Just because you say you own your car doesn't mean that it is in fact your property.
The concept of property is inherently an abstract human construction. You may have your ideas about what property should be, I certainly have mine. But when I tell the RIAA I am not a thief, and you that you are, I mean by the ideas of property that society at large has agreed upon.
How nice for you that you have constructed your own ideas of property such that you are morally free to illegally copy music. But if I took your car, I doubt you (or society in general in the form of the law) would care much about my beliefs about property rights.
Similarly, you can believe what you want,but I (and the law) will still call you a thief.
When the RIAA treats all their customers like dirty thieves, people like you make it a lot harder for us to say, "Hey, we're not thieves!". Because you, in fact, are.
The link provides that advice so you'll know what people mean when they use incorrect, made up words. It is still desirable to understand people when they misspell or misspeak. The link is pointing out that people tend to use "irregardless" because it sounds like a fancy, more formal version of "regardless", which it is actually not. So they think it makes them seem more intelligent, while actually the opposite is true.
In all honesty, your discussion of the issue at hand (HD sizes) is perhaps the most reasoned and well informed here. But regardless of that, when you use that word in almost every post it's a struggle to not think you're an idiot.
Trivia in the sense of insignificant details about generally notable topics, yes. In trying to think of an example, it occured to me to wonder who was Alexander the Great's mother; and Wikipedia is great for that. (Olympias, a princess of Epirus).
But "trivia" in the sense of who was the second drummer for some defunct band that played a few bars in Jersey in the summer of 1972... that's just search polution. No one will search for it intentionally who doesn't already know, and many will have a harder time finding the information they want because the band had the same name as something more notable.
"You may or may not be right about Canada/Japan having 'better' halth care."
As measured by infant mortality rate, I am right.
"You are wrong about their teen pregnancy rate, it is close to what the US has"
You're not just wrong, you're completely delusional. Lets see... The first stats I could find were here: http://globalis.gvu.unu.edu/indicator.cfm?IndicatorID=127, courtesy of the UN, Births per 1000 women ages 15-19:
US: 53 Canada: 16 Japan: 4
What numbers are you using?
"Like I said before, if you ignore teen pregnancy, we have BETTER infant mortality ratios than most of the world, including Canada and Japan."
Unless you want to provide a source, I'm going to assume you're just making this stat up too. But I will readily agree that our health care system probably looks really good if you ignore the cases where it fails. I'm not sure what the point of that is though.
"It is EXACTLY ignorant statements like yours that I was trying to correct. Learn the real facts, don't just spout out the same tired old statistics that you read somewhere else."
OK, Bucko, before attempting to correct ignorant statements, please acquire basic knowledge of the topic. Don't ridicule others assertions because they disagree with BS you just made up.
"So we're seen as a cost centre, rather than a profit centre."
Unless your company is selling IT services, you are a cost center and not a profit center. This doesn't mean you're not doing a good job.
As far as your larger point, IT managers can screw up and blow it in two ways: By not giving users solutions to the problems they have, and by giving users solutions to problems they don't have.
Insightful?!? try maybe "-1 Ignorant and making shit up"
Takedown notices (and counter notices) are absolutely governed by very specific rules, maybe you should look up what they are, rather than projecting your assumptions on a system you know nothing about. WTF does "extra-constitutional" even mean in this context?
"If the law supports what she did, then why should it be so easy for some multinational corporation to shut it down without them incurring any penalty?"
Let's see... the content is currently up, not shut down, and she has filed a suit which looks like it should be successful in which case they'll pay a penalty. What's your question again? The nasty multinational sent a bad takedown notice, and the system is working exactly as it was designed to, allowing the content to stay up while the issue is resolved, and penalizing them if they are found to have sent a bad notice.
I didn't really miss your point, I was just being a smartass.
"I assert that a fervent belief that advancing human knowledge is for the good of mankind can be considered a faith"
I understand this, and disagree. Faith is belief not supported by evidence. I assert that there is overwhelming historical evidence that advancing human knowledge is for the good of mankind.
I would only call a belief "scientific" is it is a well derived, evidence-based belief about how the world is. Beliefs about how the world should be or what one ought to do I would not call "science", but they can still be logically supported by good evidence and reasonable axioms, in which case I would not call them "faith".
