Anonymous sources are given weight by the journalist who choses to use them as a source. If the journalist has no standing as a person who can be trusted to relay information from informed sources then that anonymous source has no weight, just as an online forum lends no weight to an anonymous poster's comment since it doesn't discriminate between a Ph.D. and a middle school student.
After all, when I try to think of who might be pissed that their kids were exposed to openly gay people I get this image of a man in a plain colored button up shirt and a beer belly from...well, too much beer screaming into their rotary phone in a southern accent complaining about "them gays".
I, for one, acquired a copy of Left 4 Dead for less than retail and not through official retail channels...*coughthanksTPBcough*, however I noticed the recent sale and even though I already have a copy I was highly tempted to purchase a legitimate copy. I'm a little broke as hell due to a recent bout of unemployment, but otherwise I'd have bought it.
So in my case, under normal economic circumstances, lower prices turn a download into a sale.
Well, yeah. But that's the point. When you have a large population of people competing for jobs performing mindless labor you have an opportunity to undercut everyone else by treating your workers like crap. It doesn't mean it's right to do it just because you can get away with it.
Just because the company is keeping them alive doesn't mean they're paying them anywhere near what their work is worth, nor does it mean they're not being worked straight into an arthritic state, or deliberately keeping them dependent on the company by housing them in dorms instead of paying them enough to have their own place.
Being poor, unskilled, and born in an industrial area doesn't make it open season on your life.
I don't know much about tide-powered generators, but doesn't this sort of thing have the potential to screw with the natural order of things a bit? Like shredding sharks, or providing a barrier so little baby walri can't get to shore and drown?
Try telling all those physicists who guesstimated the mass of the galaxy that you need to have anything approaching evidence for an idea to be worth something.
If there's any astrophysicists reading this, don't hurt me!
The one problem with requiring execution of a concept before granting a patent is that you need the money and resources to execute it. If I managed to invent a process for producing hydrogen at 1/1000'th of the cost but it required a massive amount of money to actually produce the plant, for example...
Sure, there would be ways to protect your idea while seeking investors, but eventually that takes lawyers, and money, and the whole point of patents is that you don't need a lot of money to make an idea relatively unstealable.
It's not that we missed the opportunity to spread our love for all that is Mac, we haven't said anything because we know that as we speak Steve is on his way with The Disk and then you'll all see the true power of Jobs.
As shallow as it may seem to some, interface is big part of the computing experience.
I agree completely with you. In fact, I'll do you one better. Most people knowledgeable enough to buy a computer that is Vista capable but lacking enough knowledge to have anything to go on except for a "Vista ready" sticker will first and foremost miss the slick interface. For the common check my email and surf for gardening tips/golf shoes/porn schmo, interface is pretty much, well, everything.
I installed Windows Vista on my Mac Pro in order to run the one program I wanted that I couldn't get for Mac OS the other day (Fallout 3) and while waiting for the install to finish I viewed a few web pages. I'm not talking about pornindex2000.ru here, however it wasn't cnet, either. On a scale of amish to thai hooker I was in solid girl in high school who smoked out back territory.
In any case, I didn't really care what sort of virus or malware or autodialer or rootkit or killprog or hypnotoad I picked up because it would steal my Fallout saved games and then be deleted along with the ntfs partition when I was done playing. However, out of curiosity I installed virus protection some days later and lo and behold within about four or five domains on a fully updated Vista and completely unmodified IE7 I had picked up something. Either a production install of Fallout gave me something, or it was IE. Sooo, no, MS. Go directly to jail, do not collect my license fee.
You're ignoring the fact that many people at various points in their life can't pay commercial health insurance rates. It's not even a matter of cutting back on other things.
Insurance for healthy young people who rarely get sick and are just starting to figure out how to earn a living shouldn't cost what it does. Insurance for people with preexisting conditions shouldn't be unattainable. These are not statistics, they're people's lives. Averages are clean and tidy and lend themselves to generalizations such as "just make sure you don't have insurance". Someone with parkinson's with two children who gets laid off from their job and has their insurance lapse for two months shouldn't be up shit's creek, but this is the reality in this country. Anywhere else and he'd be fine and be able to concentrate on getting another job to take care of his family instead of flailing around desperately trying to figure out how to stop shaking long enough to pass an interview.
