I'm not a lawyer, but I don't know what kind of idiot lawyer would tell somebody to put stuff like this in a contract when he knows it's unenforceable.
A good one, insofar as "good" is defined as "aggressively represents and protects the interests of his clients."
You've already said that there's no consequences in terms of bad publicity for doing so. There appears to be no legal consequences for doing so, except perhaps getting the laughable clause thrown out. In other words, no reason NOT to include it from their perspective.
Now, reasons to include it? For starters, it gives them an excuse to do something. Most of their users won't complain to begin with. Most of those who do will be pissed but drop the issue when it's pointed out "see? you explicitly allowed this by agreeing to the EULA." The small fraction who is going to get ornery have very little recourse.
They can sue, of course. But they would have to basically do it as a public benefit. There's very little actual damages to go for and in my personal, non-legal opinion I find it unlikely one would be awarded legal fees for including language in an EULA that pretty much everybody else includes in theirs. If they win, woohoo! Maybe a couple thousand bucks tops and they get to pay for a lawyer that will need to defend the case against the army of litigation and stall tactics Sony will throw at you. And once something gets into the legal system, there's always a chance it breaks the opposite of how you expect it to.
They can report Sony to the FTC, BBA, etc. I'm sure people have, and others will continue to. There has been no effect thus far. And the BBA would probably be weary of doing anything that hurt Sony's reputation based on their own interpretation that a clause a third party agreed to but now objects to would be rendered unenforcable in a hypothetical court case that may never even come.
These clauses may ultimately have no legal weight, but they certainly do have WEIGHT. That's why they're there to begin with.
I agree. It's their site, and they should be entitled to run it as they choose. Users are entitled to use it according to their conditions or not at all. If this site has annoying advertisements, stop visiting. It will do a whole hell of a lot more harm to the site by leaving than it will by continuing to be there, participating in the community, running up the hit and page view numbers and costing him fractions of a penny by blocking his ad. And hell, maybe it will even have sent a message in the process.
The proper response for the admins should have been to make a simple post: "Thank you for the report, we'll do what we can to get this advertisement removed from rotation on our website." And then they should have done so. The users shouldn't immediately jump on "ZOMG BLOCK THE ADS AND DEPRIVE THE SITE OF ITS REVENUE!" bandwagon as if everybody in the world is happy to work for free. Instead everybody on both sides acts like nothing but self-serving wanks who depend on each other but don't feel that they do, and the Slashdot article is filled with nothing but the same.
Sometimes both parties are to blame; there is enough blame to go around. Sometimes the proper course of action is for both sides to realize they're being immature brats and work toward a mutually-beneficial solution instead of resorting to adolescent tantrum.
The admins certainly escalated the problem well beyond where it needed to go; if they were really that paranoid about the word(s?) "AdBlock" escaping they could have deleted the posts, posted their own "we're handling it" or even a more in-depth "we need the ad revenue" explanation and left it there. The users didn't help the situation either. If everybody had simply kept their cool for a few minutes and acted responsibly, everybody would have walked away happy.
Apparently that concept is nearly completely gone from the world.
This is blowing my mind. I haven't touched C in years and Java in quite a while but I don't remember their for loop structures being any different than the languages I've used a lot recently, and neither your original version nor his correction seem correct to me. It's actually making me wonder if I'm the one missing something because two separate people have gotten it wrong in similar ways.
Should the loop not be essentially this:
for(int i = 1; i <= 10; i++) { System.out.println(i); }
I mean obviously there are subtle differences; you could change the conditional to a less than 11, or move the variable declaration out of the loop or what-have-you. But if my mind is right i = 10 should result in an infinite loop (i = 10 is always true) while i == 10 should result in no output because on the first pass, 1 != 10 and the loop stops.
Is it possible that you are losing a less than sign to one of the Slashdot filters?
(I tested it and that's almost certainly what it was. So kudos to you for having it right and boo! at the other guy for mis-correcting the "mistake.")
Why? Have you ever heard the saying "all publicity is good publicity?"
I'm not going that far, but for creating a "controversial" ad likely on the cheap they have half the Internet talking about it and their product, one way or another. My exposure to the Kin is now one TV commercial and one Internet conversation on Slashdot. One cost them a little money and one was completely free.
I don't know if it was intentional. I doubt it matters. The reality is they just got hundreds of thousands of dollars of free advertising as everybody on the Internet and half the people on conventional "news" programs mention their product's name. Free.
That was one of the most terrible comparisons I have ever seen in my life.
It costs SFGate money to publish ANYTHING, in ink, and paper, and production time. Or they have to cut something else that they had already deemed as something that helps them to make money. Of course they're not obligated to publish every cartoonist in existence. The idiotic fanboy attitude it would take to even make such a comparison staggers the mind.
To Apple, the cost is approximately zero to approve the application. They've already gone through the expense of verifying the application, and bandwidth to deliver it is damn near free. Further, if it is a for-cost app, they would make far more back than it would cost them to deliver on each sale. Store space? I'll send them a quarter myself. It's opt-in, so there's no PR cost and they have no risk to be considered as endorsing his views.
Further, their App store is the only method the average consumer can use to install applications, making people deciding for themselves to install it a non-starter. They already publish other cartoonists, including from MSNBC. This is nothing but Apple imposing their own inconsistent set of values on all of their customers.
As far as obligation? Really? China doesn't consider itself obligated to not firewall off anything it doesn't agree with or who pisses them off--such as, oh, I don't know, Google for example. Are you really going to claim that means it's not censorship? Censorship didn't exist in your little world until the US codified free speech? And even then it didn't exist for the rest of the world until the UN was established and declared it a human right (despite the fact that they have no effective means to enforce it)? Honestly?
