So now the Fed is lying to us about the value of our money
The fed says jack and shit about the value of my money. Price Chopper, McDonald's, and Wal-Mart are where I discover the value of my dollars.
All the fed does is set a price for new money put into the system, which is after all the Fed's job. It can't lie about the "value of money" any more than McDonald's can lie about the value of the ice scraper I bought at Wal-Mart.
Well, guess what. As society enters the information age, that means that information is [becoming] commoditized and the service value of information starts to exceed the control value. So liars who control information like Hollywood and the Fed (and Microsoft) are in serious trouble. How [ironic] it is that, unlike the service sector, they will have no pricing power as they destroy each other.
Amazing, how you can use so many words and not actually say anything.
The "Digital Age", or "Information Revolution", or even "flat-earth effect", is pretty well set upon us now. And you know what? Controlling Information is still the best way to make immediate wealth. Google makes their money allegedly enabling the free flow of information, but they control their means and methods with a zeal greater than Coke ever used for their soda formula. The Chinese are building industrial powerhouses, but they're very careful to control the knowledge of the real cost and value of their operations from anyone.
So what if you can now buy music from China, software from Europe, or outsource your Russian McDonald's drive-thru to Utah. People still need to eat, sets still need to be built, and governments will still collection taxes. The "Information Age" might be as big a shift as the introduction of the counting machine and the photocopier, but it's not as big as you think.
And there's the problem. Similar situation with tort law; you club someone with a lawsuit and it would cost more for them to comply or settle than fight it, regardless of how frivolous the claim is. Something is broken somewhere.
Oddly enough, this is a problem best solved by another law/tort: frivolous prosecution. You can sue for not only the actual damages (that is, your court costs) but punative damages (money on top to get the other guy to never do it again.)
(Unless, of course, you really MEANT your grammatical mess-up, and intended to say that going along with legal thuggery is less expensive than standing up for your rights -- in which case, WTF?)
I also don't have to worry about the vendor shutting down my OS or apps remotely in the future.
Hi. I'm a PC user, with an HP laptop, and Office 2007. Not too long ago I had Vista Beta on this thing. And you know what? I don't have to worry about the vendor shutting me down ever. You know why? Because I live in a country that follows the rule of law, and can prove in a court that I purchased these things legally.
Part of me wishes they'd try -- it's amazing how good the upgrade from "punative damages" would be.
Now go ahead and mod me as flamebait, but what I said was absolutely true.
Quick. Name me ten "liberal" packages of legislation and tell me how they cause you an unintended headache. (No fair being, oh, a polluter who now has to pay out. Or a gun buyer who has to go through a background check. Those are intentional headaches.)
But will the $790 PC you mentioned run WinVista Premium? According to all the insider reviews I've read we're looking at 4GB RAM min, and a much higher end video card. Those who've run it with 2GB RAM say it crawls like a swapping bear even when you kill all the graphics effects in the display. Hi, I'm writing this on a HP laptop with a measly Radeon XPRess video card. With a "mere" 2 GB of RAM, the PC doesn't crawl, swap, or do much of anything except just run. Running RC2, "Vista Ultimate".
(Vista is nice, but not $400 nice. So it's going by-by as soon as I grab a copy of Office 07, which is $150-for-every-PC-I-have nice.)
Granted, the PC would have 2x more memory but apparently Vista just sucks that into a black hole anyway.
No, not really. You CAN let it draw the full screen for each program, and run Defender, and run full-drive indexing, and throw open a media share, but you can also just turn all of that off.
All else being equal, go for the Vista machine over the Mac. MS lives and dies by accommodating power users; Mac lives and dies by making an elegant universal interface. Unless you already know Mac, or really love Unix, you'll get a better experience as a windows power user with vista.
wars (and capital accumulation) ended - replaced with the [pursuit] of classic virtues
At no time in history, including the "classical" period, has more than a trivial amount of humanity not been focused on either survival, war, or capital accumulation.
