The point is that Microsoft is using the temp status to get around labor laws. The aren't really temps, they're being used as permanent employees, but designating them "temps" allows MS to get around having to give them certain benefits.
I think he just meant the trailer. I don't think any of us feel a need to sit through Arena Football to see a trailer, just downloading it off of Kazaa will be perfectly sufficient.
Which means that the students liability is ZERO unless the RIAA CAN PROVE HE MADE MONEY OFF IT.
No, liability is A factor, not THE factor in determining liability. Simply violating copyright will result in some liability, but not as much as if you're making a profit doing it.
He forgot the oldest legacy interface of all, the AC power adaptor! When will computers finally move away from legacy support for the 100+ year old technology of alternating current? Surely after such a great length of time, we should be able to come up with a better technology than that!
Seriously folks, just because something's old doesn't mean it needs to go. Sometimes it's not worth the cost of transitioning; skip this technology, and just pay the cost once, when the next technology comes along. Sometimes the new technologies are too proprietary. Zip drives eventually failed, I think, becuse of both of the above issues.
I also believe that Apple moved away from the floppy too early; when Apple dumped the floppy, there was no widespread, standardized, rewritable media to use. Now, with USB keychains and cheap CD-R/RW, we're reaching a point where it's appropriate to eliminate floppy drives. As such, I disagree with the statement that "PCs are just now catching up to Apple" as many Apple cheerleaders say here on slashdot.
I got a guy in tech support once who had the two reversed. MAN that frustrated me. I tried to correct him, but he wouldn't believe me. When you're dictating text commands to be entered into a console, it's pretty important to know which is a slash and which is a backslash, don't you think?
SPONSOR: The Sponsor of this contest is Microsoft Corporation, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington, 98052-6399. VISA and its Member financial institutions have not sponsored or offered this contest in any way.
So for once, the paraphrasing is accurate. I agree though, it is something you have to watch out for, especially on Slashdot.
Yeah, and what the hell is k**b? I'm racking my brain, but I can't think of anything to go with that. And boob is NOT a dirty word. Tits and shag are arguable, but it's still pretty weak.
Actually, wasn't this the ORIGINAL meaning? It didn't print out on toilet paper, but you realize that the first stock tickers were not shown on digital displays, right?
There's certainly precedent. McCarthy did the same thing, he'd wave a blank piece of paper around, saying it had the names of 100 (or whatever) Communists working in the government.
Here's my question: if viewing child porn is illegal, how do they find these sites? How closely do they monitor those people to make sure they're not child porn addicts who have found a very clever way to circumvent the system?
Okay, about dying for one's rights. Maybe it is an assumption, but it's one I'm comfortable making. If given the choice, I believe 99.99% of Americans would rather let an FBI agent rummage through their underwear drawer than die. Witness the number of nations worldwide that have far fewer rights than America, and come up with your own estimates at how many people would rather die than lose their privacy.
Regarding the second point, yes, we are in agreement. I'm not advocating abrogations of privacy, merely stating that the original parent's argument was unlikely to go very far.
Now for the final point. First we have to define what a single war crime is. Was the Holocaust one giant war crime, or billions of little ones? Are we counting the gas attacks used by France, England, and Germany during WWI, even though there weren't really officially "war crimes" back then? Are the methods used by the USSR to deal with dissent and rebellion considered war crimes, or merely human rights abuses? Certainly if we consider magnitude, there's no possible way the USA can be compared to Germany or Russia if we take into account the entire 20th century.
Yes, the USA has thrown a bit of weight around, but part of that is that we're just so goddamn heavy! The first half of the 20th century was characterized by American isolationism. After the two world wars and the emergence of the Soviet Union as a force dedicated to bringing about a worldwide "dictatorship of the proletariat," the message to the US was, if you'll excuse my quoting Spider-Man, with great power comes great responsibility. The message the world was sending us was that by virtue of our economic power, it was our duty to involve ourselves in the affairs of others, to try to maintain the peace. We're criticized as much for NOT involving ourselves in countries as for the opposite (we "abandoned Afghanistan" after the Soviet invasion was pushed back, we "allow" people to starve in 3rd world nations).
