Hey, everyone respond to the highly moderated troll! I'll join in now; otherwise what kind of successful troll would it be?
I know we love to have these "devil's advocate" sorts of posts to make us think more, but sometimes we really have trouble finding good ones, and it gets tiresome. For example, how many times do we need to see this line: I REALLY wish people woudl read posts before flaming away. Yeah, yeah, I know-- RTFA. Do you realize RTFA is NOT a sufficient rebuttal? Does it occur to you that people may indeed have the expressed opinions after reading the TOS? Every point listed is, at the very least, quite debatable:
1) attempting to send e-mail or newsgroup articles or postings using a name or address of someone other than yourself, attempting to impersonate any person or using forged headers or other identifying information.
There is a lot of "or" in that sentence. What qualifies as a forged header, or forged identifying information? Would the anonymizer count? How about in front of a tech-illiterate judge, with Sprint's lawyers vs. your small-ass pocketbook?
2) You grant to Sprint or any appointed subcontractors an irrevocable license to enter into or onto your Premises during normal business hours, Monday through Saturday, in order to install, repair, replace or remove Equipment. This license will survive termination or cancellation of this Agreement and will run with the land and inure to the parties' successors and assigns.
This goes beyond the right most service providers have. I sure haven't granted my DSL provider permission to come into my house and take the modem back, especially when I'm not home. And the whole bit about the right surviving termination of the agreement-- not likely to stand up in court, since if you no longer agree to the contract, you no longer agree to any of it, including this part. Still, with the latest legislation of business models, the courts seem remarkably anti-consumer. Are you willing to bet on him ruling your way when, a month after you cancel service, a Sprint rep walks by your window and sees a bag of weed inside on the table?
3) Their list of stuff you can't send, if you READ IT PROPERLY, explains that wehat they are saying is that you can't do anything illegal. They even SAY THAT. How hard is that to understand, hmm?
How hard is this sentence to understand: "you may not post or transmit any... objectionable information of any kind, including without limitation, any transmissions, constituting or encouraging, conduct that would constitute a criminal offense, give rise to civil liability, or otherwise violate any local, state, national or international law, including without limitation U.S. export control laws and regulations."
Notice they say, right there, right for you-- "including without limitation". Which means that all that is just clarification text, and what they've really prohibited is "objectionable information". You don't think that's a little excessive?
I REALLY wish people would read posts before flaming away.
But not "unreasonably" so, and that's where the courts step in. Can you stop someone from wearing a sign around in a grocery store parking lot? The courts say no, that's fine. Can you stop tobacco companies from advertising on television? Sure. What's the difference? I don't know, but you might think you have a better idea after trudging through thousands of pages of court documents.
Free Radio Berkeley fought a long battle through the courts against the FCC, and got shut down in 1998 after 5 years of suit and countersuit. That on its own shows the issue is hardly clear-cut-- there were plenty of decisions and overrides.
If you want to read about one of the most (in)famous low power radio stations ever, check out www.freeradio.org. It's an interesting read about a fairly ridiculous situation, although it's a little out of date.
Is is possible to get a Slashdot interview witht his law firm? I would like to know just how a law firm like this expects not to damage its reputation.
It may hurt its reputation in your eyes, but it helps their reputation in the eyes of the people who will be hiring them-- that is, all the people who want to file frivolous lawsuits. If they win, or manage to get any money at all out of Prodigy, it will actually look pretty good to prospective customers.
Yes, and the people who made the link made came to the obvious conclusion that if Matthew Pavlovich is ordered dropped from the case solely on the basis that he doesn't reside in California, all the other non-Californians will be dropped as a matter of course. Jurisdiction questions such as this one are a very common method by which lawsuits are dismissed.
Those hits come from people who want to read and post on a story, and the simple fact is: on slashdot, controversial stories (ie misleading, flamewar topics, etc) generate hits. So an easy method of making money with slashdot is with controversial stories; one way to do that is have Hemos act like a fool and post something misleading....
