I agree that they have monopolies on each market and that aside from satellite there is often (in my market at least) only one provider. I think you misinterpreted what I meant.
What I meant was that without ads on TV the prices would go higher, and the fact that the cable companies have monopolies on the markets would make it go even higher (if there weren't ads, of course), since there's virtually no competition.
"TV ads are a terrible bargain for the user, paying us about $1.20 per hour of our attention, and something has to change."
And how about those Big Annoying Slashdot Ads? Are they not a terrible bargain for the user? It pays us about 4 cents per instance of our extra viewing attention, and something has to change!
Don't you get it? TV doesn't make itself. I agree that ads are highly annoying and personally I tape record items and fast forward, but if there were none at all, why would TV make good shows? It is the main source of revenue for them, and they make such programs because of the ads. If not for the ads, TV would be vastly more expensive, with every channel a premium channel. Monopolies on markets would only add to this.
Now, some companies might make money by making products that allow you to skip over ads but AOL Time Warner owns several channels and thus does not want to shoot itself in the foot.
It's just some people have abused this system or used it incorrectly resulting in a less valuable resource for all.
If you don't mind me asking, how does this make it any less useful for us all? You can just Google search and find whatever official site you want, or use the direct domain names themselves. That seems pretty straightforward to me, and it works to find any site.
I agree that it is suspicious, but your argument is fallacious. You are trying to say that "if you disagree with me you are a stupid drone of the cable news station, so if you agree with me you are smarter." Come on. It was very suspicious and given how prominent they are I don't think they were coincidental, but the cable news channels aren't that far off. Slashdot is just a much a news network as other places, it just has fewer viewers and more technologically informed viewers.
Please, next time you make an argument use valid logic instead of trying to insult my intelligence if I disagree with you. Same conclusion, different logic. Valid logic.
What I would like to see is a class action suit against these spammers. AOL lost a class action suit a while ago after it claimed unlimited connectivity but there were many business signals, and they simply gave several free hours as a settlement (which is odd since they offered me 1000 free hours in the mail over 45 days, which would be nice if I didn't have a cable modem, wanted a slow net connection with software that corrupts your dlls, and I wanted to be online just over 22 hours per day).
Why aren't there class action suits against spammers? What they are doing is actually against the law in many states, or at least when they forge the headers. They also cause infrastructure damages to ISPs and violate licenses. If they are charged $500 per email in suits against those who complain, and they sent millions of emails, shouldn't they be liable to everyone in a class action suit? Why no one has taken up class action suits against the spammers astounds me, it would be almost certain to win, and it would win large amounts of money.
Hey, maybe I should send an email to millions of people from the Internet about this great idea in which they can make thousands a day!
Atoms made these days are getting worse and worse. They are filling them mostly with air these days so that you get less actual nucleic matter per bag! They do it over time so that you don't notice. In each atom, only a small percentage is actual protons and neutrons, and the rest is air. I think they learned something from the frito-lay company.
If they expect this "prize" debacle to make me buy again, they should think again. They can expect me to return to buying them once they increase the atoms' density to what it once was.
But then again, this is the same company donating millions to Senator Hollings to pass legislation that prevents fair use of atoms, so I don't think they are going to change. It's a disgrace, I tell you!
Shouldn't spyware be illegal? Most of it operates as trojan horses, which are similar to viruses, and those are illegal. They mess up the normal functioning of computers and are unauthorized. Maybe they have privacy policies saying that this is ok, but would these policies stand up in court? Often these policies are only made as such so that the consumer won't challenge them, and they are probably questionable legally. You can't take away rights from the consumer that they can't give up.
I mean, if a virus had a license agreement, would it be ok to use it then? And what if the virus attached on to another program with a license agreement that you probably wouldn't read? That is really what these scumware programs are doing. It is an outrage!
the DMCA carefully balances the interests of all
stakeholders
I think that's a type. It should be shareholders, as in shareholdings in the stock of Sen. Ernst Hollings, which is going rather cheaply these days. It carefully balances the interests of shareholders such as Disney with those of the RIAA and MPAA, who hold many shares in other political conglomerations.
