A simple statement of fact (the AC being an asshat) is NOT flambait. Here's the GP:
Newspapers clear ads before printing. Radio stations clear ads before airing them, and so do tv stations. Why should websites be any different?
To which the AC said:
What part of "The ad used a server-side setting and targetted only those outside the US, to prevent LiveJournal's own checks from noticing it. LiveJournal has apologized for the ad and slow response." did you not read?
The AC is quite clearly being a jackass because having the ads on a third party server have nothing to do with Livejournals ultimate responsibility for them, as jrumney stated:
Do newspapers clear an ad, then send their paper off to the advertiser with blank sections in pages for the advertiser to fill in with whatever they want?
They have not protested one Democrat-run military since the draft ended (under a Repubican administration, I might add).
Because the Democrats haven't run and spent on them like fikkin idiots.
Where were the protests against Haiti, Bosnia
Haiti and Bosnia were international as well as bipartisan efforts. And while Clinton, like Bush, Cheney, Rummsfield, Rove, etc (ah, remember when military service was terribly important to the GOP...when it was Clinton running against Gorge H. W. Bush) did not serve, he certainally listened to those who did.
Several reasons. Capitalism naturally concentrates wealth in fewer and fewer hands, so progressive income taxes are necessary to bring some of that cash back down. As to why the rich should care about "subsidising" in socieity, socieity is where the rich find their workers and customers. The better society is, the better workers and the more customers they'll have.
The Apple batteries didn't just "bulge," they're defective,
Duh, no one is disputing that. Unless Apple is refusing to replace the bulging batteries, this is a red herring.
and there's lots of them
Please, this is the Internet. "Lots of them" could mean a dozen out of a hundred thousand.
They fail in a short period of time after "bulging" and don't have the maxiumum battery usage during "bulging." How is this not news?
For the same reason that every single hardware defect is not "news": they happen all the time. A couple years ago, Dell had some crappy DVD drives in their Optiplexes that wouldn't close after being opened. There was no front page story on Slashdot about it a week after the first photo was posted. Same thing when they had some defective video cards, or problems with the 40 gigabyte Maxtor hard drives. You ship a sizable number of units of any product and you're going to have some defects. If this were some other company than Apple, we wouldn't even hear about this until it reached lawsuit/recall stage, and maybe not even then.
And as for "annoying anti-fanboys" - you mean "regular people?"
"Regular people" do not snobbishly complain about bais where no bias actually exists, unless you happen to be a Republican.
I was considering purchasing a macbook and now am going to reconsider until they get the kinks out.
If you wait until everything is defect free, you'll never buy anything, because a percentage of any product will be defective.
Also much more convenient than that, is having a built-in battery that gets 14-20 hours charge, that you can replace yourself if it goes wrong. Or even the novelty of being able to have several batteries spare if you run out of charge on the move.
Hardly. The batteries are small, expensive and easy to lose. If something "goes wrong" during your warranty Apple will replace it. 14-20 hours is a full days use for most of the population, and unless you're backpacking it will see you to a spot where you can recharge.
Also before some whiny bastard says it, don't give me that 'nice form-factor' bullshit,
Pfft. It's not just looks, adding a removeable battery is going to make the unit larger and less durable, unless you make it larger still.
the Creative Jukebox Zen Micro and many other MP3 players look just as good as an iPod IMHO and manage to have a replaceable rechargable battery.
Right, which is why they have 90% of the market. Not.
I'm not certain if you are trying to imply I'm an anti-Mac fanboy. I also don't really know why that would be relevant in a discussion about an iPod.
Obviously it was a response to your own question to the parent: One certainly wonders why this has become such a personal crusade for you.
I don't see how having the same battery which is removable is less desirable than having that battery built-in and not (easily) user replaceable.
Well let's see: they're expensive, small, easy to lose, and don't hold a charge very well, so you have to keep recharging your spares. It's also going to increase the size of the unit and make it less durable, unless they make it larger still. 12+ hours is enough to get most people by between places they can recharge their iPods. And if not, there are external battery packs available that use AA batteries and plug into the dock.
