Yeah, that's what I thought when I was being a jerk on an LA freeway the other day. Just cause there's a black guy driving a nice BMW doesn't mean he's some kinda gangsta' who's gonna pull a gun on me if I don't let him in. Well, when I look over, his passanger was pointing a gun at me. Needless to say I let him in. Just cause it's a stereotype doesn't mean there aren't people who fit it.
Yeah, I live in the LA area, and the bus service is pitiful. I have 2 choices for my 28 mile commute. I can take the bus and get there 2.5 hours later (according to their website, I'm not stupid enough to have tried this yet). Or I can drive (it's more like parking) and get there in an hour. That means my average speed is about 28 mph. That wouldn't be totally unreasonable, except that I'm driving on freeways designed for speeds of 65 (and commonly driven on at speeds of 80+). A good bicyclist could beat me to work (assuming he/she didn't mind riding on freeways, or through south-central).
Yeah, there's nothing more annoying than buying the latest and greatest piece of consumer software (Photoshop, Office, whatever) and finding that the code is underdocumented.
Yeah, the Tivo is "easily expandable" if you're running Linux on a system you built from spare parts and whatever was on sale last week at Frys. If you have trouble programming your VCR, expanding a Tivo is comparable to replacing a transmission on your car. Last I checked (4 months ago) it not only required some fairly serious hardware tinkering, but you also needed a machine running some form of Linux to set up the drive.
Maybe it's just me, but I often seem to record two shows at once. Especially if you have movie channels (I used to, but not anymore) you're likely to be recording a movie at the same time as some prime time show (The Simpsons?)
Actually, I've occasionally had mine crash. Sometimes something will go wrong when it records a show (or at least that's what appears to be happening). So you start seeing 0.5 frames per second for a few seconds, then the whole thing locks up and has to be power cycled. It's not very common (it's happened twice in 6 months ), but they do occasionally crash. Not to mention the fact that it's incredibly slow to respond to commands from the remote. I would have been pretty dissapointed if I had to pay for the box, but since I got it free, I love the thing.
Why would they be required to release their source? They're not selling the encoder itself, they're selling the results of it. What you're suggesting is equivalent to my saying that anyone who compiles code with gcc has to release that code as open source since it was created with an open source tool.
Yeah, I wouldn't be too worried about going to Snowbird either, considering the fact that : THE OLYMPICS AREN'T AT SNOWBIRD. For someone so excited about going, I'm surprised you don't even know the venues
Try Dance Dance REvolution. Yeah it sounds stupid, and you always end up looking like an uncoordinated freak, but it makes a great party gaem. You just have to convince people to try it once.
You guys might want to check out DIRECTV. It doesn't matter how many people live in your area, the picture quality is the same. I've had it for a few weeks now, and haven't noticed any compression problems. When you plug it in through an S-Video hook-up, the picture quality is pretty impressive. It costs about the same as digital cable, the only catch is that you need to have a view of the southern sky.
Actualy, this is not price fixing (as mentioned by numerous posts). It's actually called price discrimination. This is where a firm charges different prices to different customers based on their buying habits, or any number of other factors.
An excellent example of this is a form of price discrimination that I personally am a big fan of (at least until I graduate). When you go to a movie theater there are usually at least two ticket prices. One price for normal people, and one for students. This student discount is not because the theaters think movies are educational, or because they feel sorry for poor students. Instead, it's because students tend to have the time and inclination to watch more movies, and therefore by lowering the ticket price, the theaters actually sell more tickets, and make more money. If the price were lowered for adults however, it would cause the theaters to lose money, because my parents would still only watch 2 movies a year, but pay less for them.
Amazon is doing the same thing here, but with a much finer resolution. Instead of dividing consumers into general groups, they're looking at each individual consumer. This will be beneficial for some consumers, but not for others. However, no matter what it will benefit amazon, which is the entire point of the exercise. You're welcome to suggest that making profits is immoral, but I personally feel that that's the entire point of a company (and for that matter an individual).
While reading these posts I was trying to think of a way to intelligently filter out only porn sites. I think one of the more important criteria in filtering (from my point of view) is that nothing appropriate gets filtered. So if you're willing to let a few sites slip by you might be able to create a filter list using web indexes (not search engines, but indexes where the sites are categorized). If you take yahoo, excite, etc and do an automatic search of their pron categories, you could then add all of those URL's to your blocking list. It's extremely unlikely that you will block anything that you don't mean to if you use this approrach. There will be a few sites that you miss, but they will be hard to find unless you use a search engine that happens to pull up some site that hasn't been indexed. So using some sort of system like this should prevent the casual user from finding porn while blocking nothing useful.
What's the most riduculous conspiracy theory that you have heard about yourselves? Is there any particular movie or book that you all laugh at as an inside joke (e.g. Mercury Rising) becuase of the way it misrepresents the NSA?
