If you can't code, you are forced to rely on those that can to ensure that you can benefit from the greatest tool at your disposal
I really wish computer scientists would get over themselves. At least the arrogant ones who, like conceited physicists and preening economists, think all the problems on Earth are merely esoteric subsets of their own field of study, which they'll get around to solving in due time. Interesting philosophical arguments about universal language aside, it's simply not true that everything is better with computers or better if reduced to pure math. There are fantastic uses for programming and computing in damn near every field, but it's ludicrous seeing programmers argue, again and again, that every engineer or scientist should be a programmer, much less every citizen.
Not everything is better with a computer; some things are even worse.
It's not the goddamn Matrix yet, either; we're not "forced to rely on" people who program any more than we're forced to rely on people who grow food or fix cars. We all rely on all of those people, we're comfortable with some divisions of labor, and while computers are useful in every field that doesn't make programming the most useful skill of all. It makes it the most general skill, perhaps, but that's not an argument for universal programming literacy in and of itself. Maybe every industry needs programmers, but programmers need not become the core of every industry. Nor do I believe that programming teaches any particular problem solving or critical thinking talent, regardless of the language or whether the skills are actually used to program, better than logic, chemistry, or even anthropology courses.
We certainly don't yet need to regard programming as a component of basic literacy, in any case.
You're missing the fact that it was a LOAN, not a grant.
No, I'm not missing anything. From my original statement:
Yes, I know that the government gave out $25 billion in loans under that program and Tesla got just $465 million
Tesla may be required to pay back the loan, but they could also completely fail to produce sufficient sales to pay it back, in which case the government will much more likely see fit to forgive the principal, make ridiculous concessions on repayments, etc. than sue Tesla into oblivion and seize their assets like any competent private lender would do. The government has a hideously bad track record of getting money back out of the things they've bailed out or invested in. TARP was very much an outlier in that regard. Look at the state of federal housing subsidies, disaster relief funds, and military procurement. Trillions upon trillions in unpunished cost overruns, mismanagement, and outright fraud.
The bottom line: there's not a big difference, functionally, between a loan and a grant when it comes to government money. If a business fails or mismanages that cash they almost always get away with it. I don't think Tesla will mismanage or steal their loan cash, but I also don't believe they'll do well enough to justify the loan in the long run, and they may indeed discharge or renegotiate their loan to the detriment of the taxpayer.
I also disagree with and find suspicious, as I said before, their general pattern of development: I understand going after the enthusiast market to fund further development of the consumer editions, and I understand government funding for an ambitious and scientifically important project, but I really don't like seeing a company doing both at the same time.
When a government responsibly invests in scientific, military, or consumer technology they typically act as a major, or even the only, initial customer as well; either that or they at least invest in something specifically targeted for universal adoption at all levels of society. Why the government should invest in a consumer product which will be sold almost exclusively to the wealthy on the mere hope that the company does well enough that their third or fourth product would finally be something for the commoners is beyond me; I simply don't find that a credible or responsible way of influencing technological advance with taxpayer funds. Why should I buy a toy for the rich while merely hoping it becomes a car I can eventually attain? Why shouldn't the new product Tesla develops on federal money be a product that we would all benefit from even if the company fails to repay the loan or produce mass-marketable technology? They could, and should, have been required to use that loan on producing fleet vehicles, for example, rather than luxury sedans. Fleet vehicles have very consistent use cases, from mileage to driving style to environments driven. If Tesla built electric military jeeps for base police, or patrol cars for urban police forces, or new postal vans, then even if they didn't do well enough to make a consumer model everything they built would be useful to the citizens who funded them in the form of new public infrastructure.
Instead we funded a car for rich people, and if the company doesn't do well or can't develop a cheaper version with mass-market sales we'll end up with fuck all to show for it.
I think most of you have misinterpreted my post as libertarian blustering, and it's not. I'm entirely in favor of government funding for interesting projects, and even in favor of outright nationalizing things like healthcare; I'm much more socialist than libertarian.
I'm not opposed to a car maker getting government money, I just think Tesla is a boutique manufacturer for rich people masquerading as a technical visionary. They seem to me a place with more hype than substance, sucking up government loans and free publicity that will never translate into a car cheap and practical enough that the bottom 70% could even consider buying one.
I know I'm dying to see a government funded vehicle that only the wealthiest 10% of Americans can afford!
Yes, I know that the government gave out $25 billion in loans under that program and Tesla got just $465 million, but still. I can't imagine a dumber way of promoting green transportation for the masses than building a $60,000 sedan.
So ten thousand or so greenwashing celebrities, financiers, and Ivy League professors will buy one and then...what? They claim they'll make a cheap model when they work out the kinks and get enough funding from selling the rich-people version, and I know trickle-down economics sorta works in cutting-edge technology, but Nissan already has an electric sedan for $20,000 less.
I just don't see why Tesla deserves our adulation.
It's illegal to accept stolen property, knowingly or not.
And just how many prosecutors would nail someone who paid a fair price on eBay for an iPad?
It's illegal to accept stolen property unknowingly only because the police, rightfully, got sick of hearing: "I didn't know it was stolen! I swear! I just thought it was a really good deal! The fact that he sold his stuff out the back of a box van with no retail packaging seemed totally legit to me!" Those laws are meant to inhibit feigned ignorance as a defense, not to promote prosecution on every single Receiving Stolen Goods case the police can drum up.