Nonsense. Anger doens not == "rancor". Anger is a perfectly normal reaction to outrageous behavior. Anger is what gained the U.S. independance over a century earlier than Canada. It is anger than forces corrupt politicians from office, and keeps our cops honest.
So there's little reason the think the police broke the law, or if it was illegal that they did so knowing it was illegal: the article simply doesn't cover that.
As the librarian pointed out in the article, and as other posters here have pointed out, in New Jersey police have to use a supoena to get library records. Skipping the sopoena might have resulted in a faster arrest, but it would have also resulted in the evidence being thrown out of court.
Getting a subpoena costs time, money, and political capital.
Political capital? How do you figure? And in any case, once again: too damn bad. The fourth and fifth amendments are not negociable when the cops are "in a hurry". It's their job to prove that they need access to information, not the citizens job to prove that it should be kept private.
Sure it's more understandable, but that's not the point. The point is that the AC was being an asshat:
"What part of "The ad used a server-side setting and targetted only those outside the US, to prevent LiveJournal's own checks from noticing it. LiveJournal has apologized for the ad and slow response." did you not read?
What part of "The ad used a server-side setting and targetted only those outside the US, to prevent LiveJournal's own checks from noticing it. LiveJournal has apologized for the ad and slow response." did you not read?
No, what part of
"Newspapers clear ads before printing. Radio stations clear ads before airing them, and so do tv stations. Why should websites be any different?"
did YOU not understand? Saying the ads went through a third party server is completely irrelevant to his point. And as this poster pointed out, this is part of Livejournal's service, so they are the first ones responsible for their customers using livejournal.com and being infected with malware.
One certainly wonders why this has become such a personal crusade for you.
Because anti-Mac fanboys are just as stupid and annoying as pro-Mac fanboys, and are a lot more common.
Convenience my friend, simple consumer convenience.
Exactly. Having to swap out batteries all the time is a huge pain in the ass. And that's with rechargables. If you're talking regular alkaline batteries, it because a huge, expensive pain in the ass.
Having a built in battery that get's 14-20 hours per charge is much more convenient, yes.
No, if it happened to Dell or Compaq, we'd still hear about it right here on Slashdot.
Not until it got to recall or serious lawsuit stage, it wouldn't. For a Dell battery problem to make it onto Slashdot, it has to be a bit more catostrophic than "bulging".
The difference is that because it's Apple, Apple fanboys come on and post about how Apple is getting unfair treatment for releasing a shoddy product and people should still love them.
Or the annoying anti-fanboys who pop into EVERY APPLE STORY accusing Slashdot or some poster of pro-Apple bias, without providing any evidience of said bias.
or a cop in a hurry to ask if he or she can get the evidence *without* spending the time calling the judge, spending the political capital and man-hours to get a warrant or subpoena, etc.
Too damn bad. Breaking the law in order to enforce other laws is not only wrong, but stupid. As this librarian stated, if this information had been collected against the law, it might have been thrown out of court.
It's only a problem for me on Windows. Watching TV shows from the iTMS is laggy, escpecially when skipping around in the clip in full screen, and there are audio syncing issues on my 2.14 ghz AMD with 1.5 gigs of ram. On my three year old iBook G3 I don't have any problems.
In most countries, DVD's are DRM encumbered. CSS and region encoding and all that.
I can get a hardcopy that I can easily make a backup copy to use when I travel.
Which you can easily do with all iTMS media. You can burn as many copies of the media as you want; what you are limited to is the number of computers you can watch said media on.
The bugs they were supposed to eat live at the top of the sugar cane, whereas the toads live on the bottom. So not only did they not make a dent in the pest population, they attacked other, sometimes beneficial insects. IIRC, New Zealand also had raccoons introduced so their fur could be harvested, and but they've devastated the native bird population (NZ has the more bird species than anywhere else on the planet).
Apple's dwindling education market share didn't have anything to do with how they keep orphaning their entire user base every 3-4 years and leaving them with little option other than buying all new hardware?
Or whatever lies you pull out of your ass, yes. Apple's minimum requirements for Tiger is the slot loading iMac, released seven years ago. Why don't you try booting up Vista on 7 year old hardware and let us know how well that works for ya.
