Yea, after Superman had just gotten nuked.
on
Superhero Smackdown
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· Score: 2
It wasn't just the biomech suit, it was the fact that Superman was at ground zero during a thermonuclear explosion. Batman even tested Superman early in the fight to see if Superman had been weakened, and he had. Also the explosion darkened the skys limiting Superman's abilities since his powers are derived from sunlight.
What's the big deal? Since this country has been founded we have both regulated porn and encouraged free speech, especially political free speech. You are seeking to make things like political speech=porn, which the Supreme Court already rejected years ago.
Also we are not "preventing our own citizens" from viewing porn (as if we are banning it altogether) but saying that you cannot view porn in a taxpayer funded library. You want to get off on porn, do it in your own house. But you have no right to demand it on everyone's dollar.
Putting the Internet rhetoric aside for a second, let me ask you a question. How would you like a hard-core pornography store opened up next to where you live? Or better yet, what percentage of Americans would like hard-core pornography stores opened up where they live? Probably not very many people considering current zoning laws. You don't have to be an "evil right-wing Christian" to dislike the idea either. The regulation of porn was judged constitutional years ago.
So it is not a stretch of the imagination to think that people would not want a hard-core pornography store in their public library. I want to be able to use the library and have my kids use the library. I don't want a bunch of seedy people who could give a crap viewing porn on the library computers and jacking-off under their coats. Especially since I am paying for those computers!
Which is a second point to make in this case. The taxpayers pay for those computers. Therefore the taxpayers through their elected officials should have some say in how those computers are used. I'm sick of these librarians acting as if they solely own the library. If you want porn, buy your own computer and view porn there.
Of course censorware is not perfect. Far from it. But it will improve in research, and until then you can just a librarian assistant walk around every now and then and/or have a librarian available to take complaints.
The GPL=National Park, BSD="dump on market" is a completely unfair analogy. If you make land into a National Park, everyone has a right to use them. If you sell the land, only the landowner gets to use it.
However, that is not the case with GPL vs. BSD. I can freely use and modify any code under the GPL or the BSD. It's not like some company can just take over BSD code and never let me use it. They are both free.
The difference is that with GPL if I write a commercial application and 99% of the code is mine and 1% is GPL I am forced to give out my 99% of code. With BSD I don't.
Now this is fair if it is just some Joe Programmer on his own time who wrote the 1% of GPL code. He can let people use (or not use) it as he feels. It is *NOT* fair if that Joe Programmer is being paid to write that code with MY tax dollars! That code should be freely given to the taxpayers to do with it whatever they want, including using it in their closed-source programs and selling it.
It is not "corporate welfare" because it benefits everyone equally! Corporations can use it, individual taxpayers can use it, universities can use it, etc. Corporate welfare is if they give something to corporations that only corporations will benefit from.
Brian Ellenberger
Re:Vigilante Corporations
on
Ebay vs. Musician
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· Score: 3, Insightful
any corporation to be come a vigilante. In this case, it's obvious that Ebay has the right to deny service to any customer they please
How is a corporation being a "vigilante" by merely regulating the conduct of its own business? EBay is not breaking into people's home and beating them for trading pirated CD's. Nor are they aren't slipping viruses into pirated software sold on EBay.
Of course they have the right to deny service to *their* marketplace based on *their* policies. You claim something about this being "modern" law, but please direct me back to a time when a business wasn't able to police itself?
A blanket policy saying EBay cannot deny the right to service is quite a statement. So what happens if a serial killer wants to sell human flesh soup online? Or someone starts pimping 12 year old girls? Are they allowed to deny service to people posting fradulant auctions?
And your an idiot if you think government regulation is going to "make it all better". If the government gets in there, the regulation is going to be FAR FAR more restrictive. If the government gets in there EBay will have to start having age-checks and mature-warnings for CDs and video games in the name of "protecting children".
EBay made a mistake. Big Deal. It is darn hard policing thousands upon thousands of auctions.
What proof do you have that Turing said all there is to say about computing?
