Just like all those people that BY LAW will get paid overtime. Wait, they don't. If you own enough politicians, the law is irrelevant, especially one so poorly defined and badly enforced.
Actually, since neither of those fall under the definition of the slippery slope, I guess you aren't pissed off after all;)
A slippery slope is when someone claims that one thing will lead to a chain of increasingly unacceptable outcomes, therefore the original action is unacceptable. An example would be: if we decriminalize marijuana, then everyone will smoke it, then they'll move to crack, then they'll all become crack whores and die of AIDS.
You are correct that his examples are so dissimilar that they are not related to the original argument, why does everyone immediately go to examples that involve killing people?
Hey, when Mono gets beyond being a bare implementation of the CLI and C#, and has the full set of Microsoft libraries with 100% compatibility, let me know. Until then, it is nothing more than a cute toy in the eyes of business.
So you would, obviously, not object if you were fined $5000 for, say, buying a chicken after dark? In some states, that is still on the books. There is no reasonable way that any normal citizen would know that would be illegal, but they should still be liable because "it is against the law?" The old ignorance of the law is no excuse bit may be a cute trueism, but real laws (at least the ones with fairly harsh penalties) usually require at least some level of criminal intent and a judge or jury will usually slap down conviction on a violation a "reasonable man" would not have felt to be illegal.
This is fairly similar to how stolen merchandise is handled. If you buy a $2000 TV out of the back of a truck for $50, or unlimited music for $0.97 a month (there is a scam site claiming that!), you should be smart enough to figure out that it is not a legitimate deal, and are liable for receipt of stolen property. If you buy that TV for a normal price from a merchant, and there are many legitimate music sites offering listening for $20-$30, and it later turns out to be stolen, you only have to return the property, but you have no liability for buying stolen merchandise, and may even have the right to recover the money you paid from whoever sold it to you. In this case, they didn't even know the songs were saved, they were using it as internet radio, at what seems like a fairly normal price for that kind of a service. With Microsoft including internet radio with Windows, and a set of songs you can download, their beliefs were not that unreasonable.
No, it's called copyright infringement, a technical violation that is not at all obvious to a very large segment of the US population. Lots of people don't see any difference at all between listening to the radio, internet radio with Windows Media Player, and what many see as internet radio with Kazaa. Who was hoping for smart readers, but can't even get the terminology right? This isn't only emotional fluff, this is pointing out how silly it is to expect 12 year olds to have any idea of the difference between those three ways of listening when the differences are (to the average person) very small and petty.
You do realize that a "recent" PC costs all of around $200, that's brand new with a 20 GB hard drive, enough for plenty of music. That is hardly beyond saving for, even below the poverty line, or more likely a gift to the family from a better off relation.
Yes, it is just fine that someone on public housing spends a very small amount to have some entertainment and diversion in their life. If they can spend a less than most people spend on coffee in a couple of weeks to get entertainment whenever they want, great! This shows some good financial sense, instead of buying $20 CD's or going to $10 movies, and it gets their kids a machine to study on, and for their parents to use for very inexpensive vocational education.
Are "explicit lyrics" OK, depends on the family. Believe it or not, there are a lot of parents that see far more significant threats to their children than harsh language. Why is it that we worry so much about children hearing the "f word", but so little doing anything about the constant verbal and physical abuse at school?
Ignorance of the law is not an absolute defense, but it can be considered as a reason to let someone off the hook if the violation is overly technical, not the case here, but there are some laws where a jury would never convict someone because none of them would have thought it was a violation either. That is one of the benefits of a jury system. Ignorance of a device is not the issue, reasonable belief is. If you buy a car at a car lot, then it later turns out to be stolen, you can't be charged for the theft. You had a reasonable expectation that since you were paying a company for the vehicle in what appeared to be a normal business transaction that you were doing so legitamately. You would have to give it back, but you had no criminal intent. If they paid $30 a month to a service that let them download music, like many other web music companies do, it is not unreasonable to think you are doing so legally, and most likely a jury will back that up.
As for hauling people away for child endangerment for letting their kids surf the internet? I can think of things 100 times worse they will see on primetime television. It is pretty funny that people have a complete meltdown over kids seeing reproduction, but no problem with shows that depict violence as the most frequent and effective way of solving problems, and wholesale slaughter or humiliation (reality shows) as entertainment.
You might want to read some of the less press release like interviews with Bush, religious views are his primary guide, or in some cases like the war on (unprofitable) drugs, not backed with any reasoning more securely based than typical religious sentiment. If he looks scary, a lot of his appointees are far works...ugh.
