You mean perhaps, like the silent bulk tapping that was done on our phone calls. And of course the HUGE purge where everyone involved in that was instantly jailed... fired... reprimanded... What? nothing? Fuck!
Total contractual freedom means that all of them, including those which are clearly abusive, are legally binding.
No. There's a big difference in being able to contract, even for life-threatening things, and being held to ridiculous clauses of a clearly manipulative contract.
So you need to either rethink either of your positions here, or clarify what you mean.
That I should be able to contract for, let's say, testing some experimental AIDS drug, even if this might kill me. If I'm dying I want the right to choose.
This is not the same as thinking that if I get you to sign a contract without reading some fine print on the back of page four that I should own your soul. Theoretically (pre-EULA madness) contracts require both parties understand and accept the terms of the contract.
It's not a question of what I believe, it's a question of what the judge believes.
No, it's not though. Judges have ordered some pretty stupid things. At some point you'll have to consider how far you'll follow an order.
However, in this particular case, I couldn't sell my child even under total contractual freedom, since I don't own my children in the first place,
What if a judge said you did? The laws have been pretty crazy at some times... Is that your only objection? Or would you refuse to cooperate with the legal slavery order?
And the good end for slavers is to force them to apologize on their knees, then have them make restitutions to the best of their abilities, and [...]
I'm all for accepting apologies, if they're from someone who turned themselves in and stopped the behavior before being discovered. But if I were a slave I'd be pissed off if you wasted thirty seconds trying to capture the slavers rather than rescue us sooner. No vindictiveness, no torture, just swatted like dangerous insects so you can more easily save their human victims.
Problem is that the rabid capitalist aspect doesn't really leave you any chance to defend yourself against those who are better at it than you are. [..] coupled with hands-off social policy from the government, allowing those with power to wield it with minimal oversight, the end result is feudalism.
I'm not advocating a society of the knife, just that we admit we are already living in one. People have been sent to Iraq against their wills, certainly Iraqis have been killed against their will. And all dancing to the tune of our still nearly feudal overlords.
But we can't just disclaim responsibility because we're acting under orders, or more conveniently yet again, we're the 99% of the population who get to scapegoat the 1% who has to follow orders. We need to take moral responsibility for what we participate in, even if someone else is saying it's okay.
People at so many levels could have stepped up to stop many of the abuse of recent years (and always, I'm sure). Maher Arar for a specific examaple, but also the thousands of others like him, of any race, on either side of the world. Innocent people arrested because of McCarthyan suspicion and sentenced to truly brutal tortures. Any police officer, FBI agent, army officer, etc could have recognized injustices being done during their arrest, interrogation, and shipment to a hostile (to them) foreign country, and blown the whistle. But instead through everyone's complicity things were done that everyone would claim to be against, yet nobody tried to stop.
This is caused by blind adherence to the law. The law gave these guys guns and an order to kidnap someone. If they don't check that order, perform some amount of due diligence, what's the difference between the law and some street gang's "protection"?
The second branch of government is individual conscience. You have to have your own view of right and wrong, and at least not let yourself be pushed into wrong, even if you don't "fight" for ri
I'm all for total contractual freedom. If I can do something, why can't I contract to do it?
However, we shouldn't see contracts, and legal obligations, as anything "special". Certainly not something we are morally obliged to follow into certain personal ruin over an unseen loophole.
If I came to you and said I had a voodoo trinket concocted of your child's hair and lost teeth and that because of such, I own your child - so hand them over, you'd laugh at me, or worse.
So why would you do otherwise if I came to you with a sheet of paper, with a bunch of semi-latin text on it, claiming to own your child because of your failure to promptly pay your parking ticket?
An abusive relationship is such, regardless of how it's justified. There's only one good end for slavers - death. Properly applied this is the other branch of libertarian government- the personal realization of the right to proactive self-defense. It balances the rabid capitalism aspect you're familiar with.
Do unto others, but expect them to learn from this and attempt to do it first next time.
Just because you don't agree with elected government officials doesn't give you the right to stop paying taxes and push the cost onto other citizens
Oh, I see. I was born here so I'm obligated to go along with whatever you-all do.
Ummm. No.
By living in the country, you are accepting the whole package, including agreeing paying taxes, regardless of who is elected.