Well, it is not technically a mathematical proof but the Turing-Church thesis and the Turing machine describe the theoretical basis of all computing. All computers and all languages can be reduced to Turing machines. Think of it as the "Fundamental Theory of Computers". Much of theoretical computer science relies on this.
Postmodernism is a nonliberal arts field like Computer Science?
Post-modern math: The derivative of x^3=3x is too narrow of a definition. We need to somehow break free of such rigid rules that prevent expression. Lets try dx/dy x^3=18x on Mondays and dx/dy x^3=5x on Tuesdays.
Post-modern engineering: The concept of the modern suspension bridge is patriarchal in design and form. Instead of being tied down by cables in a seemingly unending pattern, lets have the cables lifted to the air by giant balloons! I have the math right here to prove it will work (see post-modern math)
Post-modern Biology: Sure the lungs are commonly thought to simply process Oxygen and CO2. However, that was simplistic modernistic thinking. Today we will demonstrate neo-objectivism by removing the lungs from this patient and observing their meaninglessness.
Come on, Computer Science is a Science! It has rigid and unavoidable laws, a concept which postmodernism rejects. Fundamentially, when you get down to the heart Computer Science is math and is governed by a ton of mathematical rules. We have Shannon's laws on Information Theory, Turing-Church Thesis and the Turning Machine describing the limits of computers (see Halting Problem), NP-Completeness, the wide variety of research on various algorithms, etc.
Guess what, fundamentially there is no difference between Perl, C, C++, Ada, LISP, or whatever other language you come up with because at the end of the day they are all Turning Complete.
At the end of the day the Turning Machine *IS* the "Grand Narrative". It is the fundamental basis by which all computers and all languages must obey. To use the author's words, it is the "12-note row", the thing that couples everything else together in the sea of chaos.
Of course, a writer may use a Word Processor to write a post-modern play or a animator may use a graphics tool to draw a post-modern animation. But these aren't examples of Computer Science.
I am legally color blind. There is no way I could pick out clothing from an online store by myself because I wouldn't be able to match colors worth squat. When I shop without my wife I always have to ask a clerk for help.
So how can you tell me that a fully blind person could shop from a clothing store? At least I can see the styles and shapes and kinda understand what looks good on me and what does not. And, for example, even if they gave in depth color information if you have never seen colors you will not know what goes with what.
And I know blind people shop for houses, but I doubt many buy houses without having someone tell them what it looks like!
EverCrack may not have an "immense effect", but there are plenty of instances of pretty much worthless things gaining value because they are rare and people want them. Look at stamps. Little pieces of scrap paper with a face value of pocket change. How about baseball cards? Just cheap cardboard. The pictures and information on both are easily duplicated. So why in the heck do people pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for them?
Heck compared to a stamp an Axe of Power or a level 99 character seems much more interesting and useful for entertainment. As long as it is sufficiently rare and useful, people will attach some sort monetary value to it.
Of course this isn't a visual medium, it is a message board. It is only one step from static HTML pages.
Airline tickets are a step up in that visual information can greatly help (map of cities that it serves, nice pictures that show what stage of the buying process you are in, etc).
Note again that it is not impossible for the visually impared to buy tickets, just "difficult". You would be surprised the number of visual clues that are given just by simple placement of form objects, text, and pictures. It is what the Design of Everyday Things book calls affordances. The Southwest site has visual affordances. Designing for auditory affordances is a completely different task.
Much more complicated are sites that sell things that you most of the time would like to see before you buy. Are you saying an online clothing store or an online furnature store or an online real estate store are not visual? I never buy anything from Ebay without seeing a picture of it, nor would I bother visiting a house without a picture.
Up the scale even farther are sites that use complex sound and graphics. Now you may say "oh man those sites suck". Fine, that is your opinion. But the truth is there are things you can express in Flash that are impossible to express in HTML. Visual things. As the web matures complex sound and graphics will become more and more important. Heck, Mac wouldn't be the same if the desktop wasn't so pretty. Why shouldn't websites be the same (especially if they are entertainment based like movies or games).
