The article seems to state that those who reported higher levels of physical pain also reported more easily feeling rejected in a social situation. Therefore, it stands to reason (at least to me) that they have isolated the gene which causes people to complain, rather than any link between physical pain and emotional distress.
Yeah, I know, what kind of slashdotter am I, if I actually RTFA?
Disclaimer: I will not attack your spelling, grammar, or punctuation in this post. It would waste even more of my readers' time, and be no challenge whatsoever. Besides, I'm surprised I'm bothering to respond to an AC at all, but I wanted desperately to clear up your misinformation. My rebuttal of your post follows.
Firstly, a link is ridiculously simple to create, and greatly increases your chance of actually having the reader follow your browsing trail of breadcrumbs. Here, let me show you:
Secondly, the page you failed to link to has the 1919 version of a book that was actually published in 1950 (twice!) and 1951. The three links at the bottom have access to full scans of all three earlier versions of that text.
Thirdly, There's not even a "snippet" link on the page you're linking to, so it may either have been yanked due to the slashdot effect, or perhaps it's not finished being scanned in? I seem to recall reading that this "digitize everything ever written" project is "in process".
Next, I will wonder why you are upset that you can't find any books prior to 1830, public domain or otherwise. Are you really upset that you can't find any books in this collection written/published more than 200 years ago? 200 years ago, humans didn't have electricity. Books were ineffably physical objects. A "searchable database" might have consisted of an entire library's known collected works, perhaps in a card catalogue - but more likely, catalogued (by hand!) in one of the tomes contained in the very same building as the collection it catalogued (the Network Administrator and "IT Guy" in me shudders at the thought of not having an off-site backup, but I digress). I'm not sure how long we've had mechanized printing, but it can't have been too terribly long in the grand scheme of things (sure, mod me uninformative for not providing a link to the wiki page for the printing press).
I will then continue dissecting this particular snippet of your post, wondering aloud (so to speak (type?)) if you intended to use the phrase "later than", as opposed to your wording "prior to" - the arguments you supply seem to support the latter. Your example, which you seem to be attempting to use to support your claim (ie, being unable to find the text in question) being published nearly 90 years after your "cutoff date" is confusing, otherwise.
To continue dissecting the logic here, you complain that you cannot download a scan of the book in question; I clicked two of the three links I mentioned earlier, to see if the "full scan" was available, and lo: there are links at the top-right side of the page to download the PDF.
Furthermore, I may be putting my foot in my mouth, because I just realized that the work you linked to is volumes 50-51 of the work in question, and since I don't read whichever language it's written in (and don't particularly care what language it's written in, to be honest - I can tell at least that it's Nordic, and were I interested in whatever the subject matter is, I'm sure I could find someone to at least help me get the gist of it (there's over 6 billion of us humans on this mudball, after all)), I can't determine which volumes of "Samlade Skrifter" are linked in at the bottom. I also didn't bother to read the page so I could see if it is described somewhere on the page (again, because I don't care). I'm lazy, whatever. Your example appears to be full of logic holes... My point being that there are easily half a dozen reasons why your whining does nothing to improve or further this discussion.
I'm all for freedom of information, don't misunderstand me. Cheering for someone who seems to be trying to do the same thing is also cool in my book (pardon the pun). Bitching because some obscure work that you're interested in isn't available *yet* (note the emphasis) seems worse than unproductive to me - it's annoying. If anything, we might be upset that
Sure, sure - 1,000 random WoW players in a room together... how do you determine your samples? If you pull people off the Blizzard servers at random, you might get numbers like yours. Do a quick google for "WoW private server" and you might change your thinking a bit. Literally hundreds of "private" servers that allow public access, many with multiple thousands of users. Hundreds of youtube videos with instructions on how to set them up, how to connect to existing ones, etc. Blizzard is having WoW slowly yanked out from underneath it, due to their lack of diligence in providing the service people are *paying* for. I emphasise the word "paying" because when someone has dropped upwards of US$110 (based on the current pricing for the basic game and both expansions), and is then paying US$15 per month, they expect to be able to do certain things in the game... like enter an instance without being told "No additional instances can be launched, please try again later."
