Isn't this in the EU, where the right to alter history is already the law of he land?
So what is this reporter complaining about?
Yes it is, and the reporter is complaining about: "Wales insisted, apparently without irony, that requests for Google to remove links – not actual web pages, not actual source material, just links – to pages covered by the ruling (which includes libellous attack pages, revenge porn, and old police blotters) should, at minimum, be adjudicated by a court of law. In other words, European taxpayers should pay, without limitation, for their already-overburdened court systems to deal with every single revenge-porn complaint Google receives under the ruling, at a time when the economies of half the EU’s member-states are already close to the brink, and with energy prices set to rise precipitously during the coming winter."
In other words, the EU passes provisions sharply curtailing free speech, and they expect the companies to pay out of their own pocket for such ridiculous provisions. The idea that the EU member states should actually have to pay for their nonsense is reprehensible to this reporter.
Originally I had gotten Pacbell DSL. It was pretty good, and I was quite happy. They dicked around with the connections of their non-static-ip customers (frequently power cycling the routers in the evenings to prevent people from keeping an IP), but eventually I wanted a static IP and that thing was rock-solid. I was even mostly happy with the service (emailed technical support once and found out halfway through the conversation that the guy was my brother's childhood best friend). Then Pacbell got bought out by Southwestern Bell, but they stayed pretty much the same. Then SW Bell was bought out by AT&T, and the dickery started.
I like to pay my bills. No problems with the various companies that take the bills except for one -- AT&T. One May, I paid my bill with the online-bill-pay from my bank. No problem, I had a record that the payment had been accepted and deposited. About a week later, I got a refund check for the exact amount of my bill, and then another bill with the same amount that was now "past due" and a late fee. So.. they sent a refund so they could charge me a fraudulent late fee. I went back and forth for awhile with customer/bill service. The AT&T rep I talked to seemed genuinely puzzled by the whole thing, and she told me she had put a "hold" on the account so it wouldn't get touched while this dispute happened. Later that week the account was "closed" due to non-payment. The best part? When an account is closed in such a manner, it's immediately deleted. I received all my email on that account, and when the payment dispute was resolved, I was not allowed to have it back. I went through the painstaking process of changing the registered email address of all the online sites I had signed up for, and it's when I realized that you should never tie such things to the local telco.
But man, I wish I recorded the phone call at the time where the rep said that I didn't need to worry about the account because it'd been frozen to prevent termination. Never trust the word of anyone on the phone; always get some sort of proof.
You will be punishing the service reps, not the people who make policy.
Their service reps are Comcast. They don't get to be "human shields" protecting the corporation from customer outrage. Not while they're on the payroll.
You should not rely on logic or the whims of politicians. Just look at the source code and find out what the law says (preferably with the advice of a lawyer).
* Reed doesn't have an office / cubicle / set location, so he tends to work either in a common area or in a random conference room until you kick him out because you reserved the room
A justice system must first and foremost reflect the collective will of the people it supposedly represents.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. For one, our justice system is supposed to protect the rights of all, including the minority position. Whether it's gay people getting harassed, black people being discriminated against, or copyright holders finding their works distributed, justice is supposed to apply equally.
No, I'm not trying to equate all those situations (geez, racism, gay-bashing, copying music aren't all the same), just saying that there are situations where the justice system does not represent the "Will of the majority." And it shouldn't, because sometimes the majority is indifferent to rights of a minority, even when the majority enjoys those rights.
That being said, in every similar situation I tried to think of, the justice systems found ways to screw over the minority regardless. Laws that were unconstitutional, refusal to prosecute members of the majority who committed crimes against the minority, biased juries unwilling to follow the law. Justice sure ain't perfect.
3,000 multi-million dollar settlements sounds like a lot of money, but the 30,000 multi-million dollar settlements that we're already paying insurance premiums to pay for, is even more
Yes, and that system only works because the cost is spread out among a few hundred million drivers. Shift all those costs to some dozen auto manufacturers and your entry-level crappy car will cost $70k or more. The problem with the situation is that in our legal system, the cost of an individual lawsuit is proportionate to the means of the organization being sued. You can sue another driver for the cost of a car. If you're suing a car manufacturer for a serious accident, they'll get dinged with far more than the cost of the car in the form of punitive damages. That is simply not scalable would require some restructuring of how those lawsuits work.