Or is it that Apple just gets a free pass from you?
This is CLEARLY not as bad as oppressing people or denying free speech and it is on a MUCH smaller scale than what governments can do, but that doesn't make it other than what it is. An award-winning cartoonist banned from the app store because they didn't agree with his cartoons. Of course that's censorship. In fact, scale aside, it's exactly the types of censorship we've seen before -- and endeavored to stop.
Apple is free to be as dictatorial as they please with their own products, but it doesn't change the fact that that's exactly what they're being.
Of course it was biased, and blatantly so. What happened? An Apache crew fired on and killed a reporter and seriously wounded some others. Those are the facts.
That the reporter happened to have a child is completely and utterly immaterial to what happened. It's nothing but cheap emotional manipulation, and the fact that you agree with the position they're obviously putting forward does not change that. When you try to paint somebody as a monster ("OMG LOOK, A SAD FATHERLESS CHILD!") you're manipulating people, and you're being biased. And it doesn't matter whether he deserves it or not.
If one wants to be biased, okay. There's nothing inherently wrong with it, and in fact the vast majority of situations in the world are affected by bias. What one DOESN'T get to do is be biased and claim otherwise, at least not while maintaining a shred of intellectual honesty. Without that, I have no idea why anybody would care what that person is saying.
How many times do you hear gamers complain that a game is a crappy port because it is not properly written for the platform it is on, but instead tries squeeze in the functionality of some other platform?
From time to time, because that is a crappy port. But you're making a leap if you assume the next sentence from their mouth is "I'm never buying another X-Box (game) again!" (Obviously insert your platform of choice here.)
In other words, crappy ports are crappy -- for the game. Its effect on the platform is pretty much nonexistent. Further, telling people what languages they can program in or that their code must compile into has no effect on whether or not they produce a crappy port, only what tools they used to create it. In fact, anything that limits the intermediary frameworks is MORE likely to make crappy ports, since everybody needs to re-invent the wheel each time and one has only hope that they do so the same way.
Apple is a control freak of a company. Occasionally, one can make an argument that they're doing so for the consumers' best interest (at least their perception of the consumers' best interest). This is not one of them. Read the post that Jobs endorsed. It's not critical of Apple, but it comes right out and flat-out says Apple is doing it because they want to be the ones in control and edge nearer to, in the posts' words, "a license to print money." There's no value judgment about who is actually better for any particular party, just that Apple wants to be the sole gatekeeper to development on their own hardware. The fact that that comes with gobs of money should be proof enough of the motive.
It makes it more common and the more common something is, the more people find it acceptable.
You're right. I was against the whole child porn thing before, but now that I've seen a drawing of a fictional naked child I think ALL children should be used for porn. It just seems right.
These are certainly good points, and worth more study.
I think what's worth pointing out is that there are two types of students (roughly divided): The ones who will find their own value in their learning and won't need any sort of scheme to get them to do so, and those that don't and need some type of motivation. The ideal motivation is obviously parental involvement, but if that were getting the job done we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
Ignore the first group for a moment. Is it a big deal that children you pay to read stop reading at 18? Most do anyway. If it had any positive effect for those 18 years of their life, and I fully believe that it would, then I see it as a net positive. I know this is a really short and narrow evaluation, but for this segment I consider the benefits worth the risks.
But now the more complicated question. If you paid those first students to do things--and let's face it, if a government program like this ever cropped up it would be an across-the-board thing to "be fair"--do you squelch their own learning motivations? In other words, will these students also stop reading at 18? Will they also avoid self-learning? Can you actually destroy somebody's self-motivation by providing them a more powerful motivation and then removing it?
I don't know the answer. It's probably as much philosophical as psychological. I'm just saying let's not assume that it's a universal reaction. If we can reach the students we need to reach, even if they go back to ignoring what we're paying them to do later in life, without harming the other students who wouldn't have reverted to that state, then WOOHOO. It's definitely something to be considered. If not... well, let's back away slowly. Clearly something worth studying either way though.
An instant, dismissive attempt to censor what is obviously a valid, honest opinion only lends credibility to that opinion
Uhm, no, it doesn't. You can have a heartfelt opinion that raping children is a nice, cheap form of entertainment or that Hitler destroying the Jews was the greatest accomplishment of mankind. Nobody is going to take you more seriously if you're moderated down for it or outright censored.
As far as "valid?" Valid is the opinion.
Anyone with some understanding who might have entertained the idea of both views being merely different but equal now knows that yours is inferior.
Interesting. Personally I think that somebody who judges people based on an opinion they're supposing based on a moderation choice rather than one that person has even expressed is a self-important moron. And judging by your other posts in this thread, that's exactly what you are. You are consistently smug, insulting, dismissive and superior, with an obvious belief that anybody who doesn't agree with you not only has a lesser opinion, but is a lesser person; a lesser intellect.
In fact, this entire post rings hollow. Perhaps you should go back and apologize to some of the people you were rude and insulting to first and then talk about valid, honest opinions. Or does this sort of thing only work one way for you?
I wouldn't be surprised at all.
As I've heard it said, you might chronologically be an adult but that doesn't mean you've grown up.
You don't even know these people. You don't even know who these people are, much less why they may have moderated it the way they did. What if it is just a valid, honest opinion that he was trying to start a flamewar? Never even crossed your mind, did it? You just decided the person who was moderated down was right and these mods most be puerile, childish, emotionally overreactive, dismissive, unthoughtful, immature so-called adults. All things you've said in the course of, what, 200 words or so? About people you know nothing whatsoever about, including their own views on the actual topic at hand which you nonetheless saw fit to assume and lambast in their absence?
