But "pure" science is not without its weaknesses. Take the creation of the universe for instance. How can the methodologies of science alone ever hope to explain the origin of the big bang, when the laws of physics may not have existed in the form that we know them, if at all? We can't simply expect science to explain everything eventually, or we've abandoned science and invented another faith to take it's place.
"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." ~Albert Einstein
If a question cannot be answered through scientific observation and study, why not just say "I don't know" instead of making up a religious belief to fill in the gap? Is there really something so wrong with saying "I don't know" when we really don't know, and are left to merely assume or speculate without evidence?
The Indians spend hundreds of millions of dollars on atomic-weapons research. Witness the recent attempts at building missiles with the capability of delivering a nuclear warhead. Meanwhile, the population engages in massive female infanticide or abortions targetting female fetuses.
Adam_Trask already handled most of your points in another reply, but he ignored this one and I would like to respond to it. Your research regarding the treatment of women in various Asian and Middle-Eastern nations is admirable, but it must be tempered with a greater understanding of the regions as a whole. India is currently in a stand-off with Pakistan over Kashmir. Pakistan is a nuclear-equipped nation with a small (compared to India) military, many violent extremist groups, and a government that is just barely stable. The Mutually Assured Destruction principle is the only thing keeping the Pakistani government from using nuclear weapons in the dispute over Kashmir. The use of nuclear weapons, either on the civilian population or just in an attempt to wipe out the Indian military and conquer the nation with a smaller force, would result in far worse living conditions for both women and men, especially if you consider "dead" to be a living condition.
Most people see national military defenses as a waste of time in light of egregious human rights abuses, but the human rights abuses of an occupying Pakistani military force would be far greater than those of the Indian government and its people. In this case, national military defense, especially nuclear defense, makes sense.
You think that ISPs want to let their users suck 100% of their bandwith 100% of the day on P2P? Why do you think that quite a few Universities have gone to throttling/closing those ports?
Do you think that download caps and per MB charges over that cap are not to curb people from using P2P?
Broadband providers really hate the file-sharers that are uploading and downloading 100GB per month of files, sucking up all of their bandwidth. On the other hand, though, they LOVE the customers that are using up 500MB-1GB per month file-sharing, because they're getting themselves entrenched in the love of broadband while still letting their cable provider turn a profit. They love those minor file-sharers so much that many broadband commercials specifically mention "faster music and movie downloads" and some even highlight the fact that 56k isn't a great speed for P2P.
The download caps and extra charges aren't to stop P2P use. It's to keep their customers in that friendly and very profitable "minor P2P user" subgroup that stay with them for the long term and continue to bring in profit.
The problem with most of these predictions is that there are claims of robots taking over service jobs, which I find highly doubtful. People don't like interacting with robots-- that's why automated call answering systems piss people off so much when they call their favorite stores or businesses.
And yet, as we speak (well, type, I guess), another call answering system is being added to a business' phone line, another supermarket is adding an automated checkout line, another convenience store is adding an automated menu system for ordering soups, subs, and sandwiches, and hundreds or thousands of people are simultaneously swiping their credit and debit cards through a slot in a gas station pump. Automation is taking over all around us and has been for some time. Just marvel at the fact that your phone calls aren't being put through by an operator and our correspondence with each other (and everyone else at/.) isn't being tossed around by mailmen all across the nation to get around.
People bitch about automation, but they also bitch about their airhead waitress at Applebees, the moron that can't count change at ShopRite, and the customer service person on the other end of the phone that doesn't even realize that her company HAS a technical support manager, let alone his name, his extension, or where the Hell he is in the building. In the end, automation improves and untrained dumbass workers don't, and people start to get used to the cold, dead voice of a menu ordering system speaking to them.
Consider this: We deploy robots (3.5 million was bandied about), thereby rendering a large portion of the populace without jobs. We now have all of those people that cannot afford to eat at McDonalds, go to the amusement park, etc. Why? Welfare/unemployment compensation is not designed to support that kind of lifestyle.
The problem with this idea is that robots, most likely, are not going to suddenly spread across the world like some sort of benevolent Skynet. They're going to slowly appear, much like automated services have. First operaters and receptionists were replaced with telephone menus. Then bank tellers were replaced with ATMs. Now the people behind the counters at banks, hotels, etc. are being replaced with little computer "information centers" and flights can be booked through the web instead of through talking to a human being on the phone. All of these things appeared slowly over the course of twenty years or so and I suspect that robots will do the same.
The unemployment rate will grow steadily, but will be cushioned by the creation of new robot-related jobs, such as designers, programmers, customizers, repairmen, and factory workers. Overall, fewer people will be employed, but it won't hit fast or hard enough for people to blame the robots.
Which years were these? you really should get out more.
You really should get a firmer grasp of the English language, because I think it was pretty clear that I was, at the very least, talking about a time before Fox News was on the air. That not only invalidates the first few people mentioned in that list, but also invalidates many of the others because conservative viewpoints have only been given greater respect in the years since Fox News.
That list also offers no proof for its assertions, such as "everyone on that list has done at least a dozen hit pieces on Clinton". Not that it would matter anyway, since they don't define what a "hit piece" is and I don't understand what sort of treatment they were expecting for a president who was impeached.
Lets face it- almost everything our politicians do now is either in the interests of business, stripping our rights, or pork-grabbing for votes come next election(some all of the above). This is, if I ever saw it, some seriously anti-corporate stuff.
