By contrast, letting yourself "wait a few days while you get better" from bacterial infections has been linked to numerous diseases, including several varieties of arthritis, rheumatic fever, Pelvic Inflammatory Disease, and even heart damage. Waiting it out is absolutely the worst thing you can do.
And yet, "waiting it out works" for most viruses. Do we want people in the ER every time they get "the sniffles", or just "feel bad"? If not, how to we propose to teach the general populace to accurately diagnose the difference between the common cold and one of the dangerous bacterial infections.
. . . I do think *something* needs to be done to protect retail. Retail is not an obsolete business model - online sales would suffer too if we couldn't kick the tires at retail.
In all seriousness, why save retail?
Is it just that, at brick-and-mortar retail, the customer gains more information about what he's buying? Asking a non-trivial question of a Best Buy employee will poke a hole in that balloon.
Is it that mass delivery of goods to local caches (i.e., brick and mortar stores) is more efficient than individual delivery of goods to homes? If so, retail has an advantage that should allow it to survive without being 'saved'.
Is it that online stores have lousier return policies? Then let's fix them.
Before I stand up to save retail, I want to know why. What purpose does retail serve that isn't embodied as an economic advantage that's already accounted for?
Then come out swinging and don't stop: "My opponent takes money from people who want to put you (or your kids) in jail for moving songs from their CDs to their iPods."
Meanwhile, your opponent will be talking about Iraq or the economy or eliminating crime, drugs, and halitosis.
Yeah, hid did bite the firm that fed him. He got caught doing something that embarrassed the firm in front of one of its clients (the Obama campaign) and in the media. The Obama campaign may yet have to fire the firm to get enough distance from this. It's unsurprising that he's out.
Actually, You are [also] punishing people who could be using it to further their education.
It's hard to dispute that the policy will have the effect of eliminating late-night downloading of 'bad content'. Your argument is strong enough without the just, which isn't supportable.
"Without copyright the GPL would be unenforceable. It would also be unnecessary."
Completely untrue. . . . Without any copyright protection, OSS would be dead in fairly short order.
I don't think we're appreciating the enormity of the idea of no-copyright. We need to analyze the idea from first principles. If there is no copyright on software (and let's expand that idea to include no patents or other forms of IP either), then there is no legal barrier to anyone taking any software and doing whatever they please with it.
In the zero-protection scenario, would anyone produce software? Yes, of course they would. Software is a tool for performing tasks. Having it allows a user company to perform tasks faster or better. User companies need software to efficiently order supplies, manage customer orders, and bill customers (to name just a few of the more universal tasks).
Would the lack of legal protection discourage companies from publicizing the software they paid to produce, allowing their free-riding competitors to gain the advantage of it without paying? Perhaps, but no more so than with OSS today (the free-riding competitor need not contribute to OSS to utilize OSS).
Might closed software creators take publicly-known software, add to it, and sell it in closed form? Certainly, but they would have to maintain actual secrecy of their additions, since they would have no recourse against anyone who published those additions. Once a piece of closed software was published, there would be no rule against using it. Further, many user companies might decide that they didn't need the closed additions.
The things that could be reliably sold by software companies in the zero-protection scenario are the things that can be sold in OSS today--services, mostly.
Net, in the zero-protection scenario, the volume of publicly known software is likely to increase as fast or faster over time as the volume of OSS increases today.
This is why people persist in storing paper in addition to electronic copies. Most people know how to assess the risks of loss/destruction of stored paper. They understand how to put a process in place that minimizes the significant risks.
To the layman (i.e., suits), risk assessment and mitigation in electronic storage is like magic. How many management levels up do you suppose the first guy was who said, "How could something like this just happen?" Two levels? One? Zero?
No, actually. Because we can speak about "two people" or "thirty-seven people," it qualifies as a count noun. "People" is just a non-standard plural. Of course, it's not uncommon to hear some one say, informally, "less people", but the rule says that it should be "fewer people."
Like many rules, this one is a good candidate for bending (unless you happen to be a major news periodical). YMMV.
A. "Ominous" and "rotating" are not coordinate adjectives, so you do not need a comma between them. Excellent! I learned something today. Thanks.
B. There are many grammatically correct ways to punctuate your.sig, all of which have different meanings. You have not chosen any of them. That would be the point.
C. This will teach me to stick to one subject at a time. The post was intended to share my humor at the difference between "ready my ship commander" and "ready my ship, commander." The post seems to have gotten side-tracked. I see now that it comes across as pedantic and lacking any sense of humor whatsoever. I, at least, hope not to be either of those things.
