Was somebody actually dumb enough to believe they could sell enough lead "processors" to make the whole thing worthwhile?
Probably not. Which leads me to think that the plan was not to sell fakes as the real thing but was to steal a whole lot of the real processors and replace them with fakes so it wouldn't be noticed for a while.
I understand the issue but still as somebody who considers the freedom of individuals to do whatever the hell they like with their own body in the same league as the freedom of speech, I don't see what gives the government any right to make this kind of decisions for them. Regulate the labeling all you like, make them print the fact that the risks are unknown in big bold letters etc. Still, the final decision should be with the patient. In the cases where there is not approved treatment and the patient is certainly going to die anyway, denying them untested treatments is criminal.
A agree. It's unreasonable to expect perfection from anybody. I've had some bad experiences with Newegg, received bad hard drives one after another, been charged a restocking fee for returning an item that arrived broken. The other fifty times I've been very happy with their service though and I tend to trust them more than other online retailers (Except for B&H Photo. They really do blow everyone else away in customer service).
That "one daring little company" is gonna get shut down, which is a good thing. Clinical testing of their treatment method has yet to be completed, and a lot of people could get hurt if it turns out there are problems.
In general I agree, you have to do clinical tests. However, I don't see why patients should not be able to voluntarily accept this or other untested treatments provided that a full disclaimer is made. In a case where the approval of a treatment with a great deal of evidence in it's favor has long been delayed due to political or religious reasons as is the case with human stem cell therapies, working around the FDA might be a good thing.
Kids can't get the jobs they used to get these days.
Do you really think businesses hire illegal immigrants because they prefer to have illegal workers who can't speak English rather than legal ones who can? I pay a Mexican guy to cut the grass on my front lawn once a week. He may be legal or illegal, I neither know nor care. I pay him a good deal more than the minimum wage and I would certainly be willing to pay the same to an American teenager or adult to do the same job. Guess what, even in times of high unemployment, American citizens of any color are just not willing to do those kind of jobs. My only choice is to hire an immigrant or to do the job myself. There is a reason why there are 10 million at least illegal immigrants here, which is that there is a high demand for them mainly because nobody else is willing to do those kind of low skill/low pay jobs.
(Yes, I know - all the libertardians will now proceed to mod me down and talk about how the invisible market fairy will make it all better.)
I don't mod down posts merely because I disagree with them, and I won't try to explain things to you either, because idiots like you who still don't understand how free market and liberty (yes, you can't have one without the other) are beneficial to them will probably never understand it and are not worth wasting time on. So, I won't reply at all.
He did neither of those things. He entered into a voluntary agreement with another individual on a rate of labor that was acceptable to both of them. It should be none of anybody else's business.
It may or may not be the case that the FDA is needed, but one can argue about it, it's not nearly as clear cut as your post suggests. For example, google Milton Friedman and FDA. But the reason I am replying is this idea that the moment government stops regulating something, it becomes an anarchy in which anyone can do whatever they like. In a free market every incentive is for food producers to provide safe products. The moment a food company kills somebody through neglect, that company is finished just through the damage to its reputation, never mind the lawsuits. The elaborate and costly safety procedures mandated by law don't necessarily make the food safer, but they do make it more expensive which means that the poorest people can only afford the cheapest and lowest quality foods which also causes health problems. In case of drugs, people are also killed through excessive safety regulation which delays drug research and makes the drugs much more expensive. You have to look at both sides of the equation before taking even the food safety as an example of something that obviously needs regulation. Regulating the choice of browsers, which by the way are all freely downloadable, is ridiculous.
Not to mention that he can't grasp the awesome power of 300 APIs (sorry, "technologies") each with three letter abbreviation names starting with J that make up the resume of a typical Java programmer.
That's nothing unusual when it comes to hard drives. I ordered four from Newegg and two were bad. I returned the two bad ones and received one good and one bad. Returned that one for replacement and finally I had my 4 drive RAID. The only other time I bought a hard drive it failed within a week.
Maybe it's just my luck but out of total of nine drives received including all the replacements (7 WD, 2 Seagate) from Newegg four were either DOA or failed soon after (click of death).
At this point if I had to buy another hard drive I would consider buying two, fully expecting one to fail and if by any chance I happened to get two good ones just return one for a refund.
I don't know about 180 day freezing of funds, that sounds extremely fishy to me. But the part about not doing business with potentially risky clients? Try opening a merchant account with a major bank and see that you will get rejected or have your account closed in a second if they smell something risky in your business regarding things like a slightest hint of potential copyright liability or legal adult content, or any other legal type of business that they disapprove of.
