No it's not. Calculators are bought by two kinds of people.
1) Students. Students can't use calculators with softkeys.
2) Professionals. Most professionals want calculators that actually work, not some Gameboy hack designed by Joe Shmoe that comes up with 2.99998 when asked to calculate the square root of nine. (They also want calculators with tactile feedback, long battery life, and the ability to work after being dropped a couple of times.)
[G]eneralization is cheaper than specific hardware
That's why my PC is cheaper than my XBOX. I mean, that's why my Palm is cheaper than my remote control. I mean, that's why my Hitachi 4GB Microdrive is cheaper than my iPod Mini. Hmm.
Anyway, calculators just in terms of hardware are cheap. But, er, good luck with that.
IANAL, but for that very reason you mention, there's usually some kind of limit on how much can be collected from you as a result of a wage garnishment. For example in New York State, the rule is: an income execution may take the lesser of 25% of disposable earnings or 10% of gross earnings. In Texas, one can't get a wage garnishment at all or go after any personal property up to $60K. Furthermore, there are limitations of time in collecting a judgment as well. So, in fact, as tens of millions of people will attest to, you can still raise your kids, and even send them to school. You'll just have really bad credit for a while.
This is drifting into irrelevance, but to respond to your comment:
1) Forgive me for phrasing myself poorly from the outset. I did not mean to get into the minefield of semantics a la Slashdot. In the context of this discussion I readily concede the commonly held definition of "civil disobedience." My issue was not with that, but with the notion the original poster put forward that the only appropriate response to an unjust law (other than obeying it) is civil disobedience. I disagree. I think in practice people simply outright disobey antiquated, unjust, and pointless laws all the time, without any civil-disobedience style expectation of possible punishment. People customarily practice anarchic disobedience, if you will, as opposed to the "civil" variety. Look, maybe you violated copyright law last week when you forwarded a funny jpeg to a friend. You don't expect to face a huge copyright violation suit for doing it, and if you did find yourself facing such a lawsuit, I predict that you would (wisely) try your best to avoid any penalty whatsoever. Civil disobedience simply wouldn't come into play.
2) Of course you are correct that the Founding Fathers were rebels, and did not practice civil disobedience. That was my point. They served as another reason why I disagreed with the original poster's dichotomy. It's far too simple for our complicated world. There are all sorts of levels to obedience from eager compliance to grudging acceptance to sabotage to total refusal to war.
I'm sorry, but you can't redfine the meaning of words and phrases to suit you own circumstances.
Well, yes you can, if enough people come to agree with you. Many of the events in today's Olympics weren't even really considered sports 50 years ago. Beach volleyball? Rhythmic gymnastics? Obviously there are some limits -- you still have to be invited to the Olympics to be considered an Olympic athlete, but the boundaries of who gets invited have changed considerably over the years, due precisely to people who wanted to redefine what it means to be an Olympic athlete. So perhaps civil disobedience at one time meant risking extended imprisonment or death. But I don't think that's what most people expect from their experience now. I'd wager the majority of people practicing "civil disobedience" in protests and such are hoping, at the end of the day, that their transgressions will be wiped clean or made de minimus. Someone trading mp3s is asking, I think, for no more.
In any event, it was the original poster who brought up civil disobedience. I don't seriously think that people who are trading mp3s are practicing civil disobedience any more than I think the same of people who are running the light. What I really have issue with is the false dichotomy being raised, "Either obey the law or practice civil disobedience" as if those are the only two options. In the real world, disobey the law and hope you don't get caught - and if you do get caught try to avoid being penalized is by far the most prevalent way that people oppose a law they don't wish to obey, whether it comes to pissing in an alley, dropping a candy wrapper, cheating on taxes, making an illegal turn, insider trading, perjury or murder. Each and every one of us has done illegal things and done our best to avoid the punishment facing us. Anyone who claims they expect to be caught and punished every time they break the law is frankly lying.
Do it and take your lumps. That may mean losing your house when the RIAA sues you into oblivion. Too bad- you're engaged in civil disobedience, and that has consquences.
Really, why must people be forced to abide by this "rule" that civil disobedience means you have to accept the punishment for some bogus crime? Would it have been more noble or correct if George Washington et al. had meekly submitted themselves to be executed for treason? Should all those slaves who escaped from their plantations have willingly surrendered themselves and gone back to face the lash to fit these immutable laws of protest that you are subscribing to?
Being allowed to the pants off of people for garden variety mp3 sharing is a perversion of justice, everybody knows it, and whether or not the act itself is improper, average citizens shouldn't have to fear facing bankruptcy for doing it. No-one expects to be bankrupted for running a red light, and in my book that's a far more dangerous offense, although equally ubiquitous.
