Science is a process, not a conclusion. That's how we can have various different sciences and yet they all be sciences.
Believing a specific conclusion that we don't understand may take belief in another person's work, but that doesn't make it faith (belief without proof). Because we can easily understand the concepts of science, the value of science. We have thousands of years of evidence as to whether or not this process produces reliable conclusions. We understand that just because we don't personally have the knowledge and resources to re-test a hypothesis, that somebody does--and probably will re-test it. We're secure in the knowledge that it can be tested and re-tested, unlike faith.
That doesn't mean that every conclusion will be correct; we have ample proof of that in our past. Nor does it mean that we should jump right into believing any new conclusion. But some things we have a pretty good grasp on. The longer hypotheses stand, the more supporting data turns up, the more secure we can be in their validity.
Science doesn't prove, it only disproves. If we keep that in mind, with knowledge of what science is and how it accomplishes what it accomplishes, what is there left to take on faith?
I assume it has something to do with you being an arrogant ass?
If you don't agree with their criteria for considering words for inclusion, that's fine. And if that causes you to not take them seriously, that's fine too. But to suggest, even hyperbolically, that you actually laugh at people who disagree with your assessment says far more about you than it does about them or about the OED.
The Catholic Church as a religious organization has a long history of trying to find and understand the truth, theologically.
Do they? Or do they have a long history of trying to fit the truth to the beliefs they have already adopted? Do you honestly believe there is anything short of god himself descending from the heavens and cracking them over the knuckles that would cause them to stand up and say "aw, fuck. We couldn't have been any more wrong?" If not, they're not searching for the truth.
I fail to see the point of any religion these days. If one wants to believe in god, no problem. Determine for yourself who and what he is, what he believes and demands. That's all the churches do anyway, with the caveat that they tend to be far slower to recognize and correct wrongs in their own beliefs. And hell, you have just as much chance of being more accurate than any major religion than less accurate anyway.
From TFA: "A federal judge in Tyler, Texas, today said Apple didn't infringe a patent owned by Mirror Worlds LLC and closed the case in Apple's favor."
Can you provide any proof for your conjecture, or is this just one of those things where Slashdotters think they know the constitution better than anybody else (even when they don't agree amongst themselves or with established judicial authorities)?
Amendments that have nothing whatsoever to do with a bill have been allowed for... entirely too long, so I fail to see what ground you're standing on. They wouldn't change a tax bill into a gummi bear bill because if you're making that many changes it would be simpler to just let the original die and start fresh. The only way I see for it to be unconstitutional is if they change a gummi bear bill into a tax bill in the Senate, because the tax issue still needs to originate in the House.
In context, there's nothing whatsoever from stopping the Senate from offering an amendment stripping the no-funding amendment the House offered or simply killing the bill entirely if the no-funding is the bill.
Typical-path students (those who didn't need a remedial math course, basically) would start in Algebra 1 and then move to Geometry their second year. Most would probably stop there, since only two years of math were required. But for those who didn't, they moved to Algebra 2 their junior year and Trig/Pre-Calc their senior year.
There was also an accelerated path for those identified back in grade school to be faster students which would have seen them take Algebra 1 in 8th grade, then Geometry, Algebra II, Trig/Pre-Calc and Calculus AP in high school.
I was on the typical path (not to sound arrogant but I should have been on the accelerated path except I moved into the district late in 4th grade and they never bounced me up), but I did do four years of math. Algebra was always my favorite. Geometry I did mediocre at. Algebra 2 is where everything started clicking really strongly, probably because I had my best and favorite math teacher of all my schooling. After that I had a lot of trouble figuring out why I should care and lost interest. I did alright in the classes, but I certainly didn't apply myself and I don't remember most of it anymore. The death-knell for me with math was in a calculus class in university, when a student asked the teacher what we might need this for and her response was, "well, what if you had an irregularly shaped garden and needed to know how much dirt to buy?" I'm pretty sure my eyes rolled so far back into my head that they never looked at the whiteboard again.
It's something I'm starting to regret, which actually brings me to a question: Does anybody know one of those free online class sites with a decent set of math classes, preferably geared more toward programmers? I'm a web developer primarily so I don't use it a ton, but I'd like to get more under my belt and I think some more easy-to-see applications for the things they're teaching would help me maintain interest. I'd probably need to start back at the Trig stage since it has been so long.
You embarrass yourself by not understanding the distiction while speaking on the subject. Or you shame yourself by deliberatley mis-stating it.
