The WMD charge is but one part of a number of reasons to go into Iraq.
You're trying to rewrite history again. It was the over-arching, primary justification given to the UN and the American people. It was only after the truth came out that the Bush administration started saying 'but Saddam was a really bad man!' Well, there are horrible dictators running Sudan, North Korea, Burma, China, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Zimbabwe, and Equatorial Guinea, to name but a few countries. I don't see Bush prepping to attack those countries.
running North Korea, China,
The president thinks that ID should be taught alongside evolution. There is a scientific debate on this issue--at least there is wherever a debate is even allowed to take place.
No, there is NO SCIENTIFIC DEBATE ON THIS TOPIC WHATSOEVER. There are no reputable, peer-reviewed scientific journals publishing article on "Intelligent Design." There are no respected scientists claiming that there is some invisible being tinkering with evolution. There are just a bunch of idiots who don't understand that scientific theories are disprovable and that, therefore, Intelligent Design is not a scientific theory.
But more importantly, the president supports local school boards to control the curriculum of the schools, not an all-powerful central government authority. Which would seem to me to be a good thing.
Then you would be wrong. Some child should not be put at a further educational disadvantage just because they happened to have been unfortunate enough to be born in Kansas, Mississippi, or Alabama. Educational standards should be set at the national level.
If the President is so in favor of local school boards controlling the curriculum, please explain the "No Child Left Behind" crap that he's been spewing.
You are not even describing the argument accurately, yet I'm supposed to take you seriously?
Bush said (about Intelligent Design) "I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought. You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes." Bush didn't say anything about it being up to individual school boards, so it's you who is not describing the argument accurately.
There are not tens of thousands of hurricane victims suffering needlessly.
A National Guard official said on Thursday, September 1, that as many as 60,000 people had gathered at the Superdome for evacuation. That's where there was only enough food and water for 15,000 for three days. People defecated on the ground, did without food and water, did without transportation, and suffered needlessly. That's just one place where they gathered.
Who gives a shit what Haliburton does?
American taxpayers who foot the bill.
It's a company that has extensive experience in doing some things. They get contracts for doing what they have experience in.
They get no-bid contracts for doing things that others also have experience in.
But they're getting contracts for their core competencies. This is hardly a crime.
The crime isn't getting the contracts. It's what they do after they get them. A government audit found that Halliburton overcharged the U.S. Army by $61 million for gasoline transferred to Iraq as part of one deal that was awarded without a bidding process. The company allegedly overcharged the U.S. government by $1 per gallon for gasoline purchased from Kuwait, and its employees have been accused of receiving some $6.3 million in kickbacks on another Kuwaiti contract by charging for three times as many meals as were actually served at a major army facility. Auditors at the Pentagon are looking into the company's food contracts at more than 50 other locations, where it is said to have overcharged by $27.4 million.
But I wanted to congratulate you for managing to put a good running summary of all the vacuous charges leveled against this administration.
How dare anyone criticize the administration? So what if 2,000 troops have died since invading a country with no "weapons of mass destruction"? Who cares if our President is calling for religion (creationism -- AKA "Intelligent Design") to be taught in science classes? Why would anyone make a big deal out tens of thousands of hurricane victims suffering needlessly? And so what if contracts continue to be given to Halliburton after they've been found to be fleecing the American taxpayers?
Bill Clinton did not balance the budget, the Republican Majority balanced it.
The Republicans now control the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. We have the largest federal deficit in the history of the nation. So don't try to pretend that they are the party of fiscal responsibility.
The budget was balanced by the Clinton White House and now Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress spend money like drunken sailers in port.
In fact, Bill Clinton vetoed the budget causing the longest shutdown of the federal government.
That's just more Republican bull****. The Republicans tried to use balancing the budget as an excuse to try to push through drastic cuts to funding for Medicare, education, and protection of the environment.
Text of Clinton government shutdown address:
November 14, 1995
President Bill Clinton: Good afternoon. Today, as of noon, almost half of the federal government employees are idle. The government is partially shutting down because Congress has failed to pass the straightforward legislation necessary to keep the government running without imposing sharp hikes in Medicare premiums and deep cuts in education and the environment.
It is particularly unfortunate that the Republican Congress has brought us to this juncture because, after all, we share a central goal -- balancing the federal budget. We must lift the burden of debt that threatens the future of our children and grandchildren, and we must free-up money so that the private sector can invest, create jobs, and our economy can continue its healthy growth.
Since I took office, we have cut the federal deficit nearly in half. It is important that the people of the United States know that the United States now has proportionately the lowest government budget deficit of any large industrial nation. We have eliminated 200,000 positions from the federal bureaucracy since I took office. Our federal government is now the smallest percentage of the civilian work force it has been since 1933, before the New Deal. We have made enormous progress, and now we must finish the job.
Let me be clear -- we must balance the budget. I proposed to Congress a balanced budget, but Congress refused to enact it. Congress has even refused to give me the line-item veto to help me achieve further deficit reduction. But we must balance this budget without resorting to their priorities, without their unwise cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, in education and the environment.
Five months ago I proposed my balanced budget plan. It balances the budget in the right way. It cuts hundreds of wasteful and outdated programs, but it upholds our fundamental values -- to provide opportunity, to respect our obligations to our parents and our children, to strengthen families and to strengthen America -- because it preserves Medicare and Medicaid, it invests in education and technology, it protects the environment, and it gives the tax cuts to working families for child rearing and for education. Unfortunately, Republican leaders in Washington have put ideology ahead of common sense and shared values in their pursuit of a budget plan.
We can balance the budget without doing what they seek to do. We can balance the budget without the deep cuts in education, without the deep cuts in the environment, without letting Medicare wither on the vine, without imposing tax increases on the hardest-pressed working families in America. I am fighting for a balanced budget that is good for America and consistent with our values. If they'll give me the tools, I'll balance the budget.
