How big a pain in the ass is RAW conversions? Since it's lossless you don't have to worry about conversion artifacts, and it shouldn't take very long. Reading between the lines of the Adobe press release its sounds like most RAW files are based on TIFF. It sounds like writing conversion filters would be easy, and therefore every editor would have one for every major RAW format.
So clearly I'm missing something; can you fill me in? Perhaps "not very long" times a thousand pictures on the camera becomes a real pain?
(I don't even own a digital camera; I'm just a curious programmer.)
Uh, yeah. Blame P2P software. Not because it's peer-to-peer, or because you're using it to download illegal music, but rather because of the fast-and-loose way its users play with the rules.
There are many valid, legal uses for P2P software. Unfortunately, many (I'd venture to say most) use it illegally. In all likelihood, the user that the poster complains about was using it that way.
But that's not what concerns me. What concerns me is that users who are willing to illegally download copyrighted music (not counting all the high-minded, fair-use-encouraging, fighting-for-the-musician-against-the-RIAA slashdotters, of course) will not necessarily check that the software they download is free of spyware. Indeed, they'll likely skip over the part of the EULA which says, "Warning: we're going to report everything including your shoe size".
The P2P software is an excellent vector for spyware and viruses to enter the system. Users download it deliberately. Then they execute it, and not even Linux can distinguish between spyware and valid programs. (Linux tries to prevent you from doing it as root, which MS does a lousy job of, but spyware and viruses could do plenty of damage in user mode if somebody were to write such.) It's never installed by the adminstrators, since it's rarely work-related, so it's never vetted for quality. And because it's illegal for the use many users put it to, they're unlikely to come to the administrators for help when there are problems.
I assure you, there's plenty of blame to go around: the users for installing software for dubious purposes, Microsoft for failing to secure their OS, and all the others you mentioned. But do not forget, either, that some blame goes to those who those who write P2P software and then include spyware (deliberately) and viruses (inadvertently or otherwise).
They say you can't con an honest man. It's not true, of course, but greed is a great entry past somebody's common sense. In this user's case it could have been anything: p2p software, a worm, another trojan, or in all likelihood a combination of factors. If he's tracked down the vector to some piece of P2P software, it wouldn't surprise me if he's at least partially right.
His solution? There are few good ones. Banning Outlook is an excellent start, but a properly patched Outlook client isn't much of a hazard any more. A more draconian policy towards software installation will help, at substantial cost to convenience. A switch to Linux will help more through hybrid vigor than actual security; if enough people go there they'll start slipping Gator into Linux P2P clients. Educating users is always valuable but it's expensive and imperfect. Locking down the network is best; it at least helps eliminate the spread of viruses, but at a cost of higher administration expenses.
One of the first ones I'd say is, "No P2P software until you can show that you're using it for valid reasons, and then only after I've approved the particular piece of software you want to use."
I think that was less true for Fellowship. When the extended Fellowship came out, Jackson said repeatedly that the theatrical version was the "real" one and that the extended one was for fanboys who couldn't get enough. And in most senses he was right: the additional footage added almost nothing to the story.
He kinda dropped that line of reasoning when Two Towers came out extended. Important plot points had been cut. If you're gonna mess with the character of Faramir, at least show us your entire reworking of his story; otherwise, he just comes off looking like a jerk.
There are certainly places where RotK needs additional footage, and I'm looking forward to seeing it.
I'm not gay and I live in Maryland, but I have many friends who are gay and I live right next to Virginia, which makes me "close enough".
That's why I picked Virginia as the end point of my little domino theory. I mentioned "decades" in my post. People in Virginia are already watching gay men on TV. Liberal northern Virginia is growing faster than conservative southern Virginia.
As for the nonrecognition clause, we'll see if that holds up to be constitutional. I'm hoping not, but I wish I could be surer: since it's clear that not every potential marriage is legal (you can't marry an end table), then in the absence of a legal definition allowing it "strict construction" probably assumes that the founders meant one man and one woman.
On the other hand, states are regularly forced to recognize marriages illegal in their state (underage marriages; marriages between cousins; in times past, interracial marriages) so I can still hope. We'll see who gets to nominate the next Supreme Court justice.
