If you ask me, the US has a long way to go before reaching the standards in terms of taste and healthiness (is that a word?) that grocery food has set in the UK, Belgium, Netherlands, etc.
Eh, I wasn't especially impressed by UK groceries. Prepared food, especially, is significantly better in upscale US supermarkets than in anything I found in England.
Shouldn't US have rebuilt New orleans and Missisippi devastated by Katrina before jumping into the Iraq War?
Yep. I think most people here are not going to argue that the Iraq war is worth the expense.
Each nation has its own priorities, and while you spout an altrustic question, the same was true in 1969 when UJS landed a man on moon.
The poverty in US at that time was high enough.
No, it wasn't. I think parent's argument isn't that you have to completely wipe out poverty, but that the level of poverty in India is so bad that a space program really is a waste of money. The poverty in the US in 1969 is still exponentially less than in modern-day India.
There are some quite capable eBook readers on the market, lead by the Sony Reader and the iRex iLiad. Both feature an e-ink screen which uses a matrix of charged dark and light particles at a resolution of around 160 dpi to represent a paper page.
I was very excited about the Sony Reader, until I got a chance to try one at the bookstore. The quality of the screen is excellent, size was good, price was high but not ridiculous, but that burst of static when you turn a page just killed it for me. I really hope they figure out a way to make a reader where that doesn't happen, but it might just be one of those insurmountable technical issues.
But Badnarik's platform was horrible; he was an anti-libertarian, an authoritarian whose platform consisted of him forcing people he didn't agree with to follow his lead at gunpoint. Let me paste a summary I wrote of his platform on Usenet a few years ago (I won't get offended if nobody reads it, I just always wanted to paste it to Slashdot but there aren't that many Badnarik stories lately):
No real political experience, no
real management experience, no college degree (and I'm not saying a
candidate needs all three, but one would be helpful), and his views
are just BIZARRE.
For example, in imagining his first day as president he states he
would "Declare that all 20,000+ gun control laws in the United States
are unconstitutional and unenforceable." Now you may agree with him,
nothing wrong with the idea that all gun laws are unconstitutional (I
don't agree with it, but I can recognize there are legitimate
arguments for that position), but I'm not sure where he gets the idea
that the President has the power to do that. It shows a serious lack
of a sense of reality, especially for a man who styles himself a
Constitutional scholar.
On that magical first day he'll also:
"Issue another valid executive order to my subordinates executives
working for the IRS. That order would instruct them to come to work,
make a pot of coffee, and begin working on their resumes' pending a
federal grand jury investigation as to the legitimacy of the Sixteenth
Amendment and the Internal Revenue Code. High ranking officials from
that department would be closely monitored as flight risks, pending
indictments for fraud in the event that evidence proves that they
knew that no statute exists that requires Americans to fill out a
1040 form and relinquish a significant percentage of their hard
earned money to an unconstitutional government that refuses to operate
within a budget."
Which sets off PCT alarms on two points. First is the utterly false
belief that the 16th amendment isn't legitimate. It's at this point
I'm cutting out the crosspost groups, by the way, I really don't want
to argue with too many crazy people over this point.
Secondly is the weird obsession with holding government employees
responsible for laws he doesn't like (he'll also prosecute BATF agents
who dare confiscate firearms), a PCT hallmark. The idea that IRS
officials have some conspiracy of silence is just bizarre.
But wait, it gets better! His obsession with punishing people who he
doesn't like doesn't end at the executive branch. If elected he
states:
" I would announce a special one-week session of Congress where all
535 members would be required to sit through a special version of my
Constitution class. Once I was convinced that every member of
Congress understood my interpretation of their very limited powers, I
would insist that they restate their oath of office while being
videotaped. Those videos could then be used as future evidence should
they ever vote to violate the rights of Americans again."
So, he would violate the Constitution in the most fundamental way I
can possibly imagine in order to teach a class on the Constitution.
How on earth can you support this guy, even in a completely symbolic
way?