The supercomputers on the Top 500 list absolutely are there because of their MFLOPS. Makers of such lists use a somewhat more nuanced measure, but they are measuring raw computational throughput.
The very fastest machines achieve that speed by using a different architecture than general purpose devices, but it's not a requirement. If you could build a PC as fast, it would be on the list.
"It's an example of how outdated our copyright and patent system is in the digital age."
No it isn't. Copyright law entirely supports her right to do what she did. Copyright *was* updated for the digital age by the DMCA. It was updated in various ways that slashdotters (and others) don't like, but it was also updated to provide some rules for how to handle uploads of potentially infringing material to hosting sites like YouTube. It is those rules that provide the basis for her lawsuit. There is nothing out of date about copyright law here; the authors of the current law foresaw and addressed this exact situation.
You're high. The video is "significantly transformative" in the sense that princes song appears to have been playing on a staticy radio in her laundry room while her screaming kids push toy shopping carts through. You can briefly make out Princes voice, kinda-sorta.
If my neighbor cranks up something on his boombox, do any home videos taken in the area become copyright infringement?
Without giving any actual legal advice, put the crack pipe down now.
"Scientists who believe in cloning, genetic research, altering DNA, etc"
Are correct; These things all exist.
Opinions about what's good for humanity in the future are not science, regardless of who holds them. In judging what is good for humanity, you are not doing science. On the other hand, that's no reason to do it poorly by basing your opinions on fictional video games; you could look at history. Historically, Science has done more to improve the lives of human beings than any other philosophical framework or movement. Luckily, people wringing their hands about the terrible dangers of better understanding the world have had about diddly-squat impact. Simply by valuing knowledge over ignorance, science has proven unstoppable.
"The measured effect is very simple and has repeated itself enough by now that people should know better - lower taxes increase government revenue"
Measured? Simple? Please. Reagan and George W both put forth this plan to get more revenue by lowering taxes thus stimulating the economy, etc. So then they lowered taxes a bit, increased spending super-enormously, and viola! more revenue! Please ignore the exploding debt behind the curtain. Heck, you could have gotten similar or better revenue increases just by handing out the spending to Americans as taxable income. In the face of the massive driving effect of that spending, claiming you can measure anything about the effect of the comparatively trivial tax code changes just tells people what your desired conclusion is, and that reaching it is more important to you than making any sense.
People who point to Republican economic policies of the last few decades as successes baffle me. We have hundreds of trillions less dollars than we started with, and continue to hemorrhage cash at an alarming rate; that's not success.
It is possible to pay for current spending levels without increasing taxes by having a stimulated economy provide more revenue, just as the supply siders promise. All that has to happen is the economy needs to start growing faster than it ever has before, and continue doing so without interruption forever. You can go ahead and hold your breath if you like.
The box (as I understand it, not having seen one) says it won't work outside its region. The purchaser fraudulently registers out of region anyway, exploiting a hole in Valves activation process. You think Valve is now legally bound to not fix the hole?
If you're "seeing" successful lawsuits out of this, you need to lay off the hallucinogens.
Estoppal might base a theory that would still get you laughed out of court, but not get your lawyer fined for contempt... "The actions of the defendant allowed my client became emotionally dependent on the squad-based tactical goodness of Team Fortress 2, causing him great distress when he was cruelly denied teh glorious n00b-pwning to which he had become accustomed...."
You are wrong. The US is not "near the bottom of the list" for infant mortality; it's ahead of most of the world. It is behind many other developed nations like Japan, much of Western Europe, Canada. That's not because Canada or Japans health care system doesn't try to save all the infants we do, it's because their health care system is better, as is their teen pregnancy rate.
"Legally this is pretty obvious: It's artificial barriers to trade."
Legally this is utterly obvious: it's legal.
As to whether it is moral or makes sense: All sorts of things are artificial barriers to trade, starting with borders. Your argument might make sense if copies of the Portal were cheaper in Russia (for example) because they grew better in that climate or something. But they are cheaper because Valve sells the same thing for less.
The world is not one big free market economy. In order to make a competitive offer and sell anything in Russia, Valve must charge a lower price than in the US. If you want to go clear up all those pesky inefficiencies that mean people in the US have more to spend on video games than people in Russia, I'm sure Valve will be happy to adjust their pricing to be more uniform. But blaming them for having an awareness of the realities of the world as it is seems pretty lame.