The downside is this. Those geeks are portrayed as having happy lives- attracting beautiful women- making good money- and generally having a fun social life. To the geek who doesn't have a happy life- this sets unrealistic expectations.
I don't think that's an unrealistic expectation. It's just unrealistic that you're going to have it all NOW.
I think the aspiring nerd has a higher chance of achieving his dreams than the average football player or actor or... well, most professions with people who dream big.
The grandparents' argument is basically that nerds only pirate things, which means he never entered a Fry's or Best Buy before everyone started buying everything online.
I was puzzled by the Big Bang Theory at first, until I finally realized.. "oh yeah. This is what the popular crowd thinks nerds are like." It's all the ugly stereotypes and only-half-truths inserted into the sitcom format. The sitcom format helps a little, but it doesn't save the show from the fact it was made by a bunch of people who were never nerds, didn't understand them, and developed characters and dialogue hampered by those issues.
Up to a point, and see my reply to retchdog about circumstances. However, there are people living with chronic pain and disability who don't choose suicide. There has to be a trigger somewhere that makes some people suicidal in those circumstances and others not.
For the elderly it's not just chronic pain/disability, it's a degenerative condition for which there is no cure. I feel that under various circumstances, life really isn't worth living and existence is pointless. Constant pain, an inability to move, and the knowledge that there will never be any improvement. Eventually they get to that point. I think the kids who choose suicide aren't able to see the future. They see themselves as the terminally ill patient, not because they have some illness, but because they just can't conceive that there will be a time when they will be without the mental pain, the trauma, even the physical bullying. Maybe they do buy into the BS about being worthless.
Probably the darkest point of my life was when I was touring college campuses during high school, and I had a particularly unhelpful campus tour guide who told our group of high schoolers that we should "enjoy high school while we can, years later we'll look back at it as the best point of our lives." What a stupid thing to say to high schoolers. I suppose if you aren't studying and you're on the varsity team and you're the homecoming king that could be true, but most students' lives are not so rosy. I was dumb enough to believe it, because I couldn't see the future. I lost it that day, having an emotional break-down, though I managed not to let much of it show physically. "Really? High school is terrible. This is the best it will ever get? It will only be worse in the future?" Yeah, that guy should never again guide high schoolers.
While I don't think the Big Bang Theory is funny at all, it's possible it might appeal to young geeks and have a positive influence. Older geeks might think it's continuation of mocking, but my general suspicion is that for a young geek "in trouble," seeing geeks as the main characters of a sitcom that follow sitcom rules could only a positive. The reasons are: 1) It's on national TV. Yes, you too could "make it." 2) Sitcom characters have to be relatable. Therefore, a lot of TV viewers are relating to the geek characters. 3) The main cast of a sitcom has to be 'winners' somehow, otherwise the program won't work as a comedy. It won't work for anything, really. It'll just be damned depressing. Even the main Bundys from my favorite sitcom when a teen, Married With Children, followed these rules. They were losers and they almost never came out ahead. Yet you could still identify with them, otherwise the show would have crashed and burned.
On non-SSL sites they can proxy content, which in general is a good thing. Trouble comes if they start gaming the system and not showing the freshest content to give a perceived gain in speed.
That's also the strategy that Netflix offered to Comcast, to let Comcast proxy Netflix data. Comcast refused, because they want the Netflix problem. It's to their benefit that the "problem" exists, and they don't want a clever technological solution to the issue as Netflix competes with Comcast's own services. They just want Netflix to pay them cash instead.
Hey man, you don't need to be an audiophile to know that much of the rest of the speaker industry is better than Bose. We're not talking sloppy tubes or gold-plated ding-dongs or weird vinyl artifacts. These are observations from pretty much every industry or review magazine, observations that are easily objectively measured. If speakers are on the low end of accurate sound reproduction, there's really not that much preference about it.