Money is not the solution to feeding starving peoples. They don't need money, they need food. And there's already more than enough of that to go around. The reason why they don't have that food has very little to do with them not being able to afford it, and very much to do with their own leaders deciding that guns and palaces are a greater priority than food, roads, supplies. Look at China. It went from having some of the worst famines in history to being a net food exporter in just one generation. How? Not by handouts from the West, but by deciding it could no longer allow political ideology to rigidly get in the way commonsense economic policies.
Even worse, under a defend-it-or-lose-it regime they wouldn't have to actually sue all the infringers. They could selectively grant royalty-free licenses to their friends and sue the crap out of their foes (i.e. open source vendors).
Part of the problem is that nobody was told TG was doing this. It wasn't advertised that they were tagging your downloads. So if you download something with the reasonable expectation of a degree of anonymity, which turns out not to be the case, then I think you have a gripe.
Furthermore, resorting to the "if you don't like it, don't buy it" line can get a bit old after a while. What happens when all commercial software gets tagged? When all CPUs and BIOSes get tagged? Or in the real world, too, when all your purchases get RF tagged? How about when it becomes illegal for purchases to be untagged?
That text-to-speech proggy could come in handy for making up your own custom wacky answering machine messages. You never know, Slashdotters -- callers might actually believe you've got a live-in girlfriend!
They should've done something simple, like limit the Starter Edition to accessing 256MB RAM and 40GB HDD space. That would give people a way to see how Windows really works, but give them grounds for upgrading the OS when they upgrade their system.
Imagine: "We have detected a 160GB hard drive on your system. In order to use the full power of your computer, we recommend that you upgrade your software. Would you like to unlock the full power of Windows XP Home Edition for only RS3000?"
Then they could upgrade right online. Or if they don't have credit, walk down to the store and buy an XPHE serial number (hopefully) without having to reinstall their entire system. And MS needn't worry about KeyGens. The fact that the person has bought XP Starter in the first place means they're probably looking to be honest.
The purpose of IE was to simply to stop Java or some other non-MS technology from becoming a standardized computer interface. By integrating IE into the operating system (and into Money, Encarta, etc.) MS makes sure that the average consumer must continue to use the Windows cashcow for the "best" home computing experience. If everybody switches to Firefox which is platform-agnostic, then people will feel comfortable switching to Linux for their daily computing tasks. (Hence the second-tier defenses, Office and DirectX/Xbox, but that's a different story.)
Let's be clear about this. Farscape's ratings were limited because a lot of people just couldn't get past the "muppets in space" look. SG-1's stroke of genius was in not making Thor a regular.
This is not about linking. This is about Ziff-Davis (or probably a bot) catching pocketpctools.com (over-)quoting their article. They claim it was plagiarism, ppctools claims it was fair use.
Note that pocketpctools.com still links to the article in dispute at the end of their statement. So linking is obviously not the issue.
Why would it matter if the harder work involves working for someone else, or working for yourself?
It matters because if you work for yourself, you're creating at least one job, probably more. And if there are more jobs than people to take them, salaries go up for everyone.
As the neoliberal policies continue to decimate the job base and increase the unemployed
I find it interesting that few IT people complained when each one of our jobs were effectively replacing dozens of secretaries, accountants, and whole departments of low level paper pushers. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, we expect the world to cry over our misfortune.
Come now. Nobody said that every unemployed IT person has to start his or her own business in order to work again. Merely that some people will start businesses, and in the process, employ others including some of the other formerly unemployed. And it's beyond obvious to everyone here, I think, that not every new business that needs IT workers is an IT business per se. Start a shipping company? You need computers for inventory control. Start a mail order company? You need computers for billing. Start an manufacturing company, you need computers for CAD/CAM/CAE. This isn't abstract economic theory. This is what actually happens in the real world.
That was interesting.* I just realized I haven't watched TV all week. I'm seriously considering doing just as you've suggested. The only thing holding me back is the propensity my post office has for making me go there and wait on line to pick up even the smallest of packages.
*It sometimes seems a shame that we can't moderate and comment in the same topic. But what if, by commenting, it made our moderation results visible? (E.g.: your post would have under it, "this comment was modded interesting by xigxag".) Doesn't that seem an acceptable compromise position?
suppose I was one of the 131K SW engs who got laid off this past 3 months, and I take your advice to just "work my ass off". But you seemt o forget that there are also 131K other Software Engineers also laid off, who you say should do the same thing--just work their ass off.
I find it interesting that you would quote exactly what he wrote, and then baldly mischaracterize his statement in the rest of your comment. He most pointedly did not say "just 'work my ass off.'" He said, "taking risks and working your ass off."