I guess the way I figure it is that simply determining (through some sort of regex checks perhaps?) whether or not something is work related is kosher, but actually listening to entire calls and reading entire emails is an invasion of privacy.
No, that's why a university education can be a negative as well, too much trust in what you are told by a figure in a position of assumed authority. Those of us used to dealing with corporations in the real world know that you have to read the real (legally binding) documents, which show that the SCO Group was bleeding red ink before the Microsoft cash infusion from IP. Their "core business" is 10 years out of date and utterly worthless, the lawsuits are the sole source of income keeping them alive.
I think the problem is your mischaracterization of the opposing view as having "given up and died." For every time I have seen consumer pressure succeed, I have seen it fail a dozen times. When up against major pressure from multiple segments of the entertainment and software industries, a boycott by a small group of consumers does not matter. Their strategy is to only bite off small rights each time, leaving not enough buyers concerned to risk the _major_ inconvenience of a boycott of one of the two BIOS manufacturers.
I plan to speak, but I plan to do so through my elected representatives. It is their job to protect our rights when the marketplace fails to do so. Where will my money be noticed more, the dollars a very small group of consumers spends on a competing product to be written off as "acceptable losses," or the money saved by not buying and donating that money to back a change in the laws. The corporations long ago started buying our freedoms, and rather than begging for the company to lease them to me, I would rather fight on the same battlefield and buy them back myself.
I have given up hope, hope that the system of government here will stand up for me. However, while I work locally for systemic reforms that will bring government back under the control of the people, I donate money within the current system to make sure I don't loose any more rights in the meantime.
The only way "voting with your dollars" makes a difference in the current market is pooling money to lease a Senator. All other uses of the term are, in the majority of cases, wishful thinking.
How is it an error in judgement to assume that a hot drink is served at a reasonable temperature? It was 190 degrees! This is not, repeat NOT, a normal temperature for any hot drink served at the _vast_ majority of resteraunts worldwide. This is a temp that _no human being_ could safely drink liquid at. Would it also be an "error in judgement" to assume that the next can of Coke I buy does not contain a level of acid that would eat through my clothing instantly if spilled?
Most people have trouble affording medical insurance, now they should have to ensure against companies selling dangerous products, against all industry standards. Oh, and I doubt that millions of people "love" their coffee, yuck!
Thank goodness people like you likes aren't in charge in this country (yet).
Yes, thank goodness we have "your kind" in charge instead, who have created so many "crimes" that we have a jail population that would make Stalin blush, and have brought back the disappearance of someone with no charges, to a place beyond the reach of US courts or civil rights, with no record of their existance. Boy, I feel safer already.
Did you also notice that as storage space becomes cheaper, there tend to appear newer media formats that require more space to store? By the time the disk space approaches zero for DVD's, some new format will have come along that requires a much larger amount of space to store, even with a lossy format.
The other factor is how much time and hassle is it worth to copy a DVD, when at $10 it is far easier for most to just buy the thing and not have to worry about the major hassle of trying to view beautiful movies on a PC, which is usually not very adequate to the task. For $10 you get a permanent format with multiple disks, usable on much higher quality home AV hardware, with almost zero effort. Why bother with ripping it?
I'm sorry, but I call BS. CDs have been $15 as long as I can remember.
You either shop in really strange places, or are really young. I can remember not too long ago when the average CD was $10-$12, and most of the good ones (or popular ones) these days are more likely $17-$18.
You must be new to the US. Are you suggesting that congress only uses the commerce clause when there is commerce involved? The commerce clause has become such a big loophole that it has swallowed the 9th and 10th amendments whole.
If you would stop assuming, you would see that I only posted one disagreeance. There are several things in which I think she is absolutely wrong about. Had the discussions gone beyond her feelings of "corporate $$$" than I would be inclined to offer them there.
I was assuming nothing. You gave only one point of disagreement, if dismissing the entire viewpoint of a person based on the dislike of a single word can be dignified with that term, and I responded as if that was the main point of contention. You gave no further arguments to indicate that there were others, so what was I assuming?
It's easy for you to think I'm ignorant and pompous, because you disagree with what I say. If you agreed, I would be a "free thinker" and a bunch of other things. Yes, you too are a hypocrite just like everybody else.
Hmm, so I should stop assuming, but you get to make absurd and insulting statements with no basis whatsoever in what I have said? There is no circumstance or viewpoint that anyone could hold that would make me consider petty attacks over spelling, grammar, punctuation, or a single colloquialism to be an example of a "free thinker." This is a fairly petty attempt to paint anyone who you don't agree with as a misguided partisan, and is a pathetic attempt to detract from my statements by trying to impart false motives to me.