While I find this story hilarious (if true), according to the article, the actual DRM scheme of requiring constant internet connection has not been cracked. What happened is that Ubisoft chickened out and didn't implement the scheme fully - it included a feature (to be enabled by a patch if necessary) that allowed games to be played without internet connection after all, and this is what has been hacked. My prediction: future games released without the said feature and the gamers screwed even more.
How can a lawyer be liable because he took on a client?
He's not. I know the headline is misleading but please RTFA. He is not jointly liable for the damages awarded in the case, he is liable for some of the fees incurred by the RIAA which were caused by his (ridiculous as well as illegal) tactics. From one of the linked articles:
The Court's indulgence is at an end. Too often, as described below, the important issues in this case have been overshadowed by the tactics of defense counsel: taping opposing counsel without permission (and in violation of the law), posting recordings of court communications and e-mails with potential experts (who have rejected the positions counsel asserts) on the Internet, and now allegedly replicating the acts that are the subject of this lawsuit, namely uploading the copyrighted songs that the Defendant is accused of file-sharing.
I don't use Bing but for different reasons: a) in my experience it doesn't give me the results that are as relevant as Google's, and b) because it has that stupid picture on the front page. As for your reasons:
1) Shamelessly promoted to the point of paying people off to make it a default choice (EG, Verizon & Blackberry ordeal, many others.)
If you are going to boycott companies that advertise aggressively then your list must be pretty long. Do you boycott Verizon, Blackberry etc because they "shamelessly" accept money from Microsoft to make Bing their default search engine? Why don't you boycott those sites you mention (real estate etc)? Surely if the fact that Microsoft is paying sites to use Bing is evil, then accepting money to use an inferior search engine/maps etc on your own site is an even bigger evil?
2) Created expressly to "Stop Google", rather than to fill some otherwise useful purpose. If it had been created to fill some role that google failed to deliver at, then I would consider it useful.
I think you are missing the point of competition. If companies only ever tried to do something new and never tried to "fill the role" already filled by some other company, we would be all be very much worse off. In my opinion Bing serves a useful purpose to me personally even though I don't use it: it puts pressure on Google to keep improving their service.
I think you got that the wrong way around. According to every poll, overwhelming force of public opinion in the US has always been opposed to legalizing marijuana. However, that most definitely isn't going to change my mind, as overwhelming force of public opinion is very often wrong.
Well, on one hand what is it any business of other people to vote on what I chose to smoke or not smoke in my house? On the other hand, pretty pathetic failure of imagination to have this as the top idea to improve our government.
Maybe so, but does it 'strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness by making government more transparent, participatory, and collaborative.'?
Isn't it just the case of being generous with other people's money? Another way to look at it, I am due to pay you $100, say for some services provided. I receive the services, but I pay you only $50, and I give the other $50 to charity. I am not donating my money, I am donating your money. Say you are the government and the services are whatever services our taxes pay for, roads, law enforcement, public education etc etc.
As far as I know, in the US at least donations of labor are not tax deductible. Btw the whole idea of deducting charitable contributions strikes me as a bit weird. If you are donating something to charity, why would you want (or be allowed) to pass that cost onto the rest of the taxpayers?
Yeah, but in those cases if something horrible happens and all data gets deleted, nothing of value will be lost, whereas with slashdot........ok never mind
And stop killing our ham radio operators, you goddamn savages.
Hate to be responding to a troll, but do you really think that every one of 9 million people in Haiti was responsible for shooting at some Dominicans? Do you consider yourself a goddamned savage because some Americans commit crimes and murders too?
Good luck. Depending on what state you live in, you are either well and truly fucked, or deeply, seriously fucked.
The best thing you can do is start a trivial corporation, hire on some fake employees, and then get a group plan.
I left my job and started a small business about two years ago. I applied for individual health insurance with about five companies and I got declined by some of them due to a preexisting condition (a knee injury/surgery about 6 months prior), but I got pretty decent quotes by some of them. As it happened, the plan I wanted was one of those denied, so I called them and offered to exclude knee related problems from the coverage and they agreed. This is something I highly recommend to do if you get denied for that reason. Then their agent called me back and said if I can send them evidence (such as a letter from my doctor) that the knee is fully recovered, they will give me full coverage without any exceptions, which they did in the end. So now I have a pretty decent medical and dental insurance for about $200/month. For that money the best you can do is get fully covered in case of a serious illness, but you pay a bit more for routine stuff.
So, no, you are not necessarily "deeply, seriously fucked". The horror stories mainly come from people with serious preexisting conditions who can't get insured at any price. However, as far as I know there is a bipartisan agreement to ban insurance companies from considering preexisting conditions so whenever the bill gets passed and in whatever form, that will surely be fixed.
Slashdot Mirror
I would think you pump's maximum psi rating would be the weakest point. Nothing would break, you just couldn't pump in any more air.
