And again you have a person (the guy who created the website) making a claim (manufacturers "knowingly" caused harm) without any kind of proof or evidence to prove the point.
It's elementary my dear Watson. No evidence == an invalid claim. It may be true or false, but there's no way to tell because there's nothing to back the claim in either direction. i.e. Think. Critically.
I can easily see the "politicians" which we call Congressmen going after various companies (say Toyota) for the sole purpose of winning 100 million dollar settlements, and then using that money to pay-off Some of the national debt.
Then again maybe government cracking-down on corporations would be a good thing?
I just sold a sealed copy of Windows 3.1. According to the 9th Circuit Court, I violated the license by doing that, even though I never read or signed said license (still sealed inside). Stupid judges.
It's happened to me. I listed perfectly legal TV DVDs on ebay, and some asshole came along and accused me of selling illegal copies. (No they were store-bought, mass-produced DVDs that I no longer wanted.) I asked ebay and they connected me to a lawyer in California, and further internet research revealed he was on the payroll of the MPAA.
Now with this new precedent all they have to say is, "I don't give permission in my license for customers to resell these used DVDs or CDs," and ebay will yank the auction.
I've often thought we should have a two-tier system like we have in technology:
- Engineers do the high-level design - technicians do the actual work (soldering boards, building prototypes, etc) - Likewise doctors would do diagnosing - while medtechs would do the trivial surgeries like removing appendixes, tonsils, and so on.
Since technicians get paid about half as much as engineers or doctors, that would cut labor costs significantly. Plus you wouldn't need a 8 year-long education just to get one doctor. A medtech could learn surgical skills at a 2 or 4 year trade school and quickly fill-in the current Heathcare labor shortage.
To me it just doesn't make logical sense to have a $50/hour doctor doing appendectomies when a $25/hour tech could do the job just as well.
Peak oil is not about shortages. There will be plenty of oil around, but the current inventory (underneath the soil) will be on a continual decline. It's like when Sega stopped making Dreamcasts. There was still a huge inventory that took ~2 years to empty out the warehouse. Same with oil. It will take another 100 years or so to empty out the existing inventory under the ground.
Of course as oil grows more scarce, the price will climb. That's the real issue - how will people be able to afford $10/gallon gasoline.
WOW. I had no idea such a system existed. Thanks for the information. A special "vaccine damage" court is a good idea, because it prevents the 1 billion awards we might otherwise see in the normal courts. Also 20 million doesn't sound high to me. If the kid lives another 80 years, that's only 250,000 a year - which is probably how much it would cost to keep the girl alive. I had no idea such a system existed. Thanks for the information. A special "vaccine damage" court is a good idea, because it prevents the 1 billion awards we might otherwise see in the normal courts. Also 20 million doesn't sound high to me. If the kid lives another 80 years, that's only 250,000 a year -
PENN & TELLER ripped a giant hole in the "vaccines are dangerous" theory using balls and bowling pins. Basically they said, even if we assume the vaccine causes autism, that's still just 1 autistic death per approximately one million children versus ~10,000 dead from communicable disease if they were Not vaccinated. Like gambling you play the odds and take the vaccine because it's less dangerous than going without.
Sounds like they'll be hiring a lot of engineers soon, to process that backlog of patents. Time to send your resume, if you don't mind living in the VERY expensive DC area.
How would cable channels like Syfy and TNT fund their original programs? If the channels disappear so too do the ~50 cent per channel per home fee that funds about half the cost of making Stargate, Eureka, the Closer, and so on.
Another question about torrenting: Why is it my DSL connection download speed varies with my upload speed? i.e. If I set my upload to 1/3rd maximum, the download speed maxes out but if I change the upload to 2/3rd maximum the download speed slows to half. Why would one interfere the other? (I've never noticed the problem on my old dialup line.)
Okay. Show me a bittorrent client that lets me disable uploading (or sets the upload speed to 0.0 KB/s). Or provide another solution that would make us users legal and untouchable by RIAA/MPAA.
I like my DTVpal. It's not perfect either, but it has two tuners inside of it so that I can record two channels at the same time (say Big Bang Theory and Vampire Diaries). And it's totally free... no annoying subscription fee... just add a ~70 dollar CM4228 antenna and go.
