...and it's called BitTorrent. Undoubtedly some folks will jump at the chance to eagerly fellate the industry by claiming that BitTorrent is 'stealing' and therefore evil, but I seriously doubt that's the case for most users. In fact, I'm willing to bet that most BitTorrent users already have cable and use BitTorrent to grab old episodes of a series they just clued into, or to find a show they missed or hasn't aired in their region yet, or even to do what I do: get a show *without commercials*. How this is any different than using a VCR to record a show and then fast-forward through the commercials (which is what I and just about every other person in the world who records a show does) escapes me.
BitTorrent is the ultimate time-shifter and commercial fast-forwarder all rolled into one, a system that (amazingly enough) works solely due to the kindness of strangers. And because the system works, and works well, do you honestly think I see any value whatsoever in paying for 'tv on demand' when I already pay for cable and whatever I miss/don't want to watch on TV/don't feel like recording that week I can grab off of BitTorrent whenever the bloody hell I feel like it, at no additional charge? I realize there are people who're actually stupid enough to pay several times for the exact same shit, but I'm not one of them and I doubt they comprise a large percentage of the viewing audience - who, by the way, already pays twice in the form of a cable bill first and having 20 minutes of every hour of programming dedicated to the ad industry second.
Can't really see the value in TV-on-demand so long as BitTorrent is around.
But without Government, the monopolies hire private armies to enforce their will. Nice as the idea of anarcho-sydicalism may be, I suspect they are not particulary realistic.
This is the very definition of "dictatorship". At this point the corporation *is* the government.
I see you somehow managed to miss the history behind "eminent domain" and the rail barons. Or the regulation which ended all competition with the Edison Power Company overnight, with a snap of the bureaucratic fingers. Or the government-enforced oligopolies in telecommunications and air transportation which only recently ended. I could go on here if you like.
Without the power of government to enforce the will of a corporate entity at gunpoint it's very difficult to build a monopoly, or an oligopoly. The only recent example I can think of in this regard is Microsoft, and even here we have government complicity in that through executive interference MS was let off the hook and allowed to get away with the CRIMINAL acts (matter of record, not opinion) which it used to obtain that monopoly in the first place.
Yep, government is *real* effective at putting the lid on those evil monopolies. Not.
You're assuming - incorrectly, I might add - that these countries need to comply with U.S. IP laws. Both India and China, two of the fastest-growing economies in the world, have decided to selectively ignore U.S. IP law and produce home versions of products in direct contradiction to U.S. law (generic drugs are a good example).
And really, what the fuck is the U.S. going to do about it? Invade China or India? Now *that's* a fucking laugh. America can't even summon up the balls to embargo either nation for past indiscretions, much less make a credible threat against any country stronger than "bend me over please" Iraq.
There's no disadvantage when you're in a position to tell the U.S. to fuck off and mind their own business, which both countries have done on numerous occasions.
This is a "no shit" comment. You use somebody else's code, you have to labor under the copyright restrictions they've placed on it. That's *always* true and any company that rips off somebody else's code without complying with the copyright is just another thief in the night, whether it's done purposefully or because the management is too fucking incompetent to do its job.
The GPL is no different from any other copyright restriction in this regard.
Some people are just begging to be sterilized before they pollute the rest of the gene pool with their offspring, and these losers most certainly qualify.
Of course, in this case we probably don't have to worry about these folks breeding - ever. The only thing they're ever going to slip the meat inside of is a RealDoll.
The reason is that in an unmanaged capitalism, eventually all the money gravitates to one place.
Typical left-wing liberal claptrap. The fact that there's no supporting evidence for this view doesn't seem to stop anyone from spouting it.
Monopolies break all the advantages offered by capitalism.
Monopolies are the result of governments having too much power in the marketplace. It becomes possible for the rich to buy legislation giving them government-enforced advantages while keeping out the competition and startups. How else do you think monopolies are maintained, kimosabe? Through magic?
Just because that matters to you doesn't mean it matters to everyone. Some people happen to prefer Opera and think it's a better browser than FF. Whether you agree with them or not is irrelevent.
What I don't like about most of these articles re FireFox is the zealotry. It seems the pro-FF people have a difficult time wrapping their heads around the fact that a homogenous browsing environment of any kind is a bad thing, whether it be IE, FF, or some other browser.
