"This is Casy Casum's top 40 (tm) and the number one hit in America today is 'carat open parenthesis star backslash' by the new breakout band "percent twenty"
(Those of you who have heard the mp3 of Casey going off will appreciate this.)
"Hi, this is Case Kasem and the number one song in America today is 'carat open parentheses . . . WHAT THE FUCK AM I READING HERE??'"
On this thread, a lot of people have been drawing parallels between AOL's arrival and what the Internet has become. There is a lot of support for keeping the Morse code requirement to keep the AOLers of this world off of HAM radio.
That analogy falls apart when you consider that there is only one Internet, but there are a number of different radio bands. There is HAM radio for the in-the-know. For the not, there is CB, or "Children's^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Citizen's Band" radio. In other words, the smart kids have their playground and the dumb kids have theirs.
Must everything be always rounded down to the lowest common AOL-like denominator? There's CB radio for those who don't want to learn Morse code. Leave the requirement in place.
True, but you must understand that this is yet another chink in their armor. Once-invulnerable Microsoft has now had to settle a number of actions such as this. What they really didn't want was a full-dress jury trial where all of what Microsoft did to them would have been fleshed out for all to see.
What's more, it's very telling that a company with Microsoft's resources would settle rather than fight and "clear our name."
Real socio-economic advancement is happening, by . . . nonetheless succeeding in fields that reward true hard work, skill, intelligence, and risk taking behavior (e.g., business . . .
The business world rewards intelligence and risk-taking behavior? My Introduction to Management textbook said, "the people who get promoted often are not the best workers, but the best politicians." In my experience, it's quite often the people who exhibit "intelligence and risk taking behaviors" are the ones who are labeled "management issues" or "not a team player" or "not a Company man" and are let go. Why? They represent a threat. No, there is tremendous pressure to get along by going along at the expense of these very attributes. All too often, this meets with disastarous results.
"It is this Court's view that a minor [IP] dispute has been transformed into nothing more than a shakedown. Even though it may indeed be more economical for [Linux users] to cave in and pay, in the long run, if you pay extortion today, you typically have to pay it tomorrow. When the pitch is 'pay us what we want or we will cost you more,' it is the type of negotiation one usually sees when doing business with one of the five families in New York."
(With apologies to US District Judge Elton Kendall in his ruling in American Airlines, Inc. v. Allied Pilots Ass'n, No. 7:99-CV-025, 1999 WL 66188 (N.D. Tex. Feb. 13, 1999))
They simply . . . cost too fscking much. for what you get. Four grand for a laptop (five grand for a desktop, $300 for an Apple-only MP3 player) with a lot of eye candy is too damn much.
They simply . . . don't have the software base.
They simply . . . (as stated by parent post) want to do on the hardware AND software levels what Billy wants to do on software. (Steve Jobs would have achieved it if he could market his way out of a wet paper sack. Must be nice to get rehired at $83 million a year after running the company into the ground once only to be bailed out by your largest competitor.)
Don't get me wrong, they're nice machines, but they're not the end-all, be-all that the Mac freaks claim them to be. They're certainly not worth the ridiculous prices they charge.
The Henokiens is an association of family-owned companies that have been in business for at least 200 years and are still controlled by the descendents of the founder.
Tell me you're not that naive. Until 1997, we didn't even know the how much was being spent on inteligence. It took a FOIA lawsuit by the Federation of American Scientists to get the CIA to release the "black budget" figure. The CIA then announced the figure for 1997 - $26.6 billion (yes, billion with a "b.") The FAS then forced the release of the 1998 aggregate intelligence figure - $26.7 billion.
Anybody who knows anything about government budgeting will know this figure is a lie. Most federal programs get an automatic 10% annual budget increase. Any increase of less than 10% is called a "cut" (remember the mid-90s Democrat Goebbels-worthy "Medicare cuts" campaign? Same thing.) Had the CIA's budget only increased by $0.1 billion, we would have heard a hue and cry about the intelligence budget being "cut."
The point is, they're lying about the amount of the budget even when a court ordered its release. Having been given essentially a blank check, who says they won't (or haven't) implemented TIA already via the "black budget"?
BTW, I make less than $65K a year and I've benefitted from every Bush Jr. tax cut. Similarly, I was hindered by every Clinton tax increase. Does that make me part of the richest 1%?
Under Clinton, the "rich" were defined as anyone who made over $25,000 a year.