I think government involvement in things like health care is a good thing. I hate to use a topic of the week, but look at what happened with the mortgages. The government wanted companies to give loans to people who might not otherwise be able to afford it. The executives in the loan industry took it as an excuse to sell loans to anyone and everyone and make money by selling positions. Then they made a ton of money, and hoped they'd retire or move on before it hit the fan. This is what always happens when the government fails to regulate entities who are motivated by the acquisition of money.
It's in the best interests of companies to take advantage of everyone they can, and there are three things that can keep them from doing that. Simple old fashioned morality, government regulation, and economic pressure. The bigger and more decentralized the company the less likely morality will come into play because when fifty people are involved in every decision it's really easy to shift blame. Economic pressure can only be applied when there are alternatives, and there are none in the insurance industry except for the incredibly lucky or the relatively well off, which does not constitute the bulk of the medical industry's clientele. So until insurance companies decide they no longer like making so much money or a large portion of the country decides they can do without health insurance long enough to boycott it (which will never work because companies know eventually...you'll get sick and come back), the only option is government involvement on a level which forces companies to provide adequate medical coverage.
Sure, the government sucks. They take kickbacks and they're so huge that when they do something that pisses you off you can't even be sure who to be mad at. But they're better than a private corporation that doesn't even have to pretend to care.
You're making the assumption that idiocy trumps nitro-boosted greed. I'm of the opinion that those who are highly motivated to screw you to maximize profits will do it more efficiently than those who may accidently screw you.
Yes, yes, lobbies, corruption, I know. That's a topic for another thread, nothing to do with the incompetence of the government.
Housing (through regulation of the companies which give mortgages), cars (through regulation of how many miles per gallon of gasoline a vehicle must travel and by establishing a minimum level of safety), and clothes (through regulation of how safe infant and children's clothes must be and banning certain unsafe materials) all fall under the umbrella of "the government's business". In each case the government decides to a certain extent what you can have offered to you for purchase. Furthermore, through government subsidized homeless shelters and low cost housing people are given lower-than-market cost housing. Welfare also provides money to pay for housing, food, and clothing (whether or not you think welfare is managed properly the fact is some people do deserve it and it most definitely is part of the government's business...literally).
Nobody here is asking the government to provide free health care, because the government can't possibly provide someone who pays taxes free health care. Whether it's directly from tax dollars or from investments using tax dollars or credit issued to the government, it all comes back to the money that is put into the system through taxes.
So, after taking into account the fact that your entire third paragraph is full of errors and general ignorance on what programs and aspects of life the government actually does take part in I've come to the conclusion that you don't have a wife and are, in fact, twelve years old.
Continuous coverage is not possible for a lot of people, even those who are "responsible". Take the vast majority of my college friends for example. I attended one of the more reputable art schools in the country from which many artists and designers which you've probably heard of have graduated. Most of the people who just graduated from this school have had insurance while they were children through their parent's plan, they've had insurance at school because it's a prerequisite for attendance, and then their school insurance lapsed at the end of August. Out of those who have managed to find work many of them are contract jobs, and only some of the regular paying jobs provide insurance.
Now, should any of these people have a pre-existing condition they're screwed unless they can afford to pay out of pocket for insurance which will cost a lot more than usual because of their preexisting condition. It's not through any fault of their own except for the choice of not going into a more reliably employable profession like, say, insurance adjustor.
Soooo...you've taken a slightly insensitive post which contained a point about McCain's lack of first-hand experience with the health system and replied with a sympathy grab relating to his POW experience (which has a lot to do with sucking, but nothing to do with health insurance). Good job.
Operating systems need to stop being argued like a religion, I'm getting tired of it.
I don't know about that. Both are pretty esoteric topics and I've spent a lot more time fiddling with my computer than I ever did contemplating my beliefs on the existence of a deity or deities.
In fact, considering that a person's choice of religion doesn't necessarily change whether they're a good person or not (unless your religion involves bothering me about it at dinner time, they're bad people), but your choice of computer will cost you time out of your life if it's the wrong decision, I'd say that your choice of OS is vitally important and should be argued passionately if you believe you're right.
...is that if you, as an individual took this to a DA the response you'd probably get would be "You want me to prosecute him for getting your YouTube account shut down? What are you, twelve?" The fact is that very few people really understand what a cultural and economic powerhouse the internet is these days, and will increasingly be in the decades to come. Everything that happens now sets the stage for what the internet will be when it's a mature content delivery platform, and every time someone gets away with manipulating what's out there, no matter the scale, it makes it that much easier for someone/something to control the internet at large somewhere down the line when the power of easily accessible publicly published opinion is more evident.