Despite what the ACLU and libertarian types around here think, most prosecutors have official discretion, common sense, and common decency. They're not going to bitch slap you for saving $40 on something that turns out to be stolen unless they think you knew it, or at least bought it under circumstances that damn well should have given you a clue.
Missing the point AND arrogant. Nice twofer.
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SOPA and PIPA So Far
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· Score: 5, Insightful
And Fark, Reddit, and Wired are for digital neophytes who aren't well informed about the topic? Because they all participated to some degree, and if it's only a 'nuisance' for a place with informed readers to participate in a protest then the readers of those websites are either much stupider than ours or their editors much dumber than ours...
The point of the damn protests is to point out how inconvenient and destructive it would be for your favorite sites to disappear without notice thanks to the instant, warrantless takedowns that SOPA would enable. Leaving a major tech news site on-line, where all of their users can bitch and speculate about the protests rather than experience being cut off, actually kinda blunts the effectiveness.
Just because we get it in theory doesn't mean there's no value in solidarity or that it wouldn't be good for us to experience it firsthand for a frickin day as further impetus to prevent a future where we could experience it for a lifetime.
I actually expected that, and warned of it in my own submission this morning. I think some people don't fully understand what 'tabled' means.
Eric Cantor is Speaker of the House, and he's the one who 'tabled' SOPA yesterday, according to the stories we've been reading. The Speaker controls the House by controlling the schedule. He decides what gets floor time, and if he refuses to schedule something for a vote it can't become law.
No bill is actually dead, however, until the legislative year is over. If a bill "died in committee", the committee could consider a new draft or change their minds outright; if it died because the Speaker wouldn't schedule it, he could come into work the very next day and say: "Hey, that thing I said we wouldn't vote on until my mother-in-law gave me a blowjob in the back seat of my Mercedes? Well, granny puckered up last night and it was reeaal nice, so everyone pick up your clickers and put in the old yay-or-nay on this bill!"
So when he supposedly shelved SOPA yesterday Cantor wasn't making some sort of vow or invoking a rule that destroyed the bill: congresspeople could still talk about it, continue to work on it, and continue rounding up votes for or against it. Apparently they did. He was still free to change his mind, and apparently he did. So at the moment it's been re-scheduled yet again for markup.
If you don't like a bit of legislation, do not rest until the session is over. That's the only time you can be sure that particular bill won't go through.
And when I say that particular bill I mean it specifically: it happens frequently that the same proposed law, sometimes word-for-word, comes up year after year after year, in bill after bill, until it finally gets through. It happened when North Carolina effectively banned municipal broadband this year; that was the third try for that one. There could be a second, third, fourth and fifth try for SOPA until Hollywood gets what they want. Pay attention and be vigilant. Their lawyers don't sleep, and neither can you if you want a free internet.
You're joking right? There's been a SOPA story on Slashdot atleast twice a week for the last few months..
Yeah, and I believe all from the readers. Slashdot has editors, paid staffers who ultimately decide what's posted (regardless of what the firehose says is the topmost story); there's no good reason they can't write an actual editorial or stage a protest when situations call for it.
Slashdot didn't participate in the blackout, and after multiple comments and submissions, including mine, criticizing them for being spineless punks...we get a massive pile of links spelling out a bald summary of the story so far. No opinion, no support for a cause in which they have a vested constitutional interest, nothing.
Either users submit the content and run the site, or the editor's actually have a purpose and they should show some balls. This awkward middle-ground where they never have an opinion and almost never come up with content - yet still hold final control over what stories go up and reword or cut down the summaries as they see fit - sometimes looks pretty pathetic. This is one of those times.
The whole slew of articles depends on inference, rumors, and anonymous sources. Par for the course.
The most ignorant moment, however, comes in the itworld article, when they claim that stock movements are giving credence to the rumors: RIM went up by 6.7%.
That's what happens for rumors, even crazy ones: stock prices go up. Credible rumors, however, would produce more action than that. Actual plans in the works, actual offers on the table, would create much, much more: the same article talks about Yahoo! rejecting $31 dollars a share at a time when they were valued at ~$19. RIM couldn't expect anywhere near the same premium, but nevertheless buyouts frequently come with some gravy, and a credible rumor could easily prompt the pure speculators, and even many sane investors, to push the stock up 20% or more. RIM went up a lousy 6.7%.
In other words, this isn't a credible rumor and even most speculators aren't seriously believing this talk yet. Call us when the stock goes up 15% or more, not to mention when you get a source with an actual name or some details.
I take it you never realized that "Bullshit" is carefully crafted libertarian propaganda rather than independent investigative reporting for entertainment. I don't say 'libertarian' figuratively, either; they cite the Cato Institute constantly, of which Penn and Teller are both research fellows. I'm not saying the libertarian viewpoint is inherently incorrect, but it's hardly the place to go for unbiased reporting.
