What disappoints me is that Apple gets (buys?) a ridiculous amount of publicity in so called "news" stories for inferior and overpriced products while much better and cheaper alternatives hardly ever get a mention - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00126V8WU
Users can see data, and drill into it; re-sort it; explore it interactively - all from within a virtual world.
Can you shoot at a stock prices chart until it explodes in a huge fireball? Can you chop it up with an axe? Can you take a dump on it? I can see some value in this after all
"Peter Sunde of The Pirate Bay disagrees however. He says that more than 800,000 people have uploaded stuff to The Pirate Bay, and that it is unlikely to be the only source, but that it could possibly be a major source."
Note that movies are being used here as unit of measurement. The article doesn't mention what portion of that data are movies or whether or not it contains any movies at all.
Silverlight comes along offering nothing new but plenty of obstacles and lock-out of end user browsers, requiring active download of a plug-in, and yet, there are bozos out there willing to commit paying customers and their websites to an endless, costly, non-standard nightmare in exchange for nothing! You can't make shit like that up, it's real.
Well, from what I hear, Silverlight is actually pretty good and some of us hate flash. Still, probably a stupid choice for that developer to make unless it gave them some feature they needed that they couldn't get elsewhere. On the other hand I think open source community is getting a little bit trigger happy with these kind of lawsuits (or whatever "a complaint to the European Commission" is). It's not uncommon for the government tenders to include some sort of requirement for proprietary formats,.pdf,.doc or whatever. How is this any different? Just use a PC to submit your bid, or as someone pointed out there are other options as well.
A lot of bogus traffic comes from countries that don't offer much in commercial value.
Depends on what you're selling. If your products have global appeal, you might well be losing some customers from Russia. I have setup and maintained credit card processing system for a number of sites and in my experience about 95% of customers are from USA and Europe, the remaining 5% split between Australia, Japan, S. Korea, Russia, Israel, and very occasionally a South American or one of the wealthier Arab countries. So I guess it is possible that you can exclude some countries and not lose much, but it's not as easy as you think. You also may lose reputation if you are a serious company and people see a message like that pop up due to failings with IP geolocation or simply because your client went on a trip. IMO it also makes the internet a sadder place. Imagine if such practice became widespread and every site started excluding traffic on country by country basis based on what commercial value each country represents. Given the numbers I mentioned above, most of the world would effectively be cut off from the internet, except for their local sites.
If you they can also figure out the location the picture was taken on (perhaps as a tagging feature connected to Google Maps?)
Won't be necessary in many cases since EXIF specification contains gps tags and some GPS enabled phones, notably iPhone, already embed gps data in the photos. Some high end cameras do it as well, while others provide a gps add-on http://www.google.com/search?q=exif+geolocation
If libertarianism really worked, then Somalia- which lacks a strong central government- would be a thriving society, not a failed state.
Sorry, but you are completely misinformed. Libertarianism is not the same thing as anarchism. A limit to an individual's rights is denying other individuals their rights. Without this there are no individual rights possible at all and the law of the jungle will rule, as in your Somalia example. A proper function of a government and the reason it is beneficial thing to have (as a servant of the individual citizens, not their master) is to protect those rights. This includes police (protection from criminals), military (protection from foreign invasion) and courts (application of laws and settling disputes). Of course these are complicated things (especially law) and they include a whole bunch of related issues that have to be provided and paid for.
ALL other government spending imho (not necessarily a libertarian viewpoint) is only justifiable to the extend that a. it is essential for the proper functioning of society and b. there is no realistic private alternative. For example, private, toll supported, for profit, roads would be preferable to public spending monstrosity we have (and a hell of a lot more efficient to build and maintain) as long as there is a practical way to collect toll without causing delays, privacy problems etc. Perhaps some day technology would provide this but currently it is still mostly unrealistic.
the current economic meltdown is an example of why this faith in free markets is misplaced.
This is actually laughable. True free market capitalism has never been tried, but even the very limited forms of it have in general been wildly successful compared to alternatives. After all the economic disasters, famines, human right abuses, totalitarian regimes, gulags etc that invariably happened in socialist states over many years, supporters of socialism have lost any right even to be honestly mistaken any more. Even the likes of Labour party in Britain have correctly realized that they were dragging their own country down and had to change course towards more liberal market capitalism.
