"The process of confiscating bootleg CDs from street vendors is exactly what the RIAA should be doing," said Jason Schultz, a staff attorney for the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
Jason, excuse me but are you fucking nuts??? Civilians should confiscate property because they think it's illegal, not call the cops and report it stolen, but just take it? And you are an actual attorney?????
I believe that's my big-screen TV you've got there in your living room, Jason. I'll be right over to pick it up.
In his book, Steal This Book, the late 60's activist Abbie Hoffman described a way to get a free Las Vegas vacation by taking advantage of promotional schemes offered by casinos. The casino would fly you free to Vegas and give you free room and meals, provided you bought a certain amount of casino chips. These were specially marked chips that could not be cashed in, assuring that you would gamble them away.
Hoffman's counterscheme was simple. Two people go on this trip together. One person takes the special chips and the other person buys an equal amount of normal chips. They sit down at a roulette table and preceed to bet against each other, one betting on red, the other on black. Between them they will break even on every spin (except when the wheel comes up 00). The person with the special chips bets only those chips. Every win is paid off in normal chips. Every loss of a special chip is converted to a normal chip in the other person's pile. When all the special chips are gone the two people should have almost the same amount they started with (except for 00 spins). At that point they get up and cash in, and the trip costs them nothing.
Theoretically one person could do this alone, because you should win almost 50% of the time, but in practice this is not always the outcome in the short term. Using two people makes it foolproof (assuming Guido doesn't follow you out to the alley).
I'm not a Vegas kind of guy, but am fascinated with schemes like this and the ones in The Eudaemonic Pie. I wonder if casinos still offer this sort of deal, or if it is so simple to beat that they don't bother anymore?
Working as a contractor at a now-defunct game site, I was making space on the dev server and deleted a file directory that was named with my first name. At that time I was the only person there by that name, and I knew I hadn't stored anything meaningful on that machine.
However, it turned out that months earlier there had been a key developer there with the same first name as me, and for some strange reason they were still using his old directory to store the only copies of the files for a massive website upgrade.
Fortunately the people doing this dev work managed to dig up local copies of most of it on their machines, so not a whole lot was lost. But the webmaster made a point of blatantly treating me like a retard forever afterwards. He was one of those untouchables who can walk away from a smoking pile of debris and be presumed blameless, so there was never any mention of his lack of backups or his refusal to bother with any sort of source control system. Eventually they went under for various other reasons. Dumb-asses.
Ideally yes, but in practice, No, because "your" elected officials don't represent you, they represent the people who pay for their campaigns to convince you how to vote. Your only role in American democracy is to consume advertising and respond predictably.
That's the classic view from the top of the pyramid. By any reasonable definition of the word "normal," the way 99% of the world lives is normal and what 1% of the world does that is different is abnormal. The rest of the world isn't shit poor, Americans are shit rich. The very term "3rd world" is defined from the perspective of the top of the heap. Since the winners make the rules as well as writing history, we can arbitrarily declare that our way of life is THE way and the rest of the world is backward, but that's a distorted view of reality.
American history has been shaped by vast open spaces, abundant resources and nearly constant progress. The past couple centuries have been HIGHLY unusual compared to the rest of history, and should not be expected to last forever. There simply isn't much more growing room. We've managed to squeeze out a bit more during the last few decades by creating markets for entertainment, information and other intangibles, but the market for these non-things is limited by the world's capacity to produce real things to trade for them. Ultimately every piece of software is worth a certain number of loaves of bread. Being able to effortlessly connect the world where bread is cheap and the world where bread is expensive (for example, a company in Boise being able to hire a programming staff in India) will eventually force the values of all things into equilibrium.
As a programmer and a long-time contractor, I don't personally welcome cheap foreign competition any more than anybody else, but the way I look at it, it's been a good ride while it lasted, and that's the breaks.
Why did CNN, Fox News and the other big "news" outlets fail to report the purchase of SCO last spring by Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems of New Jersey? See anything unusual in this list of SCO senior corporate officers, not to mention the fact that "SCO" itself stands for "Senior Corporate Officers?"
