I had trouble understanding the article, and even in seeing the glyphs, but it sounds like it's the functional equivalent of enumerating your lists with embedded numbers. I sometimes do that with (1), (2), and so on embedded at the appropriate places in the text. If context doesn't make it sufficiently clear, I may add a comment about the total number of options before starting the list.
[Image of ghost and three graphic exclamation points probably deleted, but perhaps Slashdot treats you differently? The emoticons do return from Preview mode, so Slashdot hasn't lost them completely?]
In some contexts, that would be an emoticon of a ghost followed by three giant exclamations points. Here on Slashdot, it appears to have been destroyed. Thank heavens for small blessings?
Sounds to me like you're confusing punctuation with emoticons. Good luck on convincing me we need more of those, but I'm pretty sure there are emoticons for both of your examples. I don't think you want to go there, and it may be one of Slashdot's few residual strengths that it's hard to use emoticons here.
The joke is about Judge-Mental telling a newbie to stop using the , but the newbie thanks him for teaching how to type more easily. As I recall the punchline, Judge-Mental says "Phuck me!"
Khassaki> HI EVERYBODY!!!!!!!!!! Judge-Mental> try pressing the the Caps Lock key Khassaki> O THANKS!!! ITS SO MUCH EASIER TO WRITE NOW!!!!!!! Judge-Mental> fuck me
You notice that the newbie is a exclamation-point criminal?
Seems like a highly inviting story for humor. May I suggest inverting the analysis and starting with the suitable punishments for crimes of punctuation?
Is my chief crime the excessive use of question marks in search of politeness? Or is it the ellipses...
Science fiction often inspires technical trends, and many of Murakami's books are in SF areas. Therefore it is reasonably relevant on Slashdot.
Having said that, and having read quite a bit of Japanese literature (mostly in translation), I'm not sure I would credit Murakami with being that influential. Admired and respected, yes, but I'm not seeing that many similarities between what he does and what the other authors write. The I novels are largely unchanged from Soseki's day, even though the backgrounds are modern.
Then again, I've only read one book by Kirino... But maybe there was some confusion with the OTHER Murakami (Ryu). Definitely seems to me to be more influential in that style. The more famous Murakami (Haruki) tends to remind me of Lewis Carroll in many places.
Yes, the problem with all of the crowdfunding platforms I've heard of is that they have become too much like a lottery. An appealing proposal may be vastly overfunded, and Kickstarter doesn't care since they take their money off the front. You've surely heard about some of the disastrous results due to the lack of accountability. Kickstarter is quite careful to disclaim any responsibility for results and deny any liability. Youse pays yer money and youse takes yer chances, but Kickstarter has already gotten theirs.
I think the saddest story was that of Diaspora. Basically a good idea to replace Facebook with a inverted platform, where you would host your own personal data ("Possession is nine points of the law") and have ultimate control over it. If they had just implemented the basic platform, they might have had a chance to add improvements later on, but because they were greatly overfunded, they tried to redesign a grandiose project on the fly, and the result was basically disastrous. (I still believe the catastrophic "success" contributed to the suicide of the key designer.)
I actually started developing the CSB idea before I heard of Kickstarter, but it was clear to me from the beginning that accountability needs to be backed deeply into the system. I'm certainly NOT saying that project planning is easy, but I do think it is essential, and most of the programmers I've worked with (including many excellent ones) are not planners.
Quite disappointing, even by today's standards of Slashdot disappointment. Only question I had, and no comment nor the summary of the article had any hint of the answer.
Question: Are there any still uncracked Enigma messages?
I did read that there were a number of still unsolved and unknown Enigma messages as of a few years ago. It certainly seems like we have the capability to brute force them now, but has anyone bothered?
No funny comments either, but that's just par now.
Repeating the ancient suggestion, but I think OSS would best be developed on a per-project basis recovering the costs, NOT speculating on infinite profits. The specific solution approach I would recommend would be a CSB (Charity Share Brokerage), where the wannabe donors would each buy a $10-share in the projects they want to support. If enough donors support the project, then it gets funded.
