You can also leverage the information you got illegally to find a legal path for how you knew it. A private investigator may illegally tap your phone, which is inadmissible. When he hears where your illicit rendezvous is, he'll take perfectly admissible pictures of you there.
It's not legal, but unless you catch them at it, you can't do much about it. And they've still got the pictures, which are still admissible evidence.
There are many different kinds of atheists, and they base their morals on different kinds of things. Most atheist Slashdotters base their morals on a kind of enlightened self-interest. From there you can derive commandments like "Thou shalt not steal" and "Thou shalt not kill". First as a law, because community enforcement of those dictates makes for a more productive society and therefore has benefits to you. Also as a personal choice, because breaking that law degrades the society you benefit from.
It makes for some interesting answers to ethical hypotheticals. If somebody asks me, "If you could kill somebody for profit and nobody would ever notice," the direct answer could be theoretically "Why not?", but in practice there's no conceivable way for a murder to go completely unnoticed. I may not be able to forsee the negative effects, but I can demonstrate why they're likely.
One rarely does the actual calculations. As in so much in life one usually uses intellectual shortcuts, which can be called "intuition" or "conscience". But it does give the opportunity to know that one can check one's decisions against one's own ultimate self-interest as the basis, and re-train the intuition if it's found wanting.
No atheist is perfect, and nobody can see all the consequences, so sometimes they are wrong. But they find that they're right often enough to leave them with a moral base more satisfying to them than a religiously based one.
It gets very, very involved, which is just my way of cutting this post short rather than trying to explain it all at one go. I'd happily elaborate, if you wanted. But I just wanted to give the gist of the idea that there's a morality based on self-interest which coincides with a lot of religious dictates on morality. Religious dictates which don't suit one's self interest, like "Thou shalt have no other god before Me" or many of the more absolute restrictions on sexual morality, don't follow and are therefore ignored or rethought.
It's not so obvious when you consider that the project isn't a guaranteed success, and even if it is successful returns on it will take decades.
But most of the time was spent negotiating how and where that money will be spent. The money doesn't just evaporate; it ends up providing jobs to somebody's economy. ITER will be built in France, and so many construction jobs will go to the French. The rest of the countries aren't going to just dump a billion dollars per year into the French (or any other) economy without some sort of quid pro quo. They spent forever negotiating that.
It would be nice if everybody could put all that aside for a project which is, as you point out, not that expensive on the cosmic scale of things.
It's not just that it's trivial on the total budgetary scale. That's a red herring; all of that money is allocated for some purpose that is ostensibly needed. (Much of it is redistributive, and merely passes through the government's hands on its way to health or educational purposes, and much of the rest is military, which the US can't reduce during what it thinks of as a war.) But it is trivial compared to the global economic conflicts caused by (or supported by) the distribution of oil. Sadly, those conflicts will grow more even more expensive until this project makes them moot, if it's successful, and that's decades away.
Really? There/their is a clear grammatical mistake, whereas the distinction between robbery and burglary is a technical one. (Maybe I'm just pouting because I didn't know the difference until a few minutes ago.)
Re:How did they get the book out so fast
on
CSS Cookbook
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· Score: 1
People probably do buy the best book they can, but when you're talking about a new technology a lot of people will rush out to buy something as quickly as possible. So while good authors are experimenting and researching, the ones who are just cranking something out are already on the shelves, and the people who rushed out to buy something aren't going to wait.
In this case, for example, a lot of people probably feel they need something on the new tech so that their bosses can know that they're ready to support it. That can be useful, since it would be nice to know how to fix your old web sites when they break under IE 7.
I have no idea if this particular book is a good one or a bad one. IE 7 was out so long in beta that there was plenty of time to write a good book on it. In fact there were probably less-good books that were on the shelves before IE 7 was officially released. But writing a good book can be incredibly time consuming. Just coming up with an order in which to present the material involves a deep understanding of the topic.
Re:How did they get the book out so fast
on
CSS Cookbook
·
· Score: 3, Informative
IE 7 had been in beta for a while. They probably had the thing printed up even before IE 7 was formally released, figuring that the last beta would look an awful lot like the final version.
If nothing else, they'd rather be the first guys in the shelf with an IE 7 book and be wrong than the last guys and be right. An author friend of mine quit writing technical books precisely because she hated losing market share to badly-written books that came out sooner.