Back to the issue though and some questions for those like you: How is it fair that people with no interest in games and no children are compelled by force to pay for this game (lets say that it really is paid by the government)? What do they gain for their money and who gives the government the right to spend it? Who decides which particular idea will be paid for, and which other multitude of spending ideas will be rejected? What agenda influences those decisions, personal whims of the decision makers? Wouldn't it be better if the game is made with private money and only those who want it would actually have to pay for it? Or another example, say with government funding of the arts. How fair is that artists who are not among the selected elite who benefits from these funds, actually have to struggle to pay their taxes which then go to finance other artists who are selected? Who does the selecting? Isn't that demeaning as well as grossly unfair? In short, the point is that with any benefit that comes from government spending you have to ask who are the victims, including those who are forced to pay for it against their wishes, as well as secondary victims (ex. anybody who doesn't get government's free money and then has to compete against somebody who does).
What evidence do you have that this is your money?
Hmm, well not much to be honest. The summary said "the MMO under development by NASA", so it seems clear enough, but then summaries are often wrong here. TFA doesn't mention who pays for the development at all. I'd be surprised if there is no NASA money going towards it though and if this will be a normal commercial game since the article does mention that NASA Learning Technologies is involved.
So what's next, Dept of Agriculture getting in on the game with SimFarmer? It's wrong because there are very few ways for the government to spend taxpayers' money that is justifiable and sorry but this isn't one of them. It's wrong to the game companies too who now face a competitor with huge guaranteed budget obtained by force, and no expectation of profit, in fact who probably will be giving the game out for free.
You'd think any lander we send up there looking for water would have the ability to analyze any liquid droplets growing, merging, and dripping on the lander's leg over the course of a Martian month.
Another example of why the "why send humans, robots can do everything just as well" idea is bogus. If that was an astronaut up there this would be resolved in a minute, not a month.
I think I can summarize your entire post with this one quote: these things should not be available to kids without guidance.
Absolutely right. I think just about everybody agrees that there are things that are not for kids. Now the real issue is does "should not be available" mean "should be forbidden by law"? I tend to think there are certain, very limited, cases where the government does have a role in protecting the child's rights against abuse or neglect by the parents, but in almost all cases it is in child's own interest to be raised by their own parents, as imperfect as they may be, rather then by government regulations. If this means that a parent allows their child to play a certain game before the rated age then so be it.
Why can't it be both? There is more good music today and it's more accessible to more people than ever before in history. It might be hard to find though since it's buried under a Mt Everest of crap.
Publicly owned airwaves are exactly the place where you should be able to express yourself. Not much of a free speech if the only place you can exercise it is in your own bathroom
There is nothing immoral about porn or prostitution as long as it's voluntary. Craigslist doesn't deliberately profit from stolen items, they will remove them (and probably contact the police) if they are discovered. TPB is more like craigslist where 99% of the items are stolen and they refuse to remove them even after being notified. As for news agencies reporting news being same as a web site providing a catalog of illegal content for download, I don't even know how to respond to that. What does one have to do with the other?
Legal or illegal is an open question but to me it's pretty clear cut that what they are doing is immoral. Without massive amounts of illegally shared content they wouldn't have the traffic that they can sell to advertisers. If they were refusing to take any payment for their service except to cover the costs they might have a case that they are engaged in some kind of anti-copyright crusade (which is bullshit and it would still be wrong even if it was true), but by profiting the alleged millions from other people's work, frankly they are just scum.
Slashdot Mirror
What disappoints me is that Apple gets (buys?) a ridiculous amount of publicity in so called "news" stories for inferior and overpriced products while much better and cheaper alternatives hardly ever get a mention - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00126V8WU
Users can see data, and drill into it; re-sort it; explore it interactively - all from within a virtual world.
