Field that is attributed to him. The emphasis should be put on using this rather tired 1940's cliché and equating it to his charisma. I do remember reading that SJ had a poster in his office that had this phrase; and in regards to his behaviour he liked to read people's outgoing email to see what they were saying about him and the company. He is also not shy about threatening to sue people; thus the meme of Steve Jobs lives on. But I digress, having to explain a piece of humour defeats it's subtleties.
Pardon? How does trusted computing plug the analogue hole, and what has 64 bits got to do with it? The 64-bits is just a product of history. Microsoft's plan is to have all there 64-bit operating systems support TCP, and Microsoft plans to phase out all their 32-bit operating systems (much like they did with their 16-bit operating systems) circa 2010. One of the goals of TCP is to in fact "plug" the analogue hole. The idea being that hardware would be harder to crack than software, and the hardware thus helping the OS to police the software and policies set forth within, that designate user rights (such as copying). As lgw points out, the analogue hole is itself not fully plugged ATM (probably only because of compatibility issues with TCP High Def monitors and video cards for example (and those that are not fully compatible yet [we here such marketing phrases as HD-compatible for example]), and the marketing and PR issues that ensue when people cannot adequately use the products they purchased).
From what I can gather from TFA the only thing that is happening with this technology is that it is merely making a copy of the analogue version of a song. With 64-bit computers that support hardware and software base Trusted Computing Platform, and the 64-bit versions of Windows which support TCP software and hardware, this application may become antiquated in the not to distant future.
Well if we can get everybody here on Slash to keep this little secret to ourselves, I'm sure there won't be any problems with the MPAA, DMCA or any other organizations harassing the company with lawsuits, etc. To quote the eloquent and charismaticSteve Jobs, "Loose lips sink ships".
Thanks for making your point. I was actually going to use "steganography" in my original arguement, but for the life of me I could not think of the term (remember it's definition or spelling; and Google was no help for me here). When I first got modded Troll I was planning on doing research (that is searching for references of things I already know or heard about), like the British government asking for encryption keys. And the more recent article here on Slash about how a person had her computer confiscated and was forced to provide passwords.
I sometimes get tired of searching for references that to me should be very obvious to Slashdot readers. Thanks for making a note of this.
Oh, I was not disagreeing with you. Sorry if it sounded that way, just adding some further talking points:) I was not trying to imply that I disagree with you, or that you said anything wrong whatsoever. Indeed it can (seem to be) presumptuous of me to imply that you should have read my previous posts in previous articles. People make assumptions, as you obviously have here (assuming that I think that you "sounded" like you disagree). People need to read through there assumptions and emotions and filter out only the relevant content. I make no attempt to help people here. And I never talk down to people (unless for a specifically rhetorical reason I decide to). Sometimes, in fact, for my own amusement, I will word things in such a way as to imply prejudice, but the careful reader will be aware not to judge me by the words I use, but by the ideas I express.
Okay, it sounds like a crazy solution, and maybe it is, but the answer doesn't have to involve bending over backwards and putting taxes on the public to fill the coffers of the studios, money which we all know will barely make it to the artists themselves. If you've read my previous posts in previous discussions of copyright issues you would realize that my opinions are very much reflective of your own. I merely propose a compromise as a practical solution, and not so much as an ideal. Sometimes you have to deal with the plutocrats on their own level.
Considering that the internet is becoming an absolute necessity to actually live, communicate etc, cutting of access is like saying you can't walk on the roads... to me it's starting to sound like a human rights violation. It's a necessity. In 20 years, nothing works without it. Imagine losing your bank account, having no phone, no home address... it would create a vast criminal class without ability to live a proper public life. Indeed it would be marginalizing a behavior into a ghetto. Today people need the Internet to look for employment. More and more companies are relying on the Internet not just to seek employees, but to communicate with employees. This would indeed be creating an underclass.
And the communication aspect of the Internet should not be minimized; people use it like they used the phone system and the post office of the past. In the end, it is not just punishing people; it is marginalizing people.
