We need to teach ethics to the younger generation.
Which will accomplish what exactly?
You can't make everyone into a paragon of virtue, no matter
how hard you try. And it only takes a few to prey on the rest
(reducing the number of scammers would just increase the profitability
per scammer).
why is this behavior acceptable -- even lauded at times?
Because the same behavior in other contexts has largely beneficial
effects (even though it offends the establishment - Though that in
a way makes it more, not less, desireable).
The same cryptographic skills that let Random Bad Guy get into your
bank account also let DVD-Jon defeat various mechanisms for denying
people unfettered access to content they have legally purchased. The
same firewall piercing technology that allows botnets to work from a
home LAN also allow VOIP and most online games to work behind a firewall.
I'd say a lot of this is the past gen. or so's fault....and
these kids are in for a shock when they hit the real world.
Though I agree, I wouldn't use the word "fault"... More like
"success". And like it or not, the "real world" needs to
accomodate the next generation, not the other way around).
Don't confuse "I don't live to work, I work to live" with a
misplaced sense of entitlement, they very much differ.
Employers need to come to terms with that fact, and adjust
accordingly (or fade into oblivion as their ageing "traditional"
workforce fades away to nothing). The new talent won't
work themselves to death just for more money than they can
use in all the free time their jobs dosn't leave them. They won't
trade every 50 weeks of their life for a mere two in which to really
live. They won't shut up and sit in a sunless cube-farm when they
could just as efficiently do their work sitting on a grassy hillside
or from a cafe or for that matter from home. But they will
work - Just on their terms.
As an aside, I have around ten years too many to fit into Gen-Y (and
the same amount to late to fit Gen-X). But I very much approve
of the changes coming to the concept of employment - And if the Y'ers
can pull it off, I'd say the previous generation did an admirable
job raising them.
(Just in case anyone needed more evidence that pretty much everything
"new" still contains 99% things-that-came-before, making the idea of copyrights
absolutely absurd...)
The converse is not true -- there's no really elegant way of being able to place
an item in multiple folders simultaneously without redefining the folder as a label.
Well, for mostly-text email, simply copying it to another folder works.
In general, though, you could make the same complaint about any filing system,
from a physical filing cabinet, to your PC's FS. Do you put your W2s under
"employment" or "government"? Do you put remix tracks under the original
author's name or the mixer's?
Personally, I prefer folders for practical reasons - Even if I sometimes need to check
two places to find something, I can do so much faster than I can re-sort and
search through 40k tagged (sorry, "labelled") items in a flat list. And since that limitation
comes from me, not the technology involved, I don't really see that as likely to
change.
True. It can. It can also mean "effect" rather than cause - In the FP case,
that would mean all those criminals put lead in our gasoline deliberately (or
at least, to make a quick buck at the expense of our health - Sadly, I'd call
that not an entirely unreasonable conclusion). It can have no relation, such
as pirates and global warming.
The best you can do is look and see the correlation between
smokers and lung cancer.
No, you could quite easily design a valid study to demonstrate
the link (or more accurately, "fail to support the null hypothesis").
You just can't do so ethically or in a timeframe convenient
for human researchers.
And why does violent behavior have to be caused by organic brain damage?
What a Perfect illustration of why we say that correlation != causation.
Let's, for argument, presume that lead causes OBD and OBD causes criminal behavior.
Pb -> OBD -> jail. That does not necessarily mean that jail -> OBD, nor
that OBD -> Pb, nor (by the extended syllogism) that jail -> Pb.
when you stack hundreds of people in shelters for days, morale soon
becomes a concern
"You haven't died yet, people - Suck it up!"
Morale? C'mon, seriously. Priority 1 - no fire. Priority 2,
toilets. Priority 3, food and water. Priority 4? The day
humanity manages to accomplish #3, we can figure out a #4.
Until then...
The shelters exist to give people a place to crash for a few
days while their houses finish burning to the ground. Save
the feel-good morale BS for your Thursday afternoon group
therapy meeting.
Hold on, what law does refusing to serve someone violate?
You can refuse to serve someone before the sale.