Finally, as the web grows in terms of the complexity of the application that are developed on it so too will the GUI elements. Right now we are stuck with text and list boxes. There are a wealth of other common GUI elements that people have or will want to start adopting more and more of. Things like trees, menus, interactive tables, spinners, etc.
I do not think it is as easy as you make it out to be. Come on, there is an entire academic field devoted to the study of Computer User Interfaces for the disabled. If it was trivial, people would not be writting Masters thesises on it.
Sure for a simple site like Slashdot it is easy. But what if your site is more complex. What if it uses more advanced user interfaces like trees views(Java/ActiveX/JavaScript)?
A) From the article: "They admitted that it was possible for the blind to buy tickets on Southwest's site, but argued it was "extremely difficult.""
I think this is an important fact. Being blind and using an inherently visual medium is always going to be difficult in some way. Coupled with the fact that the judge recognized that there are no guidelines from a generally accepted authority means that there wasn't anything for Southwest to comply or try to comply with.
2) The person could always use the phone and talk with a real person. The problem with disabilities is that human beings can adapt. Computer cannot. The ADA made things accessable (wheelchair ramps). Once inside, people can help deal with the individual disability.
For example, say a disabled person comes into a clothing store. They need help.
a) Say they are visually-impared. The employee can help describe colors and styles and pick out correct sizes.
b) Say they are hearing-impared and are mute. The employee and customer can communicate through written notes.
c) Say the employee is in a wheelchair. They may just need the employee to reach clothing for them.
The ADA does not say that all stores must have little tags on the clothes that give a verbal description when you press them or require everything to be at a height so that a person in a wheelchair can reach them.
A computer cannot adapt. Humans can. You cannot expect the WWW to give a disabled person the same abilites that a physically human being can. We do not have enough programmers to program each and every scenario on every page. Guidelines are nice, but no amount of guidelines will be sufficent at this time to make it as accessible as picking up a phone or actually going to the mall. An online clothing store is going to always rely on pictures to convey information. It will be a long time before a Clippy's great-great-great-grandson or granddaughter can come on and answer questions asthetic questions about the particular piece of clothing for blind people (or in my case color-blind people).
Someone mentioned this before, but he got modded to 0 for some reason. Sen Helms is not running for reelection. His term is up in January. There is no "shakedown".
If you going to start getting First Order Logic about it then please at least define the predicates.
Basically this is my argument. North Korea and South Korea pretty much started out the same. Same people, same general geographic local, same wartorn post-WWII state. One adopted a communist economy, one a non-communist economy. The communist one is a hellhole. The non-communist one isn't.
Of course one country does not make a proof. Maybe it was a freak occurance. But a similar thing happened in Eastern Europe. And there is a wealth of documented evidence that communism makes your country a hellhole. I don't see which proposition you think is false.
Both you and the guy that modded me "overrated" really really need to rent the movie Office Space. Trust me, if you have ever worked in an office you will laugh your butt off.:)
Your forgetting that it was North Korea that invaded South Korea---without any provocation. The reason why we haven't "left them alone" is because they *invaded* another country who is our friend. Also, don't forget that North Korea and South Korea are technically still at war. Are you actually arguing that South Korea would have been better off had we just let the North invade and take over?
Second point is that there is no such thing as a vacuum in world politics. Everybody pretty much has an interest in everyone else's affairs. Even more so when they see them as a potential threat.
We tried isolationism in the earth 20th century. For outcomes see World War I and World War II.
Bullcrap. I'll prove it. GEORGE W. BUSH IS THE BIGGEST IDIOT IN THE WORLD!! THE DMCA MUST BE ELIMINATED! WE MUST KICK EVERYONE WHO VOTED FOR IT OUT OF OFFICE! LONG LIVE COMMUNISM! (continue ad nausium)
Stifling free speech my butt. You have no clue what stifling free speech is. Why don't you go to China and try to pass out some copies of the Torah, Koran, or the Bible. Or go to Cuba and try to critize Castro. As the secret police are carting you butt off to jail (or worse) you would realize there is no "stifling" of free speech here.
