"Europe is great if you are young or unemployed. Europe sucks if you actually want to make something of yourself through hard work. Personally, I couldn't live if I worked 6 days a week knowing I'd only get 3-days pay after taxes just so some 22-yo punk could sit in the park all day and smoke pot."
It doesn't seem like you appreciate just how diverse Europe is. There is no single "Europe" that defines how things work, despite the existence of the European Union.
Also, your stereotyping of benefit receivers is completely biased and unhelpful. Taxation in general is to allow acceptable standards of welfare for as many as you can in case of accidents, illness or unemployment. Most receivers do not try to cheat the system, but unfortunately any system like this will allow some people to take advantage. Where you set the limits is always a tradeoff between allowing a certain number of personal disasters versus allowing a certain number of cheaters. This is complicated by the well established problem that allowing more personal disasters increases the crime rate.
Of course, some countries suffers from massive corruption that threatens this whole balance and makes it almost impossible to provide acceptable public service compared to the level of taxation. The United Kingdom, Germany, the scandinavian countries, Holland etc. are generally not among these countries, while Italy and Greece are.
In general it is not the 22-yo punk that sits in the park that threatens your ability to make something of yourself through hard work, although some media likes to portray it that way.
I'm sorry, but your use-case is such a small part of the market that you are practically non-existant. It makes far more sense to sell add-on devices like those USB com-ports you are talking about than keeping com-ports in new computers.
Space on a laptop is limited, it is far better spent towards other things than COM-ports. With new form factor desktop computers this is clearly the case as well.
"My guess is that this is because people on the list tend to be heavy consumers of passive entertainment, like TV and computer games; you don't want to hear that it may be bad for you."
I think you misuse the word 'passive'. While TV is essentially passive entertainment, computer games require active partitipation. 'Passive' when used in the context of entertainment is usually not referring to lack of physical activity, but lack of 'input' required from the consumer.
Personally I watch plenty of TV and play some computer games. TV is useful for shutting off a bit of brain activity in order to relax during an evening, but for exactly this reason I'd be wary about allowing children too much TV.
1. Google will probably get tax deductions or other government incentive for this. 2. You do realise that much of Google's good will around the world is the 'Do no evil' motto? Corporations do charity work and similar things all the time to gain publicity and good will.
Maybe Google is thinking that the money lost is much smaller than money gained from tax deductions, free advertisement and good will.
It also saddens me that people still propose the same thinking that is feeding oppression, pollution and exploitation around the world on a massive scale.
The Russian defence ministry has confirmed it as a nuclear detonation: "Russia's defence ministry said it was "100% certain" that an underground nuclear explosion had taken place, ITAR-Tass news agency reported"
Until other nuclear experts tell me otherwise, I'll believe their conclusion rather than your explanation. As a complete layman it is not impossible for me to think that the time scale can depend on lots of things, including type of rock surrounding the underground explosion, how far underground it was, etc.
"ISPs already employ charging models based on usage per month for their customers(consumers), charging (content)suppliers based on usage is trivial for them."
True, although this doesn't mean that we have to let them. The consumers have already paid for the content to be delivered through the ISPs lines. The ISPs argument is thus thouroughly unfair, which content provider the consumer chooses should be irrelevant to the ISP as long as the consumer only uses of the ISPs resources as they have paid for.
"What is it with these neo-communists on/. who think that people shouldn't be allowed to pay for higher quality service if they want it? Do you guys picket the airlines for offerring first class and coach?"
The customers of Nextgentel are the consumers that pay for their broadband connection. The only reason consumers pay for broadband is that there are content providers out there that create a market for the ISP. These content providers may or may not be commercial, but they all pretty much already pay some ISP (which may or may not be Nextgentel) for their high-bandwidth Internet Connection. So when a consumer tries to access some content he/she has already paid for accessing that content, and the provider has already paid for delivering it.