Step 1) Earn $400 billion Step 2) Buy 1 billion X-boxes and use them as computers, without buying any games Step 3) Watch as Microsoft begins to collapse upon itself since it loses money on each unit! Step 4) Tell all your buddies that Microsoft is dying and that they should switch to the superior Linux OS Step 5) Play Tux Racer Step 6) Repeat step 5
You have completed the six step program. Microsoft is now dead! Have a nice day!
Yes, that is cheap. But if you actually read the license, you would notice that it is only for educational uses, such as learning how to use Flash. Designing a commercial website with it is in violation of the license. You might as well tell the person to go download Flash warez.
According to the article, the 10% decrease in music sales in 2001 was caused mostly by Internet file swapping.
This quote is wrong. I used to download music to try it out (it is available for free on the radio after all, so if you wanted to make it perfectly legal you could put in a tape recorder and then just time shift it) and bought more CDs than I ever used to because of this.
Now that the RIAA treats me like a criminal, and I discovered that they treat their musicians like indentured servants who barely get a penny from CD sales (google search for Courtney Love and RIAA), I no longer care to contribute to their business.
If you want to support the musicians, download their music and send the money for CDs you would have bought directly to them.
Oops, here's the working link to The Onion's article about the Monopoly monopoly.:-) And another quote:
Prosecutors also accused Parker Brothers officials of money-laundering, both in offshore accounts and so-called "under the board" money. Parker Brothers attorneys argued that the extra funds were due to a bank error in the company's favor, but prosecutors cited tax forms showing that the company opted to pay a flat income tax, per Atlantic City law, rather than have 10 percent of its gross worth calculated. Receipts for a luxurious diamond ring taxed at $75, presented late in the prosecution phase, proved similarly damaging to the defense.
Speaking outside his green plastic Atlantic City office building, lead prosecutor Milton Bradley told reporters: "These Monopoly monopolists have been allowed to park free for way too long, and it's high time they went directly to jail. We're talking about a company so dominant, it has leveraged its board-game success into a multi-tentacled goliath with holdings in railroads, real estate, electric utilities, and water works."
Re:Slashdot at its best
on
Time Travel
·
· Score: 2
Yes, but I am also fairly sure that most scientists would agree that this is most likely in no way possible. It's like all those fake theories floating around from time to time. In one state they even nearly passed a law having schools teach that PI=3, since 3.14 is too hard to remember.
Plus, remember this article? Some people claimed to have "solved" information theory. The thing disproving them was really simple, simply being the pigeonhole principle, but they convinced a lot of people before finally being disproven.
Basically, while there is an extremely remote chance of this person being right, it is probably a maverick applying bad science.
Not only is he leaving but in this post he states that kernel 3.0 will be rewritten in Visual Basic! The email is as follows (for those too lazy to click the link):
I have been dealing with maintaining Linux in a mixture of C and Assembler for over twelve years now. While it has been a lot of fun, every day dealing with these essentially dead languages has become harder and harder for me, and other programers seem to agree.
Thus, starting with Linux 3.0 (to be released hopefully by next summer), the kernel will be completely rewritten in the easy-to-use Visual Basic language. This will eliminate all issues involving buffer overruns, as well as streamlining porting of Windows programs to Linux, since Microsoft (who will now assume ownership of Linux) assure me that Windows is written entirely in VB as well.
Microsoft has also stated that they intend to incorporate Windows features, such as the RRS (Rapid Random Shutdown) in Windows 95, into Linux 3.0.
It sounds to me like the only people winning here are the lawyers. They are the ones who get the little money there is in that settlement, not the people whose personal information DoubleClick already distributed.
On a side note, simply put lines in your hosts file setting *.doubleclick.net to 127.0.0.1 and you never get anything from them.
Has anyone seen those RoadRunner ads where the Internet is mad slow under dialup? Sun should have some kind of ad where some guy is really stressed and grabbing his hair and it zooms in on the screen saying "Your computer has crashed. Send $1000 to Bill Gates, 1 Microsoft Way, Redmond WA and we might consider fixing it in ten years."
Then again, to acknowledge M$ gives them a tint of credibility. Funny that MS can't compete on its own merits.
That is indeed interesting, but most people refer to it as the book that defined the genere. I agree though, there are books with large themes that were similar and that preceded it. Let's not forget the movie Blade Runner (as I'm sure no one will), which could probably be called cyberpunk for it has many similar elements.
That's like asking who's not using IE to read Slashdot.
