You know "parallel" when you're not running a just a benchmark and you're not running a big server or HPC load means "desktop", right? How often do you only have one application running? Multiple processes go to multiple cores just like multiple threads do.
Agreed. Traffic shaping based on type, possibly with different customers able to get plans for different types of traffic (low latency for small packets vs. high total throughput with higher latency for example). They shouldn't be charging competitors more for competing data sources or types of service or shaping them down, though, just for competing. They also shouldn't be allowed to shape a smaller player down after the peering point in favor of a bigger one or one who has paid to get an advantage on the consumer end.
refrain from social media altogether until the problem is resolved
Sorry, I didn't realize Twatter was "social media altogether". Sorry, Slashdot, you just admitted on your front page you are irrelevant. Only Twitter counts.
The MPAA is not just made up of movie studios. It is media conglomerates which operate movie studios, TV networks, news papers, news websites, magazines, and radio stations. Often they even publish books, which you might have thought if you weren't paying attention were special and done by companies with a special tie to independent thinkers as their customers.
The RIAA is the same sort of companies, and more often than not owned by the same conglomerates as the MPAA. So it's not really even two trade organizations for two industries. It's two trade organizations for two faces of the same industry.
General Electric is a $157 billion dollar a year company which owns NBC, Telemundo, Universal Pictures, Focus Features, 26 actual television stations in the US, cable networks MSNBC, Bravo, and SyFy. They also own 80% of NBC Universal, which means Oxygen, USA, and the Weather Channel. They also happen to make a lot of the electronics themselves, as well as jets, electric turbines for hydro power, jet engines, etc etc etc.
The $36 billion dollar last year Disney owns not just the Disney Channel, but ABC, ESPN, SOAP Net, A&E, 277 radio stations, and a whole lot more. You probably guess they owned Walt Disney Records, but what about Lyric Street Records and Hollywood Records? Sure, they own Walt Disney Pictures and Walt Disney Animation Studios, and DisenyToon Studios. They Touchstone Pictures, Hollywood Pictures, Miramax Films, though. They have their theme parks and their Disney stores in malls. Maybe you thought they got publishers to publish books about Disney's characters, maybe even paying to have them published since they are so profitable. Did you know, though, that they are the world's single largest publisher of children's books? They own Disney Libri and Disney Press of course, but also Hyperion Books for Children and Jump at the Sun.
You probably knew that the people who bring you Family Guy, Fox Sports, and Fox News were all part of the $30 billion dollar-per-year News Corporation. You maybe even made the 20th Century Fox, Fox Searchlight, and FX connections. What about the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, TV Guide, Barron's, Smart Money, Blue Sky Studios, Speed network, all the National Geographic properties, The Indian family of TV networks known as Star, Stats.com sports info website, MarketWatch, Sky satellite companies, Dow Jones, Sunday Times of the Uk and Australia, The Times of London, and a large share of the National Rugby League? Did you notice that one of the major players in newspapers and news TV also owns the major financial reporting properties Fox Business, The Wall Street Journal, and MarketWatch? Did you also notice they control the business and financial journalism property that actually calculates and reports the single most-often cited market index in the US, Dow Jones, which reports the Dow Jones Industrial Average (and decides who is part of it) which the other news outlets then report in turn every single weekday? Harper Collins has been the publisher for books by Mark Twain, C.S. Lewis, Charles Dickens, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., JFK, Tolkien, and H.G. Wells. Now they are just an arm of the folks that bring you The Simpsons.
Time Warner brought in $28.8 billion last year. They own Warner Brothers, of course, along with Turner Classic Movies, TBS, and Time magazine. They now longer own Time Warner Cable, since they spun that out. They still share a headquarters building with them. They also own, though, HBO, CNN, TNT, Cinemax, TruTV, Cartoon Network, and all the affiliated networks like CNN International, and regional versions of several of these networks around the world. They also, of course, own TV production companies and content distribution companies for movies and TV besides the networks and movie studios. New Line Television, Telepictures Production, Warner Home Video, and of course anything that says HBO or Warner that distributes but isn't already named above. They own AOL (actually AOL bought them and changed the name to Time War
I propose a government very limited in scope of power and size of civilian agencies, but with a very broad option of stern enforcement for issues that really need intervention.
You leaked a movie? You get sued. The government supplies the court, but is not the plaintiff. You sell a defective product? You get sued, and maybe the government asks you to do a recall.
