This is no different from one country deciding it needs the resources of another - minerals, say - and simply sending their army to annex it. A classic example of this is Iraq invading Kuwait.
Well, it's only different when you realize that no one was killed, no land was taken, no national boundaries were violated, and nothing was "lost" except money that wasn't going to get paid to the drug companies in the first place. Other than that it's a perfectly valid analogy.
What this really does is reveal the artificial nature of so-called "intellectual property." How ideas can only be granted property status by a removal of the right to use them, and only by a public that consents to it. Brazil just so happens to not be bound by US patent law.
Called the "lameness" filter, Slashdot adds these to long words or so. I forgot the reasoning on this. any help here?
I think the lameness filter ensures that language usage is kept to the lowest common denominator, and punctuation is not over-creatively used. It was supposed to keep trolls from posting in all caps and drawing penis-birds, but its actual implementation is just annoying, and, well, lame. It's like copy-protection; the crapflooders will always find a way around the latest one, and in the meantime it (apparently randomly) inhibits the rest of us from otherwise innocent activity.
What was that Isaac Asimov novella again? Oh, yes: ``Profession''. Should be required reading for any numbnuts that proposes teaching a vendor-specific technology in schools.
But the question he never answered in that story was: why do they call it the Olympics?
Yeah. Nine Tommorrows was one of my favorites when I was, oh, about nine years old.
Microsoft knows the school system is strapped for cash, and now because of their greed, it has backfired.
If we're all referring to the "Get Legal" BSA terror^H^H^H^H^H^Hletter-writing campaign (which is what I'm sure caused this), let me assure you that it has backfired in heavily MS-friendly corporate areas as well. Bill may not be aware of it, but the economy is in a recession, and companies are cutting costs, not increasing them. Being frightened witless by a BSA campaign caused some people in my IT department to re-evaluate the potential of putting Linux out there. Maybe not this year, maybe not next, but we do know it can be done and the next stupid thing MS does may be the last one they do for us.
Please, don't feel the urge to mention StarOffice or OpenOffice as we all know they just flat suck.
I've been using StarOffice to submit my weekly status reports to my boss. The difference is imperceptible. In fact, we recently discussed the possibility of putting Linux on our corporate workstations, just as an in-the-back-pocket concept, and we spent about two hours creating a test workstation that would do everything our users needed to do. smbmount and smbumount made attaching to the Windows NT network easy. Mapped drives, created word documents, etc. The fundamental lesson I learned from this was that no matter what was running underneath, if the user interface was kept consistent the end-user need not know the difference.
Good money decision, but really bad in the long run.
Aside from your misunderstanding of what constitutes an "education", exactly why is this bad in the long run?
in 5.12 there's an Option in the prefs to set what Opera ids itself asIt's been there since 5.01. I set it to mozilla, most of the time. It's fun to go to Microsoft's site with it set like that. It looks like ass. Set it to IE5 and go back, and suddenly everything works. Funny, isn't it?
I really don't think the people who wrote the original copyright by-laws would refer to widespread, global, profitless redistribution of their product to millions of people
That's a funny statement. You imply, probably without meaning to, that the people who wrote the laws are in the industry. But it's true. Copyright is not a natural property right. It has to be artificially created and enforced.
Tape-trading went on for years without people being arrested and thrown in prison for manufacturing cassette tapes. Almost certainly because first of all the cassete tape was a "product," and there was a way for the industry to extract their supposedly "lost" profits from blank media. And almost certainly because there was no way to track how many times a.60c cassette tape was used to copy the latest Duran Duran hit (or whatever).
So now we have a publicly visible excrescence of this phenomenon, and now people are seeing how much their product is worth. How many people are willing to actually pay for what they can easily copy from a friend.
The fact that everybody does it doesn't magically make it legal, proper, or morally justifyable in any context.
The value of what you put in the market is what people are willing to pay for it. If that's $0, you don't have a business model. Clearly people are willing to pay for a physical copy of a CD to put in their car, for the lyrics sheet to read and bip along to, for the pictures of the artists (if any). But the actual music is easily obtained, and it's worth $0. It only looks like theft because laws have been written to ensure this business model. But a law which is trivially violated and impossible to trace or enforce makes no sense.
The record industry is suing the Yang brothers because they're available to sue. They provide a tangible target for their so-called "loss." Why doesn't the record industry try to sue the millions of "pirates" out in the marketplace? They're the ones who actually violated the law, by taking that which they did not "own." Right?