I'm sure not 100% of the people here have read it though. Plus, a large number of people have been complaining about the page widening bug, which only affected IE.
Has anyone here read Neuromancer? It was the first book of the Cyberpunk genere, and it preceded Snow Crash and The Diamond Age.
Anyway, in this book, one of the main focuses is how they are fitting the characters with wires and chips and such, and they set it up so that one of the characters is acting like a video camera and another one is set up in such as way that he can see and feel and hear everything she experiences.
...and all it takes is a bit of activism. Write up a letter to your local representative, find ten friends, and have them all write a letter as well as finding one or two friends each. Then, they will pay more note to the issue and quite possibly change their opinion. They are supposed to represent their constituents and often will even if they don't believe in the cause.
I _would_ also recommend writing senators, but that might be a bit more ambitious since they usually represent much larger numbers of people and thus would be harder to coerce.
Oh, and recommend they join Rep. Boucher's informed technological reps bandwagon.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that they have monopolies on each market and that aside from satellite there is often (in my market at least) only one provider. I think you misinterpreted what I meant.
What I meant was that without ads on TV the prices would go higher, and the fact that the cable companies have monopolies on the markets would make it go even higher (if there weren't ads, of course), since there's virtually no competition.
Don't you get it? TV doesn't make itself. I agree that ads are highly annoying and personally I tape record items and fast forward, but if there were none at all, why would TV make good shows? It is the main source of revenue for them, and they make such programs because of the ads. If not for the ads, TV would be vastly more expensive, with every channel a premium channel. Monopolies on markets would only add to this.
Now, some companies might make money by making products that allow you to skip over ads but AOL Time Warner owns several channels and thus does not want to shoot itself in the foot.
The Google Bar spies on you. It compiles much more detailed info about your searches than the normal searches.
I agree that it is suspicious, but your argument is fallacious. You are trying to say that "if you disagree with me you are a stupid drone of the cable news station, so if you agree with me you are smarter." Come on. It was very suspicious and given how prominent they are I don't think they were coincidental, but the cable news channels aren't that far off. Slashdot is just a much a news network as other places, it just has fewer viewers and more technologically informed viewers.
Please, next time you make an argument use valid logic instead of trying to insult my intelligence if I disagree with you. Same conclusion, different logic. Valid logic.
What I would like to see is a class action suit against these spammers. AOL lost a class action suit a while ago after it claimed unlimited connectivity but there were many business signals, and they simply gave several free hours as a settlement (which is odd since they offered me 1000 free hours in the mail over 45 days, which would be nice if I didn't have a cable modem, wanted a slow net connection with software that corrupts your dlls, and I wanted to be online just over 22 hours per day).
Why aren't there class action suits against spammers? What they are doing is actually against the law in many states, or at least when they forge the headers. They also cause infrastructure damages to ISPs and violate licenses. If they are charged $500 per email in suits against those who complain, and they sent millions of emails, shouldn't they be liable to everyone in a class action suit? Why no one has taken up class action suits against the spammers astounds me, it would be almost certain to win, and it would win large amounts of money.
Hey, maybe I should send an email to millions of people from the Internet about this great idea in which they can make thousands a day!
Atoms made these days are getting worse and worse. They are filling them mostly with air these days so that you get less actual nucleic matter per bag! They do it over time so that you don't notice. In each atom, only a small percentage is actual protons and neutrons, and the rest is air. I think they learned something from the frito-lay company.
If they expect this "prize" debacle to make me buy again, they should think again. They can expect me to return to buying them once they increase the atoms' density to what it once was.
But then again, this is the same company donating millions to Senator Hollings to pass legislation that prevents fair use of atoms, so I don't think they are going to change. It's a disgrace, I tell you!
Shouldn't spyware be illegal? Most of it operates as trojan horses, which are similar to viruses, and those are illegal. They mess up the normal functioning of computers and are unauthorized. Maybe they have privacy policies saying that this is ok, but would these policies stand up in court? Often these policies are only made as such so that the consumer won't challenge them, and they are probably questionable legally. You can't take away rights from the consumer that they can't give up.
I mean, if a virus had a license agreement, would it be ok to use it then? And what if the virus attached on to another program with a license agreement that you probably wouldn't read? That is really what these scumware programs are doing. It is an outrage!
I'm glad that they are bundling the newest issues of 2600 into this mad leet new blue box! Free Kevin!!!!!!
