This is to stop members from buying used units from ex-members instead of buying from the official (and very expensive) source.
How exactly is this illegal?
Why should eBay even fucking care?
This sets a lousy precedent. What if the RIAA decides that used CDs are too cheap and asks for the same, for instance? Or Ford decides that used cars are damaging their sales so you're not allowed to sell them? Or Levis decides that their jeans last too long, so you're not allowed to resell them?
Given Scientology's record of fraud and abuse, should eBay give them this level of trust?
The answer is right there. Would you want any group with Scientology's record of fraud and abuse to have access to anything important?
What do you want to bet they'd pull auctions of other Scientology-questionable stuff that isn't e meters?
Put a DVD copy of Anonymous' Scientology protests up for sale and watch what happens. What do you want to bet that it winds up deleted? Blocking e meter sales my ass - this is nothing more than some goofy cult making decisions about what you're allowed to buy. Don't let it happen!
These people are batshit fucking insane. Don't legitimize them by giving them any sort of power, control, or authority whatsoever.
Sadly, hydrogen cars are basically a scam brought about by oil companies to distract attention and funding away from gasoline alternatives that are actually realistic.
I don't believe oil companies would fund with that in mind because it seems terribly counter productive.
If an oil company were to fund an alternate non-fossil fuel, don't you think they would want to back the one that already matches their existing infrastructure? If hydrogen became the next big thing, they'd have an awful lot of new equipment to buy. And a lot of old stuff to tear up first.
Remember, oil companies aren't in the oil business - they're in the energy business. It's just that currently the easiest way to get energy to the customer is through oil. They'd happily switch to anything else just so long as it made them a buck.
To further demonstrate the versatility of the drawing process, for which the U. of I. has applied for a patent, the researchers drew nanofibers out of sugar, out of potassium hydroxide (a major industrial chemical) and out of densely packed quantum dots.
You could lay out nano structures of quantum dots with whatever spacing and precision you'd like. And unlike all the other advances we usually see here on/. this one is already working.
The RIAA, through SoundExchange, collects a toll on every song played on internet radio. But get this - they collect for music from bands who aren't RIAA members! They collect for every song, no matter what. Because nobody would ever play a song for free. And they hold that money until you come to claim it (you have to join SoundExchange to claim it, btw).
I think it's apparent that it's only their complete ignorance of how technology works--evidenced by these ridiculous statements--that lets them have any hope that their organization can possibly continue to be relevant in the face of the increasing numbers of technological workarounds for every countermeasure that they come up with.
I had never before thought about it in that way, and you're absolutely right.
The reason why they think they can win is because they have no idea what the rules of the game actually are.
The only problem we have is in how much damage they do to the legal structure of the country while figuring this inescapable fact out.
My brother just got done buying all the 3.5 books and I'm sick of it. Sick of the updates and sick of having to shell out hundreds of dollars every few years to play what should be a simple game of DnD. Next time I run DnD, it'll be with the original TSR books and WotC can go pound salt.
Role-playing game design has continued to advance in the last ten years; wouldn't it be nice for D&D to take advantage of it?
If I wanted to play Traveller, I'd play Traveller. Coming out with all these useless complications and updates to DnD is pointless.
In short: they're must-haves for hardcore D&D fans.
I'll bet there isn't anything worth justifying the price of the new books in there if you look at it honestly.
Called "Races and Classes" and "Worlds and Monsters", the two titles cover everything from character creation to the new default world's pantheon.
They've done that dozens of times. Races and Classes was originally called Player's Manual back when I was a kid. The pantheon book was Deities and Demigods, or optionally Greyhawk. It's been done and done and done.
This is what WotC does. Take it out, polish it, change things just enough to be incompatible with the last version, and resell. Expensively. Look at Magic the Gathering for another example. Each expansion came out with something that would absolutely devastate the previous versions - to stay current you HAD to keep buying it. And for tournament play you weren't allowed to use older sets either. That's why they called MtG Cardboard Crack.
This is just the latest round of "buy this update we need another injection of cash" from WotC. I'll pass.
This is an industry that tries to hook people by marketing to children, adding adjuncts to tobacco so it's more addictive, and putting 4.9 million people per year in an early grave. By a painful death too - I got to watch my father die from cancer. It's horrific. And these people do it to millions every year.
You will never see the evil that human beings are capable of until you mix big money and big business. It's astonishing that these people are even the same species as the rest of us.
I guess that's why I'm not shocked and outraged about the RIAA. I won't get really surprised until they start shooting people in the head over a $15 cd. That'd be about par for the course, IMHO.
