In fact I beleive two players (one from each team) play the game against each other two days or so before the actual SB. It's called "the game before the game" and it has predicted the winners 6 out of the last 7 times I beleive. This year it was Keenan McCardell vs. Ronde Barber and McCardell won.
American Football has as much right to the name "football" as Association Football, Rugby Football, or Aussie Rules Football: they all stem from a common game that evolved over the centuries. Think of this proto-game as the original Unix, which gave rise to different OS's like Linux, the BSD family, and bizarro ones like AIX.
But this year, my team, the Steelers, isn't in it (we got screwed by some shoddy officiating)
What "shoddy officiating"?
I don't know if you were watching the same game as I was, but, if anything, the vast majority of questionable calls went the Steelers' way (the George fumble with the missed personal foul comes to mind, the questionable incomplete pass for the Titans early on). The end of the game was a textbook example of running into the kicker (not roughing, running into). As for the question of the timeouts, what you should do in that situation is tell the nearest official, "we're planning to call a timeout as close to the snap as we can cut it, so keep an eye out."
If you're going to blame anybody for the Steelers' losses in the past several trips to the postseason, it has to start with Bill Cowher. The simple fact is that this guy doesn't know football, at least at the chess-game level that modern NFL head coaching requires. It's the same every season: Cowher (who's a master motivator) gets his team up during the regular season to get them through a weak division and into the playoffs, where his inability to gameplan eventually does the team in when he's faced with a decent coach, be it Shanahan, Belichick, or even Fisher. I'm amazed I'm putting Fisher in that category, as he's closer to Cowher than the evil geniuses.
Cowher should be a special teams coach somewhere. No gameplanning needed, just the ability to moivate guys. Cowher may be the best coach at getting guys to come play the game in recent memory.
However, it is legal to use "Super Bowl" in news coverage of the event. However, even if you are a media outlet doing news coverage, you can't use "Super Bowl" in, say, your advertising, unless you are an NFL sponsor. Thus, CBS, ABC, and FOX can use the phrase "Super Bowl" in their ads, but the other networks cannot (I'm not sure how cable nets, like TNN, ESPN, and Fox Sports Net are handled), Coors Light can but Budweiser cannot, Reebok can but Nike cannot, Cadillac can but Toyota cannot, Pepsi can but Coke can't and so forth.
Don't the record companies make a killing on concerts as well?
Depends on the case, mainly if the record company owns the publishing & performance rights to the songs (many new bands sign these away, because let's face it, most bands starting out have a) shitty advice, b) are drugged out of their minds, c) have the idea that they'll be the next Metallica, or d) some combination of the above). If that's the case, then the band does owe royalties on performing them in concert.
OTOH, if a band refuses to give up those rights (or takes them back), then the concerts are money machines. Metallica has taken the interesting tack of creating their own corporation as a joint venture with Elektra (AOL Time Warner) which gets an ungodly cut of the record sales (on the order of $5/unit) plus all the concert profits.
The costs for the RIAA are only in marketing - something we pay for since that includes playing albums on the radio... and somehow radio has become nothing but a marketing-machine playing only the top100 or something. All that is payed for by us.
How do we pay for the radio (NPR doesn't apply here; they are decidedly not in the hot 100 hits class. XM and Sirius aren't [yet] big enough to be considered, either)? Don't go the idiotic route and say, "advertising". You don't pay for the advertising; the most you do is give money (for services unrelated to advertising) to individuals/corporations who choose to advertise. To argue that you are they paying for radio is akin to the ludicrous arguments that buying drugs supports terrorism, betting on the Super Bowl supports the Mafia, or that driving an SUV aupports terrorism.
When will politicans realize we cannot have an Orwellian government...
I'm getting fucking tired of all this "Orwellian" bullshit, and the ease with which people, of all political stripes throw that name around without any idea of what Eric Blair (aka George Orwell) actually thought.
The fact is that anyone who bothers to look at Orwell's writing can find an idea that they can applaud. For instance, Orwell was opposed to having India as a colony of the UK ("In order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred millions Indians must live on the verge of starvation -- an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream"), but he did not believe India was capable of governing itself. He found Hitler personally appealing ("I have never been able to dislike Hitler... [he] grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life [which is the attitude of] nearly all Western thought... certainly all 'progressive' thought."), using terms that were eerily similar to those in England and France who endorsed fascism. He thought that Britain should not get involved in war against Germany and advocated planning "illegal anti-war activities." However, as soon as Hitler and Stalin signed the non-aggression pact, he flip-flopped, accusing British anti-war intellectuals of "sabotage"; of having been "Europeanised"; of sneering at patriotism; of weakening the morale of the morale of the English people.