Of course, then the recording industry would probably end up facing a massive consumer revolt, a class action lawsuit from their millions of defendants, and of course the impossibility of getting all those people in the courtroom at one time to hear the charges against them.
It may be that there is simply no market value for a stream of bits, whether that stream is music, video, text, or the recorded sounds of me farting in the shower. It may be that after all this, the record companies are still making money, and ought to be happy that they can. I still buy CD's. Plenty of other people do.
You don't see big acts going out of business because they can't sell enough CD's. N'Sync played in my town just a few weeks ago. I don't recall seeing them out on the corner panhandling before the gig. You don't see record company executives selling their children for scientific experiments. Obviously, they are still selling their product. They just think they're supposed to be selling more.
So. This one example of casual abuse is clearly indicative that everyone is pirating CD's at an astonishing rate. It's amazing that the record companies aren't spilling employees into the street, looting their corporate assets for the last dime, and closing up shop.
it is a perfectly valid form of legal argumentation.
Yes I realize that. So are ad-hominem attacks, specious generalization, and anecdotal evidence. Whatever you can get away with, you will.
What would the political landscape look like, I wonder, if we did a little training in logic, the correct construction of syllogisms, and the art of recognizing fallacies, to our children at the age of four. Just for a generation or two?
I don't suppose most of what we think of as business as usual could survive a generation that could see through such nonsense.
I also realize that standing there pointing and saying "Ad-hominem!" and "false analogy!" to a courtroom wouldn't fly either. What's required (and what I went back and did to rho) is an intelligent de-construction of his argument, point by point, that refutes without textbook terms the rationality of his argument. But he used the phrase "I believe in the slippery slope" and I could not help myself. I started typing my reply less than five seconds after I read the phrase. I was so tickled by that I couldn't resist.
Hey. It's your argument which has no merit. I could recast my rebuttal as this:
I do believe in a slippery slope, and I fear that if this first step is allowed, and stem cells are found to be true saviors for millions of degenerative diseases, there will be people willing to open embryo banks
OK. And who will permit the continuous creation of embryos to support the embryo banks. Certainly not the right-to lifers. And I suspect not most pro-choicers either. I certainly feel there is a pretty thin line between a choice and a convenience. I wouldn't feel at all sympathetic towards a woman deliberately getting pregnant in order to abort. And I'm pretty supportive of the right to choose.
donate an egg or sperm, get $50!
Now that's pretty extreme. A potential human life worth only $50.
Mix in cloning,
Cloning human beings hasn't yet been made possible, and there is tremendous opposition to permitting such. We just need to start putting movies like Blade Runner back in the theatre to gauge the public's taste for senselessly killing "replicants."
and it's a short step from there to growing humans for harvesting their organs.
I'm just seeing the picture of that. It kind of looks like the scene in the Matrix where Neo awakens for the first time in his tank. That's one of the most horrifying images that has ever been put on a movie screen, and without exception people react to it with distaste. Ick. So paint that picture for even the staunchest pro-abortion activist and they'll get a little queasy. You were saying?
It's just like brainwashing -- if you can believe this, you'll soon believe this, then this, and then you'll believe something completely out of character before you know it.
But you're talking about brainwashing an entire culture, not just a single person. Brainwashing usually needs to either start at a very early age, or it needs to be accomplished by extreme torture vs. reward. Sure, it's easy enough to brainwash children into believing whatever value system you present them with -- the whole of Christianity is a perfect example of how an entire culture can be made to believe in something that simply isn't there. But we'd also have to brainwash three or four generations of adults at the same time. And you're talking about brainwashing a significant number of the population who currently cannot get past your first premise, let alone to your second and third. These are people who are openly resistant to even the hint of these ideas. The faceless conspiracy to create human clones from an aborted embryo bank would have to capture these people, torture them, and re-align their values to the new world order. All without sparking off some kind of revolt in the process. And don't tell me they'd do it with subliminal messages or hypnosis . ..
So in conclusion, and without once referencing my textbook list of fallacies (of which you have commited several) I don't buy it. Stem-cell research is not the first step on a "slippery slope" to human organ banks grown from deliberately aborted embryos. You're over-reacting, and projecting your image of what you think pro-choice people will tolerate or support into the ludicrous extreme, when in fact you've failed to demonstrate that anyone would accept even the smallest step down your slippery slope (the creation of embryo banks). Researching existing cells is one thing. Creating a demand for dead embryos is something else entirely. The rest of your scenario is equally unlikely.