Im serious. If we find a way to enforce copy right again, why shouldnt we? I know we like stuff to be free, but it really shouldnt be unless the person chooses to give it away. While I have empathy for your ideals, I would argue that they do nonetheless go against intuition and human nature. For example, if a person buys something, then it is (intuitively at least) considered to be owned by that person, and thus this person would intuitively believe that they can do what they want with this product, including making copies of it. This has certainly been my experience with tape recorders and records.
A mitigation of possible or theoretical financial losses could be had through something like a generalized tax on recording media like CD-ROMs and tape cassettes that we have here in Canada. This is of course not ideal for the consumer or any industry groups seeking compensation, but it is a more fair compromise than the overbearing and arbitrary punishments given to P2P violators. Making these taxes fair and appropriate is the most difficult and contentious thing however; for example people these days don't generally copy records onto tape anymore, and yet the tax is still applied to tapes, and at the same rate at which it was originally applied.
Merely seeking to punish behavior, and arguably behavior that does not have an intuitive or natural feeling of being wrong (like armed robbery) is an overbearing and unfair approach.
This will fail the first time anyone encrypts their traffic. The way things are going, I can see encryption being made illegal unless the government or it's delegates do not have a key to subvert this encryption, thus making it useless. So unless one can successfully obfuscate said encryption, and always be ahead of the head hunters, then I would think the oligarchs in power will have a continuing and growing advantage.
Using tools like encryption only help mitigate the symptoms in the short term. We need to see a change in ideology overall, not just in the electorate, but in the leadership.
For purely artistic merit then I we leave my answer to originality.
Like one classical composer who charged people to listen to his four minute composition of silence, I'm always interested in artistic originality. Other than that, my tastes in video games are as diverse as my tastes in music, literature, wine, and many other aesthetic pursuits.
The term "cultural merit" is a bit vague for me. I suppose anything that would make people think or take a different perspective from reality, like the anti-hero role in literature for example.
OK I'll bite. I don't claim to be an expert on China, but I certainly have studied China, its history and politics. I can't name or date the dictators from memory, but I certainly can look them up. And yeah I do have a Social Science background, so I do know how to tell FUD from certainty. Quite frankly I am starting to doubt you. You give excuses and offer no solutions. I'm starting to think you are dishonest. Prove me that I am wrong.
If you learnt a bit more about China, you'd know that the guys at the top are nowhere close to imposing total arbitrary will over others. OK educate us. The "guys at the top" don't tell people what to do and they don't have police, etc to impose their will? How is this? Don't just tell me that they can't control their citizens, this would be obvious in such a large state. Soviet Russia still had churches and dissident groups for example.
There are numerous social problems that the guys at the top wish to fix, if only to reduce civil unrest, to prevent "peasant uprisings", and ultimately to secure their own jobs as China's leaders Yes this is stating the obvious in any dictatorship. What is your point?
and let me tell you that unless your proposal is to divide the country into smaller, easier-to-administrate regions, democracy and all those human rights silver-bullsht doesn't work. Well there is not democracy now, so things obviously do not work now. What is your point? Democracy is not a silver bullet (I know this because I live in a democracy), but it is not complete bullshit either.
and if you knew a little bit about the history and culture of China you understand why that wouldn't work either Tell us what we need to know. (Or are you just being a Shill for the Chinese government as I suspect?)
If you're going to spend time criticizing the Chinese government, at least learn a bit more about China before proposing "solutions" to the wrong problems. And by "learn" I mean exposing yourself to all perspectives, not only what "the Falungung people says". I see lots of propaganda, and nothing else.
Tell us how we can subvert and overthrow the Chinese government? Or maybe that is NOT what you want? I'm starting to think that the majority of pro-China dictatorship arguments made here are completely bogus.