Bose does research. They do their work, probably more than "Beats" did. They deserve credit for that. Sure, Bose's products sound like shit up and down the product lines, and the old audiophile refrain was "got no highs, got no lows, must be Bose." Companies change over time, though, maybe in the last five years Bose improved the quality of their speakers, but there were not great in the 80s, 90s, 00s. But hey, at least they're a semi-reputable audio company.
Beats was the headphone partner of Monster Cable for the last few years, which fits. Both are overpriced and overrated self-promoters. Monster tried to get their cables in to all the Best Buys and Radio Shacks it could, getting store managers to promote the products ceaselessly. They're not terrible cables, just 5x more expensive than they should be. Beats went the hip-hop artist crowd, just like Monster getting a clueless crowd to push their products incessantly. Both are examples of success through product promotion rather than... you know, having a better product.
If they started charging comcast/timewarner/cox/whoever for Internet services they would be double dipping. This cost would certainly be passed on to users who would be unhappy to be paying twice for the same service.
Just like how Comcast double-dips by grabbing fees from the user -and- the end website?
This sounds familiar. One summer when staying at my grandmother's house, my brother taught her African Grey to meow, solely to annoy her. I'd walk by the room and I'd hear a meeeeeeeeeeeeeoww. It sounded like a doppler effect, like the cat was in a car going by at 50 mph.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't this in the EU, where the right to alter history is already the law of he land?
So what is this reporter complaining about?
Yes it is, and the reporter is complaining about: "Wales insisted, apparently without irony, that requests for Google to remove links – not actual web pages, not actual source material, just links – to pages covered by the ruling (which includes libellous attack pages, revenge porn, and old police blotters) should, at minimum, be adjudicated by a court of law. In other words, European taxpayers should pay, without limitation, for their already-overburdened court systems to deal with every single revenge-porn complaint Google receives under the ruling, at a time when the economies of half the EU’s member-states are already close to the brink, and with energy prices set to rise precipitously during the coming winter."
In other words, the EU passes provisions sharply curtailing free speech, and they expect the companies to pay out of their own pocket for such ridiculous provisions. The idea that the EU member states should actually have to pay for their nonsense is reprehensible to this reporter.
Originally I had gotten Pacbell DSL. It was pretty good, and I was quite happy. They dicked around with the connections of their non-static-ip customers (frequently power cycling the routers in the evenings to prevent people from keeping an IP), but eventually I wanted a static IP and that thing was rock-solid. I was even mostly happy with the service (emailed technical support once and found out halfway through the conversation that the guy was my brother's childhood best friend). Then Pacbell got bought out by Southwestern Bell, but they stayed pretty much the same. Then SW Bell was bought out by AT&T, and the dickery started.
I like to pay my bills. No problems with the various companies that take the bills except for one -- AT&T. One May, I paid my bill with the online-bill-pay from my bank. No problem, I had a record that the payment had been accepted and deposited. About a week later, I got a refund check for the exact amount of my bill, and then another bill with the same amount that was now "past due" and a late fee. So.. they sent a refund so they could charge me a fraudulent late fee. I went back and forth for awhile with customer/bill service. The AT&T rep I talked to seemed genuinely puzzled by the whole thing, and she told me she had put a "hold" on the account so it wouldn't get touched while this dispute happened. Later that week the account was "closed" due to non-payment. The best part? When an account is closed in such a manner, it's immediately deleted. I received all my email on that account, and when the payment dispute was resolved, I was not allowed to have it back. I went through the painstaking process of changing the registered email address of all the online sites I had signed up for, and it's when I realized that you should never tie such things to the local telco.
But man, I wish I recorded the phone call at the time where the rep said that I didn't need to worry about the account because it'd been frozen to prevent termination. Never trust the word of anyone on the phone; always get some sort of proof.
You will be punishing the service reps, not the people who make policy.