To compare the US with countries that utilize Sharia law shows your ignorance.
How is it harmful to compare two things? When you do that, you see differences and similarities. It's like the Mohs scale - you can't tell how hard one stone is unless you compare it to another. Here's the table.
As for what you see when you compare - well, that's another matter entirely.
Are we different? Surely. I can say "I dislike GW Bush and all his policies" and be reasonably sure I won't be killed for it.
Are we similar? That too. This country has a religion that a majority of people are a member of. And they use that religion to make decisions and laws for the rest of us. Like abortion. It's a "sin", so they tell me. So it's illegal.
The trick is, once you compare and see where you're similar - you do your best to fix those parts and NOT be like the countries under Sharia law.
I'd call the NFL's bluff. Jesus was a pretty rebellious and rock the boat sort of guy. He didn't back down from the Roman's or Pharisees, he told people how it was, associated with unwed women and whores, and scared those in power.
I've also heard it as the Christian argument as to why abortion is wrong, originally. I'll leave that as an exercise for you to find though. Should be easy enough.
Some of the symbolism within the coronation ceremony for British monarchs, in which they are anointed with Holy oils by the Archbishop of Canterbury, thereby ordaining them to monarchy, perpetuates the ancient Roman Catholic monarchical ideas and ceremonial (although few Protestants realise this, the ceremony is entirely based upon that of the Coronation of the Holy Roman Emperor).
Kings were put in place by the church. That's a little more than an endorsement.
Bruno was put to death for heresy - hardly a secular crime. He was arrested by the Venetian Inquisition - a church organization - in 1592. Then on the Roman Inquisition ordered his transfer, where he was transfered to Rome. He was held there seven years in the Tower of Nona, which is "a pontifical prison".
Then, "His trial was overseen by the inquisitor Cardinal Bellarmine, who demanded a full recantation, which Bruno eventually refused. Instead he appealed in vain to Pope Clement VIII, hoping to save his life through a partial recantation. The Pope expressed himself in favor of a guilty verdict."
Your point seems to be the next line, "Consequently, Bruno was declared a heretic, handed over to secular authorities on February 8 1600."
My point is that while the pope may not have personally brought the torch to the fire, the church most definitely ordered him put to death. They may not have done the actual physical deed - but they put him to death. Saying that the church didn't put him to death is disingenuous, like saying Al Capone never put anyone to death because he wasn't a trigger man.
The Church excommunicated folks. Secular powers "burned his ass at the stake for that." Big misconception that is thrown around quite frequently.
Things were different back then. The Church and the State were *not* separated at that point in history. They were intertwined. There were no wholly secular powers in Europe at that time, at least none that I am aware of. That's why the "separation of church and state" clause in the First Amendment in the United States Constitution was such a novel idea at the time.
You'll notice that every single one of the charges brought against Bruno was an offense against the Church. Not a singular charge is a secular crime.
Are you trying to say that anything connected to science is "untouchable" when it comes to morality? Perhaps you would have had a successful career in Nazi Germany, doing scientific studies on Jews.
It's a lovely straw man you've constructed there, but I'll answer anyways.
Morality does indeed have a place in science. Just not medieval morality.
For instance, embryonic stem cells. If you object because you feel that one life is being traded for another, that is a modern and logical stance. You can back that up with rational argument. You can discuss this, make points, make counter-arguments. You can debate.
If you object because you think God put a soul in there at conception and you're committing an affront to the Creator by using them - well, that doesn't belong in a scientific context. There can't be any discussion, because faith is making the argument. Faith simply believes - there is no room for negotiation. God said it, that settles it.
That's why the Catholics had such a hard time with Galileo. God said one thing, and now any yutz with $100 to go buy a telescope can prove that wrong. In the end, the Catholics had to "adjust" how they were interpreting the scripture to make the whole "foundations of the earth" thing less literal and more figurative. They moved the fault to themselves, since clearly someone was at fault, and it can't be The Book since it's never wrong. A very clever sidestep, IMHO.
In 1614 a Dominican priest filed charges at the Office of the Inquisition. Galileo was to respond by writing extraordinarily long letters which were circulated and became subject of debate. The most influential churchman of his age, Cardinal Bellamarine was to say of Galileo's theories: "a very dangerous thing, likely not only to irritate all scholastic philosophers and theologians, but also likely to harm the Holy Faith by rendering Holy Scripture false".
His actual crime was noticing that The Book has A Problem.
