let us imagine for a moment you live in a world where the police are completely reponsible and accountable. how are they supposed to successfully keep YOUR community free of crime with a citizen so mindlessly hostile to their basic function?
Then you live in a magical hippie fairyland and don't need to worry about crime in the fist place.
The problem is with the practicality of building infrastructure, it simply isn't possible to have more than a few cable or ISP companies if they have to run their own lines. You can't have serious competition because its not possible to have enough companies for a marketplace to exist.
The only real way to pull off competition in internet service (or any other utility) is to have government owned infrastructure, and allow companies to compete for who delivers to you over those lines.
Sorry but that is fucking ridiculous. If you can't make a profit off a 180% return on your investment something is seriously flawed with the business model, and you need to figure out what you did wrong.
Admittedly, its a bit tricky, but there's no baseline to know what normal teenage behavior is with respect to the questions they ask. For all this data shows, kids who play video games obsessively might be more responsible and not less. I can't imagine thats the case, and don't see a way to fix it (not playing video games suggests a radically different attitude, beyond just the video games).
I do believe that game addiction is a real problem, but determining what the addiction rate is, and how many people with game-obsession problems would just obsess over something else in the absence of games, is extraordinarily difficult, and this study wasn't up to it.
I'll save you the trouble of actually reading the link, from the deciding opinion:
Petitioners rightly possess significant discretion to determine the content of their school libraries. But that discretion may not be exercised in a narrowly partisan or political manner.
I can make a pretty good guess at who's more biased between those two groups. The companies want to maximize their profit. This means if piracy helps them, they will want piracy. If piracy doesn't help them, they won't like piracy. So, companies benefit by following the facts wherever they lead. They have an interest in finding out the truth - whatever it is. And most companies agree: piracy harms them.
A lot of the piracy analysis has been done by companies selling DRM solutions, or who like the RIAA, represent content creators, but aren't one themselves, in both cases, it's in their interest to say piracy hurts even when it doesn't, because if the content creators believe this they profit.
There is also an additional facet of piracy that people tend to ignore, which is that piracy hurts your competition even more than it hurts you 9assuming you have a dominant position). Take away piracy, and some of the tightwads will look for better deals, all that looking means they might find out about a cheaper game/program/band etc, word of mouth takes over from there, and limits the amount your bigger marketing department helps you keep market share.
You are mostly correct. Mostly is the key word here, most DMCA notices are not legitimate. From an earlier/. article:
In its submission, Google notes that more than half (57%) of the takedown notices it has received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1998, were sent by business targeting competitors and over one third (37%) of notices were not valid copyright claims.
(yes that adds up to over 100%, there is overlap)
There is, mostly, no penalty for sending fake notices, so people do it all the time. There needs to be statutory damages for sending invalid claims even when the claim is in good faith, and even when no financial damage is done to the victim, to combat this. In cases where the claim is actively malicious, the perjury clause needs to be enforced.
Then you should be supporting cracking down on piracy.
A free market demands that a cheaper product will gain market share, even if the cheaper product is inferior (not saying free software is, but people have reasons for not switching). Microsoft got where it is today partly by being cheap. But piracy acts as a market distortion, making expensive things available to the people who would otherwise buy cheap/free goods. Kill Piracy, and free software takes a chunk of the pirated software's market share. Gain that market share, and switching becomes easier.
The same thing, for that matter, goes for independent artists who can't compete on price with RIAA because everything is free to the people who aren't willing to pay, or don't want to pay much.
Support DRM, especially harsh DRM that prevents reinstalls, support draconian anti piracy laws. These things are the greatest weapons we have. And the corporations who think they'll profit off them will only suffer if they ever make it work.
~ Willing to play dirty. And getting the piracy that needs to be done, done now.
No, the Kindle reads two formats, one of those formats is only available because someone cracked the DRM, and Amazon added it to avoid the threat of widespread DRM cracking tools.
With the kindle format gone, you'd have *one* format..mobi, which is in my experience, utter crap. Very little is available* and while a converter exists, it can't transfer over images.
*In my experience, other have claimed.mobi is the thing they see most often, so it may depend on ones reading habits.
Speaking as a recovered WoW player, yes video games can be very addicting. For that matter, I'm still addicted to them, I still have urges to play WoW, to get that fix, even though I quit 6 months ago.
I can indulge in other games from time to time, secure in the knowledge that I'll get bored with it eventually, but WoW, with no ending, no limits on how much i can play per day, and designed to keep me interested no matter how many hours I put into it, nearly destroyed me.
It may not be addiction in the clinical sense, but its still self destructive behavior, and its damned hard to quit, or even acknowledge you should.