Or perhaps it's people who are commenting on what was given as "answers" and people expressing their distaste for those answers. I expect to be treated like an adult, and she fell very short on that expectation. If you feel that makes me an elitist pompous twit, that's your issue.
Yes, I expect proper grammar and spelling from those running for public office.
Yes, I expect mature conversations from those running for public office.
Fine and dandy, but a lot more of us expect someone running for public office to be excellant at communicating. Communication is the art of making yourself and your views clear to your target audience. When speaking to the group represented on Slashdot, her responses were entirely in keeping with the common styles of speech, common terms, and colloquial terms in use with that group. She was very effective in communicating. Her website speaks in a much more mature fashion, completely devoid of those oddities used in the Slashdot interview, appropriate for communication with a more general audience. What you want to hear is someone doing an interview on MTV that speaks like they are writing for National Review.
Have you ever observed how many politicians pick up the term y'all, or even worse, all'y'all, when campaigning in certain areas of the country? That is no different than the use of $$$ in the Slashdot community. It is different than using the word "dollars" because it carries with it the connotation of greed and impropriety. If you listen carefully at meetings of the Rotary Club, multilevel marketing groups, or the US Senate, you will hear many similar terms. Each group has a certain number of "in jokes" and words that carry different meanings within their ranks, and serve to assist communication on topics dear to them and to differentiate them from outsiders. As long as these terms are not used outside that group, their usage is entirely appropriate.
No, I do not expect anyone that frequents Slashdot to satisfy either of those criterias.
You are aware that the plural of criteria does not gain an "s" on the end?;)
"Oh? You mean nothing is 100% secure? You mean Linux has more monthly than Windows? People need to get off their high horse and gain some perspective."
Ahh, and now everyone who has ever had training in selecting comparable sample sets is laughing their asses off at you...
Try taking a few courses in statistics or symbolic logic, then come back.
Slashdot Mirror
There are no Justin Timberlake action figures.
Oh, how I wish that were true...
It well could. The VW Golf diesel gets around 50-55 MPG. Load it with biodiesel and you've got a winner.
Just like all those people that BY LAW will get paid overtime. Wait, they don't. If you own enough politicians, the law is irrelevant, especially one so poorly defined and badly enforced.
Actually, since neither of those fall under the definition of the slippery slope, I guess you aren't pissed off after all ;)
A slippery slope is when someone claims that one thing will lead to a chain of increasingly unacceptable outcomes, therefore the original action is unacceptable. An example would be: if we decriminalize marijuana, then everyone will smoke it, then they'll move to crack, then they'll all become crack whores and die of AIDS.
You are correct that his examples are so dissimilar that they are not related to the original argument, why does everyone immediately go to examples that involve killing people?
Hey, when Mono gets beyond being a bare implementation of the CLI and C#, and has the full set of Microsoft libraries with 100% compatibility, let me know. Until then, it is nothing more than a cute toy in the eyes of business.
So you would, obviously, not object if you were fined $5000 for, say, buying a chicken after dark? In some states, that is still on the books. There is no reasonable way that any normal citizen would know that would be illegal, but they should still be liable because "it is against the law?" The old ignorance of the law is no excuse bit may be a cute trueism, but real laws (at least the ones with fairly harsh penalties) usually require at least some level of criminal intent and a judge or jury will usually slap down conviction on a violation a "reasonable man" would not have felt to be illegal.
This is fairly similar to how stolen merchandise is handled. If you buy a $2000 TV out of the back of a truck for $50, or unlimited music for $0.97 a month (there is a scam site claiming that!), you should be smart enough to figure out that it is not a legitimate deal, and are liable for receipt of stolen property. If you buy that TV for a normal price from a merchant, and there are many legitimate music sites offering listening for $20-$30, and it later turns out to be stolen, you only have to return the property, but you have no liability for buying stolen merchandise, and may even have the right to recover the money you paid from whoever sold it to you. In this case, they didn't even know the songs were saved, they were using it as internet radio, at what seems like a fairly normal price for that kind of a service. With Microsoft including internet radio with Windows, and a set of songs you can download, their beliefs were not that unreasonable.
No, it's called copyright infringement, a technical violation that is not at all obvious to a very large segment of the US population. Lots of people don't see any difference at all between listening to the radio, internet radio with Windows Media Player, and what many see as internet radio with Kazaa. Who was hoping for smart readers, but can't even get the terminology right? This isn't only emotional fluff, this is pointing out how silly it is to expect 12 year olds to have any idea of the difference between those three ways of listening when the differences are (to the average person) very small and petty.