I don't think this is relevant at all. The story would have been read regardless of whether or not Hemos had got it right. How about this potential writeup:
"Well, the United States Supreme Court has given their "ruling" concerning the Florida Supreme Court. They've temporarily set aside the ruling that extended the deadline and required hand recounts. This could be a final step towards declaring Bush the winner, or it could simply tie things up even longer in Florida Courts."
That would be more accurate, and generate just as many posts (minus the 5 or 10 "Hemos is an idiot" posts). But if you don't believe me, here's one that would generate even more posts, and still be more accurate than the original:
"Well, the United States Supreme Court has given their "ruling" concerning the Florida Supreme Court. They've only temporarily set aside the Florida court's ruling, so they might catch a lot of heat for potentially prolonging the proceedings. However, that won't at all compare to the heat they're about to catch over today's other decision: they still refuse to hear any case over Natalie Portman and hot grits. A Beowulf cluster of Al Gores still hasn't issued a statement, and the Penis Bird couldn't be reached for comment."
I have an idea-- Moderation options based on the story type. For example, for hardware articles, we could have "-1: Beowulf Cluster". And for political articles, we could have "-1: Petty Partisan Bickering".
"But startled," I hear you say (or perhaps "but d0000d"), "we already have -1: Flamebait, and -1: Offtopic, and so on and so forth". Ah, but a look at the parents of my post points out that regardless of that status, the babbling incoherent posts get modded down -1: Flamebait, and the more coherent ones get +1: Insightful, but at the heart they're both Petty Partisan Bickering. No one browsing at +3 wants to read them.
The one flaw with my system is that this article was originally posted in the Internet category (since fixed). The options would have been "+/-1: Bitching About JonKatz".
If you've been following the opinion polls on all this, everything is sharply divided. About half the country thinks the Republicans are a bunch of crafty, evil, election stealers. The other half of the country thinks the Democrats are a bunch of crafty, evil, election stealers. Each side comes up with a lot of boring, self-righteous rhetoric. The truth is, each side is trying their damnedest to win the election, ideals be damned. The Democrats say "every vote should be heard", and then fight to get military ballots invalidated. The Republicans say, "this should be decided by the people, not the courts", and then are the first to file a lawsuit.
The truth is, both candidates are going to come out of this looking bad, and low on support. They're both going to have trouble with re-election.
The Supreme Court of the U.S. managed to stay out of the entire shitstorm by not making a decisive decision about how the election results should be treated. They may catch some crap for that, but most people are quite happy that they have some enough respect for state's rights to stay out of it.
No, setting aside a decision is different from overturning it. There were sufficient problems in the decision to question how it was reached; specifically, it appeared the decision was reached in violation of the U.S. Constitution which gives the legislature the authority to choose the manner of selecting electors.
But that is markedly different from overturning. They temporarily set aside the decision, which means that after reviewing it with the opinion the Supreme Court has given, the Florida Supreme Court can re-issue the same ruling, though hopefully with a rationale that does not include usurping the legislature's authority.
The distinction is very important. SCOTUS avoided ruling on the actual manner of the election; i.e. saying "you have to accept hand recounts" or "you can't accept hand recounts". Had they done that, it would have been a huge blow to state's rights, and a shocking decision. But you could tell they weren't going to do that from the beginning, when their questions mainly focused around one problem: how is this case a federal issue?
I think home sales might be okay, because Intel's made a chip that runs at high clock speeds. While a 1.5 GHz P4 may not run faster than a 1.2 GHz Athlon, the average home user will still say, "ooh! 1.5 > 1.2!".
"It's possible that some of our sales force overstated the benefits of dual-capable CPU systems, unfortunately, by being overly critical of single-CPU-capable systems," said the executive, who asked not to be named.
Gosh, I just can't imagine how that might have happened...