What's the difference between a cop driving down the street (or using a helicopter) and observing a crime in progress and a cop sitting being the controls of a UAV and observing a crime in progress? One also has to ask what's the difference between obtaining a subpoena to discover the contents of an ATM camera and obtaining the warrante to surveil an area with a UAV? The courts would be involved in the process in some fashion.
Apple's "current success" under Jobs consisted of eight straight years of never selling as many Macs in a year as were sold in 1995
And 8 straight years of profitability, as opposed to what was going in 95 (generally loosing hundredsd of millions).
and selling previously-free OS updates for $130 a pop.
Bullshit. Incremental upgrades are free, just as before. Major updates cost money, just as before.
Jobs improved Apple margins by the simple expedient of ceasing to try to sell more computers, and instead sucking every last available dime out of the user base created under Sculley's management.
More bullshit. Apple was drowning in costly custom parts and dozens of similar models. Moving to off-the shelf parts and reducing the different models to a handful shortened inventory times and saved Apple a lot of money.
You seem to be under the common delusion that marketshare is all that matters in the computer industry. Marketshare by itself is irrelevant - profits are what matter.
Are you saying Apple isn't incompetent? They went from nearly 100% of the educational market down to 5%.
Um, no. Education markets started getting more PC's because schools are perpetually shortchanged for cash, and so need to get cheap computers. And if there's one thing Apple has never been, it's cheap. Oh, and you're thinking general market, not education, where Apple has a lot more than 5%. No, I don't feel like looking, but every few years they swap places with Dell as the largest single supplier of computers to schools.
"This technology could be used to find missing children, search for lost hikers, or survey a fire zone," said Commander Sid Heal, head of the Technology Exploration Project of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.
Or to make flights 100 feet over highways with a laser gun and a telescopic camera. Screw red light cameras - just send an automated plane out over an area with artificially low speed limits and watch the fines come in as the automatically generated and mailed tickets go out by the thousands.
The problem with a lot of traffic law enforcement is that it doesn't have anything to do with enforcing saftey, but with generating revenue for the city/county. Red light cameras usually aren't placed at the intersections with the highest rate of accidents, but rather at ones with high amounts of traffic and low yellow light times.
Not to mention searching private property, since SCOTUS rubber stamped warrantless air searches in 1989. The Bush Administration (deservedly) gets a lot of flack for erroding privacy rights, but the Supreme Court has been eroding the 4th and 5th amendents long before Bush held any office.
"Fud" isn't just about talking down your compeditors product, it usually also involves overselling your own future product (i.e. vaporware), thus the Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. Microsoft continually prattles about how consumers should have more "choice" than Apple's offerings, even though wmv is even more DRM'd and restrictive.
They typical person may have a EV capable commute, but odds are they also make a few trips a year that are outside the range of the car.
So rent or borrow. I'm continually amazed at people who say they buy and drive Ford F-150's year round because they need them twice a year. Are they not aware gas is three bucks a gallon? Borrow a friend's truck and buy him an oil change and a pizza in return. I was in a Toyota dealership recently and the "estimated" fuel costs for a year with a Prius were $637, versus over $1800 for a Highlander SUV. That's $1200 saved for rent and fuel for a camping trip at the lake. If you don't want to go with an expensive tree-hugging hybrid, going with a more fuel efficient vehicle should also save you money up front, too. Accoring to Toyota.com, a basic Corolla sedan (32/41 mpg) will cost you almost $3000 less than a basic Tundra truck (18/22 mpg).
Copyrights aren't to protect "cultural heritage", they're meant to give authors/artists/musicians etc an incentive to create works, as they will have a monopoly over the distribution rights for a limited time, and then be open to the public. The key part here is limited time, which Congress keeps extending every time Mickey Mouse verges on going into the public domain. IMO, these extensions violate both the letter and spirit of the Constitution, and should have been smacked down two or three exensions ago.
Much piracy happens because the media is there and it's easy to get. If all methods of copyright infringment ceased to exist, these industires would not see anything close to $250 billion a year. And in any case, as failure to gain is not a loss, the amount of money lost to piracy is zero. You can't lose what you never had in the first place.
