... where the hell do they come up with $15 GRAND?!?!?
They've probably got some complicated legal argument that might or might not stand up in court. It doesn't matter whether it really would or not, because it will never get there. It would cost a lot more than $15K to fight this kind of civil action, and there's little chance they could get their costs back even if they won.
And that's how they chose the amount. It has to be enough to hurt, but not enough to make the suit worth defending. It sucks, but it's not unusual.
I think the drug issue makes you more libertarian, not more conservative. Conservatives "conserve" -- they put a premium on maintaining traditional values. Of course, whether mass euthanasia counts as a traditional value is a matter of debate.
Now, most people would call me a fuzzy-headed liberal -- which says absolutely nothing about what I actually think. For example, I also favor legalizing crack, but for very different reasons. Even if you think that addicts deserve what comes to them, they'll take a lot of innocent people with them. So the crack underground has to go. I just don't happen to think that legal sanctions are the way to do it. We've been using them for rather a long time now, with poor results. Time to try something else.
Does that make me a libertarian too? God, I hope not -- I find that movement whiny and self-centered. Besides, I hate reducing opinions, my own or other peoples', to simplistic labels.
Which is precisely why I can't abide Rush Limbaugh. He views everything that way. I've always assumed that his popularity comes from people who just don't want to bother with complicated social and moral arguments. They believe what they believe, and they're tired of being told they shouldn't believe it.
If, as you say, Rush has a liberal-left following, I'm at a loss to explain it. I don't buy the "infotainment" argument -- I hear it too often from Slashdotter who say something stupid, then insist they were "just trolling" when they're called on it. My nasty suspicion is that many liberals are closet reactionaries, and watch Rush to indulge their inner bigot -- like a monk buying porn.
So, there's no relationship at all between whether something is worth having and whether you have to pay for it? Jeez, somebody should have mentioned that before we got all wrapped up in this "free market" nonsense.
Come on, stop rationalizing. You can spend a lot of money on stuff that's worthless, and you can find valuable stuff picking through other people's garbage. But on average, there's a relationship between how much something costs and whether or not it doesn't suck. Supply and demand, yada yada yada. If there were more money to be made creating quality web content, there'd be more quality web content.
So because web content sucks, you shouldn't have to pay for it? Ever ask yourself why it sucks? Because the only way to pay for "free" content is to sell advertising, and there's only so much money to be made that way. If there were another way to pay for quality web content, you'd see a lot more of it.
An observant person (don't seem to be a lot around here) will have noticed that one of the few pay-for-access web sites that actually have customers is the one owned by the Wall Street Journal. Not a coincidence that it caters to people who have deep pockets -- or like to pretend that they do. Clearly the bucks are there if you have something people want at a price they can afford.
These "micropayments don't work" rants all fall down because they ignore a fairly conspicuous fact: micropayments not only work, but have been in use for a very long time. Do you have to buy a subscription to read a newspaper? No, you drop a quarter in the machine and you take one. (Or a buck for the WSJ.)
But wait! That's different! You don't get to pick out individual articles and just pay for those. But that's a technical issue. It isn't practical to build a machine that would do that. The smallest unit that is practical is an entire newspaper.
Somehow, nobody's managed to carry this idea over to the web. Perhaps this is technical and economic too: payment systems are too hard to implement, computers you can read in bed are still a marginal item, etc. But I suspect there's also a conflict with established interests. (Doesn't it bother anybody that not a single online newspaper has experimented with micropayments, even though they're all desperate for revenue?) Owners of "intellectual property" are very nervous about distributing it in electronic form. (Hence ebooks that cost more to buy than hard copy books.) And existing financial institutions can't be infatuated with payment systems that would compete with their lucrative credit card businesses.
So because web content sucks, you shouldn't have to pay for it? Ever ask yourself why it sucks? Because the only way to pay for "free" content is to sell advertising, and there's only so much ad
MFA was probably thinking of the order of the files in a directory, before they get sorted by some file manager or lister. Which has nothing to do with the actual physical location of the file (or its fragments). But perhaps MFA doesn't know this. I'm sure most computer users have no idea how a file system works.
I think you've discovered an important factor in the downfall of "hard" SF. But I don't think you've described it accurately. Remember, fiction about space travel is not a new thing. One of the very first movies made was George Melies's A Trip to the Moon. In printed literature, people started speculating about travelling to other worlds as soon as they realized that there were other worlds. The earliest example I know about is de Bergerac's "Voyage to the Moon" -- written in 1657!
