Most people use computers to use pirated software. You don't need a majority of people to use something for legitimate purposes, you only need substantial non-infringing use. Bnetd has that.
I already have the right to use the software. They don't need to grant me that right, it's just there. The rights I don't have are those protected by copyright; namely, non-personal copying and distribution. Right to use is not something that I need to get from the creator. So the contract gives nothing.
If you keep the current voting system and simply replace all instances of "state" with "country", what changes? Your vote still "doesn't count" if a majority of people vote the other way.
I don't see why electing someone to an office will guarantee that the person who is chosen will be fit for that office. After all, I can almost guarantee that whoever wins this year's presidential elections will be unfit to be President. I don't see why that would be different for Secretary of Defense or Secretary of Transportation or any other post.
Keep the current election system, but have an execution lottery. Every year (change as necessary) a random name from the House and Senate is chosen. That person is then dragged out onto the Capitol steps and shot (or hanged or electrocuted or injected with poison or whatever you like). This makes it so that there is a small but visible chance that any given representative or senator will not survive his term in office. That will help ensure that the only people to run for these offices will be those who sincerely think that they can help the country, and weed out those who are only in it for personal gain.
You would not have preference lists of "Cobb", "Bush", "Kerry". These are the types of contrived preference lists that are purported to show that IRV is poorly designed.
Why wouldn't you have preference lists like that? If I had to rank those three, I would rank them as "Kerry", "Bush", "Cobb", which is the same as you stated, just backwards. (I would also put the Libertarian guy who's name I can't spell at the top, making for an even more ideologically-incorrect order.)
I was watching it live. I actually stopped breathing until the rocket motor cut off and it looked like it was going to be ok. I didn't even realize it at the time, but once it was finished, I realized I'd been holding my breath. The announcers were doing pretty much the same thing, too. One of them just said "uh oh" when the roll started, and they were pretty much silent after that. I was almost sure that it was going to end in disaster.
The roll showed inherent design problems with this particular spacecraft.
There's no doubt you're a bona fide member of the press. You're making an unsubstantiated claim, cloaked in the guise of a "fact", just because it sells. There's no reason to believe it's an inherent design problem, but polluting your stories with ifs and buts won't sell as many copies as exciting lies, will it?
Not only that, but Sony The Electronics Company is extremely well-known and highly regarded for its products, with a good reputation. Sony The Music Company is just another music label.
A few murders would occur, spurred by the law's expiration. The murderers would be caught and prosecuted anyway, and convicted under some other law (manslaughter, tax evasion, whatever) that hadn't expired yet. They get off with lighter sentences than they should. The legislators responsible are all sacked, and it never happens again. Not too high a price to pay, I think.
You bring up a very good point. We're going to trust one of these guys with our nuclear launch codes and full control over the rest of our military. We're going to trust that they can keep their cool and be reasonable under tremendous pressures. But we can't even trust them to be able to handle an unscripted debate?
It also does one more thing, namely, prevents the debates from being at all meaningful. Given the choices, I'd rather have an unruly debate with lots of stupid questions and time wasting than have two guys spending an hour parroting their party line before stepping off the stage.
Ok, so making fun of French people by using vulgar stereotypes is not racist, I agree with that. (I merely said it was the same kind of thing, not that it was actually racism.) But then you go on to say that because doing it to the French isn't racist, doing it to the Indians isn't either? You can bet your ass that a post like this would get called racist:
You got dat right, massuh.
Don't you worry yoself none about these votes, massuh.
IT be needed like a bowl of gumbo when a brotha be hungry....
Some Black Guy
(Yeah, I can't do the dialect worth a damn. But you get the idea.)
So anyway, if beating up on Indians by using racial stereotypes is not racism, what is? You say I have no idea of what racism is; educate me!
We're talking about films that are filled with magical people that can levitate things with their minds, fight with their eyes closed, deflect laser blasts with hand-held energy swords, and talk telepathically between space ships, and you don't see how one of these magical people would be able to recognize his own father?
And I would be glad to teach the rudiments of selling apples on the street for five cents each, or begging for alms in the hot Calcutta slums!
Not to mention the crappy English, which is obviously saying "Indians speak funny English".
