That's my knee-jerk reaction too...I automatically cringe whenever I see the gov't stepping in to interfere in any way with the free market. Maybe it's because I was raised by an economist, I don't know.
Pardon my ignorance, but how did the poster arrive at the conclusion that deregulating the baby bells is like removing police officers from the streets?
I agree that the company should be liable for damages caused by their software, but a flat $1 fine for whenever their software screws up is not the correct way to do it. I was raised at my father's knee to believe that you just don't fsck with the free market.
By imposing the $1 fine, the users of software are saying that they want better software. Fair enough. But wait! There's a reason why they don't have it already! They're willing to buy software that's not quite bug-free as long as it works most of the time. The people who want absolutely bug-free software don't have enough market power to make it worthwhile for the software companies to develop for them, so they seek to artificially inflate their market power through legislation. The $1 fine will increase the cost to software companies, either in development and debugging, or in the fines themselves.
The end result? Increased software prices and fewer software companies. If a software package is too buggy for you, find a different one. If there is no different one, hire a programming team to write one for you and make a fortune off of selling it. If you can't afford to, make do with the buggy one. But don't use the government as a means of coercion because you don't want to pay for something.
I've been up to 50 for a while now but still I'm not eligible for meta-moderating
Everybody can be available for meta-moderation just by going to metamod.pl. For some reason, it won't show up on your front page until you've been there, but after that you get 10 meta-moderation shots per day. I've been metamoderating much longer than I've been actually moderating.
Chess, Go, Tic-tac-toe, and others of that ilk. Take out the twitch and thought is all you have left. Any game with sufficient velocity to attract the fps or role-playing *craft/diablo style players must send more information to the client than the user can see at one time. I think.
The question is, though, what will happen to those sites that depend on banner ads for their revenue? I do admit, it would be nice to not have to wait for images from many different servers and such to load while I'm surfing my favorite comic strips, but I still prefer that to having to pay for them.
It's getting increasingly difficult for web sites to generate revenue from banner ads, and if we all start just blocking ads altogether, the webmasters of those sites may be forced to seek different methods of income. This being said, the current invasion of privacy isn't acceptable (to me) either...but for many web sites no alternative exists. Is there a way to simply block out the cookies and stuff without blocking the images and thus preventing the site from getting credit for showing the ad?
Slashdot Mirror
The guy in that video sounded like Steve Jobs with a new graphics card..."That is A-mazing!"
Cost of CD's currently: $15-$20.
Cost of CD's if RIAA must compete with Napster: $2-$5.
If this isn't price fixing, what is?
That's my knee-jerk reaction too...I automatically cringe whenever I see the gov't stepping in to interfere in any way with the free market. Maybe it's because I was raised by an economist, I don't know.
Pardon my ignorance, but how did the poster arrive at the conclusion that deregulating the baby bells is like removing police officers from the streets?
By imposing the $1 fine, the users of software are saying that they want better software. Fair enough. But wait! There's a reason why they don't have it already! They're willing to buy software that's not quite bug-free as long as it works most of the time. The people who want absolutely bug-free software don't have enough market power to make it worthwhile for the software companies to develop for them, so they seek to artificially inflate their market power through legislation. The $1 fine will increase the cost to software companies, either in development and debugging, or in the fines themselves.
The end result? Increased software prices and fewer software companies. If a software package is too buggy for you, find a different one. If there is no different one, hire a programming team to write one for you and make a fortune off of selling it. If you can't afford to, make do with the buggy one. But don't use the government as a means of coercion because you don't want to pay for something.
I've been up to 50 for a while now but still I'm not eligible for meta-moderating
Everybody can be available for meta-moderation just by going to metamod.pl. For some reason, it won't show up on your front page until you've been there, but after that you get 10 meta-moderation shots per day. I've been metamoderating much longer than I've been actually moderating.
Chess, Go, Tic-tac-toe, and others of that ilk. Take out the twitch and thought is all you have left. Any game with sufficient velocity to attract the fps or role-playing *craft/diablo style players must send more information to the client than the user can see at one time. I think.
It's getting increasingly difficult for web sites to generate revenue from banner ads, and if we all start just blocking ads altogether, the webmasters of those sites may be forced to seek different methods of income. This being said, the current invasion of privacy isn't acceptable (to me) either...but for many web sites no alternative exists. Is there a way to simply block out the cookies and stuff without blocking the images and thus preventing the site from getting credit for showing the ad?