What is inherently incorrect are their interview tactics and editing techniques; they're even more misleading than Michael Moore's. Ever notice how rarely you hear the question that was actually asked? Penn's voice-over introduces a topic on their own terms, the video cuts to the interviewee answering an unknown question that was asked by a different interviewer off-camera, and he mocks their response - often while they're still talking. It's all trick editing and impatient over-simplification; it's reality TV disguised as an interview.
Believe what you want, but don't go around thinking "Bullshit" segments provide a good justification for any of your beliefs.
So we all know some of the King family have become money grubbing pricks equaled only by the Tolkien estate, and it doesn't surprise me that they want the speech behind paywalls, but this video of the speech has been on youtube for just short of a year.
So how is it impossible to view the speech without giving the Kings $10?
Sure, but the flip side of that is the people screaming "make the rich pay their fair share!!!" as if that will fix the entire problem. That's not going to be even close to enough.
That's quite true. Making only the rich pay more will not be enough; not by most persons' definition of 'rich', anyway.
What bothers me most about the 'rich paying more' debate, however, is the lying responses from the politicians and think-tanks paid to glorify the wealthy, justify flat-taxes, and vilify the bottom 2/3 as selfish profligates sucking at the socialist teat. You see bullshit statements like "even if we took the entire income of the top 1% every year we'd only solve 1/6 of the deficit" or "even if the marginal rate on the top quintile went up by 15% a that would only fix 1/2 of the deficit alone, much less the debt" or one Republican candidate's favorite "54% of Americans pay no tax at all.
First, the top 1% generally have assets far in excess of their yearly 'Income', or even their real income. It's almost outright lying to look at a guy with assets in the billions and say that taking all of his Income every year wouldn't help because his income is only in the tens of millions. Not to mention that tons of that money - for many of the 1% virtually all of it- stays permanently in investment vehicles or goes through enough (technically legal) money laundering to make a Mafioso blush. It's either never technically income despite being economic power, solely controlled by an individual, which is equal to the lifetime output of dozens or hundreds or thousands of people working at the median national salary, or it was hidden from taxation outright. Either rewrite the tax code literally from scratch, or punish their decades of shirking by taxing the extremely wealthy on their assets (even as a one-time event), and the top 1% could indeed put a huge frickin dent in our budget problems.
Second, quintile-based arguments conveniently ignore the fact that even the second quintile from the top bottoms out at $55,000. That's already an acceptable living in all but a handful of cities, and the numbers only go up from there. In most cities the top 40% can easily afford to pay another 1 or 5 or 10% in federal tax per year, to say nothing of what the top 20% and top 1% can afford. I am not saying it wouldn't hurt, but real taxes - the kind that can actually sustain a first-world nation with 350 million people, the world's best educational and scientific capabilities, and a military bigger than the entire planet put together ever had up until the first world war - might have to hurt a bit sometimes.
But the worst of all is probably the argument that the bottom x% pay nothing at all (those greedy little parastic fuckers!). The truth is, the bottom x% pay no final income tax, after their deductions and refunds are processed; when you ask non-partisan analysts and think-tanks who specialize in tax they'll tell you that even the very bottom 1% pay at least 15% of their income in various taxes on property, utilities, retail sales, where even the top 1% pay only 30-35% across all types of tax.
I just can't seem to feel bad that people with six, seven, eight, and fucking nine figure incomes pay twice as much tax as the dirt poor. Can you?
A lot of people, from the filthy rich to the upper-middle-middle class who just wish they were, need to shut up and pay their damn share. Before hey find people with pitchforks at their doorsteps. I'm not some militant communist whacko, not in the least, but I'm also not kidding when I say that. Just because the standard of living is so high that only the destitute in America have any serious complaints to make versus any other nation or time in history doesn't mean people don't notice the looting and abuse going on. Just because they have TV and cell phones and generally have heat in the winter doesn't mean the bottom 40% are happy struggling to pay for their healthc
I'm vigorously opposed to sales tax in general, and thus despise the idea of paying taxes on Amazon goods.
That said, I'm getting very tired of the several dozen comments per Amazon-related thread about how hard it is to manage the different tax zones, what a massive unfair burden it is for online retailers, how even attempting to comply would obliterate any seller smaller than Amazon or eBay in a blinding flash of red-tape, etc.
It's not that hard; not even at this moment is it anywhere near as difficult as you claim, but under any decently written law it would be a complete non-issue. The state could simply require the municipal party responsible for any layer of sales tax - mayors' offices, county commissioners, etc. - to enter their tax rules and proportions into a state database in a standard format. Then any moron could write code to parse that database, populate their sales system, and correctly tax a solid 95% of purchases with no further effort. In fact, it would be perfectly reasonable if the state required cities and counties to enter into my hypothetical database the correct tax jurisdictions for each and every property they contained. They already have to assess and charge those lands correctly for property and utility tax; it's just one more small step in a dance of surveying, assessment, and classification they already perform every year.
So there's no good reason sales taxation couldn't become easier, for physical and online stores alike, under a properly written e-commerce law. Come up with some real arguments, please. I may agree with you on the underlying point, that sales tax and complex taxes in general both suck, but it makes me nauseated seeing supporters of my ideals hiding en masse behind such a piss-poor construct.
What acid-dropping, Tea Party dipshit moderated this balls-out lie 'Insightful'?
