The British Government are considering 'implied consent' with regard to organ donorship - if you die, and you haven't withdrawn consent by some act, they consider you fair game.
Dutch government has already switched to an opt-out system. Same for France, Spain and Belgium.
A bank could dole out thumb drives to its customers, which thumb drives could boot up into an O/S [hopefully not within a VM] that only allows Internet access to the bank's website. Passwords could change every minute with use of a RSA key chain (eTrade facilitates minute-by-minute password changing).
It would be nice if the thumb drives were read only; perhaps some sort of dongle might work.
This would make me feel more secure in my online bank transactions.
Or they banks give out small card readers that the online shopper sticks their bank pass into, types in his pin and a one time code to yield a one-time key to confirm the transaction.
Wait....we've already got that! In some places anyway.
I think they do it because they want something but not enough to pay the asking price.
Actually, I want something that *bloody works*. I've got several games here where I haven't even opened the damn box because the torrent release has all the DRM crap disabled so I can actually play the game without having the sacrifice a virgin each time I pop the DVD in the drive.
If you want my money, treat me like a "valued customer"(puke) instead of a criminal. Over the last year I've bought more games online(world of goo, crayon physics, blood bowl, etc etc) than I have DVD's because it's convenient.
As for movies, when you go to the shop and buy a DVD and then try to watch it at home, the first thing it does is shove a message down your throat which is: a) irrelevant. I just paid for your fucking product, stop talking to me about piracy. b) a blatant lie. Copyright infringement is civil law, theft is criminal law. Therefore by definition piracy != theft. Not to mention that in some countries downloading music and games is actually perfectly legal and the content industry can taking a giant fucking leap. c) bloody rude. d) detrimental to the already questionable quality of the product. Why would I pay money for a crippled product when I can get the real deal elsewhere for "free"?
I do not know why medicaid/medicare does not work in USA nor why the costs are hugely bigger than anywhere else in the world but it certainly is not "lavish lifestyle".
My guess would be: a) in quite a few european countries health insurance was(or still is) state run and not intended to turn a profit which keeps prices low(unless your government suffers from banana republic style corruption) b) we're not inclined to sue doctors and hospitals quite as much as in the US, bringing a lot less lawyers that all want their cut to the deal. In fact I'd be mighty curious to see a comparison of lawyers per patient for the various countries;-)
I usually roll with the slashdot crowd on liberty issues but not here.
There's a reason medicine is locked up in pharmacies behind a prescription. People are stupid; very stupid. They don't understand the risks of overdose (people carelessly take too much acetaminophen and die of horrible liver failure). They don't understand the very complex and sometimes fatal interactions between even unrelated drugs. Some drugs like antiepileptics are dangerous even when taken exactly as directed, and patients need to be closely monitored by a doctor. Maybe illegal drug users would be savvy enough to understand the drugs they're taking, but not soccer moms. Heroin isn't any safer than those prescription drugs. Maybe LSD would be OK, that's supposed to be a very safe drug.
Yeah from a liberty perspective you ask "wait, why can't I spend every weekend quivering in bed if I want to, but I definitely see why those responsible for social order (and health insurance:p) would have an interest in keeping people active, buying hamburgers, that sort of thing.
So what makes the odds of an overdose bigger, the druggie getting his fix from a back street dealer in a little plastic bag, or from a certified pharmacy in packaging that specifies exactly how much of the active component is in there and how it should be administered?
EVE themselves allow players to buy gold with real money. You can buy 60-day GTCs (game time codes) which allow you to purchase 2 months of game time. EVEs own website allows you to exchange these GTCs for in-game currency. So if you want, you can buy as many GTCs as you like, sell them via EVE, and buy yourself the ship of your dreams.
With a large percentage of the gold farmers killed off, anybody wanting to buy gold will have to do it through EVE. The net result is that many more GTCs are sold, generating lots of extra revenue for EVE
Who knows, maybe if I explain this a couple hundred times more, people will finally figure it out...