After you've sold something, you (or rather, the store) take on
all the obligations that entails under local, state, and
federal law.
if they expressly retract the invitation for you to enter their
premises (e.g. by refusing to serve you and asking you to leave) you
are trespassing.
Okay, so at exactly what point does the seller's obligation to
honor their side of the transaction end? In stores where you pay and
then claim the product (some CompUSAs do that for more expensive
items), can they take your money then not let you leave the store with
the product, having you hauled away for trespassing if you refuse to
leave empty-handed?
If not, how does this differ from failing to honor state law regarding
the buyer's right to return product under certain conditions?
Also, if you return the game because of the ads, then you've
agreed to the license agreement which means you cannot return it
on those grounds.
Um... What? How does saying "no" to the EULA mean you've agreed
to it?
Return a video game? Where is the dream world you're writing from?
The law generally trumps "store policy"... Though you may need to sue to get your $50 back
(most companies won't even show up in small claims court, practically a slam-dunk).
Also, many states have a VERY useful law relating to this, usually called something like "Buyer's remorse".
They don't always apply to such low-priced items, though, so do your homework before you waste your
money.
Finally, never forget the power of "making a scene". If you loudly (but not threateningly!)
make a fuss over them refusing to take something back (best to wait for the busiest, most crowded
part of the day), they'll usually do what you want just to get rid of you.
I'm a frequent Amtrak passenger in the NE corridor
I can't explain our different experiences (I too live in the NE), but I've found
exactly the opposite of what you describe.
I have experienced a few delays (though nothing even close to the BS
we have to put up with for air travel), but never more than a few minutes, and when
you can sit back and comfortably read a book or play cards with a friend, who cares?
My true worst-case stories - Last time I flew (Northwest, though I don't blame
them specifically, they handled circumstances as well as possible; the
problem comes from the entire screwed-up infrastructure), my first plane
left and landed on time, but we sat on the tarmac for over an hour because
the airport had overbooked their terminals - And of course, no standing, using the
bathroom, or drink service during all this. Fortunately I didn't miss my connecting
flight, because it left two hours late - from another airport. They finally
got us on a plane almost eight hours late - Getting us in at 2:30am on a
worknight (and in a town that basically shuts down at 9pm, I pity anyone who
didn't have a prearranged ride and place to sleep).
My worst case train experience, we had to wait an hour because of some sort of
construction accident involving the Big Dig (though not directly at it, at that
time they hadn't yet opened it). An hour. In comfort. So I had another beer
and read another few chapters.
That said, I would prefer flying, because I admit I don't care to waste
much time in the travelling itself. But when the "faster" way actually ends
up taking longer, costing more, and has incredibly uncomfortable conditions...
Well, given a choice between a flight with even a single layover (good luck with
that, unless you happen to live at and want to go to a hub city, or can
afford 2-3x the ticket price for a direct nonhub flight), or taking the train...
Train wins, no question.
I've never traveled by train, just taken tourist-type train rides.
Travelling by train actually pretty much rocks, if you don't need to get across
the country in three to five hours (or cross an ocean, obviously).
They don't pack you in like sardines, you frequently have real tables
and comfy seats (as in, you can face your travelling companions and play cards
or something), you can move about (pee, go to the bar, etc) whenever you want,
usually no assigned seating (which could count as a downside, but usually the
non-commuter-trains have so few passengers you have all the choice you could
want)... For a vacation rather than a business trip, I'd highly recommend
going by train - And as a bonus, you'll actually see the country rather than
seeing clouds.
Of course, like the rest of our lives, we Americans even make our leisure time
a non-stop rush-rush-rush flurry of activity. Get "there" as fast as possible,
then lose more sleep than normal trying to visit every point of interest in a
100mi radius of our destination. Thus we have the phenomenon of needing to
come home an extra day before resuming work because we need to crash from what
we call "relaxation".
I always wonder why airlines have NEVER enforced carry on limits.
Because at the point they'd notice, they've already started boarding the plane and you've
already gone through security (with the baggage check counter on the outside).
Except in the most egregious abuses, if they tried to enforce carry-on rules, every
plane would start having extra half-hour to an hour delays (or in some cases, quite a few
hours).