Re:Yeah, it's SO much better to do NOTHING...
on
Triana Mothballed
·
· Score: 1
Well, I picked on the ad-hominem because it was such an offensive example of ad-hominem. It argued not only did the majority of people argee, (you who disagree are not in the majority), but that the majority of clear-thinking people agreed (you who disagree are not clear-thinking) and the majority of clear-thinking americans agreed (you're being faintly unamerican!). When I'm confronted with statements like that, warm spit fills my mouth. I'm not sure the people using those as logical premises realize what damage they do to their own rhetoric. A statement like that is meant to preach to the converted, rather than convert the unbelievers.
For anyone who finds themselves even faintly in opposition to the thesis of the essay's statement, to be instantly put on the outside of those three circles is almost like being called a racist epithet (at least that's what it feels like). "A majority of non-dumbfucks who don't have giant supperating genital warts and whose mothers are not whores agree . . . ". And my response to statements like that is usually just to quit reading before I rupture a vessel.
I try to plant that suggestion as often as I can. I feel it's my role as a soldier in the meme war; if I can't correct people's erroneous facts or logic, at least I can cast some self-doubt. Which I sincerely hope leads to critical examination . . .
Well maybe that's it. Multiplayer just doesn't thrill my nads either. I've participated in maybe a dozen multiplayer deathmatches and they just utterly fail to get my rocks off. It's the repetitiveness of it all. Also, in 1996, getting multiplayer games to work at all was more work than the game itself. Even quake, which I used to do with my brother all the time, had some serious problems. All told I'll play banjo-kazooie before I play another FPS. Half life was really good. It was almost like a movie. Duke Nukem Never, when it never comes out, will be interesting. If never it does.
The only way, in my eyes, of fixing the situation is to educate the general public so that they know when they are hearing BS from reporters.
I am of the opinion that the "general public" already knows reporters are full of shit. Their credibility has spiraled down as they've raced to compete with Jerry Springer and the National Enquirer for ratings.
I think the lameness filter is, well, lame. It doesn't catch trolls, and it does piss off legit posters who don't know all the tricks for getting around it.
But, if in the future they did become the only way publishers released books libraries would not be able to lend them.
It doesn't seem to have occurred to these people that they might not have a business plan doing that. I have attempted to make this point before to the "but copying is piracy and piracy is stealing from me!" type guys -- it may be that digital information simply does not have monetary value. One of the long-standing rules of the marketplace is that the value of a thing is what that thing will bring. If no one will pay for it, you can't make money selling it. It's like the dorks who want to privatize the water supply -- this shit falls out of the air, people.
Digital bits are trivially easy to copy. No encryption scheme can hold when you've got physical access to both the encoder and decoder. People are by and large unwilling to give up their rights of property (to own that which they've purchased, to view it at the time and in the manner of their choosing) in order to ensure digital profitability. Maybe it's simply time to step back from this "glorious revolution" and re-evaluate what we think we're doing, as a society.
If read the babelfish translation you will, backwards how it is written you will see. Yoda, almost as if it were written by. Normal however I have found, word order for most other indo-european languages that is.
Dude. Bite my ass. I could afford two SUV's. I don't because I don't want one. I rented one awhile back for a long trip and I abso-fucking-lutely hated it. It costs a fortune to put gas in one, and I swear the IQ of the driver goes down the minute he/she gets inside.
driving up auto insurance rates by making yourselves more vulnerable to injury
Wow. Let me tell you a story about four fucking wheel drive. About ten years ago, I was driving through Kansas in November or so. Doing 70 mph, we drove onto an inch-thick sheet of ice, rather suddenly. The wind was chilling the road, and all the melting snow suddenly became solid. The car in front of me (just a car) started fishtailing. I tapped my brake ever so lightly, not yet realizing my peril, and I was fishtailing too. Well the car in front of me lost control and went off the right side of the road, flipped upside down, blew his front and rear windows out, and landed sitting upright. Screaming kids, stunned drivers. I went off to the left, but managed to keep the car upright, and safely stopped. The 18-wheel truck behind us managed to come to a safe stop as well.