Or you make yourself look pompous by the suggestion that more than just a handful of companies have ever put together viable business models based on open source. Or suggest that some sort of large-scale switch wouldn't absolutely devastate most software businesses out there even if they were fully prepared and ready for the change by assuming the OP's comments don't actually know the definition and all you have to do is come along, inform him in the most haughty way you can think of and depart, problem solved.
Not every company can make it by support or donations, and once the code is out there "you have to pay me" becomes a race to the bottom, at best. For every Red Hat out there, there are dozens of companies who never made it with this model and a handful more companies like Mozilla, propped up largely by other generous for-profit companies like Google.
Nothing the OP said was wrong. If companies don't feel they can make money on something, they're not going to invest in it. The fact that you assume that re-spouting the same "free as in freedom not free of cost!" drivel we've heard ten thousand times before magically solves all of these major quandaries about potentially moving to open source doesn't make it so. And making snide remarks about the profession of somebody who works in an industry propping up so much open source is more despicable than the general level of despicable it takes to try insulting somebody for their profession.
no piracy occurs, at least on Amazon's part. Users may be storing pirated music on their personal cloud drives, but these are private file storage areas and do not allow MP3s to be exchanged among users, thus the cloud drive does not facilitate piracy.
I do tend to agree with you, and I certainly hope you (and Amazon) are correct.
One thing to point out though: The user is probably committing copyright infringement by uploading their music collection. Where they once had one copy of a song, they now have two--which can both rather easily be used at the same time. Does this service facilitate copyright infringement by making it essentially the default use case? I don't know. I don't think so, I call one copy at a given time a backup. Then again, I thought Napster's defense was pretty solid so I am obviously not a good source to analyze that.
Ultimately, whether you and they are right or wrong, I think a lawsuit is inevitable and the only way to find out.
You know, I think the judge recruitment pool would be rather low if you didn't allow those that have either stood as plaintiffs or defendants as lawyers. Because if they're biased then so is the EFF lawyer too, right?
Do you really not see the shift you just made? You go from talking about the "judge recruitment tool" in a frankly ridiculous way, then somehow shift to lawyers to take a shot at the EFF.
Of course the EFF lawyers are biased. So are the lawyers they're going up against. That's not a failing of the system, that's the point. These lawyers are their clients' advocates, and we have an adversarial system. They should both be as biased as humanly possible.
A judge, on the other hand, is supposed to be not only capable of making an impartial decision, but to do so in ways and cases that remove even the potential appearance of an improper or biased decision. A former RIAA lawyer ruling on whether or not you can file against thousands of John Does is hardly impartial. It may be one of the gray areas where she technically does not have to recuse herself from the case, but should have, or it may be outright misconduct. In either event, she should not have been the judge ruling on this case.
No, that does not mean the "judge recruitment pool" shrinks nor does it mean that she can't be a judge and can't rule on other federal cases. The same goes for those EFF lawyers you brought up. Nobody has a problem with them being judges, but they probably shouldn't be making any rulings on file sharing cases.
It's like a fencing match and there's no such thing as unsportsmanlike [. ..] if your client won then you did your job.
This is tangential to the point, but that's actually only partially true.
Yes, if you know the law better than your opponent you're simply a better lawyer. But as a lawyer, you also have an obligation to the court and the legal system and there are quite a lot of things you cannot do.
How many of them would write a fellow officer a traffic ticket? Those who wouldn't aren't good guys.
You don't find that to be an incredibly shallow definition?
I have never met a cop who liked writing tickets. Nobody ever joined the police force saying "I'm going to pull over soooo many speeders!" It's just a reality of the job, and a tool to look for other crime. It's not fun; it's paperwork. And worse, paperwork where the best reaction a cop can hope for is somebody who goes "yeah, I deserve this." The other possibility, absent violence, is one who hates you for doing a part of your job that you hate yourself. If tomorrow they didn't have to write another ticket ever again, I bet most would be overjoyed.
Whether or not they would write another officer a traffic ticket might be a good perspective on the (lack of) value of traffic tickets as something more than revenue generation, but it's hardly enough to judge whether they're a good cop, much less a good person. For extra mind-fuckery, try defining what a "good person" is.
Evidence from my city suggests that most officers would hide evidence of a murder, if they feared the truth would implicate another officer.
If you're trying to make a larger point, you're already biasing the discussion by calling it murder. Murder is, by is definition, malicious and unjustified.
If you're talking about only whatever specific incident you're talking about, then I think the phrasing you're looking for is "Evidence from my city suggests that a few officers may have hidden evidence of a murder, fearing it could implicate another officer." Slandering the entirety of the profession is ridiculous even if your example is 100% correct. Hell, even slandering the entirety of the city's force is -- and frankly I can conclude little from your post other than that you do not like cops and may or may not have any rational reasoning for that.