I don't hear anybody complaining when they lose their job because somebody in Alabama is willing to do it cheaper. But as soon as they leave the country, all of the racist foreigner stereotypes get trotted out.
If they were lily-white blonde Indians taking the jobs from us, you can bet there would be just as much racism. Just look at all the fun people are having with France. That might not strictly qualify as "racism", but it's the same deal.
You gotta love it. In any other context, this example of blatant racism would be moderated into the ground and rightfully ignored. But it's a jab at outsourcing, so it gets modded +5. Hooray!
Think bigger. Think to the future. "Don't log in as root/Don't be an administrator." is NOT an answer. Mac OS 9 and below operated by default in a single-user mode without *any* authentication necessary to make changes and I can list the successful viruses/exploits (especially remote exploits) by hand on a single sheet of paper.
So you're saying that the best way to stop these exploits is to make the OS completely useless? Don't get me wrong, I'm a total Mac-head, but OS 9 and under were crap, and the only reason they didn't have any remote exploits is because the OS wasn't capable of any remote operation whatsoever.
Re:Deadlines are a problem
on
After the X Prize
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The deadlines are necessary due to the nature of the prize.
Most likely, this $50 million isn't all being put in a bank somewhere to wait for somebody to win. (I know the X-Prize was done this way, at least, but I haven't really read about this one, so I could be wrong here.) Instead, they basically buy an insurance policy. The insurance company cranks some numbers, decides that there's a (say) 20% chance that somebody will win, and charges $10 million. If somebody actually wins, the insurance company pays out. A deadline is required, otherwise the insurance company couldn't get involved and the organizers would be forced to front the full amount of the prize.
On another note, it's not evil to encourage people to take risks to meet a worthy goal. If you don't like danger, stay home.
If you wanted suborbital flight, there's a dozen countries that could hook you up for this cheap.
Oh yeah, which ones?
I can count the number of countries that have demonstrated, cheap suborbital capability today on my nose. It's one, the USA, and it only has this capability courtesy of Burt Rutan and his financial backer Paul Allen. The US otherwise currently has no manned launch capability at all, suborbital or otherwise. The X-15 would have been perfect for cheap suborbital flights, but I don't know if it ever could have been as cheap as SSO, and it's also been dead and gone for a long, long time. The only two countries that can currently put a person anywhere into space are Russia and China, and neither one has a suborbital system. Of course they can send you on a suborbital flight, but it'll be using orbital hardware, and so it won't be much cheaper.
Maybe I'm totally missing something, but I don't believe your statement is correct.
It sounds pretty broken to me. That is exactly the opposite of how everybody will think it works, and exactly the opposite of how it should work. Making it require you to block all topics for a given story to block that story is basically useless, and deserves to be called "broken".
They would be getting letters even if they played the volume at full blast, and had no commentary, because they were charging for admission. You aren't allowed to do that without permission from the copyright holder. The whole satire aspect of it is completely irrelevant to the situation.
I don't know about you, but I use Google because I know that, most of the time, the result I want will be on the first page. If Google doesn't find what I want, I don't take that as meaning that it doesn't exist, but I do take it as a sign that what I want is going to be hard to find. I believe most people use Google not for its completeness, but for its ability to find what you want without forcing you to troll through five pages of crap first.
Re:seeing as it's the directors saying it...
on
Star Wars Minutiae
·
· Score: 1
In truth, look at the state of science fiction before Star Wars - you had story or realism, but rarely both, and you forgave the missing one. But you still missed it. 2001, Silent Running were two popular exceptions. Star Trek had passable story, cheesy realism, but it was all we had. This had both.
I'm sorry, did you just say that Star Wars had realism? Maybe I missed it that one time I blinked halfway through RotJ, but I never saw any.
A minor correction; the B-29s that the Soviets used to create the Tu-4 came into their hands because they performed an emergency landing in the USSR after a raid on Japan. The B-29 never performed any missions in Europe. It was indeed as close to an exact copy as you could reasonably expect.
The OP's examples (F-15/MiG-29 and Shuttle/Buran) are pretty poor; they look similar only to one who is not familiar with them.
They are offended at the very idea of trying to protect children without thinking things through.