Neither Regan (yes, President Ronald Regan) nor Berman are prophets. The mere existence of alien life will not cause humanity to unite behind a utopian ideal. Maybe if those aliens give us magic boxes that solve our food, water, and energy needs, then we'll have a chance at real utopian peace. But so long as we're bound by the laws of 20th century physics, we'll continue to fight for reasons noble and ignoble.
Fair use is guaranteed by copyright, and I believe that is in the constitution.
Fair Use is a matter of Congressional, not Constitutional, law. (All the Constitution says is that it's Congress's ball game) Lessig's recent SCOTUS case (wherein he tried to have the recent copyright extension thrown out) reinforces this.
As for not being able to use linux for various DRM'd tech -- which really is the only legitimate complaint against DRM on its face -- the right answer is probably "what do we need to do in order to work with Netflix?", not "Netflix must never do that, because it doesn't work with Linux!"
(I'm a big fan of personally identified perpetual licensing. I pay the studio X dollars, I give them my name and a current home address, and they set up a server against which I can authenticate anywhere, download the movie as often as I want, and authenticate that it is me watching my movie.)
Seriously, where's the problem with porn? It doesn't harm anyone. Not even kids.
Sex belongs in the private arena. Violence belongs in the public square.
It's not that porn "harms" anyone in the traditional sense, but a significant portion of the world wants to avoid sexual material either outside of their bedroom or altogether. This is why you can't, for example, fornicate on the city streets.
(Giving every.com a free.xxx solves just about every problem out there, save for willful link-whoring.)
Check for redundancy -- I guess you mean "In English".
Nope. The English language reached its pre-eminent world status largely due to the United States, and both American English and Australian English are markedly different from British English -- and each have approximately the same population of speakers are British English. If one simply mentions "English", it's appropriate to assume that they're talking about American English today, not British English.
Even beyond that, when discussing the differences in grammar between dialects of any language, it's appropriate to denote which dialect is which. Doubly so when discussing the differences between a foreign dialect and your current location's dialect. (So, if this where slashdot.uk, you'd have a leg to stand on.)
2: That's a two-year old article, predating either Vista or XP SP 2. I wager that, even if you did that now with the same OSes, you'd have far less likely results.
3: That's "fresh install of windows with absolutely no security at all plugged into broadband." Sheesh. Install something as trivially easy as ZoneAlarm, and well, it just doesn't happen.
I'm across the street from the main Wells Fargo branch...
A smart company will have a public, untrusted, gardenwalled network for, oh, salespeople and other bank's VPs. It shouldn't be connected to the bank's actual system, and if properly done will actually increase security of the bank's network by giving less legitimate reason for anyone to try and connect to the bank, letting IT (and the M-16 carrying security guards) treat every connection attempt as an attack.
Nothing in the world makes me trust an opinion about the law than someone who can't use an ellipsis correctly. (Every single one the parent has used in this article should be a comma.)
For anyone else reading this: if you want to try self-incorporation, hire a tax law attorney. You'll be subject to at least one of fifty distinct legal structures (more, if your work crosses state lines), in addition to the IRS, and you'll need to navigate each and every tax law code with enough due diligence to survive an audit.
If you don't think it's worth it to hire an attorney just for one of you, pool your services with a few co-workers you trust and form a single S-Corp (or other recommended structure.) You'll cut your bookkeeping costs, be able to be more flexible to your clients, and be significantly less likely of having your S-corp invalidated for tax evasion.
I don't understand why the summary uses the phrase "destroy targets." Honestly, I was thinking that a while ago, the United States should be prioritizing weapons that disable humans through means other than chemical or lethal implementations.
The goal in combat is to get the other side to stop fighting. Most of the time, the only sure way to get that result once the shooting starts it to kill them. If there were a way to stop someone from trying to kill you as quickly and effectively as shooting them in the head with an M-16, then we might see it happening. But there isn't -- even the best tasers are essentially one-shot deals that act quite a bit slower than a bullet, and don't do anything once the juice is off.
