The problem is that you will have several highly-talented people competing for the top spots. Lance Armstrong is a perfect example. The problem is not that he was lacking in talent. Even with performance-enhancing drugs, Joe Average will never be as fast on a bicycle as Lance is without performance-enhancing drugs. The problem is that there were other people who were also extremely talented, and he wanted to be faster than those guys. The "right" way is to work harder, train longer, push yourself further. But sometimes, even that won't be enough. So Lance gave himself a guaranteed edge.
I like how you toss out a token reference to Democratic corruption, and then happily regurgitate, verbatim, the Democrats' talking point that "Republicans are the Party of No." It must be nice to live in a world where there is a political party that you trust to do all your thinking for you. Some of us don't have that luxury.
By the way, to bring this back on point, let's not forget that the DNC is practically a wholly-owned subsidiary of Big Media. Or that Chris Dodd is now chairman of the MPAA. When a Democrat inevitably introduces this legislation, I will be perfectly content to let Republicans play the "No" card.
This is the sole reason I'm on the fence about class actions. On the one hand, the consumer plaintiffs never get anything out of them. They're solely for the enrichment of plaintiffs' attorneys. On the other hand, it is often the only way to hold a big player accountable when it screws a whole lot of people just a little. It's like commissioning a privateer to fight pirates by saying, "Capture them, and any stolen booty you can find on the ship is yours to keep. Just get them out of my shipping lanes." (Which, by the way, is almost exactly what the King of England told Captain Kidd. Except he also said, "And I get a cut of the booty, too.")
Words have both meaning and context. "Unlimited" in a service contract does not mean "mathematically infinite." Ordinary people understand that, pay for their "unlimited" internet service, and happily use it to their hearts' content as much as they want for ordinary, consumer-grade internet operations. Want to watch streaming HD video, all day, every day? Go for it. You won't use nearly as much bandwidth as this guy did. How else would you have Verizon inform people, in a simple, understandable way, that they are providing internet service with no arbitrary usage caps as long as you aren't trying to host google.com? And how are they not within their rights to say, "We haven't charged you extra for your abuse of our 'unlimited' internet service (it is "unlimited" after all), but if you keep it up, we will refuse to provide you service in the future"? Should they be compelled to do business with everybody?
What this guy did is analogous to going into an "all you can eat" restaurant, filling up buckets full of food, and standing on the sidewalk outside selling it---and then complaining when they ask you to leave. It's the kind of thing that smarmy, basement-dwelling geeks do when they pretend to not understand what a word means because technically it has a different definition in a different context. It's also why they can't get dates.
Hate to break it to you, but we still don't care. Seriously. 99% of the people who use Android have no idea that it has anything to do with Linux. They just call it Android. And of the small minority of people who run "Linux" on the desktop, about 99% (from my observation), just call it "Linux." Richard Stallman and a handful of his groupies are still the only people who still care about putting "GNU" in front of Linux.
This particular guy is blowing smoke, but at least he's attempting to address a problem. That is already better than the hordes of people who apparently wish the rest of us would forget that every now and then someone goes bonkers and shoots up a bunch of elementary school kids.
You have more faith in the DNC than I do. All I've seen them do is use tragedies to push their long-term political goal of ensuring that Americans do not have access to firearms. (They're not subtle about this goal, except when they're pushing gun laws. Then they pretend to have never said it.) None of the measures they have proposed would have done anything to prevent those tragedies, but they would have the effect of advancing the DNC's distinctly statist agenda of making people increasingly reliant on the State for everything from basic necessities to personal safety.
(And please, no rants about how Republicans are evil and corrupt too. Yes, they are. But on this issue they happen to be coincidentally right.)
The universe is approximately 13.7E9 years old. There are 8.766E3 hours in a year. Thus, the universe is approximately 1.20E14 hours old. So at a rate of 100 hours per second, it would take 1.20E12 second to exceed the age of the universe in YouTube videos. 1.20E12 seconds works out to around 1 million years. So we have a way to go still.
You may want to loosen your tinfoil hat. If you tighten the straps too hard, sometimes it can cause extreme irritability. Ideally, the fit should be "snug" but not "tight."
Right, which is why we have the Sherman Antitrust Act. In fact, I took a whole class on antitrust law in law school, and it was an awfully thick book, so I know first hand that we already have a ton of antitrust law. We don't need the McCain Micromanagement of Media Act.