What the ISP is trying to do is squeeze money out of both sides, both the consumer and the provider. The result is that consumers (that have paid for their service) will have a hard time getting to smaller indie-sites, non-commercial sites and other content providers that can't afford to pay these extortion fees. Only the big ISPs has enough muscle to be able to do this sort of thing, and thus it serves to limit the number of ISPs available and thus reducing competition.
Also, it reduces the choice of the consumer, negating one of the big sales points of the Internet in the first place. Because it reduces choice, it has a strong possibility in limiting free speech as only big media corporations will have the money to have their voice be heard.
You don't have to be a communist to object to these to effects.
"This only works on Intel macs, which means that everyone else with a PPC mac is screwed."
Are you any more screwed since Crossover Mac came out? Wine/Crossover is a reimplementation of the Win32 API, it is not an emulator, and as of such will not emulate the x86 processor for you.
"well, theo deraadt seemed clearly pissed indeed, but was also smart enough to realise that, and for a correct way to contact intel, he suggests the careful post written by another person that was done to TI as an example how to write to Intel.".. and strangely enough stupid enough not to realise that everything he publishes on the Internet can have consequences. If Intel-executives have read this story (and it may have been presented to them by one of their employees) then no amount of polite letter from De Raadt is going to help, because the Intel people would have already made up their minds about De Raadt.
His writing was unhelpful, unproductive, unprofessional immature, and downright slanderous.
.. of doing exactly what he suggests. Any semi-intelligent person should be able to think up some.
My try: 1. Find some sports club with scheduled activities. 2. Follow home someone that looks like a young professional with a sports bag. You now know their address. 3. Next time that class is on, watch her or his house. If the person leave before the class begins, with their trusted sports bag, you know they are going to the gym. If the person switches off the lights, then you are set! 4. Break in and enjoy the goodies!
This is a lot easier, and you have a bigger chance of figuring out whether the person has anything worth stealing straight away. Fancy clothes is a give-away.
"Maybe I missed something, but why does one person being out of the house mean the house is empty? What about partners, housemates etc?"
House mates are clearly possible, but her calendar never mentions any partner like it would if she was married or living with a partner.
His death have been reported before
on
Steve Irwin Dead
·
· Score: 1
... as an urban myth..Back then, many people (including me) bought it because it was so easy to believe he got himself into more trouble than he could handle.
This time, however, there does seem to be proper reports about it, and so RIP Steve.
"Capitalism isn't about embarassing others into doing what you want them to."
No, and not everything is about capitalism.
"If he consumes more, he has to pay more to do it. Part of his money will go into developing cleaner energy sources, and basically helping to solve the problem you're so worried about."
That only works if the higher consumption used by people like him actually provide money for developing cleaner energy sources. That requires two things: * That it costs enough * That the money is not just going to the shareholders
Pure capitalism is lousy for environmental purposes, and the only thing that is going to work is government interference. For instance emission quotas and environmental taxes earmarked for developing cleaner energy sources. Oh, and economic theory is not the answer to everything although some people use it as if it was.
"Surely the best defence would be to find out what songs you are being prosecuted for and then buying the album/game/DVD"
No. If you bought the album/game/DVD before you got sued, it may have been defendable, but if you bought it afterwards, any judge can easily see through your motivations. If you want to bring in the album as evidence, the RIAA lawyer will probably ask you to prove that you bought it before you got sued.
Your suggestion is just as dumb as buying all the albums for the copied music after you got sued and claim you owned it all along. Both are likely to be found out, and result in you having a worse case than before.
I don't know whether there have been serious scientific comparisons made, but there are certainly academics that have been using criminal profiling on corporate managers.
This is a quick link found from Google. I'm sure you'll find more if you do some more searching.
Re:Whatever happened to the Cell?
on
IBM Opts for AMD
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The Cell processor is an in-order execution chip with strong focus on floating point. For this reason it will probably be really good for scientific calculations and simulation, but not very practical for general server-applications.
The Opteron servers and the Cell servers will most likely live side by side in the product offering from IBM. Apples and Oranges and all that...
