1) The XBox still has yet to realize ROI - Twelve Years Later, and pulled in no profits at all until 2009 or so. The XBox program may finally reach ROI in 2015, but there's the fact that they'll have to start sinking even more money into R&D for the next gen console before then, so even that date is an iffy proposition. Most tech companies would have called that a miserable failure by now, if they had managed to survive such a massive loss. Nintendo had OTOH made a pure profit off of their line and usually reach ROI for any given console line within a few months of release. Sony is a bit tougher to see because their primary goal was not just selling consoles, but selling Blu-Ray players.
2) Ballmer was officially CEO in 2000, but Gates held the Chairman of the Board slot for quite some time after that - and if you don't think Gates called the shots during that time with Ballmer as a figurehead-in-transition, you're either naive or lying.
...and how many will just shift to filestube, downloading as happily as they ever had?
What I'm saying is, the adaptation may not be within a given protocol, but to a new protocol.
So far, we all went from sharing nibblers (or blank cassettes for music/video) via sneakernet, to BBS, to Napster, to eMule/LimeWire/ed2k, to BitTorrent, and now folks are getting into using one of a bajillion online "file storage" services to spread the stuff around.
Each time, it seems that the MPAA/RIAA can only seem to catch those who straggle behind and hadn't transitioned yet to the next stage.
Now that ThirdPoint (the investment firm that made the stink in the first place) got what they wanted (a guy on the board), I wonder how long it will take before Yahoo suddenly and unexpectedly sells off its patent portfolio to Microsoft at fire-sale prices.
I missed no such thing. He inferred that nerds only need an artificial womb to make babies. Since said nerds almost always have the sperm available, a female willing to provide the eggs was the missing ingredient.
Songs of Distant Earth had hibernation for the last ship to leave Earth, but otherwise yeah, good call.
To expand for the pseudo-geeks out there, the early colony ships would take along cryogenic-frozen sperm and eggs, then would use in-vitro fertilization and artificial wombs to make babies. Robots would do the education and rearing, while other robots began building everything else.
Assuming that the components would remain viable that whole time, and that the machinery held up and did what it was supposed to? Seems like the only feasible way to get people from here to another star system using what we know now, technology-wise.
But in the case of DVD's, you'll actually spend orders of magnitude more time and effort pirating it than you would have spent simply sitting through the warning.
Apples/Oranges. Pirating a DVD is the action-equivalent of going out to buy one legitimately.
It's not an inconvenience - it's a foot in the door.
First it's the little warning. Then it's the unskippable lecture. Then it's a required political 'lesson' - starting with something safe, like a reminder that all men must register with Selective Service. And then it becomes required that you cannot rip a legitimate copy without those government-imposed blurbs.
Bad enough there are 20 minutes of unskippable trailers on the friggin' thing, which is why I rip the things in the first place.
This is just a quickie list of what the impoverished get by dint of being impoverished: -- Medicare/Medicaid/CHIP (which eats 21% of the total budget) Non-Medicare "Safety Net" programs (which eat an additional 13% of the total budget) -- That's over 34% of the total US tax revenue going towards the poor. By contrast, the defense budget is around 20% of the pie in spite of two simultaneous wars in progress.
The whole legal backing behind the illegality of CP is that a child was exploited in that manner to make the photographs. Catch the exploiters, and while harder to do, will have a far more fruitful outcome than simply throwing everyone in jail who happened to see it.
I was thinking the same thing, though usually most folks know up-front that if you didn't actively seek and intentionally download it, you're not to blame.
I remember having to explain similar arguments a long time ago - not about CP, but about porn in general. A student had mis-typed a link in class, and suddenly got bombarded with pr0n - back in the days when pop-ups were all the rage. I merely turned off the monitor and killed power to the machine, then explained what can happen in such cases, but a young lady complained about the student to the school superintendent nonetheless.
They were ready to lynch the kid over it, and it took three hours to explain to these bureaucrats how such things can be accidental. I finally heaved a sigh, and told them to turn on a machine and "go to the White House's website at whitehouse dot com". They expected to find the President, but as you may have guessed, found the expected pr0n - this was before the meme became popular knowledge. Enough of the administrators got clued in by then to keep the kid from getting slammed.