Every time someone is killed by a US soldier (or even UN peacekeeper for that matter), more enemies of the United States are bred. It doesn't matter what the conditions were or the whether or not the rule of engagement were followed.
Oversimplification at its finest.
There isn't a country in the world today that doesn't understand that war is a special circumstance. If you pick up a rifle and engage in open war, you might get killed by the other side. We create "enemies" when we act in ways that enrage people, and killing someone in war doesn't do half the damage that, say, starting a war based on lies in the first place does.
If the system was that good, obviously it should have easily managed to hang on -- obviously that would have been the prime national priority. And yet it did not.
The Communist USSR took what was a relative backwater country, without a single warm-water port, large tracts of which are nearly inhospitable, and went toe-to-toe and dollar-for-dollar against a country that had to entire coasts of ports, a transcontinental rail system, and the lion's share of scientists scavenged from Germany.
If Stalin had decided to "out produce" rather than "outgun" the west, we might very well be speaking Russian as the international language of trade right now. Instead, he decided to embark on a cult-of-personality crusade, and set the USSR on a hostile stance that took more than fifty years to finally break down.
Politically speaking, the USSR was a joke -- but that's what Democracy is for, to keep revolutions and coups from tearing the country apart. Economically speaking, well, it's either a triumph of the Russian people or some solid evidence that socialism can do more than just feed and clothe people.
(And if you step ALL the way back to Marx's day, it's fairly clear that he was right. If the United States hadn't grabbed a middle path with the "New Deal", the world would uniformly be socialist right now.)
Neither of these are directly related to graphics; both are more about the ability to have a deeper game world, whether it's larger levels, more game objects to interact with, or more accurate physics...
No, it's just graphics. If you put graphical considerations aside, you could run an "as broad as conceivable" game on an old Dreamcast. The breadth of the world is determined by the developer -- how much work do they spend on the broad expanse, and how much on the fine detail--i.e., the graphics.
Because companies like Honda and Ford won't produce a viable electric car on their own!
Yep. GM's essentially just waiting for the battery. Honda and Ford will follow suit, or try and get out in front. Either way, once the battery is avaliable, they will put it in their cars.
If anything, Gonzales has erred on the side of saying that the Constitution calls it a 'right', which it plainly does not.
Habeas Corpus is one of the enshrined rights that the government was specifically prohibited infringing upon. Whether it's a "right" granted by God or a "priviledge" granted by the law is irrelevant -- Constitutionally speaking, it's something the feds can not suspend without extreme cause.
On a broader sense, if we have to abridge basic rights to wage this war, then our foes are right to oppose us. We cannot do justice to those who were murdered on 9/11/01 if we sink to our worst level.
I'm sorry but when exactly did Israel start a war in the past 100 years?
Quick question: who started the American Revolution? Who started the first US-Iraqi War? Who stated the war that General Custer died in?
Israel has been in more wars since its founding than the United States. It's one of the most high-tech, civilized countries on the planet, surrounded by essentially the third world. Israel shares a greater burden of responsibility to avoid war, and their citizens share more than a little bit of blame for it.
I have no idea whose claims have greater merits, the PLO or the ultra-Orthodox "all of the Middle East is Israel" Jews. I really don't care. They're fighting and dragging us into it, and I really wish they'd just stop, quit the killing, and go read the holy books God gave them. (All of them, not just the hundred verses they hear chanted on the streets.)
Slashdot Mirror
So now the Fed is lying to us about the value of our money
The fed says jack and shit about the value of my money. Price Chopper, McDonald's, and Wal-Mart are where I discover the value of my dollars.
All the fed does is set a price for new money put into the system, which is after all the Fed's job. It can't lie about the "value of money" any more than McDonald's can lie about the value of the ice scraper I bought at Wal-Mart.