Darl McBride, President and CEO Darl Bench, CFO Darl Mott, Director Darl Yarro III, Chairman of the Board Darl Bawa, CTO Darl Sontag, Sr VP, OS Group Darl Broughton, Sr VP Darl OConnor, Sr VP Darl Bigbooty, Sr VP Darl Parrot, Sr VP Darl SmallBerries, Sr VP
Their social security numbers are consecutive, and were all issued on the same day. Coincidence?
If your income is $47,500 USD or higher, you are in the top 1% of the world's wage earners. Expecting sympathy from the other 99% of the people in the world doesn't seem realistic.
Oh, but your expenses are higher than in India. It's not fair. When online businesses with near-zero overhead started competing with the brick-and-mortar world in the mid 90's, did you complain or did you just enjoy the convenience and lower prices?
Read the recent Ask Slashdot on this very topic (submitted by me). Lots of comments by people who received threatening notices were left alone after pointing out that their TOS says "unlimited access."
IT people are used to seeing vendor ads claiming high performance and low TCO. I doubt that these ads will create a groundswell of professional enthusiasm for Microsoft or against Linux and Open Source. The community of IT peers MS is trying to discredit is growing, not shrinking.
What's significant and encouraging is that Microsoft has moved from worrying about servers to worrying about *everything*.
From a related article: In his platform-strategist role, Taylor succeeds Peter Houston, senior director of Microsoft's Windows Server Strategies, as chief Linux watcher. "Pete was more focused on server, but I'm more cross-group focused, and focused on the whole Microsoft software stack," Taylor said.
I other words, they are realizing they are in more trouble than they thought.
Dude, why does your car simply buzz for a few seconds, rather than refuse to start, when you don't put on the seatbelt? Why did we spend a couple hundred billion dollars and start two wars in reaction to an incident that killed fewer people than car accidents kill every month?
Answer these questions and you'll realize that the U.S. government is there to govern you, not to serve you.
Many moons ago, when MS announced that people would have to replace their hardware in order to buy the upcoming fabulous and trustworthy version of Windows, I wondered at the time how in the hell MS expected to motivate the 40 million people who are still running Win98 and haven't seen fit to upgrade either their hardware or their OS in years. I wondered if MS might do something really arcane, like invoking some buried license clause to to make it illegal to run Win98 anymore. Simply denying further support is a much more straightforward tactic that didn't even occur to me.
MS probably expects millions of loyal Win98 users, after having the rug pulled out from under them, to flock to the store to buy Palladium-equipped PCs. There are probably millions who will. But with cheaper and less aggravating alternatives rising to the surface, I bet there are also millions who won't.
Re:Best Lesson: True Geeks Shouldn't Start Busines
on
Make More Mistakes
·
· Score: 1
Huh? All I said was:
"Incidentally, the pitfalls of the latter approach are showcased in the documentary film Startup.Com."
The movie is relevant because people who are interested in the discussion topic of geeks starting businesses might find the movie interesting. Look up the word, "incidentally."
I'm all in favor of any law that punishes drivers for doing anything distracting, because I figure it's my freedom to stay alive vs their freedom to save a little time or relieve boredom. But it's surprising what things are legal while driving in various states; for example, breastfeeding in Ohio and drinking in Montana (where there's also no speed limit!).
This is great news for American corporations that fly their employees all over. Now they can outsource their air travel to India. Getting someone from New York to Sydney will cost only $30 (assuming $10/hr)!!
My mother, an alcoholic, is currently serving a life sentence for murdering my father after discovering that he was selling child pornography to support our family. I'm helping to raise the illegitimate child of my sister, who is in drug rehab and currently appealing a prostitution conviction. I spent most of my youth in foster homes and on the street, supporting myself and my cocaine habit by robbing the elderly. Finally I took a high school equivalency exam, enrolled in college and learned computer programming. I am now making a good salary working as a developer at Microsoft.