Let's look deeper at more limited scope and less limited power for infractions with a concrete example. There are lots of industries that get inspected regularly by the government, usually at the public's expense. Any company should not sell a known dangerous product (I'm talking about dangerous to the user as used properly, not banning guns, fuels, fireworks, alcohol, knives, cars, or anything else just because they can be misused). Companies above a certain size or any publicly traded company should probably even to the positive know their products are safe, to the best of their ability.
Does that mean the government should employ testers at taxpayer expense? Not necessarily. Under a smaller but sterner government it means that the companies should be hiring independent testing clearinghouse companies to test their products, like UL. If there's not one available, they should pay a government lab cash to test it. Research universities with big labs could make some cash to offset the cost of tuition by having some faculty and student time doing safety testing which serves the common good and teaches useful applicable methods of engineering research. If you make screenings like that mandatory, it's not a matter of raising taxes and how big your government is. It's a matter of a capitalist system paying its own way by in most cases hiring other capitalist companies. Only the independent testing company needs close scrutiny by the government.
What if someone sell a dangerously defective product on purpose? Their case gets bumped up to criminal, everyone at the company who knew about it gets arraigned for criminal endangerment, the company has to pay for fixes or replacements even if a customer chooses a competing product, and if they try to fight that decision and lose then the company is liquidated or the penalties go to the customers who purchased the products as a controlling portion of company stock split among them. If there's an independent safety lab that was paid not to be so independent, then do the same to them. If you make penalties like that, you don't get a lot of abuses that even call for product screening by the government at taxpayer expense.
Right now the USDA and the FDA deal with food and drugs by sending out very few inspection teams and doing very few tests. Most drug studies are done t the hospitals at research universities or at other top-tier medical facilities mostly independent from the drug companies. Most slaughterhouses and food processing plants have little federal, state, or local oversight at all. Some of the cleanest food processing facilities are those handling corn meal, corn starch, and wheat flour (because they are all potentially explosive if dispersed just right in the air) and sites inspected by rabbis. Why rabbis? Because the inspections necessary to get a kosher seal are more frequent than most state-backed inspections, and any careful set of eyes is better than none. The government inspections help, but they don't keep us very safe. Look at spinach, peanut butter, eggs, and all the drug recalls the last few years. Go ahead, Google the recalls. What really helps is that once companies do get caught, they get fines and shutdowns -- after there's actual evidence of wrongdoing and not just an accusation and a court order, of course.
Why is it that the public has an interest in paying to make sure what we buy is safe? Aren't we already paying the companies to provide us products that are market-worthy? Isn't there a contract when they sell us something that it is suitable for sale?
Therefore, if a company is selling us unsafe products, we shouldn't pay more for the product through ta
No, really, they aren't. They're Statists. They think the State is the important thing, and that the people are here to benefit the government and the party in power. They don't care about corporations any more than they care about people, except when corporations help keep them in power. They want power, and the MPAA and RIAA member companies control the media outlets that do the evening news, too. For career politicians, it's all about keeping the cushy job as near the top as possible.
I think the point is that the Internet shouldn't necessarily get any more regulation simply for being the Internet. The sorts of things you're talking about wouldn't be allowed by law in meatspace. This new law is equivalent to pulling the business license and evicting a seller from a brick-and-mortar store for these offenses without a trial. why should they be doing this to web sites specifically when they wouldn't dream of passing a law to do it on Fifth Avenue if Saks was accused of it.
What judge in his right mind would think an injunction against making a living without due process is constitutional in the first place? The accused has an inalienable right to face his accusers, answer the accusations, and present evidence for his own defense.
I didn't miss that point. I didn't think it was germane to where the other 25% went to say whether or not it was thought to be an ecological concern.
My main concern in this thread is that several posters from the "news for nerds" crowd can't figure out that if you take 75% of something away that 25% of it remains. I think that's a worse catastrophe for the future of mankind than the amount of oil in this spill.
That's why the court system is an adversarial one. The defendant and the plaintiff both get to make a case, and the judge or jury doesn't have to award the full amount being claimed if they don't think it's a fair amount.
It's not the margin of error. It's the 25% that's still in the deeper water. That's why they mentioned three ways the oil came out of the mass of the water and it didn't add up to 100%.
That other 25% is getting into the plankton, fish, shrimp, and marine mammals. Part of it's undoubtedly in the gulf stream on its way to the coast of the UK and Ireland. Part of it will remain in the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, and the western Atlantic. This last 25% will take years or decades more to break down after the press grows tired of covering it.
The reason the numbers sound so fake is that they are approximate best guesses. Nobody has actually been able to reliably measure exactly what the flow was, how much is in tar balls, and the like. The initial flow is an estimate. The tar balls are an estimate. The sheen on top of the water is an estimate. What's left in the water is an estimate. The only thing they could really measure with any precision is what they scooped up or burned off.