Incidentally, I have plenty of karma. Do your worst. Waste your points on me. I'd be happy with that, since you might have otherwised use them to censor someone who doesn't have plenty of karma.
Oh, please, get over yourself. You're not that important. Drop the fucking "I ARE TEH MARTYR!!" crap. If people want to mod you into oblivion, it's because you deserve it. And hey, guess what? They have FOURTEEN MORE MOD POINTS to moderate whoever they please whichever way they please for whatever reason they please. You know this. You're a self-important ass, but not stupid; so I see no conclusion but that you're trying to puff yourself up.
And before you go ahead and guess my own opinion incorrectly, I actually agree with you. I think his post is absolutely worthless, wishful thinking not worthy of even acknowledging -- but it's not flamebait. Surprising, huh?
Out of curiosity, does this mean you would be fine with a throttling approach?
Since you paid for "up to 1mbps," they could give you 1mbps for the first 250MB/mo (or whatever, obviously these are low numbers) and then throttle you down to say 150kbits/s. As long as they don't ask for more money or send you nastygrams, it seems they've upheld their part of the bargain according to you.
Personally I do not like that approach either, though it is better than "ROAR HUNT THEM DOWN AND GET MORE MONEY!" posturing at least.
1) You agree that there's the possibility that sex ed "promotes the sexualization... of our children". In other words, kids who are taught sex ed are more alive to the thought of having sex while in H.S.
The parent indeed said he could barely understand that, but I do not agree. I have no reason to believe it is true.
Teenagers are a raging cauldron of hormones. To think that they're sitting around going "eh, nah, I won't have sex until I'm older" seems pretty naive to me to begin with (as evidenced by the problems we have with teenage sexual activity to begin with). To take that further and assume that after they say that, that they go "oh wait, I CAN have sex!" because of a sex ed class is nothing more than pushing an agenda. Believe whatever you want for whatever reasons you choose, but that doesn't mean it is reasonable to do so.
2) Kids who are taught how to use a condom think that they know how to use one -- and that they'll not only use one, but properly, in a sexual situation.
I was reading a CNN article the other day (I forget the actual subject so I can't look it up) where it talked about several different studies that concluded one important thing: Sexual education classes do not lead to increased rates of teenage sex, it leads to increased rates of safe teenage sex. Likewise, that same article mentioned another study that religious teenagers who took so-called abstinence pledges (some so far as to sign a "contract") did not have less sex either. Once again, they simply had less safe sex.
And these are exactly the types of teens you're most likely to reach: Ones who have religious objections to pre-marital sex, ones who have already decided for some reason that it is inappropriate and gone so far as to pledge they will not do it. And yet they do, at the same rate as the horny teenagers who would laugh in your face if you suggested such a thing. Sure, some of them probably did it because they were pressured to, but the statistics hold. Kids have sex if they can, news at 11.
As far as not really knowing how to use a condom, well, okay. But for one thing, it doesn't exactly take a rocket scientist to figure it out. And second, trying and doing it wrong (how?!) is still going to be better than not trying at all. It's still a net positive.
3) It's not unreasonable to think that, given a course in sex ed, kids will even more unreasonably conclude that "everyone's doing it, and so should i".
Yes, it is unreasonable. You said so in your second sentence when you suggested they will "unreasonably" conclude that they need to have sex despite not wanting to.
Kids have sex because their bodies tell them to; because when they get close their body reacts with some of the most overwhelmingly positive reinforcement that exists in the world. It floods the bloodstream with hormones that make you feel good, it floods the bloodstream with hormones that tell you that this is exactly what you should be doing -- and as much as you possibly can. And when they finally go all the way, hell, that feels pretty damn good too, and you're flooded with even more hormones.
They're having sex because they want to. Nobody is talking kids into it (except maybe their partner, and it will almost always be the female resisting--yet again because her body tells her to be more selective). Nobody has to.
Not reasonable?
#1 is reasonable because it's one of those silly situations where both parties involved in a sexual encounter can want it and yet it can still be considered legally a sexual assault. This is almost certainly what he meant.
#2 is possible but less reasonable. It still relies on a teacher whose body isn't coursing with the same level of hormones as the teen, who throw away their discretion, their career and potentially their freedom to act on it. It happens, but
I have an oldschool (non-slim) PS3 and I didn't have any problem with the update. That said, I also hadn't used the "Install Other OS" feature. Maybe the bug involves people who have, or maybe it's not as simple as people like to think.
Which makes it an interesting historical analysis from inside horrible events but not necessarily a good book, even when one evaluates it from a literature perspective and not purely on entertainment value (which is what I suspect most do when they talk about a "good book"). Reading it in history class might make sense, if a teacher has allotted that much time to covering the war; reading it in English class, much less so.
I suppose technically calling it a "classic" is not wrong. It certainly is one of a kind, and I doubt WW2 is going to be fading from our memories any time soon so it will always maintain a sort of impact as being a first-hand account of the terrible events. That said, it's not a classic in typical terms. There is no great literary device, no pioneering approach. The writing is good, but not so good as to be singled out as among the best ever. Even the subject matter is rather mundane, being as it is a diary. Its sole value is in the fact that it was written from inside terrible circumstances.
Great historical document? Yes. Worthy of historical review? Yes. Worthy of great acclaim as literature? Now you've lost me. In that sense I stand with the grandparent post.