After I talked to the driver of the car, and made sure they were all alive, we drove to the next town to call the police (this was before every pinhead had a cell phone in his back pocket) and for the next hundred miles I counted a four-wheel-drive vehicle tumbled over on the side of the road every three miles. I only saw one or two regular-sized cars. Almost without exception, the people who misjudged their driving abilities, their speed, and their car's traction, were driving a hopped-up SUV or light truck of one kind or another. I saw maybe three or four regular cars. The rest of us, not having this blind belief in the indestructibility of our vehicles, drove slowly and cautiously. But the SUV assholes roared past us all, and a good number of them ended up inverted in a ditch. So DON'T TELL ME about how your SUV is so fucking safe. I laughed as I drove past some of those people. I laughed the fuck out loud. You are buying the DELUSION of safety with an SUV.
My original post had nothing to do with the fitness of these cars. I just made a note that the lights were pointed higher than they needed to be. I will point out that I have yet to be blinded by the lights of a bus or 18-wheel truck. I think because they're correctly configured. It's as if the SUV designers sat down in a smaller car, right in front of the SUV, and designed the lights so that they could not help but annoy the driver in front of them.
People wouldn't hate SUV's so much if their designers and owners didn't make such a point of being arrogant about them. I can't tell you how I long to go up to a Jeep and paint in big bold letters on the back windshield: "No, it's a penis thing, and sadly, I do understand."
I can't imagine how anyone can be truly, "tired" of the Quake genre.
Quake I was pretty boring. After I got over the 360 degree view, I realized that the levels were all demonstrations of "look, we can do full 360 degree views!!!" I could play through the entire first four shareware episodes in under thirty minutes. I finished the full game in under three hours. no, I don't play on nightmare skill level. The interesting part of the game, to me, is not killing the monsters. Adding more of them doesn't make the game more fun. It's figuring out the level. Well in Quake they might as well paint arrows on the walls. I never got stuck in Quake.
But that's entirely subjective. I have great praise for Quake as a game . . . engine. But as an actual game it seems to lack something. It's not challenging for me to click the joystick trigger hundreds of times. I want my brain to get exercised as well.
there is nothing wrong with too much light.
this "light pollution" is just a problem made up by do-gooders.
Well, it's mostly caused by wasted light. Most of the light that actually comes out of a street fixture goes straight up into the air, where it does no one any good. That's a tremendous amount of wasted energy. The light bulb's efficiency sucks already. But now we have to make it put out more light just to see what we're doing on the ground. When headlights (which on EVERY SUV in the country are TOO BRIGHT and pointed up TOO HIGH) shine into a driver's eyes, he has more trouble seeing the road. That's actually dangerous. There's a type of headlight that's made in Europe, (my car aficianado friends tell me) which focuses a far sharper cone on the road and works about a thousand times better. They are not permitted in the US because the DOT standard is "good enough."
All in all, light pollution, besides ruining the night sky for astronomers and amateurs alike, is a pretty important topic. Our energy costs could go down . . . oh yeah. I forgot, that would hurt the oil com^H^H^H^H^H^H^Heconomy.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it's only different when you realize that no one was killed, no land was taken, no national boundaries were violated, and nothing was "lost" except money that wasn't going to get paid to the drug companies in the first place. Other than that it's a perfectly valid analogy.
What this really does is reveal the artificial nature of so-called "intellectual property." How ideas can only be granted property status by a removal of the right to use them, and only by a public that consents to it. Brazil just so happens to not be bound by US patent law.
I think the lameness filter ensures that language usage is kept to the lowest common denominator, and punctuation is not over-creatively used. It was supposed to keep trolls from posting in all caps and drawing penis-birds, but its actual implementation is just annoying, and, well, lame. It's like copy-protection; the crapflooders will always find a way around the latest one, and in the meantime it (apparently randomly) inhibits the rest of us from otherwise innocent activity.
But the question he never answered in that story was: why do they call it the Olympics?
Yeah. Nine Tommorrows was one of my favorites when I was, oh, about nine years old.
If we're all referring to the "Get Legal" BSA terror^H^H^H^H^H^Hletter-writing campaign (which is what I'm sure caused this), let me assure you that it has backfired in heavily MS-friendly corporate areas as well. Bill may not be aware of it, but the economy is in a recession, and companies are cutting costs, not increasing them. Being frightened witless by a BSA campaign caused some people in my IT department to re-evaluate the potential of putting Linux out there. Maybe not this year, maybe not next, but we do know it can be done and the next stupid thing MS does may be the last one they do for us.