A cloaked Sith lord sits in an ominous, rotating chair aboard the google-star as he reads the law suit. "Excellent. Everything is going precisely as planned. Ready my ship, commander."
--- A panda walks into a bar eats shoots and leaves.
And did the Times really make such an awful grammatical mistake?
I don't know about "awful", but it is wrong. "Operating systems" is a count noun, not a non-count noun. To be sure, fewer people will recognize that it's wrong (and fewer still will know its name) than if the Times had made a common error, like substituting a possessive for a contraction, but that doesn't make it right.
Instead of less mistakes, we should strive for fewer.
--not-your-friendly-neighborhood-grammar-snob (That'd be my sweetie.)
People are always trying to make new rules for online activities when we have perfectly good rules for regular activities.
Why treat cyber-bullying any differently than in-person bullying? There is no need for separate rules. Surely, bullying is less threatening online than in person. Presumably, there are rules about what in-person behaviors are punishable bullying. Nothing more need be punished online than is punished in person. Indeed, since there is a level of detachment in the online experience (distance, physical safety, etc.), the range of online behaviors that merit punishment should probably be narrower.
Similarly, schools limit their supervision to school grounds and school activities. The same limitation can be applied online. If a school computer or school account wasn't used, then the incident is not the school's business.
Actually, the big difference online is that there is always better evidence available of the behavior in question. Bullies are less likely to get away with bullying online. (Of course, this is why the knee-jerk crowd gets so worked up about cyber-anything. Unlike when Bobbi may or may not have yelled threats at Suzi on the playground, in the online world, we have a copy of the offending email.)
From TFA, ". . . survey results showed that those who owned a BlackBerry were, in fact, more likely to work long hours than those who didn't. 19 percent of BlackBerry-owning survey respondents reportedly worked more than 50 hours a week, compared to only 11 percent of the general population."
So, tell me, did the crackberry cause them to work more? Perhaps those who already worked more are the ones who adopted crackberries.
To accurately assess whether the BB increases workload, the survey would need to compare BB users to non-BB users doing the same job.
You can fight a philosophy. You should fight a bad philosophy. But one fights a bad philosophy with a better philosophy, not with guns or prisons. Guns and prisons are for fighting bad acts.
If this goes through, there would be no need for the Indy event, which would only be held a few months before.
Q: Why did GenCon and WotC spread their events geographically? A: To reach different audiences.
How in the name of all that is hyped and marketed would the merger of one LA event with another LA event affect the "need for" events in other parts of the country?
In a final 'think of the children' bid, the California Association of Licensed Investigators also opposed the bill, saying it needed to be able to use pretexting to help find missing children, among other things."
Riiiight. Because a carve-out for protecting kids would just have been impossible to write in.
It couldn't be that the real money in PI work might be in divorce/adultery, paparazzi-ing, or industrial disputes.
How is that better than voting by marking up a heavy card stock ballot with a marker and running it through an optical scanner?
1. Machine allows mis-markings to be corrected until final commit. A voter who mis-marks with a marker must request a fresh ballot and start over.
2. Machine has page space to legibly list options in dozens of races and issues. Card stock ballot requires a flip-book or similar.
3. Machine's ability to place mark on right spot on ballot can be error-checked before hand. It can also be checked by voter on printout. By hand, voters often unwittingly make mistakes.
4. Machine does not make incomplete or ambiguous marks on the page (e.g., hanging chads). (The FL-13 problem would have been solved by the addition of a paper trail.)
5. Machines can accommodate the blind, even in other languages.
6. Machines can verify voter compliance with rules like "vote for up to three".
Electronic voting machines have lots of problems (e.g., expense, security, repetition of small errors across all ballots). However, it's indisputable that they do things that paper doesn't. The question isn't "how is that better than paper" -- the question is "is that enough better to be worth the tradeoffs".
Slashdot Mirror
By contrast, letting yourself "wait a few days while you get better" from bacterial infections has been linked to numerous diseases, including several varieties of arthritis, rheumatic fever, Pelvic Inflammatory Disease, and even heart damage. Waiting it out is absolutely the worst thing you can do.
And yet, "waiting it out works" for most viruses. Do we want people in the ER every time they get "the sniffles", or just "feel bad"? If not, how to we propose to teach the general populace to accurately diagnose the difference between the common cold and one of the dangerous bacterial infections.
. . . I do think *something* needs to be done to protect retail. Retail is not an obsolete business model - online sales would suffer too if we couldn't kick the tires at retail.
In all seriousness, why save retail?
Is it just that, at brick-and-mortar retail, the customer gains more information about what he's buying? Asking a non-trivial question of a Best Buy employee will poke a hole in that balloon.