Yes, there is some battling going on with the DMCA and issues like bnet, bug reporting, is code=speech, etc. But in the grand scheme of thing these are piss-ant problems that could actually be solved if you convinced enough people that they need solved. That is the nice thing about living in a Republic. SSSCA got stopped because people organized and spoke up. Heck, the web royalty act that RIAA sabotaged is getting push back by Jesse Helms of all people
So please, quit with the doom and gloom until you have something substantial to doom and gloom about.
And if it weren't for the *EVIL* United States, there would be a single Korea and it would be one massive hellhole instead of half hellhole and half really nice place to live.
Right now the US has tens of thousands of troops right now helping the South Koreans hold of a million man North Korean army. With the news that North Korea has broken the treaty that gave them economic aid in exchange for giving up nukes, it should be increasingly obvious that the current US foreign policy that is heavy in, ahem, consequences, is not so naive after all. What is naive is the idea that you can solve all your problems with mean people by just talking nice to them.
I wonder how if South Vietnam would be doing as well as South Korea of the US had succeeded in defending it.
The problem RedHat has is that someone can always come along and undercut RedHat's support business since RedHat's rates have to be marked up in order to support development costs.
Uh, dude this PROVES Ballmer's point. Sun, a huge contributor to Open Source and chief Microsoft competitor, is laying off over 4 thousand people!
Look at Open Office. Sun acquires code, spends a bunch of money working on it, has staff devoted to it (ex Zaheda Bhorat (Sun; community growth) Stefan Taxhet (Sun, Coordination Manager) Sander Vesik (Sun, Release Manager), and hasn't made jack squat from it. Blow a bunch of money, don't get much return back. Not exactly a successful business model.
Open Source today depends on big companies to basically make charitable contributions. Remember, open source came to life in the free wheeling "profit and money don't mean anything" late 90's. In a "penny-pinching and cost control" environment, corporate charity will become harder and harder to find.
How much of the development of Linux is being done by for-profit companies like RedHat or IBM? It seems like most of the new development is being done by people that are getting paid to do Linux development. I think this idea of thousands of developers working in their spare time to make Linux is overrated.
In which case makes the battle between Microsoft and Linux more of a battle of business models than some overhyped free vs not free battle. And I seriously question RedHat and other Linux company's business models. Pay alot of money to develop software, give it away for free, hope people are kind enough to buy the boxed version? I know they sell various support services too, but will that actually be enough to pay the rent? And if the margins are that good, why couldn't Microsoft eventually just adopt a similar business model?
Bigger companies like IBM and Sun may have a better chance with Linux since they have other revenue streams (hardware, services) that give them much bigger margin to blow money developing Linux. However, what happens when times get tight and departments get cut? Will they cut the non-revenue generating departments first?
In the 50's and 60's they said TV will kill the film industry.
In the late 70's/early 80's they said the VCR will kill the film industry.
Now Rick McCallum is claiming that DVD will kill the film industry.
He claims that "single movie that can survive on box office gross alone". That may be true, but only because of natural competition. The total revenue for a movie in the day and age is theater release + home release. That TOTAL revenue is what pays salaries and production costs. What, did he think the DVD was going to be just pure profit? Actors aren't making 20 million just based on theater release.
But it is unlikely that theaters are going away anytime soon. Why? Because the studios control the supply and demand for movies (for the most part). You pay $8.00 to go to a movie because you can't see it on tape, even if you had a movie quality home theater. And it is going to be decades before >50% of the public has movie quality home theaters anyway. They release the movie on DVD only after noone is seeing it in the theaters anymore.
Now piracy may be an issue and that is one of the points he seems to be making. However, in order to be all that widespread everyone would need T1 lines to their houses and the total bandwidth of the Internet would have to be tripled. Most people will still be on dialup in 3 years, so mass use of a Napster-clone is unlikely to be feasible. Unless people are willing to stay online for 2 weeks to download a movie.
Slashdot Mirror
It wasn't just the biomech suit, it was the fact that Superman was at ground zero during a thermonuclear explosion. Batman even tested Superman early in the fight to see if Superman had been weakened, and he had. Also the explosion darkened the skys limiting Superman's abilities since his powers are derived from sunlight.
