Rating of films is "voluntary" only to the extent that distribution through the American cinema network is "voluntary". While this hasn't bothered the porn industry, it has been a major impediment to the non-porn independent film industry (and even Hollywood studios to the extent that this applies), who are forced to compromise their artistic vision to get a rating that will enable them to A) be carried by theaters, and B) get a large enough audience to break even and/or make money. If you want to distribute your films to theaters and recoup your investors' money, you craft them to get a PG13 rating.
The downside is that it wouldn't work. There would still be oodles of porn in the.com TLD, because no sane porn peddler would stop using his established domain and risk letting it fall into someone else's hands. As for making it easier to find for those who want it... what, like it's somehow difficult now?
The reason there's no consensus about why it was rejected is because there are so many different reasons, coming from entirely different perspectives. People in the porn industry didn't like it because using it would require submitting to regulation from the registry administrators, and because not using it might open them up to criminalization. Social conservatives didn't like it because they felt it would legitimize porn. Porn consumers didn't like it because they wouldn't be able to get their fix at work. Free speech advocates didn't like it because it could lead to laws putting a chilling effect on non-porn expression in the other TLDs. And pragmatists didn't like it because it was such an obviously unworkable proposal that would have no practical benefit. Granted, there are people in each of these populations who feel differently, but with a deal-killing reason for just about any ideological perspective, it doesn't surprise me that this keeps getting turned down.
In this context, the unit "G" refers to the amount of force applied to the body by the craft it's in (jet, rocket, centrifuge, roller coaster, etc), not a measure of gravitational attraction or acceleration. (Save the pendantry for topics in which you are better informed than your peers.)
The general collapse of brick-and-mortar stores would entail the end of small, locally-owned businesses. In the price-driven online market, large vendors like amazon.com will always have an advantage over momandpop.com. This means that the primary remaining opportunties for middle-class citizens to own businesses will be as microminority investors in megacorps in which they have about as much voice as they do with their bank. So instead of a nation of small businesses, we'd have a nation of employees, who will never be able to rise above that station because the market is all sewn up by large dot-coms. I guess if you don't mind a return to the economic/power system of the Dark Ages, there's no reason whatsover to protect small brick-and-mortar businesses.
Do you really believe that Walmart doesn't use "loss-leaders" - merchandise priced unprofitably - to draw customers into their stores?
The use of mom-and-pop stores as an example by the OP is rather disingenuous, since they're actually the least likely to undercut larger retailers on price. Their competitive advantage (if any) is personalized service. Don't get me wrong: I think price-fixing is a Very Bad Thing, and should remain illegal. But striking down this law would hurt big corporate discounters more than it would hurt small businesses.
You're right: "snappy" is not a word most people are going to use to describe NeoOffice. However:
The main computer at my workplace is a PowerMac G5 configured by my employer with MS Office. I use NeoOffice 2.1 on it instead. Seems pretty darn usable to me.
In fact, I also have an old beige PowerMac G3 tucked away in the storage room where I often take lunch breaks (so I can work on a story I'm writing, without interruptions). The new version of NeoOffice is pretty sluggish on that machine, to the point that I've decided to stick to the less-Aqua NeoOffice 1.2. But considering that it's a machine they stopped making 8 years ago, that required a hack just to install Panther, NeoOffice seems pretty darn usable to me.
dnScoop told me that one of my domains is worth $90. Netsol's appraisal tool says it's worth $7,525 - $10,025. I'm pretty sure at least one of them is mistaken. This whole notion of determining something's "worth" - in the absence of actual people who value it - is like appraising the state of Shroedinger's cat.
That couldn't possibly provide this kind of profile data about the uses of Linux in IT shops. Microsoft does have a clue about how to conduct market research, you know. And did I mention they have an army of reseller/consultants that might actually be familiar with these (potential) customers?
I bet that the "Selling Partners" just happens to be a company named Dell.
Not in this case. Sure, Dell (and other PC OEMs) sell a lot of Windows XP/Vista for Microsoft, but Redmond also has a huge army of reseller/consultants who push Windows Server, IIS, ASP, SQL Server, etc. on business IT departments. What little of this training tool I was able to take in before my eyes glazed over was clearly written in their jargon, and aimed at helping Microsoft's sales drones keep penguins from taking over the Enterprise.*
It's nice to have some empirical backing for this, but it's kinda obvious that learning to drive in an imaginary world with no physical trauma and unrealistic laws of physics introduces some habits that aren't conducive to safe driving in the real world.