For goodness sake, we can't have honesty for the fear of awkward questions now? Are you over there welcoming our new anti-sex-ed overlords?
Solar power has the same problem right now as Linux. Stop snickering in the back, I'm serious and I'm going somewhere with this. People keep trying to convince others to use Linux because of the problems with Windows. There are flaws in that, though. For one, there are improvements to Windows from time to time. A big one was going from Vista to 7 so quickly, with its better UAC and better performance. Another has been Microsoft's better security over recent years, even though there are still issues. When you sell Linux (or OS X or any other OS) on Microsoft's weaknesses, then counter-arguments are easy to make based on improvements to Windows. People are used to it, and most don't care that it's proprietary and closed-source because they themselves aren't going to mess with the code anyway. There's plenty of infrastructure around it. They just don't see the weaknesses as that big a deal for now, and won't switch for ideology. They'll switch when you can show them that for their situation Linux (or, again, OS X or QNX or Solaris or BSD...) is actually just as easy an just as cheap and offers some additional advantages, too.
Do you know the problems with marketing solar right now? It's being compared to oil. People are used to oil. There's lots of infrastructure around it. Advances are being made to make burning oil more efficient. The price tends to come back down after any big spike. The cars have better driving range and lower initial purchase cost running on oil. Sure, it'd be better for society as a whole in the long run if we could use solar (or wind, or hydrogen fuel cells, or geothermal, or some combination). Yet people are going with the easy, convenient devil they know until something solves their particular problems better.
A supplementary technology that wants to take over a small part of the market can be almost as good and in theory better. Some people will make an investment in their future. Some will even spend more than they would otherwise just to advance the technology and the agenda to get it out there and raise awareness. That's fine if you're okay with having a supplementary position for a technology. This is where OS X and Linux are on desktops, and it's where solar is for energy.
A replacement technology has to be better for the masses right now. People as a whole are too self-interested to throw away existing infrastructure and existing investments to pay a higher price for solutions almost as good or even as good as what they've got. They either want very nearly as good for a lot less investment of both time and money, as good for somewhat less, or will pay very slightly more for a huge return over what they have. This is where OS X is for workstation-class machines at many media production houses and where Linux is for server farms. It's where solar is for small niches like satellites, weather stations, handheld calculators, and electric livestock fences.
For any OS to replace Windows on a large share of mainstream desktops, it has to offer the kind of third-party support Windows does for less, or be not just somewhat easier to use and more secure but far easier and impenetrable for the same cost. You have to sell people on its strengths, not on the weaknesses of the incumbent. The incumbent might be bumbling and have its share of false starts, but it's getting better itself and still has a lot of support. Yes, I'm tempted to bring Congressional politics in after that...
Photovoltaic solar, solar thermal, wind, geothermal, fuel cells, and other technologies for energy suffer the same position. They are great technologies, and they are getting better. Oil, coal, and natural gas are the big boys in the market, though. There's infrastructure around them. Hydroelectric has made inroads at the expense of farmland and forests. Solar has its niches. Geothermal with pumps powered by the grid is becoming more popular for home hea
Hey, i first-posted a joke about Intel Upgrade Service in this thread over two hours before your post. I'm not trying to be a prick about it; I'm just curious. I find it interesting that you made the same connection in the same thread without seeming to notice mine.
Do you not read the threads at all, do you just skim over them, do you reply to the summary then read, or do you filter out posts moderated "Funny"? Maybe you filter out posts made by me, in which case I'd probably never get a reply, but you're not listed as a freak of mine or anything. Really, I'm not bitching about it. I'm just wondering how it happened, because it's something often seen and seldom addressed. Oh, there are "redundant" mods, which your post isn't because although we both mentioned the same humorous analogy from the front page I made a simple joke of it and you actually extended the analogy for further discussion. I'm just curious about the phenomenon of such disconnects between previous posts and later ones when obviously there's no time overlap between posts.
Around 15% to 25% of revenues going to customer acquisition and retention (marketing, sales calls, rebates, incentives, whatever) is a pretty common budgetary decision in US businesses. So yeah, after payroll, facilities, and other operating costs marketing and sales are a major expense. The most common advice I get as a small-business owner both online and in person from other business owners is 20%.
I've heard as low as 10%, but that's still a big chunk of the budget. I've also heard of people spending as high as 40% of revenues for a short period when entering a new market segment.
It's informative to stick "how much to spend on marketing" into a search engine and see what the different magazines, forums, and blogs say. Different industries of course have slightly different needs, but at least 10% and not more than 30% under normal circumstances should be a decent starting place for considering what to spend.
