Because I enjoy exposing the hypocritical shits for what they are, that's why. Hey, if that bothers you then don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.
Carter explains the illusion of the free will and its evolutionary origins.
Jesus H., another pseudo-intellectual blathering on about the 'illusion' of free will. I certainly hope this sophomoric proclamation is an invention of the reviewer and not the author. The last thing I'd want to read is a book by someone who never got past how 'cool' it was to be able to use what he learned in Philosophy 101 to annoy the shit out of his party guests.
But if you guys want to keep pretending that Apple is some noble philanthropic organization while Microsoft is a greedy capitalist leviathan, you go right ahead. Delusion is sure preferable to harsh reality, isn't it?
New here? Welcome to Slashdot!
Although the typical slashdotter deludes themselves into thinking they're more intelligent (and certainly more 'intellectual') than Joe Smith on the street, they're just as much into knee-jerkery as any prole. They just knee-jerk about different things, then spend inordinate amounts of time patting each other on the back for being intelligent/intellectual/rebellious/whatever, like a pack of teenage twats running down Britney because, like, that's so counterculture, duuude!
Defining what is or is not a journalist isn't within the purview of the government. The Constitution grants no such authority to any branch of the government, including the judiciary.
Sorry, but no. Leaking trade secrets is not journalism...it's corporate espionage, and deserves to be treated as such.
I see. So once again corporations get special protections that individuals - including you and me - aren't afforded. Just great.
I love living in a country where a corporation has more rights than a living, breathing human being. And where asswipes will pop out of the woodwork by the dozens to support this view because apparently sucking corporate cock is what they aspire to most in life.
A "trade secret" can only be secret if it's, well, *kept secret*. The problem isn't the guy who wrote up the secrets in his blog, but the employee who breached his contract by passing the secrets along in the first place. If Apple is embarrassed by the actions of this employee they need to sue the employee, not the blogger.
If you somehow think corporate America should have greater protections when it comes to guarding its secrets than Joe Smith down the street does, then the problem isn't Apple, the employee, or the blogger - but *you*.
...how fucking egomaniacal the folks at the RIAA actually are. The very idea of proposing this kind of sham, much less thinking at any broadband ISP will sign it, tells you how much power they think they have and how so very out of touch with reality they are.
Mark my words: when ISPs blow them raspberries for this nonsense their next step will be to try to buy enough Congressmen to turn it into law. That seems to be their only avenue of success so far.
A 'colony' on Antarctica would be a great way to test out Martian colony design principles
You already have one: Amundsen-Scott. It's been around for a while and they even have their own web site - or used to. Take a look at what it costs to maintain, then multiply that by a suitably exponential number to see what a Mars base of equal size would cost. And this doesn't take into account that Amundsen-Scott has something that a Mars base never would: free air.
Anyone who uses the phrase "common good" or "greater good" is an egomaniac looking to impose their particular view of How The World Should Be(TM) on you, by force if necessary. Never trust anyone who utters these words.
Your reasoning is flawed. Our galaxy is far older than the human race; far older than life on Earth; far older than Earth itself. Unless you think that intelligent life didn't arise in our galaxy until humans made it past Australopithecus, any space-going race that managed to make it to the interstellar colonization stage would've reached Earth a very, very, very long time ago. You only need ONE such race in the *entire history of the galaxy* that finds Earth even remotely habitable to end up with a colonized Earth. And this would've occurred long before humans ever evolved.
So where are they? No race which which manages to enter the interstellar colonization game is ever at risk of total annihiliation. You only need one colony to survive among the thousands/millions planted and the whole thing starts all over again. One race colonizes the galaxy - end of story.
I hear people talk about this inane 'prime directive' theory and I ask: so these aliens were prescient? They ambled by Earth a billion years ago and said "mmmm - prime real estate! But wait! Someday these hairless apes will evolve from the sludge so we'd better call this dirtball 'off limits'!" Yeah, right. This ain't the Star Trek universe, boys.
If even a single sentient race with a taste for oxygen-nitrogen based environments were to become technologically advanced enough to colonize worlds around other stars, within a million or so years they would end up colonizing *every such planet in the galaxy*. Including Earth. And that means there would never have been a human race, for a variety of reasons (not the least of which any such race wouldn't allow small mountains to collide with their homes and wipe out the ecology).
But they haven't. Occam's Razor tells us the most likely reason no one's colonized the Earth is because no one has ever tried. And if they haven't tried it's almost certain that it's because *they aren't around to give it a shot*.