We also get such gems from him such as "The Federal Reserve has been
inflating our money supply ever since 1933, which makes our money
worth less than Monopoly money." Really, Mike? So you'll trade me
real currency for monopoly money? Here, I'll even give you a 2:1
conversion rate.
Then there are just plain inconsistencies in his position. His
support of the electoral college, for example, seems to be based on
self-interest more than libertarian ideology. Shouldn't it be one
voter, one vote? If the majority of Americans think something, why
should their votes be weighted based on where they live? Doesn't
sound like a free marketplace of ideas to me. But compared to the
rest of his lunatic platform I guess that's not so bad.
I don't know the technical specifications of the Xbox 360, but I would think that even minor differences between hard drives (RPM, data transfer rate, etc.), drive space, and drive quality, might cause some issues down the road.
And actually MS built their empire on the fact that PCs stopped being proprietary. Course now they own the market they'd like to change that...
Not very well, and they hate doing it because it sucks money from them. That's why they charge for a lot of tech support services, and shift as many users to the online support system and vendors.
Hiding behind driver issues is a lame excuse. They could at least lose the proprietary connector, and publish a list of HDDs that would be supported by the current driver.
I think that's probably a better way to handle it, or maybe just license the exact technology to 3 or 4 hard drive manufacturers, and let them handle it. Works for the controller market.
I'm not really sure they abandoned it. And I'm a little suspicious about how permanent that population really is, considering most people wouldn't want to live in a porch suspended above the ocean.
So if you really want to complain about it, consider contributing a Slashcode patch to fix it.
...Or the editors could take an extra 20 seconds to do a google search for some of the keywords. Honestly the problem isn't just that the editors don't do a minimum of checking, but that I don't quite understand what their job is if it's not to do that kind of checking. I mean, slashdot really hasn't changed much in the past 10 years or however long it's been around, what exactly are their duties so that maybe a total of a minute and a half a day can't be spared to prevent dupes?
The Law of the Sea, like most international law, isn't hard, fast, and binding, but is an attempt to establish certain norms. As for claiming sovereignty, I believe the consensus is they a) never really had the right to claim it, and b) have not been sufficiently recognized to give them any sort of legitimacy. The more I learn about Sealand the less I'm impressed with their claims. The guy who founded it sounds like a delusional, violent thug, and an ambiguous ruling in English courts does not a sovereign nation make.
All along the Erie canal in the NY State, you will find charming little towns, stuck in 18th century seemingly progress bypassed them. But way back when Erie canal was the main transporatation artery, the barge companies controlled the local govt and made sure none of the "new fangled" railroads touch their towns. Well, they kept the railroads out and they got bogged down in 17th century.
And now they're still charming, while all the "progressive" towns in upstate New York became economically depressed rust belt cities. Which type of place is the best place to live you think?
...he says, as he lists both Democrats AND Republicans.
It's time to lose the naivte and realize that politicians (whether Republicans or Democrats) are only interested in one thing--getting re-elected.
Generalizations are rarely a good approach to take. There are a lot of shady, unscrupulous politicians. There are also good ones who try and do the best they can in what are usually difficult jobs.
By dismissing every elected official in the country you basically make it harder to get good ones in office.
Who says? Eventually, it would be a judge or jury, in which case they can say "oh, it was intended for non-infringing use", and see how credible that really sounds.
Or, why not value it at marginal cost, and give it to users for free and write it off under goodwill? I'm no accountant, but it smells like something fishy is going on.
I'm no accountant either, but from what I understand goodwill has a very specific definition and is only applied for some losses incurred during mergers.
IAAL; in my post I was specifically thinking of the law. When you intend to create a site to help distribute materials in violation of copyright law, and the site actually ends up doing that, you've become an accessory to that violation. Just because you don't actually "pull the trigger" in regards to the copyright violation doesn't mean you escape liability.
That's why you can't defend against an accessory to murder charge by saying "well I didn't actually kill the guy"--if you provided the gun and told the killer where the victim was you're probably liable to end up in jail.
