Why don't they just put a sniper or two as look out on these cargo ships? Any small boat that approaches without radio, and they have arms, you start picking them off.
Oh, I dunno... perhaps because any court in any country would consider that premeditated murder?
In the U.S. we have a constitutional provision that gives everyone the right to bear arms - which is to say, that merely carrying weapons is not, per se, evidence of intent to commit a crime. Likewise, we have a constitutional provision that guarantees the right to free speech - and that includes the right to choose not to respond when spoken to.
Now I realize that other countries have laws that differ from those of the U.S., but I seriously doubt that many of them would consider that firing with deadly intent on small craft that have not committed any overtly hostile act would be anything other than a criminal act. In fact, to be protected by international law, I'm pretty sure you'd have to wait until the presumed pirates actually attempted to board your ship without permission before you could fire on them with impunity.
After all, many other US industries have been deregulated — take, for instance, oil, natural gas, or trucking — and greater competition in those sectors swiftly brought prices down. Why not electricity?
Excuse me? Deregulation brought prices of oil and natural gas DOWN?
I don't theeng so, Quickstraw.
Because of speculation on the spot oil market, gasoline prices here in rural Ohio shot up $0.20/gallon in one day last week. I shudder to think of what my next heating (natural gas) bill will be.
Why is it that Big Lies like this one sail blithely by, unchallenged, while/. nitpickers wrangle over the definition of "free market"?
'This is going to accelerate the demise of retailers who do not have either competitive pricing or a standout store experience.'
Be creative? Negotiate better wholesale costs so that you can offer your customers lower prices? If not, someone else will. Isn't that capitalism?
It's Walmart-style capitalism, and it results in continuing, and expanding export of manufacturing to lower-cost labor pools. That, in turn, results in a loss of domestic jobs. As a consequence, fewer customers can afford to buy luxuries, and these consumers must settle for purchasing necessities on a lowest-cost (as opposed to a best-quality) basis, because they lack the income to do otherwise.
It's a Gresham's Law-style race to the bottom, which may wind up allowing marginal retailers to survive, but only at the expense of ruining the economy as a whole.
So, yes, capitalism, but the kind of capitalism - hypnotically focused on short-term profitability, while deliberately ignoring the long-term decline in customer base and profitability that exclusive focus creates - which has been ruining America ever since the rise to total dominance of the MBA in business management, back in the 1980's.
Henry Ford had the wisdom to realize that, by paying decent wages to his workers, he also grew his own customer base. That enlightened form of capitalism - which is of no interest whatsoever to careerist MBAs, because they will be working for a different company within five years, and thus don't really need to care about the long-term prospects of their current employer - is what made America an economic powerhouse in the 1950's. Sadly, the current crop of capitalism advocates seem utterly unable to grasp the fact that the exclusive focus on short-term gain, rather than long-term health and profitability, is a sign of weakness in their economic model, not strength.
Now you know how I feel every time I say anything remotely conservatively-minded. Not only do I have to deal with the hateful bile spewed my way by overzealous liberals (such as with your previous post) but I have to deal with people who will mod me down just because conservatism = trolling. I threw a fit about it a few months back, but I know the system won't be changed. So I don't get mad, I get even.
I didn't mod you down you thickwitted nimrod. When I get mod points, I use 'em to mod posts UP - because they're interesting, informative, or funny, NOT because I happen to agree or disagree philosophically or politically with their content. I called for your post to be modded down, because it was a troll. You were being an asshole - which apparently is your default mode - and contributing nothing of substance to the discussion. Your post was neither interesting, informative, nor funny. It was a blatant attempt to provoke people, off topic, and amazingly stupid, all at the same time.
In other words, a troll, EXACTLY as I characterized it.
In other words: don't hate the player, hate the game, son.:)
No thanks, Rapmaster Dickwad. I'll continue to despise the shitheads who play the game crookedly. Like you.
Run along and masturbate to Glenn Beck now, you cowardly, retarded piece of shit.
Call me all the names you want, but you'll think twice next time you put out a blanket request for negative moderation. I take my Karma very seriously.
You - and people like you - are exactly what's wrong with/.'s moderation system. You abuse moderation points to wage personal vendettas, proving conclusively that you in no way DESERVE mod points. But, because you are a prolific generator of what, back in the BBS era, we called "shit posts", you get lots of moderator points to abuse.