The CSB would hold the money and provide project-support services to earn a percentage of the budget from the successfully funded projects. In particular, the CSB would make sure the project proposals were complete, which covers such details as realistic schedules, adequate resources (including commitments from the key programmers), hardware costs, complete budgets (including compensation for the key programmers and external contributors), sufficient testing, and clear success criteria. After each project is completed, the CSB will also be responsible for evaluating the results against the success criteria and reporting to the donors who bought the charity shares and to the public.
Some projects should be for new features, others for ongoing costs (as when a server is required to support a feature), and others for various aspects of support. In cases where an ongoing-cost (or support) project becomes unfunded, there needs to be graceful degradation. For example, the server could switch to a notice that the server is not funded for the current period, but if the wannabe users of that feature sign up to buy shares for the next funding period, then they can use the feature pending full funding. (Other wrinkles are possible, such as recommending the use of an alternative version of the feature that doesn't require the server.)
As usual, I close the ancient joke with ADSAuPR. Out of time now.
I think you are being confused by the complexity of tax laws. It sounds like you are trying to avoid the case of clever deductions where a corporation's losses can be used to evade taxes. I think such cases are almost always created with bribes to politicians, but the underlying rationales are absurd, usually something along the lines of "You have to protect this industry until it can recover" or "There will be too much suffering if you let this company die."
From my perspective, if a company cannot generate a profit, that's just too bad. That's exactly the kind of situation where the government should NOT be picking winners and losers because the refs are going to get targeted. The books need to be open and honest to make sure the corporations aren't playing games, but if there really are no profits then the government should stay out and let the company go bankrupt in peace. In other words, a corporation's real income is the profit, but it shouldn't be gamed with tricks like piling several years losses into one gigantic tax write-off--which often enough includes partial bankruptcy games to dodge the debts.
Of course it's never going to happen. Figures don't lie, but liars figure. Tax policy to increase freedom is just my pipe dream. ATT's lust for infinite profit is more like an addiction to crack.
Good question. I was writing at the level of real world power plays between nations. For example, I would argue that ZTE was a largely criminal corporate cancer that had even earned bankruptcy, but Xi was able to bend little Trump over his knee and change his pointy little mind.
At the level you are writing, "successful" would point mostly at the Scandinavian counties, but Putin is losing little sleep worrying about them. Though Putin's personal wealth is unknown, the high estimates are around $200 billion, which would make him the richest man in the world. Of course no one is planning beyond his own death, but right now it looks like Putin may get to die with the most toys of all.
At risk of changing the subject or getting an off-topic mod, my prior comment helped lead me to this conclusion:
You have hit on the key term "~5" in your brief comment. Zero or one choice is not a meaningful choice. Two is the starting point of freedom, but most of us actually max out around 5 choices at a time. By the time you get up to 20 or 30 choices, you're helpless and the advertisers or slick salespeople are going to pull your strings, driven by the same kind of insane profit maximization that ATT is worshiping with this EVIL merger.
Short summary: Capitalism is deader than Communism. Socialism is sick and Libertarianism is a sick fantasy. The most successful governments now appear to be Putin's style of Kleptocracy or Xi's style of slightly benevolent Dictatorship. #PresidentTweety wants to combine the worst of those two, though he also likes Kim Jong-un's style. We are so phucked. Corporate cancerism RULZ.
In religious terms: There is no gawd but profit, and ATT wants to be a YUGER prophet!
Solution? Don't hold your breath, but how about a progressive tax on corporate profits linked to market share. In your [DogDude's] situation, now that ATT is the monopolist in your market, they would have to pay the highest tax rate on all of the profits they earn there. The goal would be to encourage them to reproduce by fission, but if they don't, then the taxes will pay for (1) extensive monitoring by honest [LOL] and unbribed [ROFLMAO] government regulators (to make sure they aren't abusing their customers too badly) and for (2) research into ways to break the monopoly. (LTE is actually such a technology, though it is actually being used by the cancers that own it to prevent breaking their monopolies.)