Read the books yourself, you won't find a more benevolent world power anywhere in history. Contrast America's handing of post-WWII western Europe to the USSR's handling of post-WWII eastern Europe. Compare America's "economic imperialism" to the military imperialism practiced by western Europe in the 19th century. Is the USA really worse for the Arab world today than the Ottoman Empire was a couple hundred years ago? Yes, we're falliable, we're human, and we even give into temptation. But we're trying, which is more than you can say for most.
Yes, Americans are more likely to be killed by traffic accidents than terrorism. But what do you expect the government to do about that? We have laws against drunk driving. We have traffic cops. What more can we do?
As for cancer and heart disease, these mainly kill people who are older and/or live unhealthy lives. It is not something that generally strikes without warning and instantaneously kills people who are not expecting it. And again, what can the government do? Maybe allocate a few more million dollars to medical research, but that's about it.
Finally, the 9/11 terrorist attacks were bad, but other terrorist attacks could be worse. NBC weapons could kill hundreds of thousands of people. When evaluating the danger from terrorism, we have to take into account not only past attacks, but also the potential scale of future attacks.
I haven't been bamboozled and I was never shellshocked. You just don't seem to understand that terrorism is a legitimate fear for this (and for any) nation. The government's solutions are certainly vunerable to criticism, but not doing anything would be tremendously "destructive and foolish."
I often wonder, as to why people forget that Osama Bin Laden was trained by the CIA during the Russian invasion of Afghanistan.
So what you're saying then is that we should have let the Soviet Union conquer Afghanistan? Yeah, that might have reduced the terrorist attacks against us now, but would that have been the right thing to do?
Bush and previous US presidents have been bullying the rest of the world for decades. Come live in south america for a couple of years, and maybe you'll understand.
Ah, but the terrorists didn't come from South America, did they? So "bullying the world" is not a sufficient explanation for why Arabs are flying around the world to attack American interests. There does appear to be something peculiar to the Middle East, be it cultural, political, or what have you.
Hell, for that matter, the US has done far less with its superpower status than any predecessor. Would you rather have the empires of England, France, Germany and Spain back? America actually protected Latin America from suffering under the colonial yoke the same way Africa and Asia did. Yes, America is the most powerful economic and military power in the world, but that does not automatically make us evil.
The only way to deal with terrorism properly is to deal with it's ROOT CAUSES (both real and percieved - from the point of the terrorist) i.e. poverty, oppression, discrimination...
First of all, I should point out that I was not advocating limiting privacy to stop terrorists. I was merely pointing out that if it was a solution, people would be willing to accept it. Now then, let's look at your exceptionally vague notes on a solution. Isn't deposing Saddam helping to free a number of Arabs from oppression, and help the Kurds with discrimination? The US supports the World Bank, which does as much as it can to help reduce poverty. I'm not sure what the USA can be expected to do beyond that. Certainly by your argument, shouldn't the terrorists be attacking, say, Panama, since Panama's never done anything to help with the "root causes" you mentioned.
That's still not censorship. Michael Moore has plenty of forums for his views, and an organization is well within its rights to forbid him to use their TV broadcasts to voice his views on certain subjects. Would you say that the news commits censorship by airing only part of what they record in the field? Do newspapers or magazines censor by selecting only some of the letters they receive for printing? Are schools committing censorship by demanding that students do their prayer outside of class?
All that being said, even though I think that Michael Moore is (to borrow from Al Franken) a big fat idiot, I'm glad the Academy did not cut his "acceptance speech." It didn't take up much of my time, and I think it would have been inappropriate to remove an acceptance speech without warning Moore beforehand what types of speeches would not be aired.
9/11, in the grand scale of things, should have already been forgotten. More than a year ago, 3005 people died as a direct result of 9/11. Today, 40,000 children the world over died as a direct result of starvation. Tomorrow, another 40,000 children will die of hunger. Another 40,000 the next day, and another 40,000 the day after that. Now, I understand the cultural and emotional significance of the event outweighs the mere logical aspect of it. But mobilizing a nation of 300 million people on a course of action based solely on an emotional reaction is just foolish. Destructive and foolish.