Seriously, there's just no more gentle way to say that. American taxes would have to almost exactly double to become the highest in the world; as it is we're barely in the top fifty highest taxing nations.
Yes, we probably need to raise taxes, but what we really really really have to do is cut spending.
I disagree that spending cuts are the major priority; we could cut plenty of things plenty deeply, yes, but there's really no sustainable path on which we can continue to charge as little as we do in tax. It's basically impossible to charge the lowest rates in the developed world while simultaneously dominating the planet in military power AND science AND culture AND economic production, yet people seem to believe we can do just that if only we cut spending and lower taxes even further.
But so long as you admit taxes should go up, I can agree with looking at spending first. It's certainly responsible to use what you have more carefully before you ask for more. Just so long as you're not one of those dumb fucks who thinks cutting spending alone can fix the problem we'll get along fine....
I know that's inflammatory language, but seriously: who can be stupid enough to look at our federal budget and think we can even balance the deficit, much less pay off some debt, with spending cuts alone. It's a truly asinine notion, one which any fourth grade math assignment can easily refute, and yet it captivates (imprisons, at this point) a major political party.
My brain almost refuses to believe that anyone could be so ignorant, so selfish and deluded, as to think fully 30% of our federal budget is waste and inexcusable handouts, all of which can be slashed without any remorse or negative consequences at all.
And if you really want to have fun, look at the things Republicans want to cut out, and then look at the fraction of the budget they represent. The NIH, the NSF, foreign aid, the national endowment for the arts, public broadcasting money....all of that put together isn't even 0.5%, and yet they harp on each of those things, individually and extensively, like they're the pinnacle of waste and socialist excess.
God dammit, I'm gonna need some heart medication soon.
But Torchlight was made by the people that made Diablo 1 and 2. Diablo 3 is created by a completely different team.
I found both Torchlight and the D3 beta totally awful.
Maybe I'm just outgrowing hack-n-slash, along with every other mainstream category. God knows I hate 95% of shooters these days.
I swear to god, I hate indie game hipsters just as much as indie music hipsters and Linux prophets, but I haven't played a good AAA game since New Vegas, whereas indies are putting out dozens of kickass titles per year.
God help me I'm becoming an elitist. Get me some non-ironic domestic beer and a copy of MW3, stat!
As the OP I'd like to acknowledge, before any lifelong Blizzard fanboy bawls me out, that sometimes the game masters, forum moderators, and community managers at Blizzard can be full of shit. If it was just that statement I quoted in support of a console release, I might be at least skeptical myself.
This story, however, has much more to it than just that final acknowledgment; from the directness of the reply, including naming the project lead, to the stuff in the extra links soulskill was kind enough to add for me, there are many credible indicators of a console Diablo 3.
Every penny they spend on typesetting and layout is a penny lost in (very meagre) profit...
Spare me. I've looked at the numbers book publishers put out, and they're obviously full of shit. Did you know even textbook publishers, those guys who think 200 hours of editing and new material between printings justifies a new $220 edition every three years, swear up and down that they make a 1% profit?
1 fucking percent? Are they joking? What other non-commodity business makes 1% and survives? For that matter, almost no commodity businesses make that little, either.
Furthermore, if 1% was true, then ebooks would've driven them out of business by now. I see plenty of ebooks at 40-80% of their print prices. The printing, binding and shipping is only ~10% of a paper book's cost, so a discount of 20% or more on something that usually replaces a print sale- when your profit on print-only editions was just 1% - pretty much means you're fucked before you sell a single copy.
Every e-book, every sale price at Amazon, puts the lie to their claims of 1% profits. Just because Amazon and B&N border on monopsony doesn't mean printers can magically afford to lose money on every sale.
You'll always be right if you automatically believe and do the exact opposite of Sony.
Seriously, I'd be convinced even if the Dalai Lama, Jesus Christ, and the entire cast of Firefly were all on the sponsor list. Sony likes that shit? Vote No!
Google used to receive mystery emails from this random guy, one every month, containing nothing but a single number.
After puzzling over it a while they realized this value was the number of words on their homepage that month; it was this guy's way of reminding them that a simple interface was working well and contrasted distinctly with the likes of yahoo!.
Fast forward to today, and the double-layer of scrolling frames on the new front page looks suspiciously like Word 2010 or Facebook. Not nearly as bad, mind you, but suddenly showing some disturbing similarity.
I bet that guy wants to punch them in the face right now.
Google: you make the vast majority of your money on the ads that go with your simple, powerful search engine. Don't fuck it up by filling your products with endless references to your other products and trying to control the entire internet.
Well this is refreshing; it looks like the truth. Usually people cramming words into the mouths of the dead are self-serving, bullshit-spewing weirdos. Either that or maudlin, irrelevant losers.
This guy, on the other hand, is a university professor who appears to have actual research behind his claims. It goes against him, of course, that he's attempting to improve or revive his famous great-grandfather's reputation with this article, but the research looks real and I presume it's open to review.