Slashdot needs an IOttMCO mod point for such comments. Moot for me (of course), since I never get a mod point to give. Actual solution would be fixing the moderation system properly, but you know that ain't never goinna happen because whoever owns Slashdot [whipslash et al. are owners #4? #7? Or someone else now?], no one can figure out a better financial model to pay for the MUCH needed improvements.
Maybe the real problem is "No patent here"? If Slashdot were a patent-generating profitable corporate cancer, there would be PROFIT galore. Some of that profit could then be invested in fixing Slashdot, eh? What a hilarious theory.
To actually display insight, I think the OP needs to link the increasing EVIL of the google with the brokenness of patent (and copyright) law. The original objective of patent law was to encourage innovation (and creativity) for the benefit of society and all the human beings therein. Now the objective has evolved to profit maximization for the corporate cancers with the mostest and the bestest lawyers.
The article is moot and pointless. If suffices for the EVIL google's purposes if the lawyers on this front make sure this approach is never patented by any other corporate cancer. Meanwhile, they have sent engineers out on flanking attacks and as soon as they devise an alternative approach that can be patented, they will capture that patent and win the battle.
All pointless, of course. A corporate cancer can NEVER win the war of maximizing profit because there is no biggest number. There are bigger numbers than googol.
As usual, it all derives from the combination of my sig and the religious dictum "There is no gawd but Profit, and the google wants to be Profit's #1 prophet."
Did you know that Barney Google existed long before the google? Some corporate cancer should buy that copyright and use it to extract profit from the google. Either that or force the google to change its spots (like the leopard). That battle of the cancers could actually be funny to watch.
This "summit" is a meeting between two puppets. Don't forgot that the KGB owned little Kim's father, and probably his grandfather, too. Whoever the KGB owned, he's now Putin's toy.
So what happens when two puppets play? In the few puppet plays I can remember, one of them beats up the other one. Suddenly this makes a lot of sense.
Puppeteer Putin make Trump puppet GREAT again! (First time was in 2016.)
I doubt it could be this trivial, but on one of my older machines I recall that booting from a USB stick is rather tricky. Though the BIOS claims to support it, you actually have to change the configuration each time, manually putting the USB stick ahead of the hard disk before it will do the boot as it thinks it is saving the configuration and rebooting.
However, this is the kind of price and pain you have to pay for being pound foolish. I'm willing to do such things sometimes on the theory that I'm learning something from the exercise.
Yes, battery drain is a dimension worth considering, but the main reason this story is absurd is because it ignores the overheads such as installing and updating the OSes. Your computer might save a little time on computations, but how much of your MUCH more valuable human time was consumed along the way? How much of your time was saved if Apple tested the OS more carefully? Looming over all of this in the real world is the recovery question. How much time could you lose trying to recover when something goes wrong? And you know that something is always going to go wrong.
I am NOT an Apple fanboi. Most of my machines run Windows, though I have 2-1/3 Linux boxen and one Macbook Pro. I actually regard Apple as a dangerous corporate cancer (but I'll drop that tangent for now). However I have to report my latest experience with Apple was MUCH improved. They fixed the hardware much more quickly than I expected, without charge (and even gave me a bit of grace on the warranty period), and without damaging my software configuration. I spent much more time restoring my Android smartphone the last time one of them had to go to the shop. (Actually ASUS has that phone now, and I have NO intention of paying those bastards for any more repairs. (However it's really my own fault because I had dealt with ASUS once before and this is a case of shame on me.) I hope ASUS enjoys eating the phone.)
The real point of this story is "Penny wise, pound foolish." Didn't find anything along those lines, but at this point I'm not at all surprised to be disappointed with Slashdot. Maybe just a failure of the moderation to make visible some better comments that I couldn't find? Increasingly convinced that the moderation system has become the biggest problem killing Slashdot.