Secular and religious marriage have been intertwined for thousands of years. I very much concur that it's time to disentangle the two, but it won't be easy. The people who are fighting to "preserve" marriage as one man and one woman will fight even harder to preserve what the would see as an attack on the institution itself. If you tell people that you want goverment to have "zero involvement in defining marriage" they'll take that as "the government wants to abolish marriage". Especially if what you replace it with offends them.
They're wrong, but in a democracy when 51% of the people are wrong they're suddenly right. It's unhappy but true.
Which means that the fight has to move to different grounds. You're probably a programmer, and programmers hate hacking solutions to things; it feels bad and wrong. But in government it's not about what's right, it's about what can be accomplished. "Politics is the art of the possible," said Otto von Bismarck.
Why am I telling you this? Because I think that if you want to see us get to the right place (the one you propose), you'll never get there by the direct route (convincing people that you're right). A better strategy, I think, is to fight to keep the situation from getting worse (preventing a constitutional amendment, which is easy, because it's pretty much self-preventing).
But what you really have to do is to do exactly the wrong thing: get various local adminstrations to change their idea of marriage. That strengthens the bond between civil and religious marriage, because you've just increased the set of people with an interest in the entanglement. But it does gradually force people (over decades) to expand their idea of marriage. If they see that Massachusetts hasn't collapsed into moral ruin, then they'll accept it in New York, then Maryland, then... maybe Virginia? Wouldn't that be something?
It sucks, it really does. I want things to be right. I want laws to be like computer programs: a minimal set of exactly the right code. But politics, unlike software, is a compromise.
I'd dispute that Iraq was a "functioning state": it was already quarantined from the rest of the world by UN-imposed sanctions. People in it were starving by the thousands because the government refused to accede to the demands that would have lifted the sanctions.
That's still not necessarily sufficient reason to invade it without clear evidence of imminent danger; I don't disagree with your overall argument. There are plenty of more dysfunctional but non-oil-bearing states that we never raise a hand against. I'm just quibbling with your description of Iraq as functional. It may be worse now as a terrorist playground, but the best you could describe it as beforehand was "functioning" and I'd dispute even that.
Presumably, they're both low-level computers. To reach a particular level you'd need at least X megahertz _AND_ Y megabytes. It's just a convenience to be able to say, "You need at least a 3 computer to play this game".
A 3 GHz processor coupled to only 64 MB RAM probably wouldn't be able to play the games intended for a computer with 2 GHz and a more reasonable 128 MB. Neither would the 1.4 GHz/512 MB. So the answer to "what if" is that each computer you mention would have a substantial limitation and therefore would qualify for only a low level (say a 5), whereas the software would require a 7.
Yeah, you may be able to use one or the other for a particular game. But this allows software sellers to commit to one particular minimum set of requirements and designate it with an easy-to-remember number (rather than a combination of processor, ram, video, etc.)
It's a convenience, not an absolute system for saying "this system is better than that system." The goal isn't to compare computers to each other, but to software. We currently do that with a clunky set of numbers; this is easier (but less precise).
I think that they want another set of emergency broadcast frequencies, perhaps to do a spread-spectrum sort of thing for noisy environments. But most of the bandwith is going to be sold off for cell phones and other wireless devices.
I suppose it doesn't surprise me that channel surfing is slow. The point of compression is to make better use of bandwidth at the cost of smarter components. A regular TV only has to lock on to the signal; a DTV has to lock on and decode it. Theoretically that should take only a fraction of a second, but more on that in a moment.
I'm disappointed to hear that over-the-air DTV broadcasts are so full of stalls and artifacts in noisy environments. I don't have one myself, so I can't confirm your experience, but it's common in telecommunications to broadcast redundant bits (with a Hamming code, for example) and smear them out so that a burst event (like a lightning strike) still allows you to reassemble an entire frame.
I can see that effect contributing to slower channel surfing. If a frame is smeared out over one second, it could well take that long for the first frame to appear, no matter how fast your processing is, but subsequent frames still appear every 1/30th of a second after that. That'll definitely slow down an experienced channel surfer.