That's just it - the companies are fudging the numbers to make the problem look worse than it really is. Routinely, we hear the BSA/RIAA/MPAA claim that such-and-such huge amount of money is "lost" annually because of piracy.
A "loss" means your total revenue is less than your total cost, or so I learned in Economics 101 and Accounting 101 - not from Arthur Andersen, mind you. Let's say the software in question costs $100 a copy to develop, to use round figures in line with M$'s actual markup, at least on WinDoze. So, in the example you gave, 10 people buy the software at $1,000 a copy and 10 people rip it from (Kazaa, or insert your favorite P2P service here.) This still means a total revenue of $10,000 and a total profit of $1,000, not $10,000 of lost revenue and $1,000 of lost profit as claimed by by the industry propagandists. To claim otherwise is to claim that each ripped copy costs the company double what each sold copy costs when in fact it costs them nothing because you can't lose what you never had in the first place.
IBM Global Services (or insert your favorite consultantcy name here) consultant:
Deregulation of the chicken's side of the road was threatening its dominant market position. The chicken was faced with significant challenges to create and develop the competencies required for the newly competitive market. IBM Global Services, in a partnering relationship with the client, helped the chicken by rethinking its physical distribution strategy and implementation processes. Using the Poultry Integration Model (PIM), IBM helped the chicken use its skills, methodologies, knowledge, capital, and experiences to align the chicken's people, processes and technology in support of its overall strategy within a Program Management framework. IBM convened a diverse cross-spectrum of road analysts and best chickens along with IBM consultants with deep skills in the transportation industry to engage in a two-day itinerary of meetings in order to leverage their personal knowledge capital, both tacit and explicit, and to enable them to synergize with each other in order to achieve the implicit goals of delivering and successfully architecting and implementing an enterprise-wide value framework across the continuum of poultry, cross-median processes. The meeting was held in a park-like setting, enabling and creating an impactful environment which was strategically based, industry focused, and built upon a consistent, clear, and unified market message and aligned with the chicken's mission, vision, and core values. This was conducive towards the creation of a total business integration solution. IBM Global Services helped the chicken change to become more successful.
Okay, so Queen Amidala bangs Anakin and has twins. Anakin goes to the dark side and Princess Leia goes into hiding. BFD. Riight. I'm going to pay $8 for this.
This is not legal advice. You are not a client. I am not even a lawyer. What I say here is probably 100% wrong and anyone who takes any action based on it is a blithering jackass who deserves whatever bad shit this is likely to befall them. If you want competent legal advice, you need to consult with someone who is an attorney.
{/DISCLAIMER}
Now that that's out of the way . . . Quoth the poster:
This new law probably won't matter because it seems like most of the telemarketing calls I've been getting lately have been coming from India. If MCI hires an Indian telemarketing company to call me did MCI break this law? How does this apply to overseas telemarketers?
First off, Worldcom^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H MCI is an American company. An American company that uses an Indian outfit is subject to liability in American courts for the wrongful acts of said Indian outfit. So, if it can be shown that MCI's hired gun didn't check the do-not-call list, for example, MCI can be fined. The same tactic can be used against companies that hire spammers. I have done it, and successfully.
The question is, will they be fined? AFAIK, the law is missing a private right of action. This means you and I can't sue the bastard^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcompany that called us 24 times after we registered our number on the national do-not-call list. You have to wait for the FCC, in their infinite wisdom, to do so, for now. I wouldn't be surprised if states enacted laws allowing a private right of action for violations.
I access Washington State Employees Credit Union's online banking website daily using Mozilla, Opera, and a whole host of other non-IE browsers with zero problems. And they're really, really nice people too.
Slashdot Mirror
Quoth the poster:
"This is Casy Casum's top 40 (tm) and the number one hit in America today is 'carat open parenthesis star backslash' by the new breakout band "percent twenty"
(Those of you who have heard the mp3 of Casey going off will appreciate this.)
"Hi, this is Case Kasem and the number one song in America today is 'carat open parentheses . . . WHAT THE FUCK AM I READING HERE??'"
On this thread, a lot of people have been drawing parallels between AOL's arrival and what the Internet has become. There is a lot of support for keeping the Morse code requirement to keep the AOLers of this world off of HAM radio.