And THAT is what sucks about/.'s mod point award algorithm - it rewards quantity, rather than quality, and enables prolific idiots like you to fuck up the comment ratings of posts that have NOTHING to do with the issue at hand, merely to satisfy your tiny, wounded ego.
That is the most absurd and arbitrary distinction I've ever heard. A law of convenience if I ever heard of one. One step closer to stripping our rights in the name of international legal harmony.
Yep. Good thing it's non-binding and the issue can be taken up at a later time, in a different case, where all nine Justices will get to vote (and before that, the entire Ninth Circuit court could decide to take up the matter, and potentially overrule its own panel).
And it's not so much an indictment of the Supremes (although they certainly deserve one), as it is of the Ninth Circuit Court's three-judge panel, which has made an ass of the law once again.
Let's see...America = land of the free, home of the brave, defender of the weak and leader of the free world.
Google = baits people into using its services so they can steal and sell their personal data.
Tell me how that's trolling, exactly?
Oh, please. Bullshit "patriotism" that turns a blind eye to misrule by fear, corruption, wholesale disregard of Constitutional protections, and the largest transfer of wealth from the middle class to the ultra-rich in history is somehow morally superior to Google's relatively benign use of the personal data that its users freely reveal to it?
Give unto me a break, Mr. Lives-under-a-bridge.
Personally, I trust Google FAR more than I do the current incarnation of the U.S. government. Ever since The Chimp and Darth Cheney took office, individual liberty and privacy in this country have gone down the oubliette - and DHS under Hope and Change Barry is no improvement over those Bad Old Days whatsoever. And this, despite his promises of transparency and openness on the campaign trail.
I can use NoScript and CookieSafe to keep DoubleClick (the only truly evil part of Google) from tracking me. What plugins do you recommend to keep the NSA, the FBI, and the rest of the Homeland Insecurity apparatus from doing the same?
Hopefully reports like this are taken as good news not fuel for the skeptics and deniers. Good news because we have a better chance and perhaps more time at managing with increased CO2
Mmm... no
It's unfortunate that the actual article is behind a paywall, but the crucial final sentence of the summary, "Compared to previous studies, these results imply that long term negative feedback from CO2-induced increases in vegetation density could reduce temperature following a stabilization of CO2 concentration," makes it clear that this theoretical cooling effect doesn't really kick in until CO2 levels stabilize. Since the increase in global CO2 levels will continue essentially unabated for the foreseeable future, the cooling effect of overall denser foliage (on, we should keep in mind, constantly diminishing areas of rainforest and other, similar concentrations of leafy plant life) will be negligible.
IOW - We're still on track for Permian Extinction II.
And as for this report not becoming fuel for climate change deniers? Don't bet on it.
The mistake they made was that they forgot (or didn't know how) to monetize the open source solutions they had.
Absolutely wrong.
The mistake McNealy made was in refusing to adapt Sun's business model of selling ridiculously-overpriced proprietary hardware with obscene profit margins in an increasingly-commodotized, increasingly-Intel/AMD CISC-centered marketplace for far longer than was sustainable. It's the classic Wang/DEC/WordPerfect business model error - stick your fingers in your ears, squeeze your eyelids shut, and go "Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah!" at the top of your voice, and just keep on keepin' on, while the dominant paradigm shifts around you.
of course in a world where we're all free to take someone elses recipe, use it, copy it, publish it or even claim it as our own we know very well that fuck all harm has been done to the industry for the lack of legal protection on such creativity.
We live in a world where everyone has family recipes but hardly anyone has family music.
Actually, according to the USPTO, recipes ARE subject to copyright. What is NOT subject to copyright is lists of ingredients. So it's legal to copy the ingredients in a recipe, but it's NOT legal to copy the instructions on how to prepare, combine, and cook them, and claim them as your own work.
"The error occurred because we did not know that Brainwave was a
complete publication of the serial parts of The Escape. We did know
from the publication of The Escape in 1953 that it was the first part
of a serialization, but did not know that Brainwave, from 1954, was
the title of the complete serialization."
The thing is that Brainwave is Poul Anderson's best-known short novel, and it has been endlessly anthologized (most famously in And Anthology of Great Science Fiction) and re-anthologized since its original publication in magazine serial form. What that means to me is that PG apparently is not relying on science fiction experts in determining the copyright status of the material they're publishing as "public domain". That is a Bad Thing.