Durable interference will break that scheme, but the point of granting a monopoly is that you shouldn't get that kind of interference, at least not from man-made sources. Perhaps a better antenna would help. Or perhaps the FCC needs to take a look at who's dumping garbage into the radio spectrum near your house.
1. The new technology makes more efficient use of the bandwidth
2. The bandwidth currently being used by TV signals is particularly valuable set of frequencies. One important potential use of it is for emergency communications, which couldn't be done as well at the higher frequencies to which the TV networks are being moved. (I believe that has to do with the better penetration capability of the lower frequencies, while the relatively immobile TV receiver can use an exertnal antenna. But I'm not certain of this.)
A corollary to #1 and #2 is that the bandwidth can be resold to wireless providers for a lot of money, thus netting a windfall for the US budget and decreasing the deficit.
Oh, BTW: you probably won't actually get the Simpsons in higher quality. The DTV standard allows them to subdivide the signals, so they get to pump you the Vikings losing AND the Redskins losing AND the Red Sox losing at the same quality as you already had.
The upshot: it's not about quality; it's about efficient allocation of bandwidth and the ability of the US consumer to have more options and make some money off the sale of bandwidth. (Not enough, to my tastes: the TV networks make vast sums of money off that bandwidth, because an awful lot of people enjoy what they're producing.)
That may not be sufficient reason for you to outweigh the price of the digital tuners, but there are reasons.
The article is actually rather devoid of information. If you want real data, you gotta go to the source: The Library of Congress.
For example, many articles in this thread have talked about them burying the the notice in the EULA. From the House bill:
The notice clearly distinguishes such notice from any other information visually presented contemporaneously on the protected computer.
They call that "clear and conspicuous notice in plain language", and it goes on from there.
As for enforcement: there's less spyware than spam. Spyware takes time to write, and it takes time to make it useful enough that dumb users install it. Claria is easily tracked down, and if they don't ask "This program will collect and transmit information about you. Do you accept?", they go to jail. Stupid users will click anyway, but "Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain" (Frederick Schiller).
The solution isn't perfect: some malware writers will just move offshore, for example. But I have reason to believe that this legislation will do at least some good.
You're referring to the winner-take-all system within each state. That's actually up to the states. If you were in Maine or Nevada, they send electors to the electoral college proportionately to the number of votes each gets.
That's still not quite one-man-one-vote, which is certainly the simplest to understand and the most clearly fair. As a sibling post to this points out, there are reasons to increase the electoral power of some states, as a compromise. There are other reasons as well: it tends to limit the effect of recounts, for one thing.
I'm not particularly standing up for the electoral college at this point; with a closely divided country it seems clearly unfair. But the Republicans in New York and the Democrats in Texas have only other New Yorkers and Texans to blame for the winner-take-all policy you're complaining about. They could change it at any time (and Colorado is thinking of doing just that.)
I'd love to have people think of "science" in terms closer to its root scientia, "knowledge". Bad science isn't just bad decisions on matters filled with people called "scientists" (environment, medicine, basic research). Bad science is bad thinking.
Science is many things, but among them is a collection of techniques for removing bias, self-deception, and self-interest from decision making. These are techniques that scientists usually apply every single day in their personal lives. I'd love to see the same sort of intellectual rigor applied to the very areas you mention.
Sadly, that's not how most people see science. They partition it off as a separate category and see certain issues as "science" and everything else as... well, other things: politics, religion, ideology, values. There are places for these things, but to draw the line and say, "No, rational thought stops here, I believe what I believe and it must be that way" makes for difficult policy, especially when your politics/religion/ideology/values conflict with mine.
Science is far from perfect, and those who call themselves scientists are hardly immune to human foibles, even in their work. But I'd like to see it go a lot further.
That's interesting. In theory poker is a zero-sum game. Less than that, since the house takes a cut. You're taking money only from other people, and minus the house's cut the game is even. Perfect bots playing each other is a wash.
So the whole point is to get slightly higher odds than somebody else. Even a tiny advantage is the difference between winning and losing money, if that's your game. Many people play just for fun, and their losses are effectively payment for that. You see that all the time at 21, where simple card counting strategies can win you small sums of money but most people don't wish to expend the effort for that; they're playing just for fun.