It's too bad most closed-source software that people actually buy shrink-wrapped is sold by software product sales companies rather than actual software development companies.
Hell, some of my CE equipment needs reboots because of software bugs or insufficient cooling considerations in the design. People who put out products to make a profit are not generally engineering things to public safety standards or business-critical standards. Most are selling consumer-grade hardware and software at as low a cost per unit as they can without completely losing the market.
The function the site (and most recipe-swapping web sites so far as I'm aware from comparisons) offered was verbatim copying of not just the list of ingredients or the ingredients and steps to combine them. It was the complete recipe with options, reasons for using optional ingredients or optional steps, serving suggestions, and sometimes stories about whose grandmother served the recipe on a cold and rainy afternoon or such. It literally took a copy from the database and put it in another user's account if the original submitter allowed the recipes to be copied. It would be easy to specify an entire cookbook made up of another user's recipes given the functionality of the site.
To be safe within the law, you don't try to skirt the borders of what one court has ruled. Our actual degreed attorney who is a member of the bar in two states gave us advice, and we followed it. Screw Slashdot's theory of how to outsmart judges and potential plaintiffs in hypothetical situations. We took the legal advice we were given, which is why you pay an attorney in the first place.
So the article to which you link says to get specific legal advice from a competent attorney, and I'm wrong because I told you what the attorney told us when we asked? Umm... okay.
An attorney's job is not really to tell you exactly what you may be able to get by with doing. It's to tell you where's a safe place to tread within the law and what precautions to take if you start to wander into questionable areas of the law.
The attorney we talked to said that to be really safe, we should only allow users to copy recipes they had permission to copy. I don't think that's such bad advice when the courts haven't settled it for sure.
If you want to fight a court battle to prove you're right about something, go ahead and get yourself sued based on your understanding of a couple web pages. As for me, I'll try to keep making my living without getting sued in the first place.
Generally on Slashdot when something is of Federal US jurisdiction as copyright is, the statements are about that US Federal jurisdiction. Sorry if you're from outside the US, but that's the way it is.
Yes I'm aware of circuit court splits and such, but those are a technicality and only apply when there's an actual split on a particular topic. There might be a circuit split right now over the copying of recipes from cookbooks, but there certainly wasn't one I was made aware of a year or so ago when I was working for a cookbook website. We had to follow the law as it was being advised to us by the attorney, and the law as advised to us was that people had to have permission to copy a recipe from another source or another user on the site.
You want people to stop talking altogether? Fine, prequalify everything everyone wants to say. I was speaking with the benefit of having spoken to counsel, although I myself am not a lawyer.
Really, if you think about it, terrorism is a warped sort of engineering discipline in itself. They are trying to apply a particular small force in a particular limited way to gain maximum effect of changing other people's actions.
It's social engineering just as sure as getting a drunk systems intern to give you a password or writing scare-tactic film scripts like "Reefer Madness" to convince people to change their ways. The terrorists think they can control people in a predictable way if only they tweak the right variables. That's quite an engineer's mindset.
In fact, even if they don't change anything in the populations they attack, they are often successful in rallying people to their cause by making those attacks. The leaders of al Qaeda for example have a large, radical, and devoted army to do their bidding largely because they attacked the US, Spain, the UK, and elsewhere. Even if their actual goal wasn't to do anything of consequence to the targets, they've still got a lot of young impressionable kids doing their bidding like a giant street gang or mafia family with little or no payroll. If you're a criminal mastermind, that's probably the kind of thing you dream about. Actual world domination is not very likely, but domination over a suitably large part of the world they've already got, and they're currently not really under the jurisdiction of any state.
Two nations, one of which Bin Laden didn't care much for in the first place, have been toppled. When Afghanistan fell, al Qaeda and the Taleban largely just went into Pakistan. They are still fighting in parts of Afghanistan, but you can bet the top leaders are pretty comfortable somewhere and being pampered with money and servants.
All of this is because they understood how to motivate certain people to do certain things with a minimum of fuss on their own part. It sounds like an elegant project come together to me: a big return on a small amount of labor because they cleverly harnessed power from elsewhere.
If an engineer goes sick in the head, I can totally see how he becomes a terrorist. When lives other than your own are just cogs, political issues like poverty and religion are levers, and news media are the fulcrum, you really can move the world. You just need someplace with no law and order on which to stand.
Slashdot Mirror
You know "parallel" when you're not running a just a benchmark and you're not running a big server or HPC load means "desktop", right? How often do you only have one application running? Multiple processes go to multiple cores just like multiple threads do.