Greg Bear's interest in this specific issue is a result of his marriage to Poul Anderson's daughter Astrid (whom I fondly remember as the uncrowned Teen Queen of StLouisCon in 1969), who is Anderson's heir and beneficiary under U.S. copyright law.
You can argue that the terms of U.S. copyright law are unfair and unreasonable - as a published author, I frequently do - but they are what they are. And, unless and until they are changed, it is entirely valid and reasonable that Bear, on behalf of his wife, Poul Anderson's heir, objects to PG's incorrect assertion of public domain status for part 1 of the serialized version of Brainwave.
And, btw, Brainwave is a great science fiction short story. I regularly recommend it to readers new to sf as a part of a "must-read" selection of classic sf that includes (among many others) Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light - and, for that matter, Poul Anderson's own Tau Zero.
My point is all the American league and National league teams in the world have an opportunity to be in the world series. There is no rules that only teams int he US can compete.
"oops, we harmed you. we admit it. our bad. So uh, we're legally liable for it, but we've decided to pay somebody else. you know, someone who's not you. just letting you know."
Er..no.
It was a settlement, not a judgement against Google, so there was no admission of liability on Google's part. And, although I'm not privy to Google's internal discussions, I'd bet a shiny, new quarter - your choice of state - that, given the size of the settlement, it was merely a tactic on Google's part to make this particular group of legal parasites go the fuck away.
Slashdot Mirror
Why don't they just put a sniper or two as look out on these cargo ships? Any small boat that approaches without radio, and they have arms, you start picking them off.
Oh, I dunno ... perhaps because any court in any country would consider that premeditated murder?
In the U.S. we have a constitutional provision that gives everyone the right to bear arms - which is to say, that merely carrying weapons is not, per se, evidence of intent to commit a crime. Likewise, we have a constitutional provision that guarantees the right to free speech - and that includes the right to choose not to respond when spoken to.
Now I realize that other countries have laws that differ from those of the U.S., but I seriously doubt that many of them would consider that firing with deadly intent on small craft that have not committed any overtly hostile act would be anything other than a criminal act. In fact, to be protected by international law, I'm pretty sure you'd have to wait until the presumed pirates actually attempted to board your ship without permission before you could fire on them with impunity.
IANAL, etc., etc. ... but still.
I didn't realize it was on fire.
The year is currently MMX. Does that make it year 10,000,000?
No, it makes it the year "Obsolete Intel Media Acceleration CPU Extensions".
I've been getting significantly MORE spam in the last month.
I've been getting almost NO spam the past few days. Maybe it's my mail host, maybe it's just vacation time for spammers, but still ...
From TFS:
After all, many other US industries have been deregulated — take, for instance, oil, natural gas, or trucking — and greater competition in those sectors swiftly brought prices down. Why not electricity?
Excuse me? Deregulation brought prices of oil and natural gas DOWN?
I don't theeng so, Quickstraw.
Because of speculation on the spot oil market, gasoline prices here in rural Ohio shot up $0.20/gallon in one day last week. I shudder to think of what my next heating (natural gas) bill will be.
Why is it that Big Lies like this one sail blithely by, unchallenged, while /. nitpickers wrangle over the definition of "free market"?
You know, you're really quite crude for someone who sounds to be 20 or 30 years older than me.
And you're really quite shallow for someone who sounds to be about 14.
This exchange has lost all amusement value for me. I enjoy a good battle of wits, but not one against an unarmed opponent.
Goodbye, Mr. Troll.
'This is going to accelerate the demise of retailers who do not have either competitive pricing or a standout store experience.'
Be creative? Negotiate better wholesale costs so that you can offer your customers lower prices? If not, someone else will. Isn't that capitalism?
It's Walmart-style capitalism, and it results in continuing, and expanding export of manufacturing to lower-cost labor pools. That, in turn, results in a loss of domestic jobs. As a consequence, fewer customers can afford to buy luxuries, and these consumers must settle for purchasing necessities on a lowest-cost (as opposed to a best-quality) basis, because they lack the income to do otherwise.
It's a Gresham's Law-style race to the bottom, which may wind up allowing marginal retailers to survive, but only at the expense of ruining the economy as a whole.
So, yes, capitalism, but the kind of capitalism - hypnotically focused on short-term profitability, while deliberately ignoring the long-term decline in customer base and profitability that exclusive focus creates - which has been ruining America ever since the rise to total dominance of the MBA in business management, back in the 1980's.