As the alternative to that, they'd need to let people cancel/transfer/change their tickets
at the last minute, and they do not want to let people out of that little
scam...
For blank recordable media, the CRIA has no ability to affect pricing directly, thus the
tax on them.
For legally purchased music, the CRIA defines the price, via their contracts with
individual distribution channels.
Thus, if they see the need for an extra $0.02, they could just, y'know, raise prices
by that much per download. No need to go through the government and needlessly complicate
the issue.
So, why phrase this as a tax?
Scarily obvious answer: This has more to do with Radiohead than with piracy. Piracy scares the
music industry, but not nearly as much as artists like Radiohead, Issa (née Jane Siberry),
and NIN finally figuring out a viable way to escape the industry's evil clutches.
...Or should I say "almost escape", since the CRIA has evidently returned fire.
Too bad he doesn't care about his cause enough to project an aura of professionalism
and courtesy. There are certain expectations when you're a GUEST speaker in a professional
setting, an academic setting.
Right - Because nothing says "I believe in this" like selling out to your audience before
you even start.
Then again... Yale? Perhaps he should save his energy for people who haven't already
sold their souls to big business. Though I suppose I can see the benefit in getting
to the minds of the Oligarchy's children during their suggestible stoner years...
so by your argument, only the wealthiest fans should be able to attend games because middlemen sprung up to grab the fans by the short hairs.
Almost, but not quite. By my argument, only the wealthiest fans should see games because the venues should charge significantly more.
And not for every game... Most of the regular season, stadiums can't even fill half their seats. IMO, after the game starts, they
should offer something like $1 tickets to any comers, not for the income but for the good PR. But in the end-season, playoffs or superbowl
or or what-have-you, when they could pack the stadiums, they should charge more. And the same goes for popular concerts, and plays,
and other ticketted events... Anything underbooked charges too much, anything sold out simply didn't charge enough.
And I don't say that as someone wealthy.
why are tickets priced at the level they are? so that all members of the community at least have a shot at enjoying the game.
Except, we've seen that doesn't hold true. The only pressure on the teams to price altruistically comes from the need to
look like they care about the fans. If you believe they really do care, I have a bridge for sale...
if they feel they can't go, what's the point of supporting the team? (and buying the merchandise, following the
games on tv and subsequent advertising, etc.)
Key word there, "feel". As I said, mid-season, not enough people go to fill the seats anyway, so no problem there. Most fans
only go to a handful of games per year anyway.
Because dirt contains relatively little neon and argon, the current
Science study wasn't affected too much by contamination and the the team remains
hopeful that they will be able to get results on oxygen and nitrogen isotopes
from the mission.
...Because, of course, air contains relatively little oxygen and nitrogen, right?
Also, one peeve - You only capitalize "science" if speaking about the magazine.
"being a douche" should be legal. i am a douche, i should be able to commit as much douchery as i wish. neither
the government nor the bag should be able to stop me.
Wow, great comeback. And so apropos - You do have the right to act like a douche, as illustrated
by your responding to a blunt yet insigntful comment with the above drivel.
With so many Slashdotters self-proclaimed Libertarians, it amazes me that people have a problem with
scalping. The "manufacturer" (the team/stadium/league) has foolishly sold a good below its actual
market value. An entire class of people (scalpers) has established a framework around that gap to
obtain as much of a scarce resource as possible and resell it at a significant profit.
We shouldn't ask, "Why should we pay a middleman more?", we should ask "Why doesn't the manufacturer
charge more?"
Face it, something like 3% of Americans count as millionaires (though technically, about half
of those lack liquidity, with the bulk tied up in things like expensive houses and untouchable
retirement funds). About half of all Americans consider themselves pro-football fans. The
NFL has 32 teams. That means, for each team, you have somewhere on the order of 140,625 people
competing for (at most, Fedex Field) 92,000 seats.
It doesn't take an economist to see that 140,625 > 92,000... Thus, for the particularly big games
that everyone wants to see, basic supply and demand mean we plebes might as well save our money for
a bigger TV, because pricing competition for those seats exists even among the wealthy. When you
hear about Rolling Stones tickets selling unscalped for $300-$500, they do that because
they can, and they'll still fill a stadium. Not "unfair", just "capitalism".
