If true, does that mean that the DOJ erred in calling Microsoft a "monopoly"?
Nope. Linux is far from having all the functionality of Windows. Sure, if you use it for work, or for school, then you can find programs that can do most things, but you will not find Quake 4 or World of Warcraft on Linux. Gimp is no paintshop killer, and WINE is nowhere near as robust as a real Windows system
that's a good point; although I'm going to pull you up on the "If you make it too difficult to watch a movie or listen to a music, people won't buy it." bit... It is already far too hard just to play DVDs that you own; you have to jump through hoops like watching "you shouldn't copy this" etc. and then on Fedora because of the copy protection it won't play strait off (you need an update from livna). And the copy protection means that I can't use my RIGHT to hold a copy of the material I have bought... which meant that when I lost one of my Futurama DVDs all I could do legally is buy another... they don't deserve to have any customers.
Unfortunately, most people use standard DVD players, or their playstation 2, if they have one, and will never know or care about the pains of trying to play DVDs on a Fedora install. As for the FBI (or interpol) warning, well, originally, a selling point of DVDs was that you could skip past the previews and go straight to the movie. Now that VCRs are going extinct, the movie industry is designing DVDs that make you watch the previews anyway, and people are still sitting through it, to get to the movie. The point is that if they are willing to sit through five minutes of previews, then the FBI warning is no obstacle for them.
The only thing they really care about is that they can't make backup copies of their stuff. Most people however, are more cynical than idealistic, and so they just assume that because most people do not make backup copies of their cds and dvds, and because most of the people who do copy them, give copies away, that it is fair for the industry to do whatever they can to protect their content. Point is, the grassroots resentment toward the MPAA/RIAA isn't getting any better, and most people will jump through whatever hoops they're given.
I'm also wondering how long it will be before the RIAA comes up with a new media distribution format (a sort of super-audio-CD) that does something for the customer (maybe raises the sampling rate from 44k to 48k), and also uses a CSS-style encryption. Such a system would be cracked in no time, but the purpose of it would be to make mp3 rippers and unlicensed players illegal (through the DMCA ban on decryption software). Of course, they could then license the rights to microsoft and a few other companies to create software (some of it would come with WMP) that could rip the music into a heavily DRMed format, so that end-users would get just enough freedom to make them use the format. The funny thing is that Microsoft would warn people that they no longer support mp3 ripping of this new media because it is "insecure", and people would eventually stop using mp3 because they perceive it as an outdated technology.
Linux is a hard OS to administer without training. It's not something you can just dive into, and a lot of admins get it shoved on them because upper management decides on a software package that requires it. The result? Downtime because the admin is unfamiliar with Linux and doesn't know where to find the answers. So in that sense, this report is spot-on.
Another factor should be either a). The Size of the company, or b). The amount of person-hours dedicated to work with that OS. The reason being that larger Corporations may have a policy that they don't give any information away for free, but their employees are the best people to talk to. They have employees dedicated to Linux or Unix systems, but, they have to have some systems that are typically dominated by Microsoft (Active Directory and Outlook Calendaring, for example).
People from larger houses tend to have seen what happens when a system is taken to a larger scale. For example, one person I know jokingly said that he never understood Microsoft's original file system, stating "Didn't they ever think that someone might have more than 26 drives?". The same person loves AIX systems because of the way that any piece of hardware on the system, from Hard drives to network cards is hot-swappable, pointing out that you can't afford to wait for a system to reboot.
And at the risk of sounding like flamebait, I have seen more than a few slashdotters who were convinced that Linux was the best system because either a). Redhat version x.y is more stable than Windows 9x or because b). The amount of overhead imposed by the Windows GUI makes it perform terribly on a 486, while the Linux system can service an entire household (not considering that the initial overhead will be insignificant when the operating system is placed on a high-powered server, and scaled out to accomodate an exponentially larger number of users).
Of course that's just my two cents. I wish that Microsoft didn't have the condition in the EULAs stating that you cannot publish benchmarks without their permission. They have effectivy reduced what should be a science (determining which tool is best for a give purpose), to opinion, marketting, and superstition.
Customers don't want to pay out the ass again for you to add a simple feature because you didn't take the time to do it properly the first time around.
I say that customers want exactly that. This is the model of software development that Microsoft has adopted from the start and customers can't seem to get enough of it. If customers had really wanted solutions that just worked and didn't have problems, then Unix would have been a much more dominant operating system in the late 80's and early 90's. Instead customers just wanted the next thing from Microsoft that fixed the problems from the previous version. Of course, MS's cheaper price didn't hurt, but true ROI anaysis would have show a "full" solution would have been better, even if more expensive.