Its frustrating to see sites take the fall for things that aren't their fault. Holding isoHunt responsible for people downloading illegal content is stupid.
They created the site specifically to allow people to download illegal content. And, with the ads, they profited from it.
Re:Same Task, Different Tools
on
IsoHunt Shut Down?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Hey! It's perfectly legal for me to time shift a TV show using a blank tape and a VCR. Why would it be illegal to time shift the same show with a torrent site and a computer?
Torrents generally encompass people-shifting, which isn't quite legal...
I think that's a dangerous, counterproductive way to phrase it. Just because you disagree with their philosophy, or think that they're greedy or evil, doesn't make them less than human. That's a very dangerous game that historically led to very bad results.
Given the recently released proof of concept Lucas arts visuals we got a little while back, I'd love to see any sort of "guy with a lightsaber (why isn't that in firefox's spell checker) + force powers in the E.U."
The European Union? What, he's supposed to fight his way through Belgium?
Some pre-emptive replies to the inevitable anti-global warming posts:
1. Yes, global climate change happened before man came around. Your implication that just because global warming was caused by factors other than man in the past, that it can never be caused by man is stupid. By implication you are stupid.
2. Please explain your assertion that climatologists have a vested interest in anthropogenic global warming being true.
3. That site is a corporate/right-wing/creationist shill, and anything it says is probably wrong.
4. Your assertion that believing that human activities can't cause global warming because believing that would be "arrogant" is even stupider than your previous statements. Presumably man-made fusion reactions don't exist because believing we could create such a reaction is "arrogant".
Slashdot Mirror
If you ask me, the US has a long way to go before reaching the standards in terms of taste and healthiness (is that a word?) that grocery food has set in the UK, Belgium, Netherlands, etc.
Eh, I wasn't especially impressed by UK groceries. Prepared food, especially, is significantly better in upscale US supermarkets than in anything I found in England.
Shouldn't US have rebuilt New orleans and Missisippi devastated by Katrina before jumping into the Iraq War?
Yep. I think most people here are not going to argue that the Iraq war is worth the expense.
Each nation has its own priorities, and while you spout an altrustic question, the same was true in 1969 when UJS landed a man on moon.
The poverty in US at that time was high enough.
No, it wasn't. I think parent's argument isn't that you have to completely wipe out poverty, but that the level of poverty in India is so bad that a space program really is a waste of money. The poverty in the US in 1969 is still exponentially less than in modern-day India.
There are some quite capable eBook readers on the market, lead by the Sony Reader and the iRex iLiad. Both feature an e-ink screen which uses a matrix of charged dark and light particles at a resolution of around 160 dpi to represent a paper page.
I was very excited about the Sony Reader, until I got a chance to try one at the bookstore. The quality of the screen is excellent, size was good, price was high but not ridiculous, but that burst of static when you turn a page just killed it for me. I really hope they figure out a way to make a reader where that doesn't happen, but it might just be one of those insurmountable technical issues.
But Badnarik's platform was horrible; he was an anti-libertarian, an authoritarian whose platform consisted of him forcing people he didn't agree with to follow his lead at gunpoint. Let me paste a summary I wrote of his platform on Usenet a few years ago (I won't get offended if nobody reads it, I just always wanted to paste it to Slashdot but there aren't that many Badnarik stories lately):
No real political experience, no real management experience, no college degree (and I'm not saying a candidate needs all three, but one would be helpful), and his views are just BIZARRE.
For example, in imagining his first day as president he states he would "Declare that all 20,000+ gun control laws in the United States are unconstitutional and unenforceable." Now you may agree with him, nothing wrong with the idea that all gun laws are unconstitutional (I don't agree with it, but I can recognize there are legitimate arguments for that position), but I'm not sure where he gets the idea that the President has the power to do that. It shows a serious lack of a sense of reality, especially for a man who styles himself a Constitutional scholar.