You want to prevent Valve from region locking to promote competition between suppliers? Which suppliers? Middlemen reselling serial numbers bought from Valve? That's who is competing here. How much efficiency do you need in that market?
It is, of course, entirely reasonable to ask that Valve be up front about things and fully disclose all region locking or other restrictions at the time of sale. Which they have done.
"Comcast, you listening? How about filtering Storm..."
How do you propose they do that, check for the evil bit?
Bittorrent/Notes/etc. send out traffic that correctly identifies itself, making it easy to block/throttle/whatever. When malware sends out traffic (I hate to be the one to tell you this) it lies.
Perhaps your replies to my posts should be in reference to my posts.
But if you'd rather dismiss your entire original post in this thread as a triviality, that's cool too. I assumed if you thought it was worth posting about, it was worth having any idea what you were talking about. Sorry for the confusion.
So, spending an hour traveling 60 miles on the ground in a car is roughly as dangerous as spending that hour in a plane hurtling across hundreds of miles at thousands of feet up in the air.
Did you point this out to make me feel better about the safety of car travel?
I honestly meant no offense, as obviously I had no idea if you had read it. I certainly guessed you had not read it, as I could not otherwise explain your reference to political orders based on The Republic, as there are not any. I even remained polite after you called me asinine, assuming we were misunderstanding each other.
Is it really "obsessively pedantic" to assume that by "political ideologies based on The Republic" you meant political ideologies based on The Republic? No political order I am aware of, and certainly not that of the United States, is based on the one proposed by Plato in The Republic. Not even broadly, figuratively, or sorta-kinda. The US system is based, very loosely, on the actual political system of democratic Athens which Plato rejected.
If we want to get into pedantic, we could mention that when you say "...note my use of the term..." you should then reference some term you have actually ever used. If you only thought it and didn't type it, you should be unsurprised I didn't note it.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because you say you own your car doesn't mean that it is in fact your property.
The concept of property is inherently an abstract human construction. You may have your ideas about what property should be, I certainly have mine. But when I tell the RIAA I am not a thief, and you that you are, I mean by the ideas of property that society at large has agreed upon.
How nice for you that you have constructed your own ideas of property such that you are morally free to illegally copy music. But if I took your car, I doubt you (or society in general in the form of the law) would care much about my beliefs about property rights.
Similarly, you can believe what you want,but I (and the law) will still call you a thief.
So, you agree with the MS guy.
When the RIAA treats all their customers like dirty thieves, people like you make it a lot harder for us to say, "Hey, we're not thieves!". Because you, in fact, are.
Those are stupid words made up words too, but were made up by knowledgeable people with good intentions.
The link provides that advice so you'll know what people mean when they use incorrect, made up words. It is still desirable to understand people when they misspell or misspeak. The link is pointing out that people tend to use "irregardless" because it sounds like a fancy, more formal version of "regardless", which it is actually not. So they think it makes them seem more intelligent, while actually the opposite is true.
In all honesty, your discussion of the issue at hand (HD sizes) is perhaps the most reasoned and well informed here. But regardless of that, when you use that word in almost every post it's a struggle to not think you're an idiot.
"You can say that he has the right to speak, sure, but that's not the same thing. "
Freedom of speech isn't the same as freedom of the press? I agree, and so do the authors of the first amendment, who chose to protect both.
What protections, rights or privileges do you think should be extended to journalists who have press passes and not to journalists who do not?
Trivia in the sense of insignificant details about generally notable topics, yes. In trying to think of an example, it occured to me to wonder who was Alexander the Great's mother; and Wikipedia is great for that. (Olympias, a princess of Epirus).
But "trivia" in the sense of who was the second drummer for some defunct band that played a few bars in Jersey in the summer of 1972... that's just search polution. No one will search for it intentionally who doesn't already know, and many will have a harder time finding the information they want because the band had the same name as something more notable.
"You may or may not be right about Canada/Japan having 'better' halth care."
As measured by infant mortality rate, I am right.
"You are wrong about their teen pregnancy rate, it is close to what the US has"
You're not just wrong, you're completely delusional. Lets see... The first stats I could find were here: http://globalis.gvu.unu.edu/indicator.cfm?IndicatorID=127, courtesy of the UN, Births per 1000 women ages 15-19:
US: 53
Canada: 16
Japan: 4
What numbers are you using?
