I'm sure any attempt by Sony to prevent second-hand sales will be highly contested in court on the first sale principle. So if they persue this an injunction will be pushed through while it sits in the court.
Automation will not replace human beings. Even if automation can begin doing some of our jobs, there will need to be people to make sure the automation works. They've been using automation in the auto industry for decades, it hasn't cause the extinction of the auto worker. Driverless cars replacing truck drivers? Haha, more like truck drivers sitting behind the wheel of a truck driving on its own making sure things go right. Things break, and without people there to fix them they'll never last.
Yeah, some people seem to think freedom of speech is a very loose thing when it isn't.
But it can be a case where the court does end up accidentally restricting free speech. If the decision is worded in such a way that it opens the door for companies to massively sue anyone who has given them a poor review, then people will be afraid to write anything critical on the internet, and that intrudes on free speech. The judge in this case will have that in the back of his head, as judges do in all libel cases.
I'm certain we've had internet defamation suits in court before. But if not, the judge would really need to be careful how to handle this. On one hand, the internet does not give anyone the right libel another person or company. But a poor review shouldn't always be taken as libel either, or else you pretty much tell people they can't complain when services rendered were poor. You do that and thousands of lawsuits from companies will come up.
As for whether the defendant has the burden of proof or not, they don't in this case. As the case is simply about the review and its affect, the plaintiff has to show that not only was it not true, but that the review itself led to a damaging loss of business. That second part is harder to prove, as he will literally have to find people that will admit in court that they were going to use him but changed their minds directly as a result of that one review alone. And unless every single one of his reviews was stellar, it becomes easy to argue that that one article may not have been the only reason a customer turned away.
1) Either most users of Slashdot are European and don't trust the US, or
2) Most users of Slashdot are American and don't trust the US government's motives.
Either way, makes your conundrum make perfect sense and not hypocrisy. Considering how involved the US government seems to be in every proposed international 'treaty' that would heavily regulate the Internet in the name of 'stopping piracy', can one be faulted for thinking this is just another attempt at ensuring they remain the 'heavy' behind things like shutting down Megaupload, behind trying to get Assange charged with crimes (not to mention what they did to the poor bastard who sent Wikileaks the info in the first place)?
Come on. Anyone with a shredder knows that even if it isn't very good, you have to really make an effort to put information that would cover several lines of a page together into something that is real. And paper flying through the air isn't one of those ways.
Exploits are not new (even if it was a mistake on ArenaNet's end, it is still an exploit) and the punishments for using them are not new either.
Ethics dictates that if you know some act to be wrong, then it would be wrong to perpetuate that act even if you can get away with it.
Argue this all you want, but they were at fault and are lucky they are even getting a second chance.
As for other legal issues, courts have found Terms of Service to be binding and thus we must follow them. If they say that inappropriate conduct can result if an ending of a person's account, then they can do it. Free speech doesn't apply in this case, and even using that as a reason shows a supreme lack of understanding about what free speech is. Free Speech isn't a blanket protection for what you say. You can say whatever you damn please, but that doesn't mean you cannot be punished for saying it.
Anyone else perturbed that a Political Science professor is the one who suggests this? What reason would those who study politics need to support removing algebra from any curriculum? Maybe it is so that the populous is dumbed-down and unable to reason properly for a candidate?
But in truth, I do not know what this guy is talking about. I took the SAT a couple times (once in high school, once while in the service to try to improve my score), and the math section at the time was not even up to the level of algebra. So how is it that he, and others, believe that algebra is causing people to drop out of school? It is so easy to blame just one thing, and as we all grew up with the 'what will I use this for later in life' question, it is easy to blame mathematics. But in reality, kids drop out of school based on a combination of multiple issues. Drugs, bad parenting, learning disabilities, becoming pregnant, etc. Realistically, if there is a subject in schools that can be toned down, it would be English courses. Do we really need to study poetry in depth? Probably not. Besides, advanced math tends to be an elective, meaning those who aren't pursuing a degree in a STEM field typically do not need to take more of it. In other words, there are so many easily studied counters to his argument that it is almost funny.