In other words, he's not claiming that you and the 131K should all merely compete against each other for the same corporate jobs by working hard. He's saying you have the ability to take a risk and start up your own business. And that if you are successful, you will not only employ yourself but in all likelihood several of the 131K unemployed tech workers. Jobs don't just exist in the ether. Someone had to create them. And the next someone could be you. And if it's not you, some of your fellow unemployed group will have an entrepreneurial drive and will create jobs. It'sl likely that when all is said and done, more jobs will be created than were outsourced or destroyed. That is how the economy grows. How do you think all those computer jobs came about in the first place?
Okay, so we've established that this game requires a substantial rig to play at anything approaching reasonable rates. The kind of box that would definitely come with a DVD-ROM player or more likely, an 8X DVD Burner. So why, in 2004, are we still forced to load up three CDs?
Maybe you are unaware of this, but going after counterfeiters is one of the main missions of the FBI. They do this sort of thing all the time. (See this pdf.) I'm not sure who you think the "real criminals" are that they ought to be chasing after , but as far as the US government is concerned, anyone who tries to short-circuit the capitalist machine is a "real criminal," much more so than a mere murderer or rapist. So feel free to write your congressman and tell him that, "as a taxpayer" you think the government should stop protecting corporate interests. But, frankly, that sort of demand is laughable when you're talking about a country that has on multiple occasions invaded foreign countries on behalf of just one corporation.
The point, though, is that bipedalism could just as easily been passed down *socially*, rather than genetically. So your little snipe about lamarckism was just silly and narrow minded.
Since you seem hellbent on trading insults instead of ideas, there seems to be little point in continuing this, so I'll conclude by saying this: I very much doubt that a major anatomical trait such as bipedalism would be passed on by social effects as opposed to straightforward genetic mutation and natural selection. However, the idea is not completely without precedent, and I would not dismiss it out of hand. See the Baldwin Effect.
Slashdot Mirror
The end is nigh.
No it's not. Calculators are bought by two kinds of people.
1) Students. Students can't use calculators with softkeys.
2) Professionals. Most professionals want calculators that actually work, not some Gameboy hack designed by Joe Shmoe that comes up with 2.99998 when asked to calculate the square root of nine. (They also want calculators with tactile feedback, long battery life, and the ability to work after being dropped a couple of times.)
[G]eneralization is cheaper than specific hardware
That's why my PC is cheaper than my XBOX. I mean, that's why my Palm is cheaper than my remote control. I mean, that's why my Hitachi 4GB Microdrive is cheaper than my iPod Mini. Hmm.
Anyway, calculators just in terms of hardware are cheap. But, er, good luck with that.
IANAL, but for that very reason you mention, there's usually some kind of limit on how much can be collected from you as a result of a wage garnishment. For example in New York State, the rule is: an income execution may take the lesser of 25% of disposable earnings or 10% of gross earnings. In Texas, one can't get a wage garnishment at all or go after any personal property up to $60K. Furthermore, there are limitations of time in collecting a judgment as well. So, in fact, as tens of millions of people will attest to, you can still raise your kids, and even send them to school. You'll just have really bad credit for a while.
This is drifting into irrelevance, but to respond to your comment:
1) Forgive me for phrasing myself poorly from the outset. I did not mean to get into the minefield of semantics a la Slashdot. In the context of this discussion I readily concede the commonly held definition of "civil disobedience." My issue was not with that, but with the notion the original poster put forward that the only appropriate response to an unjust law (other than obeying it) is civil disobedience. I disagree. I think in practice people simply outright disobey antiquated, unjust, and pointless laws all the time, without any civil-disobedience style expectation of possible punishment. People customarily practice anarchic disobedience, if you will, as opposed to the "civil" variety. Look, maybe you violated copyright law last week when you forwarded a funny jpeg to a friend. You don't expect to face a huge copyright violation suit for doing it, and if you did find yourself facing such a lawsuit, I predict that you would (wisely) try your best to avoid any penalty whatsoever. Civil disobedience simply wouldn't come into play.
2) Of course you are correct that the Founding Fathers were rebels, and did not practice civil disobedience. That was my point. They served as another reason why I disagreed with the original poster's dichotomy. It's far too simple for our complicated world. There are all sorts of levels to obedience from eager compliance to grudging acceptance to sabotage to total refusal to war.
I'm sorry, but you can't redfine the meaning of words and phrases to suit you own circumstances.