Politically, Orwell was a revolutionary Socialist. He advocated a Socialist revolution in England, and a violent one if that was required. He viewed Hitler's success as the proof of the superiority of the planned economy. He wrote, "It is not certain that Socialism is better than Capitalism, but it is certain that, unlike Capitalism, Socialism solves the problems of production and consumption. However Orwell thought that, while a classless society would be made, the monarchy would continue.
The worst part of Orwell's legacy is providing a new vocabulary for slippery-slope arguments. If ideas are to stand or fail based on their logically possible consequences, than there would be no ideas, because every idea is, ultimately against life itself, if it is taken far enough.
Of course, those who like to use language inspired by Orwell, often times prove that they never read Orwell. The prime example is "Big Brother", which is generally used to mean a system of covert surveillance and manipulation, and oppression in democratic disguise. Nothing could be further than Big Brother; in 1984 all of that was overt; there was no disguising it.
One gets the impression that Orwell's only objection to totalitarianism and propaganda was stylistic; that only because the language they use is ugly are they evil.
I think the parent post could have been worded better, as I get the impression he wasn't talking about the From: header that mailers add, but the actual SMTP connection sequence (HELO and all that).
I figure if SPAM were really a problem for businesses, it would already be solved.
The fact that you don't figure spam is a problem for business shows how little you know about this subject. I've seen estimates indicating that spam costs US businesses alone a few billion a year (in lost time reading the spam and in server/network capacity to store and receive the spam).
I think the key problem is ISPs that do not block egress traffic on port 25.
No, the key problem is ISPs that don't disconnect spammers and charge them for violating the AUP, as well as ISPs that don't even have anti-spam AUP's. Open relays are next on the list. True, blocking outgoing port 25 traffic on the routers might eliminate a lot of spam (not a significant amount: in my experience the majority of spams I get are from various Asian countries, though configuring Postfix to reject connection attempts from a dozen or so subnets in China has cut down drastically), but then again, dropping every packet would solve the problem even more effectively, because:
It is not too tough to set up an SMTP server... to run off a different port.
As soon as an ISP blocks port 25, any spammers using that ISP will run their spammachines off of different ports. If an ISP requires SMTP AUTH connections to their mailservers, how long before spammers start relaying through their own ISP servers? Ultimately, blocking port 25 will have no measurable effect on spamming, because if the ISP provides a means around it for sending legitimate mail, it will be abused to send spam. All your proposed remedy will do is make life difficult for those who run legitimate mailservers.
The fact that you think that Chapter 11 constitutes an imminent demise demonstrates how little you know. Chapter 11 in essence buys you time to reorganize the business while not paying your creditors. It is far from a death-knell.
True, many companies file Chapter 11 and never bounce back. But many companies file Chapter 11 and come back in a better financial situation than ever before. Donald Trump filed Chapter 11 about a decade ago, and he's richer now than he was at his peak in the 80's. Wayne Newton filed for bankruptcy ten years ago, and is better off now. Several airlines over the years have filed and are still in business many years later (Continental comes to mind immediately).
We probably should be. The taxes are not charged not because someone feels that you should be exempt from taxes, but rather because it is extremely difficult (i.e. impossible) to figure out the taxes. It is unreasonable to require each retaler to file and keep track of all 50 states rules/laws/tax amounts.
Not to mention that many cities and counties have their own sales taxes which are on top of the state amounts. New York City, for instance, places an extra, IIRC, 1.5% above the state rate.
with some exceptions, mail order vendors are supposed to charge sales tax on customers from many states, and remit the proceeds to each state.
Only if the mail-order vendor has a "business presence" in the state of the customers (offices, warehouses, etc.) This applies just as well to Amazon or any other Internet retailer. It's on this ground that bn.com and borders.com are now being forced to collect sales taxes because the courts are ruling that, thanks to having kiosks, pick-ups, and returns at their stores, the websites have business presence in the states.
In other cases, such purchases are not subject to sales tax; however, many states have alternative taxes in this event. Massachusetts, for instance has a Use Tax, which happens to be at the same rate and has the same applications as the sales tax. However, it is the obligation of the purchaser to keep track of all such purchases and fill out a form each year declaring the amount (this has become a favorite of the Department of Revenue in audits) and pay the tax then.
Some states have begun to join alliances where they will employ the same rates and definitions and collect each other's sales taxes.