Too be fair, it isn't just Microsoft. When is the last time you installed a game and saw "version 1.0" on the installer or help screen? Time to Market is everything in most of the more innovative industries, and the expense of having to patch is more than offset by the number of customers who will buy your product because it's the next big thing.
No one ever went broke betting against human intelligence.
I wonder if, statistically, gamers are more likely to commit murder than non-gamers.
Why doesn't someone just figure out that statistic and then we'll have an answer to whether games promote violence? Oh, because that would be the logical, non-fearmongering thing to do.
And because that would be like trying to figure out if people who watch television commit violence. Twenty years ago, games were toys and gamers were a small subset of the population. now they have become mainstream entertainment. I'd probably wonder more about the family that __doesn't__ have a video game system, because they are probably of low socioeconomic status, living in a bad neighborhood, where shooting someone in the face is a career move, or they are either hippies or amish. Either way, they do not represent a state of "normal" that we would return to if we just threw our televisions away.
We all know the most efficient way to cause chaos over the internet is to control the traffic lights to all turn green at the same time.
I can't wait for it to actually happen.
Drivers in my home town have found a way around that. They tend to ignore traffic laws entirely.
I can see how the theatrical release made it ambiguous since it cut some of the obvious clues, but anyone who doesn't know Deckard is a replicant by the end of the director's cut is a moron.
Of course. He had a dream about a unicorn. That means he's either a robot, or Dave the lighting guy from Orgasmo. Yeah, there's a test and he didn't take it. He also didn't take any pregnancy tests, aids tests, purity tests, driver's license exams. Maybe he's a slutty, pregnant, bad driving AIDs-bot. You're a moron if you didn't know that.
Of course there is also the possibility that this was intentionally left ambiguous, or merely hinted at, as a way of enforcing the idea that we are all biological machines, and that, if we have souls, we cannot feel them, and therefore have no way of knowing if we are "natural" or "fabricated" (and maybe that the difference is irrelevant).
give 'em some reasonable number of requests, and after that charge them $55-65 per incident (which should nicely cover the cost of having cleaners deal with at least some of the domestic stuff for you).
That's a good suggestion, as long as he charges enough to either make it painful for the customer, or to make it worthwhile for him. I'm thinking of the book "freakonomics" by Steven Levit, in which he talks about using money as a way of curbing negative behavior. In his example, it backfired.
A day-care center was concerned about the number of parents who showed up late to pick up their children. The center should have been closing, and everyone should have been going home, but somone would always have to stay late and wait for so-and-so's mom to show up. So, they instituted a policy that if you are late, then you get fined a dollar. The problem is that, before, their __implicit__ policy was "never be late! Our employees want to go home", and afterward, their implicit policy was "for a small fee, we'll allow you to be late".
Beforehand, guilt was one of the few things preventing parents from being late. After the policy had been announced, however, people could use the fee to justify being late, and so, therefore, the frequency of parents showing up late increased dramatically, when the policy was meant to decrease it.
Anyway, the 55-65 dollar fee sounds like it may be a reasonable amount, but I just wanted to warn the poster of the original article about a problem that could arise, if he's too generous with the pricing.
The advantage of open source shines through once again! This couldn't have happened with MS Windows, that's for sure... without access to the source code, this bug couldn't have been discovered, let alone fixed so quickly.
(And yes, I know that some gov't agencies have a deal to view the Windows source code, but there are WAAAY fewer eyeballs looking at it, and from what I've heard the code is a big badly documented mess.)
Yeah, but Windows is still safer, because the useful bugs are hidden in with all these other bugs. In fact, it's sometimes hard for a hacker to get to the exploit, because, first he runs into what I like to call "the blue screen OF FREEDOM!"
If I were google I'd start getting openoffice as much publicity as possible, and other things that compete directly with Microsofts bread and butter. Find microsofts worst nightmare for each niche, opensource it and heavily support and distribute it.
And how would that make them money? Sorry for being a smart-ass, but the heart-and-soul of capitalism lies in the competition to produce the best product. Your suggestion sounds too much like a Microsoft tactic
It would go against their mission statement...It would be evil
... so does this mean that laws made in Britain prior to the US Constitution are binding now in the USA? I think I am confused and I have not RTA so maybe someone could enlighten me.