I've been using StarOffice to submit my weekly status reports to my boss. The difference is imperceptible. In fact, we recently discussed the possibility of putting Linux on our corporate workstations, just as an in-the-back-pocket concept, and we spent about two hours creating a test workstation that would do everything our users needed to do. smbmount and smbumount made attaching to the Windows NT network easy. Mapped drives, created word documents, etc. The fundamental lesson I learned from this was that no matter what was running underneath, if the user interface was kept consistent the end-user need not know the difference.
Good money decision, but really bad in the long run.
Aside from your misunderstanding of what constitutes an "education", exactly why is this bad in the long run?
in 5.12 there's an Option in the prefs to set what Opera ids itself asIt's been there since 5.01. I set it to mozilla, most of the time. It's fun to go to Microsoft's site with it set like that. It looks like ass. Set it to IE5 and go back, and suddenly everything works. Funny, isn't it?
AOL Instant Messenger already allows file transfer. It is certainly already happening.
That's a funny statement. You imply, probably without meaning to, that the people who wrote the laws are in the industry. But it's true. Copyright is not a natural property right. It has to be artificially created and enforced.
Tape-trading went on for years without people being arrested and thrown in prison for manufacturing cassette tapes. Almost certainly because first of all the cassete tape was a "product," and there was a way for the industry to extract their supposedly "lost" profits from blank media. And almost certainly because there was no way to track how many times a .60c cassette tape was used to copy the latest Duran Duran hit (or whatever).
So now we have a publicly visible excrescence of this phenomenon, and now people are seeing how much their product is worth. How many people are willing to actually pay for what they can easily copy from a friend.
The fact that everybody does it doesn't magically make it legal, proper, or morally justifyable in any context.
The value of what you put in the market is what people are willing to pay for it. If that's $0, you don't have a business model. Clearly people are willing to pay for a physical copy of a CD to put in their car, for the lyrics sheet to read and bip along to, for the pictures of the artists (if any). But the actual music is easily obtained, and it's worth $0. It only looks like theft because laws have been written to ensure this business model. But a law which is trivially violated and impossible to trace or enforce makes no sense.
The record industry is suing the Yang brothers because they're available to sue. They provide a tangible target for their so-called "loss." Why doesn't the record industry try to sue the millions of "pirates" out in the marketplace? They're the ones who actually violated the law, by taking that which they did not "own." Right?
Of course, then the recording industry would probably end up facing a massive consumer revolt, a class action lawsuit from their millions of defendants, and of course the impossibility of getting all those people in the courtroom at one time to hear the charges against them.
It may be that there is simply no market value for a stream of bits, whether that stream is music, video, text, or the recorded sounds of me farting in the shower. It may be that after all this, the record companies are still making money, and ought to be happy that they can. I still buy CD's. Plenty of other people do.
You don't see big acts going out of business because they can't sell enough CD's. N'Sync played in my town just a few weeks ago. I don't recall seeing them out on the corner panhandling before the gig. You don't see record company executives selling their children for scientific experiments. Obviously, they are still selling their product. They just think they're supposed to be selling more.
So. This one example of casual abuse is clearly indicative that everyone is pirating CD's at an astonishing rate. It's amazing that the record companies aren't spilling employees into the street, looting their corporate assets for the last dime, and closing up shop.
Anonymous! It had to be said.
Yes I realize that. So are ad-hominem attacks, specious generalization, and anecdotal evidence. Whatever you can get away with, you will.
What would the political landscape look like, I wonder, if we did a little training in logic, the correct construction of syllogisms, and the art of recognizing fallacies, to our children at the age of four. Just for a generation or two?
I don't suppose most of what we think of as business as usual could survive a generation that could see through such nonsense.
I also realize that standing there pointing and saying "Ad-hominem!" and "false analogy!" to a courtroom wouldn't fly either. What's required (and what I went back and did to rho) is an intelligent de-construction of his argument, point by point, that refutes without textbook terms the rationality of his argument. But he used the phrase "I believe in the slippery slope" and I could not help myself. I started typing my reply less than five seconds after I read the phrase. I was so tickled by that I couldn't resist.