Remember Fukishima? Their problem was that they didn't go back far enough with their historical data when they designed their tsunami wall. Now, in what amounts to the same thinking, people do not want to overstate any possibility of water levels going too high for the sake of the almighty dollar. So when the ocean levels rise, or a 'once-in-a-lifetime' hurricane swells the sea up high enough, will those who support these lower levels be responsible for the cost?
This shows what the downside to such 'donation-based' funding schemes. The point of making it a donation is that you give someone your money with little or no expectation that you personally receive anything in return. That is how it differs from an investment. In that, you would sign a contract stating what portion you would receive of any profits made. If the project failed, you still had no recourse, but typically your required return would be more than what you put into it (and thus the risk element).
Considering the much smaller number of people who work in the nuclear field compared to, say, fast-food workers, I would say that most people who speak crap out of their behinds have no real clue what they are talking about.
The one thing I dislike sometimes about Slashdot is that people only seem to post personally selected 'quotes'. This is one of those cases. The reactor building does not have "No water". It has water, and that water is at a decent temperature for what it needs to do. The point of the article was that there wasn't as much in there as they thought there would be, meaning that the leak in the building is probably worse, and located lower, than they originally thought. And with less water level means higher radiation levels (as water acts as a partial shield on radiation).
I think what we need to get out of this is that this is for a patent application. 1) It needs to be approved (though it probably will). 2) This does not mean they can make every remote already out there do this.
What its probably intended to accomplish is give Microsoft a way to profit if TV/movie producers decide that they want to cause these charges to occur. Then Microsoft can say 'hey, we already thought of that, pay us money'.
Basing teacher 'performance' on student grades and exam scores is very open to corruption and manipulation. For one, students who do not like their teacher may purposefully underperform in an attempt to get rid of what is actually a good teacher. Such evaluations also unfairly give the view of a good teacher who works with poor performing students, even if the students improved significantly. There have also been many instances of teachers, principals, and even school districts who cheat the system by giving students a leg up on what is on the actual exams. How can we, as parents and tax payers, allows this to be the sole method of determining a teacher's performance?
So what could be done? That is the hard part. Performance reviews are always a subjective matter, which is part of the reason why they were never meant to be seen by the public. In my opinion, school/district/government administrators should have more ability to actually observe performance without the teacher knowing they are being observed. But if test scores continue to become the focus of government and public scorn towards teachers, then an independent review board should be used to assess the reviews in order to incorporate real-life situations into the final assessment.
Hiroshima was hit with an atomic explosion. Fukishima did not have this. Completely different event. Chernobyl didn't even kill nearly this many, and they actually had their reactor explode. There have been ZERO deaths so far. The only certainty is that the CHANCE of cancer in many of the workers will increase. CHANCE is a big word. This isn't a guarantee that they will all get it.
And anti-nuclear activists will always claim that there is a cover-up happening. But maybe you should take a cue from one of the founders of Greenpeace (a big anti-nuke organization) supporting the expansion of nuclear power.
That's BS. The NRC's job is to ensure operators are operating plants safely. When you are at a meltdown situation, you are already beyond that point. The NRC will do its best to advise, but stations themselves have many contigency plans in place should they reach this point. Three Mile Island was the event that prompted that to happen, and we haven't had a meltdown here since. Chernobyl was a big ball of s**t that only proved the US had better procedures, precautions, and design than the Russians. Fukishima, while a problem, generated confusion primarily because TEPSCO didn't want to tarnish its reputation by revealing how bad it was.
No one has 'won' Iowa. This election did not determine anything that matters come convention time. It simply was there for each precint to designate delagates to the county converntions, which happen in a couple months. Then the counties have their votes, and send delagates to the state convention (which I think I read was in JUNE). At that point, the state convention determines who 'wins' the states delagates to the convention. What this means is that if someone drops out of the race between now and the other conventions, the delagates assigned to them Tuesday will change their votes, which again can change any result we think we may already have.