I vetoed the spending bill sent to me by Congress last night because America can never accept under pressure what it would not accept in free and open debate. I strongly believe their budget plan is bad for America. I believe it will undermine opportunity, make it harder for families to do the work that they have to do, weaken our obligations to our parents and our childr
Monkey's Audio is junk. I used it for a while but Matt was always introducing new bugs and people were always having problems with it. I had a few verify/reliability issues myself.
I've ripped many CDs with Monkey's Audio 3.99 and have done multiple checks, never finding a difference between the WAV and the uncompressed APE file. Perhaps it's operator error to blame for your problems.
What's more fucking stupid is continually re-ripping said CDs everytime you find out about some new encoder version and everybody's latest listening tests. Lossless copies of CDs are ideal, and disk space is getting cheaper.
I don't re-rip every time a new encoder or listening test comes out. I'm not that anal. If its for a portable player or for my car, it's not like some subtle difference between encoders is likely to be audible. If it's for home use, I play the original CD on my Rotel player, not some compressed file spewed out through a $99 sound card.
Haha. I suppose you've been putting up with that buggy piece of shit for years, convincing yourself that it's doing some funky mojo that makes it so much better than cdparanoia.
If you knew a bit more about this subject, then you would know that EAC is far better than cdparanoia and is considered to be the best ripper currently in existence. It's the gold standard by which all others are measured:
1. If you have a modern drive that caches audio data in a large cache, cdparanoia will only read the data twice from the cache, and no error correction will be performed (so it will be no more secure than just any other ripper - just slower). I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for cdparanoia to be fixed, because development on it has basically been dead since 2001.
2. cdparanoia lacks such basic features as a GUI front-end, freedb lookup of the CD in the drive, automatic creation of ID3 tags, invocation of the encoder, profiles so that you can easily go from one compression mode (e.g., APE, MP3 VBR, MP3 192kbps CBR, FLAC, etc.) to another. Don't waste my time telling me how to string multiple programs together via shell scripts or other kludges. That you would need to do such a thing to even approach the features that EAC has natively shows that cdparanoia is deficient by comparison.
Sure mate, you know more than we'll ever know, we believe you.
Sure, whereas the left-wingers always have an anwser why someone should be allowed to keep their job no matter what, regardless of realities.
Reality: I don't need milk to be 5 cents cheaper per gallon. I could afford to pay 10% more for my McDonalds meal if it meant that someone working there could get healthcare. I don't need Walmart to open up "self-serve checkouts" and fire cashiers so that they can lower the price on my shampoo from $1.73 per bottle to $1.69. I'm damned realistic. I recognize that it's a lot better for the economy to pay someone to milk cows than to support them on unemployment.
They are also remarkably hostile towards those persons who are providing those jobs.
That hostility could be coming from:
1. The ever increasing ratio between the haves and have-nots at a company. The ratio of CEO pay to worker pay has been skyrocketing. Workers are being asked to make do with less and less, with layoffs, companies seeking ways to gut pensions and medical benefits, and a constant fear of lay-offs. All the while, the CEOs are taking home ever larger bonuses, paychecks, and other perks.
2. The fact that companies want loyalty from workers but don't give any back. How many people settle into a good job in their twenties, move up the corporate ladder, and then eventually retire from the same company, carrying out the gold watch that they got for their years of service? The reality now is that a "career" is often a series of job changes necessary to get a good pay increase interspersed with random layoffs.
3. Workers feeling like management is out to get rid of them. If it's not automation taking away the factory jobs, it's outsourcing taking away the intellectual jobs.
4. Ever greater demands. Companies are expecting, and getting, more hours out of workers. And the workers are having to work harder and harder just to keep their jobs. It's been borne out in many surveys.
As a moderator you should quickly realize that your posts were pretty damn troll-ish and flame like, right?;)
I realized it at the time.
But I wasn't trolling/flaming without a purpose. I find that there is way too much blind worshipping of Open Source on Slashdot. The proponents will tell you that using open source means that you can port it to any system you like. Yet how many of them have ported Ogg to an in-dash music player? I'd just like to see a little balance restored here.
As I'm writing this, I'm downloading the latest release version of SUSE, so I'm not some kind of Microsoft apologist. But Open Source isn't always the answer. It doesn't automatically mean that you have portability. And proprietary and patent-encumbered solutions are sometimes better. I just want people to keep an open mind.
The problem is mainly with the older cows, they somehow just don't feel like going by themselves. Even now, half a year after we started milking with this robot, we still walk through the barn a couple of times a day to find those cows and make sure they go to the robot.
Sounds like what many of us go through when trying to get older relatives to use computers and e-mail. Half a year after we set it up for them, we still have to go over to make sure that they are using it.
As opposed to those skilled, thinking jobs that are being outsourced.
Thank you. The right-wingers always have an answer as to why it's good to take away someone's job. But it all boils down to their blind worship of big business and a lack of empathy for those who find themselves unemployed or underemployed.
The parent to your post wrote:
"That maybe this frees humans to take up jobs which reward thinking, and maybe those downtrodden humans you despair for don't actually like dead end jobs that require no skill and no thinking?"
That ignores the fact that 25% of the population have IQ scores below 89. For someone with an IQ of 75, farm work may be very fulfilling. Take that away from them and they may be unable to find other work.
Not everyone has a high enough IQ to excel, or even function, in a job which requires intelligence, logic, and analytical skills. Not every person you meet on the street could be taught to do electronic design, software development, bio-medical research, or astrophysics. In order for our economy to thrive, we need jobs suitable for everyone in the work force -- including the mildly retarded who hold jobs as janitors, sanitation workers, laborers, assemblers, and President of the United States.
No, it's intelligent and insightful. What's "fucking stupid" is your recommendation of FLAC when Monkey's Audio offers better lossless compression.