Things reached a peak in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. With the growth of science and technology, people began to assume that space travel would happen some day, but not all of them assumed that it would happen soon. In the 30s and 40s, there were writers like Heinlen who had some grasp of rocket technology, and were sure things would get going in their own lifetimes. (I never caught Heinlen's color commentary of Apollo 11, but I'm sure he delivered it with a certain feeling of vindication.) But the mainstream imagination didn't grasp space travel as something that could happen any time soon. The Buck Rogers serials were set 5 centuries in the future. Olaf Stapledon's post-humans don't get around to it for millions of years!
Then the Soviets launched the first artificial satellite and all of a sudden space travel became a means of Soviet-American mutual oneupmanship. With actually rocket ships blasting off, everybody suddenly believed in space travel, aliens, and all the other stuff that used to be marginalized "fantasy".
Then reality set in. Probes of other planets found no ancient Martians or Venusian swamp dwellers. Only nasty environments seemingly devoid of life, or even the ability to support it. Even the old assumption that such an unimaginably huge universe had to have intelligent life somewhere came to be doubted.
Worst of all, the space race turned out to work against space becoming "the final frontier". It had the wrong goals. Instead of working on practical technologies for exploring space, we invented fearsomely expensive vehicles whose only virtue was that they "put a man on the moon" before JFK's deadline. People saw that big expensive Saturn rocket, with its teeny tiny payload, and decided that it was all a big stunt. And despite various half-assed efforts (Skylab, that "Strategic Defense" snake oil, our current limited and unsafe shuttle fleet), and short-lived enthusiasm every time there's some interesting accomplishment, that's still the underlying attitude. And space travel is now back to being "fantasy."
Safari has CSS bugs that Mozilla doesn't, and IE's Javascript parser does things differently than Opera's.
That's correct but it doesn't even begin to describe the problem. Which is that every browser implementer picks and chooses the HTML and CSS features it wants to support, and doesn't consider it urgent to fill in the blanks. CSS2 has been out for 5 years, and still has many unsupported features.
CSS advocates claim that it can help with cross-browser problems, by eliminating the complicated HTML that includes tables, frames, and "spacer" images. If you try to browse Slashdot in Netscape 7.1, you're inclined to think that they have a point. But there's no real way to test this until more browsers implement more of CSS2 -- and implement it correctly.
Meanwhile, the W3C people continue to invent new CSS stuff faster than the browsers add support for it. Oh well!
Yeah, I was negotiating with a collection agency, and they offered me "hardship status" if I gave them a bunch of information. So, OK, I answer a bunch of questions, and it's cool -- until they want my cell number. Why? "Because we need a daytime number." I refused on general principle, and also because the woman I was talking too had the social grace of a rabid octopus. Sure glad I did -- they've since gone into rapid-dial-bombing mode, which would have rendered my cell useless.
I understand these folks are just doing their jobs, but the strange BS they pull is mind boggling. Like those lame pre-recorded messages they leave on your answering machine. "This is Mister Shapiro. I have to make a decision on your behalf, and I want to make an informed decision..." Lame the first time you get it. The hundredth time you get it, there's just no word.
A coup isn't necessarily a military coup. But whatever you call it, there was a change in the power structure near the end of the war. And a good thing too. From what I know of the lunatics who were in charge before, they would have allowed Japan to be reduced to a radioactive cinder before they surrendered.
That's about how many were killed in the big raid on Tokyo. I'm not saying it's a good thing -- indeed, I have my doubts as to how much "strategic bombing" shortened the war. I simply question its importance.
Some time back we had a discussion of whether it was cool to do a game based on the Vietnam war. Some people claimed that WW II was somehow a "good war" and Vietnam wasn't. Not as simple as that. Certainly America's motives for entering WW II were better (though hardly pure). But the big difference in the public mind was that Vietnam was visible: you saw it every evening on the nightly news. And the same visibility is what really separates Hiroshima and Nagasaki from all the other cities that were obliterated in the course of their war.
You can kill 100,000 people in an instant with a single bomb, or you can kill them in the course of a day with a huge firebomb raid. I submit that the moral difference is insignificant.
But I won't be very surprised to see context specific ads on the blogs as well.