Recently I met a really wonderful girl. She is caring and loving, and I want to have a serious relationship with her, but I am afraid that if she finds out more about me she won't want to see me again. So the question is, should I tell her that I work for Microsoft?
What's hard to take seriously are the catty negative comments about this article. I see criticism of the writing style, the anti-Microsoft slant, that it's not news or that it was featured during the holidays and must therefore be worthless filler. What I don't see is intelligent analysis refuting the guy's arguments.
I would say this article is full of solid points, presented from a decidedly anti-Microsoft point of view. But a good argument is a good argument no matter who makes it, and a whiney non-argument is just that.
"Any opinion pieces you see during these days are little more than weak efforts to fill a quota."
Another important thing to remember is that offhand comments like the above are no substitute for objective critique. I found the article well worded, the historical information accurate and the reasoning sound. The fact that it was published during a holiday time is irrelevant.
Best Lesson: True Geeks Shouldn't Start Businesses
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Make More Mistakes
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· Score: 4, Informative
The overriding lesson I got out of this is that a techno-geek starting a business is like a person who loves to cook starting a restaurant. To succeed at figuring out your business model, market research, pitching to financiers, managing employees, buildings, etc, etc, etc, requires a true business geek, not a tech geek. The people who should start tech businesses are the ones who truly love business as well as technology, or those who can find a trustworthy business-genius partner. Incidentally, the pitfalls of the latter approach are showcased in the documentary film Startup.Com.
Now that's more like it. A/V devices have a REASON to be networked. Unless maybe... you could get the VCR could make toast. Oh wait, Vyvyan already did that.
I have difficulty imaging anything useful or cool about this. And apparently so does the otherwise gadget-happy Japanese public: "Net-linking home appliances without iReady are already available in Japan, though they have yet to catch on." Well, DUH, because the whole concept is pretty useless. I can't wait to stand in front of my refrigerator and surf the web.
Slashdot Mirror
"The process of confiscating bootleg CDs from street vendors is exactly what the RIAA should be doing," said Jason Schultz, a staff attorney for the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
Jason, excuse me but are you fucking nuts??? Civilians should confiscate property because they think it's illegal, not call the cops and report it stolen, but just take it? And you are an actual attorney?????
I believe that's my big-screen TV you've got there in your living room, Jason. I'll be right over to pick it up.
In his book, Steal This Book, the late 60's activist Abbie Hoffman described a way to get a free Las Vegas vacation by taking advantage of promotional schemes offered by casinos. The casino would fly you free to Vegas and give you free room and meals, provided you bought a certain amount of casino chips. These were specially marked chips that could not be cashed in, assuring that you would gamble them away.
Hoffman's counterscheme was simple. Two people go on this trip together. One person takes the special chips and the other person buys an equal amount of normal chips. They sit down at a roulette table and preceed to bet against each other, one betting on red, the other on black. Between them they will break even on every spin (except when the wheel comes up 00). The person with the special chips bets only those chips. Every win is paid off in normal chips. Every loss of a special chip is converted to a normal chip in the other person's pile. When all the special chips are gone the two people should have almost the same amount they started with (except for 00 spins). At that point they get up and cash in, and the trip costs them nothing.
Theoretically one person could do this alone, because you should win almost 50% of the time, but in practice this is not always the outcome in the short term. Using two people makes it foolproof (assuming Guido doesn't follow you out to the alley).
I'm not a Vegas kind of guy, but am fascinated with schemes like this and the ones in The Eudaemonic Pie. I wonder if casinos still offer this sort of deal, or if it is so simple to beat that they don't bother anymore?
Working as a contractor at a now-defunct game site, I was making space on the dev server and deleted a file directory that was named with my first name. At that time I was the only person there by that name, and I knew I hadn't stored anything meaningful on that machine.
However, it turned out that months earlier there had been a key developer there with the same first name as me, and for some strange reason they were still using his old directory to store the only copies of the files for a massive website upgrade.
