Yes, that's an excellent question, and I agree with another respondent that there is no really good answer, due to the actions (or in this case inactions) of the industry which produces the content.
For me, I'm not too interested in TV, and I let most shows go by. I hear about new shows when my friends mention them, but that is rare. And the shows I do watch, I hate commercials, so I try to get them on DVD.
For me, I *AM* interested in music, and I still have the same problem. I don't listen to radio ever and I have great difficulty hearing today's new good music. I have to ask my friends a lot, I listen to a few music podcasts, and I take a look at the "recommended" music on recommendation sites, based on my previous preferences.
But still, what a pain in the ass. I truly wish that I could listen to radio and watch TV without feeling like a retarded lemming, wide-eyed like the guy in Clockwork Orange. I would watch a lot more on services like iTunes, but the content is about one order of magnitude too expensive. There's no way I'd pay two dollars to watch one episode of a TV show, but I would pay twenty cents for each of ten, so I'm waiting for those prices to drop, and meanwhile I pirate some things.
So, again, damn I wish the content industry didn't make it so fricking difficult to watch their stuff and pay for it. We could have had a click-to-pay revolution in 1994 if the industry had taken the reins instead of dragging their feet.
I compared the outrageous suggested responses to global warming, to the outrageous historical examples of bad responses to other perceived crises. Neither the Crusades nor the Salem Witchcraft Trials nor undermining the modern economy in response to warm weather is reasonable or judicious -- all of them are outrageous. All of them are based on hysteria, hyperbole, and ignorance. So my comparison was apt.
You, on the other hand, are apparently trying to divide the historical outrages from the current outrage, which perhaps you don't think is outrageous at all.
I agree completely. When I look back at history, I'm really glad people took a proactive stance instead of letting certain things get out of hand! For instance, by nipping witchcraft in the bud, the good people of Salem, Massachusetts saved us all from eternal damnation. Also, thank God we undertook the Crusades and definitively crushed our enemies, because otherwise we might have a downright hostile relationship with the Muslim world. And remember those Luddites who destroyed the weaving looms, they saved us from a future where all our cloth is made by machines instead of by humans, the right and proper way. I could go on and on and on with how much I agree with you!
Yes, I am deeply thankful that our ancestors had such keen insight in predicting the future, and I welcome our current opportunity to uphold this grand human tradition.
Yes, thankfully laws are more like a high-level scripting language, interpreted inside a sandbox which can heuristically decide how to handle situations where the program logic produces exceptions; we call that sandbox the Court system. In fact the heuristics employ a learning algorithm called stare decisis. Because of stare decisis, the heuristics should become better and better over time, but some rogue hacker keeps hotpatching the system code, causing new exceptions; we call that hacker Congress.
Shall I go on? See our system code also interfaces with a legacy system called common law...
Don't be so hard on him. I use Eclipse, and I do know what MyEclipse is, and have used it, but I have never called release software "GA", and have never use "l18n" as shorthand for "internationalization". Furthermore, I am not familiar with this Web Tools Project, though it sounds like something I better look up, since that's what I do -- use Eclipse to build web stuff. (Hey, I use whatever tool my boss tells me to use, but maybe he missed a good one.)
Anyway, the mods were right, you were +5 Informative, if maybe -1 Haughty.
Critics could never decide whether Macs were weak because they were game machines, or because they weren't. As a non-gamer, to me games are a non-issue, but I definitely understand that if you like to game, you buy the computer you can game on, no bones about it. On the other hand, somehow that was a big liability in the Mac, back when they were game machines.
Still, games and business apps aren't the reasons people buy Macs, or don't. Macintosh is the hippie of American computers. Some people are hippies, some people are squares, and squares don't like hippies. This was true since the beginning, not just because of the new Apple commercials. Mac wouldn't be Mac if it were the popular choice, and hippies wouldn't be hippies if there weren't the minority.
I'm in the market for a used Mac laptop, and the ones from two generations ago are still selling for $1000 on eBay. Personally, I've never re-sold a computer, but lots of people do, and unfortunately for me, it seems Macs retain quite a bit of value, if they are cared for (and I've also never taken good care of a computer).
You just ignored his whole point. You were likely wrong when you were being a pain in Best Buy's ass.