This is why primaries are so much better than caucauses.
So, I can only assume that once Apple does this that Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo will start suing for patent infringement. Apple will somehow win despite it being obvious they are violating patents. Then after Apple sells a $700 console that for some strange reason millions of people buy despite not being any better than anything else, Apple will sue those three for having violated patents it has that really are the same as patents everyone else has and win.
How could anyone realistically believe that there could be a pure a la carte cable setup? Cable companies are charged by the networks PER SUBSCRIBER, not per person who watches the channel. So it wouldn't matter if 100k of 300k watch ESPN, Time Warner would get charged for the 300k. To make a la carte work, Time Warner would have to pass the cost on to only those who pick ESPN in their lineup, meaning that those who would get ESPN would pay more than the $4 it costs Time Warner for that same person. The real solution, in my opinion, would be for cable companies to make more tiers of service (ie 50/100/200 channels), scale the rates their customers pay for the new tiers, then allow us to pick the channels we want in our tier. Because the cost to the subscriber essentially doesn't change much, the company still earns enough to pay the costs to the networks.
There is not clear cut way to respond to this. Providing training to employees to improve their accent so more customers can understand them is a business practice, where not doing so could drive people away from that company. Monitoring teachers to see if their accent meets some vague 'requirement' for maintaining a teaching license is discrimination in its base form, especially as its use in Arizona is targetted at Mexican and South American accents. The first is perfectly acceptable, as the employee can always quit if they do not like it. The second is not.
No, the Russian government said that, and they said that after everyone knew about it because the cloud had already made it to another country.
This explosion was in a waste furnace. It doesn't produce radiation. The only risk is very local depending on how much contamination was in the furnace at the time, which wouldn't be a whole lot. This isn't a reactor.
Until a secretary can type at over 100 words per minute on a tablet/smartphone, the PC will not go away. And don't say that keyboard can be attached to the tablet, because that defeats the purpose of a tablet in the first place.
I'm sorry. I'm a worker at a nuclear plant that just recently had its license renewed by the NRC.
1) The renewing process is not a snap-of-the-fingers process. The sheer amount of paperwork that had to be collected and verified, calculations re-performed, plans made to correct potential problems, and general convincing that the plant could operate another 20 years took several years to complete. And we still have to put those plans into effect.
2) The public gets plenty of notice. The problem is that most of the public doesn't care to show up, other than those who will never support nuclear power.
3) The NRC has almost shut down my plant several times because of anything they perceive as a potential problem. This has ranged from wanting to be sure equipment would function properly if the temperature outside got above 90 degrees. As this is Wisconsin, it always does in summer. So, in this instance, the NRC has made us need to prove we can meet our requirements, not loosened the requirement.
4) More problems occur at plants because of the owners, not lack of NRC oversight. The Davis-Besse event mentioned in the report fails to mention that the NRC had already told the company that it had concerns that needed to be addressed, and the company blew it off until the NRC discovered the problem getting worse.
5) All this makes me concerned that the report researchers went into the project with the mindset that the NRC was not performing its function and ensuring safe operation of our plants. The report seems pretty biased, without trying to speak to the hundreds of instances where the NRC forced plants to become more conservative. My company just recently had to spend millions of dollars upgrading its electrical switchyard equipment based on future grid use projection and the possibility the plant could lose its power source from outside. So for a report to claim that the NRC is relaxing restrictions is misleading.
Are you positive that Lulz is not a government/theocratic cyber warfare unit operating out of Europe or the Mid-East or China or Cuba or Venezuela? In other words, people who have ponies in the race? How can you be sure?
Government sponsored hackers do not brag about obtaining access to a small affiliated company, or to PBS. They do not want people to know they have gained access, as such knowledge will surely bring resources against their hack.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure any attempt by Sony to prevent second-hand sales will be highly contested in court on the first sale principle. So if they persue this an injunction will be pushed through while it sits in the court.