This is one of the most stupid things I've ever read. Because people in other countries are starving to death, Americans shouldn't be worried that they or someone they care about could be killed by terrorists? Should we abolish AIDS research because more people worldwide are killed by diarrhea? No, of course not, Americans are going to care about what threatens THEM, and I would expect everyone else to do the same.
A terrorist caught at the cost of the invasion of privacy of a 1000 citizens should not be acceptable.
Several thousand citizens were killed on 9/11. I have little doubt that their families would be more than willing to give up their privacy to have the victims back again. No doubt the vicitms as well, if given incontrovertible proof prior to 9/11 that being deprived of privacy would save their lives, would do so in an instant.
Of course, you can't deprive just a small segment of the population of privacy, because you don't know who to target until after you've removed everyone's privacy. A much better argument would be "depriving a quarter of a billion American citizens of privacy for the sake of perhaps catching a few terrorists in the future is unaccepetable, especially without proof that giving up privacy will have the desired effect."
Something that many slashdotters seem to forget in this debate is that terrorists kill people. Terrorists kill a lot of people, and leave others without families, without friends, or without jobs. If there is a solution that will truly make people safe from this threat, THEY WILL TAKE IT, and they are right to do so. Most of us are not willing to be martyrs. If there is a better way to stop terrorism, please share it with the rest of us, because we have no fucking clue. Bush didn't start "bullying the world" until AFTER the destructive terrorist attacks. Aside from returning to our pre-WWII isolationism, what would you suggest we do to prevent future terrorist attacks?
When were the Dixie Chicks or Michael Moore unfree to speak? They spoke, others spoke back. Are you proposing that people be forbidden from booing or boycotting those whose speach offends them? That seems to me to be an abridgement of freedom of expression.
Not every country strives to be a superpower. Remember this when you hear about China being the next "superpower". China has shown little interest in what happens outside their region. If they had Taiwan they would be pretty much content.
Once upon a time, the USA didn't care what happened outside of the western hemisphere (the "Monroe Doctrine"). We had to be dragged kicking and screaming into both of the World Wars. Now the USA is a superpower. I have little doubt that China would be similarly unable to resist the meddling impulse if they became as powerful as the USA.
A few reasons. First, look at the progress on Linux so far. Linux is now much, much easier for the computer savvy person to use. Graphical shells, more software, more maturity all around, plenty of improvements. However, is Linux any closer to having a single, unified configuration tool today relative to 5 years ago? I don't think so. Does copy & paste work consistently across all applications? I'm not simply bemoaning where Linux is at the moment, I'm saying that for many of the basic features that make computers tolerable for the computer illiterate, Linux has made no progress since its inception.
Frankly, I do blame the open source development model. I don't blame open source because I don't think open source can make usable software. Rather, I believe that when your OS is made up of several different projects, some of which are in direct competition with one another, and have no authority which governs them all, you're not going to be able to create a simple consistent experience across the OS. Imagine if the Microsoft teams working on Explorer, the WinNT kernel, the UI, and so forth, were all split up and assigned to different companies. It'd be just as bad, probably worse.
Now, if some company came along and rewrote the GNU/Linux operating system, akin to how Apple rewrote BSD, that would be different. But what you would end up with wouldn't be Linux anyway, because you'd almost certainly be forking the kernel, and from an end user perspective it would be totally unrecognizable as Linux. And you'd have to find a company willing to go through that kind of success, and willing to absorb the kinds of losses they'd have to face in the first couple years as they tried to make inroads.
Sorry, I exaggerated. What I meant was "no challenger seems to exist today, or seems likely to arise in the near future that could threaten MS's desktop OS monopoly." In computer terms, I think of "never" as "not in the next 5 years."
But there comes a time when you have to give up. "Momentarily" is such a case, I think. An even better example is "healthy," which is only supposed to be used to describe the health of a living thing. "Healthful" is the correct term for something that is good for you, but I'm not sure I've ever heard someone use that in everyday speech.
"Decimate" goes far beyond the above two examples, because it hasn't even been used to mean "reduce by 10%" in living memory (indeed, once the tradition of killing every 10th person as punishment for mutiny was abolished, what need was there for a special word meaning "to kill every 10th person?"). Many dictionaries don't even list it as a definition, instead relegating it to etymology.