By "goods/services", do you mean music/movies in general, or one particular song/movie?
I'm not aware that they have a monopoly on making movies or music. They do have an ugly lock on certain distribution channels because of their scale; it's hard to get your independent band on the radio or your indie film in the theater. I'd like to see that broken, but it's never been easy to get people to take notice of your art.
As for a particular song/movie, yes, they do have a monopoly on that, but doesn't that seem reasonable? Back before it was easy to make free, accurate reproductions nobody particularly contested their right to limit duplication. They paid to have it created, took the risk of spending that before anybody bought it, and took that risk with the hope that somebody would buy it rather than merely reproduce it. They spent money to make you aware of it; there are plenty of artists who would love for you to simply take their stuff just to know somebody is listening, but can't afford to advertise it.
There is plenty of competition for music and movies, and that seems reasonable. I'd like to see distribution improved to encourage more people to create, and the monopoly of Clear Channel over the radio broken, but the web has already introduced an alternative method of distribution.
But for there to be "competition" for a single, already-created song or movie does not seem reasonable. If you're merely making a copy, in what sense are you competing with them?
With the extra proviso that it's up to us to critique the critiques, hopefully canceling out the wrongest stuff before the government agency spends all of its time being kept in line rather than actually walking it.
Nearly everything Tolkien wrote is prequel to LOTR.
None of the other books besides Hobbit are remotely filmable. They're mostly short stories or summaries of longer stories for which you'd have to write a lot of your own material to make a film.
If you had a talented writer, Tolkien left many, many fascinating stories about the Elves and early Men which could make good movies. I'm afraid I don't really consider Walsh/Boyens/Jackson in that category. As much as I enjoyed their movies, they got weaker whenever they deviated from Tolkien's story or interpolated scenes he didn't write. They were better at visualizing his world than at fleshing out his (admittedly weak) characters.
Tolkien left enough material for you to keep the franchise going longer than Bond. They probably shouldn't, mind you, but once you geared up that whole movie-making machine for Hobbit, it wouldn't hurt to make another movie or two with it.
Could you elaborate on "prevented others from making it"? They're preventing people from duplicating the CD/DVD (or trying to) but as far as I can tell they're not preventing you from making movies or songs of your own.
Good for you. Your solution is consistent and sensible. I much prefer it to the "They made it but I want it so I'm entitled to it" theory so pervasive on Slashdot.
If the RIAA etc make stuff you want, they get to set the terms. The trick is not to redefine the terms but to make your own stuff.
I'm sure we'll have another article Dec 22 with an actual price, and yet another when pre-orders become just plain "orders", and probably a review after that.
"Informed and believe" is usually used in conjunction with "allege". The lawyers agree with you that it's a weird formulation, and repeatedly say, "We don't know what you believe, and don't care." I'm not sure why they didn't use the word "allege" there, since they're right: it doesn't matter what they believe or what they know. I don't know what the judge is going to make of it.
Just for the record, they're not accusing the guy of downloading stuff. They're accusing him of uploading stuff.
It's amazing that they can generate interest in OTC stocks at all. I wouldn't even know how to go about trading in them. (And I don't particularly want to.)
It's a great idea, but it's terribly risky. With a stock sale the worst you can lose is your investment. With a short, your potential losses are unlimited.
Still, it does sound like there's a niche out there for some bold investor looking to take advantage of the idiots who buy stock based on tips from people they don't know. You could probably even do it as program trading: examine the spam, look for the peak, and short it.
Sadly, it may not help. The spammer himself may have already bought low and sold high. Or he could be short-selling himself on the peak.
I hear that. It just doesn't seem unreasonable to me to cut off a customer who is sending tens of thousands of email per day. Put the very few with a legitimate reason on a white list (after a phone call) and cut the rest off until they clean up their act.
As Heinlein said, the answer to any question beginning with "Why don't they..." is "money". Presumably the ISPs figure you'll just take your business and your bot-infested computer elsewhere. But maybe if a few major ISPs got together and agreed to all do it, they'd cut off enough spam to make their customer bases happier, and attract back those customers who gave up in frustration.
Absolutely. The same thing happens in TV. You're not the network's customer. The advertiser is the customer. You're the product. The music/news/whatever they're broadcasting is a capital expense to ensure a supply of product, and like any company they want to maximize return on capital by minimizing expenses.
