There's no reason it can't, but won't be efficient. You might as well ask why someone can't learn to herd sheep, operate a loom, and design/predict the next season's clothing fashions. Someone can do all those things, and they're all related, and yet I kind of doubt that someone who learns to predict fashions is also going to be good at herd-- hey waitaminute, maybe they are really are the same-- no, the weaving skills don't fit into this conjecture at all.
Lawmakers can demand whatever they want, and ultimately get it by means of force. I am not going to dispute that, or EU's right to (however misguidedly and stupidly) attempt to protect peoples' anonymity.
But.. this is lame, because it is so utterly at odds with how cookies work.
All cookies used by websites are voluntarily sent, at least as far as the website can tell. The website offers a cookie, and the browser (or user, depending on how good the UI is) decides whether or not to store that cookie and later send it back in future requests. If there is any lack of consent here, it's that the browsers aren't asking users what they want.
You can pretend that this is all just technicalities, but nevertheless that is the reality of the situation, so anything stemming from the false pretense is likely to have unintended consequences and fail to accomplish its goal.
Websites do not store cookies on your computer. They do not have that capability. Your browser really is the problem, and if you try to hold websites responsible for what happens, instead of whoever is actually responsible, then all the bad things that you worry about, are going to continue to happen.
That's because the bible doesn't say mounting a filesystem is supposed to make a computer immediately try to load and execute code from that filesystem. Back in biblical times, nobody ever thought of doing anything so ridiculously stupid with their computers. Unlike today, all they had was rampant mysticism, ignorance, and blind hatred and violence (good thing we finally conquered all those things).. but nothing approaching the awe-striking dim-wittedness of "hey, the user inserted some media, QUICK!! LET'S EXECUTE IT! AS THE USER, TOO!"
Competitors come out with new products? When did this start happening?!
Oh well, back to the drawing board, Samsung. It should only take a year or two to develop something that you can be assured, will totally crush your all competitors' 2011 products.
If a desktop is such an important thing that people might sometimes want to move stuff out of its way, then people ought to be able to select the desktop window like any other window, and have it come to the front.
There is no reason for desktop to be a special case. You either want to look at that particular directory in your file manager, or you don't. If you don't want to look at it, close it. If you do want to look at it, open it.
All else being equal, it's kind of neat that stuff can be made so small. But not all else remains equal.
Is everyone really complaining about their portable electronics having too long of a battery life (both in terms of times between charges, and lifetime of the product)? I'm used to a phone going 2 weeks between charges, but I don't know if my next phone is going to be as good as my 5-year-old one. And my work-issued iPod can't even hold a charge for a whole day, even if I don't use it (though to be fair, it is ancient -- a whole year old!).
More meat on the gadgets, please. It may be prejudice, but thin has become a nearly synonym for shoddiness.
You can't give people the freedom to make changes, only to complain when you don't like the changes they've made.
On the contrary: complaining is the one and only thing you can do. Why shouldn't they do it? This is a war of persuasion rather than a war of bullets or lawyers. Quite a step up.
If you were a real C64 lover you would respect the value in having some memory-mapped-IO registers in the first few bytes of address space, which allow you to easily bank-switch out the ROMs to get at the RAM underneath. But noooo.... you're stuck with a measly 6502. Where is commodore6510?
Fuck them all. Get a PC. Even running Linux (!) you can play so many games for so long, day after day, completely wasting every spare hour of your life. Medical technology will never advance the human lifespan long enough such that even Linux gaming (and c'mon, it's not like Linux is the gaming platform) can ever be exhausted by any one person, even if that person drops out of school and work completely and takes meth all the time so they never sleep. It is so ridiculous to whine about non-evil game platform unavailability when even the most meager non-evil platform has so much to waste your time on.;-) Fuck Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft. The world is bigger than them.
Online voting means no more secret ballot, unless you have ED-209 DRM hardware. "Please exit the room immediately while your spouse/employee/blackmailee votes. You have fifteen seconds to comply."
And that's a valid solution, but I don't want ED-209 DRM. Does that make me a luddite?