It seems that life is pretty resilient and shows up in the darndest of places. Based on our observation of life on Earth I'd say that finding life elsewhere is pretty much a given. However, in the entire history of life on Earth only *one* intelligent species has, to the best of our knowledge, ever developed. What that tells is that while life itself may be common, intelligent life is incredibly rare. Perhaps even unique.
Protectionism isn't good for the global economy. However, in many instances it works just fine for local economies. Making blanket statements based on unsupported personal opinion won't change this economic fact.
And I haven't seen any comparison since you're all talking out of your asses. How about an empirical study published in an accredited, peer-reviewed journal? Anyone got one of those?
Thanks, but no thanks. Even Adam Smith admitted that while completely unrestricted free trade benefits the economic system as a whole, it can lead to regional economic disasters. He didn't see this as much of a problem because in Smith's time there was no such thing as globalization; nowadays a 'regional economic disaster' could encompass the entire United States. The wealth of the global economy can easily increase while the wealth of the United States, specifically, declines; the health of the system of the whole improves, but that doesn't mean shit to the citizens of the U.S. who no longer have a job.
As a U.S. citizen, I'm really not interested in pissing away my country's economic power to improve the global economy. I'm far more interested in the health of the United States than any nebulous 'greater good'. People who only have the fuzziest grasp of economics seem to think that free trade will automagically improve their specific lot in life, if given time; but Smith never said anything of the sort, a fact that many people are ignorant of, or deliberately ignore, or simply lie about because their particular delusion about what 'free trade' really means is their holy grail.
There is no guarantee that American industry will "rise again". The only guarrantee is that the world economy as a whole will improve in terms of absolute wealth. That doesn't mean that any of that wealth will be distributed regionally to the United States, nor that the U.S. economy won't decline over time. Anyone who thinks otherwise would do with some solid re-education in basic economic theory.
If you want to create industries in America, or keep them in America, tariffs are an excellent tool for doing just that. Sure, tariffs will hurt other countries but that's their problem, not ours. We aren't in the business of 'the greater good', nor should we be.
Clearly you don't have the first fucking clue how the American school system works. Having actually taught in it I can assure you that 'training the mind for learning' is NOT one of the goals of modern schooling; it is, in fact, antithetical to those goals. The last thing in the world the school system wants is a kid that think for him or herself, or worse - figure out that some of the stuff we're selling them is absolutely useless in the real world.
I use a whitelist. Hey, if I don't know you I sure as fuck don't want to hear from you. Whatever you have to say isn't important enough to allow you to pollute my inbox on a whim. If you aren't on the list, you don't have any business sending me email in the first place.
Instead of spending mind-numbing hours wasting our lives on television, we should instead invest those hours in...Slashdot? Either way you still end up with a fat, pasty-faced loser killing time until the Big Macs eventually choke his arteries into submission.
You're (presumably) sentient. You have free will. Regardless of the psychology involved the replying poster is correct: TV didn't "make" you do anything. You chose to do what you did. And that's entirely your own fault. Blaming anyone or anything else is just ducking responsibility for your actions.
Make your own music and prove the business model of P2P works then the world will follow. When you fail at your endeavor, and I'll give you 1,000,000 to 1 odds because you will fail, explain to me why you think the world should follow your footsteps and fail too?
You might want to clue in Apple on the fact that they're about to fail with their downloadable music model.
The problem is the culture that encourages misuse of these tools, rather than a respect for them.
There will always be freeloaders and parasites in human society. Rather than getting your panties in a wad about something as old as the human race, move on and spend your energy on something more important. Whining and moaning over the fact that a relatively small percentage of the population will always look to cirumvent the system in order to avoid paying for a service is just pathetic.
There's a perfectly workable business model for downloadable music already being used. How many millions of songs have been *paid for* again? By people who could just as easily get them for free? This pretty much shoots down any argument over the idea that humans are basically selfish pricks who'll refuse to pay for a service if they can at all avoid it, legally or not. Clearly the evidence makes the assertion laughable. It's most popular, I'd think, amongst those who actually are selfish pricks and refuse to admit the fact that they're in the minority.
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Because I enjoy exposing the hypocritical shits for what they are, that's why. Hey, if that bothers you then don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.
Max
Carter explains the illusion of the free will and its evolutionary origins.
Jesus H., another pseudo-intellectual blathering on about the 'illusion' of free will. I certainly hope this sophomoric proclamation is an invention of the reviewer and not the author. The last thing I'd want to read is a book by someone who never got past how 'cool' it was to be able to use what he learned in Philosophy 101 to annoy the shit out of his party guests.