Agreed. Traffic shaping based on type, possibly with different customers able to get plans for different types of traffic (low latency for small packets vs. high total throughput with higher latency for example). They shouldn't be charging competitors more for competing data sources or types of service or shaping them down, though, just for competing. They also shouldn't be allowed to shape a smaller player down after the peering point in favor of a bigger one or one who has paid to get an advantage on the consumer end.
Sorry, I didn't realize Twatter was "social media altogether". Sorry, Slashdot, you just admitted on your front page you are irrelevant. Only Twitter counts.
The MPAA is not just made up of movie studios. It is media conglomerates which operate movie studios, TV networks, news papers, news websites, magazines, and radio stations. Often they even publish books, which you might have thought if you weren't paying attention were special and done by companies with a special tie to independent thinkers as their customers.
The RIAA is the same sort of companies, and more often than not owned by the same conglomerates as the MPAA. So it's not really even two trade organizations for two industries. It's two trade organizations for two faces of the same industry.
General Electric is a $157 billion dollar a year company which owns NBC, Telemundo, Universal Pictures, Focus Features, 26 actual television stations in the US, cable networks MSNBC, Bravo, and SyFy. They also own 80% of NBC Universal, which means Oxygen, USA, and the Weather Channel. They also happen to make a lot of the electronics themselves, as well as jets, electric turbines for hydro power, jet engines, etc etc etc.
The $36 billion dollar last year Disney owns not just the Disney Channel, but ABC, ESPN, SOAP Net, A&E, 277 radio stations, and a whole lot more. You probably guess they owned Walt Disney Records, but what about Lyric Street Records and Hollywood Records? Sure, they own Walt Disney Pictures and Walt Disney Animation Studios, and DisenyToon Studios. They Touchstone Pictures, Hollywood Pictures, Miramax Films, though. They have their theme parks and their Disney stores in malls. Maybe you thought they got publishers to publish books about Disney's characters, maybe even paying to have them published since they are so profitable. Did you know, though, that they are the world's single largest publisher of children's books? They own Disney Libri and Disney Press of course, but also Hyperion Books for Children and Jump at the Sun.
You probably knew that the people who bring you Family Guy, Fox Sports, and Fox News were all part of the $30 billion dollar-per-year News Corporation. You maybe even made the 20th Century Fox, Fox Searchlight, and FX connections. What about the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, TV Guide, Barron's, Smart Money, Blue Sky Studios, Speed network, all the National Geographic properties, The Indian family of TV networks known as Star, Stats.com sports info website, MarketWatch, Sky satellite companies, Dow Jones, Sunday Times of the Uk and Australia, The Times of London, and a large share of the National Rugby League? Did you notice that one of the major players in newspapers and news TV also owns the major financial reporting properties Fox Business, The Wall Street Journal, and MarketWatch? Did you also notice they control the business and financial journalism property that actually calculates and reports the single most-often cited market index in the US, Dow Jones, which reports the Dow Jones Industrial Average (and decides who is part of it) which the other news outlets then report in turn every single weekday? Harper Collins has been the publisher for books by Mark Twain, C.S. Lewis, Charles Dickens, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., JFK, Tolkien, and H.G. Wells. Now they are just an arm of the folks that bring you The Simpsons.
Time Warner brought in $28.8 billion last year. They own Warner Brothers, of course, along with Turner Classic Movies, TBS, and Time magazine. They now longer own Time Warner Cable, since they spun that out. They still share a headquarters building with them. They also own, though, HBO, CNN, TNT, Cinemax, TruTV, Cartoon Network, and all the affiliated networks like CNN International, and regional versions of several of these networks around the world. They also, of course, own TV production companies and content distribution companies for movies and TV besides the networks and movie studios. New Line Television, Telepictures Production, Warner Home Video, and of course anything that says HBO or Warner that distributes but isn't already named above. They own AOL (actually AOL bought them and changed the name to Time War
I propose a government very limited in scope of power and size of civilian agencies, but with a very broad option of stern enforcement for issues that really need intervention.
You leaked a movie? You get sued. The government supplies the court, but is not the plaintiff. You sell a defective product? You get sued, and maybe the government asks you to do a recall.
Let's look deeper at more limited scope and less limited power for infractions with a concrete example. There are lots of industries that get inspected regularly by the government, usually at the public's expense. Any company should not sell a known dangerous product (I'm talking about dangerous to the user as used properly, not banning guns, fuels, fireworks, alcohol, knives, cars, or anything else just because they can be misused). Companies above a certain size or any publicly traded company should probably even to the positive know their products are safe, to the best of their ability.