What's also fucking stupid is your assumption that everyone wants to eat up gigabytes of disc space to store lossless copies of CDs that they already own.
I am the moderator for the Exact Audio Copy forum on Yahoogroups and know more about this subject than you ever will, so go away little boy.
There are numerous players out there that support MP3 & WMA, but the majority of my music collection is in OGG.
You made a bad choice in going with Ogg Vorbis. Reencode your collection to MP3 and move on.
You probably bought into the malarkey on Vorbis.com:
Ogg Vorbis is a completely open, patent-free, professional audio encoding and streaming technology with all the benefits of Open Source.
What good does the "completely open, patent-free...source code" do? You can only make use of it if your passenger seat has been replaced with a Sun Blade workstation or if you have kludged together some ergonomic disaster car-mounted mini-ITX PC.
The Open Source evangelists tediously blather on about how Open Source gives users so many choices, but, had you gone with MP3 or WMA, you would have had far more choices for an in-dash MP3 player.
Finally, I'm sure we will be treated to about 100 posts whining about how the US invented the internet and the world was so unfair. This is of course utterly laughable, as it simply does not matter who invented what, or how would you react to the Chinese demanding you stop using paper, or, omg, firearms, because they invented the stuff?
Straw man argument: No one said that other countries had to stop using the Internet.
Non sequitors: 1. No one suggested that non-U.S. countries had to stop USING the Internet, so your firearm and paper analogies are invalid. 2. Firearms and paper are standalone items. If I go to a rifle range in the U.S., it does not have any impact on China. Given the amount of spam that arrives here from Chinese servers, I can tell you first hand that what China does on the Internet directly affects the U.S.
All that your opponents have said is that the U.S. shouldn't cede control of important Internet infrastructure to foreign governments or corporations. If China (or any country) wants to set up their own multi-computer network which is separate from, but uses the protocols and standards of, the Internet, they are welcome to. But this situation is analogous to Mexico and Canada demanding that we hand over partial control of U.S. roads to them because we allowed them to interconnect their roads with ours at border crossings.
But if you want to play this little game anyway, please keep in mind that the world wide web, or rather the technologies necessary for it, were invented in Europe.
No one is suggesting that other countries should be prevented from using U.S.-developed hardware and software networking standards. But why should the U.S. give up control of root name servers, ICANN, etc., especially when it provides us such a strategic advantage?
So then how exactly do you determine the value of something?
You can only determine what it is worth to you.
Who sets the price under your system?
I don't have a "system" -- and anyone can set a price on anything (exceptions for price-gouging laws, anti-trust, etc.). How many people will buy at that price is another matter.
Who determines value? The manufacturer? The consumer? The government?
There is no universal "value" for anything. There's just supply and demand and somewhere on that curve is a sweet spot to maximize profits. If Best Buy has a sale with 20% off all DVDs, it doesn't mean that all DVDs are now worth 20% less. Suppose you pay $17,500 for a new car and your coworker pays $18,700 for the same car at the same dealership. Is the value of the car $17,500? Is it $18,700? Suppose that someone else pays the $19,995 list price plus $2,500 additional dealer profit. Is that now the value of the car? Or did they pay more than it was worth (more than its value) -- in which case, the selling price doesn't determine the value?
Repeat after me, "Selling price does not equal value". Selling price just indicates what someone, perhaps someone of limited mental capacity, is willing to pay for the item, not what the item is worth.
The value of something is what the market will bear.
No, that's not how you determine the value of something. The market for Pet Rocks proved that. So did the fact that someone paid $14,000 for a piece of chewing gum supposedly chewed by Brittany Spears.
Back to the example of printer ink cartridges, I'm sure that there's someone, somewhere, who is willing to pay $150 for an ink cartridge. Maybe it's a college student who has a paper due at 8:00AM and it's 4:00AM and he has no ink. Maybe it's someone terminally ill who needs to print a will. But that doesn't mean that ink cartridges are worth $150.
That you can find someone stupid, or desperate, enough to pay way too much for something does not mean that you have established the item's "value."
No, I don't get lots of spam. Most of it is denied at the SMTP protocol level and is never even written to disk. Most of the rest is filtered out based on content and/dev/null'd before it reaches the mailbox delivery step. The client side filter is then left to handle the very small quantity of mail that is difficult to discern with more general measures and makes it past the SMTP and MDA level and is of course then downloaded by the useragent for fine-tuning of the local filter.
I'm glad that your time has zero value, because the time that you've spent setting up your mail server and client spam blocking software is obviously siginificant. I know because I run my own mail server and host multiple blacklists on a local DNS server. I know what's involved in setting up, maintaining, and monitoring a system which reduces my spam load to less than a half-dozen pieces per week. Unlike yours, however, my time has value.
Taking a guy's belongings and sticking him in prison (like most people suggest should be done) isn't really a justified response for wasiting a few kilobytes of bandwidth on my server every day.
As hard as you may find this to believe, the FBI isn't prioritizing criminal investigations based on how much the criminal cost you, personally. The FBI isn't concerned with your few kilobytes of bandwidth every day. They are concerned with the terabytes of bandwidth and storage being stolen by Ralsky every day. They are aware of the cost to businesses, colleges, and ISPs. They know that these costs are passed on to consumers.
You seem to feel that someone who steals a dollar from 100 million people is somehow not worthy of prosecution because it only cost you $1. That's f***ed up.
You're not just getting what's advertised. You're getting what you agreed to pay for. You walk into an Apple store and exchange $499 for a 1.25GHz Mac mini. You must think this is a good exchange for you, else why would you do it?
Because I want a 1.5ghz Mac mini. What I'm agreeing to pay for is the higher spec system, not the one advertised on the box.
You aren't an employee, so that analogy makes no sense.
You obviously don't know the definition of "analogy": "Similarity in some respects between things that are otherwise dissimilar" {source: dictionary.com}. That's like saying "your analogy makes no sense because we're not talking about eggs or baskets."