What is new is that they're targetting the application
instead of cancelling or forcibly upgrading the account.
If you have a contract to sell me a dozen eggs for three dollars,
and I stop paying you, you can stop giving me eggs (and sue me for
any unpaid-for eggs).
You can't, however, break my kitchen window as "payment"
for the last batch of eggs.
If Comcast commits forgery as a self-proclaimed relief of a user
violating their TOS, Comcast has still committed a crime (while,
ironically enough, the user has not).
just having someone in your house doesn't mean that when you open
fire you're defending yourself. You can use all the bold and the suggestive
phrasing you want
That "bold", "suggestive phrasing" contains the key word you keep ignoring - "Defending"!
You, not I, drifted from the idea of using deadly force against someone
who wakes me up with a gun in my face, to killing a retard in my living room
"just because". And that makes it...
A straw man is a disconnected argument. If I said that Toyota
Corporation was behind it, that would be a straw man. Try not to trip on
all those big words; it's a counterexample, plain and simple.
Oh, wait, you did exactly that. "Try not to trip on all those big words".
I grew up
Sure doesn't look
that way from here.
Wow, scraping the barrel, here - You could probably have strung a few more
of my words together out of context to make a real point. But no, you chose
to snip-and-snipe. Class, man. Real class.
The myth that pervades America that you're allowed to shoot people you find in your house is distressing.
No, the fact remains that in most US states, you have the right to use deadly force to
defend yourself.
In any case, this amounts to an irrelevant distinction, because you missed my entire point. In the
situation I described, even if the homeowner did manage to take out a few of his attackers, he would
most certainly still lose (and the press would call it "suicide by cop"). Seems a bit of a harsh
outcome for doing nothing wrong, but I guess we pay that price for the 'safety" of having a class of
armed citizens permitted to break down your door and drag you out of bed without announcing themselves
(but hey, the USSC approved no-knock, so we'll call half a dozen corpses cool, right?).
If there's a mentally retarded man in your living room and you shoot him
Careful, don't get that strawman too close to any open flames...
I grew up in a place (in the US) where quite a few people distrusted the government
(and the majority did not count as paranoid whackjobs, though I won't deny
we had our share of those). The condition I described most certainly applied - And
many private citizens had a better home armory than the police. I only meant to point
out that, if the same thing happened to one of those people, they wouldn't care about
the police/criminal distinction, they would simply think the government had finally
gone all the way bad, and defend their home with deadly force.
First of all, TFA says no such thing as the summary.
Second, Radiohead reports taking an average sales price of around $8/album, even factoring
in the people offering $0.00 for it.
Third, Radiohead gets that whole $8, minus hosting (promotion and engineering always
come out of the artists' share of the pie anyway). That makes this a wildly successful
endeavor, considering that your typical top-40 artist makes the equivalent of an upper middle
class income (in the $200k range, IIRC).
As a disclaimer, I don't personally care for radiohead (though I can stand one or two of their
"sellout popular" songs). But as an experiment, this one shook the music industry like an
18 month old baby.
It's usually not all that difficult to tell the difference
between a police raid and a home invasion.
Sitting down to eat dinner when a swat team breaks down the
door, yes. The police, however, favor pre-dawn raids. You presume
that someone would have the same capacity to tell the difference in
the 1.7 seconds between "sound asleep", "guys with guns yelling at
me", and "fire off as many rounds at my attackers as possible".
You also presume someone would care about the difference,
rather than considering the police just as dangerous (if not more)
than most actual criminals.
Re:Usenet is pretty vulnerable.
on
RIAA Sues Usenet.com
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm not even sure what the commercial news servers would charge for a real UUCP newsfeed
Very, very few of us could actually receive, much less store for even a few hours, a more-or-less
complete USENET feed. It currently pushes something on the order of 300MB/s 24/7/365 (yes, uppercase "B"
in that).
This is an organized crime of GLOBAL scale. Why the hell isn't
Interpol or some large law enforcement body prepared to follow the
money to the sources and burn them with it?