Personally I kinda like the idea of bots playing each other. It's nerds playing each other at a totally different game. Humans still have heuristics that out-play the best chess programs, but only barely (a handful of people will just barely beat the top software, at best. The rest of us get creamed.)
When they got Stephen Fry to play Jeeves in the TV series, people complained because he was too young to play the role. They had an older guy in mind from reading the books. But Fry knocked the role out of the park; maybe they were hoping for the same succeess.
Breeding life on Mars has the tendency to affect the entire planet all at once. The poster was talking about changing the entire atmosphere, which will weather the rocks differently and change the chemistry at least meters if not kilometers down. That will make it hard to determine, for example, if there ever was life. I'd kinda like to spend a few centuries examining the planet in its pristine state first.
I don't think Columbus should have waited before crossing the Atlantic, but I'd have preferred it if Cortez and Pizarro hadn't destroyed the Aztec and Inca cultures before we got a good look at them. Not just because they were human beings (there aren't any on Mars) but also because a lot of the knowledge they represented has been lost.
I'd just as soon leave it alone. We don't encounter new planets every day, and I'd really hate to have future generations say, "If only they'd left it alone rather than screwed it up." History is full of well-meaning scientists who didn't understand what they were doing and therefore lost valuable information. How many artifacts have been cut open or broken before we had X-rays and CAT scans?
Humanity will be around for a long, long time. There will be plenty of opportunities to seed Mars with whatever we want, but only one chance to see the untouched Mars and perform experiments we haven't yet conceived.
Ah, blast, I had meant to tone down the confidence on my answers a bit (especially the sentence you pointed out). I am NOT a lawyer, just an educated layman, and was just trying to help out a bit.
The AC above is right. The limitation of liability applies to the individuals in the partnership.
In a plain old partnership, the company is just a group of people. If somebody sues the business, they're really suing the owners. In an LLC the company is a separate entity and the individuals are not completely responsible for it, like in a regular corporation.
This potentially leads to the sort of abuses they documented in The Corporation, in which they likened a company to a sociopathic human, with the rights of a person but no conscience. But the overall goal is a good one: allow people to form partnerships without making one person completely responsible for the misdeeds of the other.
It also creates an object that you can sell; that is, if you own a piece of an LLC you can break off the partnership by selling it to somebody else. That sort of liquidity makes funding new companies a lot more flexible.
For the most part think of "LLC" as just like "Inc" or "Co" attached to the name. There are tax differences (the income of the company is treated as income of the partners), but the liability issues are more like corporations than like partnerships or sole proprietorships.
That's just the legal answer to your point. The article, itself, appears to be a troll.
It doesn't give any real indication about what the story is about. It does give away a few apparent plot points, but not any story twists that I can tell. (Not having seen the movie yet I can't say if some of those moments turn out to be crucial plot points, but they don't feel that way). It's full of "moments", one-second vignettes that reveal a bit of character and tell a joke without telling you much about the story.
So basically if you want to go into it totally unaware of how it's going to go, skip the trailer. Especially if you're already convinced you're going to see it. If you're looking for a good reason to see it, but don't want to know anything about it going in, well, there I can't help you. The marketing guys make the trailer to try to convince you to come see it, and they usually have to give away some of their A material to convince you that it's worth your eight bucks. In this case it doesn't look like they're giving you all the good jokes in the movie.
And if I've spoiled the movie for you by revealing that it's humorous, I apologize.
In theory it pays for itself. Penatlies for spamming include substantial fines. I'm not sure how good federal prosecutors are at actually getting their hands on that money (since much of it is probably sitting in offshore accounts; ever notice that many spammers live in Florda, a boat ride away from those offshore islands) but if they can collect it it's significantly more than the bounty.
Maybe we can get two spammers to turn in each other. Sure, they'd both get the bounty, but then we'd sentence them to the same jail cell. That's reality TV I'd watch.
Slashdot Mirror
How big a pain in the ass is RAW conversions? Since it's lossless you don't have to worry about conversion artifacts, and it shouldn't take very long. Reading between the lines of the Adobe press release its sounds like most RAW files are based on TIFF. It sounds like writing conversion filters would be easy, and therefore every editor would have one for every major RAW format.