Well, slap my ass and call me redundant, but I agree-- these are boring and not terribly useful. Shying away from the controversy that might be caused by practical suffixes, they picked a bunch of innocuous, useless suffixes. Who the hell is going to use.name, and for what?.aero!? Yeah, sign me up.
Of course, the ridiculous things that will come out of this will be the lawsuits. Someone guy named Donald will register Donald.name, and McDonald's will sue him for trademark infringment, and on and on and on.
At least the pointlessness of these new suffixes gives hope to other potential names like.dot,.sucks, and.beer.
In the case of DemocracyNow, "independent" simply means much more obviously biased. The interview with President Clinton appears to be a successful critique of President Clinton's administration, and a triumph of independent interviewers over a president weaned on soft, corporate interviews-- when you read the writeup on the front page. When you read the actual transcript of the interview, however, Clinton comes off as an extremely intelligent person with great points, who keeps getting interrupted by the interviewers as he answers their questions.
It's important to have independent media, but not crappy independent media. For these stories, check out the Philadelphia Examiner or AP stories, or (if you want a site that makes no bones about where it's coming from, because the guy works with them) check out 2600.org.
The article said he spent 6 days in jail. It was more than 6 days between his arrest and the dismissal of the charges. Hence, he must have made bail 6 days after his arrest.
HOWEVER, it also says that bail was initially set at $1 million. There is a very good chance this was reduced at a later hearing (when the judge said, so-- do you have any evidence of him being a flight risk? No? Thank you, drive through.).
And just because this guy is with 2600, does not mean he's in the right.... And fwiw, $1 million bond is hardly unheard of. Seeing that... it doesn't mention the other 3 charges that were dropped were,... and whether the bond would be lower if paid in cash (which is usually the case).
Also, seeing that he DID make bail, it obviously wasn't an impossible hardship.
*cough* (It must be contagious.) John Sellers is the one who was held on $1 million bond, not McGuckin. Sellers is not with 2600, and did not have 5 charges filed against him, 3 of which were dropped. He also spent 6 days in jail, which was likely the amount of time before bail was reduced from $1 million to a lower figure.
Now, regardless of who these people did or did not work for, I find it an indictment of the judges and their collusion with local law enforcement that Philadelphia bails were unusually high across the board (and yes, they most certainly were-- bail for "disorderly conduct" is never $500,000). But considering the trial is by jury, I see an equally scathing indictment of McGuckin's defense attorney, who couldn't even get his client off a charge against a prosecution with no evidence except a single eyewitness. Of course, that happens all the time with traffic violations-- I suppose the jury was successfully duped into thinking either detectives are better than everyone else, or misdemeanor convictions are no big deal so you might as well convict him of it.
Agreed. Frankly, I'd prefer we don't see full standards compliance. Eventually, either the W3C will get their heads out of their asses, or people will tell them to go screw themselves and no one will listen to them.
Have you ever looked at the "rules" for CSS? What a joke! Excuse me if I don't want to program a few hundred rules and their special cases just so someone can put a border around the 4th letter in the 3rd bolded work in the 2nd paragraph.
I disagree. You (or your next of kin) have the same options that you'd have if your neighbor's dog bit you or if your dentist pulled the wrong teeth. There has yet to be a law that's prevented individuals from being stupid or negligent, however there are options for those who are harmed by this negligence to seek compensation.
What good is boycotting Guinness going to do? "Oh, sorry, in that case we'll give all those guinnesssucks domains back." They've already spent their $2000 and screwed this guy. The real problem isn't Guinness-- sure, they're a bunch of assholes, but as we've discovered, so are most large corporations. All the other biggies are thinking, "wow-- they won? time to sue for microsoftsucks.com back!".
The real problem is the WIPO, a disgustingly ill-conceived, poorly-planned, and generally broken organization. Its origins are almost as dubious as its repeated abuse of power.
Until we get smart and implement a flat tax, people are just going to engage in whatever sort of financial misdirection they can to avoid paying taxes.