Fair Use is an example of something brought over from British Common Law. In 1796, society would have been in chaos if they had started over with only the constitution, and whatever bills had been passed by the individual states as guidance. For example, most states had never passed laws outlawing murder, so, had judges not relied on existing British law, they would have to prosecute murderers for depriving people of the rights to life, liberty, and all that other stuff. Then, the legality of murder would be in question, until the case had concluded. Imagine having to do that for every crime committed in those early years, and it would have been nearly impossible for American society to have survived those early years.
Did anyone else notice that the article starts off by stating that "A number of studies have recently been published looking at the risk of long term cell phone use (>10 years) and brain cancer", and then it sites one study with several components. Sure that one study is large and well funded, spanning several different countries accross the globe, but still, one of their problems with this study is that one other study contradicts it.
Not only that, but the newsworthy part of the study is not the contradiction. The INTERPHONE study says that cell phones (and cordless phones) are safe for up to ten years, while this study says that cell and cordless phones becomes dangerous after ten years. I guess the contradiction is about how dangerous they become?
If you want to argue about the soundness of their statistical methods, fine. You may have a point there, but the statement is making some questionable arguments.
Now I can propogate my terrorism plans more efficiently, all while finding exciting new sources of kiddy porn.
Does anyone else get that "gut reaction" from Freenet? I don't mean that it's the first thing you see. I can't even back this up with evidence (admittedly, I haven't been trying), but for some reason, p2p seems like an illegitimate way of getting stuff you would find at best buy, or a legitimate way of getting Linux distros...While Freenet, with all its talk of freedom, privacy, and the measures taken to ensure it, somehow comes off as a place you go for stuff too obsene for p2p.
Please don't mod me flamebait on this...It's a serious question. Does anyone else have the initial instinct that Freenet is a place to go for things that the FBI would arrest you for, if you did them on bittorrent? Something about the network...I think it's that it performs poorly (due to encryption), makes content difficult to search for (when searching by name), and that anonimity is the only selling point...but something about the network creeps me out.
Not if it's true sexism, but don't you see that this is a parody of sexism? In a field made up predominantly of men, our best attempt to appeal to women is a pink "My little pony" theme. Sure, some may be sitting at home thinking "yeah, more women will read our sight, now. They're so stupid", but I promise you, 95% of the people who read this were laughing at the lapse in judgement that would have lead to this decision.
We would have been better off without a Bill of Rights. Since the first ten amendments are enumerations of things government CAN NOT do, government has plausible (but still wrong) ground to assume there are other powers it can take on because nothing says it can't. The Constitution was better as a document enumerating the things government CAN do, with the assumption being that all other powers are strictly excluded.
This was actually an argument that some of the Founding Fathers made against the Bill of Rights at the time it was drafted. That argument was the reason that the 9th Amendment was tacked on. It says, "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
But in spite of the 9th Amendment, the fact that a declared right is not enumerated in the Constitution or its Amendments is frequently used to argue that we do not have that right. For example, the argument against abortion rights almost always begins with "Nowhere in the Constitution does it say..."
Yep. And that's why anytime a judge rules on the basis of "privacy" or "fair use" or anything that the founding fathers may have intended, but have not directly spelled out, he is denounced as an activist judge.
...but, as most of us (but not all) know, the earth is not spontaneously bursting into flames with ice cream shooting out of the grand canyon or anything like that. Ice is melting. If I saw a man sweating, I would have the good sense to say, "hey, I don't know what's going on here. He could have a fever, or he could be overdressed for the weather, or he could have just been working out. I can't judge his actual health by a small fraction of his life."
Interesting analogy, but not quite on target.
No. The earth isn't bursting into flames, but it isn't sweating either. The analogy is meant to demonstrate that one does not need to understand the entirety of existence to look at the current situation and say we may be in trouble. We're not talking about replacing every car on the road with rikshaws, here. We're talking about trying to reverse the recent trend toward buying low-MPG cars at a time when it may be responsible for the highest average yearly temperature in over five hundred years, and it may be responsible for the erratic weather patterns that we have seen in the past few years, such as El Nino, and the fact that last year, we saw a record number of hurricanes, including Katrina (see the article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Warming for the wikipedia article, which explains that the climate change brought on by global warming has been predicted to result in "increased intensity and frequency of extreme weather events", with them later explaining that hurricanes may be one such event).