Slashdot Mirror
If you can't code, you are forced to rely on those that can to ensure that you can benefit from the greatest tool at your disposal
I really wish computer scientists would get over themselves. At least the arrogant ones who, like conceited physicists and preening economists, think all the problems on Earth are merely esoteric subsets of their own field of study, which they'll get around to solving in due time. Interesting philosophical arguments about universal language aside, it's simply not true that everything is better with computers or better if reduced to pure math. There are fantastic uses for programming and computing in damn near every field, but it's ludicrous seeing programmers argue, again and again, that every engineer or scientist should be a programmer, much less every citizen. Not everything is better with a computer; some things are even worse.
It's not the goddamn Matrix yet, either; we're not "forced to rely on" people who program any more than we're forced to rely on people who grow food or fix cars. We all rely on all of those people, we're comfortable with some divisions of labor, and while computers are useful in every field that doesn't make programming the most useful skill of all. It makes it the most general skill, perhaps, but that's not an argument for universal programming literacy in and of itself. Maybe every industry needs programmers, but programmers need not become the core of every industry. Nor do I believe that programming teaches any particular problem solving or critical thinking talent, regardless of the language or whether the skills are actually used to program, better than logic, chemistry, or even anthropology courses.
We certainly don't yet need to regard programming as a component of basic literacy, in any case.
Irregardless isn't a word. Bonus points for using it while complaining about writing textbooks.
Hidden cell phone towers and data centers are weird enough, but how many of you have heard of the working oil fields underneath Los Angeles?
This video at the Huffington Post is the best explanation I can find offhand, but there are pictures and documentaries all over if you look for them.
You're missing the fact that it was a LOAN, not a grant.
No, I'm not missing anything. From my original statement:
Yes, I know that the government gave out $25 billion in loans under that program and Tesla got just $465 million
Tesla may be required to pay back the loan, but they could also completely fail to produce sufficient sales to pay it back, in which case the government will much more likely see fit to forgive the principal, make ridiculous concessions on repayments, etc. than sue Tesla into oblivion and seize their assets like any competent private lender would do. The government has a hideously bad track record of getting money back out of the things they've bailed out or invested in. TARP was very much an outlier in that regard. Look at the state of federal housing subsidies, disaster relief funds, and military procurement. Trillions upon trillions in unpunished cost overruns, mismanagement, and outright fraud.
The bottom line: there's not a big difference, functionally, between a loan and a grant when it comes to government money. If a business fails or mismanages that cash they almost always get away with it. I don't think Tesla will mismanage or steal their loan cash, but I also don't believe they'll do well enough to justify the loan in the long run, and they may indeed discharge or renegotiate their loan to the detriment of the taxpayer.
I also disagree with and find suspicious, as I said before, their general pattern of development: I understand going after the enthusiast market to fund further development of the consumer editions, and I understand government funding for an ambitious and scientifically important project, but I really don't like seeing a company doing both at the same time.
When a government responsibly invests in scientific, military, or consumer technology they typically act as a major, or even the only, initial customer as well; either that or they at least invest in something specifically targeted for universal adoption at all levels of society. Why the government should invest in a consumer product which will be sold almost exclusively to the wealthy on the mere hope that the company does well enough that their third or fourth product would finally be something for the commoners is beyond me; I simply don't find that a credible or responsible way of influencing technological advance with taxpayer funds. Why should I buy a toy for the rich while merely hoping it becomes a car I can eventually attain? Why shouldn't the new product Tesla develops on federal money be a product that we would all benefit from even if the company fails to repay the loan or produce mass-marketable technology? They could, and should, have been required to use that loan on producing fleet vehicles, for example, rather than luxury sedans. Fleet vehicles have very consistent use cases, from mileage to driving style to environments driven. If Tesla built electric military jeeps for base police, or patrol cars for urban police forces, or new postal vans, then even if they didn't do well enough to make a consumer model everything they built would be useful to the citizens who funded them in the form of new public infrastructure.
Instead we funded a car for rich people, and if the company doesn't do well or can't develop a cheaper version with mass-market sales we'll end up with fuck all to show for it.
I think most of you have misinterpreted my post as libertarian blustering, and it's not. I'm entirely in favor of government funding for interesting projects, and even in favor of outright nationalizing things like healthcare; I'm much more socialist than libertarian.
I'm not opposed to a car maker getting government money, I just think Tesla is a boutique manufacturer for rich people masquerading as a technical visionary. They seem to me a place with more hype than substance, sucking up government loans and free publicity that will never translate into a car cheap and practical enough that the bottom 70% could even consider buying one.
I know I'm dying to see a government funded vehicle that only the wealthiest 10% of Americans can afford!
Yes, I know that the government gave out $25 billion in loans under that program and Tesla got just $465 million, but still. I can't imagine a dumber way of promoting green transportation for the masses than building a $60,000 sedan.
So ten thousand or so greenwashing celebrities, financiers, and Ivy League professors will buy one and then...what? They claim they'll make a cheap model when they work out the kinks and get enough funding from selling the rich-people version, and I know trickle-down economics sorta works in cutting-edge technology, but Nissan already has an electric sedan for $20,000 less.
I just don't see why Tesla deserves our adulation.
It's illegal to accept stolen property, knowingly or not.
And just how many prosecutors would nail someone who paid a fair price on eBay for an iPad?