What's the big deal? Since this country has been founded we have both regulated porn and encouraged free speech, especially political free speech. You are seeking to make things like political speech=porn, which the Supreme Court already rejected years ago.
Also we are not "preventing our own citizens" from viewing porn (as if we are banning it altogether) but saying that you cannot view porn in a taxpayer funded library. You want to get off on porn, do it in your own house. But you have no right to demand it on everyone's dollar.
If your truely worried about speech, why not worry about something truly substantial like the Unconstitutional Campaign Finance Reform that harms political speech.
Brian Ellenberger
Putting the Internet rhetoric aside for a second, let me ask you a question. How would you like a hard-core pornography store opened up next to where you live? Or better yet, what percentage of Americans would like hard-core pornography stores opened up where they live? Probably not very many people considering current zoning laws. You don't have to be an "evil right-wing Christian" to dislike the idea either. The regulation of porn was judged constitutional years ago.
So it is not a stretch of the imagination to think that people would not want a hard-core pornography store in their public library. I want to be able to use the library and have my kids use the library. I don't want a bunch of seedy people who could give a crap viewing porn on the library computers and jacking-off under their coats. Especially since I am paying for those computers!
Which is a second point to make in this case. The taxpayers pay for those computers. Therefore the taxpayers through their elected officials should have some say in how those computers are used. I'm sick of these librarians acting as if they solely own the library. If you want porn, buy your own computer and view porn there.
Of course censorware is not perfect. Far from it. But it will improve in research, and until then you can just a librarian assistant walk around every now and then and/or have a librarian available to take complaints.
Brian Ellenberger
The GPL=National Park, BSD="dump on market" is a completely unfair analogy. If you make land into a National Park, everyone has a right to use them. If you sell the land, only the landowner gets to use it.
However, that is not the case with GPL vs. BSD. I can freely use and modify any code under the GPL or the BSD. It's not like some company can just take over BSD code and never let me use it. They are both free.
The difference is that with GPL if I write a commercial application and 99% of the code is mine and 1% is GPL I am forced to give out my 99% of code. With BSD I don't.
Now this is fair if it is just some Joe Programmer on his own time who wrote the 1% of GPL code. He can let people use (or not use) it as he feels. It is *NOT* fair if that Joe Programmer is being paid to write that code with MY tax dollars! That code should be freely given to the taxpayers to do with it whatever they want, including using it in their closed-source programs and selling it.
It is not "corporate welfare" because it benefits everyone equally! Corporations can use it, individual taxpayers can use it, universities can use it, etc. Corporate welfare is if they give something to corporations that only corporations will benefit from.
Brian Ellenberger
any corporation to be come a vigilante. In this case, it's obvious that Ebay has the right to deny service to any customer they please
How is a corporation being a "vigilante" by merely regulating the conduct of its own business? EBay is not breaking into people's home and beating them for trading pirated CD's. Nor are they aren't slipping viruses into pirated software sold on EBay.
Of course they have the right to deny service to *their* marketplace based on *their* policies. You claim something about this being "modern" law, but please direct me back to a time when a business wasn't able to police itself?
A blanket policy saying EBay cannot deny the right to service is quite a statement. So what happens if a serial killer wants to sell human flesh soup online? Or someone starts pimping 12 year old girls? Are they allowed to deny service to people posting fradulant auctions?
And your an idiot if you think government regulation is going to "make it all better". If the government gets in there, the regulation is going to be FAR FAR more restrictive. If the government gets in there EBay will have to start having age-checks and mature-warnings for CDs and video games in the name of "protecting children".
EBay made a mistake. Big Deal. It is darn hard policing thousands upon thousands of auctions.
Brian Ellenberger
I would +1 Insightful if I had any mod points. I can't believe someone modded this down as flamebait.
People in France can be charged with a hate crime for calling Islam "dumb"
What proof do you have that Turing said all there is to say about computing?
Well, it is not technically a mathematical proof but the Turing-Church thesis and the Turing machine describe the theoretical basis of all computing. All computers and all languages can be reduced to Turing machines. Think of it as the "Fundamental Theory of Computers". Much of theoretical computer science relies on this.