So clearly I'm missing something; can you fill me in? Perhaps "not very long" times a thousand pictures on the camera becomes a real pain?
(I don't even own a digital camera; I'm just a curious programmer.)
Uh, yeah. Blame P2P software. Not because it's peer-to-peer, or because you're using it to download illegal music, but rather because of the fast-and-loose way its users play with the rules.
There are many valid, legal uses for P2P software. Unfortunately, many (I'd venture to say most) use it illegally. In all likelihood, the user that the poster complains about was using it that way.
But that's not what concerns me. What concerns me is that users who are willing to illegally download copyrighted music (not counting all the high-minded, fair-use-encouraging, fighting-for-the-musician-against-the-RIAA slashdotters, of course) will not necessarily check that the software they download is free of spyware. Indeed, they'll likely skip over the part of the EULA which says, "Warning: we're going to report everything including your shoe size".
The P2P software is an excellent vector for spyware and viruses to enter the system. Users download it deliberately. Then they execute it, and not even Linux can distinguish between spyware and valid programs. (Linux tries to prevent you from doing it as root, which MS does a lousy job of, but spyware and viruses could do plenty of damage in user mode if somebody were to write such.) It's never installed by the adminstrators, since it's rarely work-related, so it's never vetted for quality. And because it's illegal for the use many users put it to, they're unlikely to come to the administrators for help when there are problems.
I assure you, there's plenty of blame to go around: the users for installing software for dubious purposes, Microsoft for failing to secure their OS, and all the others you mentioned. But do not forget, either, that some blame goes to those who those who write P2P software and then include spyware (deliberately) and viruses (inadvertently or otherwise).
They say you can't con an honest man. It's not true, of course, but greed is a great entry past somebody's common sense. In this user's case it could have been anything: p2p software, a worm, another trojan, or in all likelihood a combination of factors. If he's tracked down the vector to some piece of P2P software, it wouldn't surprise me if he's at least partially right.
His solution? There are few good ones. Banning Outlook is an excellent start, but a properly patched Outlook client isn't much of a hazard any more. A more draconian policy towards software installation will help, at substantial cost to convenience. A switch to Linux will help more through hybrid vigor than actual security; if enough people go there they'll start slipping Gator into Linux P2P clients. Educating users is always valuable but it's expensive and imperfect. Locking down the network is best; it at least helps eliminate the spread of viruses, but at a cost of higher administration expenses.
One of the first ones I'd say is, "No P2P software until you can show that you're using it for valid reasons, and then only after I've approved the particular piece of software you want to use."
I think that was less true for Fellowship. When the extended Fellowship came out, Jackson said repeatedly that the theatrical version was the "real" one and that the extended one was for fanboys who couldn't get enough. And in most senses he was right: the additional footage added almost nothing to the story.
He kinda dropped that line of reasoning when Two Towers came out extended. Important plot points had been cut. If you're gonna mess with the character of Faramir, at least show us your entire reworking of his story; otherwise, he just comes off looking like a jerk.
There are certainly places where RotK needs additional footage, and I'm looking forward to seeing it.
I'm not gay and I live in Maryland, but I have many friends who are gay and I live right next to Virginia, which makes me "close enough".
That's why I picked Virginia as the end point of my little domino theory. I mentioned "decades" in my post. People in Virginia are already watching gay men on TV. Liberal northern Virginia is growing faster than conservative southern Virginia.
As for the nonrecognition clause, we'll see if that holds up to be constitutional. I'm hoping not, but I wish I could be surer: since it's clear that not every potential marriage is legal (you can't marry an end table), then in the absence of a legal definition allowing it "strict construction" probably assumes that the founders meant one man and one woman.
On the other hand, states are regularly forced to recognize marriages illegal in their state (underage marriages; marriages between cousins; in times past, interracial marriages) so I can still hope. We'll see who gets to nominate the next Supreme Court justice.