Blizzard is not providing the service they are selling... sound familiar? We're always griping about the net access issues along the same lines... but in this case, there *is* an alternative. Several, actually. According to my (admittedly brief) research, there are at least 3 separate "WoW Server Emulation" projects currently under way (counting only functional systems), and they are apparently right behind Blizzard where patch levels are concerned (Most servers I saw were one (or less!) patch behind Blizzard's full releases). Combine that with a smaller server community, and other issues are obviated. (Who wants to be a gold seller on a server with only 800 users? Or where you spawn as a level 80 with 10,000 gold? Or where every user is a GM? Why bot when you can be rich and powerful right out of the gate?)
Let this be a lesson to corporate/closed-source software - we (geeks, nerds, basement-dwellers, etcetera) can, do, and will reverse-engineer the products you provide us - the amount of time before it occurs is based mostly on our level of satisfaction with the current regime. We have replaced Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office, and are now more compatible with Microsoft's own products than Microsoft is. Keep us happy, or become road-kill on the information superhighway.
Hate to be the one to break it to you guys, but the world has changed; Lead, follow, or get out of the way.
Games like World of Warcraft are virtually immune to piracy;
On the contrary, it has now become fairly simple to join a "private server". Blizzard is apparently losing the "service-based" battle for consumers - it has come to many people's attention that private servers tend to not have annoying things like logon queues, the frustrating "No additional instances can be launched, please try again later" message that has whole raiding groups acting like fleas in heat for 20-30 minutes before giving up, unresponsive GM's, inadequate policing for spammers, etc.
The violation of a click-through EULA/ToS is such a minor thing to most of these kids that it never even occurs to them that what they're doing is "breaking the rules" - and if it does, it just adds an extra edge, like sneaking a cookie from the cookie jar used to do.
To cut this post short, I'll just categorically refute that line about WoW, and get back to work. Oh, and I agree with the rest of your post.
You are confusing means and motive. Control is just the means, (maximized accumulation of) money is the motive.
*You* are confusing means and motive. The motive is control. The means and method of control is monetary. The more money one acquires, the more power one has. Money is just a symbol, a method of getting people to do what you want. You know the golden rule, right?
We shouldn't be modding these down, we should be modding them up. Yes, they're annoying and nonsensical (or even offensive) - but it's fairly obvious that these types of comments are computer-generated, so it becomes obvious that someone/something is breaking the captcha - modding these comments down just helps them hide the fact that they can spam slashdot any time they want to. How many of us browse at -1?
Mod these comments +1, Interesting, and maybe it will attract someone's attention that slashdot is more broken than they think.
I suppose that works, yes. On the other hand, the fact that I was not the only respondant to wonder what you're smoking seems to back up my own point, as well. Let's leave this one with an agreement that I'm an idiot for not seeing your (apparently) blindingly obvious sarcasm, and you're an idiot for attempting to use sarcasm in a venue that disallows tone of voice, facial expressions, and body language. Fair enough?
Apparently the memory part of my brain is about the same size as the part of yours which detects sarcasm:)
<rant style='grammar-nazi'>
Or, perhaps the statement you made didn't have any indication that it was sarcasm... Italics or bold are typically used for emphasis; It is extremely helpful when you want your sentence to read a specific way. It would behoove you to attempt reading your own comment without knowing that it's sarcasm, and see what hints you may have thrown to the reader to indicate that you were not completely and utterly serious.
Better yet, perhaps you should stop using sarcasm in a text-only medium - there's less chance of being misinterpreted that way.
How about Amazon's ability to remove books you've already paid for? Refund or no, if you came in my house and took a physical book like that, I'd be within my rights to shoot you...