When I got my gmail address, I never used it, I was just saving it for later. I did that for a year, literally never using it for any reason, and during that time I got maybe a half dozen emails, all spam, on that address. And this wasn't even a name that could be dictionary attacked, like BestBuy@, it was my initials and name, so it must have been brute attacked.
Unless, of course, Google sold my email address, as you presumed Best Buy did.
What does that even mean, "visible from all inhabited places on earth"? First of all, I live in Juneau, Alaska, a place which is very much so inhabited (okay, not *very* much so, but certainly inhabited), but isn't going to see the eclipse. Moreover, the west coast of the United States, inhabited by more than thirty million people, won't see it either.
Alaska represent! I'll be yawning during this eclipse. Someone email me a picture.
Perhaps I misunderstood. I thought the post above said that multiple bidders offered to run the lab, which would mean booting Sandia wouldn't lead to a closure of the lab, merely to a change of management. I don't know how deep the security problem at Sandia is, but even if the problem were small, it nevertheless led to a gigantic breech, so it doesn't seem to matter if it's "just one guy". But, perhaps I misunderstand the situation.
The stories in the Book of Mormon, or the Bible, or any other revealed source, may or may not be True (True, in the modern capital-T sense of the word), but they are certainly not scientific, in that they are not based on evidence and are not testable. All beliefs are based on faith, even science believers faithfully believe that the scientific stories they are told are true, but for those of us who limit our faith to scientific theories, revealed sources are unacceptable sources.
But, I reiterate, that leaves open the possibility that the story from the Book of Mormon is the true history of the world, either revealed to humans or miraculously guessed right by a prophet or very lucky man. Still, if so, then the story would be testable. In the specific case of the population of the Americas by so-called lost tribes of Israel, there might be a variety of possible tests, such as DNA tests to compare Native Americans to Jews -- and, in fact, exactly that test was performed not too long ago, and unfortunately for the Mormon faithful, the tests did not bear out the Mormon story.
It is still possible that the story is True, but not only is it non-scientific, so far it hasn't even stood up to scientific tests. Future science will continue to examine the issue, until scientists are satisfied that they have sufficiently shown the story to be true or false, but until the time when there is some evidence supporting it, please understand why scientific minds reject the story.
I stopped reading after you suggested that software patents have stopped technological progress. I wonder whether the rest of your comment was also hyperbolic claptrap? I guess I'll never know.
PS we have more "innovation and advancement of science and technology" than ever in history, so clearly software patents aren't stopping that.
I agree with what you said. It's true, there may be cops patrolling that street, but not at the right time, or not enough cops.
However, police officers take a professional oath not only to enforce the law, but to obey it themselves, and actually to go further than that and be upstanding citizens in general. That's not just an oath, it's reasonable expectation we put upon those we hire to enforce the law. Thus, the police officer's speeding was more egregious than the speeding of a non-officer.
Also, the abuse of power wasn't that the cop was speeding with impunity -- although, if a cop breaks the law just because he can, that probably would be an abuse of power -- the abuse was trying to intimidate the citizens. He used his status as a police officer to try to bully the people who caught him doing something he shouldn't have been doing.
Finally, even though it is possible that there is insufficient personnel to handle the speeders in the Sipples' neighborhood, there is nothing in the story to suggest that is true, and in fact we might assume that there is enough personnel, since one particular cop had plenty of time to cruise around speeding not just once, but many times.
I conclude with another statement that speed limits are too low, and that ticketing slight-speeders is a waste, like arresting pot smokers.
Dude, I hate to point out the obvious, but for the amount you are willing to spend, you can get a nice ultralight ultrathin laptop and put all the software you wanted onto it. The device you want exists, and as a bonus you get a whole laptop instead of just an eBook reader.
I assume you only mean some government officials. I would say anyone elected is fair game, any cop is okay, and anyone with executive authority (meter maids, beach patrols, people who give out tickets). But, of course, the vast majority of government workers are just private schmucks with govy jobs. If you were a phone jockey at Health And Social Services, you wouldn't want some dickwad antigovernment revolutionary beefing your deskspace with his cameraphone.
You probably make that distinction between 'officials' and 'workers'.