Postmodernism is a nonliberal arts field like Computer Science?
Post-modern math: The derivative of x^3=3x is too narrow of a definition. We need to somehow break free of such rigid rules that prevent expression. Lets try dx/dy x^3=18x on Mondays and dx/dy x^3=5x on Tuesdays.
Post-modern engineering: The concept of the modern suspension bridge is patriarchal in design and form. Instead of being tied down by cables in a seemingly unending pattern, lets have the cables lifted to the air by giant balloons! I have the math right here to prove it will work (see post-modern math)
Post-modern Biology: Sure the lungs are commonly thought to simply process Oxygen and CO2. However, that was simplistic modernistic thinking. Today we will demonstrate neo-objectivism by removing the lungs from this patient and observing their meaninglessness.
Come on, Computer Science is a Science! It has rigid and unavoidable laws, a concept which postmodernism rejects. Fundamentially, when you get down to the heart Computer Science is math and is governed by a ton of mathematical rules.
We have Shannon's laws on Information Theory, Turing-Church Thesis and the Turning Machine describing the limits of computers (see Halting Problem), NP-Completeness, the wide variety of research on various algorithms, etc.
Guess what, fundamentially there is no difference between Perl, C, C++, Ada, LISP, or whatever other language you come up with because at the end of the day they are all Turning Complete.
At the end of the day the Turning Machine *IS* the "Grand Narrative". It is the fundamental basis by which all computers and all languages must obey. To use the author's words, it is the "12-note row", the thing that couples everything else together in the sea of chaos.
Of course, a writer may use a Word Processor to write a post-modern play or a animator may use a graphics tool to draw a post-modern animation. But these aren't examples of Computer Science.
Brian Ellenberger
I am legally color blind. There is no way I could pick out clothing from an online store by myself because I wouldn't be able to match colors worth squat. When I shop without my wife I always have to ask a clerk for help.
So how can you tell me that a fully blind person could shop from a clothing store? At least I can see the styles and shapes and kinda understand what looks good on me and what does not. And, for example, even if they gave in depth color information if you have never seen colors you will not know what goes with what.
And I know blind people shop for houses, but I doubt many buy houses without having someone tell them what it looks like!
Brian Ellenberger
EverCrack may not have an "immense effect", but there are plenty of instances of pretty much worthless things gaining value because they are rare and people want them. Look at stamps. Little pieces of scrap paper with a face value of pocket change. How about baseball cards? Just cheap cardboard. The pictures and information on both are easily duplicated. So why in the heck do people pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for them?
Heck compared to a stamp an Axe of Power or a level 99 character seems much more interesting and useful for entertainment. As long as it is sufficiently rare and useful, people will attach some sort monetary value to it.
Brian Ellenberger
Of course this isn't a visual medium, it is a message board. It is only one step from static HTML pages.
Airline tickets are a step up in that visual information can greatly help (map of cities that it serves, nice pictures that show what stage of the buying process you are in, etc).
Note again that it is not impossible for the visually impared to buy tickets, just "difficult". You would be surprised the number of visual clues that are given just by simple placement of form objects, text, and pictures. It is what the Design of Everyday Things book calls affordances. The Southwest site has visual affordances. Designing for auditory affordances is a completely different task.
Much more complicated are sites that sell things that you most of the time would like to see before you buy. Are you saying an online clothing store or an online furnature store or an online real estate store are not visual? I never buy anything from Ebay without seeing a picture of it, nor would I bother visiting a house without a picture.
Up the scale even farther are sites that use complex sound and graphics. Now you may say "oh man those sites suck". Fine, that is your opinion. But the truth is there are things you can express in Flash that are impossible to express in HTML. Visual things. As the web matures complex sound and graphics will become more and more important. Heck, Mac wouldn't be the same if the desktop wasn't so pretty. Why shouldn't websites be the same (especially if they are entertainment based like movies or games).