You do realize that a "recent" PC costs all of around $200, that's brand new with a 20 GB hard drive, enough for plenty of music. That is hardly beyond saving for, even below the poverty line, or more likely a gift to the family from a better off relation.
Yes, it is just fine that someone on public housing spends a very small amount to have some entertainment and diversion in their life. If they can spend a less than most people spend on coffee in a couple of weeks to get entertainment whenever they want, great! This shows some good financial sense, instead of buying $20 CD's or going to $10 movies, and it gets their kids a machine to study on, and for their parents to use for very inexpensive vocational education.
Are "explicit lyrics" OK, depends on the family. Believe it or not, there are a lot of parents that see far more significant threats to their children than harsh language. Why is it that we worry so much about children hearing the "f word", but so little doing anything about the constant verbal and physical abuse at school?
Ignorance of the law is not an absolute defense, but it can be considered as a reason to let someone off the hook if the violation is overly technical, not the case here, but there are some laws where a jury would never convict someone because none of them would have thought it was a violation either. That is one of the benefits of a jury system. Ignorance of a device is not the issue, reasonable belief is. If you buy a car at a car lot, then it later turns out to be stolen, you can't be charged for the theft. You had a reasonable expectation that since you were paying a company for the vehicle in what appeared to be a normal business transaction that you were doing so legitamately. You would have to give it back, but you had no criminal intent. If they paid $30 a month to a service that let them download music, like many other web music companies do, it is not unreasonable to think you are doing so legally, and most likely a jury will back that up.
As for hauling people away for child endangerment for letting their kids surf the internet? I can think of things 100 times worse they will see on primetime television. It is pretty funny that people have a complete meltdown over kids seeing reproduction, but no problem with shows that depict violence as the most frequent and effective way of solving problems, and wholesale slaughter or humiliation (reality shows) as entertainment.
You might want to read some of the less press release like interviews with Bush, religious views are his primary guide, or in some cases like the war on (unprofitable) drugs, not backed with any reasoning more securely based than typical religious sentiment. If he looks scary, a lot of his appointees are far works...ugh.
I guess the way I figure it is that simply determining (through some sort of regex checks perhaps?) whether or not something is work related is kosher, but actually listening to entire calls and reading entire emails is an invasion of privacy.
No, that's why a university education can be a negative as well, too much trust in what you are told by a figure in a position of assumed authority. Those of us used to dealing with corporations in the real world know that you have to read the real (legally binding) documents, which show that the SCO Group was bleeding red ink before the Microsoft cash infusion from IP. Their "core business" is 10 years out of date and utterly worthless, the lawsuits are the sole source of income keeping them alive.
I think the problem is your mischaracterization of the opposing view as having "given up and died." For every time I have seen consumer pressure succeed, I have seen it fail a dozen times. When up against major pressure from multiple segments of the entertainment and software industries, a boycott by a small group of consumers does not matter. Their strategy is to only bite off small rights each time, leaving not enough buyers concerned to risk the _major_ inconvenience of a boycott of one of the two BIOS manufacturers.
I plan to speak, but I plan to do so through my elected representatives. It is their job to protect our rights when the marketplace fails to do so. Where will my money be noticed more, the dollars a very small group of consumers spends on a competing product to be written off as "acceptable losses," or the money saved by not buying and donating that money to back a change in the laws. The corporations long ago started buying our freedoms, and rather than begging for the company to lease them to me, I would rather fight on the same battlefield and buy them back myself.
I have given up hope, hope that the system of government here will stand up for me. However, while I work locally for systemic reforms that will bring government back under the control of the people, I donate money within the current system to make sure I don't loose any more rights in the meantime.
The only way "voting with your dollars" makes a difference in the current market is pooling money to lease a Senator. All other uses of the term are, in the majority of cases, wishful thinking.
You boycott, I'll bribe a senator. Care to bet which one gets results? ;)
How is it an error in judgement to assume that a hot drink is served at a reasonable temperature? It was 190 degrees! This is not, repeat NOT, a normal temperature for any hot drink served at the _vast_ majority of resteraunts worldwide. This is a temp that _no human being_ could safely drink liquid at. Would it also be an "error in judgement" to assume that the next can of Coke I buy does not contain a level of acid that would eat through my clothing instantly if spilled?
Most people have trouble affording medical insurance, now they should have to ensure against companies selling dangerous products, against all industry standards. Oh, and I doubt that millions of people "love" their coffee, yuck!
To run rules on existing mailboxes, check out formail. It comes with most Linux distros, and can be used to re-run procmail rules on mbox mailboxes.
Of course, if Microsoft did that, the entire open source community would probably feel about the same way some Mac users feel about VirtualPC....