Totally agreed brother. Really, the problem is the law -- speed limits set too low. You can't blame the cops for obeying and enforcing the speed limit -- that's their darn job. You also can't blame people for doing the limit when a cop is around, because they are acting in reasonable self interest. The problem is the law, speed limits should be set higher, or should be gradated toward the fast lane.
However, you CAN blame people who, when they see a cop nearby, slow down to WAY below the limit. WTF is with that?
But fuck don't get me started on driving behavior that makes me crazy. After living in Las Vegas (even worse drivers than Boston or Chicago), I moved to Juneau, Alaska. Since our road system doesn't connect to your road system, I don't have to content with "your" drivers, and drivers here seem to be okay. Also, it's nice to walk to work instead of driving. Shit, man, driving is for the birds.
Rodney King kicked and otherwise assaulted police officers that night. That doesn't make it okay for thirty cops to stand around kicking him when he's down, but it's essential context to their behavior.
That kid in the library did something similar. before refusing to comply with reasonable orders ("leave the library, you aren't allowed to be here"), he physically resisted the officer who tried to physically remove him. With that context, the officers' actions become fairly reasonable. A better solution would be to cuff the kid and drag him out of the library by his feet, but I imagine the officers were trained to taze anyone resisting them, not to do the cuff-and-drag.
In other incidents, more than in those two, police have certainly been abusive dicks.
Are these folks willing to pay more in taxes to get more police on the streets to help THEIR particular problem?
Did anyone say anything about there being too few cops on the street? The people in the article (the Sipples) did have a problem with speeders, but the context of the rest of the story suggests that there are in fact cops patrolling their street, but that the cops weren't doing anything about the speeders.
Now, I'm a libertarian, so perhaps I would suggest that the speed limit might be too low and that the Sipples need to stfu and keep their kid out of the street, but if society agreed on a speed limit -- and it did -- and if society hired some police to enforce that limit -- and it did -- and if they hired enough police to patrol that very street -- AND IT DID -- then my estimation of the situation is that the police were not only breaking the law, and were not only abusing their powers (in that watchdogging the police is not "stalking" by any stretch of the imagination), but were also negligently failing to do their job by enforcing the law.
It is certainly reasonable to fire any person from their job for failing to perform it satisfactorily, and it is even more clearly reasonable to do so with a safety officer; but this officer didn't just fail to do his job, he also broke the law (as well as his oath to obey and uphold the law), and most importantly, he abused his lawful power. Any of those transgressions are sufficient for terminating the officer; all three together might warrant criminal prosecution.
I disagree. I side with the way the law currently stands, which includes a "reasonability" test. With this test in mind, the question becomes whether or not the person providing the good/service has reasonable expectation to know that the good/service will be used illegally. Obviously, this is a big grey area, but it is good enough to assign legal obligation. For instance, if a guy with a gunshot wound and a bag full of cash runs out of a bank and gets in your cab, and asks you (not forces you at gunpoint; merely asks you) to drive him across state lines, then you have a reasonable obligation to say no, or in some way not help in the bank robbery.
That is pretty close to your example of a mechanic helping get a fast car into the hands of a criminal. That one might be in the gray area, and might hinge on how clear it is that the guy was going to commit a crime. Another good example is head shops, which sell products often used for illicit drug use: Clinton winked at head shops and let them sell bongs to stoners; but Bush wouldn't do that, he enforced the law and closed down a lot of head shops all over the country, saying they had a reasonable expectation that bongs weren't being used as "tobacco water pipes".
In the case at hand, Google would also be in the gray area, and the question is whether they had a reasonable expectation that ThePirageBay.ORG was engaging in illegal activity. From what little I know of this case, I am inclined to give Google the benefit of the doubt, especially considering ThePirateBay claims they don't break any of their local laws. But, I do object to your suggestion that ancillary consideration given to a criminal by a knowing third party does not or should not attach responsibility onto that third party -- it does, as it should.
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Is MCDonalds made a TurdBurger and nobody bought it, they'd soon cut it from the menu.
Oh, come on, man, the Arch Deluxe wasn't that bad.
Yes, that's an excellent question, and I agree with another respondent that there is no really good answer, due to the actions (or in this case inactions) of the industry which produces the content.