At least Obamacare actually matters, whether you love it or hate it. I want my legislators to care about what's going on with Obamacare. I don't want them micromanaging my television.
I was about to hop in and discuss about whether it was good or bad, if the congress should have that kind of control to legislate such a thing, especially on satelite providers... but I like your response a lot better.
At the risk of being a "me, too," seriously, they can't find anything more important to focus their legislative energy on? On the one hand, I kind of like the idea of a la carte television. On the other hand, I kind of don't care because I pretty much already do that with Netflix and iTunes (for Doctor Who). On the third hand, why is it the federal government's business how cable companies package their product? If there are antitrust issues, fine, we've had the Sherman act for more than 100 years. If that doesn't get you there, maybe it's none of your freaking legislative business.
Hell, I'll settle for a party that has an internally consistent platform, instead of one demanding small government while paying billions of dollars to track down and house people for "feeling good". Moderation be damned, I want non-hypocrites so at least I know where I really stand.
Then there is no major American political party for you.
A little bit pedantic here, but nobody has the right to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. If you lose at the district court level, you have the right to appeal to the federal appeals court for your circuit. If you lose at the circuit court, you can petition the Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari, which means they can reach out and grab that case with their awesome Supreme Court judicial superpowers. It's a bit like a pauper begging the king to intervene on his behalf because he feels like the local magistrate has treated him unfairly. And most petitions for cert fare about that well.
The guy made an animation of a Pop Tart cat flying through space on a rainbow. That drawing is copyrighted. If Nintendo made derivative works of that drawing, then it's copyright infringement. What's so hard?
They make some falsifiable predictions. We can apply selective evolutionary pressure to viruses and observe useful results, and do it repeatedly. We can interbreed and predictably speciate horses. But we cannot falsifiably predict that a single-cell organism will evolve into a horse under certain conditions, with a known set of evolutionary steps along the way. That doesn't stop us from looking at fossil records and trying to inductively trace back where horses came from and what conditions led to them and what the intermediate steps along the way were. And we still call it science.
With cosmology, we have billions of snap shots of different structures at different points in their lives, and we can look at them and say, "We think these are different stages of the same cycle." So we create a model. And we say, "If this model is correct, we would expect to find X somewhere." And then if X turns up, that increases the probability that the model is correct. But we can't create a universe and observe its evolution for 14 billion years. That doesn't stop us from creating models of how stars and planets and galaxies form, and we still call it science.
The point is that you were saying that the Scientific Method is what makes stuff Science. I'm saying, a lot of modern science can't rely on the scientific method you learned in sixth grade. As we try to understand our universe and the world around us, we are stuck making the best observations we can and trying to infer a model that we can't falsifiably test.
If it utilises the scientific method, it's science.
Exactly. Like evolutionary biology. Now that we've successfully created life from basic proteins and selectively applied evolutionary pressure until we get modern man hundreds of time, we have a solid scientific theory. And cosmology. Now that we have successfully created the universe hundreds of times and consistently observed its behavior, we have a high-confidence model for what it will do in the future.
And a good thing, too. Can you imagine where we would be if those types of things were inherently not subject to repeatable, falsifiable experiments? What a wreck that would be! Much of our body of science would be inductive reasoning that we kind of back into from our best observations, instead of nice, tidy falsifiable experiments from which we can deductively predict outcomes, just like they taught you in sixth grade. I'd sure hate to live in that kind of world.
You would still have mass, inside the ship. If you exceeded the speed of light, you'd blow up and take the ship with you in a blaze of matter/antimatter glory.
Yeah, but there might be a downside, too. It's hard to tell with these things.
I see you purchased a low-ish UID from B'Trey. Or assassinated him and cracked his 1024-bit encrypted passwords.txt file with your quantum computer. Really, it's all the same to us. Unfortunately, all that stuff he told you about Slashdot being a sort of counter-culture geek site was from 1999 when he registered. Now the articles are mostly trolls (like this one) and the comments are largely from kids who aren't old enough to remember the turn of the millennium. There are still lots of anti-DRM rants, though. Sorry if you're disappointed. Welcome, anyway.
5) politics (hell, we build bridges to nowhere on governmental funds...)
I think you just nailed it. They will come here because Senator Xzwlyng'to needs to bring some pork back to the home world, and what better way then to build a factory for an interstellar ship on government funds. It will ostensibly be so they can send an aid package, in the form of 50 billion ktars, though anybody with half a brain pod will know that as soon as it arrives, the leaders of the Blue World will confiscate the money and use it to pay for guns and prostitutes.