And I wouldn't have gone for the "facism" angle. I would instead have pointed out that the government is supposed to be looking out for the welfare of the people, not corporations.
there was a time when MP3 players did not have navigation menus
Because they didn't need them. If you can only fit 32 songs on your player, having a screen with menus is a bit of a waste of size and money. When your player holds thousands of songs, however, the need for a menu system should be very obvious.
Slashdot Mirror
To which the AC said:
The AC is quite clearly being a jackass because having the ads on a third party server have nothing to do with Livejournals ultimate responsibility for them, as jrumney stated:
They have not protested one Democrat-run military since the draft ended (under a Repubican administration, I might add).
Because the Democrats haven't run and spent on them like fikkin idiots.
Where were the protests against Haiti, Bosnia
Haiti and Bosnia were international as well as bipartisan efforts. And while Clinton, like Bush, Cheney, Rummsfield, Rove, etc (ah, remember when military service was terribly important to the GOP...when it was Clinton running against Gorge H. W. Bush) did not serve, he certainally listened to those who did.
And why should the rich have to subsidise
Several reasons. Capitalism naturally concentrates wealth in fewer and fewer hands, so progressive income taxes are necessary to bring some of that cash back down. As to why the rich should care about "subsidising" in socieity, socieity is where the rich find their workers and customers. The better society is, the better workers and the more customers they'll have.
The Apple batteries didn't just "bulge," they're defective,
Duh, no one is disputing that. Unless Apple is refusing to replace the bulging batteries, this is a red herring.
and there's lots of them
Please, this is the Internet. "Lots of them" could mean a dozen out of a hundred thousand.
They fail in a short period of time after "bulging" and don't have the maxiumum battery usage during "bulging." How is this not news?
For the same reason that every single hardware defect is not "news": they happen all the time. A couple years ago, Dell had some crappy DVD drives in their Optiplexes that wouldn't close after being opened. There was no front page story on Slashdot about it a week after the first photo was posted. Same thing when they had some defective video cards, or problems with the 40 gigabyte Maxtor hard drives. You ship a sizable number of units of any product and you're going to have some defects. If this were some other company than Apple, we wouldn't even hear about this until it reached lawsuit/recall stage, and maybe not even then.
And as for "annoying anti-fanboys" - you mean "regular people?"
"Regular people" do not snobbishly complain about bais where no bias actually exists, unless you happen to be a Republican.
I was considering purchasing a macbook and now am going to reconsider until they get the kinks out.
If you wait until everything is defect free, you'll never buy anything, because a percentage of any product will be defective.
Also much more convenient than that, is having a built-in battery that gets 14-20 hours charge, that you can replace yourself if it goes wrong. Or even the novelty of being able to have several batteries spare if you run out of charge on the move.
Hardly. The batteries are small, expensive and easy to lose. If something "goes wrong" during your warranty Apple will replace it. 14-20 hours is a full days use for most of the population, and unless you're backpacking it will see you to a spot where you can recharge.
Also before some whiny bastard says it, don't give me that 'nice form-factor' bullshit,
Pfft. It's not just looks, adding a removeable battery is going to make the unit larger and less durable, unless you make it larger still.
the Creative Jukebox Zen Micro and many other MP3 players look just as good as an iPod IMHO and manage to have a replaceable rechargable battery.
Right, which is why they have 90% of the market. Not.
Obviously it was a response to your own question to the parent: One certainly wonders why this has become such a personal crusade for you.
Well let's see: they're expensive, small, easy to lose, and don't hold a charge very well, so you have to keep recharging your spares. It's also going to increase the size of the unit and make it less durable, unless they make it larger still. 12+ hours is enough to get most people by between places they can recharge their iPods. And if not, there are external battery packs available that use AA batteries and plug into the dock.
Wow, a real life pussy.
Calm down anyway: your rancor hurts your point.
Nonsense. Anger doens not == "rancor". Anger is a perfectly normal reaction to outrageous behavior. Anger is what gained the U.S. independance over a century earlier than Canada. It is anger than forces corrupt politicians from office, and keeps our cops honest.