You're an idiot. Mostly because you like to sling terms like "you're an idiot" around for no reason.
He's angry that they've stopped supporting his platform and uninstalled the program. If you think this is something to be insulted over, perhaps you need to grow up.
Oh, and here's some italics to show I'm really fucking serious too.
So rather than simply let people easily use their machine for whatever they wished and let the majority who don't care have the product exactly as it was designed, you're supposing a world where Apple tricks everybody into thinking they want everything locked down tight (and pissing people who care about that off) and then secrets documents to hackers, encouraging them to actually break the law in many jurisdictions to provide that option for their customers for them?
In Facebook's TOS their users agree to give Facebook rights to distribute the data they provide to them.
If Facebook needs to write into their TOS an implied permission to distribute users' data, it says to me that the owners of such data are the users themselves. That being the case, Facebook wouldn't have any standing to make demands about what is done with that data by third parties; that would be the individual users' problem insofar as any of the data might be subject to copyright at all. (Most of it I assume is not, since it is purely factual.)
Music, for various reasons, is just too convenient to pirate. Most people can't tell the difference between a decent-quality MP3 and CD quality. It's already in a format you're most likely going to want it in (unlike physical CDs), they're small enough that even if the seeders aren't very fast you're not waiting very long for your file. The only way they can compete is price. I bought far more music from allofmp3 back in the day than I bought from iTunes. 99 cents is getting there, but I still find it too pricey and I really loved the ability to get the song in the quality of my choice. These are things that a company could easily offer, by the way. Other than price it probably wouldn't bring too many people in, but it's not like it takes a ton of money or time up front to get working.
Movies, on the other hand, are a pain to pirate. They're large, requiring good seeds. You typically find an H264.avi file which, while nice quality, is likely not as good as DVD quality. And I'd be willing to bet that a large number of people simply end up burning these to disc anyway, which requires the purchase of a disc, burn time, and potentially time to encode it into a DVD format before the burn. A good, fast, and significantly cheaper download service would help a lot. $15 for a downloaded copy is still too much; the price point needs to be closer to $10 to get significantly higher uptake.
Games are similar. They're large files, and extremely high virus risks, and they almost certainly just get burned up to a disc anyway. All of this is time and effort on top of the actual pirating. Buying the games online offers you no discount at all, despite the inconvenience and time consumption involved in the process compared to buying a physical copy. And again, price.
Some things for all media to take note of:
1. Yes, it's about price. Sorry. I'm not saying that every single person would turn form pirate to customer with a price drop, but you WILL significantly see demand increase with price drops. Some of these drops need to be big, some need to be smaller. Games in particular, but even movies to a lesser extent, are too much a decision to buy. Get the prices into the impulse category and watch your sales explode.
2. Stop with DRM of any kind. These is no reason that it should be less convenient to own a legitimate copy of something than a pirated one. I don't want to rely on your DRM servers being up. I don't want to be forced to sit through FBI warnings or previews that I've seen 50 times before and have no interest in watching. I don't care if your previews automatically update themselves through the Internet. It's not the point.
3. You need to be convenient. That means good selection, good choice, fast download speeds. That means cheaper prices when I'm getting less (digital vs. physical copies). Maybe even throw in a physical copy with a digital purchase as an option; charge $5 more and you'll probably even make money even on top of production and shipping for people who choose the option. Take Disney's approach: If I buy a Blu-Ray movie, toss in a DVD disc and a digital copy--sans DRM--in the case. My parents STILl haven't seen The Dark Knight because I bought it in Blu-Ray and they don't want to sit in my room watching a movie for three and a half hours. I'm not trying to screw you (I already made the purchase!) Stop being paranoid.
4. For all the talk of piracy, you're still turning strong profits. Remember that. You should care about piracy, but you should also realize there is room to drop prices and add features without impacting your product. And in areas where you do have to, deal with it. The days of becoming an instant millionaire by releasing a popular CD are probably over. You aren't getting them back, so just learn to live with that and act according to the new realities.
You missed one: Sue. And frankly I think they would win.
If they want to STOP SUPPORTING the feature they promoted in order to take your money, alright. But they're deliberately issuing a patch to remove a feature many of their customers paid specifically for, with no compensation of any sort to those customers. Regardless of the inevitable "we can do anything we want" EULA I'm sure Sony has written up, I think they have a strong case.
For such a self-righteous, bitchy post you couldn't possibly have missed the joke more if you tried.
Somebody asked how a system that grabs you by the balls would work for women, and he basically said women shouldn't be driving because it takes them out of the kitchen. And you think he's making some women's lib post? Seriously?
Do us all a favor and stow the bitchiness until you can properly parse other peoples' posts.
I'm not sure if this is what he was going for, frankly but I believe he's right.
Rapidshare is not in the business of selling copyrighted materials (or at least they weren't up until today). They are in the business of hosting file uploads which, admittedly, are used a lot (primarily?) to share copyrighted materials without license.
Rapidshare's customers are the people who view their ad impressions, or who literally pay Rapidshare to avoid the queuing system. Many of these customers are also pirates based on what they're downloading. So the way I see it, one of two things are happening:
1) Rapidshare is serious about this and is going to make it a serious push, blocking as much content as they possible can. They'll make a few dollars from people this way, probably mostly from people who go "CRAP, I GOT CAUGHT TRYING TO PIRATE SOMETHING! Maybe if I buy it..." They'll also likely piss off the majority of their current customer base, losing a lot of their subscribers and even more of their visitors and ad impressions.