Lawrence Lessig, like the rest of us, is merely a citizen and therefore has the same amount of influence as you or me.
Which is to say, none whatsoever.
Your trite little comment seems to have opened up the can of worms. I disagree. Even if I saw a mod point to give, no mod point for you [GlennC].
Let me start with the logical fallacy. The Koch brothers are citizens, too, just like "you or me" and Lawrence Lessig, too, but they have LOTS of influence. The difference is the money, at least until they die with the most toys, at which point the TRULY influential entities, the giant corporate cancers they ostensibly "own", will have to get new human placeholders. The underlying FAKE problem of insufficient profits will never be solved because there is always a bigger number for the next profit report.
The abuse of copyright and patent law are merely symptoms of the underlying problems. The original goal was to ENCOURAGE creativity and innovation for society, but the current goal is to MAXIMIZE profits for YUGE corporate cancers. Actually, the corporate cancers at the top always fear new ideas and innovation. Change from the top tends to be downward, which threatens the growth of profit.
Solution approaches to the problems of corporate cancerism exist, but for now ADSAuPR, atAJG.
I'll write an actual reply if you say something relevant to what I actually wrote. Alternatively, if you can't understand it, then your options include asking for clarification or saying nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
Eh?
I had trouble understanding the article, and even in seeing the glyphs, but it sounds like it's the functional equivalent of enumerating your lists with embedded numbers. I sometimes do that with (1), (2), and so on embedded at the appropriate places in the text. If context doesn't make it sufficiently clear, I may add a comment about the total number of options before starting the list.
[Image of ghost and three graphic exclamation points probably deleted, but perhaps Slashdot treats you differently? The emoticons do return from Preview mode, so Slashdot hasn't lost them completely?]
In some contexts, that would be an emoticon of a ghost followed by three giant exclamations points. Here on Slashdot, it appears to have been destroyed. Thank heavens for small blessings?
Things could get worse, and they mostly have.
I rest my case.
Sounds to me like you're confusing punctuation with emoticons. Good luck on convincing me we need more of those, but I'm pretty sure there are emoticons for both of your examples. I don't think you want to go there, and it may be one of Slashdot's few residual strengths that it's hard to use emoticons here.
Yes, I agree that profanity is more emotionally laden than exclamation points!!!
Is anyone else detecting a note of hysterical laughter?!?!?
Hoist by his own pe-question-mark.
You can use 1 exclamation point if a death is involved.
You can use 2 exclamation point if your own death is involved.
You may use 3 exclamation points if your own death was involved.
GHOSTS!!!
Sorry, I wasn't paying attention to the Slashdot input mangling.
http://www.bash.org/?quote=835...
What do you mean the SQL daemon is down?!?
The joke is about Judge-Mental telling a newbie to stop using the , but the newbie thanks him for teaching how to type more easily. As I recall the punchline, Judge-Mental says "Phuck me!"
Wait: Late-breaking news. I found a copy at http://forums.markzdanielewski...
Khassaki> HI EVERYBODY!!!!!!!!!!
Judge-Mental> try pressing the the Caps Lock key
Khassaki> O THANKS!!! ITS SO MUCH EASIER TO WRITE NOW!!!!!!!
Judge-Mental> fuck me
You notice that the newbie is a exclamation-point criminal?
I believe the semicolon has outlived its usefulness. Time for a walk to the lake and a little boat ride. One way.
I bet fearless leader #PresidentTweety doesn't use semicolons and wouldn't recognize one if it bit him on his fat ass.
Seems like a highly inviting story for humor. May I suggest inverting the analysis and starting with the suitable punishments for crimes of punctuation?
Is my chief crime the excessive use of question marks in search of politeness? Or is it the ellipses...
There was also Kilgore Trout.
What does this have to do with nerd news?
Science fiction often inspires technical trends, and many of Murakami's books are in SF areas. Therefore it is reasonably relevant on Slashdot.