If you'd like to see an even better example of this, check out Giordano Bruno. His crimes were:
Holding opinions contrary to the Catholic Faith and speaking against it and its ministers.
Holding erroneous opinions about the Trinity, about Christ's divinity and Incarnation.
Holding erroneous opinions about Christ.
Holding erroneous opinions about Transubstantiation and Mass.
Claiming the existence of a plurality of worlds and their eternity.
Believing in metempsychosis and in the transmigration of the human soul into brutes.
Dealing in magics and divination.
Denying the Virginity of Mary.
What did he say? Basically the same thing as Galileo - that the "heavens" are simply other stars like our sun, the comets weren't messengers from God, etc. Read it here.
Oh yeah, they burned his ass at the stake for that.
It's a better comment than you're taking credit for. Religious people really DO think their beliefs shape the universe. That's why Galileo is such a wonderful example. The book says one thing - the telescope says another. Which is right?
Turns out the Inquisition thought the book was right. Didn't matter that anyone could duplicate Galileo's observations - they're right there in the sky. Anyone with good glass working skills can see the same stuff Galileo saw.
And it took the Catholics 359 years to admit it. Three hundred, and fifty nine years to admit that they were wrong about condemning a guy who dared to notice that the Earth isn't the center of the universe. Do we really want this medieval bureaucracy clogging down scientific progress?
A good example of what I'm talking about is artificial insemination. The Catholics are against it - it's another one of those "affronts to human dignity" they're talking about. But when an otherwise sterile couple gets to have a family because of it, it's hard to see how some ethereal affront to dignity has any context whatsoever to the joy having a family can bring you.
That's why these people shouldn't have any vote on scientific issues. The Church is a medieval institution. It becomes dangerously dated when discussing things in a modern context.
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This is to stop members from buying used units from ex-members instead of buying from the official (and very expensive) source.
How exactly is this illegal?
Why should eBay even fucking care?
This sets a lousy precedent. What if the RIAA decides that used CDs are too cheap and asks for the same, for instance? Or Ford decides that used cars are damaging their sales so you're not allowed to sell them? Or Levis decides that their jeans last too long, so you're not allowed to resell them?
This is *seriously* bad news.
Given Scientology's record of fraud and abuse, should eBay give them this level of trust?
The answer is right there. Would you want any group with Scientology's record of fraud and abuse to have access to anything important?
What do you want to bet they'd pull auctions of other Scientology-questionable stuff that isn't e meters?
Put a DVD copy of Anonymous' Scientology protests up for sale and watch what happens. What do you want to bet that it winds up deleted? Blocking e meter sales my ass - this is nothing more than some goofy cult making decisions about what you're allowed to buy. Don't let it happen!
These people are batshit fucking insane. Don't legitimize them by giving them any sort of power, control, or authority whatsoever.
Nobody is obese because nobody has to be. Medicine in the Star Trek universe is IMHO far more advanced than their grasp of physics is.
Sadly, hydrogen cars are basically a scam brought about by oil companies to distract attention and funding away from gasoline alternatives that are actually realistic.
I don't believe oil companies would fund with that in mind because it seems terribly counter productive.
If an oil company were to fund an alternate non-fossil fuel, don't you think they would want to back the one that already matches their existing infrastructure? If hydrogen became the next big thing, they'd have an awful lot of new equipment to buy. And a lot of old stuff to tear up first.
Remember, oil companies aren't in the oil business - they're in the energy business. It's just that currently the easiest way to get energy to the customer is through oil. They'd happily switch to anything else just so long as it made them a buck.
IMHO, is this:
To further demonstrate the versatility of the drawing process, for which the U. of I. has applied for a patent, the researchers drew nanofibers out of sugar, out of potassium hydroxide (a major industrial chemical) and out of densely packed quantum dots.
Nanowires made of quantum dots? Sounds like an outstanding way to make a super efficient solar panel.
You could lay out nano structures of quantum dots with whatever spacing and precision you'd like. And unlike all the other advances we usually see here on /. this one is already working.
That *wooshing* sound you hear above you is the joke going over your head. Here, read this and try again.
Even though it's not hard to get telnet back, why would they go to the trouble of removing it?
Well, not many people use it. So they trimmed it out, to keep Vista from being all bloated with useless stuff.
This is Seti Alpha 5!
Read up on SoundExchange.
The RIAA, through SoundExchange, collects a toll on every song played on internet radio. But get this - they collect for music from bands who aren't RIAA members! They collect for every song, no matter what. Because nobody would ever play a song for free. And they hold that money until you come to claim it (you have to join SoundExchange to claim it, btw).
