"Just like if I don't like their policy of "No blacks allowed," I can simply find some other network to play my Xbox 360 on."
And? Don't buy an Xbox in that case. Reward some other company with your money. Punish Xbox by telling other people "I think what they did sucks" (and that's essentially what Teresa did. My problem isn't that she complained, its that she seems to have a sense of entitlement about what Micrsoft can do with their network).
This is Xbox live, not a public school or courthouse, where vital public services are being conducted and paid for with tax dollars. This is a completely private entity that sunk money into the business, has a profit philosophy, and is trying to make money with that philosophy. If you don't like that philosophy, then by all means, go to someone else.
If neo-nazis want to start White Power Live, let them. If black supremacists want to start The Malcom X Network, let them do it. If Muslim radicals want to start Allah Will Punish You! Online,then let them do it.
And if you don't like what they're doing, don't send them money or use their network. Simple as that.
There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.
Depends on what "liberty" you're fighting for in this case. If you're fighting to get a private company (one that didn't exactly hold a gun to your head to use their product) compelled to change their operation to suit your dictates... well, then you're not fighting for liberty in that case. You are in fact taking their liberty away.
I agree, homophobes definitely are not normal and should be condemned! Calling them "unnatural disgusting animals" does seem a bit extreme, however, even if all humans can technically be considered animals.
Stop it. Stop the Homophobia bullshit. There's no such thing as Homophobia. There are people that think homosexual conduct is immoral, or abnormal. That doesn't mean they have a phobia. A phobia is a clinical condition, recognized by psychologists. There's no such thing in the DSM. "Homophobia" is a marketing term for one side of the argument, a buzzword.
"As if xbox live is really appropriate for kids anyways!" - Teresa
What gives you the right to determine that? What gives you the right to tell Microsoft "I've decided that your network isn't going to be family friendly"? Video games started largely as an activity of children, and thanks to the Wii, is headed back in that direction. Nintendo has found that it's very profitable to get the whole family involved in games, rather than Sony's approach of just appealing to young adult men. Microsoft isn't stupid. They want to do what Nintendo has done. They're at enough of a disadvantage cost-wise against Nintendo as it is. It makes no sense to turn Xbox Live into a ghetto of adults from 18-25, when they can expand to market to all ages.
Ultimately, its their network, a private entity. If she doesn't like their policies, then go somewhere else.
Google's ability to combine search data from maps, Google Earth, Web Search, Google News Alerts, etc, and mine it is a much bigger problem.
Why? Because they've built a better mousetrap, and now people want to use it?
Google isn't even close to being a monopoly. I'm not a slobbering fanboy of Google the way some other people are, but I also fail to see a business boogeyman behind every corner as some people do. Some people's concept of "anti-trust" would be more correctly called "anti-success"... this notion that a company that's been very successful must have cheated or done something nefarious to get that way.
Find some documentation for that quote. It's source is a Huffington Post article praising pot, but the author gives no documentation for it. No one else seems to have a genuine source for it either, all of them circling back to that HuffPuff piece as a reference. Until I see actual proof this quote is genuine, I'm calling it just another Internet urban legend.
"Google and every other search engine would be equally culpable."
No, they wouldn't.
Courts take intent heavily into account when rendering judgement on a defendant. Google is a general purpose search engine... they index everything, with no other intent than to make money by pulling the public in to use a superior method of search. They don't condone criminal activity, nor directly assist in it.
The Pirate Bay is different, because of their stated mission: to undermine copyright law, and to encourage copyright violation, and more importantly, provide direct assistance in doing so. Come on, they have a page on their site dedicated solely to mocking companies that send them cease and desist letters on their piracy. They pretty much openly say "Ha ha, you can't get us, and we're going to continue to do it anyway. Fuck you and your copyright". These guys make no bones about what they stand for and what they're trying to do: eliminate all copyright laws and protections, period.
So, these guys are screwed. What defense can they use? Sweden has weaker copyright laws than most of Europe and the US, but they do have some, and there are penalties for breaking them. What can they use as a defense? Certainly not "we didn't know what we were doing". They've been up front all along about what they were doing, and why. One of the founders, in a television interview, looked directly into the camera and said "we're going to keep on doing this and you can't stop us. We know it's illegal. We don't care".