2) They're paying lip-service to the idea to keep people off their backs. They'll still make a few extra dollars from the scheme, but less than in plan #1. But since they'll be doing so little as to be doing nothing, they'll get to retain most of their current customers and visitors.
I don't think #1 is viable. I just don't believe they're going to convert enough would-be pirates into paying customers to justify the inevitable evisceration of their current income stream. So I think it's more likely either that it's #2 or that they're already a dying company trying anything to stay afloat.
Anyway, a long explanation to say: Pirates are RAPIDSHARE'S customers already.
Slashdot Mirror
A good one, insofar as "good" is defined as "aggressively represents and protects the interests of his clients."
You've already said that there's no consequences in terms of bad publicity for doing so. There appears to be no legal consequences for doing so, except perhaps getting the laughable clause thrown out. In other words, no reason NOT to include it from their perspective.
Now, reasons to include it? For starters, it gives them an excuse to do something. Most of their users won't complain to begin with. Most of those who do will be pissed but drop the issue when it's pointed out "see? you explicitly allowed this by agreeing to the EULA." The small fraction who is going to get ornery have very little recourse.
They can sue, of course. But they would have to basically do it as a public benefit. There's very little actual damages to go for and in my personal, non-legal opinion I find it unlikely one would be awarded legal fees for including language in an EULA that pretty much everybody else includes in theirs. If they win, woohoo! Maybe a couple thousand bucks tops and they get to pay for a lawyer that will need to defend the case against the army of litigation and stall tactics Sony will throw at you. And once something gets into the legal system, there's always a chance it breaks the opposite of how you expect it to.
They can report Sony to the FTC, BBA, etc. I'm sure people have, and others will continue to. There has been no effect thus far. And the BBA would probably be weary of doing anything that hurt Sony's reputation based on their own interpretation that a clause a third party agreed to but now objects to would be rendered unenforcable in a hypothetical court case that may never even come.
These clauses may ultimately have no legal weight, but they certainly do have WEIGHT. That's why they're there to begin with.
I agree. It's their site, and they should be entitled to run it as they choose. Users are entitled to use it according to their conditions or not at all. If this site has annoying advertisements, stop visiting. It will do a whole hell of a lot more harm to the site by leaving than it will by continuing to be there, participating in the community, running up the hit and page view numbers and costing him fractions of a penny by blocking his ad. And hell, maybe it will even have sent a message in the process.
The proper response for the admins should have been to make a simple post: "Thank you for the report, we'll do what we can to get this advertisement removed from rotation on our website." And then they should have done so. The users shouldn't immediately jump on "ZOMG BLOCK THE ADS AND DEPRIVE THE SITE OF ITS REVENUE!" bandwagon as if everybody in the world is happy to work for free. Instead everybody on both sides acts like nothing but self-serving wanks who depend on each other but don't feel that they do, and the Slashdot article is filled with nothing but the same.
Sometimes both parties are to blame; there is enough blame to go around. Sometimes the proper course of action is for both sides to realize they're being immature brats and work toward a mutually-beneficial solution instead of resorting to adolescent tantrum.
The admins certainly escalated the problem well beyond where it needed to go; if they were really that paranoid about the word(s?) "AdBlock" escaping they could have deleted the posts, posted their own "we're handling it" or even a more in-depth "we need the ad revenue" explanation and left it there. The users didn't help the situation either. If everybody had simply kept their cool for a few minutes and acted responsibly, everybody would have walked away happy.
Apparently that concept is nearly completely gone from the world.
I believe they can toss as many as they can justify. They only get a few that they can throw out without offering an explanation.
You didn't even get the joke, did you? Just decided to use it as a launching off point for a stupid Slashdot meme?
This is blowing my mind. I haven't touched C in years and Java in quite a while but I don't remember their for loop structures being any different than the languages I've used a lot recently, and neither your original version nor his correction seem correct to me. It's actually making me wonder if I'm the one missing something because two separate people have gotten it wrong in similar ways.
Should the loop not be essentially this:
I mean obviously there are subtle differences; you could change the conditional to a less than 11, or move the variable declaration out of the loop or what-have-you. But if my mind is right i = 10 should result in an infinite loop (i = 10 is always true) while i == 10 should result in no output because on the first pass, 1 != 10 and the loop stops.
Is it possible that you are losing a less than sign to one of the Slashdot filters?
(I tested it and that's almost certainly what it was. So kudos to you for having it right and boo! at the other guy for mis-correcting the "mistake.")
Why? Have you ever heard the saying "all publicity is good publicity?"
I'm not going that far, but for creating a "controversial" ad likely on the cheap they have half the Internet talking about it and their product, one way or another. My exposure to the Kin is now one TV commercial and one Internet conversation on Slashdot. One cost them a little money and one was completely free.
I don't know if it was intentional. I doubt it matters. The reality is they just got hundreds of thousands of dollars of free advertising as everybody on the Internet and half the people on conventional "news" programs mention their product's name. Free.
Total fail? No.
That was one of the most terrible comparisons I have ever seen in my life.
It costs SFGate money to publish ANYTHING, in ink, and paper, and production time. Or they have to cut something else that they had already deemed as something that helps them to make money. Of course they're not obligated to publish every cartoonist in existence. The idiotic fanboy attitude it would take to even make such a comparison staggers the mind.
To Apple, the cost is approximately zero to approve the application. They've already gone through the expense of verifying the application, and bandwidth to deliver it is damn near free. Further, if it is a for-cost app, they would make far more back than it would cost them to deliver on each sale. Store space? I'll send them a quarter myself. It's opt-in, so there's no PR cost and they have no risk to be considered as endorsing his views.