And if you don't ever claim it, they keep it.
Fucking unreal or what?
I had never before thought about it in that way, and you're absolutely right.
The reason why they think they can win is because they have no idea what the rules of the game actually are.
The only problem we have is in how much damage they do to the legal structure of the country while figuring this inescapable fact out.
...this article isn't about the RIAA pissing off customers, it's about the RIAA pissing on artists.It is - and that's actually much better. Let's hear Lars and Dre defend this.
BTW, Lars...Dre....if by some bizarre chance you happen to read this: I Told You So. Nyah Nyah Nyah.
My brother just got done buying all the 3.5 books and I'm sick of it. Sick of the updates and sick of having to shell out hundreds of dollars every few years to play what should be a simple game of DnD. Next time I run DnD, it'll be with the original TSR books and WotC can go pound salt.
Role-playing game design has continued to advance in the last ten years; wouldn't it be nice for D&D to take advantage of it?
If I wanted to play Traveller, I'd play Traveller. Coming out with all these useless complications and updates to DnD is pointless.
In short: they're must-haves for hardcore D&D fans.
I'll bet there isn't anything worth justifying the price of the new books in there if you look at it honestly.
Called "Races and Classes" and "Worlds and Monsters", the two titles cover everything from character creation to the new default world's pantheon.
They've done that dozens of times. Races and Classes was originally called Player's Manual back when I was a kid. The pantheon book was Deities and Demigods, or optionally Greyhawk. It's been done and done and done.
This is what WotC does. Take it out, polish it, change things just enough to be incompatible with the last version, and resell. Expensively. Look at Magic the Gathering for another example. Each expansion came out with something that would absolutely devastate the previous versions - to stay current you HAD to keep buying it. And for tournament play you weren't allowed to use older sets either. That's why they called MtG Cardboard Crack.
This is just the latest round of "buy this update we need another injection of cash" from WotC. I'll pass.
Yeah, the RIAA sucks. They're predatory. But they can't hold a candle to the tobacco industry.
Read this.
This is an industry that tries to hook people by marketing to children, adding adjuncts to tobacco so it's more addictive, and putting 4.9 million people per year in an early grave. By a painful death too - I got to watch my father die from cancer. It's horrific. And these people do it to millions every year.
For money.
And they're not the only ones. Big business has been dumping toxic waste next to day care centers, clear cutting rainforests, and blocking access to AIDS medications for a long time now.
You will never see the evil that human beings are capable of until you mix big money and big business. It's astonishing that these people are even the same species as the rest of us.
I guess that's why I'm not shocked and outraged about the RIAA. I won't get really surprised until they start shooting people in the head over a $15 cd. That'd be about par for the course, IMHO.
How is it harmful to compare two things? When you do that, you see differences and similarities. It's like the Mohs scale - you can't tell how hard one stone is unless you compare it to another. Here's the table.
As for what you see when you compare - well, that's another matter entirely.
Are we different? Surely. I can say "I dislike GW Bush and all his policies" and be reasonably sure I won't be killed for it.
Are we similar? That too. This country has a religion that a majority of people are a member of. And they use that religion to make decisions and laws for the rest of us. Like abortion. It's a "sin", so they tell me. So it's illegal.
The trick is, once you compare and see where you're similar - you do your best to fix those parts and NOT be like the countries under Sharia law.
And got crucified for it.
I'm without mod points at the moment, and this guy is spot-on.
If this is our spies, this would seem to be a pretty boneheaded execution of tapping lines.
Maybe it's a sort of purloined letter. Something so boneheaded looking you wouldn't suspect spies of doing it.
Then you've successfully managed to refute a hypothetical argument only tangentially related to the topic under discussion. Congratulations.
AFAIK, nowhere. But a lot of fundamental Christians believe it anyways. This link took me 5 seconds to find. And this. Not difficult to do - Google is your friend.
I've also heard it as the Christian argument as to why abortion is wrong, originally. I'll leave that as an exercise for you to find though. Should be easy enough.
Yes they were intertwined but only in so much as the state had a "recognized" religion.
More than that.
Some of the symbolism within the coronation ceremony for British monarchs, in which they are anointed with Holy oils by the Archbishop of Canterbury, thereby ordaining them to monarchy, perpetuates the ancient Roman Catholic monarchical ideas and ceremonial (although few Protestants realise this, the ceremony is entirely based upon that of the Coronation of the Holy Roman Emperor).