If a company arbitrarily gave out $2000 worth of goodies to a randomly-selected half of its employees, the other half might quit.
Ding, Ding, Ding! You got it. Even though no one promised them $2000 worth of goodies, the company was not legally required to supply same, and the company met their obligation ($X pay and benefits for $Y hours of work), those workers would be dissatisfied. You just proved my point.
Even if you were, the difference between a 1.42 GHz mini and a 1.50 Ghz mini is not the same as the difference between a plasma HDTV and nothing.
So it would be reasonable to be upset, but less so based on the lesser difference. Again, the point of an analogy is to show similarities, not to say that two situations are identical. "There's no sense crying over spilt milk" does not imply that spilling a glass of milk is identical in severity to whatever the other person is anquished about.
Users are reporting that they can't tell the difference in normal use.
The inability of luddites to recognize the difference from the higher clock speed and double the video RAM is immaterial. If you encode to MP3, it will take longer with the lower clock speed. If you play a video game, you will get better performance from the larger quantity of video RAM.
Should Apple be upset that you gave more than required at one business, but not theirs?
No, because Apple is a gargantuan corporation and doesn't have feelings or emotions.
I've seen countless postings on here which go something like "you have no right to complain because you got what was advertised."
Well I don't want what's advertised. I want the higher spec systems that Apple is shipping in the same box. I don't need lectures from people about truth in advertising or Apple's legal rights.
It's normal. If your company gives a random half of the employees plasma HDTVs as Christmas bonuses and you don't get one, you'll be pissed off, won't you? You're not going to skip to your car that evening with a satisfied smile, happy in the knowledge that they met their contractual, legal obligations to you.
I don't like the implications of what HBO is doing, either. But to some degree, it's better than the alternative;)
I disagree. If this kind of thing continues, even free speech is threatened. Imagine what happens if the Church of Scientology started DDoS attacks against every web site that posted anti-scientology information (instead of claiming copyright over quoted documents). What if Apple decides to start DDoS attacks against sites that tell people how to run OS-X86 on generic PCs? What if Microsoft decided to start poisoning torrents with Lindows ISO downloads?
At least with the current system of legislation and court cases, there is some judicial oversight.
Interesting... By this logic, it is illegal for a person getting mugged to fight back -- because his actions would certainly qualify as an attempt to harm the attacker. And harming others (intentionally!) is quite illegal, is not it?
No, the law makes an exception for self-defense when you are in danger of bodily harm. But you can't shoot some guy in the back if he robs your convenience store. Property and human life are handled differently by the law.
Distributing these files is illegal.
Then it's a matter for law enforcement and the courts. It's illegal for people to speed, but you can't shoot out the tires of every car that you believe to be speeding.
Besides, you claim that it's "illegal", but some court might decide it's fair use. That's what happened when the studios sued Sony because the beta VCRs could record television programs. That's why HBO has no legal right to take matters into their own hands.
Can I not leave fake jewelry in my house to distract the thieves?
Sure you can, but the Bittorrent servers aren't the property of HBO the way that your home is your property.
One thing is obvious -- you simply don't feel that there is anything wrong with what HBO is fighting.
No, you're incorrect. But nice try at trying to insult me and question my motives.
I don't want a situation where everyone who feels that their copyright is being infringed takes to denial of service attacks, hacking servers, etc. Maybe you believe that the Scientologists should be able to do that when they believe that their copyright is being infringed? Scary thought.
As is much of law. The part of patent law in many jurisdictions that allows a mathematical formula to be the subject matter of a patent is just as much a non-sequitur to many critics.
I asked "Is there something unique to software engineers that justifies us being held in such a lofty position relative to all other creators of art and intellectual property?" You're talking about software and I'm talking about software engineers. You're talking about laws and I'm talking about ethics. What justifies software engineers enjoying greater protections than other creators of intellectual property? It may have been illegal for blacks to drink from a fountain for whites, but that didn't justify whites being held in such a lofty position relative to blacks.
Two different works. You're perceiving a box or a print ad, not the program itself.
No, I'm seeing the box or ad and that makes me aware of the program. The definition of "perceive" is to become aware of directly through any of the senses. You can hear a twig snap and perceive that you are being followed without ever seeing the follower.
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (as amended 1994 and 1996).
Posting false information online is not.
1. If it's false, then it's not information. Information is, by definition, true.
2. It is illegal when it is an attempt to defraud, which this is. It is fraudulently offering something that the user wants, taking the user's time and bandwidth, and not delivering the promised article -- a recorded television program.
3. It is also illegal when it's part of a denial of service attack -- and that's what this is. HBO is using large numbers of IP addresses in the scheme to deny Bittorrent users access to files that they wish to download. They are offering bogus downloads that never complete. They are also, according to the article, "obstructing the downloads offered by other people." They do this by running peers that tell the tracker they have all of the chunks of the show, but that then send garbage data when a downloader requests a chunk. The downloading client can detect that it's garbage and will try another peer for the chunk, but the end result is that it takes much much longer to download shows.
Let's put it into meatspace to make it more familiar: Suppose that I advertised a free motorcycle on craigslist and you drove 100 miles to my house to get it. When you arrive, I hand you a bad of coffee grounds, rotted vegetables, soiled napkins, and miscellaneous garbage. Are you saying that you think that the false posting promising a free motorcycle is legal?
How dare anyone criticize HBO for taking the law into its own hands?
Maybe Amazon should just start hacking web sites they believe are violating their one-click-shopping patent. Microsoft could stop suing little web sites for trademark violation and just shut them down with massive denial of service attacks. Paramount could stop sending cease-and-desist letters and, instead, close down Star Trek fan fiction websites by downloading so much that the owners couldn't afford the bandwidth charges.