Max
But if you guys want to keep pretending that Apple is some noble philanthropic organization while Microsoft is a greedy capitalist leviathan, you go right ahead. Delusion is sure preferable to harsh reality, isn't it?
New here? Welcome to Slashdot!
Although the typical slashdotter deludes themselves into thinking they're more intelligent (and certainly more 'intellectual') than Joe Smith on the street, they're just as much into knee-jerkery as any prole. They just knee-jerk about different things, then spend inordinate amounts of time patting each other on the back for being intelligent/intellectual/rebellious/whatever, like a pack of teenage twats running down Britney because, like, that's so counterculture, duuude!
Same shit, different venue. Nothing to see here.
Max
What consititutes a Journalist?
Defining what is or is not a journalist isn't within the purview of the government. The Constitution grants no such authority to any branch of the government, including the judiciary.
Max
Sorry, but no. Leaking trade secrets is not journalism...it's corporate espionage, and deserves to be treated as such.
I see. So once again corporations get special protections that individuals - including you and me - aren't afforded. Just great.
I love living in a country where a corporation has more rights than a living, breathing human being. And where asswipes will pop out of the woodwork by the dozens to support this view because apparently sucking corporate cock is what they aspire to most in life.
"Corporate espionage". What a fucking oxymoron.
Max
A "trade secret" can only be secret if it's, well, *kept secret*. The problem isn't the guy who wrote up the secrets in his blog, but the employee who breached his contract by passing the secrets along in the first place. If Apple is embarrassed by the actions of this employee they need to sue the employee, not the blogger.
If you somehow think corporate America should have greater protections when it comes to guarding its secrets than Joe Smith down the street does, then the problem isn't Apple, the employee, or the blogger - but *you*.
Max
...how fucking egomaniacal the folks at the RIAA actually are. The very idea of proposing this kind of sham, much less thinking at any broadband ISP will sign it, tells you how much power they think they have and how so very out of touch with reality they are.
Mark my words: when ISPs blow them raspberries for this nonsense their next step will be to try to buy enough Congressmen to turn it into law. That seems to be their only avenue of success so far.
Max
Headed by this guy, so even if they never get anything useful done you know they're having a lot of fun not doing it!
Max
A 'colony' on Antarctica would be a great way to test out Martian colony design principles
You already have one: Amundsen-Scott. It's been around for a while and they even have their own web site - or used to. Take a look at what it costs to maintain, then multiply that by a suitably exponential number to see what a Mars base of equal size would cost. And this doesn't take into account that Amundsen-Scott has something that a Mars base never would: free air.
Max
After all, necessity is the mother of invention.
If it were *necessary* that humans colonize space, we'd be doing it already. Clearly it isn't necessary - yet.
Max
Anyone who uses the phrase "common good" or "greater good" is an egomaniac looking to impose their particular view of How The World Should Be(TM) on you, by force if necessary. Never trust anyone who utters these words.
Max
Your reasoning is flawed. Our galaxy is far older than the human race; far older than life on Earth; far older than Earth itself. Unless you think that intelligent life didn't arise in our galaxy until humans made it past Australopithecus, any space-going race that managed to make it to the interstellar colonization stage would've reached Earth a very, very, very long time ago. You only need ONE such race in the *entire history of the galaxy* that finds Earth even remotely habitable to end up with a colonized Earth. And this would've occurred long before humans ever evolved.
So where are they? No race which which manages to enter the interstellar colonization game is ever at risk of total annihiliation. You only need one colony to survive among the thousands/millions planted and the whole thing starts all over again. One race colonizes the galaxy - end of story.
I hear people talk about this inane 'prime directive' theory and I ask: so these aliens were prescient? They ambled by Earth a billion years ago and said "mmmm - prime real estate! But wait! Someday these hairless apes will evolve from the sludge so we'd better call this dirtball 'off limits'!" Yeah, right. This ain't the Star Trek universe, boys.
If even a single sentient race with a taste for oxygen-nitrogen based environments were to become technologically advanced enough to colonize worlds around other stars, within a million or so years they would end up colonizing *every such planet in the galaxy*. Including Earth. And that means there would never have been a human race, for a variety of reasons (not the least of which any such race wouldn't allow small mountains to collide with their homes and wipe out the ecology).
But they haven't. Occam's Razor tells us the most likely reason no one's colonized the Earth is because no one has ever tried. And if they haven't tried it's almost certain that it's because *they aren't around to give it a shot*.
It seems that life is pretty resilient and shows up in the darndest of places. Based on our observation of life on Earth I'd say that finding life elsewhere is pretty much a given. However, in the entire history of life on Earth only *one* intelligent species has, to the best of our knowledge, ever developed. What that tells is that while life itself may be common, intelligent life is incredibly rare. Perhaps even unique.