I find it funny how many on your side of the issue refuse to consider the possiblity. They have a "reverse chicken little" complex, in that they refuse to believe anything negative with regards to the state of the world (religious beliefs not withstanding), and yet they try to pass themselves off as being scientific by saying "let's wait. The earth is 6 billion years old. We can't know enough to make any decisions until we've had another 6 billion years to study it". Remember, "full speed ahead" is never the cautious approach. This is about weather patterns that scientists have been predicting for decades, and it has not been proven that it will kill us, but there is evidence pointing in that general direction, so the "let's wait and see" approach doesn't make much sense. At what point would republicans give up party loyalty, oil-company loyalty, and loyalty to their oversized vehicle fetish and say "ok, that may be a problem"? And, when we reach that point, then our actions would have to be extreme, to compensate for the fact that we spent decades doing everything we could to make the problem worse (because that was the cautious approach).
As for my original anaology, a better analogy would be if a man had a stroke and someone said "he's eighty. We can't rush him to the hospitol, that would be inconvenient. I say we come tommorrow and if it's gotten worse, then we'll do something."
How can the rate of an observation be "alarming" if it has only recorded 3 of 6,000,000,000 years of existense?
If I saw a man spontanously burst into flames, while ice cream shot out of his ears, I would have the good sense to say, "hey, that's just ten minutes of his existence. How can we judge his current situation by only a small fraction of his life?"
Well, isn't Utah very big on education, and the sciences in general?
Maybe the key to sucess (success being defined as "not being crucified and set on fire") is to point out that most american scientists are christian, and that one of the most religious states in the union is for the teaching of evolution, because this is not about science trying to kill religion.
the blind leading the blind routine is old, let's get an educated populus for our next election!
Let's get an educated candidate for our next election. What's sickening about this administration is that we have an elitist president, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, who had access to the best education money could buy, and squandered it because he was an alcoholic who had no interest in bettering himself. Then, he gets out of school, pretends to be a Christian, even though he disagrees with every word Jesus Christ ever said (remember, all the gay-bashing in the Bible came from the old testament, not the teachings of Christ), and, now, he has polsters who say "pretend to be a coyboy, clear brush, go buy a hunting dog", and he moves to Texas like some sort of reverse-Jed-clampett, and buys an authentic coyboy ranch-house, so he can be presidential.
Meanwhile, we have intelligent people who try to keep up with politics (and don't just take stage prompts from their political advisors), and they are unelectible, because, whenever someone asks a question, any answer that takes more than ten words to explain is considered dishonest
(of course the republican's scare tactics will be put on full force: 9/11, terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, attacked on our shores, this post 9/11 world, defending the homeland, evildoers determined to do us harm, etc)
Don't forget gay marriage, the war on christmas, and I'm sure FoxNews will pay some guy fifty bucks to say that he's a DNC contributor who wants to marry a duck
I am *confident* that most americans don't mind people who are taking calls to and from the middle east are being monitored.
But you are assuming that this is being used to monitor terrorists. In thirty years, the FISA court has blocked 4 requests, out of thousands. The Bush administration has something to hide. What's worse is that they're hiding it from a hidden court. The Bush administration could be just as secretive if they were going through legitimate means, but they're violating the law.
Checks and balances apply to everybody, and we have just as much reason to distrust this administration as any previous one, including Clinton and Nixon.
Lacy Peterson is still dead...Here we have Jeraldo Rivera looking through Scott Peterson's garbage... Michael Jackson looks like a freak...and is under trial for something... We just heard word that somewhere, a white girl is missing...
And, oh yeah, democrats are trying to interfere with George W. Bush's War on Terror.
What are the legal precedents (in the US) regarding breaking a minor law to prevent a larger problem? For example, if a man is speeding to get to a hospitol, because of a medical emergency (preganancy, spouse's heart attack, etc), or a man slashing a bank robber's tires to prevent the robber from getting away...
I'm sure we all know about self-defense laws, but what kind of precedents do we have when you're either acting to defend others, and/or when it is not a life-and-death situation, but the same concept taken to less of an extreme?
How'd you go from errors in an audit log to fraudulent and corrupt? That's a mighty big accusation...
You have a point that an audit log proves nothing. This could be malicious programming, hacking, fraud on the part of the people who man the voting booths, or who knows what else.
If anyone believes that these sorts of discrepencies are new, or limited to computer voting, he is hopelessly naive...
But, just because other people have gotten away with it, doesn't make it legal, or ethical when someone else gets caught.
And the assertion that computer voting will make these disrepencies harder to uncover is pure bullshit, as proved by this episode.
Remember, this is an extension of the controversy over machines with no paper trail. We are trusting the audit log created by an application we suspect to be bugged, and, in the case of voters who claim that they voted for Kerry and the machine counted it as a Bush vote, well, we have no evidence because critics can just say that these people were lying, making it their word verses the infallible machine.