He cites as one reason, that someone might have deleted stuff in/boot or/etc or/usr/lib64 so the machine might not come back up quite right. I would sure as hell rather be confronted by such surpises during scheduled downtime, rather than after a power outage when the UPS failed and I already have enough problems. Problems like what he's talking about, while they kind of presume you have already failed as an admin (why are clueless people deleting things in/boot?) are a reason you should reboot. The sooner I know about it, the better, especially if it's at a less panicky time like on a weekend when nobody cares if I have to spend an extra hour with a rescue CD.
Also, sometimes it's just plain convenient. If the reason you're working on the box is that you just moved your/var to a new device (maybe you were changing the kind of filesystem you used, or wanted to expand it but are using a filesystem that isn't easy to resize (though I can't think of one right now)), good fucking luck unmounting it so that you can remount it on its new device. Why go through the hassle when you can just reboot and have things magically work?
And then there's kernel updates. You're not going to upgrade from 2.6.n to 2.6.(n+1) by reloading modules. And yes, I have heard of some hacks for people updating kernels without rebooting, but if you think about how these things work, they're a hell of a lot scarier than rebooting is.
Re:Another great Python 3.x series release
on
Python 3.2 Released
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· Score: 2
I feel the pain, but if they had called the language by a new name, wouldn't that nullify the objection? Ruby isn't compatible with Python 2.x libraries either, but no one flames it for that, any more than they blame Python 2 for not being able to run awk scripts. If you can't break compatibility, then nobody can do anything new.
Think of Python3 as a new (though not particularly ground-breaking) language which happens to be very Python2-like, rather than as an update to Python. If you look at it that way, Python 3 is totally forgivable. Is it the right way to look at it? That depends. But it's sure the most useful way to look at the situation, and I think there's something to be said for that causing it to become the correct viewpoint.
The exemption says nothing about changing wireless carriers. It allows you to load software that the manufacturer hasn't blessed. It was a response to the iPhone.
What was that phrase we used to hear from Commodore employees? Ah, yes: "Snatch defeat from the jaws of victory."
MeeGo still exists and can be freely used by anyone who wants it, no? That is the big difference between this situation and the Commodore situation, where the tech simply had to rot and die with the company. This time it doesn't have to, if any other manufacturer(s) decide to step up and use the free money-making asset that Nokia has so thoughtfully spent so much to develop.
Yeah, we all used to think of that development as a selfish investment, so that Nokia could take back the marketshare they had lost to Apple and the Android-using rivals, but now just as the time to cash in has arrived, we see it was an altruistic gift to the world at the expense of their stockholders, and that they don't want to collect the rewards themselves. How noble. But there are surely still some greedy profit-oriented phone manufacturers out there somewhere, even if not in Finland?
And are you seriously referencing an article in The Onion in support of your argument?
It's a reference, not support. That Onion story is one of those things that I love, which is both true and a joke at the same time. The area man is a weirdo and yet.. well, maybe it's just me, but I happen to live and work in a situation where I sometimes mutter (as praise!), "Out of the mouth of crackpots..";-)
There's also the conflict of interest between Bell as an ISP and Bell as a content provider (satellite).
Damn, meant to check on my post and follow up, because this actually is an excellent point and I do agree with you.
Yes, many of these ISPs are also using the same wires to deliver multimedia that competes with multimedia that customers are receiving over IP. With usage-based billing, the customers would pay in proportion to their content-over-IP, yet magically this other content either is unmetered (included in the flat part of their bill). Unfair competition, and not really usage-based. On top of that, this bandwidth probably has better QoS; I bet it doesn't have much jitter.;-)
My answer to that is that if the prices are controlled by a regulatory agency and if they approve usage-based billing, then include all bandwidth used. If, say a cable TV channel uses (number-out-of-ass) half a gigabyte per hour and the cable company is streaming 20 channels into a customer's home 24/7, then that's about 7200 gigabytes per month. (Holy crap, these numbers must be way off.. hmm.. actually, maybe not.) Then a customer who streams a ten 4 gigabyte movies from Netflix over the course of a month, pays for 7600 gigabytes whereas the non-Netflix customer pays for 7200 gigabytes. That ain't so bad.