Yes, our support of laws is generally tainted by their application (of course that's what the whole jury nullification thing is about, so our legal system does, in fact, support the idea of the people actively interpreting the application of the law). However you're wrong in saying they shouldn't require a license to gather non-private information. Because this information could result in monetary and possibly even criminal penalties it's essential that not only are the individuals involved trained properly to collect and preserve the evidence but they also collect a proper paper trail that can be independently verified by the defense.
It's also very important that the people involved in pursuing litigation be faced with penalties if it's shown they did not act in good faith, something the contractors of the RIAA do on a regular basis (I'm not going to look up the supporting documentation for this, but it's out there and it's not anecdotal). An individual who's shown to be sloppy in his evidence collection only loses credibility if a lawyer in a future related case happens to know about their sloppy work. On the other hand a licensed investigator who's shown to be incompetent can lose their license, thereby preventing them from doing the same shady investigating in the future. Big difference in terms of someone habitually whoring their "expert testimony" out.
Any device you throw in there to read your media has a pretty good chance of dying a quiet death over the next 25 years. Even one critical hardware failure anywhere from the power supply to the output will require a large repair bill from a specialist.
Also, anything that outputs through a plug (CD-ROM drive, ATA drive, thumb drive, etc) will require an equally antiquated device to playback whatever you store because there's no way anything 25 years from now will be using s-video, firewire, or usb. Yes, there may be widespread adoption of Firewire 13 or Superduperspeed USB, but you can be damn sure at the very least the plugs won't fit.
Throw a DVD in there, maybe three or four copies individually wrapped. With any luck at all we'll still be using optical media to some extent and it'll be backwards compatible thanks to everyone's dvd collections.
Cheney's been so vilified by everyone but the far right (for many really, really good reasons) that putting him anywhere near the Sept ticket would guarantee a dem win.
You might as well put Limbaugh on the ticket and run one commercial, with Limbaugh front and center, filling the screen, with the barest hints of an American flag poking out from behind the flab, middle finger held high and proud, with the tagline "Suck it, Donkeys"
Slashdot Mirror
Anonymous sources are given weight by the journalist who choses to use them as a source. If the journalist has no standing as a person who can be trusted to relay information from informed sources then that anonymous source has no weight, just as an online forum lends no weight to an anonymous poster's comment since it doesn't discriminate between a Ph.D. and a middle school student.
After all, when I try to think of who might be pissed that their kids were exposed to openly gay people I get this image of a man in a plain colored button up shirt and a beer belly from...well, too much beer screaming into their rotary phone in a southern accent complaining about "them gays".
I, for one, acquired a copy of Left 4 Dead for less than retail and not through official retail channels...*coughthanksTPBcough*, however I noticed the recent sale and even though I already have a copy I was highly tempted to purchase a legitimate copy. I'm a little broke as hell due to a recent bout of unemployment, but otherwise I'd have bought it.
So in my case, under normal economic circumstances, lower prices turn a download into a sale.
Well, yeah. But that's the point. When you have a large population of people competing for jobs performing mindless labor you have an opportunity to undercut everyone else by treating your workers like crap. It doesn't mean it's right to do it just because you can get away with it.
Just because the company is keeping them alive doesn't mean they're paying them anywhere near what their work is worth, nor does it mean they're not being worked straight into an arthritic state, or deliberately keeping them dependent on the company by housing them in dorms instead of paying them enough to have their own place.
Being poor, unskilled, and born in an industrial area doesn't make it open season on your life.
I don't know much about tide-powered generators, but doesn't this sort of thing have the potential to screw with the natural order of things a bit? Like shredding sharks, or providing a barrier so little baby walri can't get to shore and drown?
Anyone? I'll take bits of string, bug collections, and good will in trade. Just, please, get me off this train.
Try telling all those physicists who guesstimated the mass of the galaxy that you need to have anything approaching evidence for an idea to be worth something.
If there's any astrophysicists reading this, don't hurt me!
The one problem with requiring execution of a concept before granting a patent is that you need the money and resources to execute it. If I managed to invent a process for producing hydrogen at 1/1000'th of the cost but it required a massive amount of money to actually produce the plant, for example...
Sure, there would be ways to protect your idea while seeking investors, but eventually that takes lawyers, and money, and the whole point of patents is that you don't need a lot of money to make an idea relatively unstealable.
It's not that we missed the opportunity to spread our love for all that is Mac, we haven't said anything because we know that as we speak Steve is on his way with The Disk and then you'll all see the true power of Jobs.