No. I don't accept that. Never have.
For an obvious example, I wouldn't follow Hitler. In fact, if I were a German citizen in WW2 I'd be morally obligated to try to kill him.
I'm no-more obligated to support or fund your unjustified murder spree in Iraq than I would support someone shooting an neighboring family under false pretenses.
The idea that you should subject yourself to punishment for speaking out against injustice is crazy. Trying to flee unjust punishment isn't wrong, it's sane.
Nobody has an obligation to suffer punishment for not obeying an unjust law.
It's hard to blame HP's machine for not being compatible with Apple's DRM. It'll run OSX just as well once it's been cracked.
You know, I'd be pissed if they spent more time making sure my OS wouldn't work if I did anything nonstandard than they spent making sure it'd work. At Apple it's pretty obvious that the EULA is job one.
It's just insane to use Apple products. With Debian on x86 I could reinstall on most any computer and be running again quickly. With Windows I could install on about as many machines - less breadth of selection, more support for newer hardware.
But with MacOS I could only install on ~5% of the machines out there. Not that the rest aren't capable, but that Steve Jobs feels his profits are more important than my ability to use a product I own.
I may not be MacGyver, but I refuse the buy things that will purposefully shut down if I try to operate them outside of the marketing department's expected patterns.
Twice the features? Even leaving out "DRM renders product useless with 3rd-party replacement hardware", the HP comes (at any price point) with far more ram and drive space, a faster CPU, and potentially better cooling. Competition, it's good for buyers.
If I had to buy an HP part I could - you could not. Haha. You spent more, got less, and got brainwashed into thinking it's more. It's not a religious open-source thing, it's an avoiding monopolies thing. Buying parts you can second-source is just good business. Buying into monopolistic lock-in just isn't good business.
Ballmer's [...] primary responsibility is to make money for MS shareholders
You know, I don't really care if someone is making my life miserable for fun, or because someone is paying them to. This whole "I was just following the 'more profit' order" thing should have gone out with the Nuremberg trials.
The funny thing is that after suing some little company out of existence over some fake shit like a software patent he'd expect one of their employees to help him if he was having a heart attack or choking. As if anything done in "business" is fine.
Your inability to follow doesn't mean there isn't a point.
I'm not going to cry about 0.00001% lost traffic [...] neither are my customers [...] I tell them they may lose a few geeks [...] laugh and call you a retard.
You say that your customers decide upon the use of Javascript because they find it useful and find the (as presented by your) ideological refusal to use it silly and beneath them because they have enough other users not to care.
However, you are incompetent at your job - from your brief description. When you say they'll "lose a few geeks to ideological reaons" you totally ignore that 98% of the people in this thread oppose needless use of JS for technological reasons, not ideological. If you were talking about Flash you might be right.
Your lack of understanding of the motives of your potential users and your arrogant laugh-and-call-them-retards style has means you've recommended your customers do probably the worst thing they could - laugh at and marginalize the technologically adept.
It's not a matter of losing the 1% of people who use NoScript-type tools, it's the possibility of finding one day that someone has written a Greasemonkey script and the other 99% of your users can access your content without your eye-manacles. Or that someone just ripped everything you have and offered it for download. And you're recommending your customers ignore and trivialize these concerns.
Your basic argument is that, because JavaScript is in some cases used for evil, [...] My argument is that that makes you a fucking retard
No, you're a fucking retard for assuming that's my argument. You're to much of an asshole to check your assumptions.
I'll repeat the key parts of what I said, and explain in smaller words.
You seem to be incapable of understanding the difference between rich-content delivery systems and ad-spam [...] I'd bet that less than 2% of the JS you use is actually beneficial to the users....
I acknowledge the existence of "JS... actually beneficial to the users". I just question if you could recognize and implement such a thing.
Everything you've said here has been about client demands, nothing about user friendliness or disabled-friendly access. I doubt you're any good at (if you ever tried) figuring out what a user would actually enjoy doing. As a consequence I don't think you could tell the difference between helping the user, so-called "content delivery", and hurting them with spam/phishing.
Neither I nor my customers care... perception of gain.... We don't fucking care.... if you don't like it you can leave, because, as I reiterate, we don't fucking care.