Isn't deciding what to sell (and what not to sell) something that every retailer does on a daily basis?
Sure, but at the same time they shouldn't expect not to be judged by those decisions. Particularly when one of their criteria is for the products it sells to be "family-friendly" to such a degree that an app for browsing swimsuits or lingerie with models pictures is banned, but then they allow an app about "curing" homosexuality like it is a disease. If you're going to play moral policeman, expect to have the morality of your future decisions questioned.
My personal preference would have been for Apple to say "anything other than malware goes" and stay out of the process, but that wasn't what they chose to do. They can reap whatever consequences come of that decision, as far as I'm concerned.
Should every store that does not sell everything be expecting a law suit?
Re-read his post. The comment about a lawsuit was if they approved an app that is used to infringe copyrights. I don't know if they would get sued for it (probably) or whether they would lose if they did (probably not), but it's hardly as if he claimed that selling or not selling this app about homosexuality is what is going to get them sued.
They want the case to be tried in California, where the courts have tended to be favorable to their causes. it's kind of how patent trolls always want to file in a specific (NE?) district in Texas.
In order for that to happen, the court has to be able to claim jurisdiction meaning, essentially, it has to have something to do with California or the laws of California. They're trolling donations to see if they can establish some link to CA that would let the court claim jurisdiction and have the trial there, despite the fact that Geohot lives in New Jersey.
I actually tend to agree with you that it is STILL a violation of his rights, however. I shouldn't be able to walk into any court I want and go "you have jurisdiction. Just let me dig through his financial records and I'll tell you how." There should, at the very minimum, be a reasonableness burden of why they believe the court has jurisdiction before lawyers just get to troll through whatever documentation they please.
Then again there probably is, and it's just something California is also sympathetic to.
Otherwise you're really weighing the pros (for you) against the cons (for someone else), which is like apples and oranges.
Yeah, but that's life. It's pretty much the entire purpose of government and of law. If everybody got along and we only did things that benefited all parties involved, there wouldn't be a need for any kind of debate or any system to resolve dispute.
Nobody should want to live next to a nuclear dump. Even if it's ultimately safe, why should anybody want to do so? Nobody should want to live next to a coal power plant either, and nobody should want wind turbines in their back yards. That leaves what, hydro? There's probably a reason not to want to live near those either, but in any event as long as we continue to like having abundant electricity it's not enough.
At its heart, it's about utilitarianism: The greatest good for the greatest number. That's not always easy to define, but it should be the goal. It's not about whether a person wants to live next to a nuclear dump; it's about whether that's the best solution available to meet our needs as a society. If somebody comes up with a completely clean, safe, affordable, abundant supply of power -- WOOHOO! Until then it will always be about one person's pros versus another person's cons. By all means, put yourself in other peoples' shoes to help you get some perspective -- but don't pretend there's a perfect solution. If there was, we'd be using it.
Small correction: Most piracy is about getting things without paying the asking price.
I literally cringed every day in December while Steam had their sale going, because I knew I was going to walk away buying something. Indeed, I did almost every day -- including things I had never heard of but looked pretty good, that I had pirated previously but really enjoyed, or had wanted to play but never had before. Some of them I still haven't played, but there they are sitting in my Steam library.
For me, $9.99 is a magic price point on games where I will buy just about anything whether I've heard of it or not. $15 has me thinking about it but probably buying it if it has piqued my interest enough to be considering it. $30 is probably the tipping point where I become less likely than likely to buy it and the $59.99 most games are priced at these days almost always gets a pass or gets passed off as a gift idea come my birthday or Christmas or what-have-you, with the possible exception of sequels of games that I found a lot of value from previously.
Even then, however, it's extremely hit or miss. I loved Dragon Age Origins, but Dragon Age 2, while not a bad game, is inferior in almost every way for me. I'll play it through, but I don't see me obsessively replaying it as different classes and personalities the way I did with the first. Worth $60? No. I got all sorts of enjoyment/value from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (which I bought for $30 a year after release to play with a friend); Black Ops was inferior in almost every way. Worth $60? Hell no. I bought MLB 2K11. It's not a bad game, and I play the hell out of my baseball games so it's probably even a good value in terms of $/play hour, but as essentially a bugfix and roster update to the incredibly buggy MLB 2K10, it's not worth the $60 to me.