Further, their App store is the only method the average consumer can use to install applications, making people deciding for themselves to install it a non-starter. They already publish other cartoonists, including from MSNBC. This is nothing but Apple imposing their own inconsistent set of values on all of their customers.
As far as obligation? Really? China doesn't consider itself obligated to not firewall off anything it doesn't agree with or who pisses them off--such as, oh, I don't know, Google for example. Are you really going to claim that means it's not censorship? Censorship didn't exist in your little world until the US codified free speech? And even then it didn't exist for the rest of the world until the UN was established and declared it a human right (despite the fact that they have no effective means to enforce it)? Honestly?
Or is it that Apple just gets a free pass from you?
This is CLEARLY not as bad as oppressing people or denying free speech and it is on a MUCH smaller scale than what governments can do, but that doesn't make it other than what it is. An award-winning cartoonist banned from the app store because they didn't agree with his cartoons. Of course that's censorship. In fact, scale aside, it's exactly the types of censorship we've seen before -- and endeavored to stop.
Apple is free to be as dictatorial as they please with their own products, but it doesn't change the fact that that's exactly what they're being.
Of course it was biased, and blatantly so. What happened? An Apache crew fired on and killed a reporter and seriously wounded some others. Those are the facts.
That the reporter happened to have a child is completely and utterly immaterial to what happened. It's nothing but cheap emotional manipulation, and the fact that you agree with the position they're obviously putting forward does not change that. When you try to paint somebody as a monster ("OMG LOOK, A SAD FATHERLESS CHILD!") you're manipulating people, and you're being biased. And it doesn't matter whether he deserves it or not.
If one wants to be biased, okay. There's nothing inherently wrong with it, and in fact the vast majority of situations in the world are affected by bias. What one DOESN'T get to do is be biased and claim otherwise, at least not while maintaining a shred of intellectual honesty. Without that, I have no idea why anybody would care what that person is saying.
From time to time, because that is a crappy port. But you're making a leap if you assume the next sentence from their mouth is "I'm never buying another X-Box (game) again!" (Obviously insert your platform of choice here.)
In other words, crappy ports are crappy -- for the game. Its effect on the platform is pretty much nonexistent. Further, telling people what languages they can program in or that their code must compile into has no effect on whether or not they produce a crappy port, only what tools they used to create it. In fact, anything that limits the intermediary frameworks is MORE likely to make crappy ports, since everybody needs to re-invent the wheel each time and one has only hope that they do so the same way.
Apple is a control freak of a company. Occasionally, one can make an argument that they're doing so for the consumers' best interest (at least their perception of the consumers' best interest). This is not one of them. Read the post that Jobs endorsed. It's not critical of Apple, but it comes right out and flat-out says Apple is doing it because they want to be the ones in control and edge nearer to, in the posts' words, "a license to print money." There's no value judgment about who is actually better for any particular party, just that Apple wants to be the sole gatekeeper to development on their own hardware. The fact that that comes with gobs of money should be proof enough of the motive.
You're right. I was against the whole child porn thing before, but now that I've seen a drawing of a fictional naked child I think ALL children should be used for porn. It just seems right.
These are certainly good points, and worth more study.
I think what's worth pointing out is that there are two types of students (roughly divided): The ones who will find their own value in their learning and won't need any sort of scheme to get them to do so, and those that don't and need some type of motivation. The ideal motivation is obviously parental involvement, but if that were getting the job done we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
Ignore the first group for a moment. Is it a big deal that children you pay to read stop reading at 18? Most do anyway. If it had any positive effect for those 18 years of their life, and I fully believe that it would, then I see it as a net positive. I know this is a really short and narrow evaluation, but for this segment I consider the benefits worth the risks.
But now the more complicated question. If you paid those first students to do things--and let's face it, if a government program like this ever cropped up it would be an across-the-board thing to "be fair"--do you squelch their own learning motivations? In other words, will these students also stop reading at 18? Will they also avoid self-learning? Can you actually destroy somebody's self-motivation by providing them a more powerful motivation and then removing it?
I don't know the answer. It's probably as much philosophical as psychological. I'm just saying let's not assume that it's a universal reaction. If we can reach the students we need to reach, even if they go back to ignoring what we're paying them to do later in life, without harming the other students who wouldn't have reverted to that state, then WOOHOO. It's definitely something to be considered. If not... well, let's back away slowly. Clearly something worth studying either way though.
Uhm, no, it doesn't. You can have a heartfelt opinion that raping children is a nice, cheap form of entertainment or that Hitler destroying the Jews was the greatest accomplishment of mankind. Nobody is going to take you more seriously if you're moderated down for it or outright censored.
As far as "valid?" Valid is the opinion.
Interesting. Personally I think that somebody who judges people based on an opinion they're supposing based on a moderation choice rather than one that person has even expressed is a self-important moron. And judging by your other posts in this thread, that's exactly what you are. You are consistently smug, insulting, dismissive and superior, with an obvious belief that anybody who doesn't agree with you not only has a lesser opinion, but is a lesser person; a lesser intellect.
In fact, this entire post rings hollow. Perhaps you should go back and apologize to some of the people you were rude and insulting to first and then talk about valid, honest opinions. Or does this sort of thing only work one way for you?
I wouldn't be surprised at all.
You don't even know these people. You don't even know who these people are, much less why they may have moderated it the way they did. What if it is just a valid, honest opinion that he was trying to start a flamewar? Never even crossed your mind, did it? You just decided the person who was moderated down was right and these mods most be puerile, childish, emotionally overreactive, dismissive, unthoughtful, immature so-called adults. All things you've said in the course of, what, 200 words or so? About people you know nothing whatsoever about, including their own views on the actual topic at hand which you nonetheless saw fit to assume and lambast in their absence?