No, it was founded under the assumption that the federal government is necessary for some things, but needs to be closely watched, monitored, and limited. The Articles of Confederation actually provided a weaker national-level government, and it failed.
I wish people would remember THAT.
But the Constitution was about central political and military power, not economic micromanagment. Keep in mind that just a few decades after the founding, we killed off things like The Bank of the United States because we thought government had no damn business being such a big player in our economy.
The standard has always been for a very minimal federal involvement in providing services to the public, usually when the job was too big for private interests... things like a post office. Very, very limited roles.
Of course they do. The Wall Street Journal is a temple of supply-side economics. According to them, the government can't do anything right, except cut capital gains taxes. I would have been very surprised if they'd had anything good to say about this bill.
So the WSJ is pro-market... that doesn't invalidate their argument. This bill still stinks. Stimulus spending doesn't work the way it's being advertised... it has little to no effect on short term job preservation or creation. While we all need things like roads and bridges, spending tax dollars on roads and bridges does not stimulate the economy in the short term... that money takes too long to percolate through the economy.
Stimlus spending didn't cure the Great Depression, nor did it shake Japan out of it's 90's doldrums. Admirers of the New Deal take great offense at the notion that the New Deal was a failure in reversing the Depression, but even left-leaning historians and economists agree that it was WWII production, not the New Deal, that finally brought us out of the depression. Shouldn't the metric of whether an anti-depression program worked be the elimination of the depression?
Four decades ago: 747 and concorde launched, first manned moon landing. 40 years later, NASA can barely keep the ISS running (or the shuttle from blowing up).
During the jet age, it was all about higher performance. Higher speeds, higher altitudes, longer ranges, higher load capacities.
Aviation has matured, and now it's only about one thing: better efficiency. Our planes carry no more people than they used to. They go no faster or farther. Cost efficiency is the last frontier of a stable, mature... but boring... industry.
We may very well see 747's in the air for another 60 years. Boeing keeps improving them, and they're wildly popular as cargo carriers. I'm not talking things like airshows, I mean real, frontline service, especially freight service. Is anything better on the horizon? The A380 is, face it, just a modernized 747 knockoff... it simply extends the 747's double decker philosophy completely along the fuselage. Boeing engineers are looking at doing much the same thing to the current design. The parts pipeline is cheap and well established, and the plane is, by accounts of pilots themselves, easy to fly and safe.
Yes, the irony of the whole history of the Jobs-Apple split and formation of NeXT is that NeXT basically consumed Apple alive when Jobs was brought back.
But the brand doesn't say NeXT. It says Apple. And to the public, perception is reality.
Same thing happend with Lockheed. When Martin Marietta bought them out, they used Martin's corporate leadership, Martin's corporate headquarters, and Martin's lobbyists. Martin, like NeXT, basically ate the other company alive. But they were smart enough to use the Lockheed name first, because it had more power and history.
Branding matters. Without that Apple logo, NeXT/OS X would be a hacker's curiosity, like BeOS. Nothing more. The parent posters point stands. Apple tried licensing their OS on clone hardware. They lost even more money and market share in the process. It's far, far too late to do something like that now. If the courts rule that Apple can't keep their hardware monopoly, then that's the end of Apple computers, and Apple will be a consumer electronics company only. You might as well rename them iPod-iPhone Inc.
It's the old "Limits To Growth" bullshit back again. The same people who predicted mass starvation in the 70s are now predicting massive climate change. The whole concept that new technology means you can't just extrapolate seems to be lost on them.
And this kind of hysterics has been around a long time. Hobbes had his "nasty, brutish, and short" predictions for mankind in Leviathan. According to experts 30 years ago, the was simply no way we could produce enough food for 5 billion people. Now we're doing it for 7. These professional pessimists have always underestimated mankind's ability to change, adapt, and solve problems. They've always underestimated our capacity to make things happen.