Finally, as the web grows in terms of the complexity of the application that are developed on it so too will the GUI elements. Right now we are stuck with text and list boxes. There are a wealth of other common GUI elements that people have or will want to start adopting more and more of. Things like trees, menus, interactive tables, spinners, etc.
I do not think it is as easy as you make it out to be. Come on, there is an entire academic field devoted to the study of Computer User Interfaces for the disabled. If it was trivial, people would not be writting Masters thesises on it.
Sure for a simple site like Slashdot it is easy. But what if your site is more complex. What if it uses more advanced user interfaces like trees views(Java/ActiveX/JavaScript)?
Brian Ellenberger
A) From the article: "They admitted that it was possible for the blind to buy tickets on Southwest's site, but argued it was "extremely difficult.""
I think this is an important fact. Being blind and using an inherently visual medium is always going to be difficult in some way. Coupled with the fact that the judge recognized that there are no guidelines from a generally accepted authority means that there wasn't anything for Southwest to comply or try to comply with.
2) The person could always use the phone and talk with a real person. The problem with disabilities is that human beings can adapt. Computer cannot. The ADA made things accessable (wheelchair ramps). Once inside, people can help deal with the individual disability.
For example, say a disabled person comes into a clothing store. They need help.
a) Say they are visually-impared. The employee can help describe colors and styles and pick out correct sizes.
b) Say they are hearing-impared and are mute. The employee and customer can communicate through written notes.
c) Say the employee is in a wheelchair. They may just need the employee to reach clothing for them.
The ADA does not say that all stores must have little tags on the clothes that give a verbal description when you press them or require everything to be at a height so that a person in a wheelchair can reach them.
A computer cannot adapt. Humans can. You cannot expect the WWW to give a disabled person the same abilites that a physically human being can. We do not have enough programmers to program each and every scenario on every page. Guidelines are nice, but no amount of guidelines will be sufficent at this time to make it as accessible as picking up a phone or actually going to the mall. An online clothing store is going to always rely on pictures to convey information. It will be a long time before a Clippy's great-great-great-grandson or granddaughter can come on and answer questions asthetic questions about the particular piece of clothing for blind people (or in my case color-blind people).
Brian Ellenberger
Someone mentioned this before, but he got modded to 0 for some reason. Sen Helms is not running for reelection. His term is up in January. There is no "shakedown".
If you going to start getting First Order Logic about it then please at least define the predicates.
Basically this is my argument. North Korea and South Korea pretty much started out the same. Same people, same general geographic local, same wartorn post-WWII state. One adopted a communist economy, one a non-communist economy. The communist one is a hellhole. The non-communist one isn't.
Of course one country does not make a proof. Maybe it was a freak occurance. But a similar thing happened in Eastern Europe. And there is a wealth of documented evidence that communism makes your country a hellhole. I don't see which proposition you think is false.
Brian
Both you and the guy that modded me "overrated" really really need to rent the movie Office Space. Trust me, if you have ever worked in an office you will laugh your butt off. :)
WTF Does PC Load Letter mean!!!
Your forgetting that it was North Korea that invaded South Korea---without any provocation. The reason why we haven't "left them alone" is because they *invaded* another country who is our friend. Also, don't forget that North Korea and South Korea are technically still at war. Are you actually arguing that South Korea would have been better off had we just let the North invade and take over?
Second point is that there is no such thing as a vacuum in world politics. Everybody pretty much has an interest in everyone else's affairs. Even more so when they see them as a potential threat.
We tried isolationism in the earth 20th century. For outcomes see World War I and World War II.
Brian Ellenberger
Bullcrap. I'll prove it. GEORGE W. BUSH IS THE BIGGEST IDIOT IN THE WORLD!! THE DMCA MUST BE ELIMINATED! WE MUST KICK EVERYONE WHO VOTED FOR IT OUT OF OFFICE! LONG LIVE COMMUNISM! (continue ad nausium)
Stifling free speech my butt. You have no clue what stifling free speech is. Why don't you go to China and try to pass out some copies of the Torah, Koran, or the Bible. Or go to Cuba and try to critize Castro. As the secret police are carting you butt off to jail (or worse) you would realize there is no "stifling" of free speech here.