Is it that mass delivery of goods to local caches (i.e., brick and mortar stores) is more efficient than individual delivery of goods to homes? If so, retail has an advantage that should allow it to survive without being 'saved'.
Is it that online stores have lousier return policies? Then let's fix them.
Before I stand up to save retail, I want to know why. What purpose does retail serve that isn't embodied as an economic advantage that's already accounted for?
Then come out swinging and don't stop: "My opponent takes money from people who want to put you (or your kids) in jail for moving songs from their CDs to their iPods."
Meanwhile, your opponent will be talking about Iraq or the economy or eliminating crime, drugs, and halitosis.
Wow, yeah, the front page of slashdot- the extra 50,000 eyeballs, of which maybe 50% belong to eligible US voters, will really help Obama's campaign.
In the 2004, U.S. Presidential election:
State: Margin (Electoral Votes)
New Mexico: 5,988 (5)
New Hampshire: -9,274 (4)
Iowa: 10,059 (7)
Wisconsin: -11,384 (10)
Nevada: 21,500 (5)
Delaware: -28,492 (3)
For less than 38,000 votes, you could have swung New Mexico, Iowa, and Nevada (20 electoral votes), and changed the outcome.
Yeah, hid did bite the firm that fed him. He got caught doing something that embarrassed the firm in front of one of its clients (the Obama campaign) and in the media. The Obama campaign may yet have to fire the firm to get enough distance from this. It's unsurprising that he's out.
Sad, but unsurprising.
To be sure, not every Fighter 8 has the right weapon for the job, but you gotta be able to dream.
"We'll take the Lotus to the Pink Elephant tonight, but have the Humvee ready for the cabin tomorrow."
The Vorpal sword is for the red tape.
For going postal on your pointy-haired boss, you use the Holy Avenger.
Every half-way competent Fighter 8 knows the value of using the right weapon for the job.
Roger that.
Antiques Roadshow much?
Actually,
You are [also] punishing people who could be using it to further their education.
It's hard to dispute that the policy will have the effect of eliminating late-night downloading of 'bad content'. Your argument is strong enough without the just , which isn't supportable.
"Without copyright the GPL would be unenforceable. It would also be unnecessary."
Completely untrue. . . . Without any copyright protection, OSS would be dead in fairly short order.
I don't think we're appreciating the enormity of the idea of no-copyright. We need to analyze the idea from first principles. If there is no copyright on software (and let's expand that idea to include no patents or other forms of IP either), then there is no legal barrier to anyone taking any software and doing whatever they please with it.
In the zero-protection scenario, would anyone produce software? Yes, of course they would. Software is a tool for performing tasks. Having it allows a user company to perform tasks faster or better. User companies need software to efficiently order supplies, manage customer orders, and bill customers (to name just a few of the more universal tasks).
Would the lack of legal protection discourage companies from publicizing the software they paid to produce, allowing their free-riding competitors to gain the advantage of it without paying? Perhaps, but no more so than with OSS today (the free-riding competitor need not contribute to OSS to utilize OSS).
Might closed software creators take publicly-known software, add to it, and sell it in closed form? Certainly, but they would have to maintain actual secrecy of their additions, since they would have no recourse against anyone who published those additions. Once a piece of closed software was published, there would be no rule against using it. Further, many user companies might decide that they didn't need the closed additions.
The things that could be reliably sold by software companies in the zero-protection scenario are the things that can be sold in OSS today--services, mostly.
Net, in the zero-protection scenario, the volume of publicly known software is likely to increase as fast or faster over time as the volume of OSS increases today.
This is why people persist in storing paper in addition to electronic copies. Most people know how to assess the risks of loss/destruction of stored paper. They understand how to put a process in place that minimizes the significant risks.
To the layman (i.e., suits), risk assessment and mitigation in electronic storage is like magic. How many management levels up do you suppose the first guy was who said, "How could something like this just happen?" Two levels? One? Zero?
There's a certain rhythm to that. It ought to be set to music.
Don't you mean "less people"?
No, actually. Because we can speak about "two people" or "thirty-seven people," it qualifies as a count noun. "People" is just a non-standard plural. Of course, it's not uncommon to hear some one say, informally, "less people", but the rule says that it should be "fewer people."
Like many rules, this one is a good candidate for bending (unless you happen to be a major news periodical). YMMV.
A.
.sig, all of which have different meanings. You have not chosen any of them.
"Ominous" and "rotating" are not coordinate adjectives, so you do not need a comma between them.
Excellent! I learned something today. Thanks.
B.
There are many grammatically correct ways to punctuate your
That would be the point.