This is a common misconception put forward as rhetoric by the tiny coalition for a flat tax. As a matter of fact, the whole movement for a flat tax is a rhetoric-driven, dumbed down, "politics for people who can't do math" proposition. I agree that the current tax code is far too complex. But in practice it's really no tougher to implement a graduated income tax than a flat one. Flat tax: declare income, pay x%. Graduated: declare income, pay (some lookup table)%. The problem currently is there are a million deductions, conditions on how you got the money, who you give money to, how many kids you have, how long you've been in your current income bracket, etc. etc. etc. It's a big fucking mess, and Bush, Gore, and Nader all haven't said they're going to do anything to simplify it. They'll all give bullshit targeted cuts to specific groups and fuck up the system even more.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've heard all these arguments before. I agree: Communism sucks. What you've failed to convince me of is that a progressive tax equals communism. Obviously, too steep a progressive tax is just about the same thing. But if you establish a maximum-- say, no one, regardless of income, ever pays more than 50% combined income tax between state and federal-- you've still got plenty of motivation. That's the current situation, as a matter of fact: combined income tax doesn't go much over 50%, and people still feel motivated to make obscene amounts of money. If you think the current tax structure is preventing people from working hard to make a pile of money, you're not paying much attention.
This is what's great about philosophers: they follow reasonable-sounding statements through to absurdities, and fail to question the results. How else could you end up with, "the best candidate to vote for is the most foolish and malicious one"?
It is flamebait. This whole thread, starting with the top level that's been moderated up for no good reason, is a stupid bit of offtopic flamebait. "Oh,/. is so hypocritical. They say boycott the MPAA and then see geek movies." There's nothing constructive in that post, there's nothing even interesting. Yes, there are many people posting to/., and some of them have different opinions from each other.
If you want to actually display hypocrisy, you'll have to find the SAME PERSON saying opposite things. And even then-- who cares? Simply pointing out hypocrisy is a pointless kid's game. Identifying real issues and finding solutions is something that's actually worthwhile. Yes, we're all upset with the MPAA. But we're also very interested in their product. Are we dedicated enough to boycott? Or perhaps there's a way to hurt the MPAA without a boycott? Is there an idealistic conflict here, or not?
The article really discussed two different points. One is, "are games more fun now than they were ten years ago"? That question is asked more or less constantly by the gaming magazines. My personal opinion is yes; I did in fact have more fun with Baldur's Gate 2 than, say, Pools of Radiance. OTOH, that's extremely subjective-- I'm a lot older now than I was then. But I do feel that when we reminisce about the old titles such as Wasteland, we forget the huge annoyances like having to copy the entire directory because you only got one save game, or having to leave a weight on the spacebar to regain hit points while you went off to lunch (note that these are design improvements, not graphical ones!). Here are some opinions on the issue from Gamespot's Question of the Week.
The other issue he brings up is the difficulty of content creation on such a massive scale. That is a much less valid concern from a "will it ever happen" standpoint. Obviously we need better ways of developing content. But that speaks to tools. No one codes games from scratch in assembly any more. In the future, no one will make all the 3-D models from scratch either. The obscene amount of work that goes into creating a new Everquest zone will seem silly ten years from now, when most of the basic stuff like terrain, trees, a couple of houses, even a few NPC's are put in there automatically. Designers will add and subtract; they'll give some initial parameters; they'll do the stuff by hand that they really need to tweak, just like coders occasionally optimize a method or two into assembly.
"Governments don't ensure your freedom."
What a load of rubbish.
You keep using that word-- I do not think it means what you think it means! Or rather, I do not think "ensure" means what you think it means. Governments do NOT ensure freedom, and I think that once you think about the meaning of "ensure", you'll agree with me.
As for the discussion of whether or not governments are only way for a large group of people to maximize freedom, that's a valid argument.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, everyone respond to the highly moderated troll! I'll join in now; otherwise what kind of successful troll would it be?