Face it; 99.9% of all "protect the children!" efforts either don't actually protect the children, seriously hurt the liberty of children and adults, and most of the time, both.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people use computers to use pirated software. You don't need a majority of people to use something for legitimate purposes, you only need substantial non-infringing use. Bnetd has that.
I already have the right to use the software. They don't need to grant me that right, it's just there. The rights I don't have are those protected by copyright; namely, non-personal copying and distribution. Right to use is not something that I need to get from the creator. So the contract gives nothing.
If you keep the current voting system and simply replace all instances of "state" with "country", what changes? Your vote still "doesn't count" if a majority of people vote the other way.
I don't see why electing someone to an office will guarantee that the person who is chosen will be fit for that office. After all, I can almost guarantee that whoever wins this year's presidential elections will be unfit to be President. I don't see why that would be different for Secretary of Defense or Secretary of Transportation or any other post.
I had an idea vaguely similar to yours:
Keep the current election system, but have an execution lottery. Every year (change as necessary) a random name from the House and Senate is chosen. That person is then dragged out onto the Capitol steps and shot (or hanged or electrocuted or injected with poison or whatever you like). This makes it so that there is a small but visible chance that any given representative or senator will not survive his term in office. That will help ensure that the only people to run for these offices will be those who sincerely think that they can help the country, and weed out those who are only in it for personal gain.
You would not have preference lists of "Cobb", "Bush", "Kerry". These are the types of contrived preference lists that are purported to show that IRV is poorly designed.
Why wouldn't you have preference lists like that? If I had to rank those three, I would rank them as "Kerry", "Bush", "Cobb", which is the same as you stated, just backwards. (I would also put the Libertarian guy who's name I can't spell at the top, making for an even more ideologically-incorrect order.)
I was watching it live. I actually stopped breathing until the rocket motor cut off and it looked like it was going to be ok. I didn't even realize it at the time, but once it was finished, I realized I'd been holding my breath. The announcers were doing pretty much the same thing, too. One of them just said "uh oh" when the roll started, and they were pretty much silent after that. I was almost sure that it was going to end in disaster.
The roll showed inherent design problems with this particular spacecraft.
There's no doubt you're a bona fide member of the press. You're making an unsubstantiated claim, cloaked in the guise of a "fact", just because it sells. There's no reason to believe it's an inherent design problem, but polluting your stories with ifs and buts won't sell as many copies as exciting lies, will it?
Not only that, but Sony The Electronics Company is extremely well-known and highly regarded for its products, with a good reputation. Sony The Music Company is just another music label.
A few murders would occur, spurred by the law's expiration. The murderers would be caught and prosecuted anyway, and convicted under some other law (manslaughter, tax evasion, whatever) that hadn't expired yet. They get off with lighter sentences than they should. The legislators responsible are all sacked, and it never happens again. Not too high a price to pay, I think.
You bring up a very good point. We're going to trust one of these guys with our nuclear launch codes and full control over the rest of our military. We're going to trust that they can keep their cool and be reasonable under tremendous pressures. But we can't even trust them to be able to handle an unscripted debate?
It also does one more thing, namely, prevents the debates from being at all meaningful. Given the choices, I'd rather have an unruly debate with lots of stupid questions and time wasting than have two guys spending an hour parroting their party line before stepping off the stage.
Ok, so making fun of French people by using vulgar stereotypes is not racist, I agree with that. (I merely said it was the same kind of thing, not that it was actually racism.) But then you go on to say that because doing it to the French isn't racist, doing it to the Indians isn't either? You can bet your ass that a post like this would get called racist:
...
You got dat right, massuh.
Don't you worry yoself none about these votes, massuh.
IT be needed like a bowl of gumbo when a brotha be hungry.
Some Black Guy
(Yeah, I can't do the dialect worth a damn. But you get the idea.)
So anyway, if beating up on Indians by using racial stereotypes is not racism, what is? You say I have no idea of what racism is; educate me!
We're talking about films that are filled with magical people that can levitate things with their minds, fight with their eyes closed, deflect laser blasts with hand-held energy swords, and talk telepathically between space ships, and you don't see how one of these magical people would be able to recognize his own father?
So comments like this are just "incidental"?
And I would be glad to teach the rudiments of selling apples on the street for five cents each, or begging for alms in the hot Calcutta slums!
Not to mention the crappy English, which is obviously saying "Indians speak funny English".