Oh, please, get over yourself. You're not that important. Drop the fucking "I ARE TEH MARTYR!!" crap. If people want to mod you into oblivion, it's because you deserve it. And hey, guess what? They have FOURTEEN MORE MOD POINTS to moderate whoever they please whichever way they please for whatever reason they please. You know this. You're a self-important ass, but not stupid; so I see no conclusion but that you're trying to puff yourself up.
And before you go ahead and guess my own opinion incorrectly, I actually agree with you. I think his post is absolutely worthless, wishful thinking not worthy of even acknowledging -- but it's not flamebait. Surprising, huh?
Out of curiosity, does this mean you would be fine with a throttling approach?
Since you paid for "up to 1mbps," they could give you 1mbps for the first 250MB/mo (or whatever, obviously these are low numbers) and then throttle you down to say 150kbits/s. As long as they don't ask for more money or send you nastygrams, it seems they've upheld their part of the bargain according to you.
Personally I do not like that approach either, though it is better than "ROAR HUNT THEM DOWN AND GET MORE MONEY!" posturing at least.
The parent indeed said he could barely understand that, but I do not agree. I have no reason to believe it is true.
Teenagers are a raging cauldron of hormones. To think that they're sitting around going "eh, nah, I won't have sex until I'm older" seems pretty naive to me to begin with (as evidenced by the problems we have with teenage sexual activity to begin with). To take that further and assume that after they say that, that they go "oh wait, I CAN have sex!" because of a sex ed class is nothing more than pushing an agenda. Believe whatever you want for whatever reasons you choose, but that doesn't mean it is reasonable to do so.
I was reading a CNN article the other day (I forget the actual subject so I can't look it up) where it talked about several different studies that concluded one important thing: Sexual education classes do not lead to increased rates of teenage sex, it leads to increased rates of safe teenage sex. Likewise, that same article mentioned another study that religious teenagers who took so-called abstinence pledges (some so far as to sign a "contract") did not have less sex either. Once again, they simply had less safe sex. And these are exactly the types of teens you're most likely to reach: Ones who have religious objections to pre-marital sex, ones who have already decided for some reason that it is inappropriate and gone so far as to pledge they will not do it. And yet they do, at the same rate as the horny teenagers who would laugh in your face if you suggested such a thing. Sure, some of them probably did it because they were pressured to, but the statistics hold. Kids have sex if they can, news at 11.
As far as not really knowing how to use a condom, well, okay. But for one thing, it doesn't exactly take a rocket scientist to figure it out. And second, trying and doing it wrong (how?!) is still going to be better than not trying at all. It's still a net positive.
Yes, it is unreasonable. You said so in your second sentence when you suggested they will "unreasonably" conclude that they need to have sex despite not wanting to.
Kids have sex because their bodies tell them to; because when they get close their body reacts with some of the most overwhelmingly positive reinforcement that exists in the world. It floods the bloodstream with hormones that make you feel good, it floods the bloodstream with hormones that tell you that this is exactly what you should be doing -- and as much as you possibly can. And when they finally go all the way, hell, that feels pretty damn good too, and you're flooded with even more hormones.
They're having sex because they want to. Nobody is talking kids into it (except maybe their partner, and it will almost always be the female resisting--yet again because her body tells her to be more selective). Nobody has to.
#1 is reasonable because it's one of those silly situations where both parties involved in a sexual encounter can want it and yet it can still be considered legally a sexual assault. This is almost certainly what he meant.
#2 is possible but less reasonable. It still relies on a teacher whose body isn't coursing with the same level of hormones as the teen, who throw away their discretion, their career and potentially their freedom to act on it. It happens, but
I have an oldschool (non-slim) PS3 and I didn't have any problem with the update. That said, I also hadn't used the "Install Other OS" feature. Maybe the bug involves people who have, or maybe it's not as simple as people like to think.
Which makes it an interesting historical analysis from inside horrible events but not necessarily a good book, even when one evaluates it from a literature perspective and not purely on entertainment value (which is what I suspect most do when they talk about a "good book"). Reading it in history class might make sense, if a teacher has allotted that much time to covering the war; reading it in English class, much less so.
I suppose technically calling it a "classic" is not wrong. It certainly is one of a kind, and I doubt WW2 is going to be fading from our memories any time soon so it will always maintain a sort of impact as being a first-hand account of the terrible events. That said, it's not a classic in typical terms. There is no great literary device, no pioneering approach. The writing is good, but not so good as to be singled out as among the best ever. Even the subject matter is rather mundane, being as it is a diary. Its sole value is in the fact that it was written from inside terrible circumstances.
Great historical document? Yes. Worthy of historical review? Yes. Worthy of great acclaim as literature? Now you've lost me. In that sense I stand with the grandparent post.
You're an idiot. Mostly because you like to sling terms like "you're an idiot" around for no reason.
He's angry that they've stopped supporting his platform and uninstalled the program. If you think this is something to be insulted over, perhaps you need to grow up.
Oh, and here's some italics to show I'm really fucking serious too.
So rather than simply let people easily use their machine for whatever they wished and let the majority who don't care have the product exactly as it was designed, you're supposing a world where Apple tricks everybody into thinking they want everything locked down tight (and pissing people who care about that off) and then secrets documents to hackers, encouraging them to actually break the law in many jurisdictions to provide that option for their customers for them?
Can you say "Apple fanboy?"
I knew you could.