Those are all sequels to things I enjoyed, and none of them are really worth the price I paid for them. Obviously that makes me less likely to buy the next sequel, if there is one; but more to the point, that's not a price point where I will ever buy a game just to try it. Even as a person in the US, for whom these are ostensibly priced, it's ultimately about price. $60 a pop is just not going to happen very often. The further you bring that down the more likely it is I buy it, even going so far as to hit an impulse buy price point. When we're talking about people for whom $60 is prohibitive instead of just (typically) unreasonable, that becomes even more pronounced.
There was an article on Slashdot a few days ago about an E-book writer who dropped the price on his book from $2.99 to $0.99 and saw a 20-fold increase in sales. Everybody's is a bit different, every nation's will be radically different on average, but that old supply and demand curve does poke its head into a lot of things. Lowering prices won't eliminate piracy, but it will certainly lower it, and in many (most?) cases the increased sales will make up for the decreased per-item profits.
This apparently constitutes flamebait on Slashdot.
Whoever moderated this, you're a fucking joke. Grow up, move out of your mom's basement and get some perspective on life. You're not nearly as smart or important as you think you are, I promise.
People spend a ton of money on having the biggest tv and the fastest pc but they still listen to low quality music on cheap devices with even cheaper headphones.
You're right. Which is all the more reason that "I sell FLAC, buy from me!" is a questionable business model. Even among those who have the inclination to keep a FLAC collection to transcode to MP3 or next-great-audio-format, most don't have the audio equipment to take advantage of it. For those that do, the CD is still an option.
I've heard that there are some places that sell FLACs from the master rather than yanked from the CD. In those cases it might be worth doing, but again, even if that became widespread, the number of people able much less willing to take advantage of (and pay for) that is relatively small.
Keeping a collection in FLAC isn't a bad idea by any means, but it's work to be able to use those songs the way the average person does and for small benefit in most cases.
This guy obviously had a legitimate copy, since his game copy was tied to his forum account. Now it no longer works. Do you believe he's going to go "shucks, I shouldn't have done that. Here's $60, may I have another copy please?"
No. At best, he goes "fuck it and fuck you, I'm done with your game." More realistically he goes out for ten seconds of Google'ing, finds a crack and continues on his merry way. Turning a paying customer into a pirate. What he does about Dragon Age III (or whatever) is certainly up in the air. If I were him, I wouldn't give them another dollar of mine. Of course, I might stil want their game... I wonder if there's any solution to wanting to play a game without paying the creator?
Not to mention, of course, how he reacts with his friends who might be intersted but not have bought the game yet. "Yeah guys, I have a cracked copy right here, just give me a blank DVD."
The API still should have been secured with some sort of credentials. They don't have to be rocket science and they don't have to be so complex they get in the way of the third parties, but I don't think a username/password passed with HTTP Auth or something would be overly burdensome if you're already asking partners to connect with an API. And a couple of Microsoft developers could probably pump out libraries for most major languages to do that in only a few days' times if they wanted.
More to the point, the API could--and should--still generate the code on the fly but randomly, be dropped into the database, and removed or marked inactive when used. It would still be a nearly instantaneous process of Request to API -> Generate/Store Code -> Return Code to Requesting Client, and the codes could still be passed along instantly to the end user -- there's just no algorithm to figure out. Combine with some sort of short-term lockout or slowdown for repeated attempts to use invalid codes to take care of brute force attempts and you have a fairly secure system with a minimum of effort expended.
The topic interests you or it doesn't, and that's completely separate from who posted it or what their motives are. The article itself is not behind a pay wall, nor is it one of those craptastic articles spread out three sentences per page over 27 pages to increase ad views.
I'm failing to see why I should care if the guy is getting paid for his submissions even if he is -- an accusation you've done little to support in any event.
We mostly use the terms interchangably these days, but there actually is a difference between a democracy and a republic: who makes the decisions.
In a democracy, the people make the decisions. Literally. They vote on each issue that comes up like how referendums work in the US. Very few true democracies exist in the world today since this is a rather cumbersome way of doing things.
In a republic, the people make the decisions but only indirectly through some other party. These days we typically mean a democratic republic, where the representatives are elected by the people to make the decisions, but I don't think that is actually a requirement.
Utah should be teaching that the US is a republic and not a democracy -- because it's true, and because I think talking about various types of government is an important exercise. That said, this bill is still retarded. It shouldn't have to be legislated, for starters, much less should legislators actually waste time on it. And if their reasoning really is because of the word "democrat," well, then they are some truly stupid twats who should be thrown out on their faces and replaced with somebody who actually cares about the people of Utah instead of trying to cement their own party's political power.