That plus syfy.com on my PC, and I can tell the Comcast Monopoly to go ____ themselves.
I agree. I never buy TVs with built-in VCRs or DVDs, because I like to buy a separate player with the specific features I desire (like the ability to record HD on SVHS tape) (or the ability to play DVDs at 1.4x speed with sound). Same with a DVR or NetTV device.
I have to wonder how successful these things will be long term?
In 2009 Comcast, Cox, Time-Warner and other companies met with one another, and agreed to set up a new CATV portal site that would only be accessible to cable customers. Next they laid pressure on Cable Channels by telling them they need to stop providing the programs for free (syfy.com, abcfamily.com, etc), because it was the cable companies that PAID for these programs via subscriber fees and they have first rights to distribution. Virtually all the channels agreed. In 2011 this "cable subscribers only" website will go live and the free net viewing disappears.
While we've not been paying attention, the cable companies quietly signed deals to lock-up these shows behind their own subscriber website. And what's worse: Because they are government-created monopolies, there's not a damn thing we can do to stop them. We have as little choice as deciding which electric, phone, or natural gas company we want.:-|
Aside -
I wonder why Microsoft does not try to revive WebTV? I had one of them in the late 90s, and it was crap because lo-definition analog sets made reading the internet difficult (color blur), but now we have high-definition sets that can produce images as clear as a Super VGA monitor. WebTV could succeed this time.
>>>The HTC G2, T-Mobile's HSPA+ successor to the HTC G1
Is it just me, or other people confused by these G1, G2 numbers? I thought we had already reached the level of G4 cell networks. .
>>>Or you can wait 6 months at get one with 2x1GHz on a smaller process. >>>You have to give up on waiting and get something eventually.
You jest but that's exactly what I'm doing. I need a cellphone with web capability, but I don't need it until 2011 and I know new models of cellphones (with 3 or even 4 inch screens) will be released between now and then, so I'm waiting until the last minute rather than buy a 2 inch phone that will be obsoleted.
>>>This just opens up the doors for companies like Nintendo and their ilk to disallow the used game market to exist. Hooray, one more way to fuck over consumers.
Maybe it's time to overthrow some corporations. Revolution is good for liberty.
>>>But the problem here is that some people, such as yourself, want us to pretend there's real competition and let the telcos and cablecos do whatever the fuck they want!
I never said anything like that. I want the government-created monopolies (Comcast, Version, etc) to be as strictly regulated as the electric or natural gas or sewer companies. Perhaps even price-fixed such that increases in rate must first be approved by the State's Public Utility Commission.
Either that or allow true competition. Let Comcast, Cox, Cablevision, Time-Warner, and so on all coexist in the same city, and let the choice to the customer of which one they want. Give power to the people. ----- But the current situation? No I don't support it at all, and you are mistaken to think I do. .
>>>But phone companies absolutely don't have the right to decide things like who you are or are not allowed to call, or what you want to talk about
Yeah actually they do. They don't control the content, but the common carrier phone companies do control who you call, by imposing fees to limit your reach. My non-regulated ISP lets me log into the European Union's website at the same cost as accessing my own website (i.e. free), but if I wanted to call the neighboring city only 30 miles away, the common carrier telco socks me with a 10 cent per minute charge. "Give ISPs common carrier status and all will be fixed," is a naive solution. That's a good idea but not enough. Net neutrality is needed. .
Remember I said it was Homeland Security that wanted to search the trunk of my car in Texas. They didn't exist until just recently. And as for Canada you can no longer pass w/o being inspected. You can't even cross without a passport anymore. Rules. Changed. Since the last time you went across.
I also doubt your claim you drove I-8 without being stopped. California does have those border inspection stations.
>>>Has this Supreme Court overturned *any* rulings favorable to corporations?
No and it's kinda surprising considering 4 of the 9 justices were put there by Liberal presidents (Clinton and Obama). You'd think they'd tend more ANTI-corporation but apparently not.
>>>If you believe that using the product of another person's labor without compensating them is "theft" and "the very definition of slavery", then you must be against libraries in the first place
No. Libraries paid the author when they bought their hardcover copy.