I usually don't make responses like this but... well, I guess I'm just too used to dealing with asshats, so I will give you this advice, and I hope you remember this:
Moderators: I've been writing up retorts to the above AC when I realized that ALL of the arguments this Asshat is using are not even worth arguing about. The above poster is a Troll, and more than likely some American middle class teenager who has nothing better to do on the weekend. If you look at my user page you will realize that I am serious about having serious discussions. This asshat is just a Troll.
Slashdot Mirror
If the USA gets socialized medicine then where will Canadians go to get good health care instead of the meat grinder that is the Canadian health care system?
They will go to Canada. But I guess it depends, if they need a kidney they can always go to India or the Philippines and buy one from either naive victims or unwilling patients. The free market for medical care will always be available for the rich. And no there is no meat grinder here.
When the government steps in and starts dictating how much hospitals/doctors/etc can make then it's a disincentive to go to school a third of your life for that profession.
The government here already dictates how much doctors and nurses, etc get paid. On rare occasions there is grumbling, and in the end everybody settles. There is no shortage of doctors here. In some rural communities yes; but these communities can and often do offer incentives, like free housing for example.
And in the US there is HMO's, which from what I have heard, is a locked-in and rationed system of health care governed by the financial profits of insurance companies.
Also if we put cost caps on medication the same way that Canada does then our R&D will go down the tubes because the huge profit won't be available for the rare hit that decent drugs can be.
There is a healthy biotech industry in Canada. Companies can choose not to locate here, and companies can choose not to sell drugs to Canadians.
Here are some medical and pharmaceutical companies who have found it worth while to be in socialized-medicine Canada:
http://ca.dir.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Business_to_Business/Health_Care/Pharmaceuticals/
I work 80 hours a week, and live on a tight budget and spend a lot on health care, and my family gets great care.
I work 40 hours a week and have a shitty low paying job and I don't spend a lot on health care and my family gets great care.
Why the hell should someone who won't get off their ass to better their income and who spends all their income on things like lotto tickets, new cars, and big screen TV's drag down my health care so that I'm not "advantaged".
You are being presumptuous. I have never met anybody who wanted to "sit on their ass" and be poor. I certainly have never met anybody who is "poor" that owns luxury items like big screen TV's. In my province at least, the welfare system is rather rigorous. There are some working-class asshats here who think poor people are just ripping off the system. I have seen no statistics or evidence of this. If in fact they are doing it, then they will get caught. Bank records, net assets, job search history, etc. are all surveyed by the people responsible for rationing the money here.
This whole "fair" health care thing doesn't lift everyone up to great health care, it just drags everyone down to poor health care.
Not according to this study:
In the survey, people were asked to rate their health from poor to excellent, and 85 percent of Americans and 88 percent of Canadians reported that they were in good, very good or excellent health.
Although there is a slight (and I would argue insignificant advantage for the US):
Americans were slightly more likely than Canadians to rate their health as excellent (26 percent compared to 24 percent).
And for uninsured Americans:
Among uninsured American respondents, 28 percent said the quality of the health care services they received was "excellent," 44 percent "good," and 28 percent "fair" or "poor."
Also:
Unmet medical needs during the past 12 months were reported by 13 percent of Americans and 11 percent
The chapter in the book you referenced speaks of welders with their own businesses (for example). This is nice, but it does not make reference to their abilities to create poetry or great works of art, or there ability to create mathematical proofs.
For the others: As a group, we are fairly well educated. Only about one in five are not college graduates. Many of us hold advanced degrees. Eighteen percent have master's degrees, 8 percent law degrees, 6 percent medical degrees, and 6 percent Ph.D.s. Well, most people who go to medical school are already born into (at the very least) upper middle class families. Ref: Getting Doctored (disclaimer: this is a PDF that appears to be just a sample page. I did however read the book; and so I list it as a reference for my point).