So there's little reason the think the police broke the law, or if it was illegal that they did so knowing it was illegal: the article simply doesn't cover that.
As the librarian pointed out in the article, and as other posters here have pointed out, in New Jersey police have to use a supoena to get library records. Skipping the sopoena might have resulted in a faster arrest, but it would have also resulted in the evidence being thrown out of court.
Getting a subpoena costs time, money, and political capital.
Political capital? How do you figure? And in any case, once again: too damn bad. The fourth and fifth amendments are not negociable when the cops are "in a hurry". It's their job to prove that they need access to information, not the citizens job to prove that it should be kept private.
No, what part of
did YOU not understand? Saying the ads went through a third party server is completely irrelevant to his point. And as this poster pointed out, this is part of Livejournal's service, so they are the first ones responsible for their customers using livejournal.com and being infected with malware.
One certainly wonders why this has become such a personal crusade for you.
Because anti-Mac fanboys are just as stupid and annoying as pro-Mac fanboys, and are a lot more common.
Convenience my friend, simple consumer convenience.
Exactly. Having to swap out batteries all the time is a huge pain in the ass. And that's with rechargables. If you're talking regular alkaline batteries, it because a huge, expensive pain in the ass.
Having a built in battery that get's 14-20 hours per charge is much more convenient, yes.
No, if it happened to Dell or Compaq, we'd still hear about it right here on Slashdot.
Not until it got to recall or serious lawsuit stage, it wouldn't. For a Dell battery problem to make it onto Slashdot, it has to be a bit more catostrophic than "bulging".
The difference is that because it's Apple, Apple fanboys come on and post about how Apple is getting unfair treatment for releasing a shoddy product and people should still love them.
Or the annoying anti-fanboys who pop into EVERY APPLE STORY accusing Slashdot or some poster of pro-Apple bias, without providing any evidience of said bias.
Out of curiosity, did you hear that quote before the release of Civ 4?
Calm down here.
No.
It's not unreasonable
Yes, it is.
or a cop in a hurry to ask if he or she can get the evidence *without* spending the time calling the judge, spending the political capital and man-hours to get a warrant or subpoena, etc.
Too damn bad. Breaking the law in order to enforce other laws is not only wrong, but stupid. As this librarian stated, if this information had been collected against the law, it might have been thrown out of court.
PLUS quicktime is a resource hog
It's only a problem for me on Windows. Watching TV shows from the iTMS is laggy, escpecially when skipping around in the clip in full screen, and there are audio syncing issues on my 2.14 ghz AMD with 1.5 gigs of ram. On my three year old iBook G3 I don't have any problems.
Why would I want a DRM encumbered version
In most countries, DVD's are DRM encumbered. CSS and region encoding and all that.
I can get a hardcopy that I can easily make a backup copy to use when I travel.
Which you can easily do with all iTMS media. You can burn as many copies of the media as you want; what you are limited to is the number of computers you can watch said media on.
The bugs they were supposed to eat live at the top of the sugar cane, whereas the toads live on the bottom. So not only did they not make a dent in the pest population, they attacked other, sometimes beneficial insects. IIRC, New Zealand also had raccoons introduced so their fur could be harvested, and but they've devastated the native bird population (NZ has the more bird species than anywhere else on the planet).
Apple's dwindling education market share didn't have anything to do with how they keep orphaning their entire user base every 3-4 years and leaving them with little option other than buying all new hardware?
Or whatever lies you pull out of your ass, yes. Apple's minimum requirements for Tiger is the slot loading iMac, released seven years ago. Why don't you try booting up Vista on 7 year old hardware and let us know how well that works for ya.
What's the difference between a cop driving down the street (or using a helicopter) and observing a crime in progress and a cop sitting being the controls of a UAV and observing a crime in progress? One also has to ask what's the difference between obtaining a subpoena to discover the contents of an ATM camera and obtaining the warrante to surveil an area with a UAV? The courts would be involved in the process in some fashion.
Because, with an aerial vehicle, cops don't need warrants.