CCP does not make a penny more when people get their isk through Gametimecards. The only thing that happens is that instead of 2 players each paying for their own subscriptions, one of them pays for both of them in exchange for ingame currency. The end result for CCP is exactly the same, in that they receive money for 2 player subscriptions.
But that was before they started selling imaginary property outside the game.
And just how do they do that? To my knowledge the only thing they sell is gametimecards that allow a subscription to their game to be extended by x amount of time. Said gametimecard can be converted into an ingame item that does the same thing, allowing players to easily trade these time extensions among themselves, often in exchange for ingame currency. The ingame item only allows the time extension, there is no conversion possible back to real life money.
Heck, if I were to start at my current location and drive 160 miles in a straight line, I'd end up in belgium, germany or the north sea;-) (yes, yes, by going north i'd stay in the country).
1. Upon the release of Win7 in the EU, MS will be inundated by support calls with "Why is the Internet broken!" or "How do I get on the Internet!". Guess what browser they are going to tell them to install?
I expect that if they were to consistently advice installing IE on their european support line that they'd get a pretty firm smackdown, and rightfully so.
I very much doubt that Firefox or Opera would mind coming to such an arrangement when it means that every fresh windows install offers their products as an equal choice to Internet Explorer.
Windows has had wizards for the most inane stuff as long as I can remember, would it really be rocket science to make a proper "install a web browser" wizard?
I recall my physics teacher in highschool bringing over some Bottom tapes at the end of the year.
I wonder how many copyrights laws he violated with his public showing...
We ignore copyright law left, right and center. The media corps, even though making money all over the place, feel they have to make a fuss so they can make more money. Who knows, maybe they will piss enough people off in the long run.
The Netherlands is asking The Pirate Bay to block its own citizens.
Why doesn't the Netherlands simply block access to The Pirate Bay?
Of course, the answer is simple: to shift the blame away from government.
Too bad most people who go to TPB are smarter than that.
Yeah, that must be it...oh wait. We don't have a great wall of china around our borders to filter the web(not that it would be a very great wall, mind you), so how would the government even filter tpb if they were allowed/wanted to? Force every ISP to do so?
I do appreciate Linus being fierce on behalf of the kernel's downstream users, but has it been factually established that emacs code was not doing something broken and just "getting lucky" until now?
That was Alan's contention, and if true then it would be better to fix emacs than to keep the tty layer broken or crufty for emacs' lazy benefit.
Hold on. You're saying that Emacs has been "getting lucky" on a regular basis and therefore needs to be fixed? This is/. remember? Anything that will allow one to "get lucky" regularly needs to be embraced!
Can we please trade eastern district of Texas back to Mexico? That court is a plague on business and an anchor on innovation.
1) Build fence 2) Hoard lawyers and judges inside fence 3) Dump remaining prisoners from Gitmo while you're at it 4) Hand over piece of cotton and some crayon 5) Declare independance for them and let them color in their own flag. As soon as that's done, declare war and nuke them from orbit, just to be sure. 6) ??? 7) Profit?
Tell me how animal fighting is illegal, but underground fighting is not (only the gambling is).
If you don't understand the difference between two consenting adults getting into a ring and beating the crap out of each other or 2 animals being driven into a fury and then placed in a small enclosement I very much doubt you'll be able to grasp any answer you'll get.
Oooh, I know this one! Is it because Einstein furthered human knowledge?
And Hendrix didn't? You could write an entire series of book about "Things I didn't know you could do to a harmless guitar but was forced to find out about due to Hendrix doing them".
Your rule of thumb is broken. Convert the same square mile of farmland to some other use, such as building automobile manufacturing plants in the 70s or 80s, and you get a rate of return that dwarfs what you dismiss as "too good to be true".
Ok, first, imagine an infinite amount of demand for American cars...
What I do blame those "dumb users" for is something I call willful helplessness.
I tend to call it willful ignorance myself, but the basic idea is the same.