That's a good point, but... how long until eSATA ports are powered? Maybe that will be implemented in the eSATA 2.0 spec. USB didn't take over the market overnight.
My point (which obviously lacked eloquence) was that no technology is unchanging, and there's always another technology coming around the corner. Serial and parallel ports were the de facto standard for a couple decades... now it's hard to find a new system that has them. PS/2 is going the same way. USB is great, fine and dandy, and 3.0 looks like it'll be fantastic... but USB is not the be-all end-all of connectivity for external devices.
You'd be entitled to be restored to the position before the purchase, i.e. you don't have the book, you do have the money. Since they already gave a refund, you'd be suing to make the situation exactly as it is.
Not quite, young grasshopper... you seem to be jumping to a false conclusion. The situation before the purchase would be me without several hundred ebooks, and also not having a Kindle (not to mention the several hundred US dollars that were in my pocket beforehand). The legal situation, as I understand it, is that they violated the contract that I had to agree to when I purchased the blasted thing, so I can (legally) make them compensate me for the entirety of my lost value.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but you are an idiot.
Fixed that for you. Do yourself a favor - when trying to show how someone else is intellectually inferior, try not to make yourself out to be an idiot with the first line.
Yeah it sucks but for a license to use something, I'd say getting your money back and them taking the book back seems fair in this situation? Its not like you bought a physical product that you could have resold or something worth more now than it was when you bought and they are ripping you off and taking it back.
... people buying these books should have known the license of what they were buying...
Actually, it is exactly like you bought a physical product...
From the Kindle Licensing Agreement (relevant phrase emphasised):
Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use.
As far as I can tell (mind you, I'm no lawyer), Amazon just left itself wide-open for violation-of-contract lawsuits, as well as the possibility of criminal charges for petty theft. Another poster said there would be lots of Kindles on ebay - I'd rather see Amazon buying them all back (as well as the ebooks that were purchased for them), as part of the reparations in a breach-of-contract civil (class action?) suit.
I am extremely interested in the outcome of any cases this generates... either Amazon is guilty of theft and/or fraud, or digital media isn't actual property... either way, looks like the Kindle just got a well-deserved smackdown, and there's all kinds of potential for piracy advocates to fire up the war-wagons. I hope this gets a decent amount of publicity.
On an only semi-related note... at what point do we simply allow copyright to slip quietly away? No one appears to be giving it anything but lip service, any more...
WinSCP sounds like what you're looking for. Either that, or SCP from the command line. If they're mission critical, I'm assuming data reliability is required; FTP isn't something you should use in that case.
A: You replied to the wrong post.
B: WinSCP will cheerfully "fall back" to SFTP or just plain FTP, if you don't turn that "feature" off.
Only if they're able to perform a man-in-the-middle attack. At best they have to be on the same physical network segment as you and able to sniff all traffic
What part of "my work involves transferring mission critical files across a 2 mbit microwave connection, into a government-run telecommunications center with a very dodgy internal network and then finally to our own server" did you not understand?
I know most of you trolls don't read the articles, but for crying out loud, at least read the summary... (Ok, yeah, there's no article in this case, but my point remains valid.)
first, take down all the ORWELLIAN cameras that litter your country.
Excellent suggestion, can't have people taking pictures of other people without their permission...
then, tell the cops they do NOT have the right to stop people just to make quotas, show that they are 'impartial' to race/color and also tell them that its NOT illegal to shoot their photo or even to shoot photos, in general.
Yeah, we don't need permission to take pictures! Wait, what?
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for photographers' rights, but your argument contradicts itself in two adjacent sentences. Either photography of anything in a "public" area is ok, or it's not. Double standards are just as unfair as any "ORWELLIAN" references.
I'm generally against IP, but if this helps make green power technology more profitable it's really not that bad is it?
I'm generally against giving up my personal freedoms, but if getting implanted with a chip that allows me to be tracked accurately to within 3 meters will help stop the terrorists it's really not that bad, is it?