Ooh, good point! I'll bet somebody at Google did some math, and decided that the ad revenue from increased blogging would more than make up for lost membership fees. These guys always seem to find a way to do the right thing, and still make a buck doing it. Strange, but actually rather admirable. And I, for one, don't mind a sponsored link or two. Sometimes they're even useful.
Note that 100% of Japanese cities were bombed flat in WWII...
Not quite true. Kyoto was never bombed. Several others. Hiroshima and Nagasaki escaped bombing until the final attacks. Why? Certain people knew the A Bomb was coming, and they wanted to see the effect on an untouched city.
Many Japanese still believe that Kyoto was never bombed out of respect for that city's cultural importance. One version of the story has it that there was that there was a tacit agreement between the U.S. and Japanese militaries that bombers would ignore Kyoto as long as there was no antiaircraft artillery there. The reality is that Kyoto was the very first city on the list of atomic targets, and was only spared by bad weather, which caused the attack to be diverted to Nagasaki.
Pretty cold, I know. I think you before you get all self righteous either way ("day of infamy" versus "atomic genocide"), you have to remember that millions of people had already died on both sides. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as bad as they were, were distinctive only for the means by which they were destroyed. In terms of people killed and human suffering, they were minor affairs.
On the other hand, the whole "was it justified" debate is rather pointless. The bombs didn't end the war (that was done by a coup in Tokyo that was already underway), nor did they raise the level of atrocity more than a notch (previous firebomb raids had killed hundreds of thousands without any atomic stuff). I find it rather ironic that Teller himself went over to the "we should have demoed the bomb first" camp just before he died. That's a cop-out. If you invent nasty weapons, they will be used.
No, you're right. The FCC manadates the maximum bandwidth supported by any device that's legal to connect to a POTS line. But that doesn't change the nature of the bottleneck.
Well, yeah, that's all true. But the modem connection is where the bottleneck is. Improving data efficiency outside the bottleneck has no effect on overall speed. It's like those impatient drivers you see who go as fast as they can to catch up with a traffic jam.
I'm no expert on the hardware, or information theory. But modem speeds haven't improved since 56K technology came in some years back. This was after a very long period in which a slightly faster modem standard appeared quite regularly, driven by heavy-duty competition. Sounds like a fundamental limit to me.
If you don't need a brand name ISP, you can find dialup access for as little as $10/month. DSL with competent tech support (and you need that, given the potential problems) is a minimum of $50/month in most locations. (I'm talking permanent rate, not "signup" discounts.) I don't know about cable access, but I hear nasty stories.
Maybe $40/month is "a few dollars" to you, but I think you'll find that a lot of Americans are less affluent.
I would prefer more browsers to use gzip for retrieving web pages.
I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure this would have not help dialup users at all. They're already using hardware data compression in the modem. When you're using lossless compression, there's an absolute limit as to how much compression you can get -- and you can't get around that limit by running your data through multiple compressors.
(I should check this out by timing various downloads, but I'm too lazy. Somebody else can prove me wrong!)
So why do JPEG files with "more" compression download faster? Because JPEG is a lossy format: when you increase the "compession" you're not encoding data more efficiently, you're throwing data away. Depending on the image, you can do this and still end up with something that looks the same. But push it far enough and you end up with crap.
China has blocked 127 mail servers which it identifies as major sources of spam. Oh, happy day.
Come on people, don't any of you see how inconsistent this attitude is? We criticize the Chinese government for blocking its citizen's access to information -- unless it's information that we think should be blocked.
No, I'm not arguing that spam is "free speech". I hate it as much as anybody, and I'd kill for a simple solution to it. But if you believe in free speech, you do not want any kind of central authority controlling who is allowed to send email.
Spam is a problem because individual recipients have no control over who can send them email. The only solution is some kind of digital certificate system, so a spammer can't establish a new identity simply by opening creating -- or forging -- a new email address. Any anti-spam measure that isn't based on recipient control, not server control, is going to be both ineffective and dangerous to civil liberties.
Slashdot Mirror
And that's how they chose the amount. It has to be enough to hurt, but not enough to make the suit worth defending. It sucks, but it's not unusual.
Now, most people would call me a fuzzy-headed liberal -- which says absolutely nothing about what I actually think. For example, I also favor legalizing crack, but for very different reasons. Even if you think that addicts deserve what comes to them, they'll take a lot of innocent people with them. So the crack underground has to go. I just don't happen to think that legal sanctions are the way to do it. We've been using them for rather a long time now, with poor results. Time to try something else.