And for the record, I know that you would have to be incredibly stupid to run a company that is programming voting machines to throw elections and then to proclaim, in public, that you will do whatever it takes to get a president elected (as the CEO of diebold proclaimed), but, in light of such a ridiculous situation, shouldn't we make even the slightest effort to create a voting system whose accuracy can be verfied? Why have all this secrecy and stonewalling (machines keeping insufficient record trail, governments requiring a court order before releasing the voting data)? How can we possibly benefit from not being sure about the accuracy of the machines?
If a bunch of paper ballots were filled out before election day, or dumped in a river, how would anyone ever know?
They wouldn't...And thanks to the current turn of events, corrupt voting officials will one day reminisce about how they had to walk, uphill, five miles in the snow, to throw voting records in the river, when now, we have technology to virtually do it for us.
So the industry had better think long and hard about how much they really want to be pushing consumers.
The industry has thought about it. They think that we are overpriveleged sheep who would pay any price to be entertained. And they probably have a point. The entertainment industry is divided into feifdoms (music, tv/movies, video games, etc), with each fiefdom fixing prices and dictating their whims to the consumer, but when has the mass consumer market ever told the industry "screw you"?
I have seen quite a bit, with the DMCA, DRM, Copyright laws being extended to the point where copyrights will probably outlast the dialect in which the original product was written, rising costs of internet and television services, and it seems like, in the last twenty years, the only victories the consumer has ever won are the betamax decision, UCITA (which would have overruled a few "bomb shelter" laws, but mostly just restated what legal precedent seems to be telling us already), and, maybe, the fact that we don't have to pay a blank media tax.
Just thought I'd spread a little sunshine your way...
Common knowledge? That our system is so corrupt that people who do take the time to vote don't matter? I don't care about which side, if any, a person is on. Failing to secure voting and ensuring fair and free elections is the basis for our whole country. Granted it's turned into a joke. However, I doubt most people *know* the election was fraudulent.
I know it's impolite to point out grammatical errors, but the sad thing about that one is the freudian honesty of the whole thing, especially if you read it as:
Failing to (secure voting and ensuring fair and free elections) is the basis for our whole country.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. Linux is far from having all the functionality of Windows. Sure, if you use it for work, or for school, then you can find programs that can do most things, but you will not find Quake 4 or World of Warcraft on Linux. Gimp is no paintshop killer, and WINE is nowhere near as robust as a real Windows system
Unfortunately, most people use standard DVD players, or their playstation 2, if they have one, and will never know or care about the pains of trying to play DVDs on a Fedora install. As for the FBI (or interpol) warning, well, originally, a selling point of DVDs was that you could skip past the previews and go straight to the movie. Now that VCRs are going extinct, the movie industry is designing DVDs that make you watch the previews anyway, and people are still sitting through it, to get to the movie. The point is that if they are willing to sit through five minutes of previews, then the FBI warning is no obstacle for them.
The only thing they really care about is that they can't make backup copies of their stuff. Most people however, are more cynical than idealistic, and so they just assume that because most people do not make backup copies of their cds and dvds, and because most of the people who do copy them, give copies away, that it is fair for the industry to do whatever they can to protect their content. Point is, the grassroots resentment toward the MPAA/RIAA isn't getting any better, and most people will jump through whatever hoops they're given.
I'm also wondering how long it will be before the RIAA comes up with a new media distribution format (a sort of super-audio-CD) that does something for the customer (maybe raises the sampling rate from 44k to 48k), and also uses a CSS-style encryption. Such a system would be cracked in no time, but the purpose of it would be to make mp3 rippers and unlicensed players illegal (through the DMCA ban on decryption software). Of course, they could then license the rights to microsoft and a few other companies to create software (some of it would come with WMP) that could rip the music into a heavily DRMed format, so that end-users would get just enough freedom to make them use the format. The funny thing is that Microsoft would warn people that they no longer support mp3 ripping of this new media because it is "insecure", and people would eventually stop using mp3 because they perceive it as an outdated technology.
Another factor should be either a). The Size of the company, or b). The amount of person-hours dedicated to work with that OS. The reason being that larger Corporations may have a policy that they don't give any information away for free, but their employees are the best people to talk to. They have employees dedicated to Linux or Unix systems, but, they have to have some systems that are typically dominated by Microsoft (Active Directory and Outlook Calendaring, for example).