Uhm. Yeah. It is. Pork in your bill is always bad, and the IP laws are screwy enough, kthxbai.
Oh, and another thing... start substituting the word "expensive" when you read "profitable". It makes no sense to me to vote ourselves an automatic 400% increase in price for "green power" technologies, especially if we're excluding any ideas on making "green power" more affordable (read "more available") simply because they come from another country, and/or might step on copyright/patent toes in this country. (Do you really think China gives a rat's ass about violating American laws? Ask NEC about the counterfeit factories (yes, plural; 18, to be precise) they found because someone RMA'd a DVD player that NEC didn't even make. The workers thought it was a legitimate operation, they had NEC's name and logo all over the building and the uniforms, not just the products. Here, have a link.)
(Off-topic rant) My take on IP: 7 years (with a one-time extension of the same duration) was reasonable; 150 years is not. Let the mouse go already, I want my public domain works.
-- Please read and think before you respond or moderate. Thank you.
... a Map with all countries green except for the US.
... unless you're not color-blind, and notice the handful that are gray (indicating not only that they have not ratified it, but haven't even signed it). The U.S.A. seems to be the only country that has signed but not ratified it. I won't even go into how well most of the other "large nations" are doing at actually meeting the protocol.
In other words, thanks for the inflammatory comments, now get back under your bridge.
Slashdot Mirror
The article seems to state that those who reported higher levels of physical pain also reported more easily feeling rejected in a social situation. Therefore, it stands to reason (at least to me) that they have isolated the gene which causes people to complain, rather than any link between physical pain and emotional distress.
Yeah, I know, what kind of slashdotter am I, if I actually RTFA?
Disclaimer: I will not attack your spelling, grammar, or punctuation in this post. It would waste even more of my readers' time, and be no challenge whatsoever. Besides, I'm surprised I'm bothering to respond to an AC at all, but I wanted desperately to clear up your misinformation.
My rebuttal of your post follows.
Firstly, a link is ridiculously simple to create, and greatly increases your chance of actually having the reader follow your browsing trail of breadcrumbs. Here, let me show you:
http://books.google.com/books?id=9zuFXqw12hUC
Secondly, the page you failed to link to has the 1919 version of a book that was actually published in 1950 (twice!) and 1951. The three links at the bottom have access to full scans of all three earlier versions of that text.
Thirdly, There's not even a "snippet" link on the page you're linking to, so it may either have been yanked due to the slashdot effect, or perhaps it's not finished being scanned in? I seem to recall reading that this "digitize everything ever written" project is "in process".
Next, I will wonder why you are upset that you can't find any books prior to 1830, public domain or otherwise. Are you really upset that you can't find any books in this collection written/published more than 200 years ago? 200 years ago, humans didn't have electricity. Books were ineffably physical objects. A "searchable database" might have consisted of an entire library's known collected works, perhaps in a card catalogue - but more likely, catalogued (by hand!) in one of the tomes contained in the very same building as the collection it catalogued (the Network Administrator and "IT Guy" in me shudders at the thought of not having an off-site backup, but I digress). I'm not sure how long we've had mechanized printing, but it can't have been too terribly long in the grand scheme of things (sure, mod me uninformative for not providing a link to the wiki page for the printing press).
I will then continue dissecting this particular snippet of your post, wondering aloud (so to speak (type?)) if you intended to use the phrase "later than", as opposed to your wording "prior to" - the arguments you supply seem to support the latter. Your example, which you seem to be attempting to use to support your claim (ie, being unable to find the text in question) being published nearly 90 years after your "cutoff date" is confusing, otherwise.
To continue dissecting the logic here, you complain that you cannot download a scan of the book in question; I clicked two of the three links I mentioned earlier, to see if the "full scan" was available, and lo: there are links at the top-right side of the page to download the PDF.