There's a huge difference between the a car and the music contained on a CD. If you tear up the car and sell it piece by piece (or give it away) you can only sell each piece once. However with a CD, you can sell/give away each track an infinite number of times.This is why it is stealing to share the data containedd on a CD. Of course it is not stealing to sell the CD itself, because then you are only selling a single copy of what you paid for.
Oh, and not only do I not own any illegal MP3s, I in fact own NO MP3s. That's right, zero. I just prefer having physical media. Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but for me I prefer having a CD so that I can listen to my music wherever I am (without having to purchase new playback devices).
This really isn't a new situation, and if the judge does ban him, it is not setting a precedent. Earlier this year (or maybe it was late last year), the rec.skiing.alpine newsgroup pretty much erupted in an all-out flame war which got to the point of threats of physical violence (there were reports of people visiting other people's houses late at night). The situation got to the point where the police were called, and eventually the courts placed a restraining order on TwoBuddah (who was making the threats). Anyway, the newsgroup calmed down nicely.
The point of this story (I think there was a slashdot article on it earlier) is that banning a user from a public service has been done before (although in this case it was a Washington state court I believe), and was in fact successful. The person in question definitely deserved banishment, as he was disrupting a public place (just like a drunkard can be forcibly removed from a department store if he is bothering the customers), so I don't see any problem with asking for legal intervention in the banning of a person from EBay, so long as his behavior warrants it (which appears to be the case here).
Did anyone else notice that the example they gave of the kid crashing the phone company resulted in a VERY flawed punishment. Sure he has to do community service and pay that huge fine, but not being allowed to use a computer with a modem is no big deal at all. I'm sitting in my dorm room fully connected to the internet right now, yet I don't have a modem. So how do I do it? That's right, I have a T1 connection through an ethernet card! No modem, but I can still do all sorts of bad things (well, if I knew what I was doing and had the deisre). So either the DOJ paraphrased the verdict, or the judge in the case was a complete moron!
The story about the lady mocrowaving her dog is simply an urban legend. See www.snopes.com under the curious critters/Beastly Mishaps section you will find the reference to this legend. It is of indeterminate origin, which means that the lawsuit is not real. Anyways, I don't think someone else should be telling me when I have the right to sue or not. If they do, doesn't that give the government/courts a lot of extra control over me? (Admittedly they do need the right to quickly through the suit out, but they should not restrict the filing of suits).
This is one of those cases where it might be nice to block out a specific IP address, since this guy has been doing this stuff all over Slashdot. Or, at least we could get some moderators to moderate this stuff down to -10^100 or so.
Can you imagine the headlines if a teacher with a gun had prevented it? ("Teacher pulls gun on students, 2 dead") No matter what, this was going to be a lose-lose situation. You have 2 kids who want to kill people, and don't care if they go down too. No matter what, you have a minimum of 2 deaths. And it seems unlikely that anyone would shoot at them before they had killed at least one or two other students.
As a side note, despite the incredible proliferation of kids who carry guns to school, not a single other student at this school had a gun? hmmmmmm, maybe the media is exaggerating the gun problem in our schools. I also have to admit that I am shocked that no one (in particular the media) has mentioned the fact that this is incredibly similar to the scene in the Matrix where they walk into the building and start shooting everything in sight.
This incident has led me to believe that there really can't be any such thing as a safe school. I'm not really sure how this can be solved, as the only possible solutions would seem to lie with either airport style security, or with a massive change in the way shildren are raised (personally, I think I was raised pretty well, as I have never had a desire to harm anyone).
Is it just me, or is it kind of unfair the way many of those sites are grouped together? Counting the Microsoft homepage as one would be fair, but when you add in all the unrelated hits at MSN and Link Exchange, it really stops being a single web site, but rather a collection of sites that happen to be owned by the same corporation
I seem to remember getting a message on a similar topic a few weeks ago (it was a totally different message though, so it probably wasn't from the same source). It seems unlikely to me that a government would use spam as a form of propoganda, seeing as it is a highly distrusted form of information. (It would be kind of like using graffiti as propoganda). Just a guess, but this type of message is probably from the same group of people that send out the "I'm dying from cancer please keep this chain mail alive so that I can stay alive....." nonsense.
I would agree with this, and in fact add, that perhaps there are a lot of people out there who read a lot more than they post, and as such they would make really good moderators, since they wouldn't be forced to choose between posting for an article or moderating it. In fact, there are probably quite a few lurkers without accounts who would make great moderators, so maybe you could have some sort of system that allows frequent readers to moderate.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that's what I thought when I was being a jerk on an LA freeway the other day. Just cause there's a black guy driving a nice BMW doesn't mean he's some kinda gangsta' who's gonna pull a gun on me if I don't let him in. Well, when I look over, his passanger was pointing a gun at me. Needless to say I let him in. Just cause it's a stereotype doesn't mean there aren't people who fit it.