Fortunately, this issue is one where the interests of politicians (their interest being themselves) and the general public (their interest also being themselves) intersect. With Fox News' rise to the top of the cable news ratings with a wide margin behind them, as well as an even wider one during events that interest the general public such as wars and terrorist attacks, left-leaning politicians have come to realize what many of their Republican colleagues figured out while the "Big 3" networks were at the top of the heap: a healthy variety of opinion in the media is a good thing, because it stops one side or another from having their character assassinated on a daily basis. One would logically assume that the right wing politicians would be in favor of greater media consolidation now that Fox News is in the lead, but years of left wing network TV media have convinced the older politicians that homogeneous media of ANY kind is a bad thing, so they're voting against consolidation, too.
The article says that they only rejected funding for FCC programs that allow consolidation of this type... a slight difference
"Rejected funding" is really just a code word for using a budget bill to eliminate something mostly unrelated to the allocation of specific amounts of government funds. The effect of this bill is that the FCC cannot spend even one dollar of government money to implement their plan, but rules that are already in place say that things like the FCC's plan cannot be privately funded. Therefore, they have $0 to implement the plan. Thus, the plan is void and will be replaced with whatever plan the funding has been allocated to (in this case, the old FCC rules before the recent change).
It's the same effect as making a gun legal, but outlawing the specific ammo for it. Sure, you can legally own and use the gun, but if they've banned its ammo, then they've effectively banned the gun. If you're hellbent on owning a projectile weapon, then you'll have to buy whichever one you can legally buy ammunition for.
And yes, as I'm sure you're thinking, politicians really DO play some damned stupid games. The mating rituals of various brightly colored birds and amphibians are simple and logical by comparison.
Yeah I think their point is that its not just the directors and actors that have to be paid...
This is EXACTLY right and it is why what the MPAA is doing is not only worthwhile, but a true public service. The crews of all of the motion pictures of the world deserve their 0.000000000002% of the billions that they bring in each year and no one but Jack Valenti has the right to take it from them.
The Method: If as many people as possible go onto stock boards, and post their negative feelings about SCO, and their own speculations as to what the outcome of the battle with IBM will be, Buyers will begin to flee from the stock.
Posting negative views of a company in large numbers on stock boards is a very old (relatively speaking) tactic that ceased to work years ago. If you post vehemently negative views about a company on stock boards, you will just be harassing innocent people that have likely already educated themselves on the subject and formed their own opinions. They do not need, nor will they enjoy or tolerate, your anti-SCO spam. They have to deal with enough whiny pseudo-activist screeds against whichever company some niche group hates already, they don't need the/. community adding one more, especially since it won't shape their ideas more than any of the others.
DoS attacks are so simple that a thirteen year old child with a decent program and set of instructions passed down to him from an older, better hacker can easily create an effective one. That means that for any given site, especially a high bandwidth one, to be shut down, all they need is for there to be one jackass on the entire internet. Unfortunately for the BT sites, the internet is the natural habitat of the Bipedal Jackass. The internet, filled with lush gardens of Morons, Suckers, and Pseudo-Intellectuals amidst a backdrop of easy hacking targets and Asian girls doing things that could make you go blind, is positively irresistable to them. In fact, you could even say that, fundamentally, Jackasses are the internet. So the BT sites are pretty much screwed.
On a slightly more serious note, though, it doesn't help that all of these BT sites are lawbreakers. Sure, they're breaking petty little copyright laws that, in the grand scheme of things, rank somewhere five spots below shoplifting and not saying "God bless you" when someone sneezes, but they're still breaking the law, and lawbreakers can't exactly stroll up to Johnny Law and ask him for help. If you break the law, then you forfeit the basic protections of the law (the ones ranking below having your murderer, rapist, or car thief found and prosecuted), because the cops have no interest in helping you get your illegal copyright infringement site back on its feet. This sort of Wild West system, where the victims can't run to the police for fear of incriminating themselves, makes the BT sites free target practice for hackers. Microsoft and Amazon, on the other hand, have no such legal restraints and can easily prosecute their attackers.
This bill imposes penalties for unploading files containing copyrighted content where the uploader does not have the permission of the copyright holder. It's perfectly reasonable. The Slashdot article, on the other hand, is sensationalist nonsense.
If making copyright infringement a federal crime punishable by jail time is perfectly reasonable, then jaywalkers should be shot on sight by police. Also, if destroying someone's computer for copyright infringement should be allowed, then I propose that we should simply roll grenades under cars that are parked in handicap spots instead of giving their owners a ticket. It's all perfectly reasonable.
It is optional. You can find the option in Options => Kazaa K++ Options => K++ Options => User's [sic!] can't get a list of all your shared files checkbox.
Actually, there shouldn't be a "[sic]" there, as "User's" is grammatically correct. It means that they are the options belonging to the user, not options regarding multiple users.
2. You haven't actually disproved the notion that file-sharing is the cause of lowered sales. You've provided a number of alternative explanations, all quite reasonable, but shown no evidence that any of your alternatives have any greater correlation to the sales drop than the record industries assertion of file-sharing.
I agreed with everything that you said except for this part. The greatest evidence that has been shown for file sharing causing the RIAA's revenue to drop is a loose correlation between the beginning of file sharing and the beginning of the sales dip. He's offering other correlations as a counterargument. When you're arguing against the idea that a certain correlation caused a specific problem by bringing up several other correlations that could reasonably have caused the problem, doesn't the correlation just have to be EQUAL, not greater? The RIAA's argument is nothing more than a correlation that could easily be a coincidence or could even be a boon to their business that is cushioning what would've been a larger sales drop created by their lousy business practices. It relies upon a lack of reasonable alternative correlations that could've caused the problem.