Furthermore, I may be putting my foot in my mouth, because I just realized that the work you linked to is volumes 50-51 of the work in question, and since I don't read whichever language it's written in (and don't particularly care what language it's written in, to be honest - I can tell at least that it's Nordic, and were I interested in whatever the subject matter is, I'm sure I could find someone to at least help me get the gist of it (there's over 6 billion of us humans on this mudball, after all)), I can't determine which volumes of "Samlade Skrifter" are linked in at the bottom. I also didn't bother to read the page so I could see if it is described somewhere on the page (again, because I don't care). I'm lazy, whatever. Your example appears to be full of logic holes... My point being that there are easily half a dozen reasons why your whining does nothing to improve or further this discussion.
I'm all for freedom of information, don't misunderstand me. Cheering for someone who seems to be trying to do the same thing is also cool in my book (pardon the pun). Bitching because some obscure work that you're interested in isn't available *yet* (note the emphasis) seems worse than unproductive to me - it's annoying. If anything, we might be upset that
Sure, sure - 1,000 random WoW players in a room together... how do you determine your samples? If you pull people off the Blizzard servers at random, you might get numbers like yours. Do a quick google for "WoW private server" and you might change your thinking a bit. Literally hundreds of "private" servers that allow public access, many with multiple thousands of users. Hundreds of youtube videos with instructions on how to set them up, how to connect to existing ones, etc. Blizzard is having WoW slowly yanked out from underneath it, due to their lack of diligence in providing the service people are *paying* for. I emphasise the word "paying" because when someone has dropped upwards of US$110 (based on the current pricing for the basic game and both expansions), and is then paying US$15 per month, they expect to be able to do certain things in the game... like enter an instance without being told "No additional instances can be launched, please try again later."
Blizzard is not providing the service they are selling... sound familiar? We're always griping about the net access issues along the same lines... but in this case, there *is* an alternative. Several, actually. According to my (admittedly brief) research, there are at least 3 separate "WoW Server Emulation" projects currently under way (counting only functional systems), and they are apparently right behind Blizzard where patch levels are concerned (Most servers I saw were one (or less!) patch behind Blizzard's full releases). Combine that with a smaller server community, and other issues are obviated. (Who wants to be a gold seller on a server with only 800 users? Or where you spawn as a level 80 with 10,000 gold? Or where every user is a GM? Why bot when you can be rich and powerful right out of the gate?)
Let this be a lesson to corporate/closed-source software - we (geeks, nerds, basement-dwellers, etcetera) can, do, and will reverse-engineer the products you provide us - the amount of time before it occurs is based mostly on our level of satisfaction with the current regime. We have replaced Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office, and are now more compatible with Microsoft's own products than Microsoft is. Keep us happy, or become road-kill on the information superhighway.
Hate to be the one to break it to you guys, but the world has changed; Lead, follow, or get out of the way.
Games like World of Warcraft are virtually immune to piracy;
On the contrary, it has now become fairly simple to join a "private server". Blizzard is apparently losing the "service-based" battle for consumers - it has come to many people's attention that private servers tend to not have annoying things like logon queues, the frustrating "No additional instances can be launched, please try again later" message that has whole raiding groups acting like fleas in heat for 20-30 minutes before giving up, unresponsive GM's, inadequate policing for spammers, etc.
The violation of a click-through EULA/ToS is such a minor thing to most of these kids that it never even occurs to them that what they're doing is "breaking the rules" - and if it does, it just adds an extra edge, like sneaking a cookie from the cookie jar used to do.
To cut this post short, I'll just categorically refute that line about WoW, and get back to work. Oh, and I agree with the rest of your post.
You are confusing means and motive. Control is just the means, (maximized accumulation of) money is the motive.
*You* are confusing means and motive. The motive is control. The means and method of control is monetary. The more money one acquires, the more power one has. Money is just a symbol, a method of getting people to do what you want. You know the golden rule, right?