People from larger houses tend to have seen what happens when a system is taken to a larger scale. For example, one person I know jokingly said that he never understood Microsoft's original file system, stating "Didn't they ever think that someone might have more than 26 drives?". The same person loves AIX systems because of the way that any piece of hardware on the system, from Hard drives to network cards is hot-swappable, pointing out that you can't afford to wait for a system to reboot.
And at the risk of sounding like flamebait, I have seen more than a few slashdotters who were convinced that Linux was the best system because either a). Redhat version x.y is more stable than Windows 9x or because b). The amount of overhead imposed by the Windows GUI makes it perform terribly on a 486, while the Linux system can service an entire household (not considering that the initial overhead will be insignificant when the operating system is placed on a high-powered server, and scaled out to accomodate an exponentially larger number of users).
Of course that's just my two cents. I wish that Microsoft didn't have the condition in the EULAs stating that you cannot publish benchmarks without their permission. They have effectivy reduced what should be a science (determining which tool is best for a give purpose), to opinion, marketting, and superstition.
Too be fair, it isn't just Microsoft. When is the last time you installed a game and saw "version 1.0" on the installer or help screen? Time to Market is everything in most of the more innovative industries, and the expense of having to patch is more than offset by the number of customers who will buy your product because it's the next big thing.
No one ever went broke betting against human intelligence.
And because that would be like trying to figure out if people who watch television commit violence. Twenty years ago, games were toys and gamers were a small subset of the population. now they have become mainstream entertainment. I'd probably wonder more about the family that __doesn't__ have a video game system, because they are probably of low socioeconomic status, living in a bad neighborhood, where shooting someone in the face is a career move, or they are either hippies or amish. Either way, they do not represent a state of "normal" that we would return to if we just threw our televisions away.
Drivers in my home town have found a way around that. They tend to ignore traffic laws entirely.
Of course. He had a dream about a unicorn. That means he's either a robot, or Dave the lighting guy from Orgasmo. Yeah, there's a test and he didn't take it. He also didn't take any pregnancy tests, aids tests, purity tests, driver's license exams. Maybe he's a slutty, pregnant, bad driving AIDs-bot. You're a moron if you didn't know that.
Of course there is also the possibility that this was intentionally left ambiguous, or merely hinted at, as a way of enforcing the idea that we are all biological machines, and that, if we have souls, we cannot feel them, and therefore have no way of knowing if we are "natural" or "fabricated" (and maybe that the difference is irrelevant).
That's a good suggestion, as long as he charges enough to either make it painful for the customer, or to make it worthwhile for him. I'm thinking of the book "freakonomics" by Steven Levit, in which he talks about using money as a way of curbing negative behavior. In his example, it backfired.
A day-care center was concerned about the number of parents who showed up late to pick up their children. The center should have been closing, and everyone should have been going home, but somone would always have to stay late and wait for so-and-so's mom to show up. So, they instituted a policy that if you are late, then you get fined a dollar. The problem is that, before, their __implicit__ policy was "never be late! Our employees want to go home", and afterward, their implicit policy was "for a small fee, we'll allow you to be late".
Beforehand, guilt was one of the few things preventing parents from being late. After the policy had been announced, however, people could use the fee to justify being late, and so, therefore, the frequency of parents showing up late increased dramatically, when the policy was meant to decrease it.
Anyway, the 55-65 dollar fee sounds like it may be a reasonable amount, but I just wanted to warn the poster of the original article about a problem that could arise, if he's too generous with the pricing.
Yeah, but Windows is still safer, because the useful bugs are hidden in with all these other bugs. In fact, it's sometimes hard for a hacker to get to the exploit, because, first he runs into what I like to call "the blue screen OF FREEDOM!"
Fair Use is an example of something brought over from British Common Law. In 1796, society would have been in chaos if they had started over with only the constitution, and whatever bills had been passed by the individual states as guidance. For example, most states had never passed laws outlawing murder, so, had judges not relied on existing British law, they would have to prosecute murderers for depriving people of the rights to life, liberty, and all that other stuff. Then, the legality of murder would be in question, until the case had concluded. Imagine having to do that for every crime committed in those early years, and it would have been nearly impossible for American society to have survived those early years.
Did anyone else notice that the article starts off by stating that "A number of studies have recently been published looking at the risk of long term cell phone use (>10 years) and brain cancer", and then it sites one study with several components. Sure that one study is large and well funded, spanning several different countries accross the globe, but still, one of their problems with this study is that one other study contradicts it.
Not only that, but the newsworthy part of the study is not the contradiction. The INTERPHONE study says that cell phones (and cordless phones) are safe for up to ten years, while this study says that cell and cordless phones becomes dangerous after ten years. I guess the contradiction is about how dangerous they become?