The cable guys will be furious over that idea and counter (rightly) that their usage doesn't really account for such a disproportionate part of the overall costs because it's multicast/broadcast -- shared. Each of their packets goes over the wire once and is received by 1000 homes so they only want their part to count for 7.2 gigabytes (you should make 'em show their work, though -- how many homes are on that last mile?). So the netflix vs not-netflix costs should be 407 vs 7, or 47 vs 7. You know what? That's ok. Let them have the math work out that way, on the condition that competing services are allowed to multicast over their network too, so that competing companies can also amortize a shared cost across multiple customers. This is how we're going to move multimedia-delivery tech forward.
Netflix won't really like that since they're all about an inefficient on-demand service, but tough shit. Their customers are increasing the load; it's really happening and you don't set policy by lying to yourself. If you want to revel in ostentatious decadence, then you should have to pay for your caviar; it's only fair. And the cable companies are offering on-demand service too, so their numbers are sometimes going to be higher as well.
Your attitude is so typically right-wing. God forbid that a penny of your money should ever go to providing for someone else, even obliquely
Waitaminute, this isn't like healthcare where someone can be doing nothing stupid/risky and yet still be suddenly hit with a crippling bill -- and if the situation isn't addressed, there is real suffering. We're talking about voluntary behavior (I want to watch these movies) which also happens to be a luxury (living without this crap is very easy to the point that you don't even miss it). And the uses that we're talking about (streaming and torrenting) really do happen to be vastly less efficient (probably at least 3 magnitudes) than the previous technological status-quo (broadcast).
And on top of that, people are bitching about how much it costs, which I think makes the question of "what are we really paying for?" fair game.
Given all that, you really think this is a right/left thing? Am I to infer that the not-right-wing position is that someone who isn't torrenting or singlecast-streaming 24/7 should pay the same as someone who does?
I won't comment on the specific CRTC situation; maybe there really was something corrupt happening there. But if people are reacting negatively to usage-based billing, then those people are being short-sighted fools, begging to be exploited and have to pay more.
I'm not saying usage-based billing isn't a cash grab by the ISPs, but anything else is even more of a cash grab and costs the consumer more. If you are paying flat rate, then you are either being subsidized by your neighbors, or you are subsidizing them.
Now, we all think we are the ones gaining unfair advantage and getting something-for-nothing, so flat rate sounds like a good idea. But are you sure that you aren't the one who is being a sucker? Maybe lots of other people are thinking the same thing.
That's the uncertainly. What doesn't have any uncertainty at all, though, is that the ISP will get their money. Whatever profit margin they think they can get away with (whether set by competitors or set by a regulatory commission), they're going to set their rates in order to get it; their gross revenue for all customers combined, is going to be some number marked up from their costs. So the only question is how much of that sum total, you pay. If you aren't torrenting 24/7 and you are paying a flat rate, then you are subsidizing the people who do that.
If I had the power to set curriculums but didn't have the balls/backing to take a stand against mystics, here's what I'd do.
Don't stress evolution. Instead, talk about how science works. Explain what a "theory" is, how they come into being and how they're tested. And then do not move on until the student understand these basics. Make it 50% of their grade if you have to.
Only then can you get into details. If the mystics demand that faith be taught as a rival to evolution, let it happen; all you have to do is frame the issues in scientific terms. Let's see how long faith lasts as a "theory," in the face of kids being assigned to come up with falsifiability tests for it. Let's talk about exploratory experiments and all the observed evidence that leads people to suspect and form the "theory" of creationism. It'll be a mockery and the mystics will demand creationism be withdrawn from science class, since those fucking science teachers keep talking about things in terms of science.
You see, what the mystics don't seem to get yet, is that a science class that teaches evolution but not creationism, is actually neutral on the subject of creationism. If creationism is forced on the class and gets discussed as science, that class will necessarily become anti- religion, not pro- religion. There is no way to talk about the world in terms of observation and confirmation and not have religion come out looking fishy. So the last thing religion proponents should want, is for their subject to come up in a context where students have to look at things in those terms. They should be fighting to include creationism in literature class, where it's actually pretty strong and will come out looking good.
The job of a science teacher isn't to tell kids how the world works; it's to tell kids how to figure out how the world works. Don't let the kids ever walk out with the impression (which they'll tell to their parents) that you told them they are "descended from monkeys." Give them evidence; it's not your fault that 100% of the available evidence just happens to suggest that humans and apes shared a common ancestor. Invite them to find any evidence which doesn't fit.