I'm sensing a slight lack of concern for the feelings of others. However, rather then being wrong for some sappy moralistic reason it's simply a bad idea to be such a bonehead because you'll never be able to predict people.
I'm more than happy to ignore anything you've ever touched (please send me a list so I can add it to the blacklist.) However I've written a few web scrapers and configured de-crappifying gateways at the request of less technical users. They may want or need something you've hidden behind the layer of incompatible and non-standard UI, or broken in their, no-doubt laughable, retard-browser (like Firefox). They don't have any political motives, they merely want their content.
I'm not going to fix your buggy UI, or rip out the minimum cruft necessary to use. I'm just going to spider the whole thing and be done with it. I'm sure you've already seen the email from the people I help, as they ask you for changes. Perhaps they simply say JS sucks because that's all they know. But when you brush them off they come to me or one o
Yeah, because we're incapable of telling an actually helpful UI in a situation like that from every other ad-laden flash-riddled piece of crap site.
So few sites actually do anything (that I'd want done) with JS that defaulting to having it off DOES improve the average web browsing experience.
And anything that breaks so completely without JS that it can't even offer an error message and a reason to enable JS is programmed so badly it should be ignored.
You seem to be incapable of understanding the difference between rich-content delivery systems and ad-spam. Explain to your customers that one geek who dislikes their presentation can write a Greasemonkey script to totally rework your site. I'd bet that less than 2% of the JS you use is actually beneficial to the users....
Amusingly, that's how users view things like NoScript... They think webdevs who use JS to hurt their users (force ads) and expect users to stay and keep JS on are retards. Unfortunately, they're far from 0.00001% percent of the sites.
When all you offer your users is a more difficult experience in order to force ad-views don't be surprised when your content shows up on Piratebay.
They're still stuck in the mindset of magazine sellers. You paid for the book and aren't going anywhere - they own you. But when they're a click away from everything else they don't get that advantage.
It would seem a bit anomalous, therefore, to allow a patent on specialized hardware that embodies precisely the same inventive character as its patent ineligible software counterpart.
That's the entire point of patents. To protect the specific implementation, NOT to prevent anyone else from achieving a specific result.
The reason software patents MUST stay invalid is that people want to patent THE ONLY way to do something.
For instance, you're free to implement an adder circuit that calculates 2+2, etc, and then patent any specific improvements. And anyone else could simultaneously develop and patent their own equivalent circuits.
But software patents would allow people to patent the fundamental elements of performing the task. For instance, making adding numbers itself (surely something that would be software-patent worthy, if not for the prior art) something you'd have to pay royalties to do.
The concept of digital logic itself could be patented. Someone patented using XOR to calculate the mask for displaying a cursor. Doesn't it seem crazy to have patented "Draw the shape of the cursor by reversing the value of the pixels it overlays". But that's what XOR is in that instance.
Madness. But then, patents aren't to help innovators they're to provide a comfortable government paycheck so your company can sit on the sofa all day eating bon bons and pumping out unwanted child-divisions. Remember when you see someone promoting patents that they're really just looking for a welfare check and listen to their "arguments" with that in mind.
they also take a LOT of risk. They should get rewarded. How much is not for you to decide.
Bullshit. In that risk deserves reward, and that it's not my place to put a limit on tax-funded handouts.
The market will determine the reward they get. It's nobody's job to make sure that crazy risks pay off.
And yes, considering my tax money is being spent on a system that limits my freedom to innovate and build, it is MY right to say no more.
Patents are just another form of tariff to protect industry we think won't survive in an open market.
Further, only a sick fucker could think it's a good thing to be able to keep people from learning a new idea or implementing it. Seriously, sick in the head and should be locked up for the good of everyone else. The world got where it was through open sharing of knowledge. Where would we be if everyone until now was like you? Now that you've benefited from that you want to make your small tweak to the state of the art and hold everyone hostage, despite that you freely learned what you know. You obviously expect to be nearly useless in life, so you want a monopoly for whatever good ideas you do have.
Patents are the ultimate in big-government nonsense. Tax everyone to pay for extorting the competition, to PROMOTE growth... Try working, asshole.
Yeah yeah, if you give the first guy to do something a monopoly on that thing, he will find it valuable.
Yeah! We festering get it. But do you get that the rest of society suffers?