Yes, IE is a badly written program with enormous, gaping security holes. But that doesn't mean we go on a religious crusade to replace every browser on Earth with just one other browser, and one browser alone. It means that we instead say "anything but vanilla IE" instead of "FF uber alles". Worshipping at the altar of FF is no better than worshipping at the altar of IE; both are brain-dead activities.
This comment is insightful? Must've been modded by a Firefox fanboy.
I use Opera, for one. And you don'thave to pay for it if you don't mind a small box of TEXT ads - not graphical, but text - in the upper right-hand corner.
To each his own. Anyone reasonable person will conclude that a world dominated by Firefox could hardly be any better than a world dominated by IE. We need a heteregeneous mix of browsers, not one browser to "rule them all".
...let's remember this is a government agency. Having worked for and with various government agencies, I can tell you right now that there is no grand conspiracy afoot to hide truckloads of documents from the general public. In fact, you can pretty much boil down the FBI's position in four ways:
- like most government agencies (federal, state, local - it doesn't matter) a good many of the people in management really don't give a shit what you want, despite the supposed goal of serving the people who sign their paychecks - meaning you, the citizen. Egomania is fairly rampant among management and they take it as a given that you're nothing more than a bunch of irritating, ignorant proles who should keep their mouths shut and do as they're told. The fact that you'd file a FOIA request in the first place annoys the hell out of these people - who are you to question the government, you stupid serf? And that means they aren't at all inclined to put anything more than the minimal amount of effort required into fulfilling your request. Sometimes they'll even deliberately hide information for no other reason than to spite you. I've actually seen this done. Yes, it's pissy and childish, but that tells you a good deal about the people you're dealing with.
- most management types are heavily invested in making sure as little information as possible gets out to the public, especially information that hasn't been vetted by house PR. This is true even if the information appears to be harmless. Why? Because in order to get ahead in the game, a fair number of these folks have done things they don't want anyone to know about (or have screwed up royally, and are trying to hide the mistake), and citizens have this surprising knack for discovering patterns in otherwise innocuous bundles of information - patterns that sometimes point fingers. The less information the citizen has, the less likely it is to come back and bite someone in the ass. This isn't an agency conspiracy, it's the local management playing CYA. The more incompetent that local management, the more likely they are to do this sort of thing (because they have more fuckups they're trying to hide).
- FOIA requests tread on someone's turf. Every manager has turf, represented by budget and personnel. When you make an FOIA request you commandeer some of that budget and a certain amount of personnel for a period of time. This is annoying to someone who views himself as the absolute ruler of his particular fiefdom.
- general incompetence means that searches will miss documents even if they aren't difficult to find. The best government workers (in my experience) are the low-level schmucks whom no one pays attention to even though they're almost entirely responsible for keeping their department afloat, but even so a good many of these people are in government because they can't cut it in any other job. It's a crapshoot whether the person or persons designated to actually do the searching will be one of the competent ones or one of the morons.
These behaviors aren't specific to government, of course. You see them in any large organization, including corporations. But they are more prevalent in government simply because government a) makes the laws and has little to fear, and b) government has a secure revenue stream backed by the threat of violence. Remember, your ability to vote politicians in and out of office means nothing to these people since it'll have no effect whatsoever on them personally; they'll still be employed at the end of the day regardless of who you put in charge of the government as a whole. In a very real sense they aren't accountable to anyone.
What do you boys think a TA does? Essentially they teach the class for the professor because the prof is too busy schmoozing for a promotion or engaged in some "publish or perish" research project. Is this somehow not teaching because it's the prof's name and not the TA's that shows up on a class schedule?
That would be rather silly. You *do* know what OS X is, don't you?
Max
Re:Not particularly difficult....
on
The Know-It-All
·
· Score: 1
I agree. The "Wheel of Time" series has got to be getting pretty close to that number by now, and for the life of my I couldn't tell you what the hell's going on or who did what, or why.
I have equal reasons to suspect, you are objecting to my hypothesis not so much on its merit, but to defend the contemporary women from these dreadful folks.
Then I'll make it crystal. Please provide a link or cite to an empirical study published in an accredited scientific journal that supports either of these two statements:
"In the past, those few men, who did get the meat were able to get more than one female. Those few, who were better at it (on average) got more action -- on average."