Why not just move cities closer to each other. It would be cheaper than your idea.
Was somebody actually dumb enough to believe they could sell enough lead "processors" to make the whole thing worthwhile?
Probably not. Which leads me to think that the plan was not to sell fakes as the real thing but was to steal a whole lot of the real processors and replace them with fakes so it wouldn't be noticed for a while.
I understand the issue but still as somebody who considers the freedom of individuals to do whatever the hell they like with their own body in the same league as the freedom of speech, I don't see what gives the government any right to make this kind of decisions for them. Regulate the labeling all you like, make them print the fact that the risks are unknown in big bold letters etc. Still, the final decision should be with the patient. In the cases where there is not approved treatment and the patient is certainly going to die anyway, denying them untested treatments is criminal.
A agree. It's unreasonable to expect perfection from anybody. I've had some bad experiences with Newegg, received bad hard drives one after another, been charged a restocking fee for returning an item that arrived broken. The other fifty times I've been very happy with their service though and I tend to trust them more than other online retailers (Except for B&H Photo. They really do blow everyone else away in customer service).
That "one daring little company" is gonna get shut down, which is a good thing. Clinical testing of their treatment method has yet to be completed, and a lot of people could get hurt if it turns out there are problems.
In general I agree, you have to do clinical tests. However, I don't see why patients should not be able to voluntarily accept this or other untested treatments provided that a full disclaimer is made. In a case where the approval of a treatment with a great deal of evidence in it's favor has long been delayed due to political or religious reasons as is the case with human stem cell therapies, working around the FDA might be a good thing.
Kids can't get the jobs they used to get these days.
Do you really think businesses hire illegal immigrants because they prefer to have illegal workers who can't speak English rather than legal ones who can? I pay a Mexican guy to cut the grass on my front lawn once a week. He may be legal or illegal, I neither know nor care. I pay him a good deal more than the minimum wage and I would certainly be willing to pay the same to an American teenager or adult to do the same job. Guess what, even in times of high unemployment, American citizens of any color are just not willing to do those kind of jobs. My only choice is to hire an immigrant or to do the job myself. There is a reason why there are 10 million at least illegal immigrants here, which is that there is a high demand for them mainly because nobody else is willing to do those kind of low skill/low pay jobs.
(Yes, I know - all the libertardians will now proceed to mod me down and talk about how the invisible market fairy will make it all better.)
I don't mod down posts merely because I disagree with them, and I won't try to explain things to you either, because idiots like you who still don't understand how free market and liberty (yes, you can't have one without the other) are beneficial to them will probably never understand it and are not worth wasting time on. So, I won't reply at all.
He did neither of those things. He entered into a voluntary agreement with another individual on a rate of labor that was acceptable to both of them. It should be none of anybody else's business.
It may or may not be the case that the FDA is needed, but one can argue about it, it's not nearly as clear cut as your post suggests. For example, google Milton Friedman and FDA. But the reason I am replying is this idea that the moment government stops regulating something, it becomes an anarchy in which anyone can do whatever they like. In a free market every incentive is for food producers to provide safe products. The moment a food company kills somebody through neglect, that company is finished just through the damage to its reputation, never mind the lawsuits. The elaborate and costly safety procedures mandated by law don't necessarily make the food safer, but they do make it more expensive which means that the poorest people can only afford the cheapest and lowest quality foods which also causes health problems. In case of drugs, people are also killed through excessive safety regulation which delays drug research and makes the drugs much more expensive. You have to look at both sides of the equation before taking even the food safety as an example of something that obviously needs regulation. Regulating the choice of browsers, which by the way are all freely downloadable, is ridiculous.
Not to mention that he can't grasp the awesome power of 300 APIs (sorry, "technologies") each with three letter abbreviation names starting with J that make up the resume of a typical Java programmer.
That's nothing unusual when it comes to hard drives. I ordered four from Newegg and two were bad. I returned the two bad ones and received one good and one bad. Returned that one for replacement and finally I had my 4 drive RAID. The only other time I bought a hard drive it failed within a week. Maybe it's just my luck but out of total of nine drives received including all the replacements (7 WD, 2 Seagate) from Newegg four were either DOA or failed soon after (click of death). At this point if I had to buy another hard drive I would consider buying two, fully expecting one to fail and if by any chance I happened to get two good ones just return one for a refund.
I don't know about 180 day freezing of funds, that sounds extremely fishy to me. But the part about not doing business with potentially risky clients? Try opening a merchant account with a major bank and see that you will get rejected or have your account closed in a second if they smell something risky in your business regarding things like a slightest hint of potential copyright liability or legal adult content, or any other legal type of business that they disapprove of.
