Copyright is what keeps Microsoft in business, and that's a government-granted monopoly, so it's stupid to say that Microsoft isn't an example of government affecting the free market.
Someone compared this to hate crimes. He used that as a reason to oppose it but it actually makes a good reason to support it. If you beat someone up because they're the wrong skin color, it intimidates a whole lot of people to a much greater degree than beathing someone up to take their money. The same is true for DDOSing someone for political reasons--it threatens society in general in ways that DDOSing someone by accidenally cutting their wire does not.
There's one thing that perhaps should have been taken away from the Dixie Chicks incident that many people haven't realized: It used to be easy to tailor your message for your audience and tell one group of people something that another group of people would hate you for, safe in the knowledge that they'd never hear it. We have the Internet; you can't do that any more.
It's not just the Dixie Chicks who have been caught by this. It's happened to actual politicians too.
Except no one at the polling station complained about them
Complaining about thugs is often not terribly safe, and the lack of complaints doesn't mean the thugs haven't intimidated anyone. Indeed it often means the thugs are very successful at intimidation.
I'm reminded of the Slashdot article about the robot made out of Legos which solves a Rubik's Cube in 12 seconds. Of course, one of the components to this robot is a computer and the computer is not built out of Legos. This is no more a car produced with a 3D printer than that was a robot made out of Legos.
But the the headline "Parts of Car which it is Possible for 3D Printers to Produce, Produced With a 3D Printer" doesn't have that same ring to it.
any potential employer or significant other that would judge you so harshly for simply having a life is frankly an employer/ S.O. you don't want to have anything to do with
An employer is someone who gives you a job which provides money you need for food, shelter, and clothes. You may not want to have anything to do with them, but you may like even less not having food, shelter, and clothes. In the real world, people work for asshole employers all the time when the alternative is unemployment.
Besides, we did find WMD in Iraq. They were only a few hundred old leftover ones and weren't the massive stockpiles that were were told were endangering everyone, but it is literally true that we found some WMDs. This makes the poll question like those poll questions that ask if witches exist--answering what they said and answering what they meant are very different.
This doesn't show how Gandhi-like tactics are successful, it shows how media manipulation and controlling the media (in this case by the left) can be successful. The media could easily have spun it the other way by pointing out that the protesters' rocks could maim or kill and that they even threw them at firefighters. I'm fairly sure that Gandhi's nonviolence didn't include hurling heavy objects at people's skulls.
Wouldn't work. The FIB would tell them to teach you a lesson, and then they'd just blow up your car without removing the device first (or letting you remove it).
Obion County is in district 24. The representative from that district is a Democrat. Just click on the representative's biography. The current senator is a Republican, but was preceded by Democrat John Tanner, who was there for 20 years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_S._Tanner
If bots are a real problem, certainly the ISP would have reason to catch them all. There probably won't be many false negatives. But it doesn't do a thing about false positives, and in fact may make it easier to get them since ISPs would readily overreach.
Your post assumes a competent, well-meaning ISP. Such an ISP probably won't get a false alarm--but assuming that the ISP is competent and well-meaning may be unwarranted. It's not hard for an incompetent (or dishonest) ISP to get one.
As long as they give the user a means to get back online through cleaning their system up, and they don't do something silly like requiring you to use a NAC that only runs on one operating system
Of course, the ISP has every right to cut off bot-infected users, and should do so. (There's still the problem of not letting the user get online to get the bot removal software, but that's relatively minor and there are several ways around that).