How to kill Microsoft
Step 1) Earn $400 billion
Step 2) Buy 1 billion X-boxes and use them as computers, without buying any games
Step 3) Watch as Microsoft begins to collapse upon itself since it loses money on each unit!
Step 4) Tell all your buddies that Microsoft is dying and that they should switch to the superior Linux OS
Step 5) Play Tux Racer
Step 6) Repeat step 5
You have completed the six step program. Microsoft is now dead! Have a nice day!
Yes, that is cheap. But if you actually read the license, you would notice that it is only for educational uses, such as learning how to use Flash. Designing a commercial website with it is in violation of the license. You might as well tell the person to go download Flash warez.
Now that the RIAA treats me like a criminal, and I discovered that they treat their musicians like indentured servants who barely get a penny from CD sales (google search for Courtney Love and RIAA), I no longer care to contribute to their business.
If you want to support the musicians, download their music and send the money for CDs you would have bought directly to them.
My favorite part:
Yes, but I am also fairly sure that most scientists would agree that this is most likely in no way possible. It's like all those fake theories floating around from time to time. In one state they even nearly passed a law having schools teach that PI=3, since 3.14 is too hard to remember.
Plus, remember this article? Some people claimed to have "solved" information theory. The thing disproving them was really simple, simply being the pigeonhole principle, but they convinced a lot of people before finally being disproven.
Basically, while there is an extremely remote chance of this person being right, it is probably a maverick applying bad science.
Not only is he leaving but in this post he states that kernel 3.0 will be rewritten in Visual Basic! The email is as follows (for those too lazy to click the link):
Linus Torvalds (torvalds@transmeta.com)
Mon, 1 Apr 2002 15:35:02 -0500
Hi folks,
I have been dealing with maintaining Linux in a mixture of C and Assembler for over twelve years now. While it has been a lot of fun, every day dealing with these essentially dead languages has become harder and harder for me, and other programers seem to agree.
Thus, starting with Linux 3.0 (to be released hopefully by next summer), the kernel will be completely rewritten in the easy-to-use Visual Basic language. This will eliminate all issues involving buffer overruns, as well as streamlining porting of Windows programs to Linux, since Microsoft (who will now assume ownership of Linux) assure me that Windows is written entirely in VB as well.
Microsoft has also stated that they intend to incorporate Windows features, such as the RRS (Rapid Random Shutdown) in Windows 95, into Linux 3.0.
Linus
It sounds to me like the only people winning here are the lawyers. They are the ones who get the little money there is in that settlement, not the people whose personal information DoubleClick already distributed.
On a side note, simply put lines in your hosts file setting *.doubleclick.net to 127.0.0.1 and you never get anything from them.
Has anyone seen those RoadRunner ads where the Internet is mad slow under dialup? Sun should have some kind of ad where some guy is really stressed and grabbing his hair and it zooms in on the screen saying "Your computer has crashed. Send $1000 to Bill Gates, 1 Microsoft Way, Redmond WA and we might consider fixing it in ten years."
Then again, to acknowledge M$ gives them a tint of credibility. Funny that MS can't compete on its own merits.
...the password there is ".seineew era snaciremA tsilatipaC"
That is indeed interesting, but most people refer to it as the book that defined the genere. I agree though, there are books with large themes that were similar and that preceded it. Let's not forget the movie Blade Runner (as I'm sure no one will), which could probably be called cyberpunk for it has many similar elements.
Has anyone here read Neuromancer? It was the first book of the Cyberpunk genere, and it preceded Snow Crash and The Diamond Age.
Anyway, in this book, one of the main focuses is how they are fitting the characters with wires and chips and such, and they set it up so that one of the characters is acting like a video camera and another one is set up in such as way that he can see and feel and hear everything she experiences.
You can prevent this...
...and all it takes is a bit of activism. Write up a letter to your local representative, find ten friends, and have them all write a letter as well as finding one or two friends each. Then, they will pay more note to the issue and quite possibly change their opinion. They are supposed to represent their constituents and often will even if they don't believe in the cause.
I _would_ also recommend writing senators, but that might be a bit more ambitious since they usually represent much larger numbers of people and thus would be harder to coerce.
Oh, and recommend they join Rep. Boucher's informed technological reps bandwagon.