For me, I'm not too interested in TV, and I let most shows go by. I hear about new shows when my friends mention them, but that is rare. And the shows I do watch, I hate commercials, so I try to get them on DVD.
For me, I *AM* interested in music, and I still have the same problem. I don't listen to radio ever and I have great difficulty hearing today's new good music. I have to ask my friends a lot, I listen to a few music podcasts, and I take a look at the "recommended" music on recommendation sites, based on my previous preferences.
But still, what a pain in the ass. I truly wish that I could listen to radio and watch TV without feeling like a retarded lemming, wide-eyed like the guy in Clockwork Orange. I would watch a lot more on services like iTunes, but the content is about one order of magnitude too expensive. There's no way I'd pay two dollars to watch one episode of a TV show, but I would pay twenty cents for each of ten, so I'm waiting for those prices to drop, and meanwhile I pirate some things.
So, again, damn I wish the content industry didn't make it so fricking difficult to watch their stuff and pay for it. We could have had a click-to-pay revolution in 1994 if the industry had taken the reins instead of dragging their feet.
I compared the outrageous suggested responses to global warming, to the outrageous historical examples of bad responses to other perceived crises. Neither the Crusades nor the Salem Witchcraft Trials nor undermining the modern economy in response to warm weather is reasonable or judicious -- all of them are outrageous. All of them are based on hysteria, hyperbole, and ignorance. So my comparison was apt.
You, on the other hand, are apparently trying to divide the historical outrages from the current outrage, which perhaps you don't think is outrageous at all.
Nope. Are you seriously saying that the proposed responses to global warming are "judicious"? (Are you kidding me?)
I agree completely. When I look back at history, I'm really glad people took a proactive stance instead of letting certain things get out of hand! For instance, by nipping witchcraft in the bud, the good people of Salem, Massachusetts saved us all from eternal damnation. Also, thank God we undertook the Crusades and definitively crushed our enemies, because otherwise we might have a downright hostile relationship with the Muslim world. And remember those Luddites who destroyed the weaving looms, they saved us from a future where all our cloth is made by machines instead of by humans, the right and proper way. I could go on and on and on with how much I agree with you!
Yes, I am deeply thankful that our ancestors had such keen insight in predicting the future, and I welcome our current opportunity to uphold this grand human tradition.
Yes, thankfully laws are more like a high-level scripting language, interpreted inside a sandbox which can heuristically decide how to handle situations where the program logic produces exceptions; we call that sandbox the Court system. In fact the heuristics employ a learning algorithm called stare decisis . Because of stare decisis, the heuristics should become better and better over time, but some rogue hacker keeps hotpatching the system code, causing new exceptions; we call that hacker Congress.
Shall I go on? See our system code also interfaces with a legacy system called common law...
Don't be so hard on him. I use Eclipse, and I do know what MyEclipse is, and have used it, but I have never called release software "GA", and have never use "l18n" as shorthand for "internationalization". Furthermore, I am not familiar with this Web Tools Project, though it sounds like something I better look up, since that's what I do -- use Eclipse to build web stuff. (Hey, I use whatever tool my boss tells me to use, but maybe he missed a good one.)
Anyway, the mods were right, you were +5 Informative, if maybe -1 Haughty.
Critics could never decide whether Macs were weak because they were game machines, or because they weren't. As a non-gamer, to me games are a non-issue, but I definitely understand that if you like to game, you buy the computer you can game on, no bones about it. On the other hand, somehow that was a big liability in the Mac, back when they were game machines.
Still, games and business apps aren't the reasons people buy Macs, or don't. Macintosh is the hippie of American computers. Some people are hippies, some people are squares, and squares don't like hippies. This was true since the beginning, not just because of the new Apple commercials. Mac wouldn't be Mac if it were the popular choice, and hippies wouldn't be hippies if there weren't the minority.
I'm in the market for a used Mac laptop, and the ones from two generations ago are still selling for $1000 on eBay. Personally, I've never re-sold a computer, but lots of people do, and unfortunately for me, it seems Macs retain quite a bit of value, if they are cared for (and I've also never taken good care of a computer).
Man, you just totally hosed the person who has blah@gmail.com as his email address. And so did I!