Secular and religious marriage have been intertwined for thousands of years. I very much concur that it's time to disentangle the two, but it won't be easy. The people who are fighting to "preserve" marriage as one man and one woman will fight even harder to preserve what the would see as an attack on the institution itself. If you tell people that you want goverment to have "zero involvement in defining marriage" they'll take that as "the government wants to abolish marriage". Especially if what you replace it with offends them.
They're wrong, but in a democracy when 51% of the people are wrong they're suddenly right. It's unhappy but true.
Which means that the fight has to move to different grounds. You're probably a programmer, and programmers hate hacking solutions to things; it feels bad and wrong. But in government it's not about what's right, it's about what can be accomplished. "Politics is the art of the possible," said Otto von Bismarck.
Why am I telling you this? Because I think that if you want to see us get to the right place (the one you propose), you'll never get there by the direct route (convincing people that you're right). A better strategy, I think, is to fight to keep the situation from getting worse (preventing a constitutional amendment, which is easy, because it's pretty much self-preventing).
But what you really have to do is to do exactly the wrong thing: get various local adminstrations to change their idea of marriage. That strengthens the bond between civil and religious marriage, because you've just increased the set of people with an interest in the entanglement. But it does gradually force people (over decades) to expand their idea of marriage. If they see that Massachusetts hasn't collapsed into moral ruin, then they'll accept it in New York, then Maryland, then... maybe Virginia? Wouldn't that be something?
It sucks, it really does. I want things to be right. I want laws to be like computer programs: a minimal set of exactly the right code. But politics, unlike software, is a compromise.
I'd dispute that Iraq was a "functioning state": it was already quarantined from the rest of the world by UN-imposed sanctions. People in it were starving by the thousands because the government refused to accede to the demands that would have lifted the sanctions.
That's still not necessarily sufficient reason to invade it without clear evidence of imminent danger; I don't disagree with your overall argument. There are plenty of more dysfunctional but non-oil-bearing states that we never raise a hand against. I'm just quibbling with your description of Iraq as functional. It may be worse now as a terrorist playground, but the best you could describe it as beforehand was "functioning" and I'd dispute even that.
Presumably, they're both low-level computers. To reach a particular level you'd need at least X megahertz _AND_ Y megabytes. It's just a convenience to be able to say, "You need at least a 3 computer to play this game".
A 3 GHz processor coupled to only 64 MB RAM probably wouldn't be able to play the games intended for a computer with 2 GHz and a more reasonable 128 MB. Neither would the 1.4 GHz/512 MB. So the answer to "what if" is that each computer you mention would have a substantial limitation and therefore would qualify for only a low level (say a 5), whereas the software would require a 7.
Yeah, you may be able to use one or the other for a particular game. But this allows software sellers to commit to one particular minimum set of requirements and designate it with an easy-to-remember number (rather than a combination of processor, ram, video, etc.)
It's a convenience, not an absolute system for saying "this system is better than that system." The goal isn't to compare computers to each other, but to software. We currently do that with a clunky set of numbers; this is easier (but less precise).
Good point. I thought that i-frames occurred more often than that, but yeah, I can see that slowing things down, too.
I think that they want another set of emergency broadcast frequencies, perhaps to do a spread-spectrum sort of thing for noisy environments. But most of the bandwith is going to be sold off for cell phones and other wireless devices.
I suppose it doesn't surprise me that channel surfing is slow. The point of compression is to make better use of bandwidth at the cost of smarter components. A regular TV only has to lock on to the signal; a DTV has to lock on and decode it. Theoretically that should take only a fraction of a second, but more on that in a moment.
I'm disappointed to hear that over-the-air DTV broadcasts are so full of stalls and artifacts in noisy environments. I don't have one myself, so I can't confirm your experience, but it's common in telecommunications to broadcast redundant bits (with a Hamming code, for example) and smear them out so that a burst event (like a lightning strike) still allows you to reassemble an entire frame.
I can see that effect contributing to slower channel surfing. If a frame is smeared out over one second, it could well take that long for the first frame to appear, no matter how fast your processing is, but subsequent frames still appear every 1/30th of a second after that. That'll definitely slow down an experienced channel surfer.