But a lot of Slashdotters, being more technically competent than the typical Internet user, have experience with ISPs who do, in fact, do something silly, and cutting off bot-infected users has great potential for the ISP to screw over the customer via silliness. ISPs could very well
Not provide enough information for the customer to figure out that a false alarm is one
Not have anyone who can understand a customer's explanation about a false alarm
Announce "we don't support Linux", and if you get a false alarm on it, tough, you just get cut off with no recourse
Just not have enough personnel to handle users who are cut off (or if they have such personnel, they are following a script in India and can't respond to things the customer might tell them which aren't in the script)
Cut off customers for other reasons using "botnet" as an excuse, which works especially well when combined with some of the other items above
Used to be that the shady Chinese knockoffs were the less useful hardware, because they wouldn't go to the extra effort to make them work right. Now, it's easy to conceive a scenario in which the cheap stuff is the most functional, because they won't go to the extra effort to properly break them.
This has long since been true for DVDs just because of region coding. Cheap Chinese manufacturers think nothing of hiding a secret menu or option which lets you make your player region-free.
I think for bundles the question is whether someone is likely to buy it for the bundled items rather than the game. Therefore, Wii Play shouldn't count since a lot of people buy it mainly for the remote and don't want the game. On the other hand, the Halo bundles mentioned above pretty much all go to people who would be buying Halo anyway if there was no bundle.
If you go by the Wikipedia article and ignore this sort of bundle the top games are Nintendogs (23.26M), Wii Fit (22.61M), Mario Cart Wii (22.55M), New Super Mario Bros (22.49M) and Pokemon Red/Blue (20.68M). However, Pokemon is tricky because Pokemon games normally come out with an updated version a while later. Does Yellow count as Pokemon Red/Blue or a second title? Using Wikipedia's sources gives 20.68 + 3.16 (Japan Yellow) + 5.10 (US Yellow) = 28.94. And then there's the fact that the list which has Pokemon at 31.38 is from a different source. Which source is right? (It's not that one source is more up to date--those early Pokemons are from years ago and don't have recent sales updates.)
and the kids coming up are brainwashed into accepting the newest absurdity.
The kids coming up are the ones doing the most pirating, actually. They're quite aware that the laws are absurd.
This may help a little bit when in the next few decades judges will start to be more informed about the issues, but it won't help a lot because when they grow up they still can be paid off by media companies just like anyone else.
The US government could neuter him by not being so secretive. If the only things that were kept a secret were those things that were truly important he'd have no power.
Oh, come on now. Names of Afghans who helped the US count as "things that were truly important" to keep secret--since releasing them can and will get them killed--and he released them anyway.
The main difference is that there are a very few such Christian terrorists and a very lot of such Islamic terrorists. The number of Christians who would do such things is big enough to produce a couple of news articles for you to quote, but it's small enough that people routinely create things like "Piss Christ" with little fear of violence. The number of Islamic terrorists who would do such things is big enough that anyone who tries the Islamic equivalent faces a serious threat.
"Ha, ha, there are Christian terrorists too" ignores the fact that there just aren't *many* Christian terrorists. It's still not good if you're the one targeted by the Christian terrorist, but the overall threat is orders of magnitude smaller.
Names containing the letter Q are just an example. It's easy to prove discrimination against names containing the letter 'Q'. It's much harder to prove discrimination based on complicated but ultimately bogus loan criteria. And the person rejected will just get rejected without being told why, so there's nothing he can tell his friends.
Statisticians for loan companies have no incentive to reduce the error rate once it's beneath a certain level, since the effort to refine the loan criteria costs more than the gain from not rejecting people who don't fit the bogus criteria. There might not even be any such gain at all if the bogus criteria are merely neutral--a company that rejects everyone whose name contains the letter 'Q' is never going to have a reason to stop doing that because while it doesn't help, it doesn't hurt the company either unless there are so many customers with 'Q' in their name that it reduces the total customer base below what they can handle.
In fact, that's one of the major problems with companies gathering information on you--they have no incentive to reduce the error rate to zero, and even a few percent of error rate can lead to millions of false positives.
The problem is that you need a license to do the format conversion, and you only have a noncommercial license for that, too (or no license at all if you're using OSS tools). So even if the end product isn't covered by patents, they can still sue you. Naturally, when they sue you for doing the patented format conversion, the amount they will demand as a settlement will just happen to be at least equal to the amount they would charge if you were distributing a patented end product.