So yeah... sometimes shit happens, and I can see it happening in a bad way for some slob who stumbles over the keyboard the wrong way. That's why I'm glad someone in the legal system is finally showing some sense.
Someone who systematically stores a shitload of CP on his hard drive and has a demonstrable history of actively seeking the shit out both on and offline? Nail 'em to the wall. Someone that accidentally stumbles into the wrong website on the other hand should never see the inside of a courtroom.
Laugh all you want, but a lot of IT management were actually accounting types back in the '80s and early '90s. They were put in charge of the computers because back then, they were the biggest users of the things. Even at my last job, the Head of IT reported directly to the CFO, and it's apparently pretty common for that chain of command elsewhere.
Ms Hart's problem was that she was put in charge of making sure his history was on the up-and-up, and she screwed up in a big way, potentially costing a metric ton of money to the company (the bulk of that loss going towards some golden parachute that Thompson likely has in his contract.) Long story short, she kinda had it coming for failing to do due diligence. It's not like they were hiring a new janitor - they were hiring the frickin' CEO. Microscopic vetting and researching of a candidate's background is pretty much a normal thing for that position, and the board has to do it - you don't trust that kind of work for that kind of position to HR drones.
I figure Thompson may get fired, but they probably want to do it in a way that doesn't touch off lawsuits, or force them to pay out whatever severance money is listed in the contract. Yeah, I know that lies in the resume would normally count as a big reason why one can get fired with cause, but I don't know the details of his contract, and maybe the causes are limited to some list, with no one thinking that bullshitting on the resume would be one of those causes.
Entertainment is quite necessary for the mind, but buying a video game console to get it is not.
Got my first video game console in 1979 - an Atari 2600. My parents saved up for months to afford the ~$200 price tag, and we were allowed to play it after dinner and homework... After that , it was a TI-99/4A (where video entertainment for me consisted of transcribing game code in BASIC from magazines so I could play 'em), and then the Commodore 64 gained a spot.
There was this big video game-less spot in my life, where I was too busy living it out there to bother. I was also too broke most of the time to get new games, or new equipment, etc. So, I made my own entertainment.
Years pass, and eventually I get ahead. For awhile, I was up to my eyeballs in Quake, Quake II, the Weapons Factory MOD, then I'm doing dev on an Unreal Tournament port for the MOD... yeah, I played a bit hard for awhile on the PC.
Th summary? It wasn't the only form of entertainment, nor did I let it suck down the budget - especially when I couldn't afford to do so.
Dude... when I was a young, broke man, we had better and far cheaper entertainment. We'd hang out somewhere with friends, sometimes playing actual sports (football = $10 or so.) I'd walk in the park with the missus. I'd go to the beach. I'd go hiking. I'd go to the library. There are a zillion ways to get entertainment that is far cheaper and far better for you than sitting stupefied in front of a TV while clutching a gaming controller.
Hell, even hanging around a bar with friends and/or getting laid is cheaper as long as you don't do it every weekend - and that's what a lot of folks do anyway.
I get your point, but seriously? An XBox is not a necessity.
You left out the 3-10 hours setting up some samba shares if you have never done it before
Right-click on folder, select "share..."
You haven't done this for awhile, have you?
Then there is another whole day spent setting up X if you dare run a multimon setup of any kind. And if you are very unlucky in this step you can't easily get to a terminal of any kind and have to start the whole process over again of re-installing linux from scratch.
Now I know the whole story, since that hasn't been true since 2006 at the very least.
It takes around 25 minutes to install Ubuntu and grab libdvdcss, and w/ 12.04, one round of downloads to patch it to a current state.
It takes around 1 hour to install Windows 7 on the same hardware, and around 6-8 separate and massive downloads (one weighed in at over 500MB) and 4-6 reboots over the next couple of days to get all the updates.
You didn't "got rid" of anything - Stalin died of old age. The only reason his successor didn't keep the ball of death rolling on "counter-revolutionaries" in the USSR was because after Lenin and Stalin, everyone else was too damned horrified by the results to even think about keeping that machine going. Still, from Khrushchev on, death still came fairly cheap in the USSR... it just happened on a slower and quieter scale. Only in the mid 1980s', during a rapid succession of leaders, did the insanity begin to come apart. The USSR lucked out when Gorbachev got the job - they finally got someone who was only half-competent at keeping things going, leading to the collapse of the power structure that had kept the whole thing going since 1917.