I know we love to have these "devil's advocate" sorts of posts to make us think more, but sometimes we really have trouble finding good ones, and it gets tiresome. For example, how many times do we need to see this line: I REALLY wish people woudl read posts before flaming away. Yeah, yeah, I know-- RTFA. Do you realize RTFA is NOT a sufficient rebuttal? Does it occur to you that people may indeed have the expressed opinions after reading the TOS? Every point listed is, at the very least, quite debatable:
1) attempting to send e-mail or newsgroup articles or postings using a name or address of someone other than yourself, attempting to impersonate any person or using forged headers or other identifying information.
There is a lot of "or" in that sentence. What qualifies as a forged header, or forged identifying information? Would the anonymizer count? How about in front of a tech-illiterate judge, with Sprint's lawyers vs. your small-ass pocketbook?
2) You grant to Sprint or any appointed subcontractors an irrevocable license to enter into or onto your Premises during normal business hours, Monday through Saturday, in order to install, repair, replace or remove Equipment. This license will survive termination or cancellation of this Agreement and will run with the land and inure to the parties' successors and assigns.
This goes beyond the right most service providers have. I sure haven't granted my DSL provider permission to come into my house and take the modem back, especially when I'm not home. And the whole bit about the right surviving termination of the agreement-- not likely to stand up in court, since if you no longer agree to the contract, you no longer agree to any of it, including this part. Still, with the latest legislation of business models, the courts seem remarkably anti-consumer. Are you willing to bet on him ruling your way when, a month after you cancel service, a Sprint rep walks by your window and sees a bag of weed inside on the table?
3) Their list of stuff you can't send, if you READ IT PROPERLY, explains that wehat they are saying is that you can't do anything illegal. They even SAY THAT. How hard is that to understand, hmm?
How hard is this sentence to understand: "you may not post or transmit any... objectionable information of any kind, including without limitation, any transmissions, constituting or encouraging, conduct that would constitute a criminal offense, give rise to civil liability, or otherwise violate any local, state, national or international law, including without limitation U.S. export control laws and regulations."
Notice they say, right there, right for you-- "including without limitation". Which means that all that is just clarification text, and what they've really prohibited is "objectionable information". You don't think that's a little excessive?
I REALLY wish people would read posts before flaming away.
But not "unreasonably" so, and that's where the courts step in. Can you stop someone from wearing a sign around in a grocery store parking lot? The courts say no, that's fine. Can you stop tobacco companies from advertising on television? Sure. What's the difference? I don't know, but you might think you have a better idea after trudging through thousands of pages of court documents.
Free Radio Berkeley fought a long battle through the courts against the FCC, and got shut down in 1998 after 5 years of suit and countersuit. That on its own shows the issue is hardly clear-cut-- there were plenty of decisions and overrides.
If you want to read about one of the most (in)famous low power radio stations ever, check out www.freeradio.org. It's an interesting read about a fairly ridiculous situation, although it's a little out of date.
Is is possible to get a Slashdot interview witht his law firm? I would like to know just how a law firm like this expects not to damage its reputation.
It may hurt its reputation in your eyes, but it helps their reputation in the eyes of the people who will be hiring them-- that is, all the people who want to file frivolous lawsuits. If they win, or manage to get any money at all out of Prodigy, it will actually look pretty good to prospective customers.
Yes, and the people who made the link made came to the obvious conclusion that if Matthew Pavlovich is ordered dropped from the case solely on the basis that he doesn't reside in California, all the other non-Californians will be dropped as a matter of course. Jurisdiction questions such as this one are a very common method by which lawsuits are dismissed.
Those hits come from people who want to read and post on a story, and the simple fact is: on slashdot, controversial stories (ie misleading, flamewar topics, etc) generate hits. So an easy method of making money with slashdot is with controversial stories; one way to do that is have Hemos act like a fool and post something misleading....