Actually, going back to "momentarily" for a moment, I looked it up on dictionary.com, and came up with some bizarre results. Webster's lists the sole definition as being "from moment to moment," which is different from your definition. The American Heritage Dictionary lists "for a moment" as a definition, but also notes that 41% of their panel also approves "in a moment," or "at any moment." In contrast, only 26% of the AHD panel approves "decimate" for anything other than the slaughter of human beings.
Ever hear the saying "a stopped clock is still right twice a day?" So what if he has a poor track record for predicting the future, that doesn't mean he's wrong this time. Furthermore, regardless of what slashdotters think, because of his position in the corporate world, people listen to him, so it behooves us to discuss whether or not a prediction like this has any validity to it.
I think the difference is that a high-end database monopoly is unlikely to be leveraged into dominance of large portions of the computing industry. Futhermore, if someone wrote a better database, Oracle would rapidly lose their market position.
In contrast, through bundling and other anti-competitive practices, Microsoft has been able to exploit their desktop OS monopoly to control several other sectors. People have written arguably better operating systems, but Microsoft has managed to set things up such that the cost of switching away from Windows is very high.
I have no doubt that if Ellison were in Gates's position, he'd be no better. I doubt, though, that Oracle is in a position to fill the power void should Microsoft lose control. They might get bigger, and they might exploit their market dominance to a greater degree, but their abuses would still not affect the average computer user as much as Microsoft has.
Slashdot Mirror
The point is that Microsoft is using the temp status to get around labor laws. The aren't really temps, they're being used as permanent employees, but designating them "temps" allows MS to get around having to give them certain benefits.
That's just the old trailer. This is the new trailer we're talking about.
I think he just meant the trailer. I don't think any of us feel a need to sit through Arena Football to see a trailer, just downloading it off of Kazaa will be perfectly sufficient.
No, liability is A factor, not THE factor in determining liability. Simply violating copyright will result in some liability, but not as much as if you're making a profit doing it.
Seriously folks, just because something's old doesn't mean it needs to go. Sometimes it's not worth the cost of transitioning; skip this technology, and just pay the cost once, when the next technology comes along. Sometimes the new technologies are too proprietary. Zip drives eventually failed, I think, becuse of both of the above issues.
I also believe that Apple moved away from the floppy too early; when Apple dumped the floppy, there was no widespread, standardized, rewritable media to use. Now, with USB keychains and cheap CD-R/RW, we're reaching a point where it's appropriate to eliminate floppy drives. As such, I disagree with the statement that "PCs are just now catching up to Apple" as many Apple cheerleaders say here on slashdot.
I got a guy in tech support once who had the two reversed. MAN that frustrated me. I tried to correct him, but he wouldn't believe me. When you're dictating text commands to be entered into a console, it's pretty important to know which is a slash and which is a backslash, don't you think?
SPONSOR: The Sponsor of this contest is Microsoft Corporation, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington, 98052-6399. VISA and its Member financial institutions have not sponsored or offered this contest in any way.
So for once, the paraphrasing is accurate. I agree though, it is something you have to watch out for, especially on Slashdot.
Yeah, and what the hell is k**b? I'm racking my brain, but I can't think of anything to go with that. And boob is NOT a dirty word. Tits and shag are arguable, but it's still pretty weak.
Actually, wasn't this the ORIGINAL meaning? It didn't print out on toilet paper, but you realize that the first stock tickers were not shown on digital displays, right?
Here's my question: if viewing child porn is illegal, how do they find these sites? How closely do they monitor those people to make sure they're not child porn addicts who have found a very clever way to circumvent the system?
Regarding the second point, yes, we are in agreement. I'm not advocating abrogations of privacy, merely stating that the original parent's argument was unlikely to go very far.
Now for the final point. First we have to define what a single war crime is. Was the Holocaust one giant war crime, or billions of little ones? Are we counting the gas attacks used by France, England, and Germany during WWI, even though there weren't really officially "war crimes" back then? Are the methods used by the USSR to deal with dissent and rebellion considered war crimes, or merely human rights abuses? Certainly if we consider magnitude, there's no possible way the USA can be compared to Germany or Russia if we take into account the entire 20th century.