"In addition to hunting, there was also fighting -- inter- and intratribal... Again, the winner got to mate more (often the main purpose of the fighting in the first place)."
You will never find such a study. This is nothing more than your personal opinion being passed off as fact, when it's nothing of the sort.
Yep. But it's a dig at christians who put over-the-top bible quotes in their sig lines commanding me to follow this or that religious tenet. On most days I'm an atheist.
May be, but they still tried -- hard and often. And those men, who were better at it, had better chance of procreating.
That's an assumption I don't see backed by any solid evidence. Why would a woman waste her time with a man who can only bring home the bacon on rare occasions, when another man who learns to gather fruits and vegetables (doing some REAL work) is available - and clearly more useful? Logic tells us that the woman will choose the man with the better genes, which in this case is clearly the guy who does gathering instead of hunting.
And you'll note: for that 99% of human history *humans didn't get any better at hunting*. This only occurred when technology started to improve, making it easier. That points to the idea that women *didn't* choose better hunters, else future generations would be more likely to be better hunters, who in turn would be chosen, etc. Genetic selection should've resulted in an increased efficiency in hunting, but it didn't.
Current thought is that *both* sexes spent most of their food-collection time gathering, not hunting (although women did more gathering than men, for reasons unknown - perhaps the men were too busy sucking down beers and playing tag football?). When humans did acquire meat they mostly did it through trapping or scavenging (neither activity favors either sex; both can do it equally well). Actual hunting was a rare activity since it usually didn't pay off. The only branch of humanity that we know for a fact was any good at all at it was the Neanderthals; every other branch of humanity seems to have pretty much sucked at the activity.
If this is true, gathering also doesn't have anything to do with multi-tasking. And right now nobody has any idea why women developed this trait and not men, but it could simply be a sex-linked random mutation that proved useful. A "shit happens" mutation that resulted in a corpus callosum in women roughly four times larger than that of men.
It's a fallacy that humans were mighty hunters, or that men did all the hunting and women all the gathering, child-rearing, etc. It appeals to quite a few men for obvious reasons, but it just isn't based on any real facts. We know now that humans didn't hunt very often, that they were most likely scavengers when it came to meat, and that meat was only a fraction of their diet. We also know that the supposed differentiation in gender roles is a wholesale construction without any empirical support (which, not surprisingly, mimic the morals of folks who happen to like women in the subservient role and would dearly love to use the argument "it's always been this way" to justify their position).
There's far too much of this stuff being passed off as fact even though there's no evidence to back any of it up. It pollutes the collective consciousness with crap that has no business being presented as 'science', and was initially promoted for political or social reasons.
Especially if they know that they will be sued to death if something happens to a kid when on a walk in the forest.
When I was a kid we did just that on a regular basis. The school went camping on rotation, several times a year, teaching kids wilderness survival. Nobody thought a thing about it, except for a few horrified transplanted Californians. All the usual 'Boy Scout' stuff was taught - e.g., making a fire, what plants are good to eat, what to do if lost or if it's raining/snowing and you have no cover, how to build a snow cave, etc. And some other things you might not think about, like when the instructors would strand you in groups of 4 or 5 several miles from camp, give you a compass, and tell you that you had the afternoon to make it back. Groups of 4 or 5 kids ranging in ages from 7 to 11, mind you.
I can't imagine that flying today. Parents would probably scream bloody murder about the 'dangers'. As if it weren't more dangerous for their kid to bike over to a friend's house, given how badly Boomer driving degenerates as they get older....
Yes, and I'm sure a great many of us will have the opportunity to put that thinking to practical use in the real world. "Hmmm, should I ally with the Mongols or conquer them? Or maybe I should wait until I get the next infantry tech?"
Slashdot Mirror
...and it's called BitTorrent. Undoubtedly some folks will jump at the chance to eagerly fellate the industry by claiming that BitTorrent is 'stealing' and therefore evil, but I seriously doubt that's the case for most users. In fact, I'm willing to bet that most BitTorrent users already have cable and use BitTorrent to grab old episodes of a series they just clued into, or to find a show they missed or hasn't aired in their region yet, or even to do what I do: get a show *without commercials*. How this is any different than using a VCR to record a show and then fast-forward through the commercials (which is what I and just about every other person in the world who records a show does) escapes me.