Automation will not replace human beings. Even if automation can begin doing some of our jobs, there will need to be people to make sure the automation works. They've been using automation in the auto industry for decades, it hasn't cause the extinction of the auto worker. Driverless cars replacing truck drivers? Haha, more like truck drivers sitting behind the wheel of a truck driving on its own making sure things go right. Things break, and without people there to fix them they'll never last.
Yeah, some people seem to think freedom of speech is a very loose thing when it isn't. But it can be a case where the court does end up accidentally restricting free speech. If the decision is worded in such a way that it opens the door for companies to massively sue anyone who has given them a poor review, then people will be afraid to write anything critical on the internet, and that intrudes on free speech. The judge in this case will have that in the back of his head, as judges do in all libel cases.
I'm certain we've had internet defamation suits in court before. But if not, the judge would really need to be careful how to handle this. On one hand, the internet does not give anyone the right libel another person or company. But a poor review shouldn't always be taken as libel either, or else you pretty much tell people they can't complain when services rendered were poor. You do that and thousands of lawsuits from companies will come up. As for whether the defendant has the burden of proof or not, they don't in this case. As the case is simply about the review and its affect, the plaintiff has to show that not only was it not true, but that the review itself led to a damaging loss of business. That second part is harder to prove, as he will literally have to find people that will admit in court that they were going to use him but changed their minds directly as a result of that one review alone. And unless every single one of his reviews was stellar, it becomes easy to argue that that one article may not have been the only reason a customer turned away.
1) Either most users of Slashdot are European and don't trust the US, or 2) Most users of Slashdot are American and don't trust the US government's motives. Either way, makes your conundrum make perfect sense and not hypocrisy. Considering how involved the US government seems to be in every proposed international 'treaty' that would heavily regulate the Internet in the name of 'stopping piracy', can one be faulted for thinking this is just another attempt at ensuring they remain the 'heavy' behind things like shutting down Megaupload, behind trying to get Assange charged with crimes (not to mention what they did to the poor bastard who sent Wikileaks the info in the first place)?
You can't control the Internet. That's our job! --- US Congress
Come on. Anyone with a shredder knows that even if it isn't very good, you have to really make an effort to put information that would cover several lines of a page together into something that is real. And paper flying through the air isn't one of those ways.
Exploits are not new (even if it was a mistake on ArenaNet's end, it is still an exploit) and the punishments for using them are not new either. Ethics dictates that if you know some act to be wrong, then it would be wrong to perpetuate that act even if you can get away with it. Argue this all you want, but they were at fault and are lucky they are even getting a second chance. As for other legal issues, courts have found Terms of Service to be binding and thus we must follow them. If they say that inappropriate conduct can result if an ending of a person's account, then they can do it. Free speech doesn't apply in this case, and even using that as a reason shows a supreme lack of understanding about what free speech is. Free Speech isn't a blanket protection for what you say. You can say whatever you damn please, but that doesn't mean you cannot be punished for saying it.
Anyone else perturbed that a Political Science professor is the one who suggests this? What reason would those who study politics need to support removing algebra from any curriculum? Maybe it is so that the populous is dumbed-down and unable to reason properly for a candidate? But in truth, I do not know what this guy is talking about. I took the SAT a couple times (once in high school, once while in the service to try to improve my score), and the math section at the time was not even up to the level of algebra. So how is it that he, and others, believe that algebra is causing people to drop out of school? It is so easy to blame just one thing, and as we all grew up with the 'what will I use this for later in life' question, it is easy to blame mathematics. But in reality, kids drop out of school based on a combination of multiple issues. Drugs, bad parenting, learning disabilities, becoming pregnant, etc. Realistically, if there is a subject in schools that can be toned down, it would be English courses. Do we really need to study poetry in depth? Probably not. Besides, advanced math tends to be an elective, meaning those who aren't pursuing a degree in a STEM field typically do not need to take more of it. In other words, there are so many easily studied counters to his argument that it is almost funny.