OTOH, the USSR had touched off Mao's turn at it, as well as others such as Pol Pot, and even Kim Il Sung (whose recently-installed grandson is continuing that tradition even today).
As for:
these guys know that a powerhouse can destroy their power. So, of course a dictator will attack religion.
Turns out you're not correct. All those folks I listed up there took their philosophies from Karl Marx, who explicitly wrote that religion was a "bourgeoisie" habit that had to go, and went out of his way to explain why. You are partially correct in that a religious infrastructure can make or break a leader. However, this is rarely the case (see also WWII Germany and Italy).
TFA states it was pulled "after a complaint" (note singular).
Likely from a small town in Northwest Washington...
I have trouble believing this is the only reason. They pulled all of them from all of their stores in America? I have trouble believing that a single complaint was the only reason. "Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity," goes the quote, and I think it applies here.
True, but that's a whole lot of stupid going on...
In science, proving climate change isn't human caused would get you more prestige and power.
Not really - in fact, not at all. Unless you can motivate a government or other authority, you gain no power over them.
If you conclusively disproved AGW beyond all doubt (or even just convinced powers and population beyond their ability to effectively doubt), you get nothing of note. They may talk you up a bit, maybe give you a pat on the back, but then you'd get quickly ignored as powers and population both turn their gaze to the next topic that has lots of "ooh, shiny!" in it.
On the other hand, conclusively proving AGW beyond all doubt (or even just convincing the powers that be and the population at large beyond their ability to successfully refute it)? That's where the power really is. Why? Because the specter of doom is raised, and isn't going to go away - you now have everyone's attention. All they know is that now the world is going to fry due to human activity, and the first question out of their mouths will be "what do we do about it!?" They will be looking to you for answers. They will give you everything you want or need to help end the threat that you've made them aware of. You will likely be hailed far and wide as a prophet and a (potential) savior, if you can come up with something to 'save' them. You become the de facto arbiter of whether or not a given mitigation program will work or not. In other words, for as long as the threat is present and people are scared, you hold the cards.
Proving new understanding is prestige with science, maintaining the status quo is how priest gain power.
Umm, we're not talking about your peers giving you props here (and a goodly number of them would likely hate your guts for blasting their work should you successfully disprove AGW). We're talking about actual power. The kind of power that lets you make people do what you want them to. Forget sex, money, or fine food. It's power, that is control over other human beings -- to be a deity among men, and to have a name that lasts -- that is the last, greatest, and strongest of all temptations.
Also, for a cult figure to gain power, status quo isn't going to cut it in an age where people are always looking for the next shiny thing. You have to get them scared or angry, and keep them whipped up on a continuing basis.
Consider it this way. You have two means to motivate and control people. Do you:
a) "Bah! All the scare-mongering is wrong. Here's why. You can go about your daily routines again without fear."
--or--
b) "Holy shit! we're all going to die if we don't stop doing what you're doing! Here's why! Listen to me before it is too late!"
I think "b" is going to get a lot more attention (thus power) than "a", no?
Clue: It's not about money - it's about prestige and power. The grant money just gets you an income and the means to further your cause.
After all, if you gain the power to influence entire governments, then why bother trying to run for office? If scientists and laymen practically worship you, why would you need bling or other attention-grabbing baubles?
Shit, man... the priests and priestesses had all this figured out at the dawn of time. If you can have all the power, adoration, and be comfortable at the same time? Why would you need anything else? Politicians and robber barons can only hope for some of it, and competition is fierce among them. The real power lies behind the throne.
Slashdot Mirror
BS. Ballmer took over in 2000.. the XBox was released in 2001.
No 1 console worldwide.. 49% marketshare
If that doesn't count, then what would?
Two things:
1) The XBox still has yet to realize ROI - Twelve Years Later, and pulled in no profits at all until 2009 or so. The XBox program may finally reach ROI in 2015, but there's the fact that they'll have to start sinking even more money into R&D for the next gen console before then, so even that date is an iffy proposition. Most tech companies would have called that a miserable failure by now, if they had managed to survive such a massive loss. Nintendo had OTOH made a pure profit off of their line and usually reach ROI for any given console line within a few months of release. Sony is a bit tougher to see because their primary goal was not just selling consoles, but selling Blu-Ray players.