(Written from a Mac Pro)
As shallow as it may seem to some, interface is big part of the computing experience.
I agree completely with you. In fact, I'll do you one better. Most people knowledgeable enough to buy a computer that is Vista capable but lacking enough knowledge to have anything to go on except for a "Vista ready" sticker will first and foremost miss the slick interface. For the common check my email and surf for gardening tips/golf shoes/porn schmo, interface is pretty much, well, everything.
I installed Windows Vista on my Mac Pro in order to run the one program I wanted that I couldn't get for Mac OS the other day (Fallout 3) and while waiting for the install to finish I viewed a few web pages. I'm not talking about pornindex2000.ru here, however it wasn't cnet, either. On a scale of amish to thai hooker I was in solid girl in high school who smoked out back territory.
In any case, I didn't really care what sort of virus or malware or autodialer or rootkit or killprog or hypnotoad I picked up because it would steal my Fallout saved games and then be deleted along with the ntfs partition when I was done playing. However, out of curiosity I installed virus protection some days later and lo and behold within about four or five domains on a fully updated Vista and completely unmodified IE7 I had picked up something. Either a production install of Fallout gave me something, or it was IE. Sooo, no, MS. Go directly to jail, do not collect my license fee.
You're ignoring the fact that many people at various points in their life can't pay commercial health insurance rates. It's not even a matter of cutting back on other things.
Insurance for healthy young people who rarely get sick and are just starting to figure out how to earn a living shouldn't cost what it does. Insurance for people with preexisting conditions shouldn't be unattainable. These are not statistics, they're people's lives. Averages are clean and tidy and lend themselves to generalizations such as "just make sure you don't have insurance". Someone with parkinson's with two children who gets laid off from their job and has their insurance lapse for two months shouldn't be up shit's creek, but this is the reality in this country. Anywhere else and he'd be fine and be able to concentrate on getting another job to take care of his family instead of flailing around desperately trying to figure out how to stop shaking long enough to pass an interview.
I think government involvement in things like health care is a good thing. I hate to use a topic of the week, but look at what happened with the mortgages. The government wanted companies to give loans to people who might not otherwise be able to afford it. The executives in the loan industry took it as an excuse to sell loans to anyone and everyone and make money by selling positions. Then they made a ton of money, and hoped they'd retire or move on before it hit the fan. This is what always happens when the government fails to regulate entities who are motivated by the acquisition of money.
It's in the best interests of companies to take advantage of everyone they can, and there are three things that can keep them from doing that. Simple old fashioned morality, government regulation, and economic pressure. The bigger and more decentralized the company the less likely morality will come into play because when fifty people are involved in every decision it's really easy to shift blame. Economic pressure can only be applied when there are alternatives, and there are none in the insurance industry except for the incredibly lucky or the relatively well off, which does not constitute the bulk of the medical industry's clientele. So until insurance companies decide they no longer like making so much money or a large portion of the country decides they can do without health insurance long enough to boycott it (which will never work because companies know eventually...you'll get sick and come back), the only option is government involvement on a level which forces companies to provide adequate medical coverage.
Sure, the government sucks. They take kickbacks and they're so huge that when they do something that pisses you off you can't even be sure who to be mad at. But they're better than a private corporation that doesn't even have to pretend to care.
You're making the assumption that idiocy trumps nitro-boosted greed. I'm of the opinion that those who are highly motivated to screw you to maximize profits will do it more efficiently than those who may accidently screw you.
Yes, yes, lobbies, corruption, I know. That's a topic for another thread, nothing to do with the incompetence of the government.
Housing (through regulation of the companies which give mortgages), cars (through regulation of how many miles per gallon of gasoline a vehicle must travel and by establishing a minimum level of safety), and clothes (through regulation of how safe infant and children's clothes must be and banning certain unsafe materials) all fall under the umbrella of "the government's business". In each case the government decides to a certain extent what you can have offered to you for purchase. Furthermore, through government subsidized homeless shelters and low cost housing people are given lower-than-market cost housing. Welfare also provides money to pay for housing, food, and clothing (whether or not you think welfare is managed properly the fact is some people do deserve it and it most definitely is part of the government's business...literally).
Nobody here is asking the government to provide free health care, because the government can't possibly provide someone who pays taxes free health care. Whether it's directly from tax dollars or from investments using tax dollars or credit issued to the government, it all comes back to the money that is put into the system through taxes.