Well, guess what. As society enters the information age, that means that information is [becoming] commoditized and the service value of information starts to exceed the control value. So liars who control information like Hollywood and the Fed (and Microsoft) are in serious trouble. How [ironic] it is that, unlike the service sector, they will have no pricing power as they destroy each other.
Amazing, how you can use so many words and not actually say anything.
The "Digital Age", or "Information Revolution", or even "flat-earth effect", is pretty well set upon us now. And you know what? Controlling Information is still the best way to make immediate wealth. Google makes their money allegedly enabling the free flow of information, but they control their means and methods with a zeal greater than Coke ever used for their soda formula. The Chinese are building industrial powerhouses, but they're very careful to control the knowledge of the real cost and value of their operations from anyone.
So what if you can now buy music from China, software from Europe, or outsource your Russian McDonald's drive-thru to Utah. People still need to eat, sets still need to be built, and governments will still collection taxes. The "Information Age" might be as big a shift as the introduction of the counting machine and the photocopier, but it's not as big as you think.
And there's the problem. Similar situation with tort law; you club someone with a lawsuit and it would cost more for them to comply or settle than fight it, regardless of how frivolous the claim is. Something is broken somewhere.
Oddly enough, this is a problem best solved by another law/tort: frivolous prosecution. You can sue for not only the actual damages (that is, your court costs) but punative damages (money on top to get the other guy to never do it again.)
(Unless, of course, you really MEANT your grammatical mess-up, and intended to say that going along with legal thuggery is less expensive than standing up for your rights -- in which case, WTF?)
I also don't have to worry about the vendor shutting down my OS or apps remotely in the future.
Hi. I'm a PC user, with an HP laptop, and Office 2007. Not too long ago I had Vista Beta on this thing. And you know what? I don't have to worry about the vendor shutting me down ever. You know why? Because I live in a country that follows the rule of law, and can prove in a court that I purchased these things legally.
Part of me wishes they'd try -- it's amazing how good the upgrade from "punative damages" would be.
why isn't U.S. growing beets?
We are. But we use a LOT of sugar; so much that we can prop up entire less-developed countries with our drive for sugar.
About 50% of US sugar production (NOT HFCS production) is from sugar beets.
Now go ahead and mod me as flamebait, but what I said was absolutely true.
Quick. Name me ten "liberal" packages of legislation and tell me how they cause you an unintended headache. (No fair being, oh, a polluter who now has to pay out. Or a gun buyer who has to go through a background check. Those are intentional headaches.)
I'll wait.
(Vista is nice, but not $400 nice. So it's going by-by as soon as I grab a copy of Office 07, which is $150-for-every-PC-I-have nice.)
Granted, the PC would have 2x more memory but apparently Vista just sucks that into a black hole anyway.
No, not really. You CAN let it draw the full screen for each program, and run Defender, and run full-drive indexing, and throw open a media share, but you can also just turn all of that off.
All else being equal, go for the Vista machine over the Mac. MS lives and dies by accommodating power users; Mac lives and dies by making an elegant universal interface. Unless you already know Mac, or really love Unix, you'll get a better experience as a windows power user with vista.
wars (and capital accumulation) ended - replaced with the [pursuit] of classic virtues
At no time in history, including the "classical" period, has more than a trivial amount of humanity not been focused on either survival, war, or capital accumulation.
Neither Regan (yes, President Ronald Regan) nor Berman are prophets. The mere existence of alien life will not cause humanity to unite behind a utopian ideal. Maybe if those aliens give us magic boxes that solve our food, water, and energy needs, then we'll have a chance at real utopian peace. But so long as we're bound by the laws of 20th century physics, we'll continue to fight for reasons noble and ignoble.
It's just human nature.
The whole profession ought to be outlawed.
/.? They're run essentially entirely by ads.
Amazing.
So... what are you doing on
I'm 30 now, and was around when he came out with the 640k line
So, where and when did he say it? Hell, quote me a source that quoted him as saying it, in the year that he said it.