Most shows I just watch on Netflix, without commercials, whenever they're available. I get Dr. Who on iTunes because I don't want to wait for it. For a season of 15 episodes, I'm paying $30. $45 if I want it in HD (which I won't get on DVD). It's a pretty reasonable price. And that's not a one-time rental. I keep the episodes. I have every episode since the 2005 reboot and a good collection of the classics, available to watch whenever I feel like it. It's really not a bad deal.
Ponzi schemes are by nature efficient. All you have to do is take people's money and pay out fake dividends until the bubble pops. It's not that hard. How is the SSA more efficient at it than private enterprise?
Yes, those jackbooted thugs are more efficient than the private sector thugs. You are apparently agreeing that they are more efficient, then arguing about why. If so, you are very disagreeable in your agreement.
I guess they're efficient at that one thing. "Effective," might be a better word. But that's not the only thing they do. In fact, according to the IRS's own website, they reorganized themselves in 1998 to be more like a private enterprise. So even if the IRS is a bastion of government efficiency, as you claim, it is because they are aping the private sector. That's not much of an endorsement of the efficiency of government operations.
Ummm, wow. Your shining examples of government efficiency are the SSA and the IRS? Do you not realize that Social Security is essentially the largest Ponzi scheme in the history of the world? They don't take your money and grow your portfolio until you retire. They take it to make disbursements to beneficiaries, with the promise that your children will pay your way when they start working. It's worked out okay so far, but the bubble will burst eventually. It's kind of one of the primary features of a Ponzi scheme.
And I assume when you say IRS, you are referring to some agency other than the Internal Revenue Service, who are essentially jackbooted thugs. I guess you could say they're "efficient" at shaking down people for money, but only because they're not answerable to the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. If they were subject to any kind of tort liability, they would be sued into oblivion next week.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that you will have several highly-talented people competing for the top spots. Lance Armstrong is a perfect example. The problem is not that he was lacking in talent. Even with performance-enhancing drugs, Joe Average will never be as fast on a bicycle as Lance is without performance-enhancing drugs. The problem is that there were other people who were also extremely talented, and he wanted to be faster than those guys. The "right" way is to work harder, train longer, push yourself further. But sometimes, even that won't be enough. So Lance gave himself a guaranteed edge.
I like how you toss out a token reference to Democratic corruption, and then happily regurgitate, verbatim, the Democrats' talking point that "Republicans are the Party of No." It must be nice to live in a world where there is a political party that you trust to do all your thinking for you. Some of us don't have that luxury.
By the way, to bring this back on point, let's not forget that the DNC is practically a wholly-owned subsidiary of Big Media. Or that Chris Dodd is now chairman of the MPAA. When a Democrat inevitably introduces this legislation, I will be perfectly content to let Republicans play the "No" card.
This is the sole reason I'm on the fence about class actions. On the one hand, the consumer plaintiffs never get anything out of them. They're solely for the enrichment of plaintiffs' attorneys. On the other hand, it is often the only way to hold a big player accountable when it screws a whole lot of people just a little. It's like commissioning a privateer to fight pirates by saying, "Capture them, and any stolen booty you can find on the ship is yours to keep. Just get them out of my shipping lanes." (Which, by the way, is almost exactly what the King of England told Captain Kidd. Except he also said, "And I get a cut of the booty, too.")
Words have both meaning and context. "Unlimited" in a service contract does not mean "mathematically infinite." Ordinary people understand that, pay for their "unlimited" internet service, and happily use it to their hearts' content as much as they want for ordinary, consumer-grade internet operations. Want to watch streaming HD video, all day, every day? Go for it. You won't use nearly as much bandwidth as this guy did. How else would you have Verizon inform people, in a simple, understandable way, that they are providing internet service with no arbitrary usage caps as long as you aren't trying to host google.com? And how are they not within their rights to say, "We haven't charged you extra for your abuse of our 'unlimited' internet service (it is "unlimited" after all), but if you keep it up, we will refuse to provide you service in the future"? Should they be compelled to do business with everybody?
What this guy did is analogous to going into an "all you can eat" restaurant, filling up buckets full of food, and standing on the sidewalk outside selling it---and then complaining when they ask you to leave. It's the kind of thing that smarmy, basement-dwelling geeks do when they pretend to not understand what a word means because technically it has a different definition in a different context. It's also why they can't get dates.