.. as it seems the only thing it is actually using the iPod for is as a mass storage device. HD is obviously a marketing gimmick as the screen is too small to enjoy high resolution.
I don't think this product qualifies as "revolutionary", but then I'm not a marketing droid.
Apple actually includes a vectorised implementation of LaPACK with every Mac sold, even the Mac Mini. Say what you want about LaPACK, but a toy it is not.
"This is the principal difference between a dog and a man."
While the sentence above was never quite true and many a starving dog has bitten the hand that feeds it. I understand it's sentiment. The human mind has a much bigger capacity for cruelty than dogs, but that is simply because the human mind has a much bigger capacity for thought, and thus also a much bigger capacity for compassion and love.
The dog will also not provide deep conversations, create magnificent works of art, cure diseases or simply just help a complete stranger. For every starving child you help that bites you, there are probably lots that will touch your life in ways that a dog simply can't.
The almost endless possibilities and potential of a human is the difference between dog and man.
"The more advanced we've become, the less valuable human life has become"
Huh? This is just clearly untrue and with absolutely no basis in history. Throughout most of our history your life would have been worth next to nothing to anyone except the people that knew you directly. Sometimes not even parents would put that much value into your life, because they were used to losing children and adopted the self-sustaining idea that they could always have more children.
Times are clearly different now, because of the relative rarety of premature death. At least now, lots of people actually care about the lives of strangers, and even the ones that don't at least pretend to care about them.
The government intrusion is made possible by people worrying too much about their security, not because they don't care about their fellow human being. And surveillance, believe it or not, is not the only benchmark of how much worth a human life has.
You seem to completely have lost track of your argument when you say "In Britain, there's a movement to monitor every child's eating habits". Do you really think this is done because these childrens lives are considered worthless? On contrary it is done because we are (maybe) too afraid for their safety.
Get some perspective, and put privacy in context with the hundreds or thousands of other issues we have in society concerning human life.
Literally EVERY parent I know have lots of pictures of their kids naked. Kids run around naked on the beach in pretty much all of Europe and small children simply enjoy taking their clothes off and running around the house and garden, sometimes to the embarrassment of their parents.
While I find it mildly weird to put family photos with naked kids on Flickr or your own family picture site, I can see no reason why this should be illegal. But isn't there a chance of these pictures finding their way into the kiddie porn database? If so, isn't there a decent chance someone may end up being tracked as a pedophile simply for proudly posting family pictures on the Internet?
Differentiating between kiddie porn and legal pictures of kids is probably hard enough when you do it manually and individually, but doing this on a massive scale just sounds incredibly hard and possibly dangerous.
"I'm also a bit of a woodworker/tool junkie, and I refuse to buy tools made in China. I'll settle for Japan, Europe or Mexico if USA isn't available. But nothing from Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, etc."
I just hope you realise that this could actually also exclude products that are made by decently paid skillful workers in third world countries... and would just make it so much harder for business in these countries to flourish, basically making sure they stay third world countries for the forseeable future.
Also, sometimes things like child labour and sweatshops is a much more complex issue than you may think. In many areas of the world, families would not survive without their children working and extensive boycotts have had very unfortunate side effects.
The only way of making sure is to research the individual companies, which may not always be that easy.
I can sort of believe that they had no illegal copies of anything in the office where The Pirate Bay was located. It makes it easier for them to wipe their hands of any wrongdoing.
However, as the main goal of the pirate bay is to facilitate copyright infringement, I find it very hard to believe that none of these guys had any illegal copies of stuff at home, on their laptops, etc.
Since their homes apparently also were raided, this is probably a way for the authorities to get to them, even if the Pirate Bay itself does nothing illegal. When you are involved in something like The Pirate Bay, it is too tempting to use it yourself.
Of course, if Swedish copyright law allows for downloading copyrighted material for personal use, then this will be fine as well.
Slashdot Mirror
"Europe is great if you are young or unemployed. Europe sucks if you actually want to make something of yourself through hard work. Personally, I couldn't live if I worked 6 days a week knowing I'd only get 3-days pay after taxes just so some 22-yo punk could sit in the park all day and smoke pot."