I'm 27, and you were born in 1975-76. If you added 10 years to that number, then maybe you'd have a leg to stand on with your old fogie routine.
Fair use is guaranteed by copyright, and I believe that is in the constitution.
Fair Use is a matter of Congressional, not Constitutional, law. (All the Constitution says is that it's Congress's ball game) Lessig's recent SCOTUS case (wherein he tried to have the recent copyright extension thrown out) reinforces this.
As for not being able to use linux for various DRM'd tech -- which really is the only legitimate complaint against DRM on its face -- the right answer is probably "what do we need to do in order to work with Netflix?", not "Netflix must never do that, because it doesn't work with Linux!"
(I'm a big fan of personally identified perpetual licensing. I pay the studio X dollars, I give them my name and a current home address, and they set up a server against which I can authenticate anywhere, download the movie as often as I want, and authenticate that it is me watching my movie.)
Seriously, where's the problem with porn? It doesn't harm anyone. Not even kids.
.com a free .xxx solves just about every problem out there, save for willful link-whoring.)
Sex belongs in the private arena. Violence belongs in the public square.
It's not that porn "harms" anyone in the traditional sense, but a significant portion of the world wants to avoid sexual material either outside of their bedroom or altogether. This is why you can't, for example, fornicate on the city streets.
(Giving every
Check for redundancy -- I guess you mean "In English".
Nope. The English language reached its pre-eminent world status largely due to the United States, and both American English and Australian English are markedly different from British English -- and each have approximately the same population of speakers are British English. If one simply mentions "English", it's appropriate to assume that they're talking about American English today, not British English.
Even beyond that, when discussing the differences in grammar between dialects of any language, it's appropriate to denote which dialect is which. Doubly so when discussing the differences between a foreign dialect and your current location's dialect. (So, if this where slashdot.uk, you'd have a leg to stand on.)
Dude.
1: Learn how to use the <A> tag.
2: That's a two-year old article, predating either Vista or XP SP 2. I wager that, even if you did that now with the same OSes, you'd have far less likely results.
3: That's "fresh install of windows with absolutely no security at all plugged into broadband." Sheesh. Install something as trivially easy as ZoneAlarm, and well, it just doesn't happen.
I'm across the street from the main Wells Fargo branch...
A smart company will have a public, untrusted, gardenwalled network for, oh, salespeople and other bank's VPs. It shouldn't be connected to the bank's actual system, and if properly done will actually increase security of the bank's network by giving less legitimate reason for anyone to try and connect to the bank, letting IT (and the M-16 carrying security guards) treat every connection attempt as an attack.
And...I supposed...even reading Slashdot.
Nothing in the world makes me trust an opinion about the law than someone who can't use an ellipsis correctly. (Every single one the parent has used in this article should be a comma.)
For anyone else reading this: if you want to try self-incorporation, hire a tax law attorney. You'll be subject to at least one of fifty distinct legal structures (more, if your work crosses state lines), in addition to the IRS, and you'll need to navigate each and every tax law code with enough due diligence to survive an audit.
If you don't think it's worth it to hire an attorney just for one of you, pool your services with a few co-workers you trust and form a single S-Corp (or other recommended structure.) You'll cut your bookkeeping costs, be able to be more flexible to your clients, and be significantly less likely of having your S-corp invalidated for tax evasion.
There's a reason lawyers get paid the big bucks.
I don't understand why the summary uses the phrase "destroy targets." Honestly, I was thinking that a while ago, the United States should be prioritizing weapons that disable humans through means other than chemical or lethal implementations.
The goal in combat is to get the other side to stop fighting. Most of the time, the only sure way to get that result once the shooting starts it to kill them. If there were a way to stop someone from trying to kill you as quickly and effectively as shooting them in the head with an M-16, then we might see it happening. But there isn't -- even the best tasers are essentially one-shot deals that act quite a bit slower than a bullet, and don't do anything once the juice is off.