And so too, it is not surprising that these millionaires (in your referenced book) can As a group, we believe that education is extremely important for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren. We spend heavily for the educations of our offspring. Also from your referenced book: I am a tightwad...Oh, they made me another offer--to donate in my name the money I earned for my interview to my favorite charity. But I told them, "I am my favorite charity." And so it is with higher education in general; the richer you are (or your parents are), the more likely you will be to go on to higher education.
And yes I am aware that ordinary people with average incomes can accumulate great amounts of wealth through frugalness and the magic of compound interest. From a purely financial perspective this is fine, but it does not make these people biologically better than poor people (remember, you were talking about a biological evolutionary survival-of-the-fittest as being a positive for society's health care system). When I stated Those at the economic apex of wealth I meant people like CEO's and those professionals who strive to higher levels within a corporation, and I was not thinking of middle-class people who built their wealth up over many years. At the very least I failed to elaborate on this. The point being that wealth (and in this case the ability to afford health care) does not correlate into being biologically superior, nor is it an imperative to being biologically superior. Those welder's who owned their own business may have had great investment advisors, but it doesn't mean they are either moral or intellectually or biologically superior. They may very well be asshats, but from what I have read; The Millionaire Next Door does not bring up these points.
Regards,
UTW
Best regards,
UTW
Interesting perhaps, Insightful no. The evolution that you speak of involves economics as much as it does biology. Those at the economic apex of wealth get there through accidents of luck (e.g. born into wealth, gambling addict lucked-out on a lottery ticket, etc), gross illegal activity (e.g. bank robbers, mafia hit men), manipulation or dishonesty (sales people, CEOs, union-busters; like the asshats in the auto-industry hiring detectives to find any type of dirt on Ralph Nader when he lobbied for safety regulations for automobiles, or more recently Dick Cheney and Haliburton). Most people at the top don't mind this type of natural selection. Most people in the middle can live with it as long is it does not effect them (hypocrisy is a big theme of mine), and the people at the bottom get screwed as they always do. This type of natural selection only breeds lazy ideas and corruption.
- The more intelligent solution is to outlaw discrimination based on pre-existing medical conditions (thus destroying the business model of the insurance industry as it exists now in the US, which wouldn't be a bad thing). The point of the medical industry is to cure people. The point of the medical insurance industry is to make the most money possible. They are contradictory goals for which only legislation can facilitate a more rational change.
And a point from the article: A bill that would ban genetic discrimination by insurers and employers -- and presumably make people feel safer about taking care of their health -- is stalled in the Senate. I will tell you that if insurers have this information then they will take steps to discriminate and obfuscate this discrimination as best they can. Like any other multi-billion dollar industry, these people are not fools or philanthropists; they will use creative accountants (think Enron), statisticians (think Ford Pinto), lawyers (just think, no explanation required), lobbyists, MBAs, etc to get what they want and minimize any adverse effects of their image.
Any legacy operating system is not a good idea for running on modern hardware because the driver support will be non-existent. This ironically enough was / (is?) Vista's main problem, along with some applications that were not specifically designed to run on Vista.
Built in virtualization would have probably been a better approach than what M$ has done thus far: trying to tweak Vista to support the most popular XP applications. I wonder how many people even bother to try and use the Compatibility Wizard.
I would suspect their is an amount of bloatware issues with Vista as well, like running Disk Defragmenter as a service, Aero, etc. I would suspect that there are probably many things that don't need to be running constantly. Some day I'll boot back into the Vista partition and check out all the services that are running.
You argue that the Producer was being stupid for having a blog and that he should have realized the consequences. I disagree, I think this person probably did realize the consequences (he was in the news media after all), but may have under-estimated the banality of CNN executives and the more dubious nature of the Human Resource profession.
But; the idea behind the article is about what is fair and reasonable. I would argue that being fired for having a blog is not fair or reasonable, and in the end it merely damages CNN's reputation. For the average person that doesn't read Slashdot or doesn't read the referenced articles to Wikipedia entries (for example) then this will be a non-issue. So too, for the average person who watches CNN for their daily news fix; an employee's blog will hardly be relevant or noticeable unless it is specifically pointed out and made noticeable by CNN.