"Like I said before, if you ignore teen pregnancy, we have BETTER infant mortality ratios than most of the world, including Canada and Japan."
Unless you want to provide a source, I'm going to assume you're just making this stat up too. But I will readily agree that our health care system probably looks really good if you ignore the cases where it fails. I'm not sure what the point of that is though.
"It is EXACTLY ignorant statements like yours that I was trying to correct. Learn the real facts, don't just spout out the same tired old statistics that you read somewhere else."
OK, Bucko, before attempting to correct ignorant statements, please acquire basic knowledge of the topic. Don't ridicule others assertions because they disagree with BS you just made up.
"So we're seen as a cost centre, rather than a profit centre."
Unless your company is selling IT services, you are a cost center and not a profit center. This doesn't mean you're not doing a good job.
As far as your larger point, IT managers can screw up and blow it in two ways: By not giving users solutions to the problems they have, and by giving users solutions to problems they don't have.
Insightful?!? try maybe "-1 Ignorant and making shit up"
Takedown notices (and counter notices) are absolutely governed by very specific rules, maybe you should look up what they are, rather than projecting your assumptions on a system you know nothing about. WTF does "extra-constitutional" even mean in this context?
"If the law supports what she did, then why should it be so easy for some multinational corporation to shut it down without them incurring any penalty?"
Let's see... the content is currently up, not shut down, and she has filed a suit which looks like it should be successful in which case they'll pay a penalty. What's your question again? The nasty multinational sent a bad takedown notice, and the system is working exactly as it was designed to, allowing the content to stay up while the issue is resolved, and penalizing them if they are found to have sent a bad notice.
I didn't really miss your point, I was just being a smartass.
"I assert that a fervent belief that advancing human knowledge is for the good of mankind can be considered a faith"
I understand this, and disagree. Faith is belief not supported by evidence. I assert that there is overwhelming historical evidence that advancing human knowledge is for the good of mankind.
I would only call a belief "scientific" is it is a well derived, evidence-based belief about how the world is. Beliefs about how the world should be or what one ought to do I would not call "science", but they can still be logically supported by good evidence and reasonable axioms, in which case I would not call them "faith".
The supercomputers on the Top 500 list absolutely are there because of their MFLOPS. Makers of such lists use a somewhat more nuanced measure, but they are measuring raw computational throughput.
The very fastest machines achieve that speed by using a different architecture than general purpose devices, but it's not a requirement. If you could build a PC as fast, it would be on the list.
"Supercomputer doesn't mean 'fastest computer of its day;'"
Yes it does, or something non-technical along those general lines. "fastest computer as measured by total throughput" perhaps.
Laws can define whatever terms they like to explain exactly what the law says, it doesn't change the meaning of the word in everyday usage.
"It's an example of how outdated our copyright and patent system is in the digital age."
No it isn't. Copyright law entirely supports her right to do what she did. Copyright *was* updated for the digital age by the DMCA. It was updated in various ways that slashdotters (and others) don't like, but it was also updated to provide some rules for how to handle uploads of potentially infringing material to hosting sites like YouTube. It is those rules that provide the basis for her lawsuit. There is nothing out of date about copyright law here; the authors of the current law foresaw and addressed this exact situation.
You're high. The video is "significantly transformative" in the sense that princes song appears to have been playing on a staticy radio in her laundry room while her screaming kids push toy shopping carts through. You can briefly make out Princes voice, kinda-sorta.
If my neighbor cranks up something on his boombox, do any home videos taken in the area become copyright infringement?
Without giving any actual legal advice, put the crack pipe down now.
"Scientists who believe in cloning, genetic research, altering DNA, etc"
Are correct; These things all exist.
Opinions about what's good for humanity in the future are not science, regardless of who holds them. In judging what is good for humanity, you are not doing science. On the other hand, that's no reason to do it poorly by basing your opinions on fictional video games; you could look at history. Historically, Science has done more to improve the lives of human beings than any other philosophical framework or movement. Luckily, people wringing their hands about the terrible dangers of better understanding the world have had about diddly-squat impact. Simply by valuing knowledge over ignorance, science has proven unstoppable.