Well, yes you can, if enough people come to agree with you. Many of the events in today's Olympics weren't even really considered sports 50 years ago. Beach volleyball? Rhythmic gymnastics? Obviously there are some limits -- you still have to be invited to the Olympics to be considered an Olympic athlete, but the boundaries of who gets invited have changed considerably over the years, due precisely to people who wanted to redefine what it means to be an Olympic athlete. So perhaps civil disobedience at one time meant risking extended imprisonment or death. But I don't think that's what most people expect from their experience now. I'd wager the majority of people practicing "civil disobedience" in protests and such are hoping, at the end of the day, that their transgressions will be wiped clean or made de minimus. Someone trading mp3s is asking, I think, for no more.
In any event, it was the original poster who brought up civil disobedience. I don't seriously think that people who are trading mp3s are practicing civil disobedience any more than I think the same of people who are running the light. What I really have issue with is the false dichotomy being raised, "Either obey the law or practice civil disobedience" as if those are the only two options. In the real world, disobey the law and hope you don't get caught - and if you do get caught try to avoid being penalized is by far the most prevalent way that people oppose a law they don't wish to obey, whether it comes to pissing in an alley, dropping a candy wrapper, cheating on taxes, making an illegal turn, insider trading, perjury or murder. Each and every one of us has done illegal things and done our best to avoid the punishment facing us. Anyone who claims they expect to be caught and punished every time they break the law is frankly lying.
Do it and take your lumps. That may mean losing your house when the RIAA sues you into oblivion. Too bad- you're engaged in civil disobedience, and that has consquences.
Really, why must people be forced to abide by this "rule" that civil disobedience means you have to accept the punishment for some bogus crime? Would it have been more noble or correct if George Washington et al. had meekly submitted themselves to be executed for treason? Should all those slaves who escaped from their plantations have willingly surrendered themselves and gone back to face the lash to fit these immutable laws of protest that you are subscribing to?
Being allowed to the pants off of people for garden variety mp3 sharing is a perversion of justice, everybody knows it, and whether or not the act itself is improper, average citizens shouldn't have to fear facing bankruptcy for doing it. No-one expects to be bankrupted for running a red light, and in my book that's a far more dangerous offense, although equally ubiquitous.
Money is not the solution to feeding starving peoples. They don't need money, they need food. And there's already more than enough of that to go around. The reason why they don't have that food has very little to do with them not being able to afford it, and very much to do with their own leaders deciding that guns and palaces are a greater priority than food, roads, supplies. Look at China. It went from having some of the worst famines in history to being a net food exporter in just one generation. How? Not by handouts from the West, but by deciding it could no longer allow political ideology to rigidly get in the way commonsense economic policies.
Even worse, under a defend-it-or-lose-it regime they wouldn't have to actually sue all the infringers. They could selectively grant royalty-free licenses to their friends and sue the crap out of their foes (i.e. open source vendors).
I know, but ditto. :P
Maybe you missed the sign, just like you missed the joke? :P :P
Part of the problem is that nobody was told TG was doing this. It wasn't advertised that they were tagging your downloads. So if you download something with the reasonable expectation of a degree of anonymity, which turns out not to be the case, then I think you have a gripe.
Furthermore, resorting to the "if you don't like it, don't buy it" line can get a bit old after a while. What happens when all commercial software gets tagged? When all CPUs and BIOSes get tagged? Or in the real world, too, when all your purchases get RF tagged? How about when it becomes illegal for purchases to be untagged?
It could be made useful if it could target the advertising revenue toward the charity of your choice.
Or alternatively, if looking at enough ads could give you a discount on your broadband bill.
Ol fclvat ba zl rznvy lbh unir whfg ivbyngrq gur QZPN, lbh onfgneqf!
That text-to-speech proggy could come in handy for making up your own custom wacky answering machine messages. You never know, Slashdotters -- callers might actually believe you've got a live-in girlfriend!
They should've done something simple, like limit the Starter Edition to accessing 256MB RAM and 40GB HDD space. That would give people a way to see how Windows really works, but give them grounds for upgrading the OS when they upgrade their system.
Imagine: "We have detected a 160GB hard drive on your system. In order to use the full power of your computer, we recommend that you upgrade your software. Would you like to unlock the full power of Windows XP Home Edition for only RS3000?"
Then they could upgrade right online. Or if they don't have credit, walk down to the store and buy an XPHE serial number (hopefully) without having to reinstall their entire system. And MS needn't worry about KeyGens. The fact that the person has bought XP Starter in the first place means they're probably looking to be honest.