It doesn't seem like you appreciate just how diverse Europe is. There is no single "Europe" that defines how things work, despite the existence of the European Union.
Also, your stereotyping of benefit receivers is completely biased and unhelpful. Taxation in general is to allow acceptable standards of welfare for as many as you can in case of accidents, illness or unemployment. Most receivers do not try to cheat the system, but unfortunately any system like this will allow some people to take advantage. Where you set the limits is always a tradeoff between allowing a certain number of personal disasters versus allowing a certain number of cheaters. This is complicated by the well established problem that allowing more personal disasters increases the crime rate.
Of course, some countries suffers from massive corruption that threatens this whole balance and makes it almost impossible to provide acceptable public service compared to the level of taxation. The United Kingdom, Germany, the scandinavian countries, Holland etc. are generally not among these countries, while Italy and Greece are.
In general it is not the 22-yo punk that sits in the park that threatens your ability to make something of yourself through hard work, although some media likes to portray it that way.
I'm sorry, but your use-case is such a small part of the market that you are practically non-existant. It makes far more sense to sell add-on devices like those USB com-ports you are talking about than keeping com-ports in new computers.
Space on a laptop is limited, it is far better spent towards other things than COM-ports. With new form factor desktop computers this is clearly the case as well.
"My guess is that this is because people on the list tend to be heavy consumers of passive entertainment, like TV and computer games; you don't want to hear that it may be bad for you."
I think you misuse the word 'passive'. While TV is essentially passive entertainment, computer games require active partitipation. 'Passive' when used in the context of entertainment is usually not referring to lack of physical activity, but lack of 'input' required from the consumer.
Personally I watch plenty of TV and play some computer games. TV is useful for shutting off a bit of brain activity in order to relax during an evening, but for exactly this reason I'd be wary about allowing children too much TV.
1. Google will probably get tax deductions or other government incentive for this.
2. You do realise that much of Google's good will around the world is the 'Do no evil' motto? Corporations do charity work and similar things all the time to gain publicity and good will.
Maybe Google is thinking that the money lost is much smaller than money gained from tax deductions, free advertisement and good will.
It also saddens me that people still propose the same thinking that is feeding oppression, pollution and exploitation around the world on a massive scale.
The Russian defence ministry has confirmed it as a nuclear detonation:
"Russia's defence ministry said it was "100% certain" that an underground nuclear explosion had taken place, ITAR-Tass news agency reported"
Until other nuclear experts tell me otherwise, I'll believe their conclusion rather than your explanation. As a complete layman it is not impossible for me to think that the time scale can depend on lots of things, including type of rock surrounding the underground explosion, how far underground it was, etc.
"ISPs already employ charging models based on usage per month for their customers(consumers), charging (content)suppliers based on usage is trivial for them."
True, although this doesn't mean that we have to let them. The consumers have already paid for the content to be delivered through the ISPs lines. The ISPs argument is thus thouroughly unfair, which content provider the consumer chooses should be irrelevant to the ISP as long as the consumer only uses of the ISPs resources as they have paid for.
"What is it with these neo-communists on /. who think that people shouldn't be allowed to pay for higher quality service if they want it? Do you guys picket the airlines for offerring first class and coach?"
The customers of Nextgentel are the consumers that pay for their broadband connection. The only reason consumers pay for broadband is that there are content providers out there that create a market for the ISP. These content providers may or may not be commercial, but they all pretty much already pay some ISP (which may or may not be Nextgentel) for their high-bandwidth Internet Connection. So when a consumer tries to access some content he/she has already paid for accessing that content, and the provider has already paid for delivering it.
What the ISP is trying to do is squeeze money out of both sides, both the consumer and the provider. The result is that consumers (that have paid for their service) will have a hard time getting to smaller indie-sites, non-commercial sites and other content providers that can't afford to pay these extortion fees. Only the big ISPs has enough muscle to be able to do this sort of thing, and thus it serves to limit the number of ISPs available and thus reducing competition.