Max
The world as a whole benefits.
Yeah, so what? The world as a whole isn't my problem. It isn't yours either, unless you've elected yourself god.
Max
Protectionism is not a good thing.
Protectionism isn't good for the global economy. However, in many instances it works just fine for local economies. Making blanket statements based on unsupported personal opinion won't change this economic fact.
Max
And I haven't seen any comparison since you're all talking out of your asses. How about an empirical study published in an accredited, peer-reviewed journal? Anyone got one of those?
Max
I'll take protectionism for $200, Alex.
Thanks, but no thanks. Even Adam Smith admitted that while completely unrestricted free trade benefits the economic system as a whole, it can lead to regional economic disasters. He didn't see this as much of a problem because in Smith's time there was no such thing as globalization; nowadays a 'regional economic disaster' could encompass the entire United States. The wealth of the global economy can easily increase while the wealth of the United States, specifically, declines; the health of the system of the whole improves, but that doesn't mean shit to the citizens of the U.S. who no longer have a job.
As a U.S. citizen, I'm really not interested in pissing away my country's economic power to improve the global economy. I'm far more interested in the health of the United States than any nebulous 'greater good'. People who only have the fuzziest grasp of economics seem to think that free trade will automagically improve their specific lot in life, if given time; but Smith never said anything of the sort, a fact that many people are ignorant of, or deliberately ignore, or simply lie about because their particular delusion about what 'free trade' really means is their holy grail.
There is no guarantee that American industry will "rise again". The only guarrantee is that the world economy as a whole will improve in terms of absolute wealth. That doesn't mean that any of that wealth will be distributed regionally to the United States, nor that the U.S. economy won't decline over time. Anyone who thinks otherwise would do with some solid re-education in basic economic theory.
Max
One word: tariffs.
If you want to create industries in America, or keep them in America, tariffs are an excellent tool for doing just that. Sure, tariffs will hurt other countries but that's their problem, not ours. We aren't in the business of 'the greater good', nor should we be.
Max
but to train the mind for learning.
Clearly you don't have the first fucking clue how the American school system works. Having actually taught in it I can assure you that 'training the mind for learning' is NOT one of the goals of modern schooling; it is, in fact, antithetical to those goals. The last thing in the world the school system wants is a kid that think for him or herself, or worse - figure out that some of the stuff we're selling them is absolutely useless in the real world.
Max
RC - Refused Classification, banned.
Shit, you motherfuckers actually ban movies? Do you burn books, too? And I thought America was puritanical....
Max
I use a whitelist. Hey, if I don't know you I sure as fuck don't want to hear from you. Whatever you have to say isn't important enough to allow you to pollute my inbox on a whim. If you aren't on the list, you don't have any business sending me email in the first place.
Max
Instead of spending mind-numbing hours wasting our lives on television, we should instead invest those hours in...Slashdot? Either way you still end up with a fat, pasty-faced loser killing time until the Big Macs eventually choke his arteries into submission.
I don't really see much of a difference here.
Max
You're (presumably) sentient. You have free will. Regardless of the psychology involved the replying poster is correct: TV didn't "make" you do anything. You chose to do what you did. And that's entirely your own fault. Blaming anyone or anything else is just ducking responsibility for your actions.
Max
Anyone who compares p2p to violence or racism has issues far deeper than the people doing the leeching. Time to look in the mirror, pal.
Max
Make your own music and prove the business model of P2P works then the world will follow. When you fail at your endeavor, and I'll give you 1,000,000 to 1 odds because you will fail, explain to me why you think the world should follow your footsteps and fail too?
You might want to clue in Apple on the fact that they're about to fail with their downloadable music model.
Max
The problem is the culture that encourages misuse of these tools, rather than a respect for them.
There will always be freeloaders and parasites in human society. Rather than getting your panties in a wad about something as old as the human race, move on and spend your energy on something more important. Whining and moaning over the fact that a relatively small percentage of the population will always look to cirumvent the system in order to avoid paying for a service is just pathetic.
There's a perfectly workable business model for downloadable music already being used. How many millions of songs have been *paid for* again? By people who could just as easily get them for free? This pretty much shoots down any argument over the idea that humans are basically selfish pricks who'll refuse to pay for a service if they can at all avoid it, legally or not. Clearly the evidence makes the assertion laughable. It's most popular, I'd think, amongst those who actually are selfish pricks and refuse to admit the fact that they're in the minority.
Max