It's illegal to accept stolen property unknowingly only because the police, rightfully, got sick of hearing: "I didn't know it was stolen! I swear! I just thought it was a really good deal! The fact that he sold his stuff out the back of a box van with no retail packaging seemed totally legit to me!" Those laws are meant to inhibit feigned ignorance as a defense, not to promote prosecution on every single Receiving Stolen Goods case the police can drum up.
Despite what the ACLU and libertarian types around here think, most prosecutors have official discretion, common sense, and common decency. They're not going to bitch slap you for saving $40 on something that turns out to be stolen unless they think you knew it, or at least bought it under circumstances that damn well should have given you a clue.
And Fark, Reddit, and Wired are for digital neophytes who aren't well informed about the topic? Because they all participated to some degree, and if it's only a 'nuisance' for a place with informed readers to participate in a protest then the readers of those websites are either much stupider than ours or their editors much dumber than ours...
The point of the damn protests is to point out how inconvenient and destructive it would be for your favorite sites to disappear without notice thanks to the instant, warrantless takedowns that SOPA would enable. Leaving a major tech news site on-line, where all of their users can bitch and speculate about the protests rather than experience being cut off, actually kinda blunts the effectiveness.
Just because we get it in theory doesn't mean there's no value in solidarity or that it wouldn't be good for us to experience it firsthand for a frickin day as further impetus to prevent a future where we could experience it for a lifetime.
And ultimately, slashdot isn't that important.
I actually expected that, and warned of it in my own submission this morning. I think some people don't fully understand what 'tabled' means.
Eric Cantor is Speaker of the House, and he's the one who 'tabled' SOPA yesterday, according to the stories we've been reading. The Speaker controls the House by controlling the schedule. He decides what gets floor time, and if he refuses to schedule something for a vote it can't become law.
No bill is actually dead, however, until the legislative year is over. If a bill "died in committee", the committee could consider a new draft or change their minds outright; if it died because the Speaker wouldn't schedule it, he could come into work the very next day and say: "Hey, that thing I said we wouldn't vote on until my mother-in-law gave me a blowjob in the back seat of my Mercedes? Well, granny puckered up last night and it was reeaal nice, so everyone pick up your clickers and put in the old yay-or-nay on this bill!"
So when he supposedly shelved SOPA yesterday Cantor wasn't making some sort of vow or invoking a rule that destroyed the bill: congresspeople could still talk about it, continue to work on it, and continue rounding up votes for or against it. Apparently they did. He was still free to change his mind, and apparently he did. So at the moment it's been re-scheduled yet again for markup.
If you don't like a bit of legislation, do not rest until the session is over. That's the only time you can be sure that particular bill won't go through.
And when I say that particular bill I mean it specifically: it happens frequently that the same proposed law, sometimes word-for-word, comes up year after year after year, in bill after bill, until it finally gets through. It happened when North Carolina effectively banned municipal broadband this year; that was the third try for that one. There could be a second, third, fourth and fifth try for SOPA until Hollywood gets what they want. Pay attention and be vigilant. Their lawyers don't sleep, and neither can you if you want a free internet.
You're joking right? There's been a SOPA story on Slashdot atleast twice a week for the last few months..
Yeah, and I believe all from the readers. Slashdot has editors, paid staffers who ultimately decide what's posted (regardless of what the firehose says is the topmost story); there's no good reason they can't write an actual editorial or stage a protest when situations call for it.
Slashdot didn't participate in the blackout, and after multiple comments and submissions, including mine, criticizing them for being spineless punks...we get a massive pile of links spelling out a bald summary of the story so far. No opinion, no support for a cause in which they have a vested constitutional interest, nothing.
Either users submit the content and run the site, or the editor's actually have a purpose and they should show some balls. This awkward middle-ground where they never have an opinion and almost never come up with content - yet still hold final control over what stories go up and reword or cut down the summaries as they see fit - sometimes looks pretty pathetic. This is one of those times.
The whole slew of articles depends on inference, rumors, and anonymous sources. Par for the course.
The most ignorant moment, however, comes in the itworld article, when they claim that stock movements are giving credence to the rumors: RIM went up by 6.7%.
That's what happens for rumors, even crazy ones: stock prices go up. Credible rumors, however, would produce more action than that. Actual plans in the works, actual offers on the table, would create much, much more: the same article talks about Yahoo! rejecting $31 dollars a share at a time when they were valued at ~$19. RIM couldn't expect anywhere near the same premium, but nevertheless buyouts frequently come with some gravy, and a credible rumor could easily prompt the pure speculators, and even many sane investors, to push the stock up 20% or more. RIM went up a lousy 6.7%.
In other words, this isn't a credible rumor and even most speculators aren't seriously believing this talk yet. Call us when the stock goes up 15% or more, not to mention when you get a source with an actual name or some details.
I take it you never realized that "Bullshit" is carefully crafted libertarian propaganda rather than independent investigative reporting for entertainment. I don't say 'libertarian' figuratively, either; they cite the Cato Institute constantly, of which Penn and Teller are both research fellows. I'm not saying the libertarian viewpoint is inherently incorrect, but it's hardly the place to go for unbiased reporting.
What is inherently incorrect are their interview tactics and editing techniques; they're even more misleading than Michael Moore's. Ever notice how rarely you hear the question that was actually asked? Penn's voice-over introduces a topic on their own terms, the video cuts to the interviewee answering an unknown question that was asked by a different interviewer off-camera, and he mocks their response - often while they're still talking. It's all trick editing and impatient over-simplification; it's reality TV disguised as an interview.