And you make a good point that authors like Harlan Ellison are not slaves because they are free to quit the job (unlike actual slaves), but is that what we really want? All the authors to leave the profession and get jobs at a factory, because they no longer earn any money from their books (which everyone takes for free)? I hope not.
That's an excellent point. I had the privilege of meeting a man named Bill Gouldd. Not well educated (no college), but very charismatic and intelligent. He tried to get me and others involved in "network marketing" aka his pyramid sales company because he had earned millions, as had his close friends. What he did not realize at the time (mid-90s) but discovered later (mid-2000s) was that his success was not scalable. It did work for the average person.
Sounds like Cory Doctorow is yet another Bill Gouldd who sincerely believes what worked for him will work for all authors, but unlikely. As I mentioned above Stephen King tried the "give a book away online and ask for $20 payments" but it did not work for him (people took but did not pay), so he went back to the traditional method of requiring paying upfront to gain access to the book.
Yeah and they complain about it, but I don't see them offering discounts for cash transactions (because the store pays no fees on cash). If they offered a 1% discount I'd gladly pay cash instead. But they don't so I'll just keep using the rewards card, which so far nobody has refused to accept.
Replace the word "survey" with "study" in my last post.
As for competitiveness, I recently saw a speech in the EU Parliament by Daniel Hannan about how european manufacturing has severely dropped, even worse than the US. He then cited a statistic that its takes 4 europeans to equal the work output of 3 americans, and therefore its no surprise that factories are moving to the US or India.
Citation please. I read the wikipedia entry and didn't see anything to indicate the 1800s manufacturers "knew" it was dangerous. Just like doctors at one time did not know what caused pernicious anemia until the 1930s (lack of B12 absorption).
Slashdot Mirror
And again you have a person (the guy who created the website) making a claim (manufacturers "knowingly" caused harm) without any kind of proof or evidence to prove the point.
It's elementary my dear Watson. No evidence == an invalid claim. It may be true or false, but there's no way to tell because there's nothing to back the claim in either direction. i.e. Think. Critically.
I can easily see the "politicians" which we call Congressmen going after various companies (say Toyota) for the sole purpose of winning 100 million dollar settlements, and then using that money to pay-off Some of the national debt.
Then again maybe government cracking-down on corporations would be a good thing?
Good point!
I just sold a sealed copy of Windows 3.1. According to the 9th Circuit Court, I violated the license by doing that, even though I never read or signed said license (still sealed inside). Stupid judges.
It's happened to me. I listed perfectly legal TV DVDs on ebay, and some asshole came along and accused me of selling illegal copies. (No they were store-bought, mass-produced DVDs that I no longer wanted.) I asked ebay and they connected me to a lawyer in California, and further internet research revealed he was on the payroll of the MPAA.
Now with this new precedent all they have to say is, "I don't give permission in my license for customers to resell these used DVDs or CDs," and ebay will yank the auction.
I wonder why that law didn't violate the Constitution's Supreme law which forbids "after the fact" laws.
I've often thought we should have a two-tier system like we have in technology:
- Engineers do the high-level design - technicians do the actual work (soldering boards, building prototypes, etc)
- Likewise doctors would do diagnosing - while medtechs would do the trivial surgeries like removing appendixes, tonsils, and so on.
Since technicians get paid about half as much as engineers or doctors, that would cut labor costs significantly. Plus you wouldn't need a 8 year-long education just to get one doctor. A medtech could learn surgical skills at a 2 or 4 year trade school and quickly fill-in the current Heathcare labor shortage.
To me it just doesn't make logical sense to have a $50/hour doctor doing appendectomies when a $25/hour tech could do the job just as well.
Okay:
Peak oil is not about shortages. There will be plenty of oil around, but the current inventory (underneath the soil) will be on a continual decline. It's like when Sega stopped making Dreamcasts. There was still a huge inventory that took ~2 years to empty out the warehouse. Same with oil. It will take another 100 years or so to empty out the existing inventory under the ground.
Of course as oil grows more scarce, the price will climb. That's the real issue - how will people be able to afford $10/gallon gasoline.
>>>Suing people who only download is impractical...... Uploading is where publishers concentrate their efforts for obvious reasons.