"He who has the gold makes the rules."
im4aired its JESUS UP THE
We shouldn't be modding these down, we should be modding them up. Yes, they're annoying and nonsensical (or even offensive) - but it's fairly obvious that these types of comments are computer-generated, so it becomes obvious that someone/something is breaking the captcha - modding these comments down just helps them hide the fact that they can spam slashdot any time they want to. How many of us browse at -1?
Mod these comments +1, Interesting, and maybe it will attract someone's attention that slashdot is more broken than they think.
... PDF is an open format and it's harder to modify after receipt than a Word file.
You can edit PDF files in OpenOffice. It's not difficult.
I suppose that works, yes. On the other hand, the fact that I was not the only respondant to wonder what you're smoking seems to back up my own point, as well. Let's leave this one with an agreement that I'm an idiot for not seeing your (apparently) blindingly obvious sarcasm, and you're an idiot for attempting to use sarcasm in a venue that disallows tone of voice, facial expressions, and body language. Fair enough?
Apparently the memory part of my brain is about the same size as the part of yours which detects sarcasm :)
<rant style='grammar-nazi'>
Or, perhaps the statement you made didn't have any indication that it was sarcasm... Italics or bold are typically used for emphasis; It is extremely helpful when you want your sentence to read a specific way. It would behoove you to attempt reading your own comment without knowing that it's sarcasm, and see what hints you may have thrown to the reader to indicate that you were not completely and utterly serious.
Better yet, perhaps you should stop using sarcasm in a text-only medium - there's less chance of being misinterpreted that way.
</rant>
Talk about a reason not to own a Kindle.
How about Amazon's ability to remove books you've already paid for? Refund or no, if you came in my house and took a physical book like that, I'd be within my rights to shoot you...
Sony is usually held as an example of a consumer-friendly, trustworthy corporation.
What?!? Is your memory so short?
That's a good point, but... how long until eSATA ports are powered? Maybe that will be implemented in the eSATA 2.0 spec. USB didn't take over the market overnight.
My point (which obviously lacked eloquence) was that no technology is unchanging, and there's always another technology coming around the corner. Serial and parallel ports were the de facto standard for a couple decades... now it's hard to find a new system that has them. PS/2 is going the same way. USB is great, fine and dandy, and 3.0 looks like it'll be fantastic... but USB is not the be-all end-all of connectivity for external devices.
You'd be entitled to be restored to the position before the purchase, i.e. you don't have the book, you do have the money.
Since they already gave a refund, you'd be suing to make the situation exactly as it is.
Not quite, young grasshopper... you seem to be jumping to a false conclusion. The situation before the purchase would be me without several hundred ebooks, and also not having a Kindle (not to mention the several hundred US dollars that were in my pocket beforehand). The legal situation, as I understand it, is that they violated the contract that I had to agree to when I purchased the blasted thing, so I can (legally) make them compensate me for the entirety of my lost value.
... It effectively halves the capacity of my spindles...
Then why not simply burn two copies with no recovery data?
Because parity data allows you to recover your data without having to search for the other disk (which may also be "bad")?
you can get SATA to USB docks for next to nothing and I don't see USB going out anytime soon
... enter eSATA...
Not to put too fine a point on it, but you are an idiot.
Fixed that for you. Do yourself a favor - when trying to show how someone else is intellectually inferior, try not to make yourself out to be an idiot with the first line.
As for your link, I see your IMDB and raise you an XKCD (http://xkcd.com/603/).
And as for your link, I see you failed. Don't worry too much about it, though... basic HTML escapes many people.
Yeah it sucks but for a license to use something, I'd say getting your money back and them taking the book back seems fair in this situation? Its not like you bought a physical product that you could have resold or something worth more now than it was when you bought and they are ripping you off and taking it back.
... people buying these books should have known the license of what they were buying...
Actually, it is exactly like you bought a physical product...
From the Kindle Licensing Agreement (relevant phrase emphasised):
Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use.