When the other side's argument is nothing more than the most reasonable assumption that anyone can offer at the time, I don't think you need concrete evidence to counter it, but rather just a reasonable doubt. The sales dip hasn't been thoroughly researched and given a concrete, factual cause yet because it is still relatively new, just like file sharing is. Therefore the discussion is a matter of theory vs. theory, not concrete, well researched fact vs. concrete, well researched fact.
If things are that bad why aren't there more labels? The RIAA is evil and makes lots of money but couldn't an ethical record company be formed that makes less money but treats artists better?
I know that there are a billion little labels how come one of them is not growing?
Something seems wrong here.
The simple truth: No radio airplay.
There aren't any radio stations in my area that play music that isn't either classical or released by the RIAA. Nothing by small independent labels, nothing by a foreign artist (even in English) that doesn't have a domestic RIAA contract; simply put, if it's not from the RIAA, it's not played. This is because if any of these stations ever want to play a really popular RIAA song at any time after playing a non-RIAA song, there's the potential that the RIAA will say, "Oh, you mean the number one song in the country? The one that you get tons of requests for and that all of your advertisers are wondering why you don't play? Nope, sorry, you won't be getting that. You don't meet our 'quality (compliance/submission) standards'. Maybe the guys that buy your station from you after you go bankrupt will get with the program."
This is why, even in highly populated areas like where I live, you don't hear anything foreign or non-RIAA. All radio stations except classical music stations and college stations are subservient to the RIAA and its whims because they know that subservience is more profitable than experimentation. Unfortunately, this behavior makes the RIAA songs the most popular songs in the United States by default, which means that radio stations must be subservient to the RIAA to be profitable, which makes RIAA songs the most popular songs in the United States by default. It's a vicious cycle perpetuated by the fact that no self-respecting, intelligent businessman in a free market system is willing to take the lead and sacrifice himself and his business for the good of the entire market.
Have you not noticed that everyone who sees The Matrix is a philosopher for a day? They normally would laugh at the thought of reading Descartes, Plato, Baudrillard, Nietzsche, etc, but when they see the pop-culture, hollow corpse of the afore-mentioned writers works, they are automatically philosophers.
Currently, there are two possible results of pop culture: 1. Philospher for a day who has become interested in the basic philosophical questions raised by the Matrix 2. "Wow, that chick's tits were AWESOME, dude!"
Thanks to the Matrix, pop culture might be on a slow climb upward. Don't try to fuck it up and send us back to Captain Horndog's Big-Tits-Big-Guns-Even-Bigger-Tits Bonanza just because pop culture hasn't gone from zero to Philosophy Major in 3.6 seconds. When someone mentions the basic philosophical questions that are raised by the Matrix, maybe you should politely point them toward Descartes instead of mocking their enthusiasm for something better than Die Hard 460: Die Harder Than You've Ever Died Hard Before WITH A VENGEANCE.
Lots of these planes have a range of systems onboard that may have been built at any point in the last 30 or so years, retrofitting all of them will take time and a lot of money, something the airline industry is not too keen on right now.
Let's see, what do I care about more... THEIR MONEY or MY SAFETY? THEIR MONEY or MY SAFETY? Hmmmm... Jesus, this is a tough one. Can I get back to you? Maybe make another reply in a couple of days or so after I've researched the matter?
Hmmm... their money or my safety... their money or my safety... yeah, this is gonna take awhile.
I, for one, think that the US was not created to take away liberties without societal need, and here there's no need past a warning label to the extent of "this cd can't be copied. don't buy it" or some such. Allowing the government to take away rights just because it's popular is dangerous. See DMCA, Patriot Act. And it's expensive. Consider the small record label that wants to copy-protect its CD's, but can't afford a lawyer to appear before a judge. This isn't fair. There's no reason the government should regulate this beyond a label, the forces of the market should handle this.
This debate, like the entire debate on copyrights and fair use, is a matter of perspective. Is this bill taking away their right to copy protect their works or asserting our fair use right to copy the things we own? That's the crux of the whole copyright issue, right there. Do Americans have a right to the free exchange of ideas without restrictions that is simply deferred for a few years by copyrights or do artists have a right to restrict and sell their ideas up until the public domain defers their right to sell after a few years?
I think that basically, the whole thing comes down to someone eventually getting screwed. As a consumer, I would prefer that the law screw THEM. As the guys that have sole ownership of the works of the artists that they've bought, the RIAA and MPAA would prefer that the law screw ME. There needs to be a compromise somewhere, but the situation that we have right now isn't it. Consumers have no fair use rights whatsoever, but the RIAA and MPAA have perpetual copyrights that last more than a century, the right to put copy protection on CDs, and total control of the hardware medium that lets them decide when I can rewind and fast forward, and whether I can play a DVD that I've bought depending on where I live and where I got my DVD player. The consumer is taking it up the ass right now and the copyright holders could stand to lose a couple of their extremely extensive and occasionally unconstitutional rights.
If so, neither is any other OS that allows you to open email attachments, since that is the main method this virus spreads. (The secondary method exploits a hole in Outlook to automatically execute the attachment, but I suspect that without user stupidity, this method wouldn't be very effective since most systems are patched.)
Automatic execution exploits are a "secondary method" compared to individual user error and most users that make dumb errors like that have their system patched?
Is it Backwards Day already and no one bothered to tell me?