You are correct on one small point (that there is no necessary connection between the GPL and patents). However, you demonstrate yourself to be uninformed by stating that there is no connection. According to the GPL, if one distributes patented software under the GPL, you are required to grant a free license to everyone who uses that piece of software.
Slashdot Mirror
Both McCardell and Barber are Buccaneers.
American Football has as much right to the name "football" as Association Football, Rugby Football, or Aussie Rules Football: they all stem from a common game that evolved over the centuries. Think of this proto-game as the original Unix, which gave rise to different OS's like Linux, the BSD family, and bizarro ones like AIX.
What "shoddy officiating"?
I don't know if you were watching the same game as I was, but, if anything, the vast majority of questionable calls went the Steelers' way (the George fumble with the missed personal foul comes to mind, the questionable incomplete pass for the Titans early on). The end of the game was a textbook example of running into the kicker (not roughing, running into). As for the question of the timeouts, what you should do in that situation is tell the nearest official, "we're planning to call a timeout as close to the snap as we can cut it, so keep an eye out."
If you're going to blame anybody for the Steelers' losses in the past several trips to the postseason, it has to start with Bill Cowher. The simple fact is that this guy doesn't know football, at least at the chess-game level that modern NFL head coaching requires. It's the same every season: Cowher (who's a master motivator) gets his team up during the regular season to get them through a weak division and into the playoffs, where his inability to gameplan eventually does the team in when he's faced with a decent coach, be it Shanahan, Belichick, or even Fisher. I'm amazed I'm putting Fisher in that category, as he's closer to Cowher than the evil geniuses.
Cowher should be a special teams coach somewhere. No gameplanning needed, just the ability to moivate guys. Cowher may be the best coach at getting guys to come play the game in recent memory.
As was written in the LA Times: "Yo ho ho, and a bottle of excruciatingly bad metaphors."
However, it is legal to use "Super Bowl" in news coverage of the event. However, even if you are a media outlet doing news coverage, you can't use "Super Bowl" in, say, your advertising, unless you are an NFL sponsor. Thus, CBS, ABC, and FOX can use the phrase "Super Bowl" in their ads, but the other networks cannot (I'm not sure how cable nets, like TNN, ESPN, and Fox Sports Net are handled), Coors Light can but Budweiser cannot, Reebok can but Nike cannot, Cadillac can but Toyota cannot, Pepsi can but Coke can't and so forth.
Also, cold weather (especially frost) tends to do a number on just about any paved surface.
And how does that equate to you paying for the promotion?
I say someone should give "-1 Easily trolled" to Paulo.
Depends on the case, mainly if the record company owns the publishing & performance rights to the songs (many new bands sign these away, because let's face it, most bands starting out have a) shitty advice, b) are drugged out of their minds, c) have the idea that they'll be the next Metallica, or d) some combination of the above). If that's the case, then the band does owe royalties on performing them in concert.
OTOH, if a band refuses to give up those rights (or takes them back), then the concerts are money machines. Metallica has taken the interesting tack of creating their own corporation as a joint venture with Elektra (AOL Time Warner) which gets an ungodly cut of the record sales (on the order of $5/unit) plus all the concert profits.
How do we pay for the radio (NPR doesn't apply here; they are decidedly not in the hot 100 hits class. XM and Sirius aren't [yet] big enough to be considered, either)? Don't go the idiotic route and say, "advertising". You don't pay for the advertising; the most you do is give money (for services unrelated to advertising) to individuals/corporations who choose to advertise. To argue that you are they paying for radio is akin to the ludicrous arguments that buying drugs supports terrorism, betting on the Super Bowl supports the Mafia, or that driving an SUV aupports terrorism.
Chapter 11's only a flesh wound...
Warning: rant ahead...
I'm getting fucking tired of all this "Orwellian" bullshit, and the ease with which people, of all political stripes throw that name around without any idea of what Eric Blair (aka George Orwell) actually thought.
The fact is that anyone who bothers to look at Orwell's writing can find an idea that they can applaud. For instance, Orwell was opposed to having India as a colony of the UK ("In order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred millions Indians must live on the verge of starvation -- an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream"), but he did not believe India was capable of governing itself. He found Hitler personally appealing ("I have never been able to dislike Hitler... [he] grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life [which is the attitude of] nearly all Western thought... certainly all 'progressive' thought."), using terms that were eerily similar to those in England and France who endorsed fascism. He thought that Britain should not get involved in war against Germany and advocated planning "illegal anti-war activities." However, as soon as Hitler and Stalin signed the non-aggression pact, he flip-flopped, accusing British anti-war intellectuals of "sabotage"; of having been "Europeanised"; of sneering at patriotism; of weakening the morale of the morale of the English people.