If you feel like you're being discriminated against at work, don't go to HR: just sabotage the work of the person you believe is discriminating against you. If you see neighborhood kids cutting across your yard, just put punji sticks throughout your yard. You're a victim, so you're above the law, whether it's the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act or laws against booby traps.
Let's stop all of this stupid "due process" thing and just go to vigilante justice, booby traps, and corporate bullying. Yay!
Yes. The technology used to perceive a computer program involves making an ephemeral copy of a substantial portion of the work into a volatile memory.
That argument is a complete non-sequitor. It's like saying "painters deserve more respect and income than software engineers because painting involves the use of brushes." Or "used DVDs should not be sold because DVD decryption takes place in RAM."
One does not need technology to "perceive a computer program." For example, I am aware of the game City of Heroes. I saw it on store shelves and saw print ads for it. It did not need to be loaded into volatile memory for me to become aware of it.
Slashdot Mirror
The WMD charge is but one part of a number of reasons to go into Iraq.
You're trying to rewrite history again. It was the over-arching, primary justification given to the UN and the American people. It was only after the truth came out that the Bush administration started saying 'but Saddam was a really bad man!' Well, there are horrible dictators running Sudan, North Korea, Burma, China, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Zimbabwe, and Equatorial Guinea, to name but a few countries. I don't see Bush prepping to attack those countries.
running North Korea, China,
The president thinks that ID should be taught alongside evolution. There is a scientific debate on this issue--at least there is wherever a debate is even allowed to take place.
No, there is NO SCIENTIFIC DEBATE ON THIS TOPIC WHATSOEVER. There are no reputable, peer-reviewed scientific journals publishing article on "Intelligent Design." There are no respected scientists claiming that there is some invisible being tinkering with evolution. There are just a bunch of idiots who don't understand that scientific theories are disprovable and that, therefore, Intelligent Design is not a scientific theory.
But more importantly, the president supports local school boards to control the curriculum of the schools, not an all-powerful central government authority. Which would seem to me to be a good thing.
Then you would be wrong. Some child should not be put at a further educational disadvantage just because they happened to have been unfortunate enough to be born in Kansas, Mississippi, or Alabama. Educational standards should be set at the national level.
If the President is so in favor of local school boards controlling the curriculum, please explain the "No Child Left Behind" crap that he's been spewing.
You are not even describing the argument accurately, yet I'm supposed to take you seriously?
Bush said (about Intelligent Design) "I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought. You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes." Bush didn't say anything about it being up to individual school boards, so it's you who is not describing the argument accurately.
There are not tens of thousands of hurricane victims suffering needlessly.
A National Guard official said on Thursday, September 1, that as many as 60,000 people had gathered at the Superdome for evacuation. That's where there was only enough food and water for 15,000 for three days. People defecated on the ground, did without food and water, did without transportation, and suffered needlessly. That's just one place where they gathered.
Who gives a shit what Haliburton does?
American taxpayers who foot the bill.
It's a company that has extensive experience in doing some things. They get contracts for doing what they have experience in.
They get no-bid contracts for doing things that others also have experience in.
But they're getting contracts for their core competencies. This is hardly a crime.
The crime isn't getting the contracts. It's what they do after they get them. A government audit found that Halliburton overcharged the U.S. Army by $61 million for gasoline transferred to Iraq as part of one deal that was awarded without a bidding process. The company allegedly overcharged the U.S. government by $1 per gallon for gasoline purchased from Kuwait, and its employees have been accused of receiving some $6.3 million in kickbacks on another Kuwaiti contract by charging for three times as many meals as were actually served at a major army facility. Auditors at the Pentagon are looking into the company's food contracts at more than 50 other locations, where it is said to have overcharged by $27.4 million.
It's not even interesting.
Yes, it is, to those of us who have ethics.
But I wanted to congratulate you for managing to put a good running summary of all the vacuous charges leveled against this administration.
How dare anyone criticize the administration? So what if 2,000 troops have died since invading a country with no "weapons of mass destruction"? Who cares if our President is calling for religion (creationism -- AKA "Intelligent Design") to be taught in science classes? Why would anyone make a big deal out tens of thousands of hurricane victims suffering needlessly? And so what if contracts continue to be given to Halliburton after they've been found to be fleecing the American taxpayers?
You have a funny idea of "vacuous."
The Republicans now control the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. We have the largest federal deficit in the history of the nation. So don't try to pretend that they are the party of fiscal responsibility.
The budget was balanced by the Clinton White House and now Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress spend money like drunken sailers in port.
In fact, Bill Clinton vetoed the budget causing the longest shutdown of the federal government.
That's just more Republican bull****. The Republicans tried to use balancing the budget as an excuse to try to push through drastic cuts to funding for Medicare, education, and protection of the environment.
Text of Clinton government shutdown address:
Monkey's Audio is junk. I used it for a while but Matt was always introducing new bugs and people were always having problems with it. I had a few verify/reliability issues myself.
I've ripped many CDs with Monkey's Audio 3.99 and have done multiple checks, never finding a difference between the WAV and the uncompressed APE file. Perhaps it's operator error to blame for your problems.
What's more fucking stupid is continually re-ripping said CDs everytime you find out about some new encoder version and everybody's latest listening tests. Lossless copies of CDs are ideal, and disk space is getting cheaper.
I don't re-rip every time a new encoder or listening test comes out. I'm not that anal. If its for a portable player or for my car, it's not like some subtle difference between encoders is likely to be audible. If it's for home use, I play the original CD on my Rotel player, not some compressed file spewed out through a $99 sound card.
Haha. I suppose you've been putting up with that buggy piece of shit for years, convincing yourself that it's doing some funky mojo that makes it so much better than cdparanoia.