On that magical first day he'll also: "Issue another valid executive order to my subordinates executives working for the IRS. That order would instruct them to come to work, make a pot of coffee, and begin working on their resumes' pending a federal grand jury investigation as to the legitimacy of the Sixteenth Amendment and the Internal Revenue Code. High ranking officials from that department would be closely monitored as flight risks, pending indictments for fraud in the event that evidence proves that they knew that no statute exists that requires Americans to fill out a 1040 form and relinquish a significant percentage of their hard earned money to an unconstitutional government that refuses to operate within a budget."
Which sets off PCT alarms on two points. First is the utterly false belief that the 16th amendment isn't legitimate. It's at this point I'm cutting out the crosspost groups, by the way, I really don't want to argue with too many crazy people over this point.
Secondly is the weird obsession with holding government employees responsible for laws he doesn't like (he'll also prosecute BATF agents who dare confiscate firearms), a PCT hallmark. The idea that IRS officials have some conspiracy of silence is just bizarre.
But wait, it gets better! His obsession with punishing people who he doesn't like doesn't end at the executive branch. If elected he states:
" I would announce a special one-week session of Congress where all 535 members would be required to sit through a special version of my Constitution class. Once I was convinced that every member of Congress understood my interpretation of their very limited powers, I would insist that they restate their oath of office while being videotaped. Those videos could then be used as future evidence should they ever vote to violate the rights of Americans again."
So, he would violate the Constitution in the most fundamental way I can possibly imagine in order to teach a class on the Constitution. How on earth can you support this guy, even in a completely symbolic way?
We also get such gems from him such as "The Federal Reserve has been inflating our money supply ever since 1933, which makes our money worth less than Monopoly money." Really, Mike? So you'll trade me real currency for monopoly money? Here, I'll even give you a 2:1 conversion rate.
Then there are just plain inconsistencies in his position. His support of the electoral college, for example, seems to be based on self-interest more than libertarian ideology. Shouldn't it be one voter, one vote? If the majority of Americans think something, why should their votes be weighted based on where they live? Doesn't sound like a free marketplace of ideas to me. But compared to the rest of his lunatic platform I guess that's not so bad.
ea, and I voted for Badnarik because he was the only candidate left after eliminating all the obvious douchebags on the ballot.
I voted for Kerrey because he was the only candidate that I think could do a passable job. And that includes Badnarik.
I never understood why so many slashdotters supported a man so unsuitable for the job as Badnarik.
I don't know the technical specifications of the Xbox 360, but I would think that even minor differences between hard drives (RPM, data transfer rate, etc.), drive space, and drive quality, might cause some issues down the road.
And actually MS built their empire on the fact that PCs stopped being proprietary. Course now they own the market they'd like to change that...
Um... don't they do this anyway, for Windows?
Not very well, and they hate doing it because it sucks money from them. That's why they charge for a lot of tech support services, and shift as many users to the online support system and vendors.
Hiding behind driver issues is a lame excuse. They could at least lose the proprietary connector, and publish a list of HDDs that would be supported by the current driver.
I think that's probably a better way to handle it, or maybe just license the exact technology to 3 or 4 hard drive manufacturers, and let them handle it. Works for the controller market.
Then again, why tackle that problem for the third (fourth, fifth?) time. It gets old hat after a while.
This is Id. "Old hat" is their motto.
Losing the proprietary case/connector would be great - the stupid thing is just a 2.5" SATA drive. Let me plop any old drive in there, MS!
The only problem is then MS would have to provide technical support for a billion different hard drives.
I admire competence. In my work I try to do the best job that I can, I don't understand why other people don't do the same.
I'm not really sure they abandoned it. And I'm a little suspicious about how permanent that population really is, considering most people wouldn't want to live in a porch suspended above the ocean.
So if you really want to complain about it, consider contributing a Slashcode patch to fix it.