Does that mean the government should employ testers at taxpayer expense? Not necessarily. Under a smaller but sterner government it means that the companies should be hiring independent testing clearinghouse companies to test their products, like UL. If there's not one available, they should pay a government lab cash to test it. Research universities with big labs could make some cash to offset the cost of tuition by having some faculty and student time doing safety testing which serves the common good and teaches useful applicable methods of engineering research. If you make screenings like that mandatory, it's not a matter of raising taxes and how big your government is. It's a matter of a capitalist system paying its own way by in most cases hiring other capitalist companies. Only the independent testing company needs close scrutiny by the government.
What if someone sell a dangerously defective product on purpose? Their case gets bumped up to criminal, everyone at the company who knew about it gets arraigned for criminal endangerment, the company has to pay for fixes or replacements even if a customer chooses a competing product, and if they try to fight that decision and lose then the company is liquidated or the penalties go to the customers who purchased the products as a controlling portion of company stock split among them. If there's an independent safety lab that was paid not to be so independent, then do the same to them. If you make penalties like that, you don't get a lot of abuses that even call for product screening by the government at taxpayer expense.
Right now the USDA and the FDA deal with food and drugs by sending out very few inspection teams and doing very few tests. Most drug studies are done t the hospitals at research universities or at other top-tier medical facilities mostly independent from the drug companies. Most slaughterhouses and food processing plants have little federal, state, or local oversight at all. Some of the cleanest food processing facilities are those handling corn meal, corn starch, and wheat flour (because they are all potentially explosive if dispersed just right in the air) and sites inspected by rabbis. Why rabbis? Because the inspections necessary to get a kosher seal are more frequent than most state-backed inspections, and any careful set of eyes is better than none. The government inspections help, but they don't keep us very safe. Look at spinach, peanut butter, eggs, and all the drug recalls the last few years. Go ahead, Google the recalls. What really helps is that once companies do get caught, they get fines and shutdowns -- after there's actual evidence of wrongdoing and not just an accusation and a court order, of course.
Why is it that the public has an interest in paying to make sure what we buy is safe? Aren't we already paying the companies to provide us products that are market-worthy? Isn't there a contract when they sell us something that it is suitable for sale?
Therefore, if a company is selling us unsafe products, we shouldn't pay more for the product through ta
No, really, they aren't. They're Statists. They think the State is the important thing, and that the people are here to benefit the government and the party in power. They don't care about corporations any more than they care about people, except when corporations help keep them in power. They want power, and the MPAA and RIAA member companies control the media outlets that do the evening news, too. For career politicians, it's all about keeping the cushy job as near the top as possible.
Ask Steve Jackson how much protection that is. You don't want a court order standing between you and losing your livelihood. You want a trial.
I think the point is that the Internet shouldn't necessarily get any more regulation simply for being the Internet. The sorts of things you're talking about wouldn't be allowed by law in meatspace. This new law is equivalent to pulling the business license and evicting a seller from a brick-and-mortar store for these offenses without a trial. why should they be doing this to web sites specifically when they wouldn't dream of passing a law to do it on Fifth Avenue if Saks was accused of it.
What judge in his right mind would think an injunction against making a living without due process is constitutional in the first place? The accused has an inalienable right to face his accusers, answer the accusations, and present evidence for his own defense.
I didn't miss that point. I didn't think it was germane to where the other 25% went to say whether or not it was thought to be an ecological concern.
My main concern in this thread is that several posters from the "news for nerds" crowd can't figure out that if you take 75% of something away that 25% of it remains. I think that's a worse catastrophe for the future of mankind than the amount of oil in this spill.
It was all in the depths of the Gulf. You saw where 75% of it came out of the deeper waters. 100% - 75% equals...
That's why the court system is an adversarial one. The defendant and the plaintiff both get to make a case, and the judge or jury doesn't have to award the full amount being claimed if they don't think it's a fair amount.
It's not the margin of error. It's the 25% that's still in the deeper water. That's why they mentioned three ways the oil came out of the mass of the water and it didn't add up to 100%.
That other 25% is getting into the plankton, fish, shrimp, and marine mammals. Part of it's undoubtedly in the gulf stream on its way to the coast of the UK and Ireland. Part of it will remain in the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, and the western Atlantic. This last 25% will take years or decades more to break down after the press grows tired of covering it.
The reason the numbers sound so fake is that they are approximate best guesses. Nobody has actually been able to reliably measure exactly what the flow was, how much is in tar balls, and the like. The initial flow is an estimate. The tar balls are an estimate. The sheen on top of the water is an estimate. What's left in the water is an estimate. The only thing they could really measure with any precision is what they scooped up or burned off.