Yeah, I live in the LA area, and the bus service is pitiful. I have 2 choices for my 28 mile commute. I can take the bus and get there 2.5 hours later (according to their website, I'm not stupid enough to have tried this yet). Or I can drive (it's more like parking) and get there in an hour. That means my average speed is about 28 mph. That wouldn't be totally unreasonable, except that I'm driving on freeways designed for speeds of 65 (and commonly driven on at speeds of 80+). A good bicyclist could beat me to work (assuming he/she didn't mind riding on freeways, or through south-central).
Yeah, there's nothing more annoying than buying the latest and greatest piece of consumer software (Photoshop, Office, whatever) and finding that the code is underdocumented.
Wow, someone really went to a lot of trouble to read the article.
If you'd read it, you would have noted that they do rent porns.
Yeah, the Tivo is "easily expandable" if you're running Linux on a system you built from spare parts and whatever was on sale last week at Frys. If you have trouble programming your VCR, expanding a Tivo is comparable to replacing a transmission on your car. Last I checked (4 months ago) it not only required some fairly serious hardware tinkering, but you also needed a machine running some form of Linux to set up the drive.
If you've got the DirecTV Tivo (I think) or an UltimateTV, you can watch both simultaneously.
Maybe it's just me, but I often seem to record two shows at once. Especially if you have movie channels (I used to, but not anymore) you're likely to be recording a movie at the same time as some prime time show (The Simpsons?)
Actually, I've occasionally had mine crash. Sometimes something will go wrong when it records a show (or at least that's what appears to be happening). So you start seeing 0.5 frames per second for a few seconds, then the whole thing locks up and has to be power cycled. It's not very common (it's happened twice in 6 months ), but they do occasionally crash. Not to mention the fact that it's incredibly slow to respond to commands from the remote. I would have been pretty dissapointed if I had to pay for the box, but since I got it free, I love the thing.
Why would they be required to release their source? They're not selling the encoder itself, they're selling the results of it. What you're suggesting is equivalent to my saying that anyone who compiles code with gcc has to release that code as open source since it was created with an open source tool.
Yeah, I wouldn't be too worried about going to Snowbird either, considering the fact that : THE OLYMPICS AREN'T AT SNOWBIRD. For someone so excited about going, I'm surprised you don't even know the venues
Try Dance Dance REvolution. Yeah it sounds stupid, and you always end up looking like an uncoordinated freak, but it makes a great party gaem. You just have to convince people to try it once.
You guys might want to check out DIRECTV. It doesn't matter how many people live in your area, the picture quality is the same. I've had it for a few weeks now, and haven't noticed any compression problems. When you plug it in through an S-Video hook-up, the picture quality is pretty impressive. It costs about the same as digital cable, the only catch is that you need to have a view of the southern sky.
Actualy, this is not price fixing (as mentioned by numerous posts). It's actually called price discrimination. This is where a firm charges different prices to different customers based on their buying habits, or any number of other factors. An excellent example of this is a form of price discrimination that I personally am a big fan of (at least until I graduate). When you go to a movie theater there are usually at least two ticket prices. One price for normal people, and one for students. This student discount is not because the theaters think movies are educational, or because they feel sorry for poor students. Instead, it's because students tend to have the time and inclination to watch more movies, and therefore by lowering the ticket price, the theaters actually sell more tickets, and make more money. If the price were lowered for adults however, it would cause the theaters to lose money, because my parents would still only watch 2 movies a year, but pay less for them. Amazon is doing the same thing here, but with a much finer resolution. Instead of dividing consumers into general groups, they're looking at each individual consumer. This will be beneficial for some consumers, but not for others. However, no matter what it will benefit amazon, which is the entire point of the exercise. You're welcome to suggest that making profits is immoral, but I personally feel that that's the entire point of a company (and for that matter an individual).
Wow, sounds like someone's been playing Asteroids too much.
While reading these posts I was trying to think of a way to intelligently filter out only porn sites. I think one of the more important criteria in filtering (from my point of view) is that nothing appropriate gets filtered. So if you're willing to let a few sites slip by you might be able to create a filter list using web indexes (not search engines, but indexes where the sites are categorized). If you take yahoo, excite, etc and do an automatic search of their pron categories, you could then add all of those URL's to your blocking list. It's extremely unlikely that you will block anything that you don't mean to if you use this approrach. There will be a few sites that you miss, but they will be hard to find unless you use a search engine that happens to pull up some site that hasn't been indexed. So using some sort of system like this should prevent the casual user from finding porn while blocking nothing useful.