Where can I find information about such 360 hacking? Even just to play import games (I know that some will play anyway but not all) Googling shows basically nothing except some references to a hack that worked for a single month in 2006, and a later hardware hack that has no information about anything except the hack itself.
Slashdot Mirror
Copyright is what keeps Microsoft in business, and that's a government-granted monopoly, so it's stupid to say that Microsoft isn't an example of government affecting the free market.
Someone compared this to hate crimes. He used that as a reason to oppose it but it actually makes a good reason to support it. If you beat someone up because they're the wrong skin color, it intimidates a whole lot of people to a much greater degree than beathing someone up to take their money. The same is true for DDOSing someone for political reasons--it threatens society in general in ways that DDOSing someone by accidenally cutting their wire does not.
There's one thing that perhaps should have been taken away from the Dixie Chicks incident that many people haven't realized: It used to be easy to tailor your message for your audience and tell one group of people something that another group of people would hate you for, safe in the knowledge that they'd never hear it. We have the Internet; you can't do that any more.
It's not just the Dixie Chicks who have been caught by this. It's happened to actual politicians too.
Complaining about thugs is often not terribly safe, and the lack of complaints doesn't mean the thugs haven't intimidated anyone. Indeed it often means the thugs are very successful at intimidation.
I'm reminded of the Slashdot article about the robot made out of Legos which solves a Rubik's Cube in 12 seconds. Of course, one of the components to this robot is a computer and the computer is not built out of Legos. This is no more a car produced with a 3D printer than that was a robot made out of Legos.
But the the headline "Parts of Car which it is Possible for 3D Printers to Produce, Produced With a 3D Printer" doesn't have that same ring to it.
any potential employer or significant other that would judge you so harshly for simply having a life is frankly an employer/ S.O. you don't want to have anything to do with
An employer is someone who gives you a job which provides money you need for food, shelter, and clothes. You may not want to have anything to do with them, but you may like even less not having food, shelter, and clothes. In the real world, people work for asshole employers all the time when the alternative is unemployment.
Besides, we did find WMD in Iraq. They were only a few hundred old leftover ones and weren't the massive stockpiles that were were told were endangering everyone, but it is literally true that we found some WMDs. This makes the poll question like those poll questions that ask if witches exist--answering what they said and answering what they meant are very different.
This doesn't show how Gandhi-like tactics are successful, it shows how media manipulation and controlling the media (in this case by the left) can be successful. The media could easily have spun it the other way by pointing out that the protesters' rocks could maim or kill and that they even threw them at firefighters. I'm fairly sure that Gandhi's nonviolence didn't include hurling heavy objects at people's skulls.
Wouldn't work. The FIB would tell them to teach you a lesson, and then they'd just blow up your car without removing the device first (or letting you remove it).
This is tagged as "republicans".
http://www.capitol.tn.gov/districtmaps/Senatewest.html
Obion County is in district 24. The representative from that district is a Democrat. Just click on the representative's biography. The current senator is a Republican, but was preceded by Democrat John Tanner, who was there for 20 years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_S._Tanner
If bots are a real problem, certainly the ISP would have reason to catch them all. There probably won't be many false negatives. But it doesn't do a thing about false positives, and in fact may make it easier to get them since ISPs would readily overreach.
Your post assumes a competent, well-meaning ISP. Such an ISP probably won't get a false alarm--but assuming that the ISP is competent and well-meaning may be unwarranted. It's not hard for an incompetent (or dishonest) ISP to get one.
Of course, the ISP has every right to cut off bot-infected users, and should do so. (There's still the problem of not letting the user get online to get the bot removal software, but that's relatively minor and there are several ways around that).