Believe what you want, but don't go around thinking "Bullshit" segments provide a good justification for any of your beliefs.
So we all know some of the King family have become money grubbing pricks equaled only by the Tolkien estate, and it doesn't surprise me that they want the speech behind paywalls, but this video of the speech has been on youtube for just short of a year.
So how is it impossible to view the speech without giving the Kings $10?
Sure, but the flip side of that is the people screaming "make the rich pay their fair share!!!" as if that will fix the entire problem. That's not going to be even close to enough.
That's quite true. Making only the rich pay more will not be enough; not by most persons' definition of 'rich', anyway.
What bothers me most about the 'rich paying more' debate, however, is the lying responses from the politicians and think-tanks paid to glorify the wealthy, justify flat-taxes, and vilify the bottom 2/3 as selfish profligates sucking at the socialist teat. You see bullshit statements like "even if we took the entire income of the top 1% every year we'd only solve 1/6 of the deficit" or "even if the marginal rate on the top quintile went up by 15% a that would only fix 1/2 of the deficit alone, much less the debt" or one Republican candidate's favorite "54% of Americans pay no tax at all.
First, the top 1% generally have assets far in excess of their yearly 'Income', or even their real income. It's almost outright lying to look at a guy with assets in the billions and say that taking all of his Income every year wouldn't help because his income is only in the tens of millions. Not to mention that tons of that money - for many of the 1% virtually all of it- stays permanently in investment vehicles or goes through enough (technically legal) money laundering to make a Mafioso blush. It's either never technically income despite being economic power, solely controlled by an individual, which is equal to the lifetime output of dozens or hundreds or thousands of people working at the median national salary, or it was hidden from taxation outright. Either rewrite the tax code literally from scratch, or punish their decades of shirking by taxing the extremely wealthy on their assets (even as a one-time event), and the top 1% could indeed put a huge frickin dent in our budget problems.
Second, quintile-based arguments conveniently ignore the fact that even the second quintile from the top bottoms out at $55,000. That's already an acceptable living in all but a handful of cities, and the numbers only go up from there. In most cities the top 40% can easily afford to pay another 1 or 5 or 10% in federal tax per year, to say nothing of what the top 20% and top 1% can afford. I am not saying it wouldn't hurt, but real taxes - the kind that can actually sustain a first-world nation with 350 million people, the world's best educational and scientific capabilities, and a military bigger than the entire planet put together ever had up until the first world war - might have to hurt a bit sometimes.
But the worst of all is probably the argument that the bottom x% pay nothing at all (those greedy little parastic fuckers!). The truth is, the bottom x% pay no final income tax, after their deductions and refunds are processed; when you ask non-partisan analysts and think-tanks who specialize in tax they'll tell you that even the very bottom 1% pay at least 15% of their income in various taxes on property, utilities, retail sales, where even the top 1% pay only 30-35% across all types of tax.
I just can't seem to feel bad that people with six, seven, eight, and fucking nine figure incomes pay twice as much tax as the dirt poor. Can you? A lot of people, from the filthy rich to the upper-middle-middle class who just wish they were, need to shut up and pay their damn share. Before hey find people with pitchforks at their doorsteps. I'm not some militant communist whacko, not in the least, but I'm also not kidding when I say that. Just because the standard of living is so high that only the destitute in America have any serious complaints to make versus any other nation or time in history doesn't mean people don't notice the looting and abuse going on. Just because they have TV and cell phones and generally have heat in the winter doesn't mean the bottom 40% are happy struggling to pay for their healthc
I'm vigorously opposed to sales tax in general, and thus despise the idea of paying taxes on Amazon goods.
That said, I'm getting very tired of the several dozen comments per Amazon-related thread about how hard it is to manage the different tax zones, what a massive unfair burden it is for online retailers, how even attempting to comply would obliterate any seller smaller than Amazon or eBay in a blinding flash of red-tape, etc.
It's not that hard; not even at this moment is it anywhere near as difficult as you claim, but under any decently written law it would be a complete non-issue. The state could simply require the municipal party responsible for any layer of sales tax - mayors' offices, county commissioners, etc. - to enter their tax rules and proportions into a state database in a standard format. Then any moron could write code to parse that database, populate their sales system, and correctly tax a solid 95% of purchases with no further effort. In fact, it would be perfectly reasonable if the state required cities and counties to enter into my hypothetical database the correct tax jurisdictions for each and every property they contained. They already have to assess and charge those lands correctly for property and utility tax; it's just one more small step in a dance of surveying, assessment, and classification they already perform every year.
So there's no good reason sales taxation couldn't become easier, for physical and online stores alike, under a properly written e-commerce law. Come up with some real arguments, please. I may agree with you on the underlying point, that sales tax and complex taxes in general both suck, but it makes me nauseated seeing supporters of my ideals hiding en masse behind such a piss-poor construct.
we have some of the highest taxes in the world.
What acid-dropping, Tea Party dipshit moderated this balls-out lie 'Insightful'?