What's the most riduculous conspiracy theory that you have heard about yourselves? Is there any particular movie or book that you all laugh at as an inside joke (e.g. Mercury Rising) becuase of the way it misrepresents the NSA?
There's a huge difference between the a car and the music contained on a CD. If you tear up the car and sell it piece by piece (or give it away) you can only sell each piece once. However with a CD, you can sell/give away each track an infinite number of times.This is why it is stealing to share the data containedd on a CD. Of course it is not stealing to sell the CD itself, because then you are only selling a single copy of what you paid for.
Oh, and not only do I not own any illegal MP3s, I in fact own NO MP3s. That's right, zero. I just prefer having physical media. Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but for me I prefer having a CD so that I can listen to my music wherever I am (without having to purchase new playback devices).
This really isn't a new situation, and if the judge does ban him, it is not setting a precedent. Earlier this year (or maybe it was late last year), the rec.skiing.alpine newsgroup pretty much erupted in an all-out flame war which got to the point of threats of physical violence (there were reports of people visiting other people's houses late at night). The situation got to the point where the police were called, and eventually the courts placed a restraining order on TwoBuddah (who was making the threats). Anyway, the newsgroup calmed down nicely.
The point of this story (I think there was a slashdot article on it earlier) is that banning a user from a public service has been done before (although in this case it was a Washington state court I believe), and was in fact successful. The person in question definitely deserved banishment, as he was disrupting a public place (just like a drunkard can be forcibly removed from a department store if he is bothering the customers), so I don't see any problem with asking for legal intervention in the banning of a person from EBay, so long as his behavior warrants it (which appears to be the case here).
Did anyone else notice that the example they gave of the kid crashing the phone company resulted in a VERY flawed punishment. Sure he has to do community service and pay that huge fine, but not being allowed to use a computer with a modem is no big deal at all. I'm sitting in my dorm room fully connected to the internet right now, yet I don't have a modem. So how do I do it? That's right, I have a T1 connection through an ethernet card! No modem, but I can still do all sorts of bad things (well, if I knew what I was doing and had the deisre). So either the DOJ paraphrased the verdict, or the judge in the case was a complete moron!
The story about the lady mocrowaving her dog is simply an urban legend. See www.snopes.com under the curious critters/Beastly Mishaps section you will find the reference to this legend. It is of indeterminate origin, which means that the lawsuit is not real. Anyways, I don't think someone else should be telling me when I have the right to sue or not. If they do, doesn't that give the government/courts a lot of extra control over me? (Admittedly they do need the right to quickly through the suit out, but they should not restrict the filing of suits).
This is one of those cases where it might be nice to block out a specific IP address, since this guy has been doing this stuff all over Slashdot. Or, at least we could get some moderators to moderate this stuff down to -10^100 or so.
Can you imagine the headlines if a teacher with a gun had prevented it? ("Teacher pulls gun on students, 2 dead") No matter what, this was going to be a lose-lose situation. You have 2 kids who want to kill people, and don't care if they go down too. No matter what, you have a minimum of 2 deaths. And it seems unlikely that anyone would shoot at them before they had killed at least one or two other students.
As a side note, despite the incredible proliferation of kids who carry guns to school, not a single other student at this school had a gun? hmmmmmm, maybe the media is exaggerating the gun problem in our schools. I also have to admit that I am shocked that no one (in particular the media) has mentioned the fact that this is incredibly similar to the scene in the Matrix where they walk into the building and start shooting everything in sight.
This incident has led me to believe that there really can't be any such thing as a safe school. I'm not really sure how this can be solved, as the only possible solutions would seem to lie with either airport style security, or with a massive change in the way shildren are raised (personally, I think I was raised pretty well, as I have never had a desire to harm anyone).
Is it just me, or is it kind of unfair the way many of those sites are grouped together? Counting the Microsoft homepage as one would be fair, but when you add in all the unrelated hits at MSN and Link Exchange, it really stops being a single web site, but rather a collection of sites that happen to be owned by the same corporation
I seem to remember getting a message on a similar topic a few weeks ago (it was a totally different message though, so it probably wasn't from the same source). It seems unlikely to me that a government would use spam as a form of propoganda, seeing as it is a highly distrusted form of information. (It would be kind of like using graffiti as propoganda). Just a guess, but this type of message is probably from the same group of people that send out the "I'm dying from cancer please keep this chain mail alive so that I can stay alive....." nonsense.
I would agree with this, and in fact add, that perhaps there are a lot of people out there who read a lot more than they post, and as such they would make really good moderators, since they wouldn't be forced to choose between posting for an article or moderating it. In fact, there are probably quite a few lurkers without accounts who would make great moderators, so maybe you could have some sort of system that allows frequent readers to moderate.