Yes, the USA has thrown a bit of weight around, but part of that is that we're just so goddamn heavy! The first half of the 20th century was characterized by American isolationism. After the two world wars and the emergence of the Soviet Union as a force dedicated to bringing about a worldwide "dictatorship of the proletariat," the message to the US was, if you'll excuse my quoting Spider-Man, with great power comes great responsibility. The message the world was sending us was that by virtue of our economic power, it was our duty to involve ourselves in the affairs of others, to try to maintain the peace. We're criticized as much for NOT involving ourselves in countries as for the opposite (we "abandoned Afghanistan" after the Soviet invasion was pushed back, we "allow" people to starve in 3rd world nations).
Read the books yourself, you won't find a more benevolent world power anywhere in history. Contrast America's handing of post-WWII western Europe to the USSR's handling of post-WWII eastern Europe. Compare America's "economic imperialism" to the military imperialism practiced by western Europe in the 19th century. Is the USA really worse for the Arab world today than the Ottoman Empire was a couple hundred years ago? Yes, we're falliable, we're human, and we even give into temptation. But we're trying, which is more than you can say for most.
As for cancer and heart disease, these mainly kill people who are older and/or live unhealthy lives. It is not something that generally strikes without warning and instantaneously kills people who are not expecting it. And again, what can the government do? Maybe allocate a few more million dollars to medical research, but that's about it.
Finally, the 9/11 terrorist attacks were bad, but other terrorist attacks could be worse. NBC weapons could kill hundreds of thousands of people. When evaluating the danger from terrorism, we have to take into account not only past attacks, but also the potential scale of future attacks.
I haven't been bamboozled and I was never shellshocked. You just don't seem to understand that terrorism is a legitimate fear for this (and for any) nation. The government's solutions are certainly vunerable to criticism, but not doing anything would be tremendously "destructive and foolish."
So what you're saying then is that we should have let the Soviet Union conquer Afghanistan? Yeah, that might have reduced the terrorist attacks against us now, but would that have been the right thing to do?
Ah, but the terrorists didn't come from South America, did they? So "bullying the world" is not a sufficient explanation for why Arabs are flying around the world to attack American interests. There does appear to be something peculiar to the Middle East, be it cultural, political, or what have you.
Hell, for that matter, the US has done far less with its superpower status than any predecessor. Would you rather have the empires of England, France, Germany and Spain back? America actually protected Latin America from suffering under the colonial yoke the same way Africa and Asia did. Yes, America is the most powerful economic and military power in the world, but that does not automatically make us evil.
First of all, I should point out that I was not advocating limiting privacy to stop terrorists. I was merely pointing out that if it was a solution, people would be willing to accept it. Now then, let's look at your exceptionally vague notes on a solution. Isn't deposing Saddam helping to free a number of Arabs from oppression, and help the Kurds with discrimination? The US supports the World Bank, which does as much as it can to help reduce poverty. I'm not sure what the USA can be expected to do beyond that. Certainly by your argument, shouldn't the terrorists be attacking, say, Panama, since Panama's never done anything to help with the "root causes" you mentioned.
All that being said, even though I think that Michael Moore is (to borrow from Al Franken) a big fat idiot, I'm glad the Academy did not cut his "acceptance speech." It didn't take up much of my time, and I think it would have been inappropriate to remove an acceptance speech without warning Moore beforehand what types of speeches would not be aired.
This is one of the most stupid things I've ever read. Because people in other countries are starving to death, Americans shouldn't be worried that they or someone they care about could be killed by terrorists? Should we abolish AIDS research because more people worldwide are killed by diarrhea? No, of course not, Americans are going to care about what threatens THEM, and I would expect everyone else to do the same.
Several thousand citizens were killed on 9/11. I have little doubt that their families would be more than willing to give up their privacy to have the victims back again. No doubt the vicitms as well, if given incontrovertible proof prior to 9/11 that being deprived of privacy would save their lives, would do so in an instant.
Of course, you can't deprive just a small segment of the population of privacy, because you don't know who to target until after you've removed everyone's privacy. A much better argument would be "depriving a quarter of a billion American citizens of privacy for the sake of perhaps catching a few terrorists in the future is unaccepetable, especially without proof that giving up privacy will have the desired effect."