Having said that, and having read quite a bit of Japanese literature (mostly in translation), I'm not sure I would credit Murakami with being that influential. Admired and respected, yes, but I'm not seeing that many similarities between what he does and what the other authors write. The I novels are largely unchanged from Soseki's day, even though the backgrounds are modern.
Then again, I've only read one book by Kirino... But maybe there was some confusion with the OTHER Murakami (Ryu). Definitely seems to me to be more influential in that style. The more famous Murakami (Haruki) tends to remind me of Lewis Carroll in many places.
Yes, the problem with all of the crowdfunding platforms I've heard of is that they have become too much like a lottery. An appealing proposal may be vastly overfunded, and Kickstarter doesn't care since they take their money off the front. You've surely heard about some of the disastrous results due to the lack of accountability. Kickstarter is quite careful to disclaim any responsibility for results and deny any liability. Youse pays yer money and youse takes yer chances, but Kickstarter has already gotten theirs.
I think the saddest story was that of Diaspora. Basically a good idea to replace Facebook with a inverted platform, where you would host your own personal data ("Possession is nine points of the law") and have ultimate control over it. If they had just implemented the basic platform, they might have had a chance to add improvements later on, but because they were greatly overfunded, they tried to redesign a grandiose project on the fly, and the result was basically disastrous. (I still believe the catastrophic "success" contributed to the suicide of the key designer.)
I actually started developing the CSB idea before I heard of Kickstarter, but it was clear to me from the beginning that accountability needs to be backed deeply into the system. I'm certainly NOT saying that project planning is easy, but I do think it is essential, and most of the programmers I've worked with (including many excellent ones) are not planners.
Quite disappointing, even by today's standards of Slashdot disappointment. Only question I had, and no comment nor the summary of the article had any hint of the answer.
Question: Are there any still uncracked Enigma messages?
I did read that there were a number of still unsolved and unknown Enigma messages as of a few years ago. It certainly seems like we have the capability to brute force them now, but has anyone bothered?
No funny comments either, but that's just par now.
Repeating the ancient suggestion, but I think OSS would best be developed on a per-project basis recovering the costs, NOT speculating on infinite profits. The specific solution approach I would recommend would be a CSB (Charity Share Brokerage), where the wannabe donors would each buy a $10-share in the projects they want to support. If enough donors support the project, then it gets funded.
The CSB would hold the money and provide project-support services to earn a percentage of the budget from the successfully funded projects. In particular, the CSB would make sure the project proposals were complete, which covers such details as realistic schedules, adequate resources (including commitments from the key programmers), hardware costs, complete budgets (including compensation for the key programmers and external contributors), sufficient testing, and clear success criteria. After each project is completed, the CSB will also be responsible for evaluating the results against the success criteria and reporting to the donors who bought the charity shares and to the public.
Some projects should be for new features, others for ongoing costs (as when a server is required to support a feature), and others for various aspects of support. In cases where an ongoing-cost (or support) project becomes unfunded, there needs to be graceful degradation. For example, the server could switch to a notice that the server is not funded for the current period, but if the wannabe users of that feature sign up to buy shares for the next funding period, then they can use the feature pending full funding. (Other wrinkles are possible, such as recommending the use of an alternative version of the feature that doesn't require the server.)
As usual, I close the ancient joke with ADSAuPR. Out of time now.
I think you are being confused by the complexity of tax laws. It sounds like you are trying to avoid the case of clever deductions where a corporation's losses can be used to evade taxes. I think such cases are almost always created with bribes to politicians, but the underlying rationales are absurd, usually something along the lines of "You have to protect this industry until it can recover" or "There will be too much suffering if you let this company die."