If you knew a bit more about this subject, then you would know that EAC is far better than cdparanoia and is considered to be the best ripper currently in existence. It's the gold standard by which all others are measured:
1. If you have a modern drive that caches audio data in a large cache, cdparanoia will only read the data twice from the cache, and no error correction will be performed (so it will be no more secure than just any other ripper - just slower). I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for cdparanoia to be fixed, because development on it has basically been dead since 2001.
2. cdparanoia lacks such basic features as a GUI front-end, freedb lookup of the CD in the drive, automatic creation of ID3 tags, invocation of the encoder, profiles so that you can easily go from one compression mode (e.g., APE, MP3 VBR, MP3 192kbps CBR, FLAC, etc.) to another. Don't waste my time telling me how to string multiple programs together via shell scripts or other kludges. That you would need to do such a thing to even approach the features that EAC has natively shows that cdparanoia is deficient by comparison.
Sure mate, you know more than we'll ever know, we believe you.
And now you have good reason to (see above).
Yeah, like my father in law who was in charge of key guidance components on the Apollo mission.
Don't forget that he was a much younger man back when Apollo launched -- the age at which people readily embrace new technology.
Sure, whereas the left-wingers always have an anwser why someone should be allowed to keep their job no matter what, regardless of realities.
Reality: I don't need milk to be 5 cents cheaper per gallon. I could afford to pay 10% more for my McDonalds meal if it meant that someone working there could get healthcare. I don't need Walmart to open up "self-serve checkouts" and fire cashiers so that they can lower the price on my shampoo from $1.73 per bottle to $1.69. I'm damned realistic. I recognize that it's a lot better for the economy to pay someone to milk cows than to support them on unemployment.
They are also remarkably hostile towards those persons who are providing those jobs.
That hostility could be coming from:
1. The ever increasing ratio between the haves and have-nots at a company. The ratio of CEO pay to worker pay has been skyrocketing. Workers are being asked to make do with less and less, with layoffs, companies seeking ways to gut pensions and medical benefits, and a constant fear of lay-offs. All the while, the CEOs are taking home ever larger bonuses, paychecks, and other perks.
2. The fact that companies want loyalty from workers but don't give any back. How many people settle into a good job in their twenties, move up the corporate ladder, and then eventually retire from the same company, carrying out the gold watch that they got for their years of service? The reality now is that a "career" is often a series of job changes necessary to get a good pay increase interspersed with random layoffs.
3. Workers feeling like management is out to get rid of them. If it's not automation taking away the factory jobs, it's outsourcing taking away the intellectual jobs.
4. Ever greater demands. Companies are expecting, and getting, more hours out of workers. And the workers are having to work harder and harder just to keep their jobs. It's been borne out in many surveys.
As a moderator you should quickly realize that your posts were pretty damn troll-ish and flame like, right? ;)
I realized it at the time.
But I wasn't trolling/flaming without a purpose. I find that there is way too much blind worshipping of Open Source on Slashdot. The proponents will tell you that using open source means that you can port it to any system you like. Yet how many of them have ported Ogg to an in-dash music player? I'd just like to see a little balance restored here.
As I'm writing this, I'm downloading the latest release version of SUSE, so I'm not some kind of Microsoft apologist. But Open Source isn't always the answer. It doesn't automatically mean that you have portability. And proprietary and patent-encumbered solutions are sometimes better. I just want people to keep an open mind.
The problem is mainly with the older cows, they somehow just don't feel like going by themselves. Even now, half a year after we started milking with this robot, we still walk through the barn a couple of times a day to find those cows and make sure they go to the robot.
Sounds like what many of us go through when trying to get older relatives to use computers and e-mail. Half a year after we set it up for them, we still have to go over to make sure that they are using it.
As opposed to those skilled, thinking jobs that are being outsourced.
Thank you. The right-wingers always have an answer as to why it's good to take away someone's job. But it all boils down to their blind worship of big business and a lack of empathy for those who find themselves unemployed or underemployed.
The parent to your post wrote:
"That maybe this frees humans to take up jobs which reward thinking, and maybe those downtrodden humans you despair for don't actually like dead end jobs that require no skill and no thinking?"
That ignores the fact that 25% of the population have IQ scores below 89. For someone with an IQ of 75, farm work may be very fulfilling. Take that away from them and they may be unable to find other work.
Not everyone has a high enough IQ to excel, or even function, in a job which requires intelligence, logic, and analytical skills. Not every person you meet on the street could be taught to do electronic design, software development, bio-medical research, or astrophysics. In order for our economy to thrive, we need jobs suitable for everyone in the work force -- including the mildly retarded who hold jobs as janitors, sanitation workers, laborers, assemblers, and President of the United States.
Can it milk my Girl friend!
No, but it could deflate her.
At home I like to use OGG files mainly because it seems easier to get a good sounding encoding by using the default settings.
lame.exe --preset-extreme file.wav file.mp3
That's pretty fucking stupid.
No, it's intelligent and insightful. What's "fucking stupid" is your recommendation of FLAC when Monkey's Audio offers better lossless compression.
What's also fucking stupid is your assumption that everyone wants to eat up gigabytes of disc space to store lossless copies of CDs that they already own.
I am the moderator for the Exact Audio Copy forum on Yahoogroups and know more about this subject than you ever will, so go away little boy.
There are numerous players out there that support MP3 & WMA, but the majority of my music collection is in OGG.
You made a bad choice in going with Ogg Vorbis. Reencode your collection to MP3 and move on.
You probably bought into the malarkey on Vorbis.com:
Ogg Vorbis is a completely open, patent-free, professional audio encoding and streaming technology with all the benefits of Open Source.
What good does the "completely open, patent-free...source code" do? You can only make use of it if your passenger seat has been replaced with a Sun Blade workstation or if you have kludged together some ergonomic disaster car-mounted mini-ITX PC.
The Open Source evangelists tediously blather on about how Open Source gives users so many choices, but, had you gone with MP3 or WMA, you would have had far more choices for an in-dash MP3 player.