I'm nearly 40 but I'm not old enough to remember a day when that wasn't true. They've gotten better at it, or perhaps just realized that they could farm up their product with less work (the 44 minutes a TV show lasts now, compared to 55 back in the 60s).
I'm hoping the Web will take these guys out as soon as possible.
So the messages carry, what, domain names? (It's probably in the article, and I did read the first page, but just wasn't going to click four more times in hopes that maybe it was there if I could just ask you.)
Clear Channel + Major Labels were a kind of unholy feedback loop of genericizing music. The labels knew that they could hit one target and have their music played in every single market, so they had no reason to try to create music for minor tastes. In fact Clear Channel would rather try to play the same music in every market, and knew that the labels would test for what made the most generically popular music. That made the music even more generic, which made aggregating the radio stations even more profitable.
It didn't help that with the lack of really independent radio stations, there didn't seem to be anybody willing to call Clear Channel and the labels on payola, which is an open secret in the music industry. Everybody knows, and it's illegal, but since the only people involved are profiting, nobody sues. The ones who would sue are already out of business, or recognize that they don't have the kind of money it would take to call Clear Channel and the labels to task.
So it's not just the desire to please most of the people; it's the fact that pleasing most of the people most of the time is so very profitable, especially when you can take a community good like the airwaves (the single best way to advertise music) and deprive the community a chance to use it.
This isn't going to change anything any time soon. This is just them recognizing that smaller markets aren't profitable. Independent bands and labels still will have a hard time getting air play, because it'll still be a challenge to find the niches.
What you're missing is that generally, you're not allowed to use your 3G for VOIP, precisely because it competes with the classic cell-provider's plan. This one explicitly set up for VOIP, and so it'll presumably be more convenient via a major mode of the phone rather than some application.
There's also the fact that this is a flat-rate plan rather than a per-minute or per-packet plan. Presumably that's aided by specific VOIP software in the cells themselves. VOIP is a bandwidth hog.
Is there any thing we can do about cookie pun abuse?
Thanks, Business Week. I've never heard any of those before. Perhaps you can stick in a few "roadkill on the information superhighway" gags while you're at it.
Slashdot Mirror
The government doesn't want you to know this, but here's the secret:
When you're outside... people can see you.
You can also leverage the information you got illegally to find a legal path for how you knew it. A private investigator may illegally tap your phone, which is inadmissible. When he hears where your illicit rendezvous is, he'll take perfectly admissible pictures of you there.
It's not legal, but unless you catch them at it, you can't do much about it. And they've still got the pictures, which are still admissible evidence.
Was the email marked with ADV:? If not, it's in violation of the CAN-SPAM act.
There are many different kinds of atheists, and they base their morals on different kinds of things. Most atheist Slashdotters base their morals on a kind of enlightened self-interest. From there you can derive commandments like "Thou shalt not steal" and "Thou shalt not kill". First as a law, because community enforcement of those dictates makes for a more productive society and therefore has benefits to you. Also as a personal choice, because breaking that law degrades the society you benefit from.
It makes for some interesting answers to ethical hypotheticals. If somebody asks me, "If you could kill somebody for profit and nobody would ever notice," the direct answer could be theoretically "Why not?", but in practice there's no conceivable way for a murder to go completely unnoticed. I may not be able to forsee the negative effects, but I can demonstrate why they're likely.
One rarely does the actual calculations. As in so much in life one usually uses intellectual shortcuts, which can be called "intuition" or "conscience". But it does give the opportunity to know that one can check one's decisions against one's own ultimate self-interest as the basis, and re-train the intuition if it's found wanting.
No atheist is perfect, and nobody can see all the consequences, so sometimes they are wrong. But they find that they're right often enough to leave them with a moral base more satisfying to them than a religiously based one.
It gets very, very involved, which is just my way of cutting this post short rather than trying to explain it all at one go. I'd happily elaborate, if you wanted. But I just wanted to give the gist of the idea that there's a morality based on self-interest which coincides with a lot of religious dictates on morality. Religious dictates which don't suit one's self interest, like "Thou shalt have no other god before Me" or many of the more absolute restrictions on sexual morality, don't follow and are therefore ignored or rethought.
It's not so obvious when you consider that the project isn't a guaranteed success, and even if it is successful returns on it will take decades.