They sold the part that makes money and kept the part that costs money. I'm not sure how long that kind of arrangement can last, at least insofar as they actually plan to continue developing Qt.
They may not be all in yet, but the pot odds are going to push them in before the end of the hand.
Joking about something is not an indication that it is not serious, nor that it is not taken seriously. To leap that a prison rape joke means anybody is condoning prison rape is inappropriate.
Slashdot Mirror
Science is a process, not a conclusion. That's how we can have various different sciences and yet they all be sciences.
Believing a specific conclusion that we don't understand may take belief in another person's work, but that doesn't make it faith (belief without proof). Because we can easily understand the concepts of science, the value of science. We have thousands of years of evidence as to whether or not this process produces reliable conclusions. We understand that just because we don't personally have the knowledge and resources to re-test a hypothesis, that somebody does--and probably will re-test it. We're secure in the knowledge that it can be tested and re-tested, unlike faith.
That doesn't mean that every conclusion will be correct; we have ample proof of that in our past. Nor does it mean that we should jump right into believing any new conclusion. But some things we have a pretty good grasp on. The longer hypotheses stand, the more supporting data turns up, the more secure we can be in their validity.
Science doesn't prove, it only disproves. If we keep that in mind, with knowledge of what science is and how it accomplishes what it accomplishes, what is there left to take on faith?
I assume it has something to do with you being an arrogant ass?
If you don't agree with their criteria for considering words for inclusion, that's fine. And if that causes you to not take them seriously, that's fine too. But to suggest, even hyperbolically, that you actually laugh at people who disagree with your assessment says far more about you than it does about them or about the OED.
Do they? Or do they have a long history of trying to fit the truth to the beliefs they have already adopted? Do you honestly believe there is anything short of god himself descending from the heavens and cracking them over the knuckles that would cause them to stand up and say "aw, fuck. We couldn't have been any more wrong?" If not, they're not searching for the truth.
I fail to see the point of any religion these days. If one wants to believe in god, no problem. Determine for yourself who and what he is, what he believes and demands. That's all the churches do anyway, with the caveat that they tend to be far slower to recognize and correct wrongs in their own beliefs. And hell, you have just as much chance of being more accurate than any major religion than less accurate anyway.
From TFA: "A federal judge in Tyler, Texas, today said Apple didn't infringe a patent owned by Mirror Worlds LLC and closed the case in Apple's favor."
Can you provide any proof for your conjecture, or is this just one of those things where Slashdotters think they know the constitution better than anybody else (even when they don't agree amongst themselves or with established judicial authorities)?
Amendments that have nothing whatsoever to do with a bill have been allowed for... entirely too long, so I fail to see what ground you're standing on. They wouldn't change a tax bill into a gummi bear bill because if you're making that many changes it would be simpler to just let the original die and start fresh. The only way I see for it to be unconstitutional is if they change a gummi bear bill into a tax bill in the Senate, because the tax issue still needs to originate in the House.
In context, there's nothing whatsoever from stopping the Senate from offering an amendment stripping the no-funding amendment the House offered or simply killing the bill entirely if the no-funding is the bill.
My high school was similar.
Typical-path students (those who didn't need a remedial math course, basically) would start in Algebra 1 and then move to Geometry their second year. Most would probably stop there, since only two years of math were required. But for those who didn't, they moved to Algebra 2 their junior year and Trig/Pre-Calc their senior year.
There was also an accelerated path for those identified back in grade school to be faster students which would have seen them take Algebra 1 in 8th grade, then Geometry, Algebra II, Trig/Pre-Calc and Calculus AP in high school.
I was on the typical path (not to sound arrogant but I should have been on the accelerated path except I moved into the district late in 4th grade and they never bounced me up), but I did do four years of math. Algebra was always my favorite. Geometry I did mediocre at. Algebra 2 is where everything started clicking really strongly, probably because I had my best and favorite math teacher of all my schooling. After that I had a lot of trouble figuring out why I should care and lost interest. I did alright in the classes, but I certainly didn't apply myself and I don't remember most of it anymore. The death-knell for me with math was in a calculus class in university, when a student asked the teacher what we might need this for and her response was, "well, what if you had an irregularly shaped garden and needed to know how much dirt to buy?" I'm pretty sure my eyes rolled so far back into my head that they never looked at the whiteboard again.
It's something I'm starting to regret, which actually brings me to a question: Does anybody know one of those free online class sites with a decent set of math classes, preferably geared more toward programmers? I'm a web developer primarily so I don't use it a ton, but I'd like to get more under my belt and I think some more easy-to-see applications for the things they're teaching would help me maintain interest. I'd probably need to start back at the Trig stage since it has been so long.