I do believe in a slippery slope, and I fear that if this first step is allowed, and stem cells are found to be true saviors for millions of degenerative diseases, there will be people willing to open embryo banks
OK. And who will permit the continuous creation of embryos to support the embryo banks. Certainly not the right-to lifers. And I suspect not most pro-choicers either. I certainly feel there is a pretty thin line between a choice and a convenience. I wouldn't feel at all sympathetic towards a woman deliberately getting pregnant in order to abort. And I'm pretty supportive of the right to choose.
donate an egg or sperm, get $50!
Now that's pretty extreme. A potential human life worth only $50.
Mix in cloning,
Cloning human beings hasn't yet been made possible, and there is tremendous opposition to permitting such. We just need to start putting movies like Blade Runner back in the theatre to gauge the public's taste for senselessly killing "replicants."
and it's a short step from there to growing humans for harvesting their organs.
I'm just seeing the picture of that. It kind of looks like the scene in the Matrix where Neo awakens for the first time in his tank. That's one of the most horrifying images that has ever been put on a movie screen, and without exception people react to it with distaste. Ick. So paint that picture for even the staunchest pro-abortion activist and they'll get a little queasy. You were saying?
It's just like brainwashing -- if you can believe this, you'll soon believe this, then this, and then you'll believe something completely out of character before you know it.
But you're talking about brainwashing an entire culture, not just a single person. Brainwashing usually needs to either start at a very early age, or it needs to be accomplished by extreme torture vs. reward. Sure, it's easy enough to brainwash children into believing whatever value system you present them with -- the whole of Christianity is a perfect example of how an entire culture can be made to believe in something that simply isn't there. But we'd also have to brainwash three or four generations of adults at the same time. And you're talking about brainwashing a significant number of the population who currently cannot get past your first premise, let alone to your second and third. These are people who are openly resistant to even the hint of these ideas. The faceless conspiracy to create human clones from an aborted embryo bank would have to capture these people, torture them, and re-align their values to the new world order. All without sparking off some kind of revolt in the process. And don't tell me they'd do it with subliminal messages or hypnosis . . .
So in conclusion, and without once referencing my textbook list of fallacies (of which you have commited several) I don't buy it. Stem-cell research is not the first step on a "slippery slope" to human organ banks grown from deliberately aborted embryos. You're over-reacting, and projecting your image of what you think pro-choice people will tolerate or support into the ludicrous extreme, when in fact you've failed to demonstrate that anyone would accept even the smallest step down your slippery slope (the creation of embryo banks). Researching existing cells is one thing. Creating a demand for dead embryos is something else entirely. The rest of your scenario is equally unlikely.
For anyone who finds themselves even faintly in opposition to the thesis of the essay's statement, to be instantly put on the outside of those three circles is almost like being called a racist epithet (at least that's what it feels like). "A majority of non-dumbfucks who don't have giant supperating genital warts and whose mothers are not whores agree . . . ". And my response to statements like that is usually just to quit reading before I rupture a vessel.
I try to plant that suggestion as often as I can. I feel it's my role as a soldier in the meme war; if I can't correct people's erroneous facts or logic, at least I can cast some self-doubt. Which I sincerely hope leads to critical examination . . .
Well maybe that's it. Multiplayer just doesn't thrill my nads either. I've participated in maybe a dozen multiplayer deathmatches and they just utterly fail to get my rocks off. It's the repetitiveness of it all. Also, in 1996, getting multiplayer games to work at all was more work than the game itself. Even quake, which I used to do with my brother all the time, had some serious problems. All told I'll play banjo-kazooie before I play another FPS. Half life was really good. It was almost like a movie. Duke Nukem Never, when it never comes out, will be interesting. If never it does.
But if you want to make a post extolling the virtues of fprintf, you'll then be SOL.
if you've been in an IRC chat room recently, you know how stupid people can be when there are no repercussions for their actions.
Hey dude, you know that's just the way it is. Some things will never change. Ah, but don't you believe them.
I am of the opinion that the "general public" already knows reporters are full of shit. Their credibility has spiraled down as they've raced to compete with Jerry Springer and the National Enquirer for ratings.
I think the lameness filter is, well, lame. It doesn't catch trolls, and it does piss off legit posters who don't know all the tricks for getting around it.
It doesn't seem to have occurred to these people that they might not have a business plan doing that. I have attempted to make this point before to the "but copying is piracy and piracy is stealing from me!" type guys -- it may be that digital information simply does not have monetary value. One of the long-standing rules of the marketplace is that the value of a thing is what that thing will bring. If no one will pay for it, you can't make money selling it. It's like the dorks who want to privatize the water supply -- this shit falls out of the air, people.