BitTorrent is the ultimate time-shifter and commercial fast-forwarder all rolled into one, a system that (amazingly enough) works solely due to the kindness of strangers. And because the system works, and works well, do you honestly think I see any value whatsoever in paying for 'tv on demand' when I already pay for cable and whatever I miss/don't want to watch on TV/don't feel like recording that week I can grab off of BitTorrent whenever the bloody hell I feel like it, at no additional charge? I realize there are people who're actually stupid enough to pay several times for the exact same shit, but I'm not one of them and I doubt they comprise a large percentage of the viewing audience - who, by the way, already pays twice in the form of a cable bill first and having 20 minutes of every hour of programming dedicated to the ad industry second.
Can't really see the value in TV-on-demand so long as BitTorrent is around.
Max
But without Government, the monopolies hire private armies to enforce their will. Nice as the idea of anarcho-sydicalism may be, I suspect they are not particulary realistic.
This is the very definition of "dictatorship". At this point the corporation *is* the government.
Max
I see no evidence for this.
I see you somehow managed to miss the history behind "eminent domain" and the rail barons. Or the regulation which ended all competition with the Edison Power Company overnight, with a snap of the bureaucratic fingers. Or the government-enforced oligopolies in telecommunications and air transportation which only recently ended. I could go on here if you like.
Without the power of government to enforce the will of a corporate entity at gunpoint it's very difficult to build a monopoly, or an oligopoly. The only recent example I can think of in this regard is Microsoft, and even here we have government complicity in that through executive interference MS was let off the hook and allowed to get away with the CRIMINAL acts (matter of record, not opinion) which it used to obtain that monopoly in the first place.
Yep, government is *real* effective at putting the lid on those evil monopolies. Not.
Max
You're assuming - incorrectly, I might add - that these countries need to comply with U.S. IP laws. Both India and China, two of the fastest-growing economies in the world, have decided to selectively ignore U.S. IP law and produce home versions of products in direct contradiction to U.S. law (generic drugs are a good example).
And really, what the fuck is the U.S. going to do about it? Invade China or India? Now *that's* a fucking laugh. America can't even summon up the balls to embargo either nation for past indiscretions, much less make a credible threat against any country stronger than "bend me over please" Iraq.
There's no disadvantage when you're in a position to tell the U.S. to fuck off and mind their own business, which both countries have done on numerous occasions.
Max
This is a "no shit" comment. You use somebody else's code, you have to labor under the copyright restrictions they've placed on it. That's *always* true and any company that rips off somebody else's code without complying with the copyright is just another thief in the night, whether it's done purposefully or because the management is too fucking incompetent to do its job.
The GPL is no different from any other copyright restriction in this regard.
Max
Some people are just begging to be sterilized before they pollute the rest of the gene pool with their offspring, and these losers most certainly qualify.
Of course, in this case we probably don't have to worry about these folks breeding - ever. The only thing they're ever going to slip the meat inside of is a RealDoll.
Max
The reason is that in an unmanaged capitalism, eventually all the money gravitates to one place.
Typical left-wing liberal claptrap. The fact that there's no supporting evidence for this view doesn't seem to stop anyone from spouting it.
Monopolies break all the advantages offered by capitalism.
Monopolies are the result of governments having too much power in the marketplace. It becomes possible for the rich to buy legislation giving them government-enforced advantages while keeping out the competition and startups. How else do you think monopolies are maintained, kimosabe? Through magic?
Max
My sig is clearly a dig, nothing more. You, it appears, actually believe that shit about resurrection.
Max
Yes ... Did your God rise from the dead on the third day?
Prove that yours did.
Max
but you can't claim that it's 40-worth better (or whatever the actual price is).
Sure I can. Who are you to tell me what I should value or how I should spend my money?
Max
I'm sorry, but free wins the day here.
Just because that matters to you doesn't mean it matters to everyone. Some people happen to prefer Opera and think it's a better browser than FF. Whether you agree with them or not is irrelevent.