Henry Ford had the wisdom to realize that, by paying decent wages to his workers, he also grew his own customer base. That enlightened form of capitalism - which is of no interest whatsoever to careerist MBAs, because they will be working for a different company within five years, and thus don't really need to care about the long-term prospects of their current employer - is what made America an economic powerhouse in the 1950's. Sadly, the current crop of capitalism advocates seem utterly unable to grasp the fact that the exclusive focus on short-term gain, rather than long-term health and profitability, is a sign of weakness in their economic model, not strength.
I'm a mainstream Republican.
No, you're a mainstream reactionary.
Go fuck yourself.
Now you know how I feel every time I say anything remotely conservatively-minded. Not only do I have to deal with the hateful bile spewed my way by overzealous liberals (such as with your previous post) but I have to deal with people who will mod me down just because conservatism = trolling. I threw a fit about it a few months back, but I know the system won't be changed. So I don't get mad, I get even.
I didn't mod you down you thickwitted nimrod. When I get mod points, I use 'em to mod posts UP - because they're interesting, informative, or funny, NOT because I happen to agree or disagree philosophically or politically with their content. I called for your post to be modded down, because it was a troll. You were being an asshole - which apparently is your default mode - and contributing nothing of substance to the discussion. Your post was neither interesting, informative, nor funny. It was a blatant attempt to provoke people, off topic, and amazingly stupid, all at the same time.
In other words, a troll, EXACTLY as I characterized it.
In other words: don't hate the player, hate the game, son. :)
No thanks, Rapmaster Dickwad. I'll continue to despise the shitheads who play the game crookedly. Like you.
Run along and masturbate to Glenn Beck now, you cowardly, retarded piece of shit.
Call me all the names you want, but you'll think twice next time you put out a blanket request for negative moderation. I take my Karma very seriously.
You - and people like you - are exactly what's wrong with /.'s moderation system. You abuse moderation points to wage personal vendettas, proving conclusively that you in no way DESERVE mod points. But, because you are a prolific generator of what, back in the BBS era, we called "shit posts", you get lots of moderator points to abuse.
And THAT is what sucks about /.'s mod point award algorithm - it rewards quantity, rather than quality, and enables prolific idiots like you to fuck up the comment ratings of posts that have NOTHING to do with the issue at hand, merely to satisfy your tiny, wounded ego.
You, sir, are a coward and a bully.
Just as an addendum, you'd do well to heed the words of your sig.
You mean like you - systematically modding every comment I've made in the past week -1 troll?
What a tool.
That is the most absurd and arbitrary distinction I've ever heard. A law of convenience if I ever heard of one. One step closer to stripping our rights in the name of international legal harmony.
Yep. Good thing it's non-binding and the issue can be taken up at a later time, in a different case, where all nine Justices will get to vote (and before that, the entire Ninth Circuit court could decide to take up the matter, and potentially overrule its own panel).
And it's not so much an indictment of the Supremes (although they certainly deserve one), as it is of the Ninth Circuit Court's three-judge panel, which has made an ass of the law once again.
Let's see...America = land of the free, home of the brave, defender of the weak and leader of the free world. Google = baits people into using its services so they can steal and sell their personal data.
Tell me how that's trolling, exactly?
Oh, please. Bullshit "patriotism" that turns a blind eye to misrule by fear, corruption, wholesale disregard of Constitutional protections, and the largest transfer of wealth from the middle class to the ultra-rich in history is somehow morally superior to Google's relatively benign use of the personal data that its users freely reveal to it?
Give unto me a break, Mr. Lives-under-a-bridge.
Personally, I trust Google FAR more than I do the current incarnation of the U.S. government. Ever since The Chimp and Darth Cheney took office, individual liberty and privacy in this country have gone down the oubliette - and DHS under Hope and Change Barry is no improvement over those Bad Old Days whatsoever. And this, despite his promises of transparency and openness on the campaign trail.
I can use NoScript and CookieSafe to keep DoubleClick (the only truly evil part of Google) from tracking me. What plugins do you recommend to keep the NSA, the FBI, and the rest of the Homeland Insecurity apparatus from doing the same?
I trust the federal government to uphold due process more than I trust Google to abide by its terms of service.
Somebody with points please mod this troll down.