2) Ballmer was officially CEO in 2000, but Gates held the Chairman of the Board slot for quite some time after that - and if you don't think Gates called the shots during that time with Ballmer as a figurehead-in-transition, you're either naive or lying.
...and how many will just shift to filestube, downloading as happily as they ever had?
What I'm saying is, the adaptation may not be within a given protocol, but to a new protocol.
So far, we all went from sharing nibblers (or blank cassettes for music/video) via sneakernet, to BBS, to Napster, to eMule/LimeWire/ed2k, to BitTorrent, and now folks are getting into using one of a bajillion online "file storage" services to spread the stuff around.
Each time, it seems that the MPAA/RIAA can only seem to catch those who straggle behind and hadn't transitioned yet to the next stage.
Not yet, but give them time.
Now that ThirdPoint (the investment firm that made the stink in the first place) got what they wanted (a guy on the board), I wonder how long it will take before Yahoo suddenly and unexpectedly sells off its patent portfolio to Microsoft at fire-sale prices.
I missed no such thing. He inferred that nerds only need an artificial womb to make babies. Since said nerds almost always have the sperm available, a female willing to provide the eggs was the missing ingredient.
you're missing one ingredient (hint: they're located in ovaries.)
Songs of Distant Earth had hibernation for the last ship to leave Earth, but otherwise yeah, good call.
To expand for the pseudo-geeks out there, the early colony ships would take along cryogenic-frozen sperm and eggs, then would use in-vitro fertilization and artificial wombs to make babies. Robots would do the education and rearing, while other robots began building everything else.
Assuming that the components would remain viable that whole time, and that the machinery held up and did what it was supposed to? Seems like the only feasible way to get people from here to another star system using what we know now, technology-wise.
But in the case of DVD's, you'll actually spend orders of magnitude more time and effort pirating it than you would have spent simply sitting through the warning.
Apples/Oranges. Pirating a DVD is the action-equivalent of going out to buy one legitimately.
It's not an inconvenience - it's a foot in the door.
First it's the little warning. Then it's the unskippable lecture. Then it's a required political 'lesson' - starting with something safe, like a reminder that all men must register with Selective Service. And then it becomes required that you cannot rip a legitimate copy without those government-imposed blurbs.
Bad enough there are 20 minutes of unskippable trailers on the friggin' thing, which is why I rip the things in the first place.
Almost none of our taxes go to that as it is.
Not to be too picky, but yeah, it does.
This is just a quickie list of what the impoverished get by dint of being impoverished:
--
Medicare/Medicaid/CHIP (which eats 21% of the total budget)
Non-Medicare "Safety Net" programs (which eat an additional 13% of the total budget)
--
That's over 34% of the total US tax revenue going towards the poor. By contrast, the defense budget is around 20% of the pie in spite of two simultaneous wars in progress.
Source.
This, right here.
The whole legal backing behind the illegality of CP is that a child was exploited in that manner to make the photographs. Catch the exploiters, and while harder to do, will have a far more fruitful outcome than simply throwing everyone in jail who happened to see it.
I was thinking the same thing, though usually most folks know up-front that if you didn't actively seek and intentionally download it, you're not to blame.
I remember having to explain similar arguments a long time ago - not about CP, but about porn in general. A student had mis-typed a link in class, and suddenly got bombarded with pr0n - back in the days when pop-ups were all the rage. I merely turned off the monitor and killed power to the machine, then explained what can happen in such cases, but a young lady complained about the student to the school superintendent nonetheless.
They were ready to lynch the kid over it, and it took three hours to explain to these bureaucrats how such things can be accidental. I finally heaved a sigh, and told them to turn on a machine and "go to the White House's website at whitehouse dot com". They expected to find the President, but as you may have guessed, found the expected pr0n - this was before the meme became popular knowledge. Enough of the administrators got clued in by then to keep the kid from getting slammed.