Or you make yourself look pompous by the suggestion that more than just a handful of companies have ever put together viable business models based on open source. Or suggest that some sort of large-scale switch wouldn't absolutely devastate most software businesses out there even if they were fully prepared and ready for the change by assuming the OP's comments don't actually know the definition and all you have to do is come along, inform him in the most haughty way you can think of and depart, problem solved.
Not every company can make it by support or donations, and once the code is out there "you have to pay me" becomes a race to the bottom, at best. For every Red Hat out there, there are dozens of companies who never made it with this model and a handful more companies like Mozilla, propped up largely by other generous for-profit companies like Google.
Nothing the OP said was wrong. If companies don't feel they can make money on something, they're not going to invest in it. The fact that you assume that re-spouting the same "free as in freedom not free of cost!" drivel we've heard ten thousand times before magically solves all of these major quandaries about potentially moving to open source doesn't make it so. And making snide remarks about the profession of somebody who works in an industry propping up so much open source is more despicable than the general level of despicable it takes to try insulting somebody for their profession.
I do tend to agree with you, and I certainly hope you (and Amazon) are correct.
One thing to point out though: The user is probably committing copyright infringement by uploading their music collection. Where they once had one copy of a song, they now have two--which can both rather easily be used at the same time. Does this service facilitate copyright infringement by making it essentially the default use case? I don't know. I don't think so, I call one copy at a given time a backup. Then again, I thought Napster's defense was pretty solid so I am obviously not a good source to analyze that.
Ultimately, whether you and they are right or wrong, I think a lawsuit is inevitable and the only way to find out.
Do you really not see the shift you just made? You go from talking about the "judge recruitment tool" in a frankly ridiculous way, then somehow shift to lawyers to take a shot at the EFF.
Of course the EFF lawyers are biased. So are the lawyers they're going up against. That's not a failing of the system, that's the point. These lawyers are their clients' advocates, and we have an adversarial system. They should both be as biased as humanly possible.
A judge, on the other hand, is supposed to be not only capable of making an impartial decision, but to do so in ways and cases that remove even the potential appearance of an improper or biased decision. A former RIAA lawyer ruling on whether or not you can file against thousands of John Does is hardly impartial. It may be one of the gray areas where she technically does not have to recuse herself from the case, but should have, or it may be outright misconduct. In either event, she should not have been the judge ruling on this case.
No, that does not mean the "judge recruitment pool" shrinks nor does it mean that she can't be a judge and can't rule on other federal cases. The same goes for those EFF lawyers you brought up. Nobody has a problem with them being judges, but they probably shouldn't be making any rulings on file sharing cases.
This is tangential to the point, but that's actually only partially true.
Yes, if you know the law better than your opponent you're simply a better lawyer. But as a lawyer, you also have an obligation to the court and the legal system and there are quite a lot of things you cannot do.
You don't find that to be an incredibly shallow definition?
I have never met a cop who liked writing tickets. Nobody ever joined the police force saying "I'm going to pull over soooo many speeders!" It's just a reality of the job, and a tool to look for other crime. It's not fun; it's paperwork. And worse, paperwork where the best reaction a cop can hope for is somebody who goes "yeah, I deserve this." The other possibility, absent violence, is one who hates you for doing a part of your job that you hate yourself. If tomorrow they didn't have to write another ticket ever again, I bet most would be overjoyed.
Whether or not they would write another officer a traffic ticket might be a good perspective on the (lack of) value of traffic tickets as something more than revenue generation, but it's hardly enough to judge whether they're a good cop, much less a good person. For extra mind-fuckery, try defining what a "good person" is.
If you're trying to make a larger point, you're already biasing the discussion by calling it murder. Murder is, by is definition, malicious and unjustified.
If you're talking about only whatever specific incident you're talking about, then I think the phrasing you're looking for is "Evidence from my city suggests that a few officers may have hidden evidence of a murder, fearing it could implicate another officer." Slandering the entirety of the profession is ridiculous even if your example is 100% correct. Hell, even slandering the entirety of the city's force is -- and frankly I can conclude little from your post other than that you do not like cops and may or may not have any rational reasoning for that.
Sure, but at the same time they shouldn't expect not to be judged by those decisions. Particularly when one of their criteria is for the products it sells to be "family-friendly" to such a degree that an app for browsing swimsuits or lingerie with models pictures is banned, but then they allow an app about "curing" homosexuality like it is a disease. If you're going to play moral policeman, expect to have the morality of your future decisions questioned.