Yes, there is some battling going on with the DMCA and issues like bnet, bug reporting, is code=speech, etc. But in the grand scheme of thing these are piss-ant problems that could actually be solved if you convinced enough people that they need solved. That is the nice thing about living in a Republic. SSSCA got stopped because people organized and spoke up. Heck, the web royalty act that RIAA sabotaged is getting push back by Jesse Helms of all people
So please, quit with the doom and gloom until you have something substantial to doom and gloom about.
Brian Ellenberger
And if it weren't for the *EVIL* United States, there would be a single Korea and it would be one massive hellhole instead of half hellhole and half really nice place to live.
Right now the US has tens of thousands of troops right now helping the South Koreans hold of a million man North Korean army. With the news that North Korea has broken the treaty that gave them economic aid in exchange for giving up nukes, it should be increasingly obvious that the current US foreign policy that is heavy in, ahem, consequences, is not so naive after all. What is naive is the idea that you can solve all your problems with mean people by just talking nice to them.
I wonder how if South Vietnam would be doing as well as South Korea of the US had succeeded in defending it.
Brian Ellenberger
The problem RedHat has is that someone can always come along and undercut RedHat's support business since RedHat's rates have to be marked up in order to support development costs.
Uh, dude this PROVES Ballmer's point. Sun, a huge contributor to Open Source and chief Microsoft competitor, is laying off over 4 thousand people!
Look at Open Office. Sun acquires code, spends a bunch of money working on it, has staff devoted to it (ex Zaheda Bhorat (Sun; community growth) Stefan Taxhet (Sun, Coordination Manager)
Sander Vesik (Sun, Release Manager), and hasn't made jack squat from it. Blow a bunch of money, don't get much return back. Not exactly a successful business model.
Open Source today depends on big companies to basically make charitable contributions. Remember, open source came to life in the free wheeling "profit and money don't mean anything" late 90's. In a "penny-pinching and cost control" environment, corporate charity will become harder and harder to find.
Brian Ellenberger
How much of the development of Linux is being done by for-profit companies like RedHat or IBM? It seems like most of the new development is being done by people that are getting paid to do Linux development. I think this idea of thousands of developers working in their spare time to make Linux is overrated.
In which case makes the battle between Microsoft and Linux more of a battle of business models than some overhyped free vs not free battle. And I seriously question RedHat and other Linux company's business models. Pay alot of money to develop software, give it away for free, hope people are kind enough to buy the boxed version? I know they sell various support services too, but will that actually be enough to pay the rent? And if the margins are that good, why couldn't Microsoft eventually just adopt a similar business model?
Bigger companies like IBM and Sun may have a better chance with Linux since they have other revenue streams (hardware, services) that give them much bigger margin to blow money developing Linux. However, what happens when times get tight and departments get cut? Will they cut the non-revenue generating departments first?
Brian Ellenberger
In the 50's and 60's they said TV will kill the film industry.
In the late 70's/early 80's they said the VCR will kill the film industry.
Now Rick McCallum is claiming that DVD will kill the film industry.
He claims that "single movie that can survive on box office gross alone". That may be true, but only because of natural competition. The total revenue for a movie in the day and age is theater release + home release. That TOTAL revenue is what pays salaries and production costs. What, did he think the DVD was going to be just pure profit? Actors aren't making 20 million just based on theater release.
But it is unlikely that theaters are going away anytime soon. Why? Because the studios control the supply and demand for movies (for the most part). You pay $8.00 to go to a movie because you can't see it on tape, even if you had a movie quality home theater. And it is going to be decades before >50% of the public has movie quality home theaters anyway. They release the movie on DVD only after noone is seeing it in the theaters anymore.
Now piracy may be an issue and that is one of the points he seems to be making. However, in order to be all that widespread everyone would need T1 lines to their houses and the total bandwidth of the Internet would have to be tripled. Most people will still be on dialup in 3 years, so mass use of a Napster-clone is unlikely to be feasible. Unless people are willing to stay online for 2 weeks to download a movie.
Brian Ellenberger