From my perspective, if a company cannot generate a profit, that's just too bad. That's exactly the kind of situation where the government should NOT be picking winners and losers because the refs are going to get targeted. The books need to be open and honest to make sure the corporations aren't playing games, but if there really are no profits then the government should stay out and let the company go bankrupt in peace. In other words, a corporation's real income is the profit, but it shouldn't be gamed with tricks like piling several years losses into one gigantic tax write-off--which often enough includes partial bankruptcy games to dodge the debts.
Of course it's never going to happen. Figures don't lie, but liars figure. Tax policy to increase freedom is just my pipe dream. ATT's lust for infinite profit is more like an addiction to crack.
Good question. I was writing at the level of real world power plays between nations. For example, I would argue that ZTE was a largely criminal corporate cancer that had even earned bankruptcy, but Xi was able to bend little Trump over his knee and change his pointy little mind.
At the level you are writing, "successful" would point mostly at the Scandinavian counties, but Putin is losing little sleep worrying about them. Though Putin's personal wealth is unknown, the high estimates are around $200 billion, which would make him the richest man in the world. Of course no one is planning beyond his own death, but right now it looks like Putin may get to die with the most toys of all.
At risk of changing the subject or getting an off-topic mod, my prior comment helped lead me to this conclusion:
Trump's qualifications for public office:
1: Loves self
2: Hates enemies
3: No scruples
4: Short-term focus
5: YUGE balls
This calls for the more complete form of my sig:
#1 Freedom = (Meaningful + Truthful - Coerced) Choice{~5} != (Beer^4 | Speech | Trade)
You have hit on the key term "~5" in your brief comment. Zero or one choice is not a meaningful choice. Two is the starting point of freedom, but most of us actually max out around 5 choices at a time. By the time you get up to 20 or 30 choices, you're helpless and the advertisers or slick salespeople are going to pull your strings, driven by the same kind of insane profit maximization that ATT is worshiping with this EVIL merger.
Short summary: Capitalism is deader than Communism. Socialism is sick and Libertarianism is a sick fantasy. The most successful governments now appear to be Putin's style of Kleptocracy or Xi's style of slightly benevolent Dictatorship. #PresidentTweety wants to combine the worst of those two, though he also likes Kim Jong-un's style. We are so phucked. Corporate cancerism RULZ.
In religious terms: There is no gawd but profit, and ATT wants to be a YUGER prophet!
Solution? Don't hold your breath, but how about a progressive tax on corporate profits linked to market share. In your [DogDude's] situation, now that ATT is the monopolist in your market, they would have to pay the highest tax rate on all of the profits they earn there. The goal would be to encourage them to reproduce by fission, but if they don't, then the taxes will pay for (1) extensive monitoring by honest [LOL] and unbribed [ROFLMAO] government regulators (to make sure they aren't abusing their customers too badly) and for (2) research into ways to break the monopoly. (LTE is actually such a technology, though it is actually being used by the cancers that own it to prevent breaking their monopolies.)
Slashdot needs an IOttMCO mod point for such comments. Moot for me (of course), since I never get a mod point to give. Actual solution would be fixing the moderation system properly, but you know that ain't never goinna happen because whoever owns Slashdot [whipslash et al. are owners #4? #7? Or someone else now?], no one can figure out a better financial model to pay for the MUCH needed improvements.
Maybe the real problem is "No patent here"? If Slashdot were a patent-generating profitable corporate cancer, there would be PROFIT galore. Some of that profit could then be invested in fixing Slashdot, eh? What a hilarious theory.
To actually display insight, I think the OP needs to link the increasing EVIL of the google with the brokenness of patent (and copyright) law. The original objective of patent law was to encourage innovation (and creativity) for the benefit of society and all the human beings therein. Now the objective has evolved to profit maximization for the corporate cancers with the mostest and the bestest lawyers.
The article is moot and pointless. If suffices for the EVIL google's purposes if the lawyers on this front make sure this approach is never patented by any other corporate cancer. Meanwhile, they have sent engineers out on flanking attacks and as soon as they devise an alternative approach that can be patented, they will capture that patent and win the battle.