Sometimes it might not matter much, if the thing is truly novel not many people would have been doing it. But look at 95% of patents. Far from worth rewarding, they've become nothing but an attempt to injure competitors by camping on the largest amount of tech possible.
Not everything that could have a dollar value should be auctioned off. I'm sure I could find a richer person than you (ie, they'd pay more than you could) who wanted your organs. Are you going to be all anti-capitalist and start whining, or will you go quietly?
It's a human rights violation to show someone something valuable and then restrict them from using it.
Many patents are so abusive. Can you imagine trying to tell people that they aren't allowed to tease cats with a laser because you've patented it? Can you imagine the chutzpa of the person who applied for that.
"Please, PTO, use tax money extorted from the people to help me set up a legal monopoly on this everyday activity! In return I shall give them the secret of holding the 'On' button while shaking the laser."
That sick joke would let the patent holder harass any number of actual useful businesses (useful - people would choose to purchase their services voluntarily). Imagine a pet-hotel that plays with the pets with a choice of toys. The sicko who patented this nonsense could sue them for either a cut of their profits or to prevent them using the "technology".
All people like you can see if the cost of the patent application and the potential royalties. You don't see the cost of checking for retarded patents, lawsuits about stupid patents, the mental cost to society of jackasses winning while useful people suffer, the burden of the PTO and court systems we have to pay for, etc.
And then all the silly technical rules. It's not like we're actually rewarding real creators for real good ideas. The system is set up to punish instead of reward. It "rewards" you essentially a letter of marque - legal right to extort your competitors, not actual rewards for spreading useful tech.
If we wanted to actually promote tech growth we'd all pitch in x% of tax for a pool, to be handed out years later based on a thorough examination of which ideas were actually helpful. As is we take people who don't understand the area (or they'd work in it) to decide before-hand which inventions are truly unique and helpful. Moreover, they don't just give a grant or something to these people, they give them the legal right to fuck with people who actually do legal things, to steal their money.
Yeah, the whole system of entitlement has helped so much! The worst thing is that there are people like yourself, likely otherwise fine but raised in this diseased atmosphere, who now think we need to enforce this totalitarian system on ourselves for fairness. How about people stop trying to get the government to pay them with other people's money and actually DID something? Huh?
Really though, he IS a lawyer in all but technicality. (For what little that's worth.) An insane one maybe, but the government merely took his license to practice, not his lifetime knowledge. As long as he's not offering to take a case for you...
It's not like the government is who I listen to in choosing who has the most accurate technical opinion in any given area. His credibility, IMHO, is right where it was before. (Zero, but for other reasons...)
They should have bots, doing something like your character studying in Eve Online... when you're not there your character could autoplay with one of a few goals - kills, resources, etc. It could just be part of the game... "What did you think your character did all day when you didn't log in? Sit in limbo?"
Then people could choose to play as much of the grind as they found fun.
But it wouldn't make the status nazis happy. It took them a long time to grind their loot and they want you to suffer at least as much as they did.
Some people just want a game where they have high status, merely to lord it over those who don't, not because they like the gameplay. (Much like IRC ops.)
So Blizzard should fix this. A few lines of code and the target monsters would start running from the people who had slaughtered so many, or some other in-game fix.
The fact that blizzard is suing the bot makers is proof the game is pathetic. They're cracking down on software that can play their game rather than making it more complex and balancing its flaws.
They should embrace the bot authors, including the auto-play features in the game. If there's good gameplay or content it'll survive. If not...
Someone willing to lump people into "torture" and "no torture - yet" seems to need a taste of their own medicine. Perhaps the downfall of Guantanamo will be when people fake enough evidence on people like you to clog the system.
Sorry, but if you think abduction and torture of a SUSPECT you don't actually have hard evidence on is reasonable, you're the enemy. Watch your back.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the new filtered internet requires failing the basic intelligence test.
Here's your ID card.
You mean perhaps, like the silent bulk tapping that was done on our phone calls. And of course the HUGE purge where everyone involved in that was instantly jailed... fired... reprimanded... What? nothing? Fuck!
Internet - the DRM generation
Total contractual freedom means that all of them, including those which are clearly abusive, are legally binding.
No. There's a big difference in being able to contract, even for life-threatening things, and being held to ridiculous clauses of a clearly manipulative contract.