Like GNU/Linux. No one cared.
Hate to break it to you, but we still don't care. Seriously. 99% of the people who use Android have no idea that it has anything to do with Linux. They just call it Android. And of the small minority of people who run "Linux" on the desktop, about 99% (from my observation), just call it "Linux." Richard Stallman and a handful of his groupies are still the only people who still care about putting "GNU" in front of Linux.
This particular guy is blowing smoke, but at least he's attempting to address a problem. That is already better than the hordes of people who apparently wish the rest of us would forget that every now and then someone goes bonkers and shoots up a bunch of elementary school kids.
You have more faith in the DNC than I do. All I've seen them do is use tragedies to push their long-term political goal of ensuring that Americans do not have access to firearms. (They're not subtle about this goal, except when they're pushing gun laws. Then they pretend to have never said it.) None of the measures they have proposed would have done anything to prevent those tragedies, but they would have the effect of advancing the DNC's distinctly statist agenda of making people increasingly reliant on the State for everything from basic necessities to personal safety.
(And please, no rants about how Republicans are evil and corrupt too. Yes, they are. But on this issue they happen to be coincidentally right.)
The universe is approximately 13.7E9 years old. There are 8.766E3 hours in a year. Thus, the universe is approximately 1.20E14 hours old. So at a rate of 100 hours per second, it would take 1.20E12 second to exceed the age of the universe in YouTube videos. 1.20E12 seconds works out to around 1 million years. So we have a way to go still.
You may want to loosen your tinfoil hat. If you tighten the straps too hard, sometimes it can cause extreme irritability. Ideally, the fit should be "snug" but not "tight."
Right, which is why we have the Sherman Antitrust Act. In fact, I took a whole class on antitrust law in law school, and it was an awfully thick book, so I know first hand that we already have a ton of antitrust law. We don't need the McCain Micromanagement of Media Act.
At least Obamacare actually matters, whether you love it or hate it. I want my legislators to care about what's going on with Obamacare. I don't want them micromanaging my television.
I was about to hop in and discuss about whether it was good or bad, if the congress should have that kind of control to legislate such a thing, especially on satelite providers... but I like your response a lot better.
At the risk of being a "me, too," seriously, they can't find anything more important to focus their legislative energy on? On the one hand, I kind of like the idea of a la carte television. On the other hand, I kind of don't care because I pretty much already do that with Netflix and iTunes (for Doctor Who). On the third hand, why is it the federal government's business how cable companies package their product? If there are antitrust issues, fine, we've had the Sherman act for more than 100 years. If that doesn't get you there, maybe it's none of your freaking legislative business.
Hell, I'll settle for a party that has an internally consistent platform, instead of one demanding small government while paying billions of dollars to track down and house people for "feeling good". Moderation be damned, I want non-hypocrites so at least I know where I really stand.
Then there is no major American political party for you.
A little bit pedantic here, but nobody has the right to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. If you lose at the district court level, you have the right to appeal to the federal appeals court for your circuit. If you lose at the circuit court, you can petition the Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari, which means they can reach out and grab that case with their awesome Supreme Court judicial superpowers. It's a bit like a pauper begging the king to intervene on his behalf because he feels like the local magistrate has treated him unfairly. And most petitions for cert fare about that well.
What do you do for NHL games that are blacked out of NHL Center Ice because they are shown on national or regional cable television?
What I usually do in that situation is not watch hockey. But honestly, that's my response to most situations.
The guy made an animation of a Pop Tart cat flying through space on a rainbow. That drawing is copyrighted. If Nintendo made derivative works of that drawing, then it's copyright infringement. What's so hard?
They make some falsifiable predictions. We can apply selective evolutionary pressure to viruses and observe useful results, and do it repeatedly. We can interbreed and predictably speciate horses. But we cannot falsifiably predict that a single-cell organism will evolve into a horse under certain conditions, with a known set of evolutionary steps along the way. That doesn't stop us from looking at fossil records and trying to inductively trace back where horses came from and what conditions led to them and what the intermediate steps along the way were. And we still call it science.
With cosmology, we have billions of snap shots of different structures at different points in their lives, and we can look at them and say, "We think these are different stages of the same cycle." So we create a model. And we say, "If this model is correct, we would expect to find X somewhere." And then if X turns up, that increases the probability that the model is correct. But we can't create a universe and observe its evolution for 14 billion years. That doesn't stop us from creating models of how stars and planets and galaxies form, and we still call it science.