So, after taking into account the fact that your entire third paragraph is full of errors and general ignorance on what programs and aspects of life the government actually does take part in I've come to the conclusion that you don't have a wife and are, in fact, twelve years old.
Continuous coverage is not possible for a lot of people, even those who are "responsible". Take the vast majority of my college friends for example. I attended one of the more reputable art schools in the country from which many artists and designers which you've probably heard of have graduated. Most of the people who just graduated from this school have had insurance while they were children through their parent's plan, they've had insurance at school because it's a prerequisite for attendance, and then their school insurance lapsed at the end of August. Out of those who have managed to find work many of them are contract jobs, and only some of the regular paying jobs provide insurance.
Now, should any of these people have a pre-existing condition they're screwed unless they can afford to pay out of pocket for insurance which will cost a lot more than usual because of their preexisting condition. It's not through any fault of their own except for the choice of not going into a more reliably employable profession like, say, insurance adjustor.
Soooo...you've taken a slightly insensitive post which contained a point about McCain's lack of first-hand experience with the health system and replied with a sympathy grab relating to his POW experience (which has a lot to do with sucking, but nothing to do with health insurance). Good job.
First thing through my mind when I saw the headline. I've been hanging around the internet far too long.
Operating systems need to stop being argued like a religion, I'm getting tired of it.
I don't know about that. Both are pretty esoteric topics and I've spent a lot more time fiddling with my computer than I ever did contemplating my beliefs on the existence of a deity or deities.
In fact, considering that a person's choice of religion doesn't necessarily change whether they're a good person or not (unless your religion involves bothering me about it at dinner time, they're bad people), but your choice of computer will cost you time out of your life if it's the wrong decision, I'd say that your choice of OS is vitally important and should be argued passionately if you believe you're right.
P.S. We're not rebels, we're just smarter than you. Not because you use a PC, but because trolls are dumb. Starve, bitch! For I will not feed you :)
...is that if you, as an individual took this to a DA the response you'd probably get would be "You want me to prosecute him for getting your YouTube account shut down? What are you, twelve?" The fact is that very few people really understand what a cultural and economic powerhouse the internet is these days, and will increasingly be in the decades to come. Everything that happens now sets the stage for what the internet will be when it's a mature content delivery platform, and every time someone gets away with manipulating what's out there, no matter the scale, it makes it that much easier for someone/something to control the internet at large somewhere down the line when the power of easily accessible publicly published opinion is more evident.
Yes, our support of laws is generally tainted by their application (of course that's what the whole jury nullification thing is about, so our legal system does, in fact, support the idea of the people actively interpreting the application of the law). However you're wrong in saying they shouldn't require a license to gather non-private information. Because this information could result in monetary and possibly even criminal penalties it's essential that not only are the individuals involved trained properly to collect and preserve the evidence but they also collect a proper paper trail that can be independently verified by the defense.
It's also very important that the people involved in pursuing litigation be faced with penalties if it's shown they did not act in good faith, something the contractors of the RIAA do on a regular basis (I'm not going to look up the supporting documentation for this, but it's out there and it's not anecdotal). An individual who's shown to be sloppy in his evidence collection only loses credibility if a lawyer in a future related case happens to know about their sloppy work. On the other hand a licensed investigator who's shown to be incompetent can lose their license, thereby preventing them from doing the same shady investigating in the future. Big difference in terms of someone habitually whoring their "expert testimony" out.
Any device you throw in there to read your media has a pretty good chance of dying a quiet death over the next 25 years. Even one critical hardware failure anywhere from the power supply to the output will require a large repair bill from a specialist.
Also, anything that outputs through a plug (CD-ROM drive, ATA drive, thumb drive, etc) will require an equally antiquated device to playback whatever you store because there's no way anything 25 years from now will be using s-video, firewire, or usb. Yes, there may be widespread adoption of Firewire 13 or Superduperspeed USB, but you can be damn sure at the very least the plugs won't fit.
Throw a DVD in there, maybe three or four copies individually wrapped. With any luck at all we'll still be using optical media to some extent and it'll be backwards compatible thanks to everyone's dvd collections.
Cheney's been so vilified by everyone but the far right (for many really, really good reasons) that putting him anywhere near the Sept ticket would guarantee a dem win.
You might as well put Limbaugh on the ticket and run one commercial, with Limbaugh front and center, filling the screen, with the barest hints of an American flag poking out from behind the flab, middle finger held high and proud, with the tagline "Suck it, Donkeys"