I don't think this is relevant at all. The story would have been read regardless of whether or not Hemos had got it right. How about this potential writeup:
"Well, the United States Supreme Court has given their "ruling" concerning the Florida Supreme Court. They've temporarily set aside the ruling that extended the deadline and required hand recounts. This could be a final step towards declaring Bush the winner, or it could simply tie things up even longer in Florida Courts."
That would be more accurate, and generate just as many posts (minus the 5 or 10 "Hemos is an idiot" posts). But if you don't believe me, here's one that would generate even more posts, and still be more accurate than the original:
"Well, the United States Supreme Court has given their "ruling" concerning the Florida Supreme Court. They've only temporarily set aside the Florida court's ruling, so they might catch a lot of heat for potentially prolonging the proceedings. However, that won't at all compare to the heat they're about to catch over today's other decision: they still refuse to hear any case over Natalie Portman and hot grits. A Beowulf cluster of Al Gores still hasn't issued a statement, and the Penis Bird couldn't be reached for comment."
I have an idea-- Moderation options based on the story type. For example, for hardware articles, we could have "-1: Beowulf Cluster". And for political articles, we could have "-1: Petty Partisan Bickering".
"But startled," I hear you say (or perhaps "but d0000d"), "we already have -1: Flamebait, and -1: Offtopic, and so on and so forth". Ah, but a look at the parents of my post points out that regardless of that status, the babbling incoherent posts get modded down -1: Flamebait, and the more coherent ones get +1: Insightful, but at the heart they're both Petty Partisan Bickering. No one browsing at +3 wants to read them.
The one flaw with my system is that this article was originally posted in the Internet category (since fixed). The options would have been "+/-1: Bitching About JonKatz".
*yawn* Let me guess-- you voted Republican.
If you've been following the opinion polls on all this, everything is sharply divided. About half the country thinks the Republicans are a bunch of crafty, evil, election stealers. The other half of the country thinks the Democrats are a bunch of crafty, evil, election stealers. Each side comes up with a lot of boring, self-righteous rhetoric. The truth is, each side is trying their damnedest to win the election, ideals be damned. The Democrats say "every vote should be heard", and then fight to get military ballots invalidated. The Republicans say, "this should be decided by the people, not the courts", and then are the first to file a lawsuit.
The truth is, both candidates are going to come out of this looking bad, and low on support. They're both going to have trouble with re-election.
The Supreme Court of the U.S. managed to stay out of the entire shitstorm by not making a decisive decision about how the election results should be treated. They may catch some crap for that, but most people are quite happy that they have some enough respect for state's rights to stay out of it.
No, setting aside a decision is different from overturning it. There were sufficient problems in the decision to question how it was reached; specifically, it appeared the decision was reached in violation of the U.S. Constitution which gives the legislature the authority to choose the manner of selecting electors.
But that is markedly different from overturning. They temporarily set aside the decision, which means that after reviewing it with the opinion the Supreme Court has given, the Florida Supreme Court can re-issue the same ruling, though hopefully with a rationale that does not include usurping the legislature's authority.
The distinction is very important. SCOTUS avoided ruling on the actual manner of the election; i.e. saying "you have to accept hand recounts" or "you can't accept hand recounts". Had they done that, it would have been a huge blow to state's rights, and a shocking decision. But you could tell they weren't going to do that from the beginning, when their questions mainly focused around one problem: how is this case a federal issue?
I think home sales might be okay, because Intel's made a chip that runs at high clock speeds. While a 1.5 GHz P4 may not run faster than a 1.2 GHz Athlon, the average home user will still say, "ooh! 1.5 > 1.2!".
My favorite line:
"It's possible that some of our sales force overstated the benefits of dual-capable CPU systems, unfortunately, by being overly critical of single-CPU-capable systems," said the executive, who asked not to be named.
Gosh, I just can't imagine how that might have happened...