Remember Fukishima? Their problem was that they didn't go back far enough with their historical data when they designed their tsunami wall. Now, in what amounts to the same thinking, people do not want to overstate any possibility of water levels going too high for the sake of the almighty dollar. So when the ocean levels rise, or a 'once-in-a-lifetime' hurricane swells the sea up high enough, will those who support these lower levels be responsible for the cost?
This shows what the downside to such 'donation-based' funding schemes. The point of making it a donation is that you give someone your money with little or no expectation that you personally receive anything in return. That is how it differs from an investment. In that, you would sign a contract stating what portion you would receive of any profits made. If the project failed, you still had no recourse, but typically your required return would be more than what you put into it (and thus the risk element).
Considering the much smaller number of people who work in the nuclear field compared to, say, fast-food workers, I would say that most people who speak crap out of their behinds have no real clue what they are talking about.
The one thing I dislike sometimes about Slashdot is that people only seem to post personally selected 'quotes'. This is one of those cases. The reactor building does not have "No water". It has water, and that water is at a decent temperature for what it needs to do. The point of the article was that there wasn't as much in there as they thought there would be, meaning that the leak in the building is probably worse, and located lower, than they originally thought. And with less water level means higher radiation levels (as water acts as a partial shield on radiation).
I think what we need to get out of this is that this is for a patent application. 1) It needs to be approved (though it probably will). 2) This does not mean they can make every remote already out there do this. What its probably intended to accomplish is give Microsoft a way to profit if TV/movie producers decide that they want to cause these charges to occur. Then Microsoft can say 'hey, we already thought of that, pay us money'.
Basing teacher 'performance' on student grades and exam scores is very open to corruption and manipulation. For one, students who do not like their teacher may purposefully underperform in an attempt to get rid of what is actually a good teacher. Such evaluations also unfairly give the view of a good teacher who works with poor performing students, even if the students improved significantly. There have also been many instances of teachers, principals, and even school districts who cheat the system by giving students a leg up on what is on the actual exams. How can we, as parents and tax payers, allows this to be the sole method of determining a teacher's performance? So what could be done? That is the hard part. Performance reviews are always a subjective matter, which is part of the reason why they were never meant to be seen by the public. In my opinion, school/district/government administrators should have more ability to actually observe performance without the teacher knowing they are being observed. But if test scores continue to become the focus of government and public scorn towards teachers, then an independent review board should be used to assess the reviews in order to incorporate real-life situations into the final assessment.
Hiroshima was hit with an atomic explosion. Fukishima did not have this. Completely different event. Chernobyl didn't even kill nearly this many, and they actually had their reactor explode. There have been ZERO deaths so far. The only certainty is that the CHANCE of cancer in many of the workers will increase. CHANCE is a big word. This isn't a guarantee that they will all get it. And anti-nuclear activists will always claim that there is a cover-up happening. But maybe you should take a cue from one of the founders of Greenpeace (a big anti-nuke organization) supporting the expansion of nuclear power.
That's BS. The NRC's job is to ensure operators are operating plants safely. When you are at a meltdown situation, you are already beyond that point. The NRC will do its best to advise, but stations themselves have many contigency plans in place should they reach this point. Three Mile Island was the event that prompted that to happen, and we haven't had a meltdown here since. Chernobyl was a big ball of s**t that only proved the US had better procedures, precautions, and design than the Russians. Fukishima, while a problem, generated confusion primarily because TEPSCO didn't want to tarnish its reputation by revealing how bad it was.
No one has 'won' Iowa. This election did not determine anything that matters come convention time. It simply was there for each precint to designate delagates to the county converntions, which happen in a couple months. Then the counties have their votes, and send delagates to the state convention (which I think I read was in JUNE). At that point, the state convention determines who 'wins' the states delagates to the convention. What this means is that if someone drops out of the race between now and the other conventions, the delagates assigned to them Tuesday will change their votes, which again can change any result we think we may already have. This is why primaries are so much better than caucauses.