Apple's "current success" under Jobs consisted of eight straight years of never selling as many Macs in a year as were sold in 1995
And 8 straight years of profitability, as opposed to what was going in 95 (generally loosing hundredsd of millions).
and selling previously-free OS updates for $130 a pop.
Bullshit. Incremental upgrades are free, just as before. Major updates cost money, just as before.
Jobs improved Apple margins by the simple expedient of ceasing to try to sell more computers, and instead sucking every last available dime out of the user base created under Sculley's management.
More bullshit. Apple was drowning in costly custom parts and dozens of similar models. Moving to off-the shelf parts and reducing the different models to a handful shortened inventory times and saved Apple a lot of money.
You seem to be under the common delusion that marketshare is all that matters in the computer industry. Marketshare by itself is irrelevant - profits are what matter.
Are you saying Apple isn't incompetent? They went from nearly 100% of the educational market down to 5%.
Um, no. Education markets started getting more PC's because schools are perpetually shortchanged for cash, and so need to get cheap computers. And if there's one thing Apple has never been, it's cheap. Oh, and you're thinking general market, not education, where Apple has a lot more than 5%. No, I don't feel like looking, but every few years they swap places with Dell as the largest single supplier of computers to schools.
"This technology could be used to find missing children, search for lost hikers, or survey a fire zone," said Commander Sid Heal, head of the Technology Exploration Project of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.
Or to make flights 100 feet over highways with a laser gun and a telescopic camera. Screw red light cameras - just send an automated plane out over an area with artificially low speed limits and watch the fines come in as the automatically generated and mailed tickets go out by the thousands.
The problem with a lot of traffic law enforcement is that it doesn't have anything to do with enforcing saftey, but with generating revenue for the city/county. Red light cameras usually aren't placed at the intersections with the highest rate of accidents, but rather at ones with high amounts of traffic and low yellow light times.
Not to mention searching private property, since SCOTUS rubber stamped warrantless air searches in 1989. The Bush Administration (deservedly) gets a lot of flack for erroding privacy rights, but the Supreme Court has been eroding the 4th and 5th amendents long before Bush held any office.
"Fud" isn't just about talking down your compeditors product, it usually also involves overselling your own future product (i.e. vaporware), thus the Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. Microsoft continually prattles about how consumers should have more "choice" than Apple's offerings, even though wmv is even more DRM'd and restrictive.
They typical person may have a EV capable commute, but odds are they also make a few trips a year that are outside the range of the car.
So rent or borrow. I'm continually amazed at people who say they buy and drive Ford F-150's year round because they need them twice a year. Are they not aware gas is three bucks a gallon? Borrow a friend's truck and buy him an oil change and a pizza in return. I was in a Toyota dealership recently and the "estimated" fuel costs for a year with a Prius were $637, versus over $1800 for a Highlander SUV. That's $1200 saved for rent and fuel for a camping trip at the lake. If you don't want to go with an expensive tree-hugging hybrid, going with a more fuel efficient vehicle should also save you money up front, too. Accoring to Toyota.com, a basic Corolla sedan (32/41 mpg) will cost you almost $3000 less than a basic Tundra truck (18/22 mpg).
Copyrights aren't to protect "cultural heritage", they're meant to give authors/artists/musicians etc an incentive to create works, as they will have a monopoly over the distribution rights for a limited time, and then be open to the public. The key part here is limited time, which Congress keeps extending every time Mickey Mouse verges on going into the public domain. IMO, these extensions violate both the letter and spirit of the Constitution, and should have been smacked down two or three exensions ago.
Much piracy happens because the media is there and it's easy to get. If all methods of copyright infringment ceased to exist, these industires would not see anything close to $250 billion a year. And in any case, as failure to gain is not a loss, the amount of money lost to piracy is zero. You can't lose what you never had in the first place.
And I wouldn't have gone for the "facism" angle. I would instead have pointed out that the government is supposed to be looking out for the welfare of the people, not corporations.
there was a time when MP3 players did not have navigation menus
Because they didn't need them. If you can only fit 32 songs on your player, having a screen with menus is a bit of a waste of size and money. When your player holds thousands of songs, however, the need for a menu system should be very obvious.