Geez, I just start relaxing at the end of the night, and you have to remind me of this...evil I say!
Thank goodness people like you likes aren't in charge in this country (yet).
Yes, thank goodness we have "your kind" in charge instead, who have created so many "crimes" that we have a jail population that would make Stalin blush, and have brought back the disappearance of someone with no charges, to a place beyond the reach of US courts or civil rights, with no record of their existance. Boy, I feel safer already.
Did you also notice that as storage space becomes cheaper, there tend to appear newer media formats that require more space to store? By the time the disk space approaches zero for DVD's, some new format will have come along that requires a much larger amount of space to store, even with a lossy format.
The other factor is how much time and hassle is it worth to copy a DVD, when at $10 it is far easier for most to just buy the thing and not have to worry about the major hassle of trying to view beautiful movies on a PC, which is usually not very adequate to the task. For $10 you get a permanent format with multiple disks, usable on much higher quality home AV hardware, with almost zero effort. Why bother with ripping it?
Darn right she does. Remember: money can't buy love, but it can get a whole lot of people willing to fake it for you ;)
I'm sorry, but I call BS. CDs have been $15 as long as I can remember.
You either shop in really strange places, or are really young. I can remember not too long ago when the average CD was $10-$12, and most of the good ones (or popular ones) these days are more likely $17-$18.
Man, I don't want to live in your town. $10 for a used DVD is a _good_ price? Most places I shop, I can get new ones for that, of recent releases too.
You must be new to the US. Are you suggesting that congress only uses the commerce clause when there is commerce involved? The commerce clause has become such a big loophole that it has swallowed the 9th and 10th amendments whole.
If you would stop assuming, you would see that I only posted one disagreeance. There are several things in which I think she is absolutely wrong about. Had the discussions gone beyond her feelings of "corporate $$$" than I would be inclined to offer them there.
I was assuming nothing. You gave only one point of disagreement, if dismissing the entire viewpoint of a person based on the dislike of a single word can be dignified with that term, and I responded as if that was the main point of contention. You gave no further arguments to indicate that there were others, so what was I assuming?
It's easy for you to think I'm ignorant and pompous, because you disagree with what I say. If you agreed, I would be a "free thinker" and a bunch of other things. Yes, you too are a hypocrite just like everybody else.
Hmm, so I should stop assuming, but you get to make absurd and insulting statements with no basis whatsoever in what I have said? There is no circumstance or viewpoint that anyone could hold that would make me consider petty attacks over spelling, grammar, punctuation, or a single colloquialism to be an example of a "free thinker." This is a fairly petty attempt to paint anyone who you don't agree with as a misguided partisan, and is a pathetic attempt to detract from my statements by trying to impart false motives to me.
Or perhaps it's people who are commenting on what was given as "answers" and people expressing their distaste for those answers. I expect to be treated like an adult, and she fell very short on that expectation. If you feel that makes me an elitist pompous twit, that's your issue. Yes, I expect proper grammar and spelling from those running for public office. Yes, I expect mature conversations from those running for public office.
Fine and dandy, but a lot more of us expect someone running for public office to be excellant at communicating. Communication is the art of making yourself and your views clear to your target audience. When speaking to the group represented on Slashdot, her responses were entirely in keeping with the common styles of speech, common terms, and colloquial terms in use with that group. She was very effective in communicating. Her website speaks in a much more mature fashion, completely devoid of those oddities used in the Slashdot interview, appropriate for communication with a more general audience. What you want to hear is someone doing an interview on MTV that speaks like they are writing for National Review.
Have you ever observed how many politicians pick up the term y'all, or even worse, all'y'all, when campaigning in certain areas of the country? That is no different than the use of $$$ in the Slashdot community. It is different than using the word "dollars" because it carries with it the connotation of greed and impropriety. If you listen carefully at meetings of the Rotary Club, multilevel marketing groups, or the US Senate, you will hear many similar terms. Each group has a certain number of "in jokes" and words that carry different meanings within their ranks, and serve to assist communication on topics dear to them and to differentiate them from outsiders. As long as these terms are not used outside that group, their usage is entirely appropriate.
No, I do not expect anyone that frequents Slashdot to satisfy either of those criterias.
You are aware that the plural of criteria does not gain an "s" on the end? ;)
"Oh? You mean nothing is 100% secure? You mean Linux has more monthly than Windows? People need to get off their high horse and gain some perspective."
Ahh, and now everyone who has ever had training in selecting comparable sample sets is laughing their asses off at you...
Try taking a few courses in statistics or symbolic logic, then come back.