It isn't obvious to me. Why would they go after uploaders and not downloaders? Why is the latter impractical. Please explain.
Has anyone noticed the summary repeats itself?
WOW. I had no idea such a system existed. Thanks for the information. A special "vaccine damage" court is a good idea, because it prevents the 1 billion awards we might otherwise see in the normal courts. Also 20 million doesn't sound high to me. If the kid lives another 80 years, that's only 250,000 a year - which is probably how much it would cost to keep the girl alive. I had no idea such a system existed. Thanks for the information. A special "vaccine damage" court is a good idea, because it prevents the 1 billion awards we might otherwise see in the normal courts. Also 20 million doesn't sound high to me. If the kid lives another 80 years, that's only 250,000 a year -
PENN & TELLER ripped a giant hole in the "vaccines are dangerous" theory using balls and bowling pins. Basically they said, even if we assume the vaccine causes autism, that's still just 1 autistic death per approximately one million children versus ~10,000 dead from communicable disease if they were Not vaccinated. Like gambling you play the odds and take the vaccine because it's less dangerous than going without.
Long Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aky-sRri-NQ
Short Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfdZTZQvuCo
Sounds like they'll be hiring a lot of engineers soon, to process that backlog of patents. Time to send your resume, if you don't mind living in the VERY expensive DC area.
Question:
How would cable channels like Syfy and TNT fund their original programs? If the channels disappear so too do the ~50 cent per channel per home fee that funds about half the cost of making Stargate, Eureka, the Closer, and so on.
P.S.
Another question about torrenting: Why is it my DSL connection download speed varies with my upload speed? i.e. If I set my upload to 1/3rd maximum, the download speed maxes out but if I change the upload to 2/3rd maximum the download speed slows to half. Why would one interfere the other? (I've never noticed the problem on my old dialup line.)
>>>Uploading, such as in torrents, is illegal.
Okay. Show me a bittorrent client that lets me disable uploading (or sets the upload speed to 0.0 KB/s). Or provide another solution that would make us users legal and untouchable by RIAA/MPAA.
I like my DTVpal. It's not perfect either, but it has two tuners inside of it so that I can record two channels at the same time (say Big Bang Theory and Vampire Diaries). And it's totally free... no annoying subscription fee... just add a ~70 dollar CM4228 antenna and go.
That plus syfy.com on my PC, and I can tell the Comcast Monopoly to go ____ themselves.
I agree. I never buy TVs with built-in VCRs or DVDs, because I like to buy a separate player with the specific features I desire (like the ability to record HD on SVHS tape) (or the ability to play DVDs at 1.4x speed with sound). Same with a DVR or NetTV device.
I have to wonder how successful these things will be long term?
In 2009 Comcast, Cox, Time-Warner and other companies met with one another, and agreed to set up a new CATV portal site that would only be accessible to cable customers. Next they laid pressure on Cable Channels by telling them they need to stop providing the programs for free (syfy.com, abcfamily.com, etc), because it was the cable companies that PAID for these programs via subscriber fees and they have first rights to distribution. Virtually all the channels agreed. In 2011 this "cable subscribers only" website will go live and the free net viewing disappears.
While we've not been paying attention, the cable companies quietly signed deals to lock-up these shows behind their own subscriber website. And what's worse: Because they are government-created monopolies, there's not a damn thing we can do to stop them. We have as little choice as deciding which electric, phone, or natural gas company we want. :-|
Aside -
I wonder why Microsoft does not try to revive WebTV? I had one of them in the late 90s, and it was crap because lo-definition analog sets made reading the internet difficult (color blur), but now we have high-definition sets that can produce images as clear as a Super VGA monitor. WebTV could succeed this time.
>>>The HTC G2, T-Mobile's HSPA+ successor to the HTC G1
Is it just me, or other people confused by these G1, G2 numbers? I thought we had already reached the level of G4 cell networks.
.
>>>Or you can wait 6 months at get one with 2x1GHz on a smaller process.
>>>You have to give up on waiting and get something eventually.