PS: This isn't meant to imply that every gamer, or every MMO player, is like me, just that some are.
Yeah, having the same issue, just had a job turned down for not being experienced in perl, even though I have other languages, and scripting/regular expression experience.
Its an HR problem though, they're still looking for a person to fill it, because nobody who meets all the reqs will work for what they want, even in this economy. I only applied because I've been turned down from to many other jobs for not having enough backend experience, and need something on my resume. (also because I'll take a paycut in a heartbeat if I don't have to deal with windows machines anymore).
Um, no, the warrant does not cite any illegal activity. The only actual 'crime' he's accused of is creating a false profile in the defamed's name. This is equivalent to the Lori Drew case, where a civil matter is being made criminal on the justification 'he used a computer'.
(That said, if this were a crime, the dns logs do show a Linux system accessing the adam4adam site, making that relevant to probable cause).
"India is constantly weeding out the "dumb" folks"
I work with programmers based out of India. Some of them are so dumb they can't spell their own name (no, thats not an exaggeration, that really happened to me today), the best of them have trouble following basic instructions or answering the question you ask them instead of talking about something else entirely.
I want to believe that meme is dead, I really do. But I thought I killed it in bolivia back in 04, and again I thought it was dead when it went missing in the alps in January of 08.
somehow, I can't believe it really died this time.
You should probably actually watch the video, once it stops being slashdotted. Or go to Youtube.
The winner isn't anything that would be recognized as a I'm a Mac/I'm a PC commercial rip off, or anything like what Microsoft made either. I'm not sure why this is styled an "I'm Linux" contest in the first place, almost none of the videos had anything to do with that (The only one that was even close and worth mentioning was the "I'm Not Linux" video series).
Slashdot Mirror
let us imagine for a moment you live in a world where the police are completely reponsible and accountable. how are they supposed to successfully keep YOUR community free of crime with a citizen so mindlessly hostile to their basic function?
Then you live in a magical hippie fairyland and don't need to worry about crime in the fist place.
The problem is with the practicality of building infrastructure, it simply isn't possible to have more than a few cable or ISP companies if they have to run their own lines. You can't have serious competition because its not possible to have enough companies for a marketplace to exist.
The only real way to pull off competition in internet service (or any other utility) is to have government owned infrastructure, and allow companies to compete for who delivers to you over those lines.
Sorry but that is fucking ridiculous. If you can't make a profit off a 180% return on your investment something is seriously flawed with the business model, and you need to figure out what you did wrong.
No control group.
Admittedly, its a bit tricky, but there's no baseline to know what normal teenage behavior is with respect to the questions they ask. For all this data shows, kids who play video games obsessively might be more responsible and not less. I can't imagine thats the case, and don't see a way to fix it (not playing video games suggests a radically different attitude, beyond just the video games).
I do believe that game addiction is a real problem, but determining what the addiction rate is, and how many people with game-obsession problems would just obsess over something else in the absence of games, is extraordinarily difficult, and this study wasn't up to it.
You should really do research on this before you spout off:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_Trees_School_District_v._Pico
I'll save you the trouble of actually reading the link, from the deciding opinion:
Petitioners rightly possess significant discretion to determine the content of their school libraries. But that discretion may not be exercised in a narrowly partisan or political manner.
Apple's software breaks PCs (makes the CD drive go poof, requires a registry edit to fix).
Um, no, they can't. They kindof have to use that one. Especially if they live in the dorms.
How comfortable are you with your ISP and landlord tracking you?
I don't know about fedex, but UPS has pulled similar on me a few times.
I can make a pretty good guess at who's more biased between those two groups. The companies want to maximize their profit. This means if piracy helps them, they will want piracy. If piracy doesn't help them, they won't like piracy. So, companies benefit by following the facts wherever they lead. They have an interest in finding out the truth - whatever it is. And most companies agree: piracy harms them.
A lot of the piracy analysis has been done by companies selling DRM solutions, or who like the RIAA, represent content creators, but aren't one themselves, in both cases, it's in their interest to say piracy hurts even when it doesn't, because if the content creators believe this they profit.
There is also an additional facet of piracy that people tend to ignore, which is that piracy hurts your competition even more than it hurts you 9assuming you have a dominant position). Take away piracy, and some of the tightwads will look for better deals, all that looking means they might find out about a cheaper game/program/band etc, word of mouth takes over from there, and limits the amount your bigger marketing department helps you keep market share.
Yes, I totally botched the math.