Their service reps are Comcast. They don't get to be "human shields" protecting the corporation from customer outrage. Not while they're on the payroll.
That's what being a "local monopoly" means. It may be a government-granted monopoly, but it's still a monopoly from our end.
You should not rely on logic or the whims of politicians. Just look at the source code and find out what the law says (preferably with the advice of a lawyer).
+2 asshole would be a fantastic moderation option.
* Reed doesn't have an office / cubicle / set location, so he tends to work either in a common area or in a random conference room until you kick him out because you reserved the room
So he's Netflix-homeless?
A justice system must first and foremost reflect the collective will of the people it supposedly represents.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. For one, our justice system is supposed to protect the rights of all, including the minority position. Whether it's gay people getting harassed, black people being discriminated against, or copyright holders finding their works distributed, justice is supposed to apply equally.
No, I'm not trying to equate all those situations (geez, racism, gay-bashing, copying music aren't all the same), just saying that there are situations where the justice system does not represent the "Will of the majority." And it shouldn't, because sometimes the majority is indifferent to rights of a minority, even when the majority enjoys those rights.
That being said, in every similar situation I tried to think of, the justice systems found ways to screw over the minority regardless. Laws that were unconstitutional, refusal to prosecute members of the majority who committed crimes against the minority, biased juries unwilling to follow the law. Justice sure ain't perfect.
3,000 multi-million dollar settlements sounds like a lot of money, but the 30,000 multi-million dollar settlements that we're already paying insurance premiums to pay for, is even more
Yes, and that system only works because the cost is spread out among a few hundred million drivers. Shift all those costs to some dozen auto manufacturers and your entry-level crappy car will cost $70k or more. The problem with the situation is that in our legal system, the cost of an individual lawsuit is proportionate to the means of the organization being sued. You can sue another driver for the cost of a car. If you're suing a car manufacturer for a serious accident, they'll get dinged with far more than the cost of the car in the form of punitive damages. That is simply not scalable would require some restructuring of how those lawsuits work.
You are certainly the trolliest of the trolls from Russia, I'll give you that.
Wow that '===!' must be a new PHP operator
x == y means x is equal to y.
x === y means x is REALLY equal to y. Like, a lot more equal.
The downside is this. Those geeks are portrayed as having happy lives- attracting beautiful women- making good money- and generally having a fun social life.
To the geek who doesn't have a happy life- this sets unrealistic expectations.
I don't think that's an unrealistic expectation. It's just unrealistic that you're going to have it all NOW.
I think the aspiring nerd has a higher chance of achieving his dreams than the average football player or actor or... well, most professions with people who dream big.
The grandparents' argument is basically that nerds only pirate things, which means he never entered a Fry's or Best Buy before everyone started buying everything online.
Strangely I came to like the laugh track from Married With Children partly because the actors were aware of it and eventually played to it well.
I was puzzled by the Big Bang Theory at first, until I finally realized.. "oh yeah. This is what the popular crowd thinks nerds are like." It's all the ugly stereotypes and only-half-truths inserted into the sitcom format. The sitcom format helps a little, but it doesn't save the show from the fact it was made by a bunch of people who were never nerds, didn't understand them, and developed characters and dialogue hampered by those issues.
Up to a point, and see my reply to retchdog about circumstances. However, there are people living with chronic pain and disability who don't choose suicide. There has to be a trigger somewhere that makes some people suicidal in those circumstances and others not.
For the elderly it's not just chronic pain/disability, it's a degenerative condition for which there is no cure. I feel that under various circumstances, life really isn't worth living and existence is pointless. Constant pain, an inability to move, and the knowledge that there will never be any improvement. Eventually they get to that point. I think the kids who choose suicide aren't able to see the future. They see themselves as the terminally ill patient, not because they have some illness, but because they just can't conceive that there will be a time when they will be without the mental pain, the trauma, even the physical bullying. Maybe they do buy into the BS about being worthless.