And once again, those of us who know how to configure our windows systems and aren't stupid enough to (a) have open network shares with no passwords and (b) open random email attachments are safe. (emphasis mine)
Please read the fucking article. Not only is the email attachment not random, because it pretends to be a reply to an email that you've recently sent to an infected person (among other tricks), but it also doesn't have to be opened, because it uses an IE exploit to run itself as soon as it shows up in Outlook's preview window.
Namely, instead of reducing window size in the case of packet loss, window size is changed based on round trip latency. The problem being that reducing the window size in response to loss works well on most networks, but has a serious problem when dealing with very high-bandwidth links.
In such a case, the conventional TCP windowing will shrink greatly in response to even one or two lost packets, which when you are sending a LOT of data, will occur.
I don't have a ton of knowledge about TCP, but is it me, or is this something that is very simple to copy? It sounds like nothing but a small change in TCP that has some small extras put in to compensate for the small change. Is this something that takes tons of money, proprietary hardware, and a bunch of guys at Caltech to do, or is it something like Napster, where it's really not very complicated, and once the idea is brought up, everyone thinks, "Wow, that's a pretty simple idea. I could do that. Why didn't I think of it before?"
Then again, the articles make it sound like vaporware, so it could sound simple because it's way too simple to work in real life.
If you take the contract, you shouldn't complain about the conditions later.
He's not just complaining about it, he's doing something about it, which is leaving the company. Don't act like he's just bitching and moaning about a contract that he could easily get out of, but is still holding himself to for the sake of money and position. He doesn't like his situation, so he's taking action to resolve it. That is not just pathetic little piss ant whining. That's really following through and I think that's worthy of a little respect.
While I agree with the court's decision to turn down this ban, after playing the game vice city on the computer, it is obvious that kids should not play this. There is sex, lots of violence, drugs, etc, depicted in a very graphical way. Whether the parents do it or not, this game is much too explicit for the younger generations.
This ordinance was not aimed at things like Vice City. If a kid is making enough money on his own to buy a PS2 and Vice City without his parents knowing about it, he is arguably mature enough to be playing the game, and he's at least over the age of fifteen. That situation isn't really relevant (a fifteen or sixteen year old playing a game made for eighteen year olds... THE HORROR) and isn't going to happen that often anyway. What this ordinance was really aimed at, besides getting votes by "taking a stand" on a non-issue that only a few organized zealots know about (which is a great way to get easy votes), is the arcade industry. This ordinance would have effectively shut down the arcade industry in the area, and just for the sake of making sure that kids couldn't kill cheesy vampires in "Vampire Night" or kick Ryu's ass in "Street Fighter III".
There is nothing like Vice City in the arcades, so this game was arguably just going after the sort of games that you find in arcades, which are far, far more tame. And by getting rid of those tame games, it would've put the final nail in the coffin of the area's arcade industry, because finding a game less "racy" (term used loosely) than "Vampire Night" is almost impossible in the American market.
And if I remember correctly, this wasn't just an unintended consequence, either. If this is the anti-video game law that I think it is, then it has specific guidelines in it for arcades which are absolutely ridiculous, such as checking every kid that comes in the door for ID to make sure they're eighteen. Again, this is just to play tame games like "Vampire Night" and "Street Fighter", because games get no more violent than that in arcades and I don't think that there are ANY arcade games with sexual content in the United States right now, nor planned for the future.
So really, the way this bill is being covered is just a deception. Half of the people that seem to support it here, most of which don't want kids playing games like Grand Theft Auto without supervision, don't know that the only real effect of this game is shutting down arcades that offer much tamer games that hardly anyone would be shocked or disgusted by.
Disagreement about a philosophical or political ideology does not make someone an idiot.
No, but basing his decision that an entire medium is not a form of speech on playing just four video games, and then failing to grasp them on such a basic level that he referred to the first "Resident Evil" game as "The Resident of Evil Creek" and "Mortal Kombat" as "Mortal Combat" in his decision, definitely makes him an idiot. I don't know about you, but I think that knowing the names of the things on which you base your decisions should definitely be the base requirement for judging legal challenges, especially when you're making the sort of bold statement that he was making, which was that a medium that contains the written word, the spoken word, and hand-drawn art is not speech, and neither are any of its components.
But you can never say that violent video games have no effect or no influence whatsoever on the individuals that play them. Neither does, as your post seem to imply (though I know that's not what you meant), poor parenting breed violence.
Good parenting can minimize the violence, but poor parenting doesn't necessarily cause violence. Neither can you say with 100% certainty that violent games do not cause violent behavior - it depends on too many different factors - but violent games by themselves cannot be proven to definitely cause violent behavior.
So basically, you're saying that since we can never definitively prove what causes violence in human beings, then violent video games count as one of those causes. Under that logic, PEANUT BUTTER is also one of the contributing factors in human violence, simply because I cannot prove that it does or doesn't. In fact, if I had replaced "violent video games" with "PEANUT BUTTER" in your post, it would've made as much sense.
This kind of post is an excellent example of why this debate lasts. People are convinced that violent video games cause violence simply because of mix of "common sense" and constant assertions by the scaremongering media that it is true. They have a general feeling that something is true, so they grasp at absolutely anything that will verify that feeling, even if it makes no sense whatsoever. They don't have statistics because violence among minors and violence as a whole in the United States (where Grand Theft Auto 3 has sold seven million copies, at least since last September) has been falling and they don't even have anecdotes because the only school shooting that was seriously linked to video games was Columbine, which also had two kids with detached, moronic parents and other kids beating them up regularly and throwing bottles at them out of moving cars. With nothing else to grasp, they just make arguments like this one, which basically amount to "ummm... because."