Give in on the specific theories, and fight hard for the method. They can't question you on this. The nuts are able to get away with saying, "science class should expose our children to all the possibilities," but they won't get away with "science class should teach our kids to ignore their observations" or "science class should not explain how theories are tested."
Now they have their own format and have changed to what is essentially a "fuck everyone" stand
Yes, but it's "fuck everyone" in the sense of "hey everybody, we're all gonna get laid!" Google doesn't have their own video format; the world finally has a video format, one that unlike H.264, everyone is allowed to use.
(Not disagreeing with your other Google flames, just your bitching about the video tag and VP8/WebM codec, since those happen to easily be the most positive things to have ever happened so far in the history of video-on-the-web. Finally video is going to have the chance to "grow up" like the situation we now take for granted with static images.)
Near identical? Use the key to write a VoIP program that runs on the PS3, and it will be identical.
The recent LoC exemptions were kinda funny. On one hand, it used some very specific wording in some places (e.g. "DVD" instead of "optical disc" so it wouldn't apply to Blu-Rays) but on the other hand, it used words like "wireless telephone handsets" which became interchangable with "personal computer" after the market converged a few years years ago (maybe even earlier, when stuff like Skype came out). The PS3 is a wireless telephone handset if that's what you do with it, just as the iPhone is a game machine if that's what you do with it.
"Let's hunt some orc!" ended the first movie (or nearly so) as Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas race off to find the lost hobbits. In the book: "We will make such a chase as shall be accounted a marvel among the Three Kindreds: Elves, Dwarves, and Men."
And how about his butchery of Bad Taste (a.k.a. Braindead)? "I kick ass for the lord!"? Oh, please! In the original 1950s novel, it was "I shall deliver unto thee, such an asskicking it shall be accounted a marvel across the schismed branches, and thenceforth Protestants and Catholics will reunite in their joy over your suffering."
I actually think your post is indicative of a huge problem in American politics today. More and more people are advocating a rejection of democracy when they don't get their way.
He was advocating that people vote for who they want to win. How is that rejection of democracy?
Voting against the candidate that you want to win, and instead supporting a candidate that you secretly hope loses as long as they don't come in second place -- that's rejection of democracy.
Are you sure you really know which side you're on, when it comes to this whole democracy issue?
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There's no reason it can't, but won't be efficient. You might as well ask why someone can't learn to herd sheep, operate a loom, and design/predict the next season's clothing fashions. Someone can do all those things, and they're all related, and yet I kind of doubt that someone who learns to predict fashions is also going to be good at herd-- hey waitaminute, maybe they are really are the same-- no, the weaving skills don't fit into this conjecture at all.
Lawmakers can demand whatever they want, and ultimately get it by means of force. I am not going to dispute that, or EU's right to (however misguidedly and stupidly) attempt to protect peoples' anonymity.
But .. this is lame, because it is so utterly at odds with how cookies work.
All cookies used by websites are voluntarily sent, at least as far as the website can tell. The website offers a cookie, and the browser (or user, depending on how good the UI is) decides whether or not to store that cookie and later send it back in future requests. If there is any lack of consent here, it's that the browsers aren't asking users what they want.
You can pretend that this is all just technicalities, but nevertheless that is the reality of the situation, so anything stemming from the false pretense is likely to have unintended consequences and fail to accomplish its goal.
Websites do not store cookies on your computer. They do not have that capability. Your browser really is the problem, and if you try to hold websites responsible for what happens, instead of whoever is actually responsible, then all the bad things that you worry about, are going to continue to happen.
That's because the bible doesn't say mounting a filesystem is supposed to make a computer immediately try to load and execute code from that filesystem. Back in biblical times, nobody ever thought of doing anything so ridiculously stupid with their computers. Unlike today, all they had was rampant mysticism, ignorance, and blind hatred and violence (good thing we finally conquered all those things) .. but nothing approaching the awe-striking dim-wittedness of "hey, the user inserted some media, QUICK!! LET'S EXECUTE IT! AS THE USER, TOO!"
Competitors come out with new products? When did this start happening?!