You assume too much in not considering that Interpol or the NSA
or Mossad may very well run this thing.
Not claiming that they do, but finding out they do
wouldn't surprise me in the least.
Slashdot Mirror
We need to teach ethics to the younger generation.
Which will accomplish what exactly?
You can't make everyone into a paragon of virtue, no matter how hard you try. And it only takes a few to prey on the rest (reducing the number of scammers would just increase the profitability per scammer).
why is this behavior acceptable -- even lauded at times?
Because the same behavior in other contexts has largely beneficial effects (even though it offends the establishment - Though that in a way makes it more, not less, desireable).
The same cryptographic skills that let Random Bad Guy get into your bank account also let DVD-Jon defeat various mechanisms for denying people unfettered access to content they have legally purchased. The same firewall piercing technology that allows botnets to work from a home LAN also allow VOIP and most online games to work behind a firewall.
I'd say a lot of this is the past gen. or so's fault....and these kids are in for a shock when they hit the real world.
Though I agree, I wouldn't use the word "fault"... More like "success". And like it or not, the "real world" needs to accomodate the next generation, not the other way around).
Don't confuse "I don't live to work, I work to live" with a misplaced sense of entitlement, they very much differ. Employers need to come to terms with that fact, and adjust accordingly (or fade into oblivion as their ageing "traditional" workforce fades away to nothing). The new talent won't work themselves to death just for more money than they can use in all the free time their jobs dosn't leave them. They won't trade every 50 weeks of their life for a mere two in which to really live. They won't shut up and sit in a sunless cube-farm when they could just as efficiently do their work sitting on a grassy hillside or from a cafe or for that matter from home. But they will work - Just on their terms.
As an aside, I have around ten years too many to fit into Gen-Y (and the same amount to late to fit Gen-X). But I very much approve of the changes coming to the concept of employment - And if the Y'ers can pull it off, I'd say the previous generation did an admirable job raising them.
Classical music is the new Rock'n'Roll
...Or something like that, anyway...
(Just in case anyone needed more evidence that pretty much everything "new" still contains 99% things-that-came-before, making the idea of copyrights absolutely absurd...)
The converse is not true -- there's no really elegant way of being able to place an item in multiple folders simultaneously without redefining the folder as a label.
Well, for mostly-text email, simply copying it to another folder works.
In general, though, you could make the same complaint about any filing system, from a physical filing cabinet, to your PC's FS. Do you put your W2s under "employment" or "government"? Do you put remix tracks under the original author's name or the mixer's?
Personally, I prefer folders for practical reasons - Even if I sometimes need to check two places to find something, I can do so much faster than I can re-sort and search through 40k tagged (sorry, "labelled") items in a flat list. And since that limitation comes from me, not the technology involved, I don't really see that as likely to change.
Correlation can be causation.
True. It can. It can also mean "effect" rather than cause - In the FP case, that would mean all those criminals put lead in our gasoline deliberately (or at least, to make a quick buck at the expense of our health - Sadly, I'd call that not an entirely unreasonable conclusion). It can have no relation, such as pirates and global warming.
The best you can do is look and see the correlation between smokers and lung cancer.
No, you could quite easily design a valid study to demonstrate the link (or more accurately, "fail to support the null hypothesis"). You just can't do so ethically or in a timeframe convenient for human researchers.
And why does violent behavior have to be caused by organic brain damage?
What a Perfect illustration of why we say that correlation != causation.
Let's, for argument, presume that lead causes OBD and OBD causes criminal behavior. Pb -> OBD -> jail. That does not necessarily mean that jail -> OBD, nor that OBD -> Pb, nor (by the extended syllogism) that jail -> Pb.
when you stack hundreds of people in shelters for days, morale soon becomes a concern
"You haven't died yet, people - Suck it up!"
Morale? C'mon, seriously. Priority 1 - no fire. Priority 2, toilets. Priority 3, food and water. Priority 4? The day humanity manages to accomplish #3, we can figure out a #4. Until then...
The shelters exist to give people a place to crash for a few days while their houses finish burning to the ground. Save the feel-good morale BS for your Thursday afternoon group therapy meeting.