Probably the darkest point of my life was when I was touring college campuses during high school, and I had a particularly unhelpful campus tour guide who told our group of high schoolers that we should "enjoy high school while we can, years later we'll look back at it as the best point of our lives." What a stupid thing to say to high schoolers. I suppose if you aren't studying and you're on the varsity team and you're the homecoming king that could be true, but most students' lives are not so rosy. I was dumb enough to believe it, because I couldn't see the future. I lost it that day, having an emotional break-down, though I managed not to let much of it show physically. "Really? High school is terrible. This is the best it will ever get? It will only be worse in the future?" Yeah, that guy should never again guide high schoolers.
While I don't think the Big Bang Theory is funny at all, it's possible it might appeal to young geeks and have a positive influence. Older geeks might think it's continuation of mocking, but my general suspicion is that for a young geek "in trouble," seeing geeks as the main characters of a sitcom that follow sitcom rules could only a positive. The reasons are: 1) It's on national TV. Yes, you too could "make it." 2) Sitcom characters have to be relatable. Therefore, a lot of TV viewers are relating to the geek characters. 3) The main cast of a sitcom has to be 'winners' somehow, otherwise the program won't work as a comedy. It won't work for anything, really. It'll just be damned depressing. Even the main Bundys from my favorite sitcom when a teen, Married With Children, followed these rules. They were losers and they almost never came out ahead. Yet you could still identify with them, otherwise the show would have crashed and burned.
I was born on American soil, which makes me as pure-blooded "native" as anyone else in the US.
On non-SSL sites they can proxy content, which in general is a good thing. Trouble comes if they start gaming the system and not showing the freshest content to give a perceived gain in speed.
That's also the strategy that Netflix offered to Comcast, to let Comcast proxy Netflix data. Comcast refused, because they want the Netflix problem. It's to their benefit that the "problem" exists, and they don't want a clever technological solution to the issue as Netflix competes with Comcast's own services. They just want Netflix to pay them cash instead.
> Bose targets the more mature ignorant quality-seeking crowd,
Well. That's the crowd they target. The parent poster didn't say they offer great products, just that that's the group they want to go after. :-)
Hey man, you don't need to be an audiophile to know that much of the rest of the speaker industry is better than Bose. We're not talking sloppy tubes or gold-plated ding-dongs or weird vinyl artifacts. These are observations from pretty much every industry or review magazine, observations that are easily objectively measured. If speakers are on the low end of accurate sound reproduction, there's really not that much preference about it.
So in your mind research and development takes zero time, then. Got it.
You are absolutely correct with that, when it comes to patent enforcement, all that time spent earlier means, pretty much nothing.
Bose does research. They do their work, probably more than "Beats" did. They deserve credit for that. Sure, Bose's products sound like shit up and down the product lines, and the old audiophile refrain was "got no highs, got no lows, must be Bose." Companies change over time, though, maybe in the last five years Bose improved the quality of their speakers, but there were not great in the 80s, 90s, 00s. But hey, at least they're a semi-reputable audio company.
Beats was the headphone partner of Monster Cable for the last few years, which fits. Both are overpriced and overrated self-promoters. Monster tried to get their cables in to all the Best Buys and Radio Shacks it could, getting store managers to promote the products ceaselessly. They're not terrible cables, just 5x more expensive than they should be. Beats went the hip-hop artist crowd, just like Monster getting a clueless crowd to push their products incessantly. Both are examples of success through product promotion rather than... you know, having a better product.
They had the right to "rebroadcast" (really it was redirecting) to me because I gave them permission
If you are the content owner (not the equipment owner) then let Aereo know, and I'm sure the two of you can reach a deal.
If they started charging comcast/timewarner/cox/whoever for Internet services they would be double dipping. This cost would certainly be passed on to users who would be unhappy to be paying twice for the same service.
Just like how Comcast double-dips by grabbing fees from the user -and- the end website?
This sounds familiar. One summer when staying at my grandmother's house, my brother taught her African Grey to meow, solely to annoy her. I'd walk by the room and I'd hear a meeeeeeeeeeeeeoww. It sounded like a doppler effect, like the cat was in a car going by at 50 mph.