So you need to either rethink either of your positions here, or clarify what you mean.
That I should be able to contract for, let's say, testing some experimental AIDS drug, even if this might kill me. If I'm dying I want the right to choose.
This is not the same as thinking that if I get you to sign a contract without reading some fine print on the back of page four that I should own your soul. Theoretically (pre-EULA madness) contracts require both parties understand and accept the terms of the contract.
It's not a question of what I believe, it's a question of what the judge believes.
No, it's not though. Judges have ordered some pretty stupid things. At some point you'll have to consider how far you'll follow an order.
However, in this particular case, I couldn't sell my child even under total contractual freedom, since I don't own my children in the first place,
What if a judge said you did? The laws have been pretty crazy at some times... Is that your only objection? Or would you refuse to cooperate with the legal slavery order?
And the good end for slavers is to force them to apologize on their knees, then have them make restitutions to the best of their abilities, and [...]
I'm all for accepting apologies, if they're from someone who turned themselves in and stopped the behavior before being discovered. But if I were a slave I'd be pissed off if you wasted thirty seconds trying to capture the slavers rather than rescue us sooner. No vindictiveness, no torture, just swatted like dangerous insects so you can more easily save their human victims.
Problem is that the rabid capitalist aspect doesn't really leave you any chance to defend yourself against those who are better at it than you are. [..] coupled with hands-off social policy from the government, allowing those with power to wield it with minimal oversight, the end result is feudalism.
I'm not advocating a society of the knife, just that we admit we are already living in one. People have been sent to Iraq against their wills, certainly Iraqis have been killed against their will. And all dancing to the tune of our still nearly feudal overlords.
But we can't just disclaim responsibility because we're acting under orders, or more conveniently yet again, we're the 99% of the population who get to scapegoat the 1% who has to follow orders. We need to take moral responsibility for what we participate in, even if someone else is saying it's okay.
People at so many levels could have stepped up to stop many of the abuse of recent years (and always, I'm sure). Maher Arar for a specific examaple, but also the thousands of others like him, of any race, on either side of the world. Innocent people arrested because of McCarthyan suspicion and sentenced to truly brutal tortures. Any police officer, FBI agent, army officer, etc could have recognized injustices being done during their arrest, interrogation, and shipment to a hostile (to them) foreign country, and blown the whistle. But instead through everyone's complicity things were done that everyone would claim to be against, yet nobody tried to stop.
This is caused by blind adherence to the law. The law gave these guys guns and an order to kidnap someone. If they don't check that order, perform some amount of due diligence, what's the difference between the law and some street gang's "protection"?
The second branch of government is individual conscience. You have to have your own view of right and wrong, and at least not let yourself be pushed into wrong, even if you don't "fight" for ri
I'm all for total contractual freedom. If I can do something, why can't I contract to do it?
However, we shouldn't see contracts, and legal obligations, as anything "special". Certainly not something we are morally obliged to follow into certain personal ruin over an unseen loophole.
If I came to you and said I had a voodoo trinket concocted of your child's hair and lost teeth and that because of such, I own your child - so hand them over, you'd laugh at me, or worse.
So why would you do otherwise if I came to you with a sheet of paper, with a bunch of semi-latin text on it, claiming to own your child because of your failure to promptly pay your parking ticket?
An abusive relationship is such, regardless of how it's justified. There's only one good end for slavers - death. Properly applied this is the other branch of libertarian government- the personal realization of the right to proactive self-defense. It balances the rabid capitalism aspect you're familiar with.
Do unto others, but expect them to learn from this and attempt to do it first next time.
Just because you don't agree with elected government officials doesn't give you the right to stop paying taxes and push the cost onto other citizens
Oh, I see. I was born here so I'm obligated to go along with whatever you-all do.
Ummm. No.
By living in the country, you are accepting the whole package, including agreeing paying taxes, regardless of who is elected.
No. I don't accept that. Never have.
For an obvious example, I wouldn't follow Hitler. In fact, if I were a German citizen in WW2 I'd be morally obligated to try to kill him.
I'm no-more obligated to support or fund your unjustified murder spree in Iraq than I would support someone shooting an neighboring family under false pretenses.
The world isn't black and white
No? You seem to think it's all or nothing...