" In at least one of those speeches, according to a contemporary account in the Daily Worker, he intimated that Communism might sweep the world after World War II and equated it with human progress."
Does it matter if people are Nazis? That's a rhetorical question, really, because the answer is "Hell Yes".
"Its just a political ideology, and just like the rest of them, it has good points and bad points."
This is one of the dumbest things I've ever seen posted here on Slashdot, and that's saying a lot. If I could mod you -1 Clueless I would. Communism was as bad as National Socialism ever was. Nazis were just more open about their plans for genocide, but when you crunch the numbers, communism accomplished a lot more in the murder category. Commies (and yes, I use that term intentionally) were just less creative about how they committed mass murder... the skipped the whole elaborate Xyklon-off-the-trains scenario, and went straight to firing squads and starvation. Your thinking is a prime example of what we used to call "The Banality of Evil"... the ideal that evil is overblown and really, isn't that big a deal. In your case, the ghosts of 60+ million people would disagree.
"Dear Mr. Schwartz: Please hire a real marketing department and see to it that your product line makes sense to the average consumer. KTHXBYE."
Schwartz is part of the problem at Sun. When McNealy named Schwartz as his successor, a collective "huh?" was heard all over the tech world.
Schwartz's gamble seems to be "give every piece of software away, and sell commodity hardware".
This is, in a word, foolish. IBM doesn't give everything away. Nor does HP, or Apple. They carefully balance their open source obligations against the need for exclusivity in some areas. Sun should be trying to emulate Apple in many ways (and IBM in some others), but instead, is trying to remake itself into a Red Hat that sells cheap X86 hardware, and this is a recipe for doom.
Sun has been a great innovator, but when they were the only game in town they charged obscene prices for their products and services. It helped open the door for Linux and Sun has only itself to blame.
When you walked into a data center ten years ago all you saw were Sun servers. Where I work now I'm hard pressed to find a single Sun box anywhere.
Sun was expensive compared to what? Windows boxes? Linux boxes that came later? Sun became the huge company it was because they were far more affordable than what IBM and Digital was charging in the 80s, and everyone ran to them. It's kind of hard to blame Sun because some guy in Finland came up with an alternative that ran on El Cheapo X86 hardware, and then gave it away to the whole world.
Don't forget about the projected Japanese death toll in the event of a land invasion.
Don't forget that the japs had been negotiating a surrender with the Russians for about a year before someone chose to murder hundreds of thousands of civilians to obtain an unconditional surrender to the US.
They weren't negotiating a surrender with the Russians... they were hoping to use a diplomatic alliance with the Russians as leverage against the Anglo/American part of the alliance. They wanted to use Russia as bulwark against invasion, and didn't want to give up some of the spoils of their conquest. What they didn't know is that we had broken their codes and were listening in on all of their machinations. We knew exactly what they were trying to do.
This clown is trying to paint a picture of those poor Imperial Japanese... they tried so hard for peace, while those savage Americans were just determined to use their nukes on someone.
". If you fight an enemy "fairly", you'll end up with equal casualties on both sides, thus abusing the soldier's trust in their superiors. In war, you don't fight fairly, you minimize your own losses."
"You don't win wars by dying for your country. You win wars by making that other poor bastard die for his!" - GC Scott in Patton
It's kind of a big deal. You should read about it.
So should you. Are you a terrorist fighting US forces on a foreign battlefield, and doing so in plain clothes/not in the uniform of a standing army? Then Habeas never applied to you in the first place. In fact, the Geneva Convention says you should be executed via firing squad upon capture.
So far, terrorists that happened to be US citizens have gotten civil trials. So you can retire the "loss of Habeus Corpus" bullshit.
Slashdot Mirror
If it was possible to provide a competing service for online matchmaking, go somewhere else would be a viable alternative.
However, it's not.
This seems like an obvious freedom of speech issue to me.
How is it freedom of speech on a private network?
Censorship is an act of government, and despite what we say here at Slashdot, the last time I looked, Microsoft wasn't the government.
"Just like if I don't like their policy of "No blacks allowed," I can simply find some other network to play my Xbox 360 on."