If you're in that noisy an environment, your best bet is to use signal isolation technology. What it does is provide a focused signal path between nodes on your local network, generally confining your traffic to that path (so it doesn't interfere with your neighbors') and deflecting all but the strongest interference from outside signals. It's marketed under several names and it's available in different specs, but the generic term for it is "wire".
A slashdotter using his real name doesn't make him an idiot or subservient to the government. Maybe he's just a grown-up who's learned how to function in society and doesn't feel a need to hide.
Could also cause pile-ups, as someone gets a warning that there's oil on the road ahead and slams on his brakes "just to be safe". The traffic patterns formed by drivers who can only see a short distance ahead can be frustrating, but at least they're fairly consistent and predictable. Introducing widespread limited clairvoyance of this sort would change that, and not necessarily for the better.
The fact that the submitter referred to "violence" and "obscenity" (the latter term applying specifically to sexual content) demonstrates a fundamental problem in how we think about these matters. Putting a bullet in someone's mouth is more obscene than putting a penis or a foul word in it. I'm not calling for censorship and I think any regulation needs to be carefully crafted to avoid that, but the notion that sex and language are more harmful to viewers than violence is misguided.
For most people to "use" travel pictures means "look at and/or show to your friends and family". If you're a photojournalist working for a travel magazine or someone else whose definition of "use" is remarkably different, then you ought to know enough not to get into this situation in the first place.
Traveling from place to place with your belongs in a backpack is called "backpacking", regardless of whether those places are cities or mountaintops or whether you get there by foot/canoe/bike or by trains/plains/automobiles. I've done both types of travel, and feel no need to denigrate either activity. (By the way, when one says one is backpacking for a year around the world, it's a safe assumption he means the city-to-city type, since it's damn hard to circumnavigate the planet on foot.)
Slashdot Mirror
What about support costs? A small number of governments and NGOs are a lot less work to deal with than potentially tens of thousands of consumers.
Rating of films is "voluntary" only to the extent that distribution through the American cinema network is "voluntary". While this hasn't bothered the porn industry, it has been a major impediment to the non-porn independent film industry (and even Hollywood studios to the extent that this applies), who are forced to compromise their artistic vision to get a rating that will enable them to A) be carried by theaters, and B) get a large enough audience to break even and/or make money. If you want to distribute your films to theaters and recoup your investors' money, you craft them to get a PG13 rating.
The downside is that it wouldn't work. There would still be oodles of porn in the .com TLD, because no sane porn peddler would stop using his established domain and risk letting it fall into someone else's hands. As for making it easier to find for those who want it... what, like it's somehow difficult now?
The reason there's no consensus about why it was rejected is because there are so many different reasons, coming from entirely different perspectives. People in the porn industry didn't like it because using it would require submitting to regulation from the registry administrators, and because not using it might open them up to criminalization. Social conservatives didn't like it because they felt it would legitimize porn. Porn consumers didn't like it because they wouldn't be able to get their fix at work. Free speech advocates didn't like it because it could lead to laws putting a chilling effect on non-porn expression in the other TLDs. And pragmatists didn't like it because it was such an obviously unworkable proposal that would have no practical benefit. Granted, there are people in each of these populations who feel differently, but with a deal-killing reason for just about any ideological perspective, it doesn't surprise me that this keeps getting turned down.
In this context, the unit "G" refers to the amount of force applied to the body by the craft it's in (jet, rocket, centrifuge, roller coaster, etc), not a measure of gravitational attraction or acceleration. (Save the pendantry for topics in which you are better informed than your peers.)
Just so long as they don't patent the double-click.
The general collapse of brick-and-mortar stores would entail the end of small, locally-owned businesses. In the price-driven online market, large vendors like amazon.com will always have an advantage over momandpop.com. This means that the primary remaining opportunties for middle-class citizens to own businesses will be as microminority investors in megacorps in which they have about as much voice as they do with their bank. So instead of a nation of small businesses, we'd have a nation of employees, who will never be able to rise above that station because the market is all sewn up by large dot-coms. I guess if you don't mind a return to the economic/power system of the Dark Ages, there's no reason whatsover to protect small brick-and-mortar businesses.