...Or the editors could take an extra 20 seconds to do a google search for some of the keywords. Honestly the problem isn't just that the editors don't do a minimum of checking, but that I don't quite understand what their job is if it's not to do that kind of checking. I mean, slashdot really hasn't changed much in the past 10 years or however long it's been around, what exactly are their duties so that maybe a total of a minute and a half a day can't be spared to prevent dupes?
The Law of the Sea, like most international law, isn't hard, fast, and binding, but is an attempt to establish certain norms. As for claiming sovereignty, I believe the consensus is they a) never really had the right to claim it, and b) have not been sufficiently recognized to give them any sort of legitimacy. The more I learn about Sealand the less I'm impressed with their claims. The guy who founded it sounds like a delusional, violent thug, and an ambiguous ruling in English courts does not a sovereign nation make.
All along the Erie canal in the NY State, you will find charming little towns, stuck in 18th century seemingly progress bypassed them. But way back when Erie canal was the main transporatation artery, the barge companies controlled the local govt and made sure none of the "new fangled" railroads touch their towns. Well, they kept the railroads out and they got bogged down in 17th century.
And now they're still charming, while all the "progressive" towns in upstate New York became economically depressed rust belt cities. Which type of place is the best place to live you think?
It's a structure, not an island.
Yep, I was shocked at this myself.
I wish they'd make one last Shenmue before they go...
But here are the Democrats [loc.gov]
...he says, as he lists both Democrats AND Republicans.
It's time to lose the naivte and realize that politicians (whether Republicans or Democrats) are only interested in one thing--getting re-elected.
Generalizations are rarely a good approach to take. There are a lot of shady, unscrupulous politicians. There are also good ones who try and do the best they can in what are usually difficult jobs.
By dismissing every elected official in the country you basically make it harder to get good ones in office.
Who says? Eventually, it would be a judge or jury, in which case they can say "oh, it was intended for non-infringing use", and see how credible that really sounds.
Or, why not value it at marginal cost, and give it to users for free and write it off under goodwill? I'm no accountant, but it smells like something fishy is going on.
I'm no accountant either, but from what I understand goodwill has a very specific definition and is only applied for some losses incurred during mergers.
IAAL; in my post I was specifically thinking of the law. When you intend to create a site to help distribute materials in violation of copyright law, and the site actually ends up doing that, you've become an accessory to that violation. Just because you don't actually "pull the trigger" in regards to the copyright violation doesn't mean you escape liability.
That's why you can't defend against an accessory to murder charge by saying "well I didn't actually kill the guy"--if you provided the gun and told the killer where the victim was you're probably liable to end up in jail.
Its frustrating to see sites take the fall for things that aren't their fault. Holding isoHunt responsible for people downloading illegal content is stupid.
They created the site specifically to allow people to download illegal content. And, with the ads, they profited from it.
Hey! It's perfectly legal for me to time shift a TV show using a blank tape and a VCR. Why would it be illegal to time shift the same show with a torrent site and a computer?
Torrents generally encompass people-shifting, which isn't quite legal...
The **AA are subhumans (more or less)
I think that's a dangerous, counterproductive way to phrase it. Just because you disagree with their philosophy, or think that they're greedy or evil, doesn't make them less than human. That's a very dangerous game that historically led to very bad results.
Given the recently released proof of concept Lucas arts visuals we got a little while back, I'd love to see any sort of "guy with a lightsaber (why isn't that in firefox's spell checker) + force powers in the E.U."
The European Union? What, he's supposed to fight his way through Belgium?
Some pre-emptive replies to the inevitable anti-global warming posts:
1. Yes, global climate change happened before man came around. Your implication that just because global warming was caused by factors other than man in the past, that it can never be caused by man is stupid. By implication you are stupid.
2. Please explain your assertion that climatologists have a vested interest in anthropogenic global warming being true.
3. That site is a corporate/right-wing/creationist shill, and anything it says is probably wrong.
4. Your assertion that believing that human activities can't cause global warming because believing that would be "arrogant" is even stupider than your previous statements. Presumably man-made fusion reactions don't exist because believing we could create such a reaction is "arrogant".