Can you shoot at a stock prices chart until it explodes in a huge fireball? Can you chop it up with an axe? Can you take a dump on it? I can see some value in this after all
No boss, I'm not playing rpg games at work, I'm working on my quarterly sales report
So passing a ridiculous bill but adding amendments to make it ineffective in addition to being ridiculous is a good thing? Good job Utah
apparently on torrent site's P drive
They'll see them all right: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/21/0425218&from=rss
Probably slightly less wrong than to wish on lumps of rock and ice
Read it again
"Peter Sunde of The Pirate Bay disagrees however. He says that more than 800,000 people have uploaded stuff to The Pirate Bay, and that it is unlikely to be the only source, but that it could possibly be a major source."
Note that movies are being used here as unit of measurement. The article doesn't mention what portion of that data are movies or whether or not it contains any movies at all.
Silverlight comes along offering nothing new but plenty of obstacles and lock-out of end user browsers, requiring active download of a plug-in, and yet, there are bozos out there willing to commit paying customers and their websites to an endless, costly, non-standard nightmare in exchange for nothing! You can't make shit like that up, it's real.
.pdf, .doc or whatever. How is this any different? Just use a PC to submit your bid, or as someone pointed out there are other options as well.
Well, from what I hear, Silverlight is actually pretty good and some of us hate flash. Still, probably a stupid choice for that developer to make unless it gave them some feature they needed that they couldn't get elsewhere. On the other hand I think open source community is getting a little bit trigger happy with these kind of lawsuits (or whatever "a complaint to the European Commission" is). It's not uncommon for the government tenders to include some sort of requirement for proprietary formats,
A lot of bogus traffic comes from countries that don't offer much in commercial value.
Depends on what you're selling. If your products have global appeal, you might well be losing some customers from Russia. I have setup and maintained credit card processing system for a number of sites and in my experience about 95% of customers are from USA and Europe, the remaining 5% split between Australia, Japan, S. Korea, Russia, Israel, and very occasionally a South American or one of the wealthier Arab countries. So I guess it is possible that you can exclude some countries and not lose much, but it's not as easy as you think. You also may lose reputation if you are a serious company and people see a message like that pop up due to failings with IP geolocation or simply because your client went on a trip. IMO it also makes the internet a sadder place. Imagine if such practice became widespread and every site started excluding traffic on country by country basis based on what commercial value each country represents. Given the numbers I mentioned above, most of the world would effectively be cut off from the internet, except for their local sites.
If you they can also figure out the location the picture was taken on (perhaps as a tagging feature connected to Google Maps?)
Won't be necessary in many cases since EXIF specification contains gps tags and some GPS enabled phones, notably iPhone, already embed gps data in the photos. Some high end cameras do it as well, while others provide a gps add-on http://www.google.com/search?q=exif+geolocation
If libertarianism really worked, then Somalia- which lacks a strong central government- would be a thriving society, not a failed state.
Sorry, but you are completely misinformed. Libertarianism is not the same thing as anarchism. A limit to an individual's rights is denying other individuals their rights. Without this there are no individual rights possible at all and the law of the jungle will rule, as in your Somalia example. A proper function of a government and the reason it is beneficial thing to have (as a servant of the individual citizens, not their master) is to protect those rights. This includes police (protection from criminals), military (protection from foreign invasion) and courts (application of laws and settling disputes). Of course these are complicated things (especially law) and they include a whole bunch of related issues that have to be provided and paid for.
ALL other government spending imho (not necessarily a libertarian viewpoint) is only justifiable to the extend that a. it is essential for the proper functioning of society and b. there is no realistic private alternative. For example, private, toll supported, for profit, roads would be preferable to public spending monstrosity we have (and a hell of a lot more efficient to build and maintain) as long as there is a practical way to collect toll without causing delays, privacy problems etc. Perhaps some day technology would provide this but currently it is still mostly unrealistic.
the current economic meltdown is an example of why this faith in free markets is misplaced.
This is actually laughable. True free market capitalism has never been tried, but even the very limited forms of it have in general been wildly successful compared to alternatives. After all the economic disasters, famines, human right abuses, totalitarian regimes, gulags etc that invariably happened in socialist states over many years, supporters of socialism have lost any right even to be honestly mistaken any more. Even the likes of Labour party in Britain have correctly realized that they were dragging their own country down and had to change course towards more liberal market capitalism.