Kings were put in place by the church. That's a little more than an endorsement.
Bruno was put to death for heresy - hardly a secular crime. He was arrested by the Venetian Inquisition - a church organization - in 1592. Then on the Roman Inquisition ordered his transfer, where he was transfered to Rome. He was held there seven years in the Tower of Nona, which is "a pontifical prison".
Then, "His trial was overseen by the inquisitor Cardinal Bellarmine, who demanded a full recantation, which Bruno eventually refused. Instead he appealed in vain to Pope Clement VIII, hoping to save his life through a partial recantation. The Pope expressed himself in favor of a guilty verdict."
Your point seems to be the next line, "Consequently, Bruno was declared a heretic, handed over to secular authorities on February 8 1600."
My point is that while the pope may not have personally brought the torch to the fire, the church most definitely ordered him put to death. They may not have done the actual physical deed - but they put him to death. Saying that the church didn't put him to death is disingenuous, like saying Al Capone never put anyone to death because he wasn't a trigger man.
The Church excommunicated folks. Secular powers "burned his ass at the stake for that." Big misconception that is thrown around quite frequently.
Things were different back then. The Church and the State were *not* separated at that point in history. They were intertwined. There were no wholly secular powers in Europe at that time, at least none that I am aware of. That's why the "separation of church and state" clause in the First Amendment in the United States Constitution was such a novel idea at the time.
You'll notice that every single one of the charges brought against Bruno was an offense against the Church. Not a singular charge is a secular crime.
Are you trying to say that anything connected to science is "untouchable" when it comes to morality? Perhaps you would have had a successful career in Nazi Germany, doing scientific studies on Jews.
It's a lovely straw man you've constructed there, but I'll answer anyways.
Morality does indeed have a place in science. Just not medieval morality.
For instance, embryonic stem cells. If you object because you feel that one life is being traded for another, that is a modern and logical stance. You can back that up with rational argument. You can discuss this, make points, make counter-arguments. You can debate.
If you object because you think God put a soul in there at conception and you're committing an affront to the Creator by using them - well, that doesn't belong in a scientific context. There can't be any discussion, because faith is making the argument. Faith simply believes - there is no room for negotiation. God said it, that settles it.
That's why the Catholics had such a hard time with Galileo. God said one thing, and now any yutz with $100 to go buy a telescope can prove that wrong. In the end, the Catholics had to "adjust" how they were interpreting the scripture to make the whole "foundations of the earth" thing less literal and more figurative. They moved the fault to themselves, since clearly someone was at fault, and it can't be The Book since it's never wrong. A very clever sidestep, IMHO.
That may be the "official" reason, but the real reason is that he found an error in the Flawless Undisputed Work of God.
A quote:
In 1614 a Dominican priest filed charges at the Office of the Inquisition. Galileo was to respond by writing extraordinarily long letters which were circulated and became subject of debate. The most influential churchman of his age, Cardinal Bellamarine was to say of Galileo's theories: "a very dangerous thing, likely not only to irritate all scholastic philosophers and theologians, but also likely to harm the Holy Faith by rendering Holy Scripture false".
His actual crime was noticing that The Book has A Problem.
If you'd like to see an even better example of this, check out Giordano Bruno. His crimes were:
What did he say? Basically the same thing as Galileo - that the "heavens" are simply other stars like our sun, the comets weren't messengers from God, etc. Read it here.
Oh yeah, they burned his ass at the stake for that.
It's a better comment than you're taking credit for. Religious people really DO think their beliefs shape the universe. That's why Galileo is such a wonderful example. The book says one thing - the telescope says another. Which is right?
Turns out the Inquisition thought the book was right. Didn't matter that anyone could duplicate Galileo's observations - they're right there in the sky. Anyone with good glass working skills can see the same stuff Galileo saw.
And it took the Catholics 359 years to admit it. Three hundred, and fifty nine years to admit that they were wrong about condemning a guy who dared to notice that the Earth isn't the center of the universe. Do we really want this medieval bureaucracy clogging down scientific progress?
A good example of what I'm talking about is artificial insemination. The Catholics are against it - it's another one of those "affronts to human dignity" they're talking about. But when an otherwise sterile couple gets to have a family because of it, it's hard to see how some ethereal affront to dignity has any context whatsoever to the joy having a family can bring you.
That's why these people shouldn't have any vote on scientific issues. The Church is a medieval institution. It becomes dangerously dated when discussing things in a modern context.