The point is that you were saying that the Scientific Method is what makes stuff Science. I'm saying, a lot of modern science can't rely on the scientific method you learned in sixth grade. As we try to understand our universe and the world around us, we are stuck making the best observations we can and trying to infer a model that we can't falsifiably test.
If it utilises the scientific method, it's science.
Exactly. Like evolutionary biology. Now that we've successfully created life from basic proteins and selectively applied evolutionary pressure until we get modern man hundreds of time, we have a solid scientific theory. And cosmology. Now that we have successfully created the universe hundreds of times and consistently observed its behavior, we have a high-confidence model for what it will do in the future.
And a good thing, too. Can you imagine where we would be if those types of things were inherently not subject to repeatable, falsifiable experiments? What a wreck that would be! Much of our body of science would be inductive reasoning that we kind of back into from our best observations, instead of nice, tidy falsifiable experiments from which we can deductively predict outcomes, just like they taught you in sixth grade. I'd sure hate to live in that kind of world.
You would still have mass, inside the ship. If you exceeded the speed of light, you'd blow up and take the ship with you in a blaze of matter/antimatter glory.
Yeah, but there might be a downside, too. It's hard to tell with these things.
Did you RTFA?
I see you purchased a low-ish UID from B'Trey. Or assassinated him and cracked his 1024-bit encrypted passwords.txt file with your quantum computer. Really, it's all the same to us. Unfortunately, all that stuff he told you about Slashdot being a sort of counter-culture geek site was from 1999 when he registered. Now the articles are mostly trolls (like this one) and the comments are largely from kids who aren't old enough to remember the turn of the millennium. There are still lots of anti-DRM rants, though. Sorry if you're disappointed. Welcome, anyway.
5) politics (hell, we build bridges to nowhere on governmental funds...)
I think you just nailed it. They will come here because Senator Xzwlyng'to needs to bring some pork back to the home world, and what better way then to build a factory for an interstellar ship on government funds. It will ostensibly be so they can send an aid package, in the form of 50 billion ktars, though anybody with half a brain pod will know that as soon as it arrives, the leaders of the Blue World will confiscate the money and use it to pay for guns and prostitutes.
Most shows I just watch on Netflix, without commercials, whenever they're available. I get Dr. Who on iTunes because I don't want to wait for it. For a season of 15 episodes, I'm paying $30. $45 if I want it in HD (which I won't get on DVD). It's a pretty reasonable price. And that's not a one-time rental. I keep the episodes. I have every episode since the 2005 reboot and a good collection of the classics, available to watch whenever I feel like it. It's really not a bad deal.
It doesn't mean that they've made any actual changes
Well, we can certainly agree on that.
Because the organizations that do it privately cost more to do it than SSA does.
Hey, you should join our tautology club! The only membership requirement is that you're a member of the tautology club.
An efficiently run one.
Ponzi schemes are by nature efficient. All you have to do is take people's money and pay out fake dividends until the bubble pops. It's not that hard. How is the SSA more efficient at it than private enterprise?
Yes, those jackbooted thugs are more efficient than the private sector thugs. You are apparently agreeing that they are more efficient, then arguing about why. If so, you are very disagreeable in your agreement.
I guess they're efficient at that one thing. "Effective," might be a better word. But that's not the only thing they do. In fact, according to the IRS's own website, they reorganized themselves in 1998 to be more like a private enterprise. So even if the IRS is a bastion of government efficiency, as you claim, it is because they are aping the private sector. That's not much of an endorsement of the efficiency of government operations.
Ummm, wow. Your shining examples of government efficiency are the SSA and the IRS? Do you not realize that Social Security is essentially the largest Ponzi scheme in the history of the world? They don't take your money and grow your portfolio until you retire. They take it to make disbursements to beneficiaries, with the promise that your children will pay your way when they start working. It's worked out okay so far, but the bubble will burst eventually. It's kind of one of the primary features of a Ponzi scheme.
And I assume when you say IRS, you are referring to some agency other than the Internal Revenue Service, who are essentially jackbooted thugs. I guess you could say they're "efficient" at shaking down people for money, but only because they're not answerable to the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. If they were subject to any kind of tort liability, they would be sued into oblivion next week.