What was it that set Muad'Dib aside from his contemporaries again? Something about having acquired to ability to learn...strangely enough that part of Dune made more of an impression on me than anything else, simply because it made me realize just how many people are out there who've somehow managed to convince themselves they're not able to learn certain things.
EVE is not for anyone any more. Advancement is done using the progress quest engine, so at this point, if you haven't been paying for the game since nearly the beginning, your ambitions are going to have to be limited to "find someone who's been playing since the beginning and join their coalition as a lowly minion for life."
Bleh, I've been playing since 2006, and a new player is more than ready to fly besides me and seriously kick ass in less than 3 months or so. Training skills is easy. Getting people to stop whining about everything and just go out there and have fun fighting is *hard*.
You are assuming that free content will always be produced. The problem, especially at the local level, is that banner ads do not bring in much revenue, and ad blockers actually reduce that even further. The internet revenue model continues to be:
Who cares? The internet is filled to the brim with people who will create "content" for the sheer pleasure of creating something that brings joy or use or whatever to themselves and others. Nobody's paying all the people that contribute to wiki's, yet somehow if you can think of a subject, somewhere out there there's a wiki about it.
So maybe the traditional print media is failing. Tough cookies. There is demand for news, and supply will come, one way or the other.
Because a big chunk of the/. readership isn't actually made up of hot-stuff programmers but consists of typical desk jockeys, helldesk employees and other assorted Joe Sixpacks who just happen to have an interest in nerd-related stuff? Take a wild guess what they(or maybe I should say include myself and say we) use at our jobs;-)
Full disclosure: posting from home on an XP-64 workstation...
Slashdot Mirror
The British Government are considering 'implied consent' with regard to organ donorship - if you die, and you haven't withdrawn consent by some act, they consider you fair game.
Dutch government has already switched to an opt-out system. Same for France, Spain and Belgium.
My dream:
A bank could dole out thumb drives to its customers, which thumb drives could boot up into an O/S [hopefully not within a VM] that only allows Internet access to the bank's website. Passwords could change every minute with use of a RSA key chain (eTrade facilitates minute-by-minute password changing).
It would be nice if the thumb drives were read only; perhaps some sort of dongle might work.
This would make me feel more secure in my online bank transactions.
Or they banks give out small card readers that the online shopper sticks their bank pass into, types in his pin and a one time code to yield a one-time key to confirm the transaction.
Wait....we've already got that! In some places anyway.
I don't know about you, but I am happily married and getting some tonight (and got some Sunday afternoon too... I love my wife!).
Tsk, tsk. You won't true know happiness until you start referring to "it" as "giving her some"...take back the power! ;-)
I think they do it because they want something but not enough to pay the asking price.
Actually, I want something that *bloody works*. I've got several games here where I haven't even opened the damn box because the torrent release has all the DRM crap disabled so I can actually play the game without having the sacrifice a virgin each time I pop the DVD in the drive.
If you want my money, treat me like a "valued customer"(puke) instead of a criminal. Over the last year I've bought more games online(world of goo, crayon physics, blood bowl, etc etc) than I have DVD's because it's convenient.
As for movies, when you go to the shop and buy a DVD and then try to watch it at home, the first thing it does is shove a message down your throat which is:
a) irrelevant. I just paid for your fucking product, stop talking to me about piracy.
b) a blatant lie. Copyright infringement is civil law, theft is criminal law. Therefore by definition piracy != theft. Not to mention that in some countries downloading music and games is actually perfectly legal and the content industry can taking a giant fucking leap.
c) bloody rude.
d) detrimental to the already questionable quality of the product. Why would I pay money for a crippled product when I can get the real deal elsewhere for "free"?
I do not know why medicaid/medicare does not work in USA nor why the costs are hugely bigger than anywhere else in the world but it certainly is not "lavish lifestyle".
My guess would be: ;-)
a) in quite a few european countries health insurance was(or still is) state run and not intended to turn a profit which keeps prices low(unless your government suffers from banana republic style corruption)
b) we're not inclined to sue doctors and hospitals quite as much as in the US, bringing a lot less lawyers that all want their cut to the deal. In fact I'd be mighty curious to see a comparison of lawyers per patient for the various countries
I usually roll with the slashdot crowd on liberty issues but not here.