Seriously, there's just no more gentle way to say that. American taxes would have to almost exactly double to become the highest in the world; as it is we're barely in the top fifty highest taxing nations.
Yes, we probably need to raise taxes, but what we really really really have to do is cut spending.
I disagree that spending cuts are the major priority; we could cut plenty of things plenty deeply, yes, but there's really no sustainable path on which we can continue to charge as little as we do in tax. It's basically impossible to charge the lowest rates in the developed world while simultaneously dominating the planet in military power AND science AND culture AND economic production, yet people seem to believe we can do just that if only we cut spending and lower taxes even further.
But so long as you admit taxes should go up, I can agree with looking at spending first. It's certainly responsible to use what you have more carefully before you ask for more. Just so long as you're not one of those dumb fucks who thinks cutting spending alone can fix the problem we'll get along fine....
I know that's inflammatory language, but seriously: who can be stupid enough to look at our federal budget and think we can even balance the deficit, much less pay off some debt, with spending cuts alone. It's a truly asinine notion, one which any fourth grade math assignment can easily refute, and yet it captivates (imprisons, at this point) a major political party.
My brain almost refuses to believe that anyone could be so ignorant, so selfish and deluded, as to think fully 30% of our federal budget is waste and inexcusable handouts, all of which can be slashed without any remorse or negative consequences at all.
And if you really want to have fun, look at the things Republicans want to cut out, and then look at the fraction of the budget they represent. The NIH, the NSF, foreign aid, the national endowment for the arts, public broadcasting money....all of that put together isn't even 0.5%, and yet they harp on each of those things, individually and extensively, like they're the pinnacle of waste and socialist excess.
God dammit, I'm gonna need some heart medication soon.
But Torchlight was made by the people that made Diablo 1 and 2. Diablo 3 is created by a completely different team.
I found both Torchlight and the D3 beta totally awful.
Maybe I'm just outgrowing hack-n-slash, along with every other mainstream category. God knows I hate 95% of shooters these days.
I swear to god, I hate indie game hipsters just as much as indie music hipsters and Linux prophets, but I haven't played a good AAA game since New Vegas, whereas indies are putting out dozens of kickass titles per year.
God help me I'm becoming an elitist. Get me some non-ironic domestic beer and a copy of MW3, stat!
As the OP I'd like to acknowledge, before any lifelong Blizzard fanboy bawls me out, that sometimes the game masters, forum moderators, and community managers at Blizzard can be full of shit. If it was just that statement I quoted in support of a console release, I might be at least skeptical myself.
This story, however, has much more to it than just that final acknowledgment; from the directness of the reply, including naming the project lead, to the stuff in the extra links soulskill was kind enough to add for me, there are many credible indicators of a console Diablo 3.
Every penny they spend on typesetting and layout is a penny lost in (very meagre) profit ...
Spare me. I've looked at the numbers book publishers put out, and they're obviously full of shit. Did you know even textbook publishers, those guys who think 200 hours of editing and new material between printings justifies a new $220 edition every three years, swear up and down that they make a 1% profit?
1 fucking percent? Are they joking? What other non-commodity business makes 1% and survives? For that matter, almost no commodity businesses make that little, either.
Furthermore, if 1% was true, then ebooks would've driven them out of business by now. I see plenty of ebooks at 40-80% of their print prices. The printing, binding and shipping is only ~10% of a paper book's cost, so a discount of 20% or more on something that usually replaces a print sale- when your profit on print-only editions was just 1% - pretty much means you're fucked before you sell a single copy.
Every e-book, every sale price at Amazon, puts the lie to their claims of 1% profits. Just because Amazon and B&N border on monopsony doesn't mean printers can magically afford to lose money on every sale.
Relax. It's probably megaBITS. Most people get that confused.
Which is still a metric shitload.
It must be streaming all that uncompressed video back to its pilot that costs so much bandwidth.
You'll always be right if you automatically believe and do the exact opposite of Sony.
Seriously, I'd be convinced even if the Dalai Lama, Jesus Christ, and the entire cast of Firefly were all on the sponsor list. Sony likes that shit? Vote No!
But those pills totally work! I tried them and my dick got 69% longer in just 3 short...
Hey, what's with all the laughing?
Google used to receive mystery emails from this random guy, one every month, containing nothing but a single number.
After puzzling over it a while they realized this value was the number of words on their homepage that month; it was this guy's way of reminding them that a simple interface was working well and contrasted distinctly with the likes of yahoo!.
Fast forward to today, and the double-layer of scrolling frames on the new front page looks suspiciously like Word 2010 or Facebook. Not nearly as bad, mind you, but suddenly showing some disturbing similarity.
I bet that guy wants to punch them in the face right now.
Google: you make the vast majority of your money on the ads that go with your simple, powerful search engine. Don't fuck it up by filling your products with endless references to your other products and trying to control the entire internet.
Well this is refreshing; it looks like the truth. Usually people cramming words into the mouths of the dead are self-serving, bullshit-spewing weirdos. Either that or maudlin, irrelevant losers.
This guy, on the other hand, is a university professor who appears to have actual research behind his claims. It goes against him, of course, that he's attempting to improve or revive his famous great-grandfather's reputation with this article, but the research looks real and I presume it's open to review.
How refreshing.