That analogy falls apart when you consider that there is only one Internet, but there are a number of different radio bands. There is HAM radio for the in-the-know. For the not, there is CB, or "Children's^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Citizen's Band" radio. In other words, the smart kids have their playground and the dumb kids have theirs.
Must everything be always rounded down to the lowest common AOL-like denominator? There's CB radio for those who don't want to learn Morse code. Leave the requirement in place.
True, but you must understand that this is yet another chink in their armor. Once-invulnerable Microsoft has now had to settle a number of actions such as this. What they really didn't want was a full-dress jury trial where all of what Microsoft did to them would have been fleshed out for all to see.
What's more, it's very telling that a company with Microsoft's resources would settle rather than fight and "clear our name."
How soon you've forgotten about _NSAKEY.
For you non-USians, NSA stands for No Such Agency.
Bless this thy Holy Hand Phone of Antioch, that with it thou may burnest thy faces of thine enemies into little tiny bits, in thy mercy.
Real socio-economic advancement is happening, by . . . nonetheless succeeding in fields that reward true hard work, skill, intelligence, and risk taking behavior (e.g., business . . .
The business world rewards intelligence and risk-taking behavior? My Introduction to Management textbook said, "the people who get promoted often are not the best workers, but the best politicians." In my experience, it's quite often the people who exhibit "intelligence and risk taking behaviors" are the ones who are labeled "management issues" or "not a team player" or "not a Company man" and are let go. Why? They represent a threat. No, there is tremendous pressure to get along by going along at the expense of these very attributes. All too often, this meets with disastarous results.
You're dangerously close to starting an editor flamewar.
"It is this Court's view that a minor [IP] dispute has been transformed into nothing more than a shakedown. Even though it may indeed be more economical for [Linux users] to cave in and pay, in the long run, if you pay extortion today, you typically have to pay it tomorrow. When the pitch is 'pay us what we want or we will cost you more,' it is the type of negotiation one usually sees when doing business with one of the five families in New York."
(With apologies to US District Judge Elton Kendall in his ruling in American Airlines, Inc. v. Allied Pilots Ass'n, No. 7:99-CV-025, 1999 WL 66188 (N.D. Tex. Feb. 13, 1999))
They simply . . . cost too fscking much. for what you get. Four grand for a laptop (five grand for a desktop, $300 for an Apple-only MP3 player) with a lot of eye candy is too damn much.
They simply . . . don't have the software base.
They simply . . . (as stated by parent post) want to do on the hardware AND software levels what Billy wants to do on software. (Steve Jobs would have achieved it if he could market his way out of a wet paper sack. Must be nice to get rehired at $83 million a year after running the company into the ground once only to be bailed out by your largest competitor.)
Don't get me wrong, they're nice machines, but they're not the end-all, be-all that the Mac freaks claim them to be. They're certainly not worth the ridiculous prices they charge.
Oops, I should have looked before I hit the "submit" button. Beretta's US counterpart hasn't been around that long, but the company has.
I got ya beat anyway. Beretta Arms Company and its U.S. counterpart have been around since 1526.
Tell me you're not that naive. Until 1997, we didn't even know the how much was being spent on inteligence. It took a FOIA lawsuit by the Federation of American Scientists to get the CIA to release the "black budget" figure. The CIA then announced the figure for 1997 - $26.6 billion (yes, billion with a "b.") The FAS then forced the release of the 1998 aggregate intelligence figure - $26.7 billion.
Anybody who knows anything about government budgeting will know this figure is a lie. Most federal programs get an automatic 10% annual budget increase. Any increase of less than 10% is called a "cut" (remember the mid-90s Democrat Goebbels-worthy "Medicare cuts" campaign? Same thing.) Had the CIA's budget only increased by $0.1 billion, we would have heard a hue and cry about the intelligence budget being "cut."
The point is, they're lying about the amount of the budget even when a court ordered its release. Having been given essentially a blank check, who says they won't (or haven't) implemented TIA already via the "black budget"?
The Clinton administration was the most tech-savvy administration in quite a whiled. We took a huge step back with GW.
Tech-savvy my ass. Who signed the DMCA into law?
Quoth the poster:
BTW, I make less than $65K a year and I've benefitted from every Bush Jr. tax cut. Similarly, I was hindered by every Clinton tax increase. Does that make me part of the richest 1%?
Under Clinton, the "rich" were defined as anyone who made over $25,000 a year.
Quoth the poster: I guess you perfered "Stagflation" and the Carter Administration.