Hold on, what law does refusing to serve someone violate?
You can refuse to serve someone before the sale.
After you've sold something, you (or rather, the store) take on all the obligations that entails under local, state, and federal law.
if they expressly retract the invitation for you to enter their premises (e.g. by refusing to serve you and asking you to leave) you are trespassing.
Okay, so at exactly what point does the seller's obligation to honor their side of the transaction end? In stores where you pay and then claim the product (some CompUSAs do that for more expensive items), can they take your money then not let you leave the store with the product, having you hauled away for trespassing if you refuse to leave empty-handed?
If not, how does this differ from failing to honor state law regarding the buyer's right to return product under certain conditions?
Also, if you return the game because of the ads, then you've agreed to the license agreement which means you cannot return it on those grounds.
Um... What? How does saying "no" to the EULA mean you've agreed to it?
Return a video game? Where is the dream world you're writing from?
The law generally trumps "store policy"... Though you may need to sue to get your $50 back (most companies won't even show up in small claims court, practically a slam-dunk).
Also, many states have a VERY useful law relating to this, usually called something like "Buyer's remorse". They don't always apply to such low-priced items, though, so do your homework before you waste your money.
Finally, never forget the power of "making a scene". If you loudly (but not threateningly!) make a fuss over them refusing to take something back (best to wait for the busiest, most crowded part of the day), they'll usually do what you want just to get rid of you.
I'm a frequent Amtrak passenger in the NE corridor
I can't explain our different experiences (I too live in the NE), but I've found exactly the opposite of what you describe.
I have experienced a few delays (though nothing even close to the BS we have to put up with for air travel), but never more than a few minutes, and when you can sit back and comfortably read a book or play cards with a friend, who cares?
My true worst-case stories - Last time I flew (Northwest, though I don't blame them specifically, they handled circumstances as well as possible; the problem comes from the entire screwed-up infrastructure), my first plane left and landed on time, but we sat on the tarmac for over an hour because the airport had overbooked their terminals - And of course, no standing, using the bathroom, or drink service during all this. Fortunately I didn't miss my connecting flight, because it left two hours late - from another airport. They finally got us on a plane almost eight hours late - Getting us in at 2:30am on a worknight (and in a town that basically shuts down at 9pm, I pity anyone who didn't have a prearranged ride and place to sleep).
My worst case train experience, we had to wait an hour because of some sort of construction accident involving the Big Dig (though not directly at it, at that time they hadn't yet opened it). An hour. In comfort. So I had another beer and read another few chapters.
That said, I would prefer flying, because I admit I don't care to waste much time in the travelling itself. But when the "faster" way actually ends up taking longer, costing more, and has incredibly uncomfortable conditions... Well, given a choice between a flight with even a single layover (good luck with that, unless you happen to live at and want to go to a hub city, or can afford 2-3x the ticket price for a direct nonhub flight), or taking the train... Train wins, no question.
I've never traveled by train, just taken tourist-type train rides.
Travelling by train actually pretty much rocks, if you don't need to get across the country in three to five hours (or cross an ocean, obviously).
They don't pack you in like sardines, you frequently have real tables and comfy seats (as in, you can face your travelling companions and play cards or something), you can move about (pee, go to the bar, etc) whenever you want, usually no assigned seating (which could count as a downside, but usually the non-commuter-trains have so few passengers you have all the choice you could want)... For a vacation rather than a business trip, I'd highly recommend going by train - And as a bonus, you'll actually see the country rather than seeing clouds.
Of course, like the rest of our lives, we Americans even make our leisure time a non-stop rush-rush-rush flurry of activity. Get "there" as fast as possible, then lose more sleep than normal trying to visit every point of interest in a 100mi radius of our destination. Thus we have the phenomenon of needing to come home an extra day before resuming work because we need to crash from what we call "relaxation".
Sad.
I always wonder why airlines have NEVER enforced carry on limits.
Because at the point they'd notice, they've already started boarding the plane and you've already gone through security (with the baggage check counter on the outside).