The idea that you should subject yourself to punishment for speaking out against injustice is crazy. Trying to flee unjust punishment isn't wrong, it's sane.
Nobody has an obligation to suffer punishment for not obeying an unjust law.
It's hard to blame HP's machine for not being compatible with Apple's DRM. It'll run OSX just as well once it's been cracked.
You know, I'd be pissed if they spent more time making sure my OS wouldn't work if I did anything nonstandard than they spent making sure it'd work. At Apple it's pretty obvious that the EULA is job one.
It's just insane to use Apple products. With Debian on x86 I could reinstall on most any computer and be running again quickly. With Windows I could install on about as many machines - less breadth of selection, more support for newer hardware.
But with MacOS I could only install on ~5% of the machines out there. Not that the rest aren't capable, but that Steve Jobs feels his profits are more important than my ability to use a product I own.
I may not be MacGyver, but I refuse the buy things that will purposefully shut down if I try to operate them outside of the marketing department's expected patterns.
Twice the features? Even leaving out "DRM renders product useless with 3rd-party replacement hardware", the HP comes (at any price point) with far more ram and drive space, a faster CPU, and potentially better cooling. Competition, it's good for buyers.
If I had to buy an HP part I could - you could not. Haha. You spent more, got less, and got brainwashed into thinking it's more. It's not a religious open-source thing, it's an avoiding monopolies thing. Buying parts you can second-source is just good business. Buying into monopolistic lock-in just isn't good business.
Ballmer's [...] primary responsibility is to make money for MS shareholders
You know, I don't really care if someone is making my life miserable for fun, or because someone is paying them to. This whole "I was just following the 'more profit' order" thing should have gone out with the Nuremberg trials.
The funny thing is that after suing some little company out of existence over some fake shit like a software patent he'd expect one of their employees to help him if he was having a heart attack or choking. As if anything done in "business" is fine.
Strawman after strawman
Your inability to follow doesn't mean there isn't a point.
I'm not going to cry about 0.00001% lost traffic [...] neither are my customers [...] I tell them they may lose a few geeks [...] laugh and call you a retard.
You say that your customers decide upon the use of Javascript because they find it useful and find the (as presented by your) ideological refusal to use it silly and beneath them because they have enough other users not to care.
However, you are incompetent at your job - from your brief description. When you say they'll "lose a few geeks to ideological reaons" you totally ignore that 98% of the people in this thread oppose needless use of JS for technological reasons, not ideological. If you were talking about Flash you might be right.
Your lack of understanding of the motives of your potential users and your arrogant laugh-and-call-them-retards style has means you've recommended your customers do probably the worst thing they could - laugh at and marginalize the technologically adept.
It's not a matter of losing the 1% of people who use NoScript-type tools, it's the possibility of finding one day that someone has written a Greasemonkey script and the other 99% of your users can access your content without your eye-manacles. Or that someone just ripped everything you have and offered it for download. And you're recommending your customers ignore and trivialize these concerns.
Your basic argument is that, because JavaScript is in some cases used for evil, [...] My argument is that that makes you a fucking retard
No, you're a fucking retard for assuming that's my argument. You're to much of an asshole to check your assumptions.
I'll repeat the key parts of what I said, and explain in smaller words.
You seem to be incapable of understanding the difference between rich-content delivery systems and ad-spam [...] I'd bet that less than 2% of the JS you use is actually beneficial to the users....
I acknowledge the existence of "JS ... actually beneficial to the users". I just question if you could recognize and implement such a thing.
Everything you've said here has been about client demands, nothing about user friendliness or disabled-friendly access. I doubt you're any good at (if you ever tried) figuring out what a user would actually enjoy doing. As a consequence I don't think you could tell the difference between helping the user, so-called "content delivery", and hurting them with spam/phishing.
Neither I nor my customers care ... perception of gain. ... We don't fucking care. ... if you don't like it you can leave, because, as I reiterate, we don't fucking care.
I'm sensing a slight lack of concern for the feelings of others. However, rather then being wrong for some sappy moralistic reason it's simply a bad idea to be such a bonehead because you'll never be able to predict people.
I'm more than happy to ignore anything you've ever touched (please send me a list so I can add it to the blacklist.) However I've written a few web scrapers and configured de-crappifying gateways at the request of less technical users. They may want or need something you've hidden behind the layer of incompatible and non-standard UI, or broken in their, no-doubt laughable, retard-browser (like Firefox). They don't have any political motives, they merely want their content.