"The measured effect is very simple and has repeated itself enough by now that people should know better - lower taxes increase government revenue"
Measured? Simple? Please. Reagan and George W both put forth this plan to get more revenue by lowering taxes thus stimulating the economy, etc. So then they lowered taxes a bit, increased spending super-enormously, and viola! more revenue! Please ignore the exploding debt behind the curtain. Heck, you could have gotten similar or better revenue increases just by handing out the spending to Americans as taxable income. In the face of the massive driving effect of that spending, claiming you can measure anything about the effect of the comparatively trivial tax code changes just tells people what your desired conclusion is, and that reaching it is more important to you than making any sense.
People who point to Republican economic policies of the last few decades as successes baffle me. We have hundreds of trillions less dollars than we started with, and continue to hemorrhage cash at an alarming rate; that's not success.
It is possible to pay for current spending levels without increasing taxes by having a stimulated economy provide more revenue, just as the supply siders promise. All that has to happen is the economy needs to start growing faster than it ever has before, and continue doing so without interruption forever. You can go ahead and hold your breath if you like.
The box (as I understand it, not having seen one) says it won't work outside its region. The purchaser fraudulently registers out of region anyway, exploiting a hole in Valves activation process. You think Valve is now legally bound to not fix the hole?
If you're "seeing" successful lawsuits out of this, you need to lay off the hallucinogens.
Estoppal might base a theory that would still get you laughed out of court, but not get your lawyer fined for contempt... "The actions of the defendant allowed my client became emotionally dependent on the squad-based tactical goodness of Team Fortress 2, causing him great distress when he was cruelly denied teh glorious n00b-pwning to which he had become accustomed...."
You are wrong. The US is not "near the bottom of the list" for infant mortality; it's ahead of most of the world. It is behind many other developed nations like Japan, much of Western Europe, Canada. That's not because Canada or Japans health care system doesn't try to save all the infants we do, it's because their health care system is better, as is their teen pregnancy rate.
"Legally this is pretty obvious: It's artificial barriers to trade."
Legally this is utterly obvious: it's legal.
As to whether it is moral or makes sense: All sorts of things are artificial barriers to trade, starting with borders. Your argument might make sense if copies of the Portal were cheaper in Russia (for example) because they grew better in that climate or something. But they are cheaper because Valve sells the same thing for less.
The world is not one big free market economy. In order to make a competitive offer and sell anything in Russia, Valve must charge a lower price than in the US. If you want to go clear up all those pesky inefficiencies that mean people in the US have more to spend on video games than people in Russia, I'm sure Valve will be happy to adjust their pricing to be more uniform. But blaming them for having an awareness of the realities of the world as it is seems pretty lame.
You want to prevent Valve from region locking to promote competition between suppliers? Which suppliers? Middlemen reselling serial numbers bought from Valve? That's who is competing here. How much efficiency do you need in that market?
It is, of course, entirely reasonable to ask that Valve be up front about things and fully disclose all region locking or other restrictions at the time of sale. Which they have done.
"Comcast, you listening? How about filtering Storm..."
How do you propose they do that, check for the evil bit?
Bittorrent/Notes/etc. send out traffic that correctly identifies itself, making it easy to block/throttle/whatever. When malware sends out traffic (I hate to be the one to tell you this) it lies.
Please unsubscribe me from this list.
Perhaps your replies to my posts should be in reference to my posts.
But if you'd rather dismiss your entire original post in this thread as a triviality, that's cool too. I assumed if you thought it was worth posting about, it was worth having any idea what you were talking about. Sorry for the confusion.
So, spending an hour traveling 60 miles on the ground in a car is roughly as dangerous as spending that hour in a plane hurtling across hundreds of miles at thousands of feet up in the air.
Did you point this out to make me feel better about the safety of car travel?
I honestly meant no offense, as obviously I had no idea if you had read it. I certainly guessed you had not read it, as I could not otherwise explain your reference to political orders based on The Republic, as there are not any. I even remained polite after you called me asinine, assuming we were misunderstanding each other.
Is it really "obsessively pedantic" to assume that by "political ideologies based on The Republic" you meant political ideologies based on The Republic? No political order I am aware of, and certainly not that of the United States, is based on the one proposed by Plato in The Republic. Not even broadly, figuratively, or sorta-kinda. The US system is based, very loosely, on the actual political system of democratic Athens which Plato rejected.
If we want to get into pedantic, we could mention that when you say "...note my use of the term..." you should then reference some term you have actually ever used. If you only thought it and didn't type it, you should be unsurprised I didn't note it.