All pointless, of course. A corporate cancer can NEVER win the war of maximizing profit because there is no biggest number. There are bigger numbers than googol.
As usual, it all derives from the combination of my sig and the religious dictum "There is no gawd but Profit, and the google wants to be Profit's #1 prophet."
Did you know that Barney Google existed long before the google? Some corporate cancer should buy that copyright and use it to extract profit from the google. Either that or force the google to change its spots (like the leopard). That battle of the cancers could actually be funny to watch.
This "summit" is a meeting between two puppets. Don't forgot that the KGB owned little Kim's father, and probably his grandfather, too. Whoever the KGB owned, he's now Putin's toy.
So what happens when two puppets play? In the few puppet plays I can remember, one of them beats up the other one. Suddenly this makes a lot of sense.
Puppeteer Putin make Trump puppet GREAT again! (First time was in 2016.)
Now a bit of satire for comic relief:
https://www.newyorker.com/humo...
I doubt it could be this trivial, but on one of my older machines I recall that booting from a USB stick is rather tricky. Though the BIOS claims to support it, you actually have to change the configuration each time, manually putting the USB stick ahead of the hard disk before it will do the boot as it thinks it is saving the configuration and rebooting.
However, this is the kind of price and pain you have to pay for being pound foolish. I'm willing to do such things sometimes on the theory that I'm learning something from the exercise.
Yes, battery drain is a dimension worth considering, but the main reason this story is absurd is because it ignores the overheads such as installing and updating the OSes. Your computer might save a little time on computations, but how much of your MUCH more valuable human time was consumed along the way? How much of your time was saved if Apple tested the OS more carefully? Looming over all of this in the real world is the recovery question. How much time could you lose trying to recover when something goes wrong? And you know that something is always going to go wrong.
I am NOT an Apple fanboi. Most of my machines run Windows, though I have 2-1/3 Linux boxen and one Macbook Pro. I actually regard Apple as a dangerous corporate cancer (but I'll drop that tangent for now). However I have to report my latest experience with Apple was MUCH improved. They fixed the hardware much more quickly than I expected, without charge (and even gave me a bit of grace on the warranty period), and without damaging my software configuration. I spent much more time restoring my Android smartphone the last time one of them had to go to the shop. (Actually ASUS has that phone now, and I have NO intention of paying those bastards for any more repairs. (However it's really my own fault because I had dealt with ASUS once before and this is a case of shame on me.) I hope ASUS enjoys eating the phone.)
The real point of this story is "Penny wise, pound foolish." Didn't find anything along those lines, but at this point I'm not at all surprised to be disappointed with Slashdot. Maybe just a failure of the moderation to make visible some better comments that I couldn't find? Increasingly convinced that the moderation system has become the biggest problem killing Slashdot.
Lawrence Lessig, like the rest of us, is merely a citizen and therefore has the same amount of influence as you or me.
Which is to say, none whatsoever.
Your trite little comment seems to have opened up the can of worms. I disagree. Even if I saw a mod point to give, no mod point for you [GlennC].
Let me start with the logical fallacy. The Koch brothers are citizens, too, just like "you or me" and Lawrence Lessig, too, but they have LOTS of influence. The difference is the money, at least until they die with the most toys, at which point the TRULY influential entities, the giant corporate cancers they ostensibly "own", will have to get new human placeholders. The underlying FAKE problem of insufficient profits will never be solved because there is always a bigger number for the next profit report.
The abuse of copyright and patent law are merely symptoms of the underlying problems. The original goal was to ENCOURAGE creativity and innovation for society, but the current goal is to MAXIMIZE profits for YUGE corporate cancers. Actually, the corporate cancers at the top always fear new ideas and innovation. Change from the top tends to be downward, which threatens the growth of profit.
Solution approaches to the problems of corporate cancerism exist, but for now ADSAuPR, atAJG.
I'll write an actual reply if you say something relevant to what I actually wrote. Alternatively, if you can't understand it, then your options include asking for clarification or saying nothing.