Oh well, back to the drawing board, Samsung. It should only take a year or two to develop something that you can be assured, will totally crush your all competitors' 2011 products.
If a desktop is such an important thing that people might sometimes want to move stuff out of its way, then people ought to be able to select the desktop window like any other window, and have it come to the front.
There is no reason for desktop to be a special case. You either want to look at that particular directory in your file manager, or you don't. If you don't want to look at it, close it. If you do want to look at it, open it.
All else being equal, it's kind of neat that stuff can be made so small. But not all else remains equal.
Is everyone really complaining about their portable electronics having too long of a battery life (both in terms of times between charges, and lifetime of the product)? I'm used to a phone going 2 weeks between charges, but I don't know if my next phone is going to be as good as my 5-year-old one. And my work-issued iPod can't even hold a charge for a whole day, even if I don't use it (though to be fair, it is ancient -- a whole year old!).
More meat on the gadgets, please. It may be prejudice, but thin has become a nearly synonym for shoddiness.
On the contrary: complaining is the one and only thing you can do. Why shouldn't they do it? This is a war of persuasion rather than a war of bullets or lawyers. Quite a step up.
If you were a real C64 lover you would respect the value in having some memory-mapped-IO registers in the first few bytes of address space, which allow you to easily bank-switch out the ROMs to get at the RAM underneath. But noooo.... you're stuck with a measly 6502. Where is commodore6510?
Fuck them all. Get a PC. Even running Linux (!) you can play so many games for so long, day after day, completely wasting every spare hour of your life. Medical technology will never advance the human lifespan long enough such that even Linux gaming (and c'mon, it's not like Linux is the gaming platform) can ever be exhausted by any one person, even if that person drops out of school and work completely and takes meth all the time so they never sleep. It is so ridiculous to whine about non-evil game platform unavailability when even the most meager non-evil platform has so much to waste your time on. ;-) Fuck Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft. The world is bigger than them.
Except you can't; yu'll be subsidizing 16-bit listeners' habits. Only Apple customers are able to subsidize 24-bit pirates.
Online voting means no more secret ballot, unless you have ED-209 DRM hardware. "Please exit the room immediately while your spouse/employee/blackmailee votes. You have fifteen seconds to comply."
And that's a valid solution, but I don't want ED-209 DRM. Does that make me a luddite?
He cites as one reason, that someone might have deleted stuff in /boot or /etc or /usr/lib64 so the machine might not come back up quite right. I would sure as hell rather be confronted by such surpises during scheduled downtime, rather than after a power outage when the UPS failed and I already have enough problems. Problems like what he's talking about, while they kind of presume you have already failed as an admin (why are clueless people deleting things in /boot?) are a reason you should reboot. The sooner I know about it, the better, especially if it's at a less panicky time like on a weekend when nobody cares if I have to spend an extra hour with a rescue CD.
Also, sometimes it's just plain convenient. If the reason you're working on the box is that you just moved your /var to a new device (maybe you were changing the kind of filesystem you used, or wanted to expand it but are using a filesystem that isn't easy to resize (though I can't think of one right now)), good fucking luck unmounting it so that you can remount it on its new device. Why go through the hassle when you can just reboot and have things magically work?
And then there's kernel updates. You're not going to upgrade from 2.6.n to 2.6.(n+1) by reloading modules. And yes, I have heard of some hacks for people updating kernels without rebooting, but if you think about how these things work, they're a hell of a lot scarier than rebooting is.
I feel the pain, but if they had called the language by a new name, wouldn't that nullify the objection? Ruby isn't compatible with Python 2.x libraries either, but no one flames it for that, any more than they blame Python 2 for not being able to run awk scripts. If you can't break compatibility, then nobody can do anything new.
Think of Python3 as a new (though not particularly ground-breaking) language which happens to be very Python2-like, rather than as an update to Python. If you look at it that way, Python 3 is totally forgivable. Is it the right way to look at it? That depends. But it's sure the most useful way to look at the situation, and I think there's something to be said for that causing it to become the correct viewpoint.
The exemption says nothing about changing wireless carriers. It allows you to load software that the manufacturer hasn't blessed. It was a response to the iPhone.