Max
What I don't like about most of these articles re FireFox is the zealotry. It seems the pro-FF people have a difficult time wrapping their heads around the fact that a homogenous browsing environment of any kind is a bad thing, whether it be IE, FF, or some other browser.
Yes, IE is a badly written program with enormous, gaping security holes. But that doesn't mean we go on a religious crusade to replace every browser on Earth with just one other browser, and one browser alone. It means that we instead say "anything but vanilla IE" instead of "FF uber alles". Worshipping at the altar of FF is no better than worshipping at the altar of IE; both are brain-dead activities.
Max
This comment is insightful? Must've been modded by a Firefox fanboy.
I use Opera, for one. And you don'thave to pay for it if you don't mind a small box of TEXT ads - not graphical, but text - in the upper right-hand corner.
To each his own. Anyone reasonable person will conclude that a world dominated by Firefox could hardly be any better than a world dominated by IE. We need a heteregeneous mix of browsers, not one browser to "rule them all".
Max
...let's remember this is a government agency. Having worked for and with various government agencies, I can tell you right now that there is no grand conspiracy afoot to hide truckloads of documents from the general public. In fact, you can pretty much boil down the FBI's position in four ways:
- like most government agencies (federal, state, local - it doesn't matter) a good many of the people in management really don't give a shit what you want, despite the supposed goal of serving the people who sign their paychecks - meaning you, the citizen. Egomania is fairly rampant among management and they take it as a given that you're nothing more than a bunch of irritating, ignorant proles who should keep their mouths shut and do as they're told. The fact that you'd file a FOIA request in the first place annoys the hell out of these people - who are you to question the government, you stupid serf? And that means they aren't at all inclined to put anything more than the minimal amount of effort required into fulfilling your request. Sometimes they'll even deliberately hide information for no other reason than to spite you. I've actually seen this done. Yes, it's pissy and childish, but that tells you a good deal about the people you're dealing with.
- most management types are heavily invested in making sure as little information as possible gets out to the public, especially information that hasn't been vetted by house PR. This is true even if the information appears to be harmless. Why? Because in order to get ahead in the game, a fair number of these folks have done things they don't want anyone to know about (or have screwed up royally, and are trying to hide the mistake), and citizens have this surprising knack for discovering patterns in otherwise innocuous bundles of information - patterns that sometimes point fingers. The less information the citizen has, the less likely it is to come back and bite someone in the ass. This isn't an agency conspiracy, it's the local management playing CYA. The more incompetent that local management, the more likely they are to do this sort of thing (because they have more fuckups they're trying to hide).
- FOIA requests tread on someone's turf. Every manager has turf, represented by budget and personnel. When you make an FOIA request you commandeer some of that budget and a certain amount of personnel for a period of time. This is annoying to someone who views himself as the absolute ruler of his particular fiefdom.
- general incompetence means that searches will miss documents even if they aren't difficult to find. The best government workers (in my experience) are the low-level schmucks whom no one pays attention to even though they're almost entirely responsible for keeping their department afloat, but even so a good many of these people are in government because they can't cut it in any other job. It's a crapshoot whether the person or persons designated to actually do the searching will be one of the competent ones or one of the morons.
These behaviors aren't specific to government, of course. You see them in any large organization, including corporations. But they are more prevalent in government simply because government a) makes the laws and has little to fear, and b) government has a secure revenue stream backed by the threat of violence. Remember, your ability to vote politicians in and out of office means nothing to these people since it'll have no effect whatsoever on them personally; they'll still be employed at the end of the day regardless of who you put in charge of the government as a whole. In a very real sense they aren't accountable to anyone.
Max
What do you boys think a TA does? Essentially they teach the class for the professor because the prof is too busy schmoozing for a promotion or engaged in some "publish or perish" research project. Is this somehow not teaching because it's the prof's name and not the TA's that shows up on a class schedule?
Max
and not by a Linux fanboy
That would be rather silly. You *do* know what OS X is, don't you?
Max
I agree. The "Wheel of Time" series has got to be getting pretty close to that number by now, and for the life of my I couldn't tell you what the hell's going on or who did what, or why.
Max
I have equal reasons to suspect, you are objecting to my hypothesis not so much on its merit, but to defend the contemporary women from these dreadful folks.