Except in the most egregious abuses, if they tried to enforce carry-on rules, every plane would start having extra half-hour to an hour delays (or in some cases, quite a few hours).
As the alternative to that, they'd need to let people cancel/transfer/change their tickets at the last minute, and they do not want to let people out of that little scam...
For blank recordable media, the CRIA has no ability to affect pricing directly, thus the tax on them.
...Or should I say "almost escape", since the CRIA has evidently returned fire.
For legally purchased music, the CRIA defines the price, via their contracts with individual distribution channels.
Thus, if they see the need for an extra $0.02, they could just, y'know, raise prices by that much per download. No need to go through the government and needlessly complicate the issue.
So, why phrase this as a tax?
Scarily obvious answer: This has more to do with Radiohead than with piracy. Piracy scares the music industry, but not nearly as much as artists like Radiohead, Issa (née Jane Siberry), and NIN finally figuring out a viable way to escape the industry's evil clutches.
Too bad he doesn't care about his cause enough to project an aura of professionalism and courtesy. There are certain expectations when you're a GUEST speaker in a professional setting, an academic setting.
Right - Because nothing says "I believe in this" like selling out to your audience before you even start.
Then again... Yale? Perhaps he should save his energy for people who haven't already sold their souls to big business. Though I suppose I can see the benefit in getting to the minds of the Oligarchy's children during their suggestible stoner years...
so by your argument, only the wealthiest fans should be able to attend games because middlemen sprung up to grab the fans by the short hairs.
Almost, but not quite. By my argument, only the wealthiest fans should see games because the venues should charge significantly more.
And not for every game... Most of the regular season, stadiums can't even fill half their seats. IMO, after the game starts, they should offer something like $1 tickets to any comers, not for the income but for the good PR. But in the end-season, playoffs or superbowl or or what-have-you, when they could pack the stadiums, they should charge more. And the same goes for popular concerts, and plays, and other ticketted events... Anything underbooked charges too much, anything sold out simply didn't charge enough.
And I don't say that as someone wealthy.
why are tickets priced at the level they are? so that all members of the community at least have a shot at enjoying the game.
Except, we've seen that doesn't hold true. The only pressure on the teams to price altruistically comes from the need to look like they care about the fans. If you believe they really do care, I have a bridge for sale...
if they feel they can't go, what's the point of supporting the team? (and buying the merchandise, following the games on tv and subsequent advertising, etc.)
Key word there, "feel". As I said, mid-season, not enough people go to fill the seats anyway, so no problem there. Most fans only go to a handful of games per year anyway.
Also, one peeve - You only capitalize "science" if speaking about the magazine.
"being a douche" should be legal. i am a douche, i should be able to commit as much douchery as i wish. neither the government nor the bag should be able to stop me.
Wow, great comeback. And so apropos - You do have the right to act like a douche, as illustrated by your responding to a blunt yet insigntful comment with the above drivel.
With so many Slashdotters self-proclaimed Libertarians, it amazes me that people have a problem with scalping. The "manufacturer" (the team/stadium/league) has foolishly sold a good below its actual market value. An entire class of people (scalpers) has established a framework around that gap to obtain as much of a scarce resource as possible and resell it at a significant profit.
We shouldn't ask, "Why should we pay a middleman more?", we should ask "Why doesn't the manufacturer charge more?"
Face it, something like 3% of Americans count as millionaires (though technically, about half of those lack liquidity, with the bulk tied up in things like expensive houses and untouchable retirement funds). About half of all Americans consider themselves pro-football fans. The NFL has 32 teams. That means, for each team, you have somewhere on the order of 140,625 people competing for (at most, Fedex Field) 92,000 seats.
It doesn't take an economist to see that 140,625 > 92,000... Thus, for the particularly big games that everyone wants to see, basic supply and demand mean we plebes might as well save our money for a bigger TV, because pricing competition for those seats exists even among the wealthy. When you hear about Rolling Stones tickets selling unscalped for $300-$500, they do that because they can, and they'll still fill a stadium. Not "unfair", just "capitalism".
What is new is that they're targetting the application instead of cancelling or forcibly upgrading the account.