Does that make me a libertarian too? God, I hope not -- I find that movement whiny and self-centered. Besides, I hate reducing opinions, my own or other peoples', to simplistic labels.
Which is precisely why I can't abide Rush Limbaugh. He views everything that way. I've always assumed that his popularity comes from people who just don't want to bother with complicated social and moral arguments. They believe what they believe, and they're tired of being told they shouldn't believe it.
If, as you say, Rush has a liberal-left following, I'm at a loss to explain it. I don't buy the "infotainment" argument -- I hear it too often from Slashdotter who say something stupid, then insist they were "just trolling" when they're called on it. My nasty suspicion is that many liberals are closet reactionaries, and watch Rush to indulge their inner bigot -- like a monk buying porn.
I was thinking more along the lines of "narrowly targeted". I've never known anyone who so completely dedicated themselves to preaching to the choir.
Sorry, a hundred other trolls were ahead of you.
Come on, stop rationalizing. You can spend a lot of money on stuff that's worthless, and you can find valuable stuff picking through other people's garbage. But on average, there's a relationship between how much something costs and whether or not it doesn't suck. Supply and demand, yada yada yada. If there were more money to be made creating quality web content, there'd be more quality web content.
An observant person (don't seem to be a lot around here) will have noticed that one of the few pay-for-access web sites that actually have customers is the one owned by the Wall Street Journal. Not a coincidence that it caters to people who have deep pockets -- or like to pretend that they do. Clearly the bucks are there if you have something people want at a price they can afford.
These "micropayments don't work" rants all fall down because they ignore a fairly conspicuous fact: micropayments not only work, but have been in use for a very long time. Do you have to buy a subscription to read a newspaper? No, you drop a quarter in the machine and you take one. (Or a buck for the WSJ.)
But wait! That's different! You don't get to pick out individual articles and just pay for those. But that's a technical issue. It isn't practical to build a machine that would do that. The smallest unit that is practical is an entire newspaper.
Somehow, nobody's managed to carry this idea over to the web. Perhaps this is technical and economic too: payment systems are too hard to implement, computers you can read in bed are still a marginal item, etc. But I suspect there's also a conflict with established interests. (Doesn't it bother anybody that not a single online newspaper has experimented with micropayments, even though they're all desperate for revenue?) Owners of "intellectual property" are very nervous about distributing it in electronic form. (Hence ebooks that cost more to buy than hard copy books.) And existing financial institutions can't be infatuated with payment systems that would compete with their lucrative credit card businesses.
So because web content sucks, you shouldn't have to pay for it? Ever ask yourself why it sucks? Because the only way to pay for "free" content is to sell advertising, and there's only so much ad
MFA was probably thinking of the order of the files in a directory, before they get sorted by some file manager or lister. Which has nothing to do with the actual physical location of the file (or its fragments). But perhaps MFA doesn't know this. I'm sure most computer users have no idea how a file system works.
Things reached a peak in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. With the growth of science and technology, people began to assume that space travel would happen some day, but not all of them assumed that it would happen soon. In the 30s and 40s, there were writers like Heinlen who had some grasp of rocket technology, and were sure things would get going in their own lifetimes. (I never caught Heinlen's color commentary of Apollo 11, but I'm sure he delivered it with a certain feeling of vindication.) But the mainstream imagination didn't grasp space travel as something that could happen any time soon. The Buck Rogers serials were set 5 centuries in the future. Olaf Stapledon's post-humans don't get around to it for millions of years!
Then the Soviets launched the first artificial satellite and all of a sudden space travel became a means of Soviet-American mutual oneupmanship. With actually rocket ships blasting off, everybody suddenly believed in space travel, aliens, and all the other stuff that used to be marginalized "fantasy".
Then reality set in. Probes of other planets found no ancient Martians or Venusian swamp dwellers. Only nasty environments seemingly devoid of life, or even the ability to support it. Even the old assumption that such an unimaginably huge universe had to have intelligent life somewhere came to be doubted.
Worst of all, the space race turned out to work against space becoming "the final frontier". It had the wrong goals. Instead of working on practical technologies for exploring space, we invented fearsomely expensive vehicles whose only virtue was that they "put a man on the moon" before JFK's deadline. People saw that big expensive Saturn rocket, with its teeny tiny payload, and decided that it was all a big stunt. And despite various half-assed efforts (Skylab, that "Strategic Defense" snake oil, our current limited and unsafe shuttle fleet), and short-lived enthusiasm every time there's some interesting accomplishment, that's still the underlying attitude. And space travel is now back to being "fantasy."