You jest but that's exactly what I'm doing. I need a cellphone with web capability, but I don't need it until 2011 and I know new models of cellphones (with 3 or even 4 inch screens) will be released between now and then, so I'm waiting until the last minute rather than buy a 2 inch phone that will be obsoleted.
>>>This just opens up the doors for companies like Nintendo and their ilk to disallow the used game market to exist. Hooray, one more way to fuck over consumers.
Maybe it's time to overthrow some corporations.
Revolution is good for liberty.
>>>But the problem here is that some people, such as yourself, want us to pretend there's real competition and let the telcos and cablecos do whatever the fuck they want!
I never said anything like that. I want the government-created monopolies (Comcast, Version, etc) to be as strictly regulated as the electric or natural gas or sewer companies. Perhaps even price-fixed such that increases in rate must first be approved by the State's Public Utility Commission.
Either that or allow true competition. Let Comcast, Cox, Cablevision, Time-Warner, and so on all coexist in the same city, and let the choice to the customer of which one they want. Give power to the people. ----- But the current situation? No I don't support it at all, and you are mistaken to think I do.
.
>>>But phone companies absolutely don't have the right to decide things like who you are or are not allowed to call, or what you want to talk about
Yeah actually they do. They don't control the content, but the common carrier phone companies do control who you call, by imposing fees to limit your reach. My non-regulated ISP lets me log into the European Union's website at the same cost as accessing my own website (i.e. free), but if I wanted to call the neighboring city only 30 miles away, the common carrier telco socks me with a 10 cent per minute charge. "Give ISPs common carrier status and all will be fixed," is a naive solution. That's a good idea but not enough. Net neutrality is needed.
.
Before or after 9/11?
Remember I said it was Homeland Security that wanted to search the trunk of my car in Texas. They didn't exist until just recently. And as for Canada you can no longer pass w/o being inspected. You can't even cross without a passport anymore. Rules. Changed. Since the last time you went across.
I also doubt your claim you drove I-8 without being stopped. California does have those border inspection stations.
>>>Has this Supreme Court overturned *any* rulings favorable to corporations?
No and it's kinda surprising considering 4 of the 9 justices were put there by Liberal presidents (Clinton and Obama). You'd think they'd tend more ANTI-corporation but apparently not.
>>>If you believe that using the product of another person's labor without compensating them is "theft" and "the very definition of slavery", then you must be against libraries in the first place
No. Libraries paid the author when they bought their hardcover copy.
And you make a good point that authors like Harlan Ellison are not slaves because they are free to quit the job (unlike actual slaves), but is that what we really want? All the authors to leave the profession and get jobs at a factory, because they no longer earn any money from their books (which everyone takes for free)? I hope not.
>>>it doesn't scale
That's an excellent point. I had the privilege of meeting a man named Bill Gouldd. Not well educated (no college), but very charismatic and intelligent. He tried to get me and others involved in "network marketing" aka his pyramid sales company because he had earned millions, as had his close friends. What he did not realize at the time (mid-90s) but discovered later (mid-2000s) was that his success was not scalable. It did work for the average person.
Sounds like Cory Doctorow is yet another Bill Gouldd who sincerely believes what worked for him will work for all authors, but unlikely. As I mentioned above Stephen King tried the "give a book away online and ask for $20 payments" but it did not work for him (people took but did not pay), so he went back to the traditional method of requiring paying upfront to gain access to the book.
>>>You do realize the vendor pays those rewards?
Yeah and they complain about it, but I don't see them offering discounts for cash transactions (because the store pays no fees on cash). If they offered a 1% discount I'd gladly pay cash instead. But they don't so I'll just keep using the rewards card, which so far nobody has refused to accept.
Replace the word "survey" with "study" in my last post.
As for competitiveness, I recently saw a speech in the EU Parliament by Daniel Hannan about how european manufacturing has severely dropped, even worse than the US. He then cited a statistic that its takes 4 europeans to equal the work output of 3 americans, and therefore its no surprise that factories are moving to the US or India.
>>>They knew [white pohsphorus was dangerous]
Citation please. I read the wikipedia entry and didn't see anything to indicate the 1800s manufacturers "knew" it was dangerous. Just like doctors at one time did not know what caused pernicious anemia until the 1930s (lack of B12 absorption).