Every time someone is killed by a US soldier (or even UN peacekeeper for that matter), more enemies of the United States are bred. It doesn't matter what the conditions were or the whether or not the rule of engagement were followed.
Oversimplification at its finest.
There isn't a country in the world today that doesn't understand that war is a special circumstance. If you pick up a rifle and engage in open war, you might get killed by the other side. We create "enemies" when we act in ways that enrage people, and killing someone in war doesn't do half the damage that, say, starting a war based on lies in the first place does.
If the system was that good, obviously it should have easily managed to hang on -- obviously that would have been the prime national priority. And yet it did not.
The Communist USSR took what was a relative backwater country, without a single warm-water port, large tracts of which are nearly inhospitable, and went toe-to-toe and dollar-for-dollar against a country that had to entire coasts of ports, a transcontinental rail system, and the lion's share of scientists scavenged from Germany.
If Stalin had decided to "out produce" rather than "outgun" the west, we might very well be speaking Russian as the international language of trade right now. Instead, he decided to embark on a cult-of-personality crusade, and set the USSR on a hostile stance that took more than fifty years to finally break down.
Politically speaking, the USSR was a joke -- but that's what Democracy is for, to keep revolutions and coups from tearing the country apart. Economically speaking, well, it's either a triumph of the Russian people or some solid evidence that socialism can do more than just feed and clothe people.
(And if you step ALL the way back to Marx's day, it's fairly clear that he was right. If the United States hadn't grabbed a middle path with the "New Deal", the world would uniformly be socialist right now.)
Neither of these are directly related to graphics; both are more about the ability to have a deeper game world, whether it's larger levels, more game objects to interact with, or more accurate physics...
No, it's just graphics. If you put graphical considerations aside, you could run an "as broad as conceivable" game on an old Dreamcast. The breadth of the world is determined by the developer -- how much work do they spend on the broad expanse, and how much on the fine detail--i.e., the graphics.
And because the kernel can't load unsigned drivers...
Sure it can. You just need to tell it to, and they don't make that especially easy.
Because companies like Honda and Ford won't produce a viable electric car on their own!
Yep. GM's essentially just waiting for the battery. Honda and Ford will follow suit, or try and get out in front. Either way, once the battery is avaliable, they will put it in their cars.
If anything, Gonzales has erred on the side of saying that the Constitution calls it a 'right', which it plainly does not.
Habeas Corpus is one of the enshrined rights that the government was specifically prohibited infringing upon. Whether it's a "right" granted by God or a "priviledge" granted by the law is irrelevant -- Constitutionally speaking, it's something the feds can not suspend without extreme cause.
On a broader sense, if we have to abridge basic rights to wage this war, then our foes are right to oppose us. We cannot do justice to those who were murdered on 9/11/01 if we sink to our worst level.
It's government's place to stay the hell out of the way.
Nope. It's government's place to enforce the law, and the law says you can't buy your way into a monopoly.
Don't like the law? Who are you supporting for Congress, or where's your Constitutional amendment to explictly enshrine your interpretation?
except to demand the physical slip I allegedly signed be entered in evidence
Won't work. Those "sign pads" aren't a substitute for a signed contact -- they *are* a signed contract.
I'm sorry but when exactly did Israel start a war in the past 100 years?
Quick question: who started the American Revolution? Who started the first US-Iraqi War? Who stated the war that General Custer died in?
Israel has been in more wars since its founding than the United States. It's one of the most high-tech, civilized countries on the planet, surrounded by essentially the third world. Israel shares a greater burden of responsibility to avoid war, and their citizens share more than a little bit of blame for it.
I have no idea whose claims have greater merits, the PLO or the ultra-Orthodox "all of the Middle East is Israel" Jews. I really don't care. They're fighting and dragging us into it, and I really wish they'd just stop, quit the killing, and go read the holy books God gave them. (All of them, not just the hundred verses they hear chanted on the streets.)