Finally, I'm sure we will be treated to about 100 posts whining about how the US invented the internet and the world was so unfair. This is of course utterly laughable, as it simply does not matter who invented what, or how would you react to the Chinese demanding you stop using paper, or, omg, firearms, because they invented the stuff?
Straw man argument:
No one said that other countries had to stop using the Internet.
Non sequitors:
1. No one suggested that non-U.S. countries had to stop USING the Internet, so your firearm and paper analogies are invalid.
2. Firearms and paper are standalone items. If I go to a rifle range in the U.S., it does not have any impact on China. Given the amount of spam that arrives here from Chinese servers, I can tell you first hand that what China does on the Internet directly affects the U.S.
All that your opponents have said is that the U.S. shouldn't cede control of important Internet infrastructure to foreign governments or corporations. If China (or any country) wants to set up their own multi-computer network which is separate from, but uses the protocols and standards of, the Internet, they are welcome to. But this situation is analogous to Mexico and Canada demanding that we hand over partial control of U.S. roads to them because we allowed them to interconnect their roads with ours at border crossings.
But if you want to play this little game anyway, please keep in mind that the world wide web, or rather the technologies necessary for it, were invented in Europe.
No one is suggesting that other countries should be prevented from using U.S.-developed hardware and software networking standards. But why should the U.S. give up control of root name servers, ICANN, etc., especially when it provides us such a strategic advantage?
So then how exactly do you determine the value of something?
You can only determine what it is worth to you.
Who sets the price under your system?
I don't have a "system" -- and anyone can set a price on anything (exceptions for price-gouging laws, anti-trust, etc.). How many people will buy at that price is another matter.
Who determines value? The manufacturer? The consumer? The government?
There is no universal "value" for anything. There's just supply and demand and somewhere on that curve is a sweet spot to maximize profits. If Best Buy has a sale with 20% off all DVDs, it doesn't mean that all DVDs are now worth 20% less. Suppose you pay $17,500 for a new car and your coworker pays $18,700 for the same car at the same dealership. Is the value of the car $17,500? Is it $18,700? Suppose that someone else pays the $19,995 list price plus $2,500 additional dealer profit. Is that now the value of the car? Or did they pay more than it was worth (more than its value) -- in which case, the selling price doesn't determine the value?
Repeat after me, "Cost does not equal value".
Repeat after me, "Selling price does not equal value". Selling price just indicates what someone, perhaps someone of limited mental capacity, is willing to pay for the item, not what the item is worth.
The value of something is what the market will bear.
No, that's not how you determine the value of something. The market for Pet Rocks proved that. So did the fact that someone paid $14,000 for a piece of chewing gum supposedly chewed by Brittany Spears.
Back to the example of printer ink cartridges, I'm sure that there's someone, somewhere, who is willing to pay $150 for an ink cartridge. Maybe it's a college student who has a paper due at 8:00AM and it's 4:00AM and he has no ink. Maybe it's someone terminally ill who needs to print a will. But that doesn't mean that ink cartridges are worth $150.
That you can find someone stupid, or desperate, enough to pay way too much for something does not mean that you have established the item's "value."
No, I don't get lots of spam. Most of it is denied at the SMTP protocol level and is never even written to disk. Most of the rest is filtered out based on content and /dev/null'd before it reaches the mailbox delivery step. The client side filter is then left to handle the very small quantity of mail that is difficult to discern with more general measures and makes it past the SMTP and MDA level and is of course then downloaded by the useragent for fine-tuning of the local filter.
I'm glad that your time has zero value, because the time that you've spent setting up your mail server and client spam blocking software is obviously siginificant. I know because I run my own mail server and host multiple blacklists on a local DNS server. I know what's involved in setting up, maintaining, and monitoring a system which reduces my spam load to less than a half-dozen pieces per week. Unlike yours, however, my time has value.
Taking a guy's belongings and sticking him in prison (like most people suggest should be done) isn't really a justified response for wasiting a few kilobytes of bandwidth on my server every day.
As hard as you may find this to believe, the FBI isn't prioritizing criminal investigations based on how much the criminal cost you, personally. The FBI isn't concerned with your few kilobytes of bandwidth every day. They are concerned with the terabytes of bandwidth and storage being stolen by Ralsky every day. They are aware of the cost to businesses, colleges, and ISPs. They know that these costs are passed on to consumers.
You seem to feel that someone who steals a dollar from 100 million people is somehow not worthy of prosecution because it only cost you $1. That's f***ed up.
You're not just getting what's advertised. You're getting what you agreed to pay for. You walk into an Apple store and exchange $499 for a 1.25GHz Mac mini. You must think this is a good exchange for you, else why would you do it?
Because I want a 1.5ghz Mac mini. What I'm agreeing to pay for is the higher spec system, not the one advertised on the box.
You aren't an employee, so that analogy makes no sense.
You obviously don't know the definition of "analogy": "Similarity in some respects between things that are otherwise dissimilar" {source: dictionary.com}. That's like saying "your analogy makes no sense because we're not talking about eggs or baskets."
If a company arbitrarily gave out $2000 worth of goodies to a randomly-selected half of its employees, the other half might quit.
Ding, Ding, Ding! You got it. Even though no one promised them $2000 worth of goodies, the company was not legally required to supply same, and the company met their obligation ($X pay and benefits for $Y hours of work), those workers would be dissatisfied. You just proved my point.
Even if you were, the difference between a 1.42 GHz mini and a 1.50 Ghz mini is not the same as the difference between a plasma HDTV and nothing.
So it would be reasonable to be upset, but less so based on the lesser difference. Again, the point of an analogy is to show similarities, not to say that two situations are identical. "There's no sense crying over spilt milk" does not imply that spilling a glass of milk is identical in severity to whatever the other person is anquished about.
Users are reporting that they can't tell the difference in normal use.