Then I'll make it crystal. Please provide a link or cite to an empirical study published in an accredited scientific journal that supports either of these two statements:
"In the past, those few men, who did get the meat were able to get more than one female. Those few, who were better at it (on average) got more action -- on average."
"In addition to hunting, there was also fighting -- inter- and intratribal... Again, the winner got to mate more (often the main purpose of the fighting in the first place)."
You will never find such a study. This is nothing more than your personal opinion being passed off as fact, when it's nothing of the sort.
Max
Yep. But it's a dig at christians who put over-the-top bible quotes in their sig lines commanding me to follow this or that religious tenet. On most days I'm an atheist.
Max
May be, but they still tried -- hard and often. And those men, who were better at it, had better chance of procreating.
That's an assumption I don't see backed by any solid evidence. Why would a woman waste her time with a man who can only bring home the bacon on rare occasions, when another man who learns to gather fruits and vegetables (doing some REAL work) is available - and clearly more useful? Logic tells us that the woman will choose the man with the better genes, which in this case is clearly the guy who does gathering instead of hunting.
And you'll note: for that 99% of human history *humans didn't get any better at hunting*. This only occurred when technology started to improve, making it easier. That points to the idea that women *didn't* choose better hunters, else future generations would be more likely to be better hunters, who in turn would be chosen, etc. Genetic selection should've resulted in an increased efficiency in hunting, but it didn't.
Current thought is that *both* sexes spent most of their food-collection time gathering, not hunting (although women did more gathering than men, for reasons unknown - perhaps the men were too busy sucking down beers and playing tag football?). When humans did acquire meat they mostly did it through trapping or scavenging (neither activity favors either sex; both can do it equally well). Actual hunting was a rare activity since it usually didn't pay off. The only branch of humanity that we know for a fact was any good at all at it was the Neanderthals; every other branch of humanity seems to have pretty much sucked at the activity.
If this is true, gathering also doesn't have anything to do with multi-tasking. And right now nobody has any idea why women developed this trait and not men, but it could simply be a sex-linked random mutation that proved useful. A "shit happens" mutation that resulted in a corpus callosum in women roughly four times larger than that of men.
It's a fallacy that humans were mighty hunters, or that men did all the hunting and women all the gathering, child-rearing, etc. It appeals to quite a few men for obvious reasons, but it just isn't based on any real facts. We know now that humans didn't hunt very often, that they were most likely scavengers when it came to meat, and that meat was only a fraction of their diet. We also know that the supposed differentiation in gender roles is a wholesale construction without any empirical support (which, not surprisingly, mimic the morals of folks who happen to like women in the subservient role and would dearly love to use the argument "it's always been this way" to justify their position).
There's far too much of this stuff being passed off as fact even though there's no evidence to back any of it up. It pollutes the collective consciousness with crap that has no business being presented as 'science', and was initially promoted for political or social reasons.
Max
Ice cores from Antarctica give a fairly clear picture on the subject.
Max
Carmaggeddon was an invaluable tool for improving my driving skills! I can rack up splatter bonuses like nobody's business!
Max
Especially if they know that they will be sued to death if something happens to a kid when on a walk in the forest.
When I was a kid we did just that on a regular basis. The school went camping on rotation, several times a year, teaching kids wilderness survival. Nobody thought a thing about it, except for a few horrified transplanted Californians. All the usual 'Boy Scout' stuff was taught - e.g., making a fire, what plants are good to eat, what to do if lost or if it's raining/snowing and you have no cover, how to build a snow cave, etc. And some other things you might not think about, like when the instructors would strand you in groups of 4 or 5 several miles from camp, give you a compass, and tell you that you had the afternoon to make it back. Groups of 4 or 5 kids ranging in ages from 7 to 11, mind you.
I can't imagine that flying today. Parents would probably scream bloody murder about the 'dangers'. As if it weren't more dangerous for their kid to bike over to a friend's house, given how badly Boomer driving degenerates as they get older....
Max
Yes, and I'm sure a great many of us will have the opportunity to put that thinking to practical use in the real world. "Hmmm, should I ally with the Mongols or conquer them? Or maybe I should wait until I get the next infantry tech?"
Max
give consumers what consumers want, not what you want consumers to want (to make the most money)
According to the RIAA and MPAA, this is the new definition of "communism".
Max