C.
This will teach me to stick to one subject at a time. The post was intended to share my humor at the difference between "ready my ship commander" and "ready my ship, commander." The post seems to have gotten side-tracked. I see now that it comes across as pedantic and lacking any sense of humor whatsoever. I, at least, hope not to be either of those things.
I think you meant:
A cloaked Sith lord sits in an ominous, rotating chair aboard the google-star as he reads the law suit. "Excellent. Everything is going precisely as planned. Ready my ship, commander."
---
A panda walks into a bar eats shoots and leaves.
And did the Times really make such an awful grammatical mistake?
I don't know about "awful", but it is wrong. "Operating systems" is a count noun, not a non-count noun. To be sure, fewer people will recognize that it's wrong (and fewer still will know its name) than if the Times had made a common error, like substituting a possessive for a contraction, but that doesn't make it right.
Instead of less mistakes, we should strive for fewer.
--not-your-friendly-neighborhood-grammar-snob
(That'd be my sweetie.)
People are always trying to make new rules for online activities when we have perfectly good rules for regular activities.
Why treat cyber-bullying any differently than in-person bullying? There is no need for separate rules. Surely, bullying is less threatening online than in person. Presumably, there are rules about what in-person behaviors are punishable bullying. Nothing more need be punished online than is punished in person. Indeed, since there is a level of detachment in the online experience (distance, physical safety, etc.), the range of online behaviors that merit punishment should probably be narrower.
Similarly, schools limit their supervision to school grounds and school activities. The same limitation can be applied online. If a school computer or school account wasn't used, then the incident is not the school's business.
Actually, the big difference online is that there is always better evidence available of the behavior in question. Bullies are less likely to get away with bullying online. (Of course, this is why the knee-jerk crowd gets so worked up about cyber-anything. Unlike when Bobbi may or may not have yelled threats at Suzi on the playground, in the online world, we have a copy of the offending email.)
Well, if you start out killing übermonsters, what's the end game like?
Why, you finish by nurturing the underzombies until they achieve personal enlightenment, of course.
From TFA, ". . . survey results showed that those who owned a BlackBerry were, in fact, more likely to work long hours than those who didn't. 19 percent of BlackBerry-owning survey respondents reportedly worked more than 50 hours a week, compared to only 11 percent of the general population."
So, tell me, did the crackberry cause them to work more? Perhaps those who already worked more are the ones who adopted crackberries.
To accurately assess whether the BB increases workload, the survey would need to compare BB users to non-BB users doing the same job.
Ok well to start, you cant fight a philosophy.
You can fight a philosophy. You should fight a bad philosophy. But one fights a bad philosophy with a better philosophy, not with guns or prisons. Guns and prisons are for fighting bad acts.
Nah, this deal affects all of us. It basically says Microsoft is going to start suing users of Linux (except Novell's customers).
Let's put a finer point on the question:
How is MS in any better position to sue anyone after the Novell deal than it was before?
Taxes are the price we pay for being rich, free and alive all at the same time.
(--apologies to Aaron Sorkin)
If this goes through, there would be no need for the Indy event, which would only be held a few months before.
Q: Why did GenCon and WotC spread their events geographically?
A: To reach different audiences.
How in the name of all that is hyped and marketed would the merger of one LA event with another LA event affect the "need for" events in other parts of the country?
In a final 'think of the children' bid, the California Association of Licensed Investigators also opposed the bill, saying it needed to be able to use pretexting to help find missing children, among other things."
Riiiight. Because a carve-out for protecting kids would just have been impossible to write in.
It couldn't be that the real money in PI work might be in divorce/adultery, paparazzi-ing, or industrial disputes.
- 1. Machine allows mis-markings to be corrected until final commit. A voter who mis-marks with a marker must request a fresh ballot and start over.
- 2. Machine has page space to legibly list options in dozens of races and issues. Card stock ballot requires a flip-book or similar.
- 3. Machine's ability to place mark on right spot on ballot can be error-checked before hand. It can also be checked by voter on printout. By hand, voters often unwittingly make mistakes.
- 4. Machine does not make incomplete or ambiguous marks on the page (e.g., hanging chads). (The FL-13 problem would have been solved by the addition of a paper trail.)
- 5. Machines can accommodate the blind, even in other languages.
- 6. Machines can verify voter compliance with rules like "vote for up to three".
Electronic voting machines have lots of problems (e.g., expense, security, repetition of small errors across all ballots). However, it's indisputable that they do things that paper doesn't. The question isn't "how is that better than paper" -- the question is "is that enough better to be worth the tradeoffs".