So yeah... sometimes shit happens, and I can see it happening in a bad way for some slob who stumbles over the keyboard the wrong way. That's why I'm glad someone in the legal system is finally showing some sense.
Someone who systematically stores a shitload of CP on his hard drive and has a demonstrable history of actively seeking the shit out both on and offline? Nail 'em to the wall. Someone that accidentally stumbles into the wrong website on the other hand should never see the inside of a courtroom.
Laugh all you want, but a lot of IT management were actually accounting types back in the '80s and early '90s. They were put in charge of the computers because back then, they were the biggest users of the things. Even at my last job, the Head of IT reported directly to the CFO, and it's apparently pretty common for that chain of command elsewhere.
Actually, in this case, it would be more like: "...and if you believe that, you're fired!"
He probably will in due time.
Ms Hart's problem was that she was put in charge of making sure his history was on the up-and-up, and she screwed up in a big way, potentially costing a metric ton of money to the company (the bulk of that loss going towards some golden parachute that Thompson likely has in his contract.) Long story short, she kinda had it coming for failing to do due diligence. It's not like they were hiring a new janitor - they were hiring the frickin' CEO. Microscopic vetting and researching of a candidate's background is pretty much a normal thing for that position, and the board has to do it - you don't trust that kind of work for that kind of position to HR drones.
I figure Thompson may get fired, but they probably want to do it in a way that doesn't touch off lawsuits, or force them to pay out whatever severance money is listed in the contract. Yeah, I know that lies in the resume would normally count as a big reason why one can get fired with cause, but I don't know the details of his contract, and maybe the causes are limited to some list, with no one thinking that bullshitting on the resume would be one of those causes.
Entertainment is quite necessary for the mind, but buying a video game console to get it is not.
Got my first video game console in 1979 - an Atari 2600. My parents saved up for months to afford the ~$200 price tag, and we were allowed to play it after dinner and homework... After that , it was a TI-99/4A (where video entertainment for me consisted of transcribing game code in BASIC from magazines so I could play 'em), and then the Commodore 64 gained a spot.
There was this big video game-less spot in my life, where I was too busy living it out there to bother. I was also too broke most of the time to get new games, or new equipment, etc. So, I made my own entertainment.
Years pass, and eventually I get ahead. For awhile, I was up to my eyeballs in Quake, Quake II, the Weapons Factory MOD, then I'm doing dev on an Unreal Tournament port for the MOD... yeah, I played a bit hard for awhile on the PC.
Th summary? It wasn't the only form of entertainment, nor did I let it suck down the budget - especially when I couldn't afford to do so.
Depends on where you live.
$7/hr in Mississippi or Arkansas is actually quite livable - I've done it.
$28/hr in New York City or San Francisco is starvation wages, in spite of being 4x larger.
Wait, what?
Dude... when I was a young, broke man, we had better and far cheaper entertainment. We'd hang out somewhere with friends, sometimes playing actual sports (football = $10 or so.) I'd walk in the park with the missus. I'd go to the beach. I'd go hiking. I'd go to the library. There are a zillion ways to get entertainment that is far cheaper and far better for you than sitting stupefied in front of a TV while clutching a gaming controller.
Hell, even hanging around a bar with friends and/or getting laid is cheaper as long as you don't do it every weekend - and that's what a lot of folks do anyway.
I get your point, but seriously? An XBox is not a necessity.
http://www.7tutorials.com/how-access-ubuntu-shared-folders-windows-7
HTH.
You left out the 3-10 hours setting up some samba shares if you have never done it before
Right-click on folder, select "share..."
You haven't done this for awhile, have you?
Then there is another whole day spent setting up X if you dare run a multimon setup of any kind. And if you are very unlucky in this step you can't easily get to a terminal of any kind and have to start the whole process over again of re-installing linux from scratch.
Now I know the whole story, since that hasn't been true since 2006 at the very least.
tl;dr: STFU, stupid troll.
It takes around 25 minutes to install Ubuntu and grab libdvdcss, and w/ 12.04, one round of downloads to patch it to a current state.
It takes around 1 hour to install Windows 7 on the same hardware, and around 6-8 separate and massive downloads (one weighed in at over 500MB) and 4-6 reboots over the next couple of days to get all the updates.
We got rid of Stalin etc.