Durable interference will break that scheme, but the point of granting a monopoly is that you shouldn't get that kind of interference, at least not from man-made sources. Perhaps a better antenna would help. Or perhaps the FCC needs to take a look at who's dumping garbage into the radio spectrum near your house.
There are two reasons for the switch:
1. The new technology makes more efficient use of the bandwidth
2. The bandwidth currently being used by TV signals is particularly valuable set of frequencies. One important potential use of it is for emergency communications, which couldn't be done as well at the higher frequencies to which the TV networks are being moved. (I believe that has to do with the better penetration capability of the lower frequencies, while the relatively immobile TV receiver can use an exertnal antenna. But I'm not certain of this.)
A corollary to #1 and #2 is that the bandwidth can be resold to wireless providers for a lot of money, thus netting a windfall for the US budget and decreasing the deficit.
Oh, BTW: you probably won't actually get the Simpsons in higher quality. The DTV standard allows them to subdivide the signals, so they get to pump you the Vikings losing AND the Redskins losing AND the Red Sox losing at the same quality as you already had.
The upshot: it's not about quality; it's about efficient allocation of bandwidth and the ability of the US consumer to have more options and make some money off the sale of bandwidth. (Not enough, to my tastes: the TV networks make vast sums of money off that bandwidth, because an awful lot of people enjoy what they're producing.)
That may not be sufficient reason for you to outweigh the price of the digital tuners, but there are reasons.
The article is actually rather devoid of information. If you want real data, you gotta go to the source: The Library of Congress.
For example, many articles in this thread have talked about them burying the the notice in the EULA. From the House bill:
The notice clearly distinguishes such notice from any other information visually presented contemporaneously on the protected computer.
They call that "clear and conspicuous notice in plain language", and it goes on from there.
As for enforcement: there's less spyware than spam. Spyware takes time to write, and it takes time to make it useful enough that dumb users install it. Claria is easily tracked down, and if they don't ask "This program will collect and transmit information about you. Do you accept?", they go to jail. Stupid users will click anyway, but "Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain" (Frederick Schiller).
The solution isn't perfect: some malware writers will just move offshore, for example. But I have reason to believe that this legislation will do at least some good.
You're referring to the winner-take-all system within each state. That's actually up to the states. If you were in Maine or Nevada, they send electors to the electoral college proportionately to the number of votes each gets.
That's still not quite one-man-one-vote, which is certainly the simplest to understand and the most clearly fair. As a sibling post to this points out, there are reasons to increase the electoral power of some states, as a compromise. There are other reasons as well: it tends to limit the effect of recounts, for one thing.
I'm not particularly standing up for the electoral college at this point; with a closely divided country it seems clearly unfair. But the Republicans in New York and the Democrats in Texas have only other New Yorkers and Texans to blame for the winner-take-all policy you're complaining about. They could change it at any time (and Colorado is thinking of doing just that.)
I'd love to have people think of "science" in terms closer to its root scientia, "knowledge". Bad science isn't just bad decisions on matters filled with people called "scientists" (environment, medicine, basic research). Bad science is bad thinking.
Science is many things, but among them is a collection of techniques for removing bias, self-deception, and self-interest from decision making. These are techniques that scientists usually apply every single day in their personal lives. I'd love to see the same sort of intellectual rigor applied to the very areas you mention.
Sadly, that's not how most people see science. They partition it off as a separate category and see certain issues as "science" and everything else as... well, other things: politics, religion, ideology, values. There are places for these things, but to draw the line and say, "No, rational thought stops here, I believe what I believe and it must be that way" makes for difficult policy, especially when your politics/religion/ideology/values conflict with mine.
Science is far from perfect, and those who call themselves scientists are hardly immune to human foibles, even in their work. But I'd like to see it go a lot further.
That's interesting. In theory poker is a zero-sum game. Less than that, since the house takes a cut. You're taking money only from other people, and minus the house's cut the game is even. Perfect bots playing each other is a wash.
So the whole point is to get slightly higher odds than somebody else. Even a tiny advantage is the difference between winning and losing money, if that's your game. Many people play just for fun, and their losses are effectively payment for that. You see that all the time at 21, where simple card counting strategies can win you small sums of money but most people don't wish to expend the effort for that; they're playing just for fun.