CSS advocates claim that it can help with cross-browser problems, by eliminating the complicated HTML that includes tables, frames, and "spacer" images. If you try to browse Slashdot in Netscape 7.1, you're inclined to think that they have a point. But there's no real way to test this until more browsers implement more of CSS2 -- and implement it correctly.
Meanwhile, the W3C people continue to invent new CSS stuff faster than the browsers add support for it. Oh well!
I understand these folks are just doing their jobs, but the strange BS they pull is mind boggling. Like those lame pre-recorded messages they leave on your answering machine. "This is Mister Shapiro. I have to make a decision on your behalf, and I want to make an informed decision..." Lame the first time you get it. The hundredth time you get it, there's just no word.
Yeah, I know, time to declare bankruptcy.
A coup isn't necessarily a military coup. But whatever you call it, there was a change in the power structure near the end of the war. And a good thing too. From what I know of the lunatics who were in charge before, they would have allowed Japan to be reduced to a radioactive cinder before they surrendered.
Some time back we had a discussion of whether it was cool to do a game based on the Vietnam war. Some people claimed that WW II was somehow a "good war" and Vietnam wasn't. Not as simple as that. Certainly America's motives for entering WW II were better (though hardly pure). But the big difference in the public mind was that Vietnam was visible: you saw it every evening on the nightly news. And the same visibility is what really separates Hiroshima and Nagasaki from all the other cities that were obliterated in the course of their war.
You can kill 100,000 people in an instant with a single bomb, or you can kill them in the course of a day with a huge firebomb raid. I submit that the moral difference is insignificant.
I think I saw that movie.
Many Japanese still believe that Kyoto was never bombed out of respect for that city's cultural importance. One version of the story has it that there was that there was a tacit agreement between the U.S. and Japanese militaries that bombers would ignore Kyoto as long as there was no antiaircraft artillery there. The reality is that Kyoto was the very first city on the list of atomic targets, and was only spared by bad weather, which caused the attack to be diverted to Nagasaki.
Pretty cold, I know. I think you before you get all self righteous either way ("day of infamy" versus "atomic genocide"), you have to remember that millions of people had already died on both sides. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as bad as they were, were distinctive only for the means by which they were destroyed. In terms of people killed and human suffering, they were minor affairs.
On the other hand, the whole "was it justified" debate is rather pointless. The bombs didn't end the war (that was done by a coup in Tokyo that was already underway), nor did they raise the level of atrocity more than a notch (previous firebomb raids had killed hundreds of thousands without any atomic stuff). I find it rather ironic that Teller himself went over to the "we should have demoed the bomb first" camp just before he died. That's a cop-out. If you invent nasty weapons, they will be used.
No, you're right. The FCC manadates the maximum bandwidth supported by any device that's legal to connect to a POTS line. But that doesn't change the nature of the bottleneck.
Well, yeah, that's all true. But the modem connection is where the bottleneck is. Improving data efficiency outside the bottleneck has no effect on overall speed. It's like those impatient drivers you see who go as fast as they can to catch up with a traffic jam.
I'm no expert on the hardware, or information theory. But modem speeds haven't improved since 56K technology came in some years back. This was after a very long period in which a slightly faster modem standard appeared quite regularly, driven by heavy-duty competition. Sounds like a fundamental limit to me.
Maybe $40/month is "a few dollars" to you, but I think you'll find that a lot of Americans are less affluent.
(I should check this out by timing various downloads, but I'm too lazy. Somebody else can prove me wrong!)
So why do JPEG files with "more" compression download faster? Because JPEG is a lossy format: when you increase the "compession" you're not encoding data more efficiently, you're throwing data away. Depending on the image, you can do this and still end up with something that looks the same. But push it far enough and you end up with crap.
(Not available in Florida.)
No, I'm not arguing that spam is "free speech". I hate it as much as anybody, and I'd kill for a simple solution to it. But if you believe in free speech, you do not want any kind of central authority controlling who is allowed to send email.
Spam is a problem because individual recipients have no control over who can send them email. The only solution is some kind of digital certificate system, so a spammer can't establish a new identity simply by opening creating -- or forging -- a new email address. Any anti-spam measure that isn't based on recipient control, not server control, is going to be both ineffective and dangerous to civil liberties.