Back to the issue though and some questions for those like you: How is it fair that people with no interest in games and no children are compelled by force to pay for this game (lets say that it really is paid by the government)? What do they gain for their money and who gives the government the right to spend it? Who decides which particular idea will be paid for, and which other multitude of spending ideas will be rejected? What agenda influences those decisions, personal whims of the decision makers? Wouldn't it be better if the game is made with private money and only those who want it would actually have to pay for it? Or another example, say with government funding of the arts. How fair is that artists who are not among the selected elite who benefits from these funds, actually have to struggle to pay their taxes which then go to finance other artists who are selected? Who does the selecting? Isn't that demeaning as well as grossly unfair? In short, the point is that with any benefit that comes from government spending you have to ask who are the victims, including those who are forced to pay for it against their wishes, as well as secondary victims (ex. anybody who doesn't get government's free money and then has to compete against somebody who does).
What evidence do you have that this is your money?
Hmm, well not much to be honest. The summary said "the MMO under development by NASA", so it seems clear enough, but then summaries are often wrong here. TFA doesn't mention who pays for the development at all. I'd be surprised if there is no NASA money going towards it though and if this will be a normal commercial game since the article does mention that NASA Learning Technologies is involved.
So what's next, Dept of Agriculture getting in on the game with SimFarmer? It's wrong because there are very few ways for the government to spend taxpayers' money that is justifiable and sorry but this isn't one of them. It's wrong to the game companies too who now face a competitor with huge guaranteed budget obtained by force, and no expectation of profit, in fact who probably will be giving the game out for free.
What's up with everybody using my money to make games these days. It's the latest fad in government agencies or what?
Hmm, I meant more like analyzing by other means that tasting it...
Astronaut: "Mission Control, I see some strange liquid substance here on Mars, how should I proceed?"
Mission Control: "Hey, why don't you just pop it in your mouth, see what it tastes like"
Astronaut: "Mmm, yummy"
Mission Control: "You do realize that was a joke,...... right?"
Astronaut: "Must...kill...humans..."
You'd think any lander we send up there looking for water would have the ability to analyze any liquid droplets growing, merging, and dripping on the lander's leg over the course of a Martian month.
Another example of why the "why send humans, robots can do everything just as well" idea is bogus. If that was an astronaut up there this would be resolved in a minute, not a month.
I think I can summarize your entire post with this one quote: these things should not be available to kids without guidance.
Absolutely right. I think just about everybody agrees that there are things that are not for kids. Now the real issue is does "should not be available" mean "should be forbidden by law"? I tend to think there are certain, very limited, cases where the government does have a role in protecting the child's rights against abuse or neglect by the parents, but in almost all cases it is in child's own interest to be raised by their own parents, as imperfect as they may be, rather then by government regulations. If this means that a parent allows their child to play a certain game before the rated age then so be it.
Why can't it be both? There is more good music today and it's more accessible to more people than ever before in history. It might be hard to find though since it's buried under a Mt Everest of crap.
Publicly owned airwaves are exactly the place where you should be able to express yourself. Not much of a free speech if the only place you can exercise it is in your own bathroom
i veel check urls before posting
http://www.game-walls.com/images/terminator%203/terminator_3_the_redemption_01_1024x768.jpg
i veel ban violent games
http://www.game-walls.com/images/terminator%203/terminator_3_the_redemption_01_1024x768.jpg/
There is nothing immoral about porn or prostitution as long as it's voluntary. Craigslist doesn't deliberately profit from stolen items, they will remove them (and probably contact the police) if they are discovered. TPB is more like craigslist where 99% of the items are stolen and they refuse to remove them even after being notified. As for news agencies reporting news being same as a web site providing a catalog of illegal content for download, I don't even know how to respond to that. What does one have to do with the other?
Legal or illegal is an open question but to me it's pretty clear cut that what they are doing is immoral. Without massive amounts of illegally shared content they wouldn't have the traffic that they can sell to advertisers. If they were refusing to take any payment for their service except to cover the costs they might have a case that they are engaged in some kind of anti-copyright crusade (which is bullshit and it would still be wrong even if it was true), but by profiting the alleged millions from other people's work, frankly they are just scum.