Well, slap my ass and call me redundant, but I agree-- these are boring and not terribly useful. Shying away from the controversy that might be caused by practical suffixes, they picked a bunch of innocuous, useless suffixes. Who the hell is going to use .name, and for what? .aero!? Yeah, sign me up.
.dot, .sucks, and .beer.
Of course, the ridiculous things that will come out of this will be the lawsuits. Someone guy named Donald will register Donald.name, and McDonald's will sue him for trademark infringment, and on and on and on.
At least the pointlessness of these new suffixes gives hope to other potential names like
In the case of DemocracyNow, "independent" simply means much more obviously biased. The interview with President Clinton appears to be a successful critique of President Clinton's administration, and a triumph of independent interviewers over a president weaned on soft, corporate interviews-- when you read the writeup on the front page. When you read the actual transcript of the interview, however, Clinton comes off as an extremely intelligent person with great points, who keeps getting interrupted by the interviewers as he answers their questions.
It's important to have independent media, but not crappy independent media. For these stories, check out the Philadelphia Examiner or AP stories, or (if you want a site that makes no bones about where it's coming from, because the guy works with them) check out 2600.org.
The article said he spent 6 days in jail. It was more than 6 days between his arrest and the dismissal of the charges. Hence, he must have made bail 6 days after his arrest.
HOWEVER, it also says that bail was initially set at $1 million. There is a very good chance this was reduced at a later hearing (when the judge said, so-- do you have any evidence of him being a flight risk? No? Thank you, drive through.).
And just because this guy is with 2600, does not mean he's in the right.... And fwiw, $1 million bond is hardly unheard of. Seeing that... it doesn't mention the other 3 charges that were dropped were,... and whether the bond would be lower if paid in cash (which is usually the case). Also, seeing that he DID make bail, it obviously wasn't an impossible hardship.
*cough* (It must be contagious.) John Sellers is the one who was held on $1 million bond, not McGuckin. Sellers is not with 2600, and did not have 5 charges filed against him, 3 of which were dropped. He also spent 6 days in jail, which was likely the amount of time before bail was reduced from $1 million to a lower figure.
Now, regardless of who these people did or did not work for, I find it an indictment of the judges and their collusion with local law enforcement that Philadelphia bails were unusually high across the board (and yes, they most certainly were-- bail for "disorderly conduct" is never $500,000). But considering the trial is by jury, I see an equally scathing indictment of McGuckin's defense attorney, who couldn't even get his client off a charge against a prosecution with no evidence except a single eyewitness. Of course, that happens all the time with traffic violations-- I suppose the jury was successfully duped into thinking either detectives are better than everyone else, or misdemeanor convictions are no big deal so you might as well convict him of it.
RTFA.
and offers up to 4.7GB of storage capacity per DVD side.
And moderators, RTFP.
Agreed. Frankly, I'd prefer we don't see full standards compliance. Eventually, either the W3C will get their heads out of their asses, or people will tell them to go screw themselves and no one will listen to them.
Have you ever looked at the "rules" for CSS? What a joke! Excuse me if I don't want to program a few hundred rules and their special cases just so someone can put a border around the 4th letter in the 3rd bolded work in the 2nd paragraph.
I disagree. You (or your next of kin) have the same options that you'd have if your neighbor's dog bit you or if your dentist pulled the wrong teeth. There has yet to be a law that's prevented individuals from being stupid or negligent, however there are options for those who are harmed by this negligence to seek compensation.
What good is boycotting Guinness going to do? "Oh, sorry, in that case we'll give all those guinnesssucks domains back." They've already spent their $2000 and screwed this guy. The real problem isn't Guinness-- sure, they're a bunch of assholes, but as we've discovered, so are most large corporations. All the other biggies are thinking, "wow-- they won? time to sue for microsoftsucks.com back!".
The real problem is the WIPO, a disgustingly ill-conceived, poorly-planned, and generally broken organization. Its origins are almost as dubious as its repeated abuse of power.
You mean like cigarettes? Good thing we don't do that already!