But a lot of Slashdotters, being more technically competent than the typical Internet user, have experience with ISPs who do, in fact, do something silly, and cutting off bot-infected users has great potential for the ISP to screw over the customer via silliness. ISPs could very well
The answer is always "I wouldn't really want it, but I'd want even less to not be able to eat and pay rent".
This has long since been true for DVDs just because of region coding. Cheap Chinese manufacturers think nothing of hiding a secret menu or option which lets you make your player region-free.
I think for bundles the question is whether someone is likely to buy it for the bundled items rather than the game. Therefore, Wii Play shouldn't count since a lot of people buy it mainly for the remote and don't want the game. On the other hand, the Halo bundles mentioned above pretty much all go to people who would be buying Halo anyway if there was no bundle.
If you go by the Wikipedia article and ignore this sort of bundle the top games are Nintendogs (23.26M), Wii Fit (22.61M), Mario Cart Wii (22.55M), New Super Mario Bros (22.49M) and Pokemon Red/Blue (20.68M). However, Pokemon is tricky because Pokemon games normally come out with an updated version a while later. Does Yellow count as Pokemon Red/Blue or a second title? Using Wikipedia's sources gives 20.68 + 3.16 (Japan Yellow) + 5.10 (US Yellow) = 28.94. And then there's the fact that the list which has Pokemon at 31.38 is from a different source. Which source is right? (It's not that one source is more up to date--those early Pokemons are from years ago and don't have recent sales updates.)
The kids coming up are the ones doing the most pirating, actually. They're quite aware that the laws are absurd.
This may help a little bit when in the next few decades judges will start to be more informed about the issues, but it won't help a lot because when they grow up they still can be paid off by media companies just like anyone else.
Oh, come on now. Names of Afghans who helped the US count as "things that were truly important" to keep secret--since releasing them can and will get them killed--and he released them anyway.
The main difference is that there are a very few such Christian terrorists and a very lot of such Islamic terrorists. The number of Christians who would do such things is big enough to produce a couple of news articles for you to quote, but it's small enough that people routinely create things like "Piss Christ" with little fear of violence. The number of Islamic terrorists who would do such things is big enough that anyone who tries the Islamic equivalent faces a serious threat.
"Ha, ha, there are Christian terrorists too" ignores the fact that there just aren't *many* Christian terrorists. It's still not good if you're the one targeted by the Christian terrorist, but the overall threat is orders of magnitude smaller.
Names containing the letter Q are just an example. It's easy to prove discrimination against names containing the letter 'Q'. It's much harder to prove discrimination based on complicated but ultimately bogus loan criteria. And the person rejected will just get rejected without being told why, so there's nothing he can tell his friends.
Statisticians for loan companies have no incentive to reduce the error rate once it's beneath a certain level, since the effort to refine the loan criteria costs more than the gain from not rejecting people who don't fit the bogus criteria. There might not even be any such gain at all if the bogus criteria are merely neutral--a company that rejects everyone whose name contains the letter 'Q' is never going to have a reason to stop doing that because while it doesn't help, it doesn't hurt the company either unless there are so many customers with 'Q' in their name that it reduces the total customer base below what they can handle.
In fact, that's one of the major problems with companies gathering information on you--they have no incentive to reduce the error rate to zero, and even a few percent of error rate can lead to millions of false positives.
The problem is that you need a license to do the format conversion, and you only have a noncommercial license for that, too (or no license at all if you're using OSS tools). So even if the end product isn't covered by patents, they can still sue you. Naturally, when they sue you for doing the patented format conversion, the amount they will demand as a settlement will just happen to be at least equal to the amount they would charge if you were distributing a patented end product.
People generally don't have political and ideological motives to exaggerate peak helium like they do peak for coal and oil.
You do need them in your life if they're hiring for a job and you want to eat and pay rent.
Where can I find information about such 360 hacking? Even just to play import games (I know that some will play anyway but not all) Googling shows basically nothing except some references to a hack that worked for a single month in 2006, and a later hardware hack that has no information about anything except the hack itself.