Fortunately the people doing this dev work managed to dig up local copies of most of it on their machines, so not a whole lot was lost. But the webmaster made a point of blatantly treating me like a retard forever afterwards. He was one of those untouchables who can walk away from a smoking pile of debris and be presumed blameless, so there was never any mention of his lack of backups or his refusal to bother with any sort of source control system. Eventually they went under for various other reasons. Dumb-asses.
Ideally yes, but in practice, No, because "your" elected officials don't represent you, they represent the people who pay for their campaigns to convince you how to vote. Your only role in American democracy is to consume advertising and respond predictably.
Wow, two doses of reality in one thread.
That's the classic view from the top of the pyramid. By any reasonable definition of the word "normal," the way 99% of the world lives is normal and what 1% of the world does that is different is abnormal. The rest of the world isn't shit poor, Americans are shit rich. The very term "3rd world" is defined from the perspective of the top of the heap. Since the winners make the rules as well as writing history, we can arbitrarily declare that our way of life is THE way and the rest of the world is backward, but that's a distorted view of reality.
American history has been shaped by vast open spaces, abundant resources and nearly constant progress. The past couple centuries have been HIGHLY unusual compared to the rest of history, and should not be expected to last forever. There simply isn't much more growing room. We've managed to squeeze out a bit more during the last few decades by creating markets for entertainment, information and other intangibles, but the market for these non-things is limited by the world's capacity to produce real things to trade for them. Ultimately every piece of software is worth a certain number of loaves of bread. Being able to effortlessly connect the world where bread is cheap and the world where bread is expensive (for example, a company in Boise being able to hire a programming staff in India) will eventually force the values of all things into equilibrium.
As a programmer and a long-time contractor, I don't personally welcome cheap foreign competition any more than anybody else, but the way I look at it, it's been a good ride while it lasted, and that's the breaks.
Why did CNN, Fox News and the other big "news" outlets fail to report the purchase of SCO last spring by Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems of New Jersey? See anything unusual in this list of SCO senior corporate officers, not to mention the fact that "SCO" itself stands for "Senior Corporate Officers?"
Darl McBride, President and CEO
Darl Bench, CFO
Darl Mott, Director
Darl Yarro III, Chairman of the Board
Darl Bawa, CTO
Darl Sontag, Sr VP, OS Group
Darl Broughton, Sr VP
Darl OConnor, Sr VP
Darl Bigbooty, Sr VP
Darl Parrot, Sr VP
Darl SmallBerries, Sr VP
Their social security numbers are consecutive, and were all issued on the same day. Coincidence?
If your income is $47,500 USD or higher, you are in the top 1% of the world's wage earners. Expecting sympathy from the other 99% of the people in the world doesn't seem realistic.
Oh, but your expenses are higher than in India. It's not fair. When online businesses with near-zero overhead started competing with the brick-and-mortar world in the mid 90's, did you complain or did you just enjoy the convenience and lower prices?
Welcome to Econ 101.
Read the recent Ask Slashdot on this very topic (submitted by me). Lots of comments by people who received threatening notices were left alone after pointing out that their TOS says "unlimited access."
It should be noted that "Mine-Destroying Robot Lobsters" would be a good name for a rock band.
Apparently the rank amateurs in Dell's sales staff, and probably many others.
Maybe it's a typo for " Latka engineers."
IT people are used to seeing vendor ads claiming high performance and low TCO. I doubt that these ads will create a groundswell of professional enthusiasm for Microsoft or against Linux and Open Source. The community of IT peers MS is trying to discredit is growing, not shrinking.
What's significant and encouraging is that Microsoft has moved from worrying about servers to worrying about *everything*.
From a related article: In his platform-strategist role, Taylor succeeds Peter Houston, senior director of Microsoft's Windows Server Strategies, as chief Linux watcher. "Pete was more focused on server, but I'm more cross-group focused, and focused on the whole Microsoft software stack," Taylor said.
I other words, they are realizing they are in more trouble than they thought.
Dude, why does your car simply buzz for a few seconds, rather than refuse to start, when you don't put on the seatbelt? Why did we spend a couple hundred billion dollars and start two wars in reaction to an incident that killed fewer people than car accidents kill every month?