If you have a contract to sell me a dozen eggs for three dollars, and I stop paying you, you can stop giving me eggs (and sue me for any unpaid-for eggs).
You can't, however, break my kitchen window as "payment" for the last batch of eggs.
If Comcast commits forgery as a self-proclaimed relief of a user violating their TOS, Comcast has still committed a crime (while, ironically enough, the user has not).
You, not I, drifted from the idea of using deadly force against someone who wakes me up with a gun in my face, to killing a retard in my living room "just because". And that makes it...
You might want to look that one up again: " The Straw Man fallacy is committed when a person simply ignores a person's actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated or misrepresented version of that position"... For example, if I said something about defending myself against an armed attacker and you turned it into some garbage about killing retards, that would count as a strawman.
Oh, wait, you did exactly that. "Try not to trip on all those big words".
Wow, scraping the barrel, here - You could probably have strung a few more of my words together out of context to make a real point. But no, you chose to snip-and-snipe. Class, man. Real class.
Three Laws of Robotics:
Even taking them at face value (Asimov didn't, for starters), those laws have as a critical precursor the existence of reasonably intelligent robots.
Current robots can't even accurately identify a human. Makes it tough to avoid killing them, much less "obeying orders" from them.
The myth that pervades America that you're allowed to shoot people you find in your house is distressing.
No, the fact remains that in most US states, you have the right to use deadly force to defend yourself.
In any case, this amounts to an irrelevant distinction, because you missed my entire point. In the situation I described, even if the homeowner did manage to take out a few of his attackers, he would most certainly still lose (and the press would call it "suicide by cop"). Seems a bit of a harsh outcome for doing nothing wrong, but I guess we pay that price for the 'safety" of having a class of armed citizens permitted to break down your door and drag you out of bed without announcing themselves (but hey, the USSC approved no-knock, so we'll call half a dozen corpses cool, right?).
If there's a mentally retarded man in your living room and you shoot him
Careful, don't get that strawman too close to any open flames...
I grew up in a place (in the US) where quite a few people distrusted the government (and the majority did not count as paranoid whackjobs, though I won't deny we had our share of those). The condition I described most certainly applied - And many private citizens had a better home armory than the police. I only meant to point out that, if the same thing happened to one of those people, they wouldn't care about the police/criminal distinction, they would simply think the government had finally gone all the way bad, and defend their home with deadly force.
First of all, TFA says no such thing as the summary.
Second, Radiohead reports taking an average sales price of around $8/album, even factoring in the people offering $0.00 for it.
Third, Radiohead gets that whole $8, minus hosting (promotion and engineering always come out of the artists' share of the pie anyway). That makes this a wildly successful endeavor, considering that your typical top-40 artist makes the equivalent of an upper middle class income (in the $200k range, IIRC).
As a disclaimer, I don't personally care for radiohead (though I can stand one or two of their "sellout popular" songs). But as an experiment, this one shook the music industry like an 18 month old baby.
It's usually not all that difficult to tell the difference between a police raid and a home invasion.
Sitting down to eat dinner when a swat team breaks down the door, yes. The police, however, favor pre-dawn raids. You presume that someone would have the same capacity to tell the difference in the 1.7 seconds between "sound asleep", "guys with guns yelling at me", and "fire off as many rounds at my attackers as possible".
You also presume someone would care about the difference, rather than considering the police just as dangerous (if not more) than most actual criminals.
I'm not even sure what the commercial news servers would charge for a real UUCP newsfeed
Very, very few of us could actually receive, much less store for even a few hours, a more-or-less complete USENET feed. It currently pushes something on the order of 300MB/s 24/7/365 (yes, uppercase "B" in that).
This is an organized crime of GLOBAL scale. Why the hell isn't Interpol or some large law enforcement body prepared to follow the money to the sources and burn them with it?
You assume too much in not considering that Interpol or the NSA or Mossad may very well run this thing.
Not claiming that they do, but finding out they do wouldn't surprise me in the least.
Does this mean Emacs Pinky is just evil VI propaganda?
Of course! You can't spell "evil" without "VI".
Anyway, if you use Emacs that much, just get a foot-pedal and map it as your Ctrl key.