And? Don't buy an Xbox in that case. Reward some other company with your money. Punish Xbox by telling other people "I think what they did sucks" (and that's essentially what Teresa did. My problem isn't that she complained, its that she seems to have a sense of entitlement about what Micrsoft can do with their network).
This is Xbox live, not a public school or courthouse, where vital public services are being conducted and paid for with tax dollars. This is a completely private entity that sunk money into the business, has a profit philosophy, and is trying to make money with that philosophy. If you don't like that philosophy, then by all means, go to someone else.
If neo-nazis want to start White Power Live, let them. If black supremacists want to start The Malcom X Network, let them do it. If Muslim radicals want to start Allah Will Punish You! Online,then let them do it.
And if you don't like what they're doing, don't send them money or use their network. Simple as that.
There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.
Depends on what "liberty" you're fighting for in this case. If you're fighting to get a private company (one that didn't exactly hold a gun to your head to use their product) compelled to change their operation to suit your dictates... well, then you're not fighting for liberty in that case. You are in fact taking their liberty away.
I agree, homophobes definitely are not normal and should be condemned! Calling them "unnatural disgusting animals" does seem a bit extreme, however, even if all humans can technically be considered animals.
Stop it. Stop the Homophobia bullshit. There's no such thing as Homophobia. There are people that think homosexual conduct is immoral, or abnormal. That doesn't mean they have a phobia. A phobia is a clinical condition, recognized by psychologists. There's no such thing in the DSM. "Homophobia" is a marketing term for one side of the argument, a buzzword.
From the article:
"As if xbox live is really appropriate for kids anyways!" - Teresa
What gives you the right to determine that? What gives you the right to tell Microsoft "I've decided that your network isn't going to be family friendly"? Video games started largely as an activity of children, and thanks to the Wii, is headed back in that direction. Nintendo has found that it's very profitable to get the whole family involved in games, rather than Sony's approach of just appealing to young adult men. Microsoft isn't stupid. They want to do what Nintendo has done. They're at enough of a disadvantage cost-wise against Nintendo as it is. It makes no sense to turn Xbox Live into a ghetto of adults from 18-25, when they can expand to market to all ages.
Ultimately, its their network, a private entity. If she doesn't like their policies, then go somewhere else.
I was never a big Simpsons fan, but I loved Futurama.
Google's ability to combine search data from maps, Google Earth, Web Search, Google News Alerts, etc, and mine it is a much bigger problem.
Why? Because they've built a better mousetrap, and now people want to use it?
Google isn't even close to being a monopoly. I'm not a slobbering fanboy of Google the way some other people are, but I also fail to see a business boogeyman behind every corner as some people do. Some people's concept of "anti-trust" would be more correctly called "anti-success"... this notion that a company that's been very successful must have cheated or done something nefarious to get that way.
Find some documentation for that quote. It's source is a Huffington Post article praising pot, but the author gives no documentation for it. No one else seems to have a genuine source for it either, all of them circling back to that HuffPuff piece as a reference. Until I see actual proof this quote is genuine, I'm calling it just another Internet urban legend.
"Google and every other search engine would be equally culpable."
No, they wouldn't.
Courts take intent heavily into account when rendering judgement on a defendant. Google is a general purpose search engine... they index everything, with no other intent than to make money by pulling the public in to use a superior method of search. They don't condone criminal activity, nor directly assist in it.
The Pirate Bay is different, because of their stated mission: to undermine copyright law, and to encourage copyright violation, and more importantly, provide direct assistance in doing so. Come on, they have a page on their site dedicated solely to mocking companies that send them cease and desist letters on their piracy. They pretty much openly say "Ha ha, you can't get us, and we're going to continue to do it anyway. Fuck you and your copyright". These guys make no bones about what they stand for and what they're trying to do: eliminate all copyright laws and protections, period.
So, these guys are screwed. What defense can they use? Sweden has weaker copyright laws than most of Europe and the US, but they do have some, and there are penalties for breaking them. What can they use as a defense? Certainly not "we didn't know what we were doing". They've been up front all along about what they were doing, and why. One of the founders, in a television interview, looked directly into the camera and said "we're going to keep on doing this and you can't stop us. We know it's illegal. We don't care".