The purpose of IE was to simply to stop Java or some other non-MS technology from becoming a standardized computer interface. By integrating IE into the operating system (and into Money, Encarta, etc.) MS makes sure that the average consumer must continue to use the Windows cashcow for the "best" home computing experience. If everybody switches to Firefox which is platform-agnostic, then people will feel comfortable switching to Linux for their daily computing tasks. (Hence the second-tier defenses, Office and DirectX/Xbox, but that's a different story.)
Let's be clear about this. Farscape's ratings were limited because a lot of people just couldn't get past the "muppets in space" look. SG-1's stroke of genius was in not making Thor a regular.
This is not about linking. This is about Ziff-Davis (or probably a bot) catching pocketpctools.com (over-)quoting their article. They claim it was plagiarism, ppctools claims it was fair use.
Note that pocketpctools.com still links to the article in dispute at the end of their statement. So linking is obviously not the issue.
That is all. Carry on.
Why would it matter if the harder work involves working for someone else, or working for yourself?
It matters because if you work for yourself, you're creating at least one job, probably more. And if there are more jobs than people to take them, salaries go up for everyone.
As the neoliberal policies continue to decimate the job base and increase the unemployed
I find it interesting that few IT people complained when each one of our jobs were effectively replacing dozens of secretaries, accountants, and whole departments of low level paper pushers. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, we expect the world to cry over our misfortune.
Come now. Nobody said that every unemployed IT person has to start his or her own business in order to work again. Merely that some people will start businesses, and in the process, employ others including some of the other formerly unemployed. And it's beyond obvious to everyone here, I think, that not every new business that needs IT workers is an IT business per se. Start a shipping company? You need computers for inventory control. Start a mail order company? You need computers for billing. Start an manufacturing company, you need computers for CAD/CAM/CAE. This isn't abstract economic theory. This is what actually happens in the real world.
That was interesting.* I just realized I haven't watched TV all week. I'm seriously considering doing just as you've suggested. The only thing holding me back is the propensity my post office has for making me go there and wait on line to pick up even the smallest of packages.
*It sometimes seems a shame that we can't moderate and comment in the same topic. But what if, by commenting, it made our moderation results visible? (E.g.: your post would have under it, "this comment was modded interesting by xigxag".) Doesn't that seem an acceptable compromise position?
suppose I was one of the 131K SW engs who got laid off this past 3 months, and I take your advice to just "work my ass off". But you seemt o forget that there are also 131K other Software Engineers also laid off, who you say should do the same thing--just work their ass off.
I find it interesting that you would quote exactly what he wrote, and then baldly mischaracterize his statement in the rest of your comment. He most pointedly did not say "just 'work my ass off.'" He said, "taking risks and working your ass off."
In other words, he's not claiming that you and the 131K should all merely compete against each other for the same corporate jobs by working hard. He's saying you have the ability to take a risk and start up your own business. And that if you are successful, you will not only employ yourself but in all likelihood several of the 131K unemployed tech workers. Jobs don't just exist in the ether. Someone had to create them. And the next someone could be you. And if it's not you, some of your fellow unemployed group will have an entrepreneurial drive and will create jobs. It'sl likely that when all is said and done, more jobs will be created than were outsourced or destroyed. That is how the economy grows. How do you think all those computer jobs came about in the first place?
Okay, so we've established that this game requires a substantial rig to play at anything approaching reasonable rates. The kind of box that would definitely come with a DVD-ROM player or more likely, an 8X DVD Burner. So why, in 2004, are we still forced to load up three CDs?
On Slashdot, the US is like the Microsoft of nations. Any gratuitous slam, no matter how patently ridiculous, is greeted here with naked glee.
FWIW, Crocodile Dundee is well-known for being the most popular Australian film of all time. So don't blame that one on the seppos.
Maybe you are unaware of this, but going after counterfeiters is one of the main missions of the FBI. They do this sort of thing all the time. (See this pdf.) I'm not sure who you think the "real criminals" are that they ought to be chasing after , but as far as the US government is concerned, anyone who tries to short-circuit the capitalist machine is a "real criminal," much more so than a mere murderer or rapist. So feel free to write your congressman and tell him that, "as a taxpayer" you think the government should stop protecting corporate interests. But, frankly, that sort of demand is laughable when you're talking about a country that has on multiple occasions invaded foreign countries on behalf of just one corporation.
The point, though, is that bipedalism could just as easily been passed down *socially*, rather than genetically. So your little snipe about lamarckism was just silly and narrow minded.
Since you seem hellbent on trading insults instead of ideas, there seems to be little point in continuing this, so I'll conclude by saying this: I very much doubt that a major anatomical trait such as bipedalism would be passed on by social effects as opposed to straightforward genetic mutation and natural selection. However, the idea is not completely without precedent, and I would not dismiss it out of hand. See the Baldwin Effect.