But most of the time was spent negotiating how and where that money will be spent. The money doesn't just evaporate; it ends up providing jobs to somebody's economy. ITER will be built in France, and so many construction jobs will go to the French. The rest of the countries aren't going to just dump a billion dollars per year into the French (or any other) economy without some sort of quid pro quo. They spent forever negotiating that.
It would be nice if everybody could put all that aside for a project which is, as you point out, not that expensive on the cosmic scale of things.
It's not just that it's trivial on the total budgetary scale. That's a red herring; all of that money is allocated for some purpose that is ostensibly needed. (Much of it is redistributive, and merely passes through the government's hands on its way to health or educational purposes, and much of the rest is military, which the US can't reduce during what it thinks of as a war.) But it is trivial compared to the global economic conflicts caused by (or supported by) the distribution of oil. Sadly, those conflicts will grow more even more expensive until this project makes them moot, if it's successful, and that's decades away.
Really? There/their is a clear grammatical mistake, whereas the distinction between robbery and burglary is a technical one. (Maybe I'm just pouting because I didn't know the difference until a few minutes ago.)
People probably do buy the best book they can, but when you're talking about a new technology a lot of people will rush out to buy something as quickly as possible. So while good authors are experimenting and researching, the ones who are just cranking something out are already on the shelves, and the people who rushed out to buy something aren't going to wait.
In this case, for example, a lot of people probably feel they need something on the new tech so that their bosses can know that they're ready to support it. That can be useful, since it would be nice to know how to fix your old web sites when they break under IE 7.
I have no idea if this particular book is a good one or a bad one. IE 7 was out so long in beta that there was plenty of time to write a good book on it. In fact there were probably less-good books that were on the shelves before IE 7 was officially released. But writing a good book can be incredibly time consuming. Just coming up with an order in which to present the material involves a deep understanding of the topic.
IE 7 had been in beta for a while. They probably had the thing printed up even before IE 7 was formally released, figuring that the last beta would look an awful lot like the final version.
If nothing else, they'd rather be the first guys in the shelf with an IE 7 book and be wrong than the last guys and be right. An author friend of mine quit writing technical books precisely because she hated losing market share to badly-written books that came out sooner.
By "goods/services", do you mean music/movies in general, or one particular song/movie?
I'm not aware that they have a monopoly on making movies or music. They do have an ugly lock on certain distribution channels because of their scale; it's hard to get your independent band on the radio or your indie film in the theater. I'd like to see that broken, but it's never been easy to get people to take notice of your art.
As for a particular song/movie, yes, they do have a monopoly on that, but doesn't that seem reasonable? Back before it was easy to make free, accurate reproductions nobody particularly contested their right to limit duplication. They paid to have it created, took the risk of spending that before anybody bought it, and took that risk with the hope that somebody would buy it rather than merely reproduce it. They spent money to make you aware of it; there are plenty of artists who would love for you to simply take their stuff just to know somebody is listening, but can't afford to advertise it.
There is plenty of competition for music and movies, and that seems reasonable. I'd like to see distribution improved to encourage more people to create, and the monopoly of Clear Channel over the radio broken, but the web has already introduced an alternative method of distribution.
But for there to be "competition" for a single, already-created song or movie does not seem reasonable. If you're merely making a copy, in what sense are you competing with them?
With the extra proviso that it's up to us to critique the critiques, hopefully canceling out the wrongest stuff before the government agency spends all of its time being kept in line rather than actually walking it.
Nearly everything Tolkien wrote is prequel to LOTR.
None of the other books besides Hobbit are remotely filmable. They're mostly short stories or summaries of longer stories for which you'd have to write a lot of your own material to make a film.
If you had a talented writer, Tolkien left many, many fascinating stories about the Elves and early Men which could make good movies. I'm afraid I don't really consider Walsh/Boyens/Jackson in that category. As much as I enjoyed their movies, they got weaker whenever they deviated from Tolkien's story or interpolated scenes he didn't write. They were better at visualizing his world than at fleshing out his (admittedly weak) characters.
Tolkien left enough material for you to keep the franchise going longer than Bond. They probably shouldn't, mind you, but once you geared up that whole movie-making machine for Hobbit, it wouldn't hurt to make another movie or two with it.
Could you elaborate on "prevented others from making it"? They're preventing people from duplicating the CD/DVD (or trying to) but as far as I can tell they're not preventing you from making movies or songs of your own.