Not even Swedish judges can overlook that.
No, it was founded under the assumption that the federal government is necessary for some things, but needs to be closely watched, monitored, and limited. The Articles of Confederation actually provided a weaker national-level government, and it failed.
I wish people would remember THAT.
But the Constitution was about central political and military power, not economic micromanagment. Keep in mind that just a few decades after the founding, we killed off things like The Bank of the United States because we thought government had no damn business being such a big player in our economy.
The standard has always been for a very minimal federal involvement in providing services to the public, usually when the job was too big for private interests... things like a post office. Very, very limited roles.
Of course they do. The Wall Street Journal is a temple of supply-side economics. According to them, the government can't do anything right, except cut capital gains taxes. I would have been very surprised if they'd had anything good to say about this bill.
So the WSJ is pro-market... that doesn't invalidate their argument. This bill still stinks. Stimulus spending doesn't work the way it's being advertised... it has little to no effect on short term job preservation or creation. While we all need things like roads and bridges, spending tax dollars on roads and bridges does not stimulate the economy in the short term... that money takes too long to percolate through the economy.
Stimlus spending didn't cure the Great Depression, nor did it shake Japan out of it's 90's doldrums. Admirers of the New Deal take great offense at the notion that the New Deal was a failure in reversing the Depression, but even left-leaning historians and economists agree that it was WWII production, not the New Deal, that finally brought us out of the depression. Shouldn't the metric of whether an anti-depression program worked be the elimination of the depression?
Four decades ago:
747 and concorde launched, first manned moon landing. 40 years later, NASA can barely keep the ISS running (or the shuttle from blowing up).
During the jet age, it was all about higher performance. Higher speeds, higher altitudes, longer ranges, higher load capacities.
Aviation has matured, and now it's only about one thing: better efficiency. Our planes carry no more people than they used to. They go no faster or farther. Cost efficiency is the last frontier of a stable, mature... but boring... industry.
We may very well see 747's in the air for another 60 years. Boeing keeps improving them, and they're wildly popular as cargo carriers. I'm not talking things like airshows, I mean real, frontline service, especially freight service. Is anything better on the horizon? The A380 is, face it, just a modernized 747 knockoff... it simply extends the 747's double decker philosophy completely along the fuselage. Boeing engineers are looking at doing much the same thing to the current design. The parts pipeline is cheap and well established, and the plane is, by accounts of pilots themselves, easy to fly and safe.
This thing will be around a long, long time.
Take NeXT off that list. OS X *IS* NeXT.
Yes, the irony of the whole history of the Jobs-Apple split and formation of NeXT is that NeXT basically consumed Apple alive when Jobs was brought back.
But the brand doesn't say NeXT. It says Apple. And to the public, perception is reality.
Same thing happend with Lockheed. When Martin Marietta bought them out, they used Martin's corporate leadership, Martin's corporate headquarters, and Martin's lobbyists. Martin, like NeXT, basically ate the other company alive. But they were smart enough to use the Lockheed name first, because it had more power and history.
Branding matters. Without that Apple logo, NeXT/OS X would be a hacker's curiosity, like BeOS. Nothing more. The parent posters point stands. Apple tried licensing their OS on clone hardware. They lost even more money and market share in the process. It's far, far too late to do something like that now. If the courts rule that Apple can't keep their hardware monopoly, then that's the end of Apple computers, and Apple will be a consumer electronics company only. You might as well rename them iPod-iPhone Inc.
This is just another rehash of the same Olbermann interview... and like the previous one, he still doesn't offer any specifics.
It's the old "Limits To Growth" bullshit back again. The same people who predicted mass starvation in the 70s are now predicting massive climate change. The whole concept that new technology means you can't just extrapolate seems to be lost on them.
And this kind of hysterics has been around a long time. Hobbes had his "nasty, brutish, and short" predictions for mankind in Leviathan. According to experts 30 years ago, the was simply no way we could produce enough food for 5 billion people. Now we're doing it for 7. These professional pessimists have always underestimated mankind's ability to change, adapt, and solve problems. They've always underestimated our capacity to make things happen.