I'm not going to fix your buggy UI, or rip out the minimum cruft necessary to use. I'm just going to spider the whole thing and be done with it. I'm sure you've already seen the email from the people I help, as they ask you for changes. Perhaps they simply say JS sucks because that's all they know. But when you brush them off they come to me or one o
Yeah, because we're incapable of telling an actually helpful UI in a situation like that from every other ad-laden flash-riddled piece of crap site.
So few sites actually do anything (that I'd want done) with JS that defaulting to having it off DOES improve the average web browsing experience.
And anything that breaks so completely without JS that it can't even offer an error message and a reason to enable JS is programmed so badly it should be ignored.
You seem to be incapable of understanding the difference between rich-content delivery systems and ad-spam. Explain to your customers that one geek who dislikes their presentation can write a Greasemonkey script to totally rework your site. I'd bet that less than 2% of the JS you use is actually beneficial to the users....
Amusingly, that's how users view things like NoScript... They think webdevs who use JS to hurt their users (force ads) and expect users to stay and keep JS on are retards. Unfortunately, they're far from 0.00001% percent of the sites.
When all you offer your users is a more difficult experience in order to force ad-views don't be surprised when your content shows up on Piratebay.
They're still stuck in the mindset of magazine sellers. You paid for the book and aren't going anywhere - they own you. But when they're a click away from everything else they don't get that advantage.
Then watch people rip that content and place it on the Piratebay. When DRM gets so bad you can't use the content, rip and fix it.
It would seem a bit anomalous, therefore, to allow a patent on specialized hardware that embodies precisely the same inventive character as its patent ineligible software counterpart.
That's the entire point of patents. To protect the specific implementation, NOT to prevent anyone else from achieving a specific result.
The reason software patents MUST stay invalid is that people want to patent THE ONLY way to do something.
For instance, you're free to implement an adder circuit that calculates 2+2, etc, and then patent any specific improvements. And anyone else could simultaneously develop and patent their own equivalent circuits.
But software patents would allow people to patent the fundamental elements of performing the task. For instance, making adding numbers itself (surely something that would be software-patent worthy, if not for the prior art) something you'd have to pay royalties to do.
The concept of digital logic itself could be patented. Someone patented using XOR to calculate the mask for displaying a cursor. Doesn't it seem crazy to have patented "Draw the shape of the cursor by reversing the value of the pixels it overlays". But that's what XOR is in that instance.
Madness. But then, patents aren't to help innovators they're to provide a comfortable government paycheck so your company can sit on the sofa all day eating bon bons and pumping out unwanted child-divisions. Remember when you see someone promoting patents that they're really just looking for a welfare check and listen to their "arguments" with that in mind.
they also take a LOT of risk. They should get rewarded. How much is not for you to decide.
Bullshit. In that risk deserves reward, and that it's not my place to put a limit on tax-funded handouts.
The market will determine the reward they get. It's nobody's job to make sure that crazy risks pay off.
And yes, considering my tax money is being spent on a system that limits my freedom to innovate and build, it is MY right to say no more.
Patents are just another form of tariff to protect industry we think won't survive in an open market.
Further, only a sick fucker could think it's a good thing to be able to keep people from learning a new idea or implementing it. Seriously, sick in the head and should be locked up for the good of everyone else. The world got where it was through open sharing of knowledge. Where would we be if everyone until now was like you? Now that you've benefited from that you want to make your small tweak to the state of the art and hold everyone hostage, despite that you freely learned what you know. You obviously expect to be nearly useless in life, so you want a monopoly for whatever good ideas you do have.
Patents are the ultimate in big-government nonsense. Tax everyone to pay for extorting the competition, to PROMOTE growth... Try working, asshole.
Weird - my meat is capable of poetry...
So you're like an NPC right, controlled by the GM via this 'soul' thing?
Yeah yeah, if you give the first guy to do something a monopoly on that thing, he will find it valuable.
Yeah! We festering get it. But do you get that the rest of society suffers?
Sometimes it might not matter much, if the thing is truly novel not many people would have been doing it. But look at 95% of patents. Far from worth rewarding, they've become nothing but an attempt to injure competitors by camping on the largest amount of tech possible.