You just ignored his whole point. You were likely wrong when you were being a pain in Best Buy's ass.
When I got my gmail address, I never used it, I was just saving it for later. I did that for a year, literally never using it for any reason, and during that time I got maybe a half dozen emails, all spam, on that address. And this wasn't even a name that could be dictionary attacked, like BestBuy@, it was my initials and name, so it must have been brute attacked.
Unless, of course, Google sold my email address, as you presumed Best Buy did.
Apparently it isn't stupid enough to discourage you.
The worst thing is that you should have just done the in-store pickup thing the first time. That's the real forehead slapper.
What does that even mean, "visible from all inhabited places on earth"? First of all, I live in Juneau, Alaska, a place which is very much so inhabited (okay, not *very* much so, but certainly inhabited), but isn't going to see the eclipse. Moreover, the west coast of the United States, inhabited by more than thirty million people, won't see it either.
Alaska represent! I'll be yawning during this eclipse. Someone email me a picture.
Perhaps I misunderstood. I thought the post above said that multiple bidders offered to run the lab, which would mean booting Sandia wouldn't lead to a closure of the lab, merely to a change of management. I don't know how deep the security problem at Sandia is, but even if the problem were small, it nevertheless led to a gigantic breech, so it doesn't seem to matter if it's "just one guy". But, perhaps I misunderstand the situation.
How much you wanna bet the government renews their contract?
The stories in the Book of Mormon, or the Bible, or any other revealed source, may or may not be True (True, in the modern capital-T sense of the word), but they are certainly not scientific, in that they are not based on evidence and are not testable. All beliefs are based on faith, even science believers faithfully believe that the scientific stories they are told are true, but for those of us who limit our faith to scientific theories, revealed sources are unacceptable sources.
But, I reiterate, that leaves open the possibility that the story from the Book of Mormon is the true history of the world, either revealed to humans or miraculously guessed right by a prophet or very lucky man. Still, if so, then the story would be testable. In the specific case of the population of the Americas by so-called lost tribes of Israel, there might be a variety of possible tests, such as DNA tests to compare Native Americans to Jews -- and, in fact, exactly that test was performed not too long ago, and unfortunately for the Mormon faithful, the tests did not bear out the Mormon story.
It is still possible that the story is True, but not only is it non-scientific, so far it hasn't even stood up to scientific tests. Future science will continue to examine the issue, until scientists are satisfied that they have sufficiently shown the story to be true or false, but until the time when there is some evidence supporting it, please understand why scientific minds reject the story.
I stopped reading after you suggested that software patents have stopped technological progress. I wonder whether the rest of your comment was also hyperbolic claptrap? I guess I'll never know.
PS we have more "innovation and advancement of science and technology" than ever in history, so clearly software patents aren't stopping that.
got any links to the posts?
I agree with what you said. It's true, there may be cops patrolling that street, but not at the right time, or not enough cops.
However, police officers take a professional oath not only to enforce the law, but to obey it themselves, and actually to go further than that and be upstanding citizens in general. That's not just an oath, it's reasonable expectation we put upon those we hire to enforce the law. Thus, the police officer's speeding was more egregious than the speeding of a non-officer.
Also, the abuse of power wasn't that the cop was speeding with impunity -- although, if a cop breaks the law just because he can, that probably would be an abuse of power -- the abuse was trying to intimidate the citizens. He used his status as a police officer to try to bully the people who caught him doing something he shouldn't have been doing.
Finally, even though it is possible that there is insufficient personnel to handle the speeders in the Sipples' neighborhood, there is nothing in the story to suggest that is true, and in fact we might assume that there is enough personnel, since one particular cop had plenty of time to cruise around speeding not just once, but many times.
I conclude with another statement that speed limits are too low, and that ticketing slight-speeders is a waste, like arresting pot smokers.
Dude, I hate to point out the obvious, but for the amount you are willing to spend, you can get a nice ultralight ultrathin laptop and put all the software you wanted onto it. The device you want exists, and as a bonus you get a whole laptop instead of just an eBook reader.