You forgot the Misery Index (unemployment plus inflation) being over 20% during the Carter years. It fell to below ten during the Reagan years.
I wish I had the patent on the business model.
OHMIGOD! You've just committed a /. mortal sin. It's a {gasp} GIF image!
Palm watches YOU!
You "conceed" the point about simple "arithmatic" and you're an English major?!? Jeesh!
This kernel release includes support for the Palm Tungsten T. Finally, I can wipe my Windows partition. WOOHOO!
On another note, kernel.org does seem to be slashdotted.
That's just it - the companies are fudging the numbers to make the problem look worse than it really is. Routinely, we hear the BSA/RIAA/MPAA claim that such-and-such huge amount of money is "lost" annually because of piracy.
A "loss" means your total revenue is less than your total cost, or so I learned in Economics 101 and Accounting 101 - not from Arthur Andersen, mind you. Let's say the software in question costs $100 a copy to develop, to use round figures in line with M$'s actual markup, at least on WinDoze. So, in the example you gave, 10 people buy the software at $1,000 a copy and 10 people rip it from (Kazaa, or insert your favorite P2P service here.) This still means a total revenue of $10,000 and a total profit of $1,000, not $10,000 of lost revenue and $1,000 of lost profit as claimed by by the industry propagandists. To claim otherwise is to claim that each ripped copy costs the company double what each sold copy costs when in fact it costs them nothing because you can't lose what you never had in the first place.
No, must resist, can't, ngahhhh . . .
WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE ROAD?
IBM Global Services (or insert your favorite consultantcy name here) consultant: Deregulation of the chicken's side of the road was threatening its dominant market position. The chicken was faced with significant challenges to create and develop the competencies required for the newly competitive market. IBM Global Services, in a partnering relationship with the client, helped the chicken by rethinking its physical distribution strategy and implementation processes. Using the Poultry Integration Model (PIM), IBM helped the chicken use its skills, methodologies, knowledge, capital, and experiences to align the chicken's people, processes and technology in support of its overall strategy within a Program Management framework. IBM convened a diverse cross-spectrum of road analysts and best chickens along with IBM consultants with deep skills in the transportation industry to engage in a two-day itinerary of meetings in order to leverage their personal knowledge capital, both tacit and explicit, and to enable them to synergize with each other in order to achieve the implicit goals of delivering and successfully architecting and implementing an enterprise-wide value framework across the continuum of poultry, cross-median processes. The meeting was held in a park-like setting, enabling and creating an impactful environment which was strategically based, industry focused, and built upon a consistent, clear, and unified market message and aligned with the chicken's mission, vision, and core values. This was conducive towards the creation of a total business integration solution. IBM Global Services helped the chicken change to become more successful.
Okay, so Queen Amidala bangs Anakin and has twins. Anakin goes to the dark side and Princess Leia goes into hiding. BFD. Riight. I'm going to pay $8 for this.
Now, if I get to see Natalie Portman naked . . .
{DISCLAIMER}
This is not legal advice. You are not a client. I am not even a lawyer. What I say here is probably 100% wrong and anyone who takes any action based on it is a blithering jackass who deserves whatever bad shit this is likely to befall them. If you want competent legal advice, you need to consult with someone who is an attorney.
{/DISCLAIMER}
Now that that's out of the way . . . Quoth the poster:
This new law probably won't matter because it seems like most of the telemarketing calls I've been getting lately have been coming from India. If MCI hires an Indian telemarketing company to call me did MCI break this law? How does this apply to overseas telemarketers?
First off, Worldcom^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H MCI is an American company. An American company that uses an Indian outfit is subject to liability in American courts for the wrongful acts of said Indian outfit. So, if it can be shown that MCI's hired gun didn't check the do-not-call list, for example, MCI can be fined. The same tactic can be used against companies that hire spammers. I have done it, and successfully.
The question is, will they be fined? AFAIK, the law is missing a private right of action. This means you and I can't sue the bastard^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcompany that called us 24 times after we registered our number on the national do-not-call list. You have to wait for the FCC, in their infinite wisdom, to do so, for now. I wouldn't be surprised if states enacted laws allowing a private right of action for violations.
[SHAMELESS PLUG]
I access Washington State Employees Credit Union's online banking website daily using Mozilla, Opera, and a whole host of other non-IE browsers with zero problems. And they're really, really nice people too.
[/SHAMELESS PLUG]