If you're going to copy and paste somebody's post, you could at least remove Slashdot's URL display.
I really hope it was yours to begin with.
So what? Often times doing the right thing for the wrong reasons is still better than not doing it at all.
If Facebook needs to write into their TOS an implied permission to distribute users' data, it says to me that the owners of such data are the users themselves. That being the case, Facebook wouldn't have any standing to make demands about what is done with that data by third parties; that would be the individual users' problem insofar as any of the data might be subject to copyright at all. (Most of it I assume is not, since it is purely factual.)
It depends on what we're talking about.
Music, for various reasons, is just too convenient to pirate. Most people can't tell the difference between a decent-quality MP3 and CD quality. It's already in a format you're most likely going to want it in (unlike physical CDs), they're small enough that even if the seeders aren't very fast you're not waiting very long for your file. The only way they can compete is price. I bought far more music from allofmp3 back in the day than I bought from iTunes. 99 cents is getting there, but I still find it too pricey and I really loved the ability to get the song in the quality of my choice. These are things that a company could easily offer, by the way. Other than price it probably wouldn't bring too many people in, but it's not like it takes a ton of money or time up front to get working.
Movies, on the other hand, are a pain to pirate. They're large, requiring good seeds. You typically find an H264 .avi file which, while nice quality, is likely not as good as DVD quality. And I'd be willing to bet that a large number of people simply end up burning these to disc anyway, which requires the purchase of a disc, burn time, and potentially time to encode it into a DVD format before the burn. A good, fast, and significantly cheaper download service would help a lot. $15 for a downloaded copy is still too much; the price point needs to be closer to $10 to get significantly higher uptake.
Games are similar. They're large files, and extremely high virus risks, and they almost certainly just get burned up to a disc anyway. All of this is time and effort on top of the actual pirating. Buying the games online offers you no discount at all, despite the inconvenience and time consumption involved in the process compared to buying a physical copy. And again, price.
Some things for all media to take note of:
1. Yes, it's about price. Sorry. I'm not saying that every single person would turn form pirate to customer with a price drop, but you WILL significantly see demand increase with price drops. Some of these drops need to be big, some need to be smaller. Games in particular, but even movies to a lesser extent, are too much a decision to buy. Get the prices into the impulse category and watch your sales explode.
2. Stop with DRM of any kind. These is no reason that it should be less convenient to own a legitimate copy of something than a pirated one. I don't want to rely on your DRM servers being up. I don't want to be forced to sit through FBI warnings or previews that I've seen 50 times before and have no interest in watching. I don't care if your previews automatically update themselves through the Internet. It's not the point.
3. You need to be convenient. That means good selection, good choice, fast download speeds. That means cheaper prices when I'm getting less (digital vs. physical copies). Maybe even throw in a physical copy with a digital purchase as an option; charge $5 more and you'll probably even make money even on top of production and shipping for people who choose the option. Take Disney's approach: If I buy a Blu-Ray movie, toss in a DVD disc and a digital copy--sans DRM--in the case. My parents STILl haven't seen The Dark Knight because I bought it in Blu-Ray and they don't want to sit in my room watching a movie for three and a half hours. I'm not trying to screw you (I already made the purchase!) Stop being paranoid.
4. For all the talk of piracy, you're still turning strong profits. Remember that. You should care about piracy, but you should also realize there is room to drop prices and add features without impacting your product. And in areas where you do have to, deal with it. The days of becoming an instant millionaire by releasing a popular CD are probably over. You aren't getting them back, so just learn to live with that and act according to the new realities.
5.
You missed one: Sue. And frankly I think they would win.
If they want to STOP SUPPORTING the feature they promoted in order to take your money, alright. But they're deliberately issuing a patch to remove a feature many of their customers paid specifically for, with no compensation of any sort to those customers. Regardless of the inevitable "we can do anything we want" EULA I'm sure Sony has written up, I think they have a strong case.
For such a self-righteous, bitchy post you couldn't possibly have missed the joke more if you tried.
Somebody asked how a system that grabs you by the balls would work for women, and he basically said women shouldn't be driving because it takes them out of the kitchen. And you think he's making some women's lib post? Seriously?
Do us all a favor and stow the bitchiness until you can properly parse other peoples' posts.
I'm not sure if this is what he was going for, frankly but I believe he's right.
Rapidshare is not in the business of selling copyrighted materials (or at least they weren't up until today). They are in the business of hosting file uploads which, admittedly, are used a lot (primarily?) to share copyrighted materials without license.
Rapidshare's customers are the people who view their ad impressions, or who literally pay Rapidshare to avoid the queuing system. Many of these customers are also pirates based on what they're downloading. So the way I see it, one of two things are happening:
1) Rapidshare is serious about this and is going to make it a serious push, blocking as much content as they possible can. They'll make a few dollars from people this way, probably mostly from people who go "CRAP, I GOT CAUGHT TRYING TO PIRATE SOMETHING! Maybe if I buy it..." They'll also likely piss off the majority of their current customer base, losing a lot of their subscribers and even more of their visitors and ad impressions.
2) They're paying lip-service to the idea to keep people off their backs. They'll still make a few extra dollars from the scheme, but less than in plan #1. But since they'll be doing so little as to be doing nothing, they'll get to retain most of their current customers and visitors.
I don't think #1 is viable. I just don't believe they're going to convert enough would-be pirates into paying customers to justify the inevitable evisceration of their current income stream. So I think it's more likely either that it's #2 or that they're already a dying company trying anything to stay afloat.
Anyway, a long explanation to say: Pirates are RAPIDSHARE'S customers already.