I don't hear anybody complaining when they lose their job because somebody in Alabama is willing to do it cheaper. But as soon as they leave the country, all of the racist foreigner stereotypes get trotted out.
If they were lily-white blonde Indians taking the jobs from us, you can bet there would be just as much racism. Just look at all the fun people are having with France. That might not strictly qualify as "racism", but it's the same deal.
You gotta love it. In any other context, this example of blatant racism would be moderated into the ground and rightfully ignored. But it's a jab at outsourcing, so it gets modded +5. Hooray!
Think bigger. Think to the future. "Don't log in as root/Don't be an administrator." is NOT an answer. Mac OS 9 and below operated by default in a single-user mode without *any* authentication necessary to make changes and I can list the successful viruses/exploits (especially remote exploits) by hand on a single sheet of paper.
So you're saying that the best way to stop these exploits is to make the OS completely useless? Don't get me wrong, I'm a total Mac-head, but OS 9 and under were crap, and the only reason they didn't have any remote exploits is because the OS wasn't capable of any remote operation whatsoever.
The deadlines are necessary due to the nature of the prize.
Most likely, this $50 million isn't all being put in a bank somewhere to wait for somebody to win. (I know the X-Prize was done this way, at least, but I haven't really read about this one, so I could be wrong here.) Instead, they basically buy an insurance policy. The insurance company cranks some numbers, decides that there's a (say) 20% chance that somebody will win, and charges $10 million. If somebody actually wins, the insurance company pays out. A deadline is required, otherwise the insurance company couldn't get involved and the organizers would be forced to front the full amount of the prize.
On another note, it's not evil to encourage people to take risks to meet a worthy goal. If you don't like danger, stay home.
If you wanted suborbital flight, there's a dozen countries that could hook you up for this cheap.
Oh yeah, which ones?
I can count the number of countries that have demonstrated, cheap suborbital capability today on my nose. It's one, the USA, and it only has this capability courtesy of Burt Rutan and his financial backer Paul Allen. The US otherwise currently has no manned launch capability at all, suborbital or otherwise. The X-15 would have been perfect for cheap suborbital flights, but I don't know if it ever could have been as cheap as SSO, and it's also been dead and gone for a long, long time. The only two countries that can currently put a person anywhere into space are Russia and China, and neither one has a suborbital system. Of course they can send you on a suborbital flight, but it'll be using orbital hardware, and so it won't be much cheaper.
Maybe I'm totally missing something, but I don't believe your statement is correct.
It sounds pretty broken to me. That is exactly the opposite of how everybody will think it works, and exactly the opposite of how it should work. Making it require you to block all topics for a given story to block that story is basically useless, and deserves to be called "broken".
They would be getting letters even if they played the volume at full blast, and had no commentary, because they were charging for admission. You aren't allowed to do that without permission from the copyright holder. The whole satire aspect of it is completely irrelevant to the situation.
I don't know about you, but I use Google because I know that, most of the time, the result I want will be on the first page. If Google doesn't find what I want, I don't take that as meaning that it doesn't exist, but I do take it as a sign that what I want is going to be hard to find. I believe most people use Google not for its completeness, but for its ability to find what you want without forcing you to troll through five pages of crap first.
In truth, look at the state of science fiction before Star Wars - you had story or realism, but rarely both, and you forgave the missing one. But you still missed it. 2001, Silent Running were two popular exceptions. Star Trek had passable story, cheesy realism, but it was all we had. This had both.
I'm sorry, did you just say that Star Wars had realism? Maybe I missed it that one time I blinked halfway through RotJ, but I never saw any.
(Still a good flick, though.)
A minor correction; the B-29s that the Soviets used to create the Tu-4 came into their hands because they performed an emergency landing in the USSR after a raid on Japan. The B-29 never performed any missions in Europe. It was indeed as close to an exact copy as you could reasonably expect.
The OP's examples (F-15/MiG-29 and Shuttle/Buran) are pretty poor; they look similar only to one who is not familiar with them.
Very close, but you're missing some words.
They are offended at the very idea of trying to protect children without thinking things through.
Face it; 99.9% of all "protect the children!" efforts either don't actually protect the children, seriously hurt the liberty of children and adults, and most of the time, both.