If you want to argue about the soundness of their statistical methods, fine. You may have a point there, but the statement is making some questionable arguments.
Does anyone else get that "gut reaction" from Freenet? I don't mean that it's the first thing you see. I can't even back this up with evidence (admittedly, I haven't been trying), but for some reason, p2p seems like an illegitimate way of getting stuff you would find at best buy, or a legitimate way of getting Linux distros...While Freenet, with all its talk of freedom, privacy, and the measures taken to ensure it, somehow comes off as a place you go for stuff too obsene for p2p.
Please don't mod me flamebait on this...It's a serious question. Does anyone else have the initial instinct that Freenet is a place to go for things that the FBI would arrest you for, if you did them on bittorrent? Something about the network...I think it's that it performs poorly (due to encryption), makes content difficult to search for (when searching by name), and that anonimity is the only selling point...but something about the network creeps me out.
Not if it's true sexism, but don't you see that this is a parody of sexism? In a field made up predominantly of men, our best attempt to appeal to women is a pink "My little pony" theme. Sure, some may be sitting at home thinking "yeah, more women will read our sight, now. They're so stupid", but I promise you, 95% of the people who read this were laughing at the lapse in judgement that would have lead to this decision.
Yep. And that's why anytime a judge rules on the basis of "privacy" or "fair use" or anything that the founding fathers may have intended, but have not directly spelled out, he is denounced as an activist judge.
Interesting analogy, but not quite on target.
No. The earth isn't bursting into flames, but it isn't sweating either. The analogy is meant to demonstrate that one does not need to understand the entirety of existence to look at the current situation and say we may be in trouble. We're not talking about replacing every car on the road with rikshaws, here. We're talking about trying to reverse the recent trend toward buying low-MPG cars at a time when it may be responsible for the highest average yearly temperature in over five hundred years, and it may be responsible for the erratic weather patterns that we have seen in the past few years, such as El Nino, and the fact that last year, we saw a record number of hurricanes, including Katrina (see the article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Warming for the wikipedia article, which explains that the climate change brought on by global warming has been predicted to result in "increased intensity and frequency of extreme weather events", with them later explaining that hurricanes may be one such event).
I find it funny how many on your side of the issue refuse to consider the possiblity. They have a "reverse chicken little" complex, in that they refuse to believe anything negative with regards to the state of the world (religious beliefs not withstanding), and yet they try to pass themselves off as being scientific by saying "let's wait. The earth is 6 billion years old. We can't know enough to make any decisions until we've had another 6 billion years to study it". Remember, "full speed ahead" is never the cautious approach. This is about weather patterns that scientists have been predicting for decades, and it has not been proven that it will kill us, but there is evidence pointing in that general direction, so the "let's wait and see" approach doesn't make much sense. At what point would republicans give up party loyalty, oil-company loyalty, and loyalty to their oversized vehicle fetish and say "ok, that may be a problem"? And, when we reach that point, then our actions would have to be extreme, to compensate for the fact that we spent decades doing everything we could to make the problem worse (because that was the cautious approach).
As for my original anaology, a better analogy would be if a man had a stroke and someone said "he's eighty. We can't rush him to the hospitol, that would be inconvenient. I say we come tommorrow and if it's gotten worse, then we'll do something."
If I saw a man spontanously burst into flames, while ice cream shot out of his ears, I would have the good sense to say, "hey, that's just ten minutes of his existence. How can we judge his current situation by only a small fraction of his life?"
Well, isn't Utah very big on education, and the sciences in general?
Maybe the key to sucess (success being defined as "not being crucified and set on fire") is to point out that most american scientists are christian, and that one of the most religious states in the union is for the teaching of evolution, because this is not about science trying to kill religion.
Let's get an educated candidate for our next election. What's sickening about this administration is that we have an elitist president, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, who had access to the best education money could buy, and squandered it because he was an alcoholic who had no interest in bettering himself. Then, he gets out of school, pretends to be a Christian, even though he disagrees with every word Jesus Christ ever said (remember, all the gay-bashing in the Bible came from the old testament, not the teachings of Christ), and, now, he has polsters who say "pretend to be a coyboy, clear brush, go buy a hunting dog", and he moves to Texas like some sort of reverse-Jed-clampett, and buys an authentic coyboy ranch-house, so he can be presidential.