Also, it reduces the choice of the consumer, negating one of the big sales points of the Internet in the first place. Because it reduces choice, it has a strong possibility in limiting free speech as only big media corporations will have the money to have their voice be heard.
You don't have to be a communist to object to these to effects.
"This only works on Intel macs, which means that everyone else with a PPC mac is screwed."
Are you any more screwed since Crossover Mac came out? Wine/Crossover is a reimplementation of the Win32 API, it is not an emulator, and as of such will not emulate the x86 processor for you.
"well, theo deraadt seemed clearly pissed indeed, but was also smart enough to realise that, and for a correct way to contact intel, he suggests the careful post written by another person that was done to TI as an example how to write to Intel." .. and strangely enough stupid enough not to realise that everything he publishes on the Internet can have consequences. If Intel-executives have read this story (and it may have been presented to them by one of their employees) then no amount of polite letter from De Raadt is going to help, because the Intel people would have already made up their minds about De Raadt.
His writing was unhelpful, unproductive, unprofessional immature, and downright slanderous.
.. of doing exactly what he suggests. Any semi-intelligent person should be able to think up some.
My try:
1. Find some sports club with scheduled activities.
2. Follow home someone that looks like a young professional with a sports bag. You now know their address.
3. Next time that class is on, watch her or his house. If the person leave before the class begins, with their trusted sports bag, you know they are going to the gym. If the person switches off the lights, then you are set!
4. Break in and enjoy the goodies!
This is a lot easier, and you have a bigger chance of figuring out whether the person has anything worth stealing straight away. Fancy clothes is a give-away.
"Maybe I missed something, but why does one person being out of the house mean the house is empty? What about partners, housemates etc?"
House mates are clearly possible, but her calendar never mentions any partner like it would if she was married or living with a partner.
... as an urban myth..Back then, many people (including me) bought it because it was so easy to believe he got himself into more trouble than he could handle.
This time, however, there does seem to be proper reports about it, and so RIP Steve.
"Capitalism isn't about embarassing others into doing what you want them to."
No, and not everything is about capitalism.
"If he consumes more, he has to pay more to do it. Part of his money will go into developing cleaner energy sources, and basically helping to solve the problem you're so worried about."
That only works if the higher consumption used by people like him actually provide money for developing cleaner energy sources. That requires two things:
* That it costs enough
* That the money is not just going to the shareholders
Pure capitalism is lousy for environmental purposes, and the only thing that is going to work is government interference. For instance emission quotas and environmental taxes earmarked for developing cleaner energy sources. Oh, and economic theory is not the answer to everything although some people use it as if it was.
"Surely the best defence would be to find out what songs you are being prosecuted for and then buying the album/game/DVD"
No. If you bought the album/game/DVD before you got sued, it may have been defendable, but if you bought it afterwards, any judge can easily see through your motivations. If you want to bring in the album as evidence, the RIAA lawyer will probably ask you to prove that you bought it before you got sued.
Your suggestion is just as dumb as buying all the albums for the copied music after you got sued and claim you owned it all along. Both are likely to be found out, and result in you having a worse case than before.
I don't know whether there have been serious scientific comparisons made, but there are certainly academics that have been using criminal profiling on corporate managers.
This is a quick link found from Google. I'm sure you'll find more if you do some more searching.
The Cell processor is an in-order execution chip with strong focus on floating point. For this reason it will probably be really good for scientific calculations and simulation, but not very practical for general server-applications.
The Opteron servers and the Cell servers will most likely live side by side in the product offering from IBM. Apples and Oranges and all that...
.. as it seems the only thing it is actually using the iPod for is as a mass storage device. HD is obviously a marketing gimmick as the screen is too small to enjoy high resolution.
I don't think this product qualifies as "revolutionary", but then I'm not a marketing droid.
FlyaKiteOSX is a clear violation of Apple copyright, as it uses actual Apple icons. I can't imagine that Apple have granted them permission.