Politically, Orwell was a revolutionary Socialist. He advocated a Socialist revolution in England, and a violent one if that was required. He viewed Hitler's success as the proof of the superiority of the planned economy. He wrote, "It is not certain that Socialism is better than Capitalism, but it is certain that, unlike Capitalism, Socialism solves the problems of production and consumption. However Orwell thought that, while a classless society would be made, the monarchy would continue.
The worst part of Orwell's legacy is providing a new vocabulary for slippery-slope arguments. If ideas are to stand or fail based on their logically possible consequences, than there would be no ideas, because every idea is, ultimately against life itself, if it is taken far enough.
Of course, those who like to use language inspired by Orwell, often times prove that they never read Orwell. The prime example is "Big Brother", which is generally used to mean a system of covert surveillance and manipulation, and oppression in democratic disguise. Nothing could be further than Big Brother; in 1984 all of that was overt; there was no disguising it.
One gets the impression that Orwell's only objection to totalitarianism and propaganda was stylistic; that only because the language they use is ugly are they evil.
+1 FP (n/t)
I think the parent post could have been worded better, as I get the impression he wasn't talking about the From: header that mailers add, but the actual SMTP connection sequence (HELO and all that).
The fact that you don't figure spam is a problem for business shows how little you know about this subject. I've seen estimates indicating that spam costs US businesses alone a few billion a year (in lost time reading the spam and in server/network capacity to store and receive the spam).
Mr. Smith, not only is your site pure genius, but your ideas are as well!
You are a god among men, dear sir.
No, the key problem is ISPs that don't disconnect spammers and charge them for violating the AUP, as well as ISPs that don't even have anti-spam AUP's. Open relays are next on the list. True, blocking outgoing port 25 traffic on the routers might eliminate a lot of spam (not a significant amount: in my experience the majority of spams I get are from various Asian countries, though configuring Postfix to reject connection attempts from a dozen or so subnets in China has cut down drastically), but then again, dropping every packet would solve the problem even more effectively, because:
As soon as an ISP blocks port 25, any spammers using that ISP will run their spammachines off of different ports. If an ISP requires SMTP AUTH connections to their mailservers, how long before spammers start relaying through their own ISP servers? Ultimately, blocking port 25 will have no measurable effect on spamming, because if the ISP provides a means around it for sending legitimate mail, it will be abused to send spam. All your proposed remedy will do is make life difficult for those who run legitimate mailservers.
How many scripts are there out there to exploit VMS holes?
That's Berkeley for ya...
Sometimes I wonder how the Santa Cruz Software Distribution flavor of Unix would have turned out...
The fact that you think that Chapter 11 constitutes an imminent demise demonstrates how little you know. Chapter 11 in essence buys you time to reorganize the business while not paying your creditors. It is far from a death-knell.
True, many companies file Chapter 11 and never bounce back. But many companies file Chapter 11 and come back in a better financial situation than ever before. Donald Trump filed Chapter 11 about a decade ago, and he's richer now than he was at his peak in the 80's. Wayne Newton filed for bankruptcy ten years ago, and is better off now. Several airlines over the years have filed and are still in business many years later (Continental comes to mind immediately).
May I ask where that set of laws has any legal standing?
Not to mention that many cities and counties have their own sales taxes which are on top of the state amounts. New York City, for instance, places an extra, IIRC, 1.5% above the state rate.
Only if the mail-order vendor has a "business presence" in the state of the customers (offices, warehouses, etc.) This applies just as well to Amazon or any other Internet retailer. It's on this ground that bn.com and borders.com are now being forced to collect sales taxes because the courts are ruling that, thanks to having kiosks, pick-ups, and returns at their stores, the websites have business presence in the states.
In other cases, such purchases are not subject to sales tax; however, many states have alternative taxes in this event. Massachusetts, for instance has a Use Tax, which happens to be at the same rate and has the same applications as the sales tax. However, it is the obligation of the purchaser to keep track of all such purchases and fill out a form each year declaring the amount (this has become a favorite of the Department of Revenue in audits) and pay the tax then.
Some states have begun to join alliances where they will employ the same rates and definitions and collect each other's sales taxes.
That is true. However, SCO (Caldera) has distributed the software under the GPL.
You are correct on one small point (that there is no necessary connection between the GPL and patents). However, you demonstrate yourself to be uninformed by stating that there is no connection. According to the GPL, if one distributes patented software under the GPL, you are required to grant a free license to everyone who uses that piece of software.