As far as I can tell (mind you, I'm no lawyer), Amazon just left itself wide-open for violation-of-contract lawsuits, as well as the possibility of criminal charges for petty theft. Another poster said there would be lots of Kindles on ebay - I'd rather see Amazon buying them all back (as well as the ebooks that were purchased for them), as part of the reparations in a breach-of-contract civil (class action?) suit.
I am extremely interested in the outcome of any cases this generates... either Amazon is guilty of theft and/or fraud, or digital media isn't actual property... either way, looks like the Kindle just got a well-deserved smackdown, and there's all kinds of potential for piracy advocates to fire up the war-wagons. I hope this gets a decent amount of publicity.
On an only semi-related note... at what point do we simply allow copyright to slip quietly away? No one appears to be giving it anything but lip service, any more...
How freakin' hard is it to make a url into a link? I mean, really...
WinSCP sounds like what you're looking for. Either that, or SCP from the command line. If they're mission critical, I'm assuming data reliability is required; FTP isn't something you should use in that case.
A: You replied to the wrong post.
B: WinSCP will cheerfully "fall back" to SFTP or just plain FTP, if you don't turn that "feature" off.
Where are my mod points when i actually *want* them?!?
This is a beautifully simplified explanation of the complexities involved in the spaghetti code we call copyright law.
Two thumbs up.
Only if they're able to perform a man-in-the-middle attack. At best they have to be on the same physical network segment as you and able to sniff all traffic
What part of "my work involves transferring mission critical files across a 2 mbit microwave connection, into a government-run telecommunications center with a very dodgy internal network and then finally to our own server" did you not understand?
I know most of you trolls don't read the articles, but for crying out loud, at least read the summary...
(Ok, yeah, there's no article in this case, but my point remains valid.)
first, take down all the ORWELLIAN cameras that litter your country.
Excellent suggestion, can't have people taking pictures of other people without their permission...
then, tell the cops they do NOT have the right to stop people just to make quotas, show that they are 'impartial' to race/color and also tell them that its NOT illegal to shoot their photo or even to shoot photos, in general.
Yeah, we don't need permission to take pictures! Wait, what?
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for photographers' rights, but your argument contradicts itself in two adjacent sentences. Either photography of anything in a "public" area is ok, or it's not. Double standards are just as unfair as any "ORWELLIAN" references.
I'm generally against IP, but if this helps make green power technology more profitable it's really not that bad is it?
I'm generally against giving up my personal freedoms, but if getting implanted with a chip that allows me to be tracked accurately to within 3 meters will help stop the terrorists it's really not that bad, is it?
Uhm. Yeah. It is. Pork in your bill is always bad, and the IP laws are screwy enough, kthxbai.
Oh, and another thing... start substituting the word "expensive" when you read "profitable". It makes no sense to me to vote ourselves an automatic 400% increase in price for "green power" technologies, especially if we're excluding any ideas on making "green power" more affordable (read "more available") simply because they come from another country, and/or might step on copyright/patent toes in this country. (Do you really think China gives a rat's ass about violating American laws? Ask NEC about the counterfeit factories (yes, plural; 18, to be precise) they found because someone RMA'd a DVD player that NEC didn't even make. The workers thought it was a legitimate operation, they had NEC's name and logo all over the building and the uniforms, not just the products. Here, have a link.)
(Off-topic rant) My take on IP: 7 years (with a one-time extension of the same duration) was reasonable; 150 years is not. Let the mouse go already, I want my public domain works.
--
Please read and think before you respond or moderate. Thank you.
... a Map with all countries green except for the US.
... unless you're not color-blind, and notice the handful that are gray (indicating not only that they have not ratified it, but haven't even signed it). The U.S.A. seems to be the only country that has signed but not ratified it. I won't even go into how well most of the other "large nations" are doing at actually meeting the protocol.
In other words, thanks for the inflammatory comments, now get back under your bridge.