For goodness sake, we can't have honesty for the fear of awkward questions now? Are you over there welcoming our new anti-sex-ed overlords?
Solar power has the same problem right now as Linux. Stop snickering in the back, I'm serious and I'm going somewhere with this. People keep trying to convince others to use Linux because of the problems with Windows. There are flaws in that, though. For one, there are improvements to Windows from time to time. A big one was going from Vista to 7 so quickly, with its better UAC and better performance. Another has been Microsoft's better security over recent years, even though there are still issues. When you sell Linux (or OS X or any other OS) on Microsoft's weaknesses, then counter-arguments are easy to make based on improvements to Windows. People are used to it, and most don't care that it's proprietary and closed-source because they themselves aren't going to mess with the code anyway. There's plenty of infrastructure around it. They just don't see the weaknesses as that big a deal for now, and won't switch for ideology. They'll switch when you can show them that for their situation Linux (or, again, OS X or QNX or Solaris or BSD...) is actually just as easy an just as cheap and offers some additional advantages, too.
Do you know the problems with marketing solar right now? It's being compared to oil. People are used to oil. There's lots of infrastructure around it. Advances are being made to make burning oil more efficient. The price tends to come back down after any big spike. The cars have better driving range and lower initial purchase cost running on oil. Sure, it'd be better for society as a whole in the long run if we could use solar (or wind, or hydrogen fuel cells, or geothermal, or some combination). Yet people are going with the easy, convenient devil they know until something solves their particular problems better.
A supplementary technology that wants to take over a small part of the market can be almost as good and in theory better. Some people will make an investment in their future. Some will even spend more than they would otherwise just to advance the technology and the agenda to get it out there and raise awareness. That's fine if you're okay with having a supplementary position for a technology. This is where OS X and Linux are on desktops, and it's where solar is for energy.
A replacement technology has to be better for the masses right now. People as a whole are too self-interested to throw away existing infrastructure and existing investments to pay a higher price for solutions almost as good or even as good as what they've got. They either want very nearly as good for a lot less investment of both time and money, as good for somewhat less, or will pay very slightly more for a huge return over what they have. This is where OS X is for workstation-class machines at many media production houses and where Linux is for server farms. It's where solar is for small niches like satellites, weather stations, handheld calculators, and electric livestock fences.
For any OS to replace Windows on a large share of mainstream desktops, it has to offer the kind of third-party support Windows does for less, or be not just somewhat easier to use and more secure but far easier and impenetrable for the same cost. You have to sell people on its strengths, not on the weaknesses of the incumbent. The incumbent might be bumbling and have its share of false starts, but it's getting better itself and still has a lot of support. Yes, I'm tempted to bring Congressional politics in after that...
Photovoltaic solar, solar thermal, wind, geothermal, fuel cells, and other technologies for energy suffer the same position. They are great technologies, and they are getting better. Oil, coal, and natural gas are the big boys in the market, though. There's infrastructure around them. Hydroelectric has made inroads at the expense of farmland and forests. Solar has its niches. Geothermal with pumps powered by the grid is becoming more popular for home hea
O, HAI!
See also:
U has got it nao?
HTH.
KTHXBAI!
Hey, i first-posted a joke about Intel Upgrade Service in this thread over two hours before your post. I'm not trying to be a prick about it; I'm just curious. I find it interesting that you made the same connection in the same thread without seeming to notice mine.
Do you not read the threads at all, do you just skim over them, do you reply to the summary then read, or do you filter out posts moderated "Funny"? Maybe you filter out posts made by me, in which case I'd probably never get a reply, but you're not listed as a freak of mine or anything. Really, I'm not bitching about it. I'm just wondering how it happened, because it's something often seen and seldom addressed. Oh, there are "redundant" mods, which your post isn't because although we both mentioned the same humorous analogy from the front page I made a simple joke of it and you actually extended the analogy for further discussion. I'm just curious about the phenomenon of such disconnects between previous posts and later ones when obviously there's no time overlap between posts.
Sure I can easily replace it. Novell has NDS. ;-)
I can haz turnkey upgrade for 50$?
Around 15% to 25% of revenues going to customer acquisition and retention (marketing, sales calls, rebates, incentives, whatever) is a pretty common budgetary decision in US businesses. So yeah, after payroll, facilities, and other operating costs marketing and sales are a major expense. The most common advice I get as a small-business owner both online and in person from other business owners is 20%.
I've heard as low as 10%, but that's still a big chunk of the budget. I've also heard of people spending as high as 40% of revenues for a short period when entering a new market segment.