Good for you. Your solution is consistent and sensible. I much prefer it to the "They made it but I want it so I'm entitled to it" theory so pervasive on Slashdot.
If the RIAA etc make stuff you want, they get to set the terms. The trick is not to redefine the terms but to make your own stuff.
I'm sure we'll have another article Dec 22 with an actual price, and yet another when pre-orders become just plain "orders", and probably a review after that.
"Informed and believe" is usually used in conjunction with "allege". The lawyers agree with you that it's a weird formulation, and repeatedly say, "We don't know what you believe, and don't care." I'm not sure why they didn't use the word "allege" there, since they're right: it doesn't matter what they believe or what they know. I don't know what the judge is going to make of it.
Just for the record, they're not accusing the guy of downloading stuff. They're accusing him of uploading stuff.
It's amazing that they can generate interest in OTC stocks at all. I wouldn't even know how to go about trading in them. (And I don't particularly want to.)
It's a great idea, but it's terribly risky. With a stock sale the worst you can lose is your investment. With a short, your potential losses are unlimited.
Still, it does sound like there's a niche out there for some bold investor looking to take advantage of the idiots who buy stock based on tips from people they don't know. You could probably even do it as program trading: examine the spam, look for the peak, and short it.
Sadly, it may not help. The spammer himself may have already bought low and sold high. Or he could be short-selling himself on the peak.
Were you at least allowed to tell them, "For the love of God do not buy any stock on a tip from an email from somebody you don't know"?
I hear that. It just doesn't seem unreasonable to me to cut off a customer who is sending tens of thousands of email per day. Put the very few with a legitimate reason on a white list (after a phone call) and cut the rest off until they clean up their act.
As Heinlein said, the answer to any question beginning with "Why don't they..." is "money". Presumably the ISPs figure you'll just take your business and your bot-infested computer elsewhere. But maybe if a few major ISPs got together and agreed to all do it, they'd cut off enough spam to make their customer bases happier, and attract back those customers who gave up in frustration.
Absolutely. The same thing happens in TV. You're not the network's customer. The advertiser is the customer. You're the product. The music/news/whatever they're broadcasting is a capital expense to ensure a supply of product, and like any company they want to maximize return on capital by minimizing expenses.
I'm nearly 40 but I'm not old enough to remember a day when that wasn't true. They've gotten better at it, or perhaps just realized that they could farm up their product with less work (the 44 minutes a TV show lasts now, compared to 55 back in the 60s).
I'm hoping the Web will take these guys out as soon as possible.
So the messages carry, what, domain names? (It's probably in the article, and I did read the first page, but just wasn't going to click four more times in hopes that maybe it was there if I could just ask you.)
Clear Channel + Major Labels were a kind of unholy feedback loop of genericizing music. The labels knew that they could hit one target and have their music played in every single market, so they had no reason to try to create music for minor tastes. In fact Clear Channel would rather try to play the same music in every market, and knew that the labels would test for what made the most generically popular music. That made the music even more generic, which made aggregating the radio stations even more profitable.
It didn't help that with the lack of really independent radio stations, there didn't seem to be anybody willing to call Clear Channel and the labels on payola, which is an open secret in the music industry. Everybody knows, and it's illegal, but since the only people involved are profiting, nobody sues. The ones who would sue are already out of business, or recognize that they don't have the kind of money it would take to call Clear Channel and the labels to task.
So it's not just the desire to please most of the people; it's the fact that pleasing most of the people most of the time is so very profitable, especially when you can take a community good like the airwaves (the single best way to advertise music) and deprive the community a chance to use it.
This isn't going to change anything any time soon. This is just them recognizing that smaller markets aren't profitable. Independent bands and labels still will have a hard time getting air play, because it'll still be a challenge to find the niches.
What you're missing is that generally, you're not allowed to use your 3G for VOIP, precisely because it competes with the classic cell-provider's plan. This one explicitly set up for VOIP, and so it'll presumably be more convenient via a major mode of the phone rather than some application.
There's also the fact that this is a flat-rate plan rather than a per-minute or per-packet plan. Presumably that's aided by specific VOIP software in the cells themselves. VOIP is a bandwidth hog.
Is there any thing we can do about cookie pun abuse?
Thanks, Business Week. I've never heard any of those before. Perhaps you can stick in a few "roadkill on the information superhighway" gags while you're at it.
I suspect that most phishers these days are using the non-caring ISPs. There are plenty of them.