Hopefully reports like this are taken as good news not fuel for the skeptics and deniers. Good news because we have a better chance and perhaps more time at managing with increased CO2
Mmm ... no
It's unfortunate that the actual article is behind a paywall, but the crucial final sentence of the summary, "Compared to previous studies, these results imply that long term negative feedback from CO2-induced increases in vegetation density could reduce temperature following a stabilization of CO2 concentration," makes it clear that this theoretical cooling effect doesn't really kick in until CO2 levels stabilize. Since the increase in global CO2 levels will continue essentially unabated for the foreseeable future, the cooling effect of overall denser foliage (on, we should keep in mind, constantly diminishing areas of rainforest and other, similar concentrations of leafy plant life) will be negligible.
IOW - We're still on track for Permian Extinction II.
And as for this report not becoming fuel for climate change deniers? Don't bet on it.
By any chance, were the father's names Adam and Steve?
The mistake they made was that they forgot (or didn't know how) to monetize the open source solutions they had.
Absolutely wrong.
The mistake McNealy made was in refusing to adapt Sun's business model of selling ridiculously-overpriced proprietary hardware with obscene profit margins in an increasingly-commodotized, increasingly-Intel/AMD CISC-centered marketplace for far longer than was sustainable. It's the classic Wang/DEC/WordPerfect business model error - stick your fingers in your ears, squeeze your eyelids shut, and go "Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah!" at the top of your voice, and just keep on keepin' on, while the dominant paradigm shifts around you.
of course in a world where we're all free to take someone elses recipe, use it, copy it, publish it or even claim it as our own we know very well that fuck all harm has been done to the industry for the lack of legal protection on such creativity. We live in a world where everyone has family recipes but hardly anyone has family music.
Actually, according to the USPTO, recipes ARE subject to copyright. What is NOT subject to copyright is lists of ingredients. So it's legal to copy the ingredients in a recipe, but it's NOT legal to copy the instructions on how to prepare, combine, and cook them, and claim them as your own work.
Did anyone else read that or is it just me with a one track mind?
You mean "Tiny Teen Crews, Only a Quarter?"
Or is that just me?
http://cand.pglaf.org/bear-response.txt
"The error occurred because we did not know that Brainwave was a complete publication of the serial parts of The Escape. We did know from the publication of The Escape in 1953 that it was the first part of a serialization, but did not know that Brainwave, from 1954, was the title of the complete serialization."
The thing is that Brainwave is Poul Anderson's best-known short novel, and it has been endlessly anthologized (most famously in And Anthology of Great Science Fiction) and re-anthologized since its original publication in magazine serial form. What that means to me is that PG apparently is not relying on science fiction experts in determining the copyright status of the material they're publishing as "public domain". That is a Bad Thing.
Greg Bear's interest in this specific issue is a result of his marriage to Poul Anderson's daughter Astrid (whom I fondly remember as the uncrowned Teen Queen of StLouisCon in 1969), who is Anderson's heir and beneficiary under U.S. copyright law.
You can argue that the terms of U.S. copyright law are unfair and unreasonable - as a published author, I frequently do - but they are what they are. And, unless and until they are changed, it is entirely valid and reasonable that Bear, on behalf of his wife, Poul Anderson's heir, objects to PG's incorrect assertion of public domain status for part 1 of the serialized version of Brainwave.
And, btw, Brainwave is a great science fiction short story. I regularly recommend it to readers new to sf as a part of a "must-read" selection of classic sf that includes (among many others) Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light - and, for that matter, Poul Anderson's own Tau Zero.
... looks like her verdict was a (ahem) far cry from what Uwe Boll was expecting.
... Burt Rutan thinks of this guy ... ?
My point is all the American league and National league teams in the world have an opportunity to be in the world series. There is no rules that only teams int he US can compete.
Including the Toronto Blue Jays?
Nothing is stopping you from starting a baseball team in another country. well, nothing but money.
Well ...that. And massive disinterest on the part of European, African, and Asian nations (other than Japan, of course).
But I wouldn't let a little detail like having no audience or fanbase stop you ...
"oops, we harmed you. we admit it. our bad. So uh, we're legally liable for it, but we've decided to pay somebody else. you know, someone who's not you. just letting you know."
Er..no.
It was a settlement, not a judgement against Google, so there was no admission of liability on Google's part. And, although I'm not privy to Google's internal discussions, I'd bet a shiny, new quarter - your choice of state - that, given the size of the settlement, it was merely a tactic on Google's part to make this particular group of legal parasites go the fuck away.
Again, IANAL, yadda, yadda, yadda ...