It's informative to stick "how much to spend on marketing" into a search engine and see what the different magazines, forums, and blogs say. Different industries of course have slightly different needs, but at least 10% and not more than 30% under normal circumstances should be a decent starting place for considering what to spend.
You should have included the next two as well:
A Windows-specific character set and a looping nonexistent background sound. Heh.
It's too bad most closed-source software that people actually buy shrink-wrapped is sold by software product sales companies rather than actual software development companies.
Hell, some of my CE equipment needs reboots because of software bugs or insufficient cooling considerations in the design. People who put out products to make a profit are not generally engineering things to public safety standards or business-critical standards. Most are selling consumer-grade hardware and software at as low a cost per unit as they can without completely losing the market.
The function the site (and most recipe-swapping web sites so far as I'm aware from comparisons) offered was verbatim copying of not just the list of ingredients or the ingredients and steps to combine them. It was the complete recipe with options, reasons for using optional ingredients or optional steps, serving suggestions, and sometimes stories about whose grandmother served the recipe on a cold and rainy afternoon or such. It literally took a copy from the database and put it in another user's account if the original submitter allowed the recipes to be copied. It would be easy to specify an entire cookbook made up of another user's recipes given the functionality of the site.
To be safe within the law, you don't try to skirt the borders of what one court has ruled. Our actual degreed attorney who is a member of the bar in two states gave us advice, and we followed it. Screw Slashdot's theory of how to outsmart judges and potential plaintiffs in hypothetical situations. We took the legal advice we were given, which is why you pay an attorney in the first place.
So the article to which you link says to get specific legal advice from a competent attorney, and I'm wrong because I told you what the attorney told us when we asked? Umm... okay.
An attorney's job is not really to tell you exactly what you may be able to get by with doing. It's to tell you where's a safe place to tread within the law and what precautions to take if you start to wander into questionable areas of the law.
The attorney we talked to said that to be really safe, we should only allow users to copy recipes they had permission to copy. I don't think that's such bad advice when the courts haven't settled it for sure.
If you want to fight a court battle to prove you're right about something, go ahead and get yourself sued based on your understanding of a couple web pages. As for me, I'll try to keep making my living without getting sued in the first place.
Generally on Slashdot when something is of Federal US jurisdiction as copyright is, the statements are about that US Federal jurisdiction. Sorry if you're from outside the US, but that's the way it is.
Yes I'm aware of circuit court splits and such, but those are a technicality and only apply when there's an actual split on a particular topic. There might be a circuit split right now over the copying of recipes from cookbooks, but there certainly wasn't one I was made aware of a year or so ago when I was working for a cookbook website. We had to follow the law as it was being advised to us by the attorney, and the law as advised to us was that people had to have permission to copy a recipe from another source or another user on the site.
You want people to stop talking altogether? Fine, prequalify everything everyone wants to say. I was speaking with the benefit of having spoken to counsel, although I myself am not a lawyer.
Really, if you think about it, terrorism is a warped sort of engineering discipline in itself. They are trying to apply a particular small force in a particular limited way to gain maximum effect of changing other people's actions.
It's social engineering just as sure as getting a drunk systems intern to give you a password or writing scare-tactic film scripts like "Reefer Madness" to convince people to change their ways. The terrorists think they can control people in a predictable way if only they tweak the right variables. That's quite an engineer's mindset.
In fact, even if they don't change anything in the populations they attack, they are often successful in rallying people to their cause by making those attacks. The leaders of al Qaeda for example have a large, radical, and devoted army to do their bidding largely because they attacked the US, Spain, the UK, and elsewhere. Even if their actual goal wasn't to do anything of consequence to the targets, they've still got a lot of young impressionable kids doing their bidding like a giant street gang or mafia family with little or no payroll. If you're a criminal mastermind, that's probably the kind of thing you dream about. Actual world domination is not very likely, but domination over a suitably large part of the world they've already got, and they're currently not really under the jurisdiction of any state.
Two nations, one of which Bin Laden didn't care much for in the first place, have been toppled. When Afghanistan fell, al Qaeda and the Taleban largely just went into Pakistan. They are still fighting in parts of Afghanistan, but you can bet the top leaders are pretty comfortable somewhere and being pampered with money and servants.
All of this is because they understood how to motivate certain people to do certain things with a minimum of fuss on their own part. It sounds like an elegant project come together to me: a big return on a small amount of labor because they cleverly harnessed power from elsewhere.
If an engineer goes sick in the head, I can totally see how he becomes a terrorist. When lives other than your own are just cogs, political issues like poverty and religion are levers, and news media are the fulcrum, you really can move the world. You just need someplace with no law and order on which to stand.