Personally I kinda like the idea of bots playing each other. It's nerds playing each other at a totally different game. Humans still have heuristics that out-play the best chess programs, but only barely (a handful of people will just barely beat the top software, at best. The rest of us get creamed.)
When they got Stephen Fry to play Jeeves in the TV series, people complained because he was too young to play the role. They had an older guy in mind from reading the books. But Fry knocked the role out of the park; maybe they were hoping for the same succeess.
Sharp eye, BTW.
Breeding life on Mars has the tendency to affect the entire planet all at once. The poster was talking about changing the entire atmosphere, which will weather the rocks differently and change the chemistry at least meters if not kilometers down. That will make it hard to determine, for example, if there ever was life. I'd kinda like to spend a few centuries examining the planet in its pristine state first.
I don't think Columbus should have waited before crossing the Atlantic, but I'd have preferred it if Cortez and Pizarro hadn't destroyed the Aztec and Inca cultures before we got a good look at them. Not just because they were human beings (there aren't any on Mars) but also because a lot of the knowledge they represented has been lost.
I'd just as soon leave it alone. We don't encounter new planets every day, and I'd really hate to have future generations say, "If only they'd left it alone rather than screwed it up." History is full of well-meaning scientists who didn't understand what they were doing and therefore lost valuable information. How many artifacts have been cut open or broken before we had X-rays and CAT scans?
Humanity will be around for a long, long time. There will be plenty of opportunities to seed Mars with whatever we want, but only one chance to see the untouched Mars and perform experiments we haven't yet conceived.
Ah, blast, I had meant to tone down the confidence on my answers a bit (especially the sentence you pointed out). I am NOT a lawyer, just an educated layman, and was just trying to help out a bit.
The AC above is right. The limitation of liability applies to the individuals in the partnership.
In a plain old partnership, the company is just a group of people. If somebody sues the business, they're really suing the owners. In an LLC the company is a separate entity and the individuals are not completely responsible for it, like in a regular corporation.
This potentially leads to the sort of abuses they documented in The Corporation, in which they likened a company to a sociopathic human, with the rights of a person but no conscience. But the overall goal is a good one: allow people to form partnerships without making one person completely responsible for the misdeeds of the other.
It also creates an object that you can sell; that is, if you own a piece of an LLC you can break off the partnership by selling it to somebody else. That sort of liquidity makes funding new companies a lot more flexible.
For the most part think of "LLC" as just like "Inc" or "Co" attached to the name. There are tax differences (the income of the company is treated as income of the partners), but the liability issues are more like corporations than like partnerships or sole proprietorships.
That's just the legal answer to your point. The article, itself, appears to be a troll.
It doesn't give any real indication about what the story is about. It does give away a few apparent plot points, but not any story twists that I can tell. (Not having seen the movie yet I can't say if some of those moments turn out to be crucial plot points, but they don't feel that way). It's full of "moments", one-second vignettes that reveal a bit of character and tell a joke without telling you much about the story.
So basically if you want to go into it totally unaware of how it's going to go, skip the trailer. Especially if you're already convinced you're going to see it. If you're looking for a good reason to see it, but don't want to know anything about it going in, well, there I can't help you. The marketing guys make the trailer to try to convince you to come see it, and they usually have to give away some of their A material to convince you that it's worth your eight bucks. In this case it doesn't look like they're giving you all the good jokes in the movie.
And if I've spoiled the movie for you by revealing that it's humorous, I apologize.
In theory it pays for itself. Penatlies for spamming include substantial fines. I'm not sure how good federal prosecutors are at actually getting their hands on that money (since much of it is probably sitting in offshore accounts; ever notice that many spammers live in Florda, a boat ride away from those offshore islands) but if they can collect it it's significantly more than the bounty.
Maybe we can get two spammers to turn in each other. Sure, they'd both get the bounty, but then we'd sentence them to the same jail cell. That's reality TV I'd watch.
Hey, thanks! I didn't realize that I could turn that off. I'd been using middle-click but if I missed the link, it autoscrolled. That makes my day.
What an excellent answer (answers, actually). Thank you. Always pleasant to have somebody who actually knows something about something around here.