I didn't read the study either, so maybe I'm going to be an idiot here, but...
What makes you think they're claiming that the Internet contributes to depression? Speaking as somebody who has been depressed (and frankly probably still is more than I admit sometimes), one of the main symptoms of depression is withdrawal from ordinary life. Withdrawal in particular from social contact, which at least in my case actually tends to make the depression worse.
At the same time, humans are social creatures. We all want to be left alone sometimes, but anybody who claims they legitimately want no social contact is probably just trying to cover for the fact that they don't have any. For me, and probably others, it was always easier to communicate on the Internet, and far more easy to be open with people on the Internet. That's probably doubly true of people who are depressed and who, accurately or not, see all sorts of problems with themselves and their lives and become self-conscious and self-obsessed about them.
In other words, I doubt they're claiming the Internet causes you to be depressed. Frankly I doubt they're even claiming spending lots of time on the Internet makes it worse. I suspect they're claiming a correlation: Depressed people spend more time online. To me, that's not saying anything new. Of course they do. They're trying to get some degree of social contact that they're otherwise denying themselves. It's actually a good thing, because it means at least they're trying to cope. It only turns bad, in my mind, if they don't manage to fix or get help to fix whatever their underlying problems are.
But as I said, I didn't read the article. Maybe they really are claiming something else.
As an aside...
I don't see any of that detail here. If I told you that 1.2% of people who used the Internet were convicted murderers, but failed to mention that 2% of the general population are convicted murderers, would I be right in claiming to have established a correlation between the Internet and murder?
I'm no expert, but I believe the answer is yes. You've established a weak negative correlation. Apparently convicted murderers are slightly less likely to use the Internet, if those numbers are accurate. (I assume "people who used the Internet" and "general population" are sufficiently random samples to draw a conclusion from.)
The problem is that some people assign much more meaning to such a correlation than is worthwhile.
That just goes to show that with enough resources, you can brute-force anything.
Fair enough I suppose. On the other hand, maybe it also goes to show that people without enough resources start with things that are easier, faster and cheaper and only come to care whether or not they are brute-forcing a problem while they're rolling around in their piles of money?
I don't agree with having more fun as one ages; I think children have much more fun on average than adults.
I do, however, agree that the more responsibility part is a major factor. I also think it's compounded by the fact that not only is one more busy on average, but the events are less remarkable. At some point, a person is probably working five days a week. The details of what exactly they're doing may change, but by and large it's the same thing, folded in their head into "work." It takes a particularly eventful day to stick out in one's mind, and there's not that many of them. When somebody stops to look back they don't realize how far they've come because all of the days blur together.
Even the respites from the work drudgery tend to be the same sets of thing: Working around the house, shopping, watching television. All things unlikely to stick out in your mind.
I do give the article some credit, however. I do agree that there's something to the novelty of a situation sticking out more for a small time around the event. I don't particularly remember learning to read, for example, but I'm sure it was a really exciting moment for me when it was happening; as were any number of other events that were new in childhood and old hat now.
I agree that the decision is dumb, if for no other reason than it punishes the wrong person.
However, you're spinning "unduly contentious" an awful lot. There's a difference between saying "you're wrong" and "you fucking scrub motherfucker, how can you be so fucking stupid?!@" even if both ultimately say the same thing. In other words, you can do your job to the exact same degree and still have multiple possible ways to have conducted yourself.
What, exactly, did NYCL do that was "unduly contentious?" I don't know. I do know it has nothing to do with "working harder" or "successfully [wearing] down the representatives of a large monopoly" like you suggest. It has something to do with the way he went about his business. Maybe the decision goes into specifics (I really don't care enough to bother reading it) or maybe you'd have to delve through all of the filings yourself to get a clue, but there was one party who was there the whole time and heard it all: The judge.
Stupid decision? Yes. Some sort of anti-individual, pro-monopolistic corporation perversion of the legal system conspiracy? No.
He's probably right; the case is highly unlikely to be refiled.
However it is still a bad precedent to allow somebody to file a lawsuit, string it out for five years and then withdraw it and not have to pay the other party for their expenses. Five years of lawyer fees x1 is better than five years of lawyers fees x2, but only marginally. A group as well-financed as the RIAA could surely bankrupt people without any bother of actually proceeding to trial and they don't need to continuously re-file the lawsuit to accomplish it.
That's hardly proof of anything without some context. All I can see from the screenshot is that there are a shit-ton of toolbars. Whether this person deliberately installed them (intentionally or to make FF look bad), they were installed as part of some third-party program (optionally or otherwise) or they are the result of some sort of malware infection(s) isn't clear.
In fact, a lot of the toolbars strike me as horribly suspicious to be anything related to malware. Google Toolbar, Netcraft, Facebook? These certainly don't seem like sites that malware would bother installing toolbars for. Somebody just went out of their way to cram as many stupid toolbars as possible into their browser for some reason.
private interests are suppressing individual citizens to protect their near monopoly gained profits through legal system. in addition to that, they buy lawmakers and manufacture laws that will protect ill gained profits in expense of freedoms of citizens, as in the acta case.
It's easy to score cheap points with statements like this--or in Slashdot terms, an easy way to get some quick karma--but let's be realistic. Imagine a world where these entities do not exert any undue influence. That is, they are who they are and they want what they want, but they do not lobby, they do not make campaign contributions, they accept any decisions without commentary. In other words, the politicans get to decide all of the issues purely on their merits without any other considerations.
Do you really think they're going to side with you? Do you really think any significant number of politicians are going to decide that more good is done by a person's right to create a Mickey Mouse porno or what-have-you than is generated by allowing Disney to continue to use it to generate wealth? Hell, let's assume that's exactly the case and it WILL do more good (and it very well might)-- do you believe you can convince enough politicians of that to make it matter? Disney has balance sheets and accounting books and X number of employees to show what IT'S doing with the IP. What do you have? Other than "but but but feudal system!?"
It's not as clear-cut an issue as Slashdotters make it out to be, and I'm frankly getting awfully tired of the constant, unending suggestions that every time somebody disagrees with somebody on Slashdot it must be because they're in some corporation's pocket. The concept of IP, at least in the form of copyright, has existed literally as long as the US has existed under its Constitution. Private interests, interjecting their power into the secret drafting process? I don't think so. Maybe smart people just find value in it that you don't.
There's a LOT wrong with many of the things going on right now, not the least of which are the crazy awards these lawsuits have been garnering, but let's not pretend there can only be one possible sane view of the issue. Sometimes smart people disagree. And it doesn't even take a bribe.
Why do you have a problem with that? The hypothetical