You didn't "got rid" of anything - Stalin died of old age. The only reason his successor didn't keep the ball of death rolling on "counter-revolutionaries" in the USSR was because after Lenin and Stalin, everyone else was too damned horrified by the results to even think about keeping that machine going. Still, from Khrushchev on, death still came fairly cheap in the USSR... it just happened on a slower and quieter scale. Only in the mid 1980s', during a rapid succession of leaders, did the insanity begin to come apart. The USSR lucked out when Gorbachev got the job - they finally got someone who was only half-competent at keeping things going, leading to the collapse of the power structure that had kept the whole thing going since 1917.
OTOH, the USSR had touched off Mao's turn at it, as well as others such as Pol Pot, and even Kim Il Sung (whose recently-installed grandson is continuing that tradition even today).
As for:
these guys know that a powerhouse can destroy their power. So, of course a dictator will attack religion.
Turns out you're not correct. All those folks I listed up there took their philosophies from Karl Marx, who explicitly wrote that religion was a "bourgeoisie" habit that had to go, and went out of his way to explain why. You are partially correct in that a religious infrastructure can make or break a leader. However, this is rarely the case (see also WWII Germany and Italy).
TFA states it was pulled "after a complaint" (note singular).
Likely from a small town in Northwest Washington...
I have trouble believing this is the only reason. They pulled all of them from all of their stores in America? I have trouble believing that a single complaint was the only reason. "Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity," goes the quote, and I think it applies here.
True, but that's a whole lot of stupid going on...
In science, proving climate change isn't human caused would get you more prestige and power.
Not really - in fact, not at all. Unless you can motivate a government or other authority, you gain no power over them.
If you conclusively disproved AGW beyond all doubt (or even just convinced powers and population beyond their ability to effectively doubt), you get nothing of note. They may talk you up a bit, maybe give you a pat on the back, but then you'd get quickly ignored as powers and population both turn their gaze to the next topic that has lots of "ooh, shiny!" in it.
On the other hand, conclusively proving AGW beyond all doubt (or even just convincing the powers that be and the population at large beyond their ability to successfully refute it)? That's where the power really is. Why? Because the specter of doom is raised, and isn't going to go away - you now have everyone's attention. All they know is that now the world is going to fry due to human activity, and the first question out of their mouths will be "what do we do about it!?" They will be looking to you for answers. They will give you everything you want or need to help end the threat that you've made them aware of. You will likely be hailed far and wide as a prophet and a (potential) savior, if you can come up with something to 'save' them. You become the de facto arbiter of whether or not a given mitigation program will work or not. In other words, for as long as the threat is present and people are scared, you hold the cards.
Proving new understanding is prestige with science, maintaining the status quo is how priest gain power.
Umm, we're not talking about your peers giving you props here (and a goodly number of them would likely hate your guts for blasting their work should you successfully disprove AGW). We're talking about actual power. The kind of power that lets you make people do what you want them to. Forget sex, money, or fine food. It's power, that is control over other human beings -- to be a deity among men, and to have a name that lasts -- that is the last, greatest, and strongest of all temptations.
Also, for a cult figure to gain power, status quo isn't going to cut it in an age where people are always looking for the next shiny thing. You have to get them scared or angry, and keep them whipped up on a continuing basis.
Consider it this way. You have two means to motivate and control people. Do you:
a) "Bah! All the scare-mongering is wrong. Here's why. You can go about your daily routines again without fear."
--or--
b) "Holy shit! we're all going to die if we don't stop doing what you're doing! Here's why! Listen to me before it is too late!"
I think "b" is going to get a lot more attention (thus power) than "a", no?
Clue: It's not about money - it's about prestige and power. The grant money just gets you an income and the means to further your cause.
After all, if you gain the power to influence entire governments, then why bother trying to run for office? If scientists and laymen practically worship you, why would you need bling or other attention-grabbing baubles?
Shit, man... the priests and priestesses had all this figured out at the dawn of time. If you can have all the power, adoration, and be comfortable at the same time? Why would you need anything else? Politicians and robber barons can only hope for some of it, and competition is fierce among them. The real power lies behind the throne.
Nah - it just means that you lack taste. ;)
(I jest, but you did leave the opening...)