Until we get smart and implement a flat tax, people are just going to engage in whatever sort of financial misdirection they can to avoid paying taxes.
This is a common misconception put forward as rhetoric by the tiny coalition for a flat tax. As a matter of fact, the whole movement for a flat tax is a rhetoric-driven, dumbed down, "politics for people who can't do math" proposition. I agree that the current tax code is far too complex. But in practice it's really no tougher to implement a graduated income tax than a flat one. Flat tax: declare income, pay x%. Graduated: declare income, pay (some lookup table)%. The problem currently is there are a million deductions, conditions on how you got the money, who you give money to, how many kids you have, how long you've been in your current income bracket, etc. etc. etc. It's a big fucking mess, and Bush, Gore, and Nader all haven't said they're going to do anything to simplify it. They'll all give bullshit targeted cuts to specific groups and fuck up the system even more.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've heard all these arguments before. I agree: Communism sucks. What you've failed to convince me of is that a progressive tax equals communism. Obviously, too steep a progressive tax is just about the same thing. But if you establish a maximum-- say, no one, regardless of income, ever pays more than 50% combined income tax between state and federal-- you've still got plenty of motivation. That's the current situation, as a matter of fact: combined income tax doesn't go much over 50%, and people still feel motivated to make obscene amounts of money. If you think the current tax structure is preventing people from working hard to make a pile of money, you're not paying much attention.
This is what's great about philosophers: they follow reasonable-sounding statements through to absurdities, and fail to question the results. How else could you end up with, "the best candidate to vote for is the most foolish and malicious one"?
It is flamebait. This whole thread, starting with the top level that's been moderated up for no good reason, is a stupid bit of offtopic flamebait. "Oh, /. is so hypocritical. They say boycott the MPAA and then see geek movies." There's nothing constructive in that post, there's nothing even interesting. Yes, there are many people posting to /., and some of them have different opinions from each other.
If you want to actually display hypocrisy, you'll have to find the SAME PERSON saying opposite things. And even then-- who cares? Simply pointing out hypocrisy is a pointless kid's game. Identifying real issues and finding solutions is something that's actually worthwhile. Yes, we're all upset with the MPAA. But we're also very interested in their product. Are we dedicated enough to boycott? Or perhaps there's a way to hurt the MPAA without a boycott? Is there an idealistic conflict here, or not?
The article really discussed two different points. One is, "are games more fun now than they were ten years ago"? That question is asked more or less constantly by the gaming magazines. My personal opinion is yes; I did in fact have more fun with Baldur's Gate 2 than, say, Pools of Radiance. OTOH, that's extremely subjective-- I'm a lot older now than I was then. But I do feel that when we reminisce about the old titles such as Wasteland, we forget the huge annoyances like having to copy the entire directory because you only got one save game, or having to leave a weight on the spacebar to regain hit points while you went off to lunch (note that these are design improvements, not graphical ones!). Here are some opinions on the issue from Gamespot's Question of the Week.
The other issue he brings up is the difficulty of content creation on such a massive scale. That is a much less valid concern from a "will it ever happen" standpoint. Obviously we need better ways of developing content. But that speaks to tools. No one codes games from scratch in assembly any more. In the future, no one will make all the 3-D models from scratch either. The obscene amount of work that goes into creating a new Everquest zone will seem silly ten years from now, when most of the basic stuff like terrain, trees, a couple of houses, even a few NPC's are put in there automatically. Designers will add and subtract; they'll give some initial parameters; they'll do the stuff by hand that they really need to tweak, just like coders occasionally optimize a method or two into assembly.
"Governments don't ensure your freedom." What a load of rubbish.
You keep using that word-- I do not think it means what you think it means! Or rather, I do not think "ensure" means what you think it means. Governments do NOT ensure freedom, and I think that once you think about the meaning of "ensure", you'll agree with me.
As for the discussion of whether or not governments are only way for a large group of people to maximize freedom, that's a valid argument.