My personal preference would have been for Apple to say "anything other than malware goes" and stay out of the process, but that wasn't what they chose to do. They can reap whatever consequences come of that decision, as far as I'm concerned.
Re-read his post. The comment about a lawsuit was if they approved an app that is used to infringe copyrights. I don't know if they would get sued for it (probably) or whether they would lose if they did (probably not), but it's hardly as if he claimed that selling or not selling this app about homosexuality is what is going to get them sued.
Certainly a good quote, both humorous and insightful in its own way.
The truly sad part is it doesn't take much to argue even that isn't really true -- in several different ways.
They want the case to be tried in California, where the courts have tended to be favorable to their causes. it's kind of how patent trolls always want to file in a specific (NE?) district in Texas.
In order for that to happen, the court has to be able to claim jurisdiction meaning, essentially, it has to have something to do with California or the laws of California. They're trolling donations to see if they can establish some link to CA that would let the court claim jurisdiction and have the trial there, despite the fact that Geohot lives in New Jersey.
I actually tend to agree with you that it is STILL a violation of his rights, however. I shouldn't be able to walk into any court I want and go "you have jurisdiction. Just let me dig through his financial records and I'll tell you how." There should, at the very minimum, be a reasonableness burden of why they believe the court has jurisdiction before lawyers just get to troll through whatever documentation they please.
Then again there probably is, and it's just something California is also sympathetic to.
Yeah, but that's life. It's pretty much the entire purpose of government and of law. If everybody got along and we only did things that benefited all parties involved, there wouldn't be a need for any kind of debate or any system to resolve dispute.
Nobody should want to live next to a nuclear dump. Even if it's ultimately safe, why should anybody want to do so? Nobody should want to live next to a coal power plant either, and nobody should want wind turbines in their back yards. That leaves what, hydro? There's probably a reason not to want to live near those either, but in any event as long as we continue to like having abundant electricity it's not enough.
At its heart, it's about utilitarianism: The greatest good for the greatest number. That's not always easy to define, but it should be the goal. It's not about whether a person wants to live next to a nuclear dump; it's about whether that's the best solution available to meet our needs as a society. If somebody comes up with a completely clean, safe, affordable, abundant supply of power -- WOOHOO! Until then it will always be about one person's pros versus another person's cons. By all means, put yourself in other peoples' shoes to help you get some perspective -- but don't pretend there's a perfect solution. If there was, we'd be using it.
Small correction: Most piracy is about getting things without paying the asking price.
I literally cringed every day in December while Steam had their sale going, because I knew I was going to walk away buying something. Indeed, I did almost every day -- including things I had never heard of but looked pretty good, that I had pirated previously but really enjoyed, or had wanted to play but never had before. Some of them I still haven't played, but there they are sitting in my Steam library.
For me, $9.99 is a magic price point on games where I will buy just about anything whether I've heard of it or not. $15 has me thinking about it but probably buying it if it has piqued my interest enough to be considering it. $30 is probably the tipping point where I become less likely than likely to buy it and the $59.99 most games are priced at these days almost always gets a pass or gets passed off as a gift idea come my birthday or Christmas or what-have-you, with the possible exception of sequels of games that I found a lot of value from previously.
Even then, however, it's extremely hit or miss. I loved Dragon Age Origins, but Dragon Age 2, while not a bad game, is inferior in almost every way for me. I'll play it through, but I don't see me obsessively replaying it as different classes and personalities the way I did with the first. Worth $60? No. I got all sorts of enjoyment/value from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (which I bought for $30 a year after release to play with a friend); Black Ops was inferior in almost every way. Worth $60? Hell no. I bought MLB 2K11. It's not a bad game, and I play the hell out of my baseball games so it's probably even a good value in terms of $/play hour, but as essentially a bugfix and roster update to the incredibly buggy MLB 2K10, it's not worth the $60 to me.
Those are all sequels to things I enjoyed, and none of them are really worth the price I paid for them. Obviously that makes me less likely to buy the next sequel, if there is one; but more to the point, that's not a price point where I will ever buy a game just to try it. Even as a person in the US, for whom these are ostensibly priced, it's ultimately about price. $60 a pop is just not going to happen very often. The further you bring that down the more likely it is I buy it, even going so far as to hit an impulse buy price point. When we're talking about people for whom $60 is prohibitive instead of just (typically) unreasonable, that becomes even more pronounced.