There's a reason medicine is locked up in pharmacies behind a prescription. People are stupid; very stupid. They don't understand the risks of overdose (people carelessly take too much acetaminophen and die of horrible liver failure). They don't understand the very complex and sometimes fatal interactions between even unrelated drugs. Some drugs like antiepileptics are dangerous even when taken exactly as directed, and patients need to be closely monitored by a doctor. Maybe illegal drug users would be savvy enough to understand the drugs they're taking, but not soccer moms. Heroin isn't any safer than those prescription drugs. Maybe LSD would be OK, that's supposed to be a very safe drug.
Yeah from a liberty perspective you ask "wait, why can't I spend every weekend quivering in bed if I want to, but I definitely see why those responsible for social order (and health insurance :p) would have an interest in keeping people active, buying hamburgers, that sort of thing.
So what makes the odds of an overdose bigger, the druggie getting his fix from a back street dealer in a little plastic bag, or from a certified pharmacy in packaging that specifies exactly how much of the active component is in there and how it should be administered?
EVE themselves allow players to buy gold with real money. You can buy 60-day GTCs (game time codes) which allow you to purchase 2 months of game time. EVEs own website allows you to exchange these GTCs for in-game currency. So if you want, you can buy as many GTCs as you like, sell them via EVE, and buy yourself the ship of your dreams.
With a large percentage of the gold farmers killed off, anybody wanting to buy gold will have to do it through EVE. The net result is that many more GTCs are sold, generating lots of extra revenue for EVE
Who knows, maybe if I explain this a couple hundred times more, people will finally figure it out...
CCP does not make a penny more when people get their isk through Gametimecards. The only thing that happens is that instead of 2 players each paying for their own subscriptions, one of them pays for both of them in exchange for ingame currency. The end result for CCP is exactly the same, in that they receive money for 2 player subscriptions.
But that was before they started selling imaginary property outside the game.
And just how do they do that? To my knowledge the only thing they sell is gametimecards that allow a subscription to their game to be extended by x amount of time. Said gametimecard can be converted into an ingame item that does the same thing, allowing players to easily trade these time extensions among themselves, often in exchange for ingame currency. The ingame item only allows the time extension, there is no conversion possible back to real life money.
(e.g. drones that can be piloted from thousands of miles away.)
thousands of miles? 60km with max skills is pretty much it ;-)
Heck, if I were to start at my current location and drive 160 miles in a straight line, I'd end up in belgium, germany or the north sea ;-) (yes, yes, by going north i'd stay in the country).
You have no place you can easily and quickly refill- a full charge is 8 hours.
Some countries are already working on providing chargepoints for electric cars...and the obvious place to put these would be at existing gas stations.
Scream all you want, the future is coming. Next stop, chargepoints at work. 8 hour workday...8 hour recharge...throw in solar cells for good measure.
Now all I need is a driver's license.
Wow....that's a whole lot of Navy Megathrons.
1. Upon the release of Win7 in the EU, MS will be inundated by support calls with "Why is the Internet broken!" or "How do I get on the Internet!". Guess what browser they are going to tell them to install?
I expect that if they were to consistently advice installing IE on their european support line that they'd get a pretty firm smackdown, and rightfully so.
Really? How fucking hard would it be to make a deal with the top 5 browser makers that states that they always have their latest stable release available at ftp://ftp.browserbuilder.com/release/stable/latest.msi
I very much doubt that Firefox or Opera would mind coming to such an arrangement when it means that every fresh windows install offers their products as an equal choice to Internet Explorer.
Windows has had wizards for the most inane stuff as long as I can remember, would it really be rocket science to make a proper "install a web browser" wizard?
I recall my physics teacher in highschool bringing over some Bottom tapes at the end of the year.
I wonder how many copyrights laws he violated with his public showing...