Slashdot Mirror
But "pure" science is not without its weaknesses. Take the creation of the universe for instance. How can the methodologies of science alone ever hope to explain the origin of the big bang, when the laws of physics may not have existed in the form that we know them, if at all? We can't simply expect science to explain everything eventually, or we've abandoned science and invented another faith to take it's place.
"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." ~Albert Einstein
If a question cannot be answered through scientific observation and study, why not just say "I don't know" instead of making up a religious belief to fill in the gap? Is there really something so wrong with saying "I don't know" when we really don't know, and are left to merely assume or speculate without evidence?
The Indians spend hundreds of millions of dollars on atomic-weapons research. Witness the recent attempts at building missiles with the capability of delivering a nuclear warhead. Meanwhile, the population engages in massive female infanticide or abortions targetting female fetuses.
Adam_Trask already handled most of your points in another reply, but he ignored this one and I would like to respond to it. Your research regarding the treatment of women in various Asian and Middle-Eastern nations is admirable, but it must be tempered with a greater understanding of the regions as a whole. India is currently in a stand-off with Pakistan over Kashmir. Pakistan is a nuclear-equipped nation with a small (compared to India) military, many violent extremist groups, and a government that is just barely stable. The Mutually Assured Destruction principle is the only thing keeping the Pakistani government from using nuclear weapons in the dispute over Kashmir. The use of nuclear weapons, either on the civilian population or just in an attempt to wipe out the Indian military and conquer the nation with a smaller force, would result in far worse living conditions for both women and men, especially if you consider "dead" to be a living condition.
Most people see national military defenses as a waste of time in light of egregious human rights abuses, but the human rights abuses of an occupying Pakistani military force would be far greater than those of the Indian government and its people. In this case, national military defense, especially nuclear defense, makes sense.
You think that ISPs want to let their users suck 100% of their bandwith 100% of the day on P2P? Why do you think that quite a few Universities have gone to throttling/closing those ports?
Do you think that download caps and per MB charges over that cap are not to curb people from using P2P?
Broadband providers really hate the file-sharers that are uploading and downloading 100GB per month of files, sucking up all of their bandwidth. On the other hand, though, they LOVE the customers that are using up 500MB-1GB per month file-sharing, because they're getting themselves entrenched in the love of broadband while still letting their cable provider turn a profit. They love those minor file-sharers so much that many broadband commercials specifically mention "faster music and movie downloads" and some even highlight the fact that 56k isn't a great speed for P2P.
The download caps and extra charges aren't to stop P2P use. It's to keep their customers in that friendly and very profitable "minor P2P user" subgroup that stay with them for the long term and continue to bring in profit.
The problem with most of these predictions is that there are claims of robots taking over service jobs, which I find highly doubtful. People don't like interacting with robots-- that's why automated call answering systems piss people off so much when they call their favorite stores or businesses.
/.) isn't being tossed around by mailmen all across the nation to get around.
And yet, as we speak (well, type, I guess), another call answering system is being added to a business' phone line, another supermarket is adding an automated checkout line, another convenience store is adding an automated menu system for ordering soups, subs, and sandwiches, and hundreds or thousands of people are simultaneously swiping their credit and debit cards through a slot in a gas station pump. Automation is taking over all around us and has been for some time. Just marvel at the fact that your phone calls aren't being put through by an operator and our correspondence with each other (and everyone else at
People bitch about automation, but they also bitch about their airhead waitress at Applebees, the moron that can't count change at ShopRite, and the customer service person on the other end of the phone that doesn't even realize that her company HAS a technical support manager, let alone his name, his extension, or where the Hell he is in the building. In the end, automation improves and untrained dumbass workers don't, and people start to get used to the cold, dead voice of a menu ordering system speaking to them.
Consider this: We deploy robots (3.5 million was bandied about), thereby rendering a large portion of the populace without jobs. We now have all of those people that cannot afford to eat at McDonalds, go to the amusement park, etc. Why? Welfare/unemployment compensation is not designed to support that kind of lifestyle.
The problem with this idea is that robots, most likely, are not going to suddenly spread across the world like some sort of benevolent Skynet. They're going to slowly appear, much like automated services have. First operaters and receptionists were replaced with telephone menus. Then bank tellers were replaced with ATMs. Now the people behind the counters at banks, hotels, etc. are being replaced with little computer "information centers" and flights can be booked through the web instead of through talking to a human being on the phone. All of these things appeared slowly over the course of twenty years or so and I suspect that robots will do the same.
The unemployment rate will grow steadily, but will be cushioned by the creation of new robot-related jobs, such as designers, programmers, customizers, repairmen, and factory workers. Overall, fewer people will be employed, but it won't hit fast or hard enough for people to blame the robots.
Which years were these? you really should get out more.
You really should get a firmer grasp of the English language, because I think it was pretty clear that I was, at the very least, talking about a time before Fox News was on the air. That not only invalidates the first few people mentioned in that list, but also invalidates many of the others because conservative viewpoints have only been given greater respect in the years since Fox News.
That list also offers no proof for its assertions, such as "everyone on that list has done at least a dozen hit pieces on Clinton". Not that it would matter anyway, since they don't define what a "hit piece" is and I don't understand what sort of treatment they were expecting for a president who was impeached.
Lets face it- almost everything our politicians do now is either in the interests of business, stripping our rights, or pork-grabbing for votes come next election(some all of the above). This is, if I ever saw it, some seriously anti-corporate stuff.