You are mostly correct. Mostly is the key word here, most DMCA notices are not legitimate. From an earlier /. article:
In its submission, Google notes that more than half (57%) of the takedown notices it has received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1998, were sent by business targeting competitors and over one third (37%) of notices were not valid copyright claims.
(yes that adds up to over 100%, there is overlap)
There is, mostly, no penalty for sending fake notices, so people do it all the time. There needs to be statutory damages for sending invalid claims even when the claim is in good faith, and even when no financial damage is done to the victim, to combat this. In cases where the claim is actively malicious, the perjury clause needs to be enforced.
Then you should be supporting cracking down on piracy.
A free market demands that a cheaper product will gain market share, even if the cheaper product is inferior (not saying free software is, but people have reasons for not switching). Microsoft got where it is today partly by being cheap. But piracy acts as a market distortion, making expensive things available to the people who would otherwise buy cheap/free goods. Kill Piracy, and free software takes a chunk of the pirated software's market share. Gain that market share, and switching becomes easier.
The same thing, for that matter, goes for independent artists who can't compete on price with RIAA because everything is free to the people who aren't willing to pay, or don't want to pay much.
Support DRM, especially harsh DRM that prevents reinstalls, support draconian anti piracy laws. These things are the greatest weapons we have. And the corporations who think they'll profit off them will only suffer if they ever make it work.
~ Willing to play dirty. And getting the piracy that needs to be done, done now.
Kindle will *read* a variety of formats
No, the Kindle reads two formats, one of those formats is only available because someone cracked the DRM, and Amazon added it to avoid the threat of widespread DRM cracking tools.
With the kindle format gone, you'd have *one* format. .mobi, which is in my experience, utter crap. Very little is available* and while a converter exists, it can't transfer over images.
*In my experience, other have claimed .mobi is the thing they see most often, so it may depend on ones reading habits.
Speaking as a recovered WoW player, yes video games can be very addicting. For that matter, I'm still addicted to them, I still have urges to play WoW, to get that fix, even though I quit 6 months ago.
I can indulge in other games from time to time, secure in the knowledge that I'll get bored with it eventually, but WoW, with no ending, no limits on how much i can play per day, and designed to keep me interested no matter how many hours I put into it, nearly destroyed me.
It may not be addiction in the clinical sense, but its still self destructive behavior, and its damned hard to quit, or even acknowledge you should.
PS: This isn't meant to imply that every gamer, or every MMO player, is like me, just that some are.
Red Herring.
The article is about addiction, not violence. Addiction can lead to violence, but this has nothing to do with the media being violent.
Hulu's player is also complete crap. I need to be able to watch my show without having it constantly rebuffer.
Yeah, having the same issue, just had a job turned down for not being experienced in perl, even though I have other languages, and scripting/regular expression experience.
Its an HR problem though, they're still looking for a person to fill it, because nobody who meets all the reqs will work for what they want, even in this economy. I only applied because I've been turned down from to many other jobs for not having enough backend experience, and need something on my resume. (also because I'll take a paycut in a heartbeat if I don't have to deal with windows machines anymore).
Um, no, the warrant does not cite any illegal activity. The only actual 'crime' he's accused of is creating a false profile in the defamed's name. This is equivalent to the Lori Drew case, where a civil matter is being made criminal on the justification 'he used a computer'.
(That said, if this were a crime, the dns logs do show a Linux system accessing the adam4adam site, making that relevant to probable cause).
I think the problem is that it appears* the government is footing the bill.
Making this a free handout for Microsoft.
*I say appears, as in not necessarily is, but is implied by 'public private partnership'.
Speaking as the person who has to support SP2. No.
Its about as Stable as Vista was pre SP1.
I would point out that Microsoft has lasted for decades with huge money draining projects, on a few heavily profitable ones.
"India is constantly weeding out the "dumb" folks"
I work with programmers based out of India. Some of them are so dumb they can't spell their own name (no, thats not an exaggeration, that really happened to me today), the best of them have trouble following basic instructions or answering the question you ask them instead of talking about something else entirely.
I want to believe that meme is dead, I really do. But I thought I killed it in bolivia back in 04, and again I thought it was dead when it went missing in the alps in January of 08.
somehow, I can't believe it really died this time.
Linux did its spoof years ago.
You should probably actually watch the video, once it stops being slashdotted. Or go to Youtube.
The winner isn't anything that would be recognized as a I'm a Mac/I'm a PC commercial rip off, or anything like what Microsoft made either. I'm not sure why this is styled an "I'm Linux" contest in the first place, almost none of the videos had anything to do with that (The only one that was even close and worth mentioning was the "I'm Not Linux" video series).