Sales. As the original media's reputation for not working right continues to increase, so does the attractiveness of the trouble-free mkv file.
What was that phrase we used to hear from Commodore employees? Ah, yes: "Snatch defeat from the jaws of victory."
MeeGo still exists and can be freely used by anyone who wants it, no? That is the big difference between this situation and the Commodore situation, where the tech simply had to rot and die with the company. This time it doesn't have to, if any other manufacturer(s) decide to step up and use the free money-making asset that Nokia has so thoughtfully spent so much to develop.
Yeah, we all used to think of that development as a selfish investment, so that Nokia could take back the marketshare they had lost to Apple and the Android-using rivals, but now just as the time to cash in has arrived, we see it was an altruistic gift to the world at the expense of their stockholders, and that they don't want to collect the rewards themselves. How noble. But there are surely still some greedy profit-oriented phone manufacturers out there somewhere, even if not in Finland?
It's a reference, not support. That Onion story is one of those things that I love, which is both true and a joke at the same time. The area man is a weirdo and yet .. well, maybe it's just me, but I happen to live and work in a situation where I sometimes mutter (as praise!), "Out of the mouth of crackpots.." ;-)
Damn, meant to check on my post and follow up, because this actually is an excellent point and I do agree with you.
Yes, many of these ISPs are also using the same wires to deliver multimedia that competes with multimedia that customers are receiving over IP. With usage-based billing, the customers would pay in proportion to their content-over-IP, yet magically this other content either is unmetered (included in the flat part of their bill). Unfair competition, and not really usage-based. On top of that, this bandwidth probably has better QoS; I bet it doesn't have much jitter. ;-)
My answer to that is that if the prices are controlled by a regulatory agency and if they approve usage-based billing, then include all bandwidth used. If, say a cable TV channel uses (number-out-of-ass) half a gigabyte per hour and the cable company is streaming 20 channels into a customer's home 24/7, then that's about 7200 gigabytes per month. (Holy crap, these numbers must be way off.. hmm.. actually, maybe not.) Then a customer who streams a ten 4 gigabyte movies from Netflix over the course of a month, pays for 7600 gigabytes whereas the non-Netflix customer pays for 7200 gigabytes. That ain't so bad.
The cable guys will be furious over that idea and counter (rightly) that their usage doesn't really account for such a disproportionate part of the overall costs because it's multicast/broadcast -- shared. Each of their packets goes over the wire once and is received by 1000 homes so they only want their part to count for 7.2 gigabytes (you should make 'em show their work, though -- how many homes are on that last mile?). So the netflix vs not-netflix costs should be 407 vs 7, or 47 vs 7. You know what? That's ok. Let them have the math work out that way, on the condition that competing services are allowed to multicast over their network too, so that competing companies can also amortize a shared cost across multiple customers. This is how we're going to move multimedia-delivery tech forward.
Netflix won't really like that since they're all about an inefficient on-demand service, but tough shit. Their customers are increasing the load; it's really happening and you don't set policy by lying to yourself. If you want to revel in ostentatious decadence, then you should have to pay for your caviar; it's only fair. And the cable companies are offering on-demand service too, so their numbers are sometimes going to be higher as well.
Waitaminute, this isn't like healthcare where someone can be doing nothing stupid/risky and yet still be suddenly hit with a crippling bill -- and if the situation isn't addressed, there is real suffering. We're talking about voluntary behavior (I want to watch these movies) which also happens to be a luxury (living without this crap is very easy to the point that you don't even miss it). And the uses that we're talking about (streaming and torrenting) really do happen to be vastly less efficient (probably at least 3 magnitudes) than the previous technological status-quo (broadcast).
And on top of that, people are bitching about how much it costs, which I think makes the question of "what are we really paying for?" fair game.
Given all that, you really think this is a right/left thing? Am I to infer that the not-right-wing position is that someone who isn't torrenting or singlecast-streaming 24/7 should pay the same as someone who does?
I won't comment on the specific CRTC situation; maybe there really was something corrupt happening there. But if people are reacting negatively to usage-based billing, then those people are being short-sighted fools, begging to be exploited and have to pay more.
I'm not saying usage-based billing isn't a cash grab by the ISPs, but anything else is even more of a cash grab and costs the consumer more. If you are paying flat rate, then you are either being subsidized by your neighbors, or you are subsidizing them.