While I find this story hilarious (if true), according to the article, the actual DRM scheme of requiring constant internet connection has not been cracked. What happened is that Ubisoft chickened out and didn't implement the scheme fully - it included a feature (to be enabled by a patch if necessary) that allowed games to be played without internet connection after all, and this is what has been hacked. My prediction: future games released without the said feature and the gamers screwed even more.
How can a lawyer be liable because he took on a client?
He's not. I know the headline is misleading but please RTFA. He is not jointly liable for the damages awarded in the case, he is liable for some of the fees incurred by the RIAA which were caused by his (ridiculous as well as illegal) tactics. From one of the linked articles:
The Court's indulgence is at an end. Too often, as described below, the important issues in this case have been overshadowed by the tactics of defense counsel: taping opposing counsel without permission (and in violation of the law), posting recordings of court communications and e-mails with potential experts (who have rejected the positions counsel asserts) on the Internet, and now allegedly replicating the acts that are the subject of this lawsuit, namely uploading the copyrighted songs that the Defendant is accused of file-sharing.
I don't use Bing but for different reasons: a) in my experience it doesn't give me the results that are as relevant as Google's, and b) because it has that stupid picture on the front page. As for your reasons:
1) Shamelessly promoted to the point of paying people off to make it a default choice (EG, Verizon & Blackberry ordeal, many others.)
If you are going to boycott companies that advertise aggressively then your list must be pretty long. Do you boycott Verizon, Blackberry etc because they "shamelessly" accept money from Microsoft to make Bing their default search engine? Why don't you boycott those sites you mention (real estate etc)? Surely if the fact that Microsoft is paying sites to use Bing is evil, then accepting money to use an inferior search engine/maps etc on your own site is an even bigger evil?
2) Created expressly to "Stop Google", rather than to fill some otherwise useful purpose. If it had been created to fill some role that google failed to deliver at, then I would consider it useful.
I think you are missing the point of competition. If companies only ever tried to do something new and never tried to "fill the role" already filled by some other company, we would be all be very much worse off. In my opinion Bing serves a useful purpose to me personally even though I don't use it: it puts pressure on Google to keep improving their service.
I think you got that the wrong way around. According to every poll, overwhelming force of public opinion in the US has always been opposed to legalizing marijuana. However, that most definitely isn't going to change my mind, as overwhelming force of public opinion is very often wrong.
Well, on one hand what is it any business of other people to vote on what I chose to smoke or not smoke in my house? On the other hand, pretty pathetic failure of imagination to have this as the top idea to improve our government.
Maybe so, but does it 'strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness by making government more transparent, participatory, and collaborative.'?
Isn't it just the case of being generous with other people's money? Another way to look at it, I am due to pay you $100, say for some services provided. I receive the services, but I pay you only $50, and I give the other $50 to charity. I am not donating my money, I am donating your money. Say you are the government and the services are whatever services our taxes pay for, roads, law enforcement, public education etc etc.
As far as I know, in the US at least donations of labor are not tax deductible. Btw the whole idea of deducting charitable contributions strikes me as a bit weird. If you are donating something to charity, why would you want (or be allowed) to pass that cost onto the rest of the taxpayers?
Companies involved in open-source projects generally intend to profit from it. It's not a charitable donation but a marketing strategy.
Yeah, but in those cases if something horrible happens and all data gets deleted, nothing of value will be lost, whereas with slashdot........ok never mind
And stop killing our ham radio operators, you goddamn savages.
Hate to be responding to a troll, but do you really think that every one of 9 million people in Haiti was responsible for shooting at some Dominicans? Do you consider yourself a goddamned savage because some Americans commit crimes and murders too?
Good luck. Depending on what state you live in, you are either well and truly fucked, or deeply, seriously fucked. The best thing you can do is start a trivial corporation, hire on some fake employees, and then get a group plan.
I left my job and started a small business about two years ago. I applied for individual health insurance with about five companies and I got declined by some of them due to a preexisting condition (a knee injury/surgery about 6 months prior), but I got pretty decent quotes by some of them. As it happened, the plan I wanted was one of those denied, so I called them and offered to exclude knee related problems from the coverage and they agreed. This is something I highly recommend to do if you get denied for that reason. Then their agent called me back and said if I can send them evidence (such as a letter from my doctor) that the knee is fully recovered, they will give me full coverage without any exceptions, which they did in the end. So now I have a pretty decent medical and dental insurance for about $200/month. For that money the best you can do is get fully covered in case of a serious illness, but you pay a bit more for routine stuff.
So, no, you are not necessarily "deeply, seriously fucked". The horror stories mainly come from people with serious preexisting conditions who can't get insured at any price. However, as far as I know there is a bipartisan agreement to ban insurance companies from considering preexisting conditions so whenever the bill gets passed and in whatever form, that will surely be fixed.