Meanwhile, we have intelligent people who try to keep up with politics (and don't just take stage prompts from their political advisors), and they are unelectible, because, whenever someone asks a question, any answer that takes more than ten words to explain is considered dishonest
(of course the republican's scare tactics will be put on full force: 9/11, terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, attacked on our shores, this post 9/11 world, defending the homeland, evildoers determined to do us harm, etc)Don't forget gay marriage, the war on christmas, and I'm sure FoxNews will pay some guy fifty bucks to say that he's a DNC contributor who wants to marry a duck
But you are assuming that this is being used to monitor terrorists. In thirty years, the FISA court has blocked 4 requests, out of thousands. The Bush administration has something to hide. What's worse is that they're hiding it from a hidden court. The Bush administration could be just as secretive if they were going through legitimate means, but they're violating the law.
Checks and balances apply to everybody, and we have just as much reason to distrust this administration as any previous one, including Clinton and Nixon.
Lacy Peterson is still dead...Here we have Jeraldo Rivera looking through Scott Peterson's garbage...
Michael Jackson looks like a freak...and is under trial for something...
We just heard word that somewhere, a white girl is missing...
And, oh yeah, democrats are trying to interfere with George W. Bush's War on Terror.
What are the legal precedents (in the US) regarding breaking a minor law to prevent a larger problem? For example, if a man is speeding to get to a hospitol, because of a medical emergency (preganancy, spouse's heart attack, etc), or a man slashing a bank robber's tires to prevent the robber from getting away...
I'm sure we all know about self-defense laws, but what kind of precedents do we have when you're either acting to defend others, and/or when it is not a life-and-death situation, but the same concept taken to less of an extreme?
How'd you go from errors in an audit log to fraudulent and corrupt? That's a mighty big accusation...
You have a point that an audit log proves nothing. This could be malicious programming, hacking, fraud on the part of the people who man the voting booths, or who knows what else.
If anyone believes that these sorts of discrepencies are new, or limited to computer voting, he is hopelessly naive...
But, just because other people have gotten away with it, doesn't make it legal, or ethical when someone else gets caught.
And the assertion that computer voting will make these disrepencies harder to uncover is pure bullshit, as proved by this episode.
Remember, this is an extension of the controversy over machines with no paper trail. We are trusting the audit log created by an application we suspect to be bugged, and, in the case of voters who claim that they voted for Kerry and the machine counted it as a Bush vote, well, we have no evidence because critics can just say that these people were lying, making it their word verses the infallible machine.
And for the record, I know that you would have to be incredibly stupid to run a company that is programming voting machines to throw elections and then to proclaim, in public, that you will do whatever it takes to get a president elected (as the CEO of diebold proclaimed), but, in light of such a ridiculous situation, shouldn't we make even the slightest effort to create a voting system whose accuracy can be verfied? Why have all this secrecy and stonewalling (machines keeping insufficient record trail, governments requiring a court order before releasing the voting data)? How can we possibly benefit from not being sure about the accuracy of the machines?
If a bunch of paper ballots were filled out before election day, or dumped in a river, how would anyone ever know?
They wouldn't...And thanks to the current turn of events, corrupt voting officials will one day reminisce about how they had to walk, uphill, five miles in the snow, to throw voting records in the river, when now, we have technology to virtually do it for us.
So the industry had better think long and hard about how much they really want to be pushing consumers.
The industry has thought about it. They think that we are overpriveleged sheep who would pay any price to be entertained. And they probably have a point. The entertainment industry is divided into feifdoms (music, tv/movies, video games, etc), with each fiefdom fixing prices and dictating their whims to the consumer, but when has the mass consumer market ever told the industry "screw you"?
I have seen quite a bit, with the DMCA, DRM, Copyright laws being extended to the point where copyrights will probably outlast the dialect in which the original product was written, rising costs of internet and television services, and it seems like, in the last twenty years, the only victories the consumer has ever won are the betamax decision, UCITA (which would have overruled a few "bomb shelter" laws, but mostly just restated what legal precedent seems to be telling us already), and, maybe, the fact that we don't have to pay a blank media tax.
Just thought I'd spread a little sunshine your way...
Common knowledge? That our system is so corrupt that people who do take the time to vote don't matter? I don't care about which side, if any, a person is on. Failing to secure voting and ensuring fair and free elections is the basis for our whole country. Granted it's turned into a joke. However, I doubt most people *know* the election was fraudulent.
I know it's impolite to point out grammatical errors, but the sad thing about that one is the freudian honesty of the whole thing, especially if you read it as:
Failing to (secure voting and ensuring fair and free elections) is the basis for our whole country.