Answer these questions and you'll realize that the U.S. government is there to govern you, not to serve you.
Many moons ago, when MS announced that people would have to replace their hardware in order to buy the upcoming fabulous and trustworthy version of Windows, I wondered at the time how in the hell MS expected to motivate the 40 million people who are still running Win98 and haven't seen fit to upgrade either their hardware or their OS in years. I wondered if MS might do something really arcane, like invoking some buried license clause to to make it illegal to run Win98 anymore. Simply denying further support is a much more straightforward tactic that didn't even occur to me.
MS probably expects millions of loyal Win98 users, after having the rug pulled out from under them, to flock to the store to buy Palladium-equipped PCs. There are probably millions who will. But with cheaper and less aggravating alternatives rising to the surface, I bet there are also millions who won't.
Huh? All I said was:
"Incidentally, the pitfalls of the latter approach are showcased in the documentary film Startup.Com."
The movie is relevant because people who are interested in the discussion topic of geeks starting businesses might find the movie interesting. Look up the word, "incidentally."
I'm all in favor of any law that punishes drivers for doing anything distracting, because I figure it's my freedom to stay alive vs their freedom to save a little time or relieve boredom. But it's surprising what things are legal while driving in various states; for example, breastfeeding in Ohio and drinking in Montana (where there's also no speed limit!).
This is great news for American corporations that fly their employees all over. Now they can outsource their air travel to India. Getting someone from New York to Sydney will cost only $30 (assuming $10/hr)!!
I miss that extra second of sleep we used to get every New Year's Eve.
The updated version would go something like this:
Dear Abby,
My mother, an alcoholic, is currently serving a life sentence for murdering my father after discovering that he was selling child pornography to support our family. I'm helping to raise the illegitimate child of my sister, who is in drug rehab and currently appealing a prostitution conviction. I spent most of my youth in foster homes and on the street, supporting myself and my cocaine habit by robbing the elderly. Finally I took a high school equivalency exam, enrolled in college and learned computer programming. I am now making a good salary working as a developer at Microsoft.
Recently I met a really wonderful girl. She is caring and loving, and I want to have a serious relationship with her, but I am afraid that if she finds out more about me she won't want to see me again. So the question is, should I tell her that I work for Microsoft?
Just a side comment, but is anybody else getting sick of predators being called "raptors" ever since Jurassic Park came out?
What's hard to take seriously are the catty negative comments about this article. I see criticism of the writing style, the anti-Microsoft slant, that it's not news or that it was featured during the holidays and must therefore be worthless filler. What I don't see is intelligent analysis refuting the guy's arguments.
I would say this article is full of solid points, presented from a decidedly anti-Microsoft point of view. But a good argument is a good argument no matter who makes it, and a whiney non-argument is just that.
"Any opinion pieces you see during these days are little more than weak efforts to fill a quota."
Another important thing to remember is that offhand comments like the above are no substitute for objective critique. I found the article well worded, the historical information accurate and the reasoning sound. The fact that it was published during a holiday time is irrelevant.
The overriding lesson I got out of this is that a techno-geek starting a business is like a person who loves to cook starting a restaurant. To succeed at figuring out your business model, market research, pitching to financiers, managing employees, buildings, etc, etc, etc, requires a true business geek, not a tech geek. The people who should start tech businesses are the ones who truly love business as well as technology, or those who can find a trustworthy business-genius partner. Incidentally, the pitfalls of the latter approach are showcased in the documentary film Startup.Com .
Now that's more like it. A/V devices have a REASON to be networked. Unless maybe... you could get the VCR could make toast. Oh wait, Vyvyan already did that.
I have difficulty imaging anything useful or cool about this. And apparently so does the otherwise gadget-happy Japanese public: "Net-linking home appliances without iReady are already available in Japan, though they have yet to catch on." Well, DUH, because the whole concept is pretty useless. I can't wait to stand in front of my refrigerator and surf the web.