So, I can only assume that once Apple does this that Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo will start suing for patent infringement. Apple will somehow win despite it being obvious they are violating patents. Then after Apple sells a $700 console that for some strange reason millions of people buy despite not being any better than anything else, Apple will sue those three for having violated patents it has that really are the same as patents everyone else has and win.
How could anyone realistically believe that there could be a pure a la carte cable setup? Cable companies are charged by the networks PER SUBSCRIBER, not per person who watches the channel. So it wouldn't matter if 100k of 300k watch ESPN, Time Warner would get charged for the 300k. To make a la carte work, Time Warner would have to pass the cost on to only those who pick ESPN in their lineup, meaning that those who would get ESPN would pay more than the $4 it costs Time Warner for that same person. The real solution, in my opinion, would be for cable companies to make more tiers of service (ie 50/100/200 channels), scale the rates their customers pay for the new tiers, then allow us to pick the channels we want in our tier. Because the cost to the subscriber essentially doesn't change much, the company still earns enough to pay the costs to the networks.
There is not clear cut way to respond to this. Providing training to employees to improve their accent so more customers can understand them is a business practice, where not doing so could drive people away from that company. Monitoring teachers to see if their accent meets some vague 'requirement' for maintaining a teaching license is discrimination in its base form, especially as its use in Arizona is targetted at Mexican and South American accents. The first is perfectly acceptable, as the employee can always quit if they do not like it. The second is not.
No, the Russian government said that, and they said that after everyone knew about it because the cloud had already made it to another country. This explosion was in a waste furnace. It doesn't produce radiation. The only risk is very local depending on how much contamination was in the furnace at the time, which wouldn't be a whole lot. This isn't a reactor.
Until a secretary can type at over 100 words per minute on a tablet/smartphone, the PC will not go away. And don't say that keyboard can be attached to the tablet, because that defeats the purpose of a tablet in the first place.
I'm sorry. I'm a worker at a nuclear plant that just recently had its license renewed by the NRC. 1) The renewing process is not a snap-of-the-fingers process. The sheer amount of paperwork that had to be collected and verified, calculations re-performed, plans made to correct potential problems, and general convincing that the plant could operate another 20 years took several years to complete. And we still have to put those plans into effect. 2) The public gets plenty of notice. The problem is that most of the public doesn't care to show up, other than those who will never support nuclear power. 3) The NRC has almost shut down my plant several times because of anything they perceive as a potential problem. This has ranged from wanting to be sure equipment would function properly if the temperature outside got above 90 degrees. As this is Wisconsin, it always does in summer. So, in this instance, the NRC has made us need to prove we can meet our requirements, not loosened the requirement. 4) More problems occur at plants because of the owners, not lack of NRC oversight. The Davis-Besse event mentioned in the report fails to mention that the NRC had already told the company that it had concerns that needed to be addressed, and the company blew it off until the NRC discovered the problem getting worse. 5) All this makes me concerned that the report researchers went into the project with the mindset that the NRC was not performing its function and ensuring safe operation of our plants. The report seems pretty biased, without trying to speak to the hundreds of instances where the NRC forced plants to become more conservative. My company just recently had to spend millions of dollars upgrading its electrical switchyard equipment based on future grid use projection and the possibility the plant could lose its power source from outside. So for a report to claim that the NRC is relaxing restrictions is misleading.
Are you positive that Lulz is not a government/theocratic cyber warfare unit operating out of Europe or the Mid-East or China or Cuba or Venezuela? In other words, people who have ponies in the race? How can you be sure?
Government sponsored hackers do not brag about obtaining access to a small affiliated company, or to PBS. They do not want people to know they have gained access, as such knowledge will surely bring resources against their hack.