Something that many slashdotters seem to forget in this debate is that terrorists kill people. Terrorists kill a lot of people, and leave others without families, without friends, or without jobs. If there is a solution that will truly make people safe from this threat, THEY WILL TAKE IT, and they are right to do so. Most of us are not willing to be martyrs. If there is a better way to stop terrorism, please share it with the rest of us, because we have no fucking clue. Bush didn't start "bullying the world" until AFTER the destructive terrorist attacks. Aside from returning to our pre-WWII isolationism, what would you suggest we do to prevent future terrorist attacks?
When were the Dixie Chicks or Michael Moore unfree to speak? They spoke, others spoke back. Are you proposing that people be forbidden from booing or boycotting those whose speach offends them? That seems to me to be an abridgement of freedom of expression.
Once upon a time, the USA didn't care what happened outside of the western hemisphere (the "Monroe Doctrine"). We had to be dragged kicking and screaming into both of the World Wars. Now the USA is a superpower. I have little doubt that China would be similarly unable to resist the meddling impulse if they became as powerful as the USA.
A few reasons. First, look at the progress on Linux so far. Linux is now much, much easier for the computer savvy person to use. Graphical shells, more software, more maturity all around, plenty of improvements. However, is Linux any closer to having a single, unified configuration tool today relative to 5 years ago? I don't think so. Does copy & paste work consistently across all applications? I'm not simply bemoaning where Linux is at the moment, I'm saying that for many of the basic features that make computers tolerable for the computer illiterate, Linux has made no progress since its inception.
Frankly, I do blame the open source development model. I don't blame open source because I don't think open source can make usable software. Rather, I believe that when your OS is made up of several different projects, some of which are in direct competition with one another, and have no authority which governs them all, you're not going to be able to create a simple consistent experience across the OS. Imagine if the Microsoft teams working on Explorer, the WinNT kernel, the UI, and so forth, were all split up and assigned to different companies. It'd be just as bad, probably worse.
Now, if some company came along and rewrote the GNU/Linux operating system, akin to how Apple rewrote BSD, that would be different. But what you would end up with wouldn't be Linux anyway, because you'd almost certainly be forking the kernel, and from an end user perspective it would be totally unrecognizable as Linux. And you'd have to find a company willing to go through that kind of success, and willing to absorb the kinds of losses they'd have to face in the first couple years as they tried to make inroads.
Sorry, I exaggerated. What I meant was "no challenger seems to exist today, or seems likely to arise in the near future that could threaten MS's desktop OS monopoly." In computer terms, I think of "never" as "not in the next 5 years."
"Decimate" goes far beyond the above two examples, because it hasn't even been used to mean "reduce by 10%" in living memory (indeed, once the tradition of killing every 10th person as punishment for mutiny was abolished, what need was there for a special word meaning "to kill every 10th person?"). Many dictionaries don't even list it as a definition, instead relegating it to etymology.
Actually, going back to "momentarily" for a moment, I looked it up on dictionary.com, and came up with some bizarre results. Webster's lists the sole definition as being "from moment to moment," which is different from your definition. The American Heritage Dictionary lists "for a moment" as a definition, but also notes that 41% of their panel also approves "in a moment," or "at any moment." In contrast, only 26% of the AHD panel approves "decimate" for anything other than the slaughter of human beings.
Ever hear the saying "a stopped clock is still right twice a day?" So what if he has a poor track record for predicting the future, that doesn't mean he's wrong this time. Furthermore, regardless of what slashdotters think, because of his position in the corporate world, people listen to him, so it behooves us to discuss whether or not a prediction like this has any validity to it.
In contrast, through bundling and other anti-competitive practices, Microsoft has been able to exploit their desktop OS monopoly to control several other sectors. People have written arguably better operating systems, but Microsoft has managed to set things up such that the cost of switching away from Windows is very high.
I have no doubt that if Ellison were in Gates's position, he'd be no better. I doubt, though, that Oracle is in a position to fill the power void should Microsoft lose control. They might get bigger, and they might exploit their market dominance to a greater degree, but their abuses would still not affect the average computer user as much as Microsoft has.