Fortunately, this issue is one where the interests of politicians (their interest being themselves) and the general public (their interest also being themselves) intersect. With Fox News' rise to the top of the cable news ratings with a wide margin behind them, as well as an even wider one during events that interest the general public such as wars and terrorist attacks, left-leaning politicians have come to realize what many of their Republican colleagues figured out while the "Big 3" networks were at the top of the heap: a healthy variety of opinion in the media is a good thing, because it stops one side or another from having their character assassinated on a daily basis. One would logically assume that the right wing politicians would be in favor of greater media consolidation now that Fox News is in the lead, but years of left wing network TV media have convinced the older politicians that homogeneous media of ANY kind is a bad thing, so they're voting against consolidation, too.
Savor it while it lasts...
The article says that they only rejected funding for FCC programs that allow consolidation of this type... a slight difference
"Rejected funding" is really just a code word for using a budget bill to eliminate something mostly unrelated to the allocation of specific amounts of government funds. The effect of this bill is that the FCC cannot spend even one dollar of government money to implement their plan, but rules that are already in place say that things like the FCC's plan cannot be privately funded. Therefore, they have $0 to implement the plan. Thus, the plan is void and will be replaced with whatever plan the funding has been allocated to (in this case, the old FCC rules before the recent change).
It's the same effect as making a gun legal, but outlawing the specific ammo for it. Sure, you can legally own and use the gun, but if they've banned its ammo, then they've effectively banned the gun. If you're hellbent on owning a projectile weapon, then you'll have to buy whichever one you can legally buy ammunition for.
And yes, as I'm sure you're thinking, politicians really DO play some damned stupid games. The mating rituals of various brightly colored birds and amphibians are simple and logical by comparison.
Yeah I think their point is that its not just the directors and actors that have to be paid...
This is EXACTLY right and it is why what the MPAA is doing is not only worthwhile, but a true public service. The crews of all of the motion pictures of the world deserve their 0.000000000002% of the billions that they bring in each year and no one but Jack Valenti has the right to take it from them.
The Method: If as many people as possible go onto stock boards, and post their negative feelings about SCO, and their own speculations as to what the outcome of the battle with IBM will be, Buyers will begin to flee from the stock.
/. community adding one more, especially since it won't shape their ideas more than any of the others.
Posting negative views of a company in large numbers on stock boards is a very old (relatively speaking) tactic that ceased to work years ago. If you post vehemently negative views about a company on stock boards, you will just be harassing innocent people that have likely already educated themselves on the subject and formed their own opinions. They do not need, nor will they enjoy or tolerate, your anti-SCO spam. They have to deal with enough whiny pseudo-activist screeds against whichever company some niche group hates already, they don't need the
Please find a more mature tactic than spam.
DoS attacks are so simple that a thirteen year old child with a decent program and set of instructions passed down to him from an older, better hacker can easily create an effective one. That means that for any given site, especially a high bandwidth one, to be shut down, all they need is for there to be one jackass on the entire internet. Unfortunately for the BT sites, the internet is the natural habitat of the Bipedal Jackass. The internet, filled with lush gardens of Morons, Suckers, and Pseudo-Intellectuals amidst a backdrop of easy hacking targets and Asian girls doing things that could make you go blind, is positively irresistable to them. In fact, you could even say that, fundamentally, Jackasses are the internet. So the BT sites are pretty much screwed.
On a slightly more serious note, though, it doesn't help that all of these BT sites are lawbreakers. Sure, they're breaking petty little copyright laws that, in the grand scheme of things, rank somewhere five spots below shoplifting and not saying "God bless you" when someone sneezes, but they're still breaking the law, and lawbreakers can't exactly stroll up to Johnny Law and ask him for help. If you break the law, then you forfeit the basic protections of the law (the ones ranking below having your murderer, rapist, or car thief found and prosecuted), because the cops have no interest in helping you get your illegal copyright infringement site back on its feet. This sort of Wild West system, where the victims can't run to the police for fear of incriminating themselves, makes the BT sites free target practice for hackers. Microsoft and Amazon, on the other hand, have no such legal restraints and can easily prosecute their attackers.
This bill imposes penalties for unploading files containing copyrighted content where the uploader does not have the permission of the copyright holder. It's perfectly reasonable. The Slashdot article, on the other hand, is sensationalist nonsense.
If making copyright infringement a federal crime punishable by jail time is perfectly reasonable, then jaywalkers should be shot on sight by police. Also, if destroying someone's computer for copyright infringement should be allowed, then I propose that we should simply roll grenades under cars that are parked in handicap spots instead of giving their owners a ticket. It's all perfectly reasonable.
It is optional. You can find the option in Options => Kazaa K++ Options => K++ Options => User's [sic!] can't get a list of all your shared files checkbox.
Actually, there shouldn't be a "[sic]" there, as "User's" is grammatically correct. It means that they are the options belonging to the user, not options regarding multiple users.
2. You haven't actually disproved the notion that file-sharing is the cause of lowered sales. You've provided a number of alternative explanations, all quite reasonable, but shown no evidence that any of your alternatives have any greater correlation to the sales drop than the record industries assertion of file-sharing.
I agreed with everything that you said except for this part. The greatest evidence that has been shown for file sharing causing the RIAA's revenue to drop is a loose correlation between the beginning of file sharing and the beginning of the sales dip. He's offering other correlations as a counterargument. When you're arguing against the idea that a certain correlation caused a specific problem by bringing up several other correlations that could reasonably have caused the problem, doesn't the correlation just have to be EQUAL, not greater? The RIAA's argument is nothing more than a correlation that could easily be a coincidence or could even be a boon to their business that is cushioning what would've been a larger sales drop created by their lousy business practices. It relies upon a lack of reasonable alternative correlations that could've caused the problem.