Lol, I wish it was called Lenix :) that would be cool.
And when the computer freezes, you can say that it's stalin'.... :)
The government is going to give it to them anyway.
That is all what you need to know about the imbecile.
Chaplin may not have been a party member, but he gave speeches on their behalf at times.
" In at least one of those speeches, according to a contemporary account in the Daily Worker, he intimated that Communism might sweep the world after World War II and equated it with human progress."
"Does it really matter if people were "commies"?"
Does it matter if people are Nazis? That's a rhetorical question, really, because the answer is "Hell Yes".
"Its just a political ideology, and just like the rest of them, it has good points and bad points."
This is one of the dumbest things I've ever seen posted here on Slashdot, and that's saying a lot. If I could mod you -1 Clueless I would. Communism was as bad as National Socialism ever was. Nazis were just more open about their plans for genocide, but when you crunch the numbers, communism accomplished a lot more in the murder category. Commies (and yes, I use that term intentionally) were just less creative about how they committed mass murder... the skipped the whole elaborate Xyklon-off-the-trains scenario, and went straight to firing squads and starvation. Your thinking is a prime example of what we used to call "The Banality of Evil"... the ideal that evil is overblown and really, isn't that big a deal. In your case, the ghosts of 60+ million people would disagree.
"Dear Mr. Schwartz: Please hire a real marketing department and see to it that your product line makes sense to the average consumer. KTHXBYE."
Schwartz is part of the problem at Sun. When McNealy named Schwartz as his successor, a collective "huh?" was heard all over the tech world.
Schwartz's gamble seems to be "give every piece of software away, and sell commodity hardware".
This is, in a word, foolish. IBM doesn't give everything away. Nor does HP, or Apple. They carefully balance their open source obligations against the need for exclusivity in some areas. Sun should be trying to emulate Apple in many ways (and IBM in some others), but instead, is trying to remake itself into a Red Hat that sells cheap X86 hardware, and this is a recipe for doom.
Sun has been a great innovator, but when they were the only game in town they charged obscene prices for their products and services. It helped open the door for Linux and Sun has only itself to blame.
When you walked into a data center ten years ago all you saw were Sun servers. Where I work now I'm hard pressed to find a single Sun box anywhere.
Sun was expensive compared to what? Windows boxes? Linux boxes that came later? Sun became the huge company it was because they were far more affordable than what IBM and Digital was charging in the 80s, and everyone ran to them. It's kind of hard to blame Sun because some guy in Finland came up with an alternative that ran on El Cheapo X86 hardware, and then gave it away to the whole world.
Don't forget about the projected Japanese death toll in the event of a land invasion.
Don't forget that the japs had been negotiating a surrender with the Russians for about a year before someone chose to murder hundreds of thousands of civilians to obtain an unconditional surrender to the US.
They weren't negotiating a surrender with the Russians... they were hoping to use a diplomatic alliance with the Russians as leverage against the Anglo/American part of the alliance. They wanted to use Russia as bulwark against invasion, and didn't want to give up some of the spoils of their conquest. What they didn't know is that we had broken their codes and were listening in on all of their machinations. We knew exactly what they were trying to do.
This clown is trying to paint a picture of those poor Imperial Japanese... they tried so hard for peace, while those savage Americans were just determined to use their nukes on someone.
". If you fight an enemy "fairly", you'll end up with equal casualties on both sides, thus abusing the soldier's trust in their superiors. In war, you don't fight fairly, you minimize your own losses."
"You don't win wars by dying for your country. You win wars by making that other poor bastard die for his!" - GC Scott in Patton
What right have you lost?
Habeas corpus.
It's kind of a big deal. You should read about it.
So should you. Are you a terrorist fighting US forces on a foreign battlefield, and doing so in plain clothes/not in the uniform of a standing army? Then Habeas never applied to you in the first place. In fact, the Geneva Convention says you should be executed via firing squad upon capture.
So far, terrorists that happened to be US citizens have gotten civil trials. So you can retire the "loss of Habeus Corpus" bullshit.