Not everything that could have a dollar value should be auctioned off. I'm sure I could find a richer person than you (ie, they'd pay more than you could) who wanted your organs. Are you going to be all anti-capitalist and start whining, or will you go quietly?
It's a human rights violation to show someone something valuable and then restrict them from using it.
Many patents are so abusive. Can you imagine trying to tell people that they aren't allowed to tease cats with a laser because you've patented it? Can you imagine the chutzpa of the person who applied for that.
"Please, PTO, use tax money extorted from the people to help me set up a legal monopoly on this everyday activity! In return I shall give them the secret of holding the 'On' button while shaking the laser."
That sick joke would let the patent holder harass any number of actual useful businesses (useful - people would choose to purchase their services voluntarily). Imagine a pet-hotel that plays with the pets with a choice of toys. The sicko who patented this nonsense could sue them for either a cut of their profits or to prevent them using the "technology".
All people like you can see if the cost of the patent application and the potential royalties. You don't see the cost of checking for retarded patents, lawsuits about stupid patents, the mental cost to society of jackasses winning while useful people suffer, the burden of the PTO and court systems we have to pay for, etc.
And then all the silly technical rules. It's not like we're actually rewarding real creators for real good ideas. The system is set up to punish instead of reward. It "rewards" you essentially a letter of marque - legal right to extort your competitors, not actual rewards for spreading useful tech.
If we wanted to actually promote tech growth we'd all pitch in x% of tax for a pool, to be handed out years later based on a thorough examination of which ideas were actually helpful. As is we take people who don't understand the area (or they'd work in it) to decide before-hand which inventions are truly unique and helpful. Moreover, they don't just give a grant or something to these people, they give them the legal right to fuck with people who actually do legal things, to steal their money.
Yeah, the whole system of entitlement has helped so much! The worst thing is that there are people like yourself, likely otherwise fine but raised in this diseased atmosphere, who now think we need to enforce this totalitarian system on ourselves for fairness. How about people stop trying to get the government to pay them with other people's money and actually DID something? Huh?
Really though, he IS a lawyer in all but technicality. (For what little that's worth.) An insane one maybe, but the government merely took his license to practice, not his lifetime knowledge. As long as he's not offering to take a case for you...
It's not like the government is who I listen to in choosing who has the most accurate technical opinion in any given area. His credibility, IMHO, is right where it was before. (Zero, but for other reasons...)
Without copyright law you couldn't stop us from abusing the results. Sounds fine.
Yeah, but what relevance could the time possibly have if not tracking the workings of the celestial clock?
As much fun as a smack-addicted monkey mashing the button mindlessly, looking for its next rush.
Have fun playing exactly the game Blizzard feels is the most profitable, not the one that any players would pick if they could design it.
They should have bots, doing something like your character studying in Eve Online... when you're not there your character could autoplay with one of a few goals - kills, resources, etc. It could just be part of the game... "What did you think your character did all day when you didn't log in? Sit in limbo?"
Then people could choose to play as much of the grind as they found fun.
But it wouldn't make the status nazis happy. It took them a long time to grind their loot and they want you to suffer at least as much as they did.
Some people just want a game where they have high status, merely to lord it over those who don't, not because they like the gameplay. (Much like IRC ops.)
GM checking in on you (you wouldn't know)
Not true - you know that feeling of déjà vu you get when you've just killed the thousandth monster for some stupid quest - like you've been right there before, doing the exact same thing? That's a GM looking at you.
Or maybe it's the repetitive gameplay...
So Blizzard should fix this. A few lines of code and the target monsters would start running from the people who had slaughtered so many, or some other in-game fix.
The fact that blizzard is suing the bot makers is proof the game is pathetic. They're cracking down on software that can play their game rather than making it more complex and balancing its flaws.
They should embrace the bot authors, including the auto-play features in the game. If there's good gameplay or content it'll survive. If not...
Someone willing to lump people into "torture" and "no torture - yet" seems to need a taste of their own medicine. Perhaps the downfall of Guantanamo will be when people fake enough evidence on people like you to clog the system.
Sorry, but if you think abduction and torture of a SUSPECT you don't actually have hard evidence on is reasonable, you're the enemy. Watch your back.