We ignore copyright law left, right and center. The media corps, even though making money all over the place, feel they have to make a fuss so they can make more money. Who knows, maybe they will piss enough people off in the long run.
The Netherlands is asking The Pirate Bay to block its own citizens.
Why doesn't the Netherlands simply block access to The Pirate Bay?
Of course, the answer is simple: to shift the blame away from government.
Too bad most people who go to TPB are smarter than that.
Yeah, that must be it...oh wait. We don't have a great wall of china around our borders to filter the web(not that it would be a very great wall, mind you), so how would the government even filter tpb if they were allowed/wanted to? Force every ISP to do so?
I do appreciate Linus being fierce on behalf of the kernel's downstream users, but has it been factually established that emacs code was not doing something broken and just "getting lucky" until now?
That was Alan's contention, and if true then it would be better to fix emacs than to keep the tty layer broken or crufty for emacs' lazy benefit.
Hold on. You're saying that Emacs has been "getting lucky" on a regular basis and therefore needs to be fixed? This is /. remember? Anything that will allow one to "get lucky" regularly needs to be embraced!
1 word: Coventry
Can we please trade eastern district of Texas back to Mexico? That court is a plague on business and an anchor on innovation.
1) Build fence
2) Hoard lawyers and judges inside fence
3) Dump remaining prisoners from Gitmo while you're at it
4) Hand over piece of cotton and some crayon
5) Declare independance for them and let them color in their own flag. As soon as that's done, declare war and nuke them from orbit, just to be sure.
6) ???
7) Profit?
Tell me how animal fighting is illegal, but underground fighting is not (only the gambling is).
If you don't understand the difference between two consenting adults getting into a ring and beating the crap out of each other or 2 animals being driven into a fury and then placed in a small enclosement I very much doubt you'll be able to grasp any answer you'll get.
Oooh, I know this one! Is it because Einstein furthered human knowledge?
And Hendrix didn't? You could write an entire series of book about "Things I didn't know you could do to a harmless guitar but was forced to find out about due to Hendrix doing them".
Your rule of thumb is broken. Convert the same square mile of farmland to some other use, such as building automobile manufacturing plants in the 70s or 80s, and you get a rate of return that dwarfs what you dismiss as "too good to be true".
Ok, first, imagine an infinite amount of demand for American cars...
What I do blame those "dumb users" for is something I call willful helplessness.
I tend to call it willful ignorance myself, but the basic idea is the same.
What was it that set Muad'Dib aside from his contemporaries again? Something about having acquired to ability to learn...strangely enough that part of Dune made more of an impression on me than anything else, simply because it made me realize just how many people are out there who've somehow managed to convince themselves they're not able to learn certain things.
EVE is not for anyone any more. Advancement is done using the progress quest engine, so at this point, if you haven't been paying for the game since nearly the beginning, your ambitions are going to have to be limited to "find someone who's been playing since the beginning and join their coalition as a lowly minion for life."
Bleh, I've been playing since 2006, and a new player is more than ready to fly besides me and seriously kick ass in less than 3 months or so. Training skills is easy. Getting people to stop whining about everything and just go out there and have fun fighting is *hard*.
You are assuming that free content will always be produced. The problem, especially at the local level, is that banner ads do not bring in much revenue, and ad blockers actually reduce that even further. The internet revenue model continues to be:
Who cares? The internet is filled to the brim with people who will create "content" for the sheer pleasure of creating something that brings joy or use or whatever to themselves and others. Nobody's paying all the people that contribute to wiki's, yet somehow if you can think of a subject, somewhere out there there's a wiki about it.
So maybe the traditional print media is failing. Tough cookies. There is demand for news, and supply will come, one way or the other.
Because a big chunk of the /. readership isn't actually made up of hot-stuff programmers but consists of typical desk jockeys, helldesk employees and other assorted Joe Sixpacks who just happen to have an interest in nerd-related stuff? Take a wild guess what they(or maybe I should say include myself and say we) use at our jobs ;-)
Full disclosure: posting from home on an XP-64 workstation...