Now, we all think we are the ones gaining unfair advantage and getting something-for-nothing, so flat rate sounds like a good idea. But are you sure that you aren't the one who is being a sucker? Maybe lots of other people are thinking the same thing.
That's the uncertainly. What doesn't have any uncertainty at all, though, is that the ISP will get their money. Whatever profit margin they think they can get away with (whether set by competitors or set by a regulatory commission), they're going to set their rates in order to get it; their gross revenue for all customers combined, is going to be some number marked up from their costs. So the only question is how much of that sum total, you pay. If you aren't torrenting 24/7 and you are paying a flat rate, then you are subsidizing the people who do that.
If I had the power to set curriculums but didn't have the balls/backing to take a stand against mystics, here's what I'd do.
Don't stress evolution. Instead, talk about how science works. Explain what a "theory" is, how they come into being and how they're tested. And then do not move on until the student understand these basics. Make it 50% of their grade if you have to.
Only then can you get into details. If the mystics demand that faith be taught as a rival to evolution, let it happen; all you have to do is frame the issues in scientific terms. Let's see how long faith lasts as a "theory," in the face of kids being assigned to come up with falsifiability tests for it. Let's talk about exploratory experiments and all the observed evidence that leads people to suspect and form the "theory" of creationism. It'll be a mockery and the mystics will demand creationism be withdrawn from science class, since those fucking science teachers keep talking about things in terms of science.
You see, what the mystics don't seem to get yet, is that a science class that teaches evolution but not creationism, is actually neutral on the subject of creationism. If creationism is forced on the class and gets discussed as science, that class will necessarily become anti- religion, not pro- religion. There is no way to talk about the world in terms of observation and confirmation and not have religion come out looking fishy. So the last thing religion proponents should want, is for their subject to come up in a context where students have to look at things in those terms. They should be fighting to include creationism in literature class, where it's actually pretty strong and will come out looking good.
The job of a science teacher isn't to tell kids how the world works; it's to tell kids how to figure out how the world works. Don't let the kids ever walk out with the impression (which they'll tell to their parents) that you told them they are "descended from monkeys." Give them evidence; it's not your fault that 100% of the available evidence just happens to suggest that humans and apes shared a common ancestor. Invite them to find any evidence which doesn't fit.
Give in on the specific theories, and fight hard for the method. They can't question you on this. The nuts are able to get away with saying, "science class should expose our children to all the possibilities," but they won't get away with "science class should teach our kids to ignore their observations" or "science class should not explain how theories are tested."
Yes, but it's "fuck everyone" in the sense of "hey everybody, we're all gonna get laid!" Google doesn't have their own video format; the world finally has a video format, one that unlike H.264, everyone is allowed to use.
(Not disagreeing with your other Google flames, just your bitching about the video tag and VP8/WebM codec, since those happen to easily be the most positive things to have ever happened so far in the history of video-on-the-web. Finally video is going to have the chance to "grow up" like the situation we now take for granted with static images.)
Near identical? Use the key to write a VoIP program that runs on the PS3, and it will be identical.
The recent LoC exemptions were kinda funny. On one hand, it used some very specific wording in some places (e.g. "DVD" instead of "optical disc" so it wouldn't apply to Blu-Rays) but on the other hand, it used words like "wireless telephone handsets" which became interchangable with "personal computer" after the market converged a few years years ago (maybe even earlier, when stuff like Skype came out). The PS3 is a wireless telephone handset if that's what you do with it, just as the iPhone is a game machine if that's what you do with it.
And how about his butchery of Bad Taste (a.k.a. Braindead)? "I kick ass for the lord!"? Oh, please! In the original 1950s novel, it was "I shall deliver unto thee, such an asskicking it shall be accounted a marvel across the schismed branches, and thenceforth Protestants and Catholics will reunite in their joy over your suffering."
He was advocating that people vote for who they want to win. How is that rejection of democracy?
Voting against the candidate that you want to win, and instead supporting a candidate that you secretly hope loses as long as they don't come in second place -- that's rejection of democracy.
Are you sure you really know which side you're on, when it comes to this whole democracy issue?