Whenever you mix business with idealism, the business side of the debate will always win. I noted one time a sign that was hanging in a company's sales department, "The buck stops here". If one wants truly objective news then it cannot come from a business nor any source that offers donations, because these sources of revenue will always provide a conflict of interest to the news that gets presented, and how that news is presented.
It is more for the audience to have the critical thinking skills to see through the biases of the news that is presented to them, and hopefully a rational compromise between the editors and the advertisers to present the news as fairly as possible. Unfortunately compromise itself takes critical thinking abilities into account, and more intellectual work than your average person either can or is willing to do. Compromise itself can water-down stories, but at least it is an attempt at fairness.
From what I can gather from TFA the only thing that is happening with this technology is that it is merely making a copy of the analogue version of a song. With 64-bit computers that support hardware and software base Trusted Computing Platform, and the 64-bit versions of Windows which support TCP software and hardware, this application may become antiquated in the not to distant future.
Well if we can get everybody here on Slash to keep this little secret to ourselves, I'm sure there won't be any problems with the MPAA, DMCA or any other organizations harassing the company with lawsuits, etc. To quote the eloquent and charismaticSteve Jobs, "Loose lips sink ships".
Thanks for making your point. I was actually going to use "steganography" in my original arguement, but for the life of me I could not think of the term (remember it's definition or spelling; and Google was no help for me here).
When I first got modded Troll I was planning on doing research (that is searching for references of things I already know or heard about), like the British government asking for encryption keys. And the more recent article here on Slash about how a person had her computer confiscated and was forced to provide passwords.
I sometimes get tired of searching for references that to me should be very obvious to Slashdot readers. Thanks for making a note of this.
Best regards,
UTW
And the communication aspect of the Internet should not be minimized; people use it like they used the phone system and the post office of the past. In the end, it is not just punishing people; it is marginalizing people.
A mitigation of possible or theoretical financial losses could be had through something like a generalized tax on recording media like CD-ROMs and tape cassettes that we have here in Canada. This is of course not ideal for the consumer or any industry groups seeking compensation, but it is a more fair compromise than the overbearing and arbitrary punishments given to P2P violators. Making these taxes fair and appropriate is the most difficult and contentious thing however; for example people these days don't generally copy records onto tape anymore, and yet the tax is still applied to tapes, and at the same rate at which it was originally applied.
Merely seeking to punish behavior, and arguably behavior that does not have an intuitive or natural feeling of being wrong (like armed robbery) is an overbearing and unfair approach.
Using tools like encryption only help mitigate the symptoms in the short term. We need to see a change in ideology overall, not just in the electorate, but in the leadership.
Like a virus bad ideas have a way of spreading.
For purely artistic merit then I we leave my answer to originality.
Like one classical composer who charged people to listen to his four minute composition of silence, I'm always interested in artistic originality. Other than that, my tastes in video games are as diverse as my tastes in music, literature, wine, and many other aesthetic pursuits.
The term "cultural merit" is a bit vague for me. I suppose anything that would make people think or take a different perspective from reality, like the anti-hero role in literature for example.
Tell us how we can subvert and overthrow the Chinese government?
Or maybe that is NOT what you want? I'm starting to think that the majority of pro-China dictatorship arguments made here are completely bogus.
I usually don't make responses like this but... well, I guess I'm just too used to dealing with asshats, so I will give you this advice, and I hope you remember this:
Never underestimate who you are dealing with.
I will go out of my way here to ask you for an apology.
Will you actually admit that you are wrong?
Moderators: I've been writing up retorts to the above AC when I realized that ALL of the arguments this Asshat is using are not even worth arguing about. The above poster is a Troll, and more than likely some American middle class teenager who has nothing better to do on the weekend. If you look at my user page you will realize that I am serious about having serious discussions. This asshat is just a Troll.
Thanks, and best regards,
UTC