I assume you only mean some government officials. I would say anyone elected is fair game, any cop is okay, and anyone with executive authority (meter maids, beach patrols, people who give out tickets). But, of course, the vast majority of government workers are just private schmucks with govy jobs. If you were a phone jockey at Health And Social Services, you wouldn't want some dickwad antigovernment revolutionary beefing your deskspace with his cameraphone.
You probably make that distinction between 'officials' and 'workers'.
Totally agreed brother. Really, the problem is the law -- speed limits set too low. You can't blame the cops for obeying and enforcing the speed limit -- that's their darn job. You also can't blame people for doing the limit when a cop is around, because they are acting in reasonable self interest. The problem is the law, speed limits should be set higher, or should be gradated toward the fast lane.
However, you CAN blame people who, when they see a cop nearby, slow down to WAY below the limit. WTF is with that?
But fuck don't get me started on driving behavior that makes me crazy. After living in Las Vegas (even worse drivers than Boston or Chicago), I moved to Juneau, Alaska. Since our road system doesn't connect to your road system, I don't have to content with "your" drivers, and drivers here seem to be okay. Also, it's nice to walk to work instead of driving. Shit, man, driving is for the birds.
Rodney King kicked and otherwise assaulted police officers that night. That doesn't make it okay for thirty cops to stand around kicking him when he's down, but it's essential context to their behavior.
That kid in the library did something similar. before refusing to comply with reasonable orders ("leave the library, you aren't allowed to be here"), he physically resisted the officer who tried to physically remove him. With that context, the officers' actions become fairly reasonable. A better solution would be to cuff the kid and drag him out of the library by his feet, but I imagine the officers were trained to taze anyone resisting them, not to do the cuff-and-drag.
In other incidents, more than in those two, police have certainly been abusive dicks.
Are these folks willing to pay more in taxes to get more police on the streets to help THEIR particular problem?
Did anyone say anything about there being too few cops on the street? The people in the article (the Sipples) did have a problem with speeders, but the context of the rest of the story suggests that there are in fact cops patrolling their street, but that the cops weren't doing anything about the speeders.
Now, I'm a libertarian, so perhaps I would suggest that the speed limit might be too low and that the Sipples need to stfu and keep their kid out of the street, but if society agreed on a speed limit -- and it did -- and if society hired some police to enforce that limit -- and it did -- and if they hired enough police to patrol that very street -- AND IT DID -- then my estimation of the situation is that the police were not only breaking the law, and were not only abusing their powers (in that watchdogging the police is not "stalking" by any stretch of the imagination), but were also negligently failing to do their job by enforcing the law.
It is certainly reasonable to fire any person from their job for failing to perform it satisfactorily, and it is even more clearly reasonable to do so with a safety officer; but this officer didn't just fail to do his job, he also broke the law (as well as his oath to obey and uphold the law), and most importantly, he abused his lawful power. Any of those transgressions are sufficient for terminating the officer; all three together might warrant criminal prosecution.
I disagree. I side with the way the law currently stands, which includes a "reasonability" test. With this test in mind, the question becomes whether or not the person providing the good/service has reasonable expectation to know that the good/service will be used illegally. Obviously, this is a big grey area, but it is good enough to assign legal obligation. For instance, if a guy with a gunshot wound and a bag full of cash runs out of a bank and gets in your cab, and asks you (not forces you at gunpoint; merely asks you) to drive him across state lines, then you have a reasonable obligation to say no, or in some way not help in the bank robbery.
That is pretty close to your example of a mechanic helping get a fast car into the hands of a criminal. That one might be in the gray area, and might hinge on how clear it is that the guy was going to commit a crime. Another good example is head shops, which sell products often used for illicit drug use: Clinton winked at head shops and let them sell bongs to stoners; but Bush wouldn't do that, he enforced the law and closed down a lot of head shops all over the country, saying they had a reasonable expectation that bongs weren't being used as "tobacco water pipes".
In the case at hand, Google would also be in the gray area, and the question is whether they had a reasonable expectation that ThePirageBay.ORG was engaging in illegal activity. From what little I know of this case, I am inclined to give Google the benefit of the doubt, especially considering ThePirateBay claims they don't break any of their local laws. But, I do object to your suggestion that ancillary consideration given to a criminal by a knowing third party does not or should not attach responsibility onto that third party -- it does, as it should.