Digital bits are trivially easy to copy. No encryption scheme can hold when you've got physical access to both the encoder and decoder. People are by and large unwilling to give up their rights of property (to own that which they've purchased, to view it at the time and in the manner of their choosing) in order to ensure digital profitability. Maybe it's simply time to step back from this "glorious revolution" and re-evaluate what we think we're doing, as a society.
If read the babelfish translation you will, backwards how it is written you will see. Yoda, almost as if it were written by. Normal however I have found, word order for most other indo-european languages that is.
driving up auto insurance rates by making yourselves more vulnerable to injury
Wow. Let me tell you a story about four fucking wheel drive. About ten years ago, I was driving through Kansas in November or so. Doing 70 mph, we drove onto an inch-thick sheet of ice, rather suddenly. The wind was chilling the road, and all the melting snow suddenly became solid. The car in front of me (just a car) started fishtailing. I tapped my brake ever so lightly, not yet realizing my peril, and I was fishtailing too. Well the car in front of me lost control and went off the right side of the road, flipped upside down, blew his front and rear windows out, and landed sitting upright. Screaming kids, stunned drivers. I went off to the left, but managed to keep the car upright, and safely stopped. The 18-wheel truck behind us managed to come to a safe stop as well.
After I talked to the driver of the car, and made sure they were all alive, we drove to the next town to call the police (this was before every pinhead had a cell phone in his back pocket) and for the next hundred miles I counted a four-wheel-drive vehicle tumbled over on the side of the road every three miles. I only saw one or two regular-sized cars. Almost without exception, the people who misjudged their driving abilities, their speed, and their car's traction, were driving a hopped-up SUV or light truck of one kind or another. I saw maybe three or four regular cars. The rest of us, not having this blind belief in the indestructibility of our vehicles, drove slowly and cautiously. But the SUV assholes roared past us all, and a good number of them ended up inverted in a ditch. So DON'T TELL ME about how your SUV is so fucking safe. I laughed as I drove past some of those people. I laughed the fuck out loud. You are buying the DELUSION of safety with an SUV.
My original post had nothing to do with the fitness of these cars. I just made a note that the lights were pointed higher than they needed to be. I will point out that I have yet to be blinded by the lights of a bus or 18-wheel truck. I think because they're correctly configured. It's as if the SUV designers sat down in a smaller car, right in front of the SUV, and designed the lights so that they could not help but annoy the driver in front of them.
People wouldn't hate SUV's so much if their designers and owners didn't make such a point of being arrogant about them. I can't tell you how I long to go up to a Jeep and paint in big bold letters on the back windshield: "No, it's a penis thing, and sadly, I do understand."
What I wouldn't give to have Mike Judge read that account in his "Beavis" voice! And get all excited when talking about the burn, the BURN!
Quake I was pretty boring. After I got over the 360 degree view, I realized that the levels were all demonstrations of "look, we can do full 360 degree views!!!" I could play through the entire first four shareware episodes in under thirty minutes. I finished the full game in under three hours. no, I don't play on nightmare skill level. The interesting part of the game, to me, is not killing the monsters. Adding more of them doesn't make the game more fun. It's figuring out the level. Well in Quake they might as well paint arrows on the walls. I never got stuck in Quake.
But that's entirely subjective. I have great praise for Quake as a game . . . engine. But as an actual game it seems to lack something. It's not challenging for me to click the joystick trigger hundreds of times. I want my brain to get exercised as well.
this "light pollution" is just a problem made up by do-gooders.
Well, it's mostly caused by wasted light. Most of the light that actually comes out of a street fixture goes straight up into the air, where it does no one any good. That's a tremendous amount of wasted energy. The light bulb's efficiency sucks already. But now we have to make it put out more light just to see what we're doing on the ground. When headlights (which on EVERY SUV in the country are TOO BRIGHT and pointed up TOO HIGH) shine into a driver's eyes, he has more trouble seeing the road. That's actually dangerous. There's a type of headlight that's made in Europe, (my car aficianado friends tell me) which focuses a far sharper cone on the road and works about a thousand times better. They are not permitted in the US because the DOT standard is "good enough."
All in all, light pollution, besides ruining the night sky for astronomers and amateurs alike, is a pretty important topic. Our energy costs could go down . . . oh yeah. I forgot, that would hurt the oil com^H^H^H^H^H^H^Heconomy.