The inability of luddites to recognize the difference from the higher clock speed and double the video RAM is immaterial. If you encode to MP3, it will take longer with the lower clock speed. If you play a video game, you will get better performance from the larger quantity of video RAM.
Should Apple be upset that you gave more than required at one business, but not theirs?
No, because Apple is a gargantuan corporation and doesn't have feelings or emotions.
I've seen countless postings on here which go something like "you have no right to complain because you got what was advertised."
Well I don't want what's advertised. I want the higher spec systems that Apple is shipping in the same box. I don't need lectures from people about truth in advertising or Apple's legal rights.
It's normal. If your company gives a random half of the employees plasma HDTVs as Christmas bonuses and you don't get one, you'll be pissed off, won't you? You're not going to skip to your car that evening with a satisfied smile, happy in the knowledge that they met their contractual, legal obligations to you.
I don't like the implications of what HBO is doing, either. But to some degree, it's better than the alternative ;)
I disagree. If this kind of thing continues, even free speech is threatened. Imagine what happens if the Church of Scientology started DDoS attacks against every web site that posted anti-scientology information (instead of claiming copyright over quoted documents). What if Apple decides to start DDoS attacks against sites that tell people how to run OS-X86 on generic PCs? What if Microsoft decided to start poisoning torrents with Lindows ISO downloads?
At least with the current system of legislation and court cases, there is some judicial oversight.
Interesting... By this logic, it is illegal for a person getting mugged to fight back -- because his actions would certainly qualify as an attempt to harm the attacker. And harming others (intentionally!) is quite illegal, is not it?
No, the law makes an exception for self-defense when you are in danger of bodily harm. But you can't shoot some guy in the back if he robs your convenience store. Property and human life are handled differently by the law.
Distributing these files is illegal.
Then it's a matter for law enforcement and the courts. It's illegal for people to speed, but you can't shoot out the tires of every car that you believe to be speeding.
Besides, you claim that it's "illegal", but some court might decide it's fair use. That's what happened when the studios sued Sony because the beta VCRs could record television programs. That's why HBO has no legal right to take matters into their own hands.
Can I not leave fake jewelry in my house to distract the thieves?
Sure you can, but the Bittorrent servers aren't the property of HBO the way that your home is your property.
One thing is obvious -- you simply don't feel that there is anything wrong with what HBO is fighting.
No, you're incorrect. But nice try at trying to insult me and question my motives.
I don't want a situation where everyone who feels that their copyright is being infringed takes to denial of service attacks, hacking servers, etc. Maybe you believe that the Scientologists should be able to do that when they believe that their copyright is being infringed? Scary thought.
As is much of law. The part of patent law in many jurisdictions that allows a mathematical formula to be the subject matter of a patent is just as much a non-sequitur to many critics.
I asked "Is there something unique to software engineers that justifies us being held in such a lofty position relative to all other creators of art and intellectual property?" You're talking about software and I'm talking about software engineers. You're talking about laws and I'm talking about ethics. What justifies software engineers enjoying greater protections than other creators of intellectual property? It may have been illegal for blacks to drink from a fountain for whites, but that didn't justify whites being held in such a lofty position relative to blacks.
Two different works. You're perceiving a box or a print ad, not the program itself.
No, I'm seeing the box or ad and that makes me aware of the program. The definition of "perceive" is to become aware of directly through any of the senses. You can hear a twig snap and perceive that you are being followed without ever seeing the follower.
Which law?
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (as amended 1994 and 1996).
Posting false information online is not.
1. If it's false, then it's not information. Information is, by definition, true.
2. It is illegal when it is an attempt to defraud, which this is. It is fraudulently offering something that the user wants, taking the user's time and bandwidth, and not delivering the promised article -- a recorded television program.
3. It is also illegal when it's part of a denial of service attack -- and that's what this is. HBO is using large numbers of IP addresses in the scheme to deny Bittorrent users access to files that they wish to download. They are offering bogus downloads that never complete. They are also, according to the article, "obstructing the downloads offered by other people." They do this by running peers that tell the tracker they have all of the chunks of the show, but that then send garbage data when a downloader requests a chunk. The downloading client can detect that it's garbage and will try another peer for the chunk, but the end result is that it takes much much longer to download shows.
Let's put it into meatspace to make it more familiar: Suppose that I advertised a free motorcycle on craigslist and you drove 100 miles to my house to get it. When you arrive, I hand you a bad of coffee grounds, rotted vegetables, soiled napkins, and miscellaneous garbage. Are you saying that you think that the false posting promising a free motorcycle is legal?
Outrage!
How dare anyone criticize HBO for taking the law into its own hands?
Maybe Amazon should just start hacking web sites they believe are violating their one-click-shopping patent. Microsoft could stop suing little web sites for trademark violation and just shut them down with massive denial of service attacks. Paramount could stop sending cease-and-desist letters and, instead, close down Star Trek fan fiction websites by downloading so much that the owners couldn't afford the bandwidth charges.
If you feel like you're being discriminated against at work, don't go to HR: just sabotage the work of the person you believe is discriminating against you. If you see neighborhood kids cutting across your yard, just put punji sticks throughout your yard. You're a victim, so you're above the law, whether it's the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act or laws against booby traps.
Let's stop all of this stupid "due process" thing and just go to vigilante justice, booby traps, and corporate bullying. Yay!
Yes. The technology used to perceive a computer program involves making an ephemeral copy of a substantial portion of the work into a volatile memory.
That argument is a complete non-sequitor. It's like saying "painters deserve more respect and income than software engineers because painting involves the use of brushes." Or "used DVDs should not be sold because DVD decryption takes place in RAM."
One does not need technology to "perceive a computer program." For example, I am aware of the game City of Heroes. I saw it on store shelves and saw print ads for it. It did not need to be loaded into volatile memory for me to become aware of it.