When the other side's argument is nothing more than the most reasonable assumption that anyone can offer at the time, I don't think you need concrete evidence to counter it, but rather just a reasonable doubt. The sales dip hasn't been thoroughly researched and given a concrete, factual cause yet because it is still relatively new, just like file sharing is. Therefore the discussion is a matter of theory vs. theory, not concrete, well researched fact vs. concrete, well researched fact.
If things are that bad why aren't there more labels? The RIAA is evil and makes lots of money but couldn't an ethical record company be formed that makes less money but treats artists better?
I know that there are a billion little labels how come one of them is not growing?
Something seems wrong here.
The simple truth: No radio airplay.
There aren't any radio stations in my area that play music that isn't either classical or released by the RIAA. Nothing by small independent labels, nothing by a foreign artist (even in English) that doesn't have a domestic RIAA contract; simply put, if it's not from the RIAA, it's not played. This is because if any of these stations ever want to play a really popular RIAA song at any time after playing a non-RIAA song, there's the potential that the RIAA will say, "Oh, you mean the number one song in the country? The one that you get tons of requests for and that all of your advertisers are wondering why you don't play? Nope, sorry, you won't be getting that. You don't meet our 'quality (compliance/submission) standards'. Maybe the guys that buy your station from you after you go bankrupt will get with the program."
This is why, even in highly populated areas like where I live, you don't hear anything foreign or non-RIAA. All radio stations except classical music stations and college stations are subservient to the RIAA and its whims because they know that subservience is more profitable than experimentation. Unfortunately, this behavior makes the RIAA songs the most popular songs in the United States by default, which means that radio stations must be subservient to the RIAA to be profitable, which makes RIAA songs the most popular songs in the United States by default. It's a vicious cycle perpetuated by the fact that no self-respecting, intelligent businessman in a free market system is willing to take the lead and sacrifice himself and his business for the good of the entire market.
Have you not noticed that everyone who sees The Matrix is a philosopher for a day?
They normally would laugh at the thought of reading Descartes, Plato, Baudrillard, Nietzsche, etc, but when they see the pop-culture, hollow corpse of the afore-mentioned writers works, they are automatically philosophers.
Currently, there are two possible results of pop culture:
1. Philospher for a day who has become interested in the basic philosophical questions raised by the Matrix
2. "Wow, that chick's tits were AWESOME , dude!"
Thanks to the Matrix, pop culture might be on a slow climb upward. Don't try to fuck it up and send us back to Captain Horndog's Big-Tits-Big-Guns-Even-Bigger-Tits Bonanza just because pop culture hasn't gone from zero to Philosophy Major in 3.6 seconds. When someone mentions the basic philosophical questions that are raised by the Matrix, maybe you should politely point them toward Descartes instead of mocking their enthusiasm for something better than Die Hard 460: Die Harder Than You've Ever Died Hard Before WITH A VENGEANCE.
Lots of these planes have a range of systems onboard that may have been built at any point in the last 30 or so years, retrofitting all of them will take time and a lot of money, something the airline industry is not too keen on right now.
Let's see, what do I care about more... THEIR MONEY or MY SAFETY? THEIR MONEY or MY SAFETY? Hmmmm... Jesus, this is a tough one. Can I get back to you? Maybe make another reply in a couple of days or so after I've researched the matter?
Hmmm... their money or my safety... their money or my safety... yeah, this is gonna take awhile.
I, for one, think that the US was not created to take away liberties without societal need, and here there's no need past a warning label to the extent of "this cd can't be copied. don't buy it" or some such. Allowing the government to take away rights just because it's popular is dangerous. See DMCA, Patriot Act. And it's expensive. Consider the small record label that wants to copy-protect its CD's, but can't afford a lawyer to appear before a judge. This isn't fair. There's no reason the government should regulate this beyond a label, the forces of the market should handle this.
This debate, like the entire debate on copyrights and fair use, is a matter of perspective. Is this bill taking away their right to copy protect their works or asserting our fair use right to copy the things we own? That's the crux of the whole copyright issue, right there. Do Americans have a right to the free exchange of ideas without restrictions that is simply deferred for a few years by copyrights or do artists have a right to restrict and sell their ideas up until the public domain defers their right to sell after a few years?
I think that basically, the whole thing comes down to someone eventually getting screwed. As a consumer, I would prefer that the law screw THEM. As the guys that have sole ownership of the works of the artists that they've bought, the RIAA and MPAA would prefer that the law screw ME. There needs to be a compromise somewhere, but the situation that we have right now isn't it. Consumers have no fair use rights whatsoever, but the RIAA and MPAA have perpetual copyrights that last more than a century, the right to put copy protection on CDs, and total control of the hardware medium that lets them decide when I can rewind and fast forward, and whether I can play a DVD that I've bought depending on where I live and where I got my DVD player. The consumer is taking it up the ass right now and the copyright holders could stand to lose a couple of their extremely extensive and occasionally unconstitutional rights.
If so, neither is any other OS that allows you to open email attachments, since that is the main method this virus spreads. (The secondary method exploits a hole in Outlook to automatically execute the attachment, but I suspect that without user stupidity, this method wouldn't be very effective since most systems are patched.)
Automatic execution exploits are a "secondary method" compared to individual user error and most users that make dumb errors like that have their system patched?
Is it Backwards Day already and no one bothered to tell me?