Do you really believe that Walmart doesn't use "loss-leaders" - merchandise priced unprofitably - to draw customers into their stores?
The use of mom-and-pop stores as an example by the OP is rather disingenuous, since they're actually the least likely to undercut larger retailers on price. Their competitive advantage (if any) is personalized service. Don't get me wrong: I think price-fixing is a Very Bad Thing, and should remain illegal. But striking down this law would hurt big corporate discounters more than it would hurt small businesses.
With lots and lots of wishful thinking.
You're right: "snappy" is not a word most people are going to use to describe NeoOffice. However:
The main computer at my workplace is a PowerMac G5 configured by my employer with MS Office. I use NeoOffice 2.1 on it instead. Seems pretty darn usable to me.
In fact, I also have an old beige PowerMac G3 tucked away in the storage room where I often take lunch breaks (so I can work on a story I'm writing, without interruptions). The new version of NeoOffice is pretty sluggish on that machine, to the point that I've decided to stick to the less-Aqua NeoOffice 1.2. But considering that it's a machine they stopped making 8 years ago, that required a hack just to install Panther, NeoOffice seems pretty darn usable to me.
dnScoop told me that one of my domains is worth $90. Netsol's appraisal tool says it's worth $7,525 - $10,025. I'm pretty sure at least one of them is mistaken. This whole notion of determining something's "worth" - in the absence of actual people who value it - is like appraising the state of Shroedinger's cat.
If your coworkers are already eager to work on the company's projects for free, then this is an excellent analogy. Otherwise, it's not.
That couldn't possibly provide this kind of profile data about the uses of Linux in IT shops. Microsoft does have a clue about how to conduct market research, you know. And did I mention they have an army of reseller/consultants that might actually be familiar with these (potential) customers?
*(which would have made a fun episode of ST:TOS)
Your thought patterns disgust me.
;)
And turn me on.
It's nice to have some empirical backing for this, but it's kinda obvious that learning to drive in an imaginary world with no physical trauma and unrealistic laws of physics introduces some habits that aren't conducive to safe driving in the real world.
If you're in that noisy an environment, your best bet is to use signal isolation technology. What it does is provide a focused signal path between nodes on your local network, generally confining your traffic to that path (so it doesn't interfere with your neighbors') and deflecting all but the strongest interference from outside signals. It's marketed under several names and it's available in different specs, but the generic term for it is "wire".
A slashdotter using his real name doesn't make him an idiot or subservient to the government. Maybe he's just a grown-up who's learned how to function in society and doesn't feel a need to hide.
Could also cause pile-ups, as someone gets a warning that there's oil on the road ahead and slams on his brakes "just to be safe". The traffic patterns formed by drivers who can only see a short distance ahead can be frustrating, but at least they're fairly consistent and predictable. Introducing widespread limited clairvoyance of this sort would change that, and not necessarily for the better.
The fact that the submitter referred to "violence" and "obscenity" (the latter term applying specifically to sexual content) demonstrates a fundamental problem in how we think about these matters. Putting a bullet in someone's mouth is more obscene than putting a penis or a foul word in it. I'm not calling for censorship and I think any regulation needs to be carefully crafted to avoid that, but the notion that sex and language are more harmful to viewers than violence is misguided.
For most people to "use" travel pictures means "look at and/or show to your friends and family". If you're a photojournalist working for a travel magazine or someone else whose definition of "use" is remarkably different, then you ought to know enough not to get into this situation in the first place.
On my last backpacking trip (two weeks), I took exactly two items that used electricity: my digital camera and my analog watch.
Traveling from place to place with your belongs in a backpack is called "backpacking", regardless of whether those places are cities or mountaintops or whether you get there by foot/canoe/bike or by trains/plains/automobiles. I've done both types of travel, and feel no need to denigrate either activity. (By the way, when one says one is backpacking for a year around the world, it's a safe assumption he means the city-to-city type, since it's damn hard to circumnavigate the planet on foot.)