There was an article on Slashdot a few days ago about an E-book writer who dropped the price on his book from $2.99 to $0.99 and saw a 20-fold increase in sales. Everybody's is a bit different, every nation's will be radically different on average, but that old supply and demand curve does poke its head into a lot of things. Lowering prices won't eliminate piracy, but it will certainly lower it, and in many (most?) cases the increased sales will make up for the decreased per-item profits.
This apparently constitutes flamebait on Slashdot.
Whoever moderated this, you're a fucking joke. Grow up, move out of your mom's basement and get some perspective on life. You're not nearly as smart or important as you think you are, I promise.
You want flamebait? There it is.
You're right. Which is all the more reason that "I sell FLAC, buy from me!" is a questionable business model. Even among those who have the inclination to keep a FLAC collection to transcode to MP3 or next-great-audio-format, most don't have the audio equipment to take advantage of it. For those that do, the CD is still an option.
I've heard that there are some places that sell FLACs from the master rather than yanked from the CD. In those cases it might be worth doing, but again, even if that became widespread, the number of people able much less willing to take advantage of (and pay for) that is relatively small.
Keeping a collection in FLAC isn't a bad idea by any means, but it's work to be able to use those songs the way the average person does and for small benefit in most cases.
Not entirely true.
This guy obviously had a legitimate copy, since his game copy was tied to his forum account. Now it no longer works. Do you believe he's going to go "shucks, I shouldn't have done that. Here's $60, may I have another copy please?"
No. At best, he goes "fuck it and fuck you, I'm done with your game." More realistically he goes out for ten seconds of Google'ing, finds a crack and continues on his merry way. Turning a paying customer into a pirate. What he does about Dragon Age III (or whatever) is certainly up in the air. If I were him, I wouldn't give them another dollar of mine. Of course, I might stil want their game... I wonder if there's any solution to wanting to play a game without paying the creator?
Not to mention, of course, how he reacts with his friends who might be intersted but not have bought the game yet. "Yeah guys, I have a cracked copy right here, just give me a blank DVD."
That really doesn't change his point, though.
The API still should have been secured with some sort of credentials. They don't have to be rocket science and they don't have to be so complex they get in the way of the third parties, but I don't think a username/password passed with HTTP Auth or something would be overly burdensome if you're already asking partners to connect with an API. And a couple of Microsoft developers could probably pump out libraries for most major languages to do that in only a few days' times if they wanted.
More to the point, the API could--and should--still generate the code on the fly but randomly, be dropped into the database, and removed or marked inactive when used. It would still be a nearly instantaneous process of Request to API -> Generate/Store Code -> Return Code to Requesting Client, and the codes could still be passed along instantly to the end user -- there's just no algorithm to figure out. Combine with some sort of short-term lockout or slowdown for repeated attempts to use invalid codes to take care of brute force attempts and you have a fairly secure system with a minimum of effort expended.
Does it matter?
The topic interests you or it doesn't, and that's completely separate from who posted it or what their motives are. The article itself is not behind a pay wall, nor is it one of those craptastic articles spread out three sentences per page over 27 pages to increase ad views.
I'm failing to see why I should care if the guy is getting paid for his submissions even if he is -- an accusation you've done little to support in any event.
We mostly use the terms interchangably these days, but there actually is a difference between a democracy and a republic: who makes the decisions.
In a democracy, the people make the decisions. Literally. They vote on each issue that comes up like how referendums work in the US. Very few true democracies exist in the world today since this is a rather cumbersome way of doing things.
In a republic, the people make the decisions but only indirectly through some other party. These days we typically mean a democratic republic, where the representatives are elected by the people to make the decisions, but I don't think that is actually a requirement.
Utah should be teaching that the US is a republic and not a democracy -- because it's true, and because I think talking about various types of government is an important exercise. That said, this bill is still retarded. It shouldn't have to be legislated, for starters, much less should legislators actually waste time on it. And if their reasoning really is because of the word "democrat," well, then they are some truly stupid twats who should be thrown out on their faces and replaced with somebody who actually cares about the people of Utah instead of trying to cement their own party's political power.
They sold the part that makes money and kept the part that costs money. I'm not sure how long that kind of arrangement can last, at least insofar as they actually plan to continue developing Qt.
They may not be all in yet, but the pot odds are going to push them in before the end of the hand.
Joking about something is not an indication that it is not serious, nor that it is not taken seriously. To leap that a prison rape joke means anybody is condoning prison rape is inappropriate.
It's a crime if they report something false to police.
If they, oh, I don't know, post it on their Facebook wall it is, at best, a tort -- an entirely civil matter.
And, ironically, the students who called the teacher a pedophile and a rapist were suspended -- the student who was expelled called him bipolar.