And once again, those of us who know how to configure our windows systems and aren't stupid enough to (a) have open network shares with no passwords and (b) open random email attachments are safe. (emphasis mine)
Please read the fucking article. Not only is the email attachment not random, because it pretends to be a reply to an email that you've recently sent to an infected person (among other tricks), but it also doesn't have to be opened, because it uses an IE exploit to run itself as soon as it shows up in Outlook's preview window.
Namely, instead of reducing window size in the case of packet loss, window size is changed based on round trip latency. The problem being that reducing the window size in response to loss works well on most networks, but has a serious problem when dealing with very high-bandwidth links.
In such a case, the conventional TCP windowing will shrink greatly in response to even one or two lost packets, which when you are sending a LOT of data, will occur.
I don't have a ton of knowledge about TCP, but is it me, or is this something that is very simple to copy? It sounds like nothing but a small change in TCP that has some small extras put in to compensate for the small change. Is this something that takes tons of money, proprietary hardware, and a bunch of guys at Caltech to do, or is it something like Napster, where it's really not very complicated, and once the idea is brought up, everyone thinks, "Wow, that's a pretty simple idea. I could do that. Why didn't I think of it before?"
Then again, the articles make it sound like vaporware, so it could sound simple because it's way too simple to work in real life.
If you take the contract, you shouldn't complain about the conditions later.
He's not just complaining about it, he's doing something about it, which is leaving the company. Don't act like he's just bitching and moaning about a contract that he could easily get out of, but is still holding himself to for the sake of money and position. He doesn't like his situation, so he's taking action to resolve it. That is not just pathetic little piss ant whining. That's really following through and I think that's worthy of a little respect.
While I agree with the court's decision to turn down this ban, after playing the game vice city on the computer, it is obvious that kids should not play this. There is sex, lots of violence, drugs, etc, depicted in a very graphical way. Whether the parents do it or not, this game is much too explicit for the younger generations.
This ordinance was not aimed at things like Vice City. If a kid is making enough money on his own to buy a PS2 and Vice City without his parents knowing about it, he is arguably mature enough to be playing the game, and he's at least over the age of fifteen. That situation isn't really relevant (a fifteen or sixteen year old playing a game made for eighteen year olds... THE HORROR) and isn't going to happen that often anyway. What this ordinance was really aimed at, besides getting votes by "taking a stand" on a non-issue that only a few organized zealots know about (which is a great way to get easy votes), is the arcade industry. This ordinance would have effectively shut down the arcade industry in the area, and just for the sake of making sure that kids couldn't kill cheesy vampires in "Vampire Night" or kick Ryu's ass in "Street Fighter III".
There is nothing like Vice City in the arcades, so this game was arguably just going after the sort of games that you find in arcades, which are far, far more tame. And by getting rid of those tame games, it would've put the final nail in the coffin of the area's arcade industry, because finding a game less "racy" (term used loosely) than "Vampire Night" is almost impossible in the American market.
And if I remember correctly, this wasn't just an unintended consequence, either. If this is the anti-video game law that I think it is, then it has specific guidelines in it for arcades which are absolutely ridiculous, such as checking every kid that comes in the door for ID to make sure they're eighteen. Again, this is just to play tame games like "Vampire Night" and "Street Fighter", because games get no more violent than that in arcades and I don't think that there are ANY arcade games with sexual content in the United States right now, nor planned for the future.
So really, the way this bill is being covered is just a deception. Half of the people that seem to support it here, most of which don't want kids playing games like Grand Theft Auto without supervision, don't know that the only real effect of this game is shutting down arcades that offer much tamer games that hardly anyone would be shocked or disgusted by.
Disagreement about a philosophical or political ideology does not make someone an idiot.
No, but basing his decision that an entire medium is not a form of speech on playing just four video games, and then failing to grasp them on such a basic level that he referred to the first "Resident Evil" game as "The Resident of Evil Creek" and "Mortal Kombat" as "Mortal Combat" in his decision, definitely makes him an idiot. I don't know about you, but I think that knowing the names of the things on which you base your decisions should definitely be the base requirement for judging legal challenges, especially when you're making the sort of bold statement that he was making, which was that a medium that contains the written word, the spoken word, and hand-drawn art is not speech, and neither are any of its components.
But you can never say that violent video games have no effect or no influence whatsoever on the individuals that play them. Neither does, as your post seem to imply (though I know that's not what you meant), poor parenting breed violence.
Good parenting can minimize the violence, but poor parenting doesn't necessarily cause violence. Neither can you say with 100% certainty that violent games do not cause violent behavior - it depends on too many different factors - but violent games by themselves cannot be proven to definitely cause violent behavior.
So basically, you're saying that since we can never definitively prove what causes violence in human beings, then violent video games count as one of those causes. Under that logic, PEANUT BUTTER is also one of the contributing factors in human violence, simply because I cannot prove that it does or doesn't. In fact, if I had replaced "violent video games" with "PEANUT BUTTER" in your post, it would've made as much sense.
This kind of post is an excellent example of why this debate lasts. People are convinced that violent video games cause violence simply because of mix of "common sense" and constant assertions by the scaremongering media that it is true. They have a general feeling that something is true, so they grasp at absolutely anything that will verify that feeling, even if it makes no sense whatsoever. They don't have statistics because violence among minors and violence as a whole in the United States (where Grand Theft Auto 3 has sold seven million copies, at least since last September) has been falling and they don't even have anecdotes because the only school shooting that was seriously linked to video games was Columbine, which also had two kids with detached, moronic parents and other kids beating them up regularly and throwing bottles at them out of moving cars. With nothing else to grasp, they just make arguments like this one, which basically amount to "ummm... because."