... and removing the DRM from iTunes is also straightforward for people in the know.
Watermarking seems perfectly acceptable to me, since it does not hamper fair use. I hope watermarking takes over from DRM.
" I never much cared for the Macintosh line of computers ; they seem more toys than anything, but that's just one person's opinion."
Yes it is clearly just your opinion.
Apple actually includes a vectorised implementation of LaPACK with every Mac sold, even the Mac Mini. Say what you want about LaPACK, but a toy it is not.
"This is the principal difference between a dog and a man."
While the sentence above was never quite true and many a starving dog has bitten the hand that feeds it. I understand it's sentiment. The human mind has a much bigger capacity for cruelty than dogs, but that is simply because the human mind has a much bigger capacity for thought, and thus also a much bigger capacity for compassion and love.
The dog will also not provide deep conversations, create magnificent works of art, cure diseases or simply just help a complete stranger. For every starving child you help that bites you, there are probably lots that will touch your life in ways that a dog simply can't.
The almost endless possibilities and potential of a human is the difference between dog and man.
"The more advanced we've become, the less valuable human life has become"
Huh? This is just clearly untrue and with absolutely no basis in history. Throughout most of our history your life would have been worth next to nothing to anyone except the people that knew you directly. Sometimes not even parents would put that much value into your life, because they were used to losing children and adopted the self-sustaining idea that they could always have more children.
Times are clearly different now, because of the relative rarety of premature death. At least now, lots of people actually care about the lives of strangers, and even the ones that don't at least pretend to care about them.
The government intrusion is made possible by people worrying too much about their security, not because they don't care about their fellow human being. And surveillance, believe it or not, is not the only benchmark of how much worth a human life has.
You seem to completely have lost track of your argument when you say "In Britain, there's a movement to monitor every child's eating habits". Do you really think this is done because these childrens lives are considered worthless? On contrary it is done because we are (maybe) too afraid for their safety.
Get some perspective, and put privacy in context with the hundreds or thousands of other issues we have in society concerning human life.
Literally EVERY parent I know have lots of pictures of their kids naked. Kids run around naked on the beach in pretty much all of Europe and small children simply enjoy taking their clothes off and running around the house and garden, sometimes to the embarrassment of their parents.
While I find it mildly weird to put family photos with naked kids on Flickr or your own family picture site, I can see no reason why this should be illegal. But isn't there a chance of these pictures finding their way into the kiddie porn database? If so, isn't there a decent chance someone may end up being tracked as a pedophile simply for proudly posting family pictures on the Internet?
Differentiating between kiddie porn and legal pictures of kids is probably hard enough when you do it manually and individually, but doing this on a massive scale just sounds incredibly hard and possibly dangerous.
"I'm also a bit of a woodworker/tool junkie, and I refuse to buy tools made in China. I'll settle for Japan, Europe or Mexico if USA isn't available. But nothing from Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, etc."
I just hope you realise that this could actually also exclude products that are made by decently paid skillful workers in third world countries... and would just make it so much harder for business in these countries to flourish, basically making sure they stay third world countries for the forseeable future.
Also, sometimes things like child labour and sweatshops is a much more complex issue than you may think. In many areas of the world, families would not survive without their children working and extensive boycotts have had very unfortunate side effects.
The only way of making sure is to research the individual companies, which may not always be that easy.
--
Gaute
I can sort of believe that they had no illegal copies of anything in the office where The Pirate Bay was located. It makes it easier for them to wipe their hands of any wrongdoing.
However, as the main goal of the pirate bay is to facilitate copyright infringement, I find it very hard to believe that none of these guys had any illegal copies of stuff at home, on their laptops, etc.
Since their homes apparently also were raided, this is probably a way for the authorities to get to them, even if the Pirate Bay itself does nothing illegal. When you are involved in something like The Pirate Bay, it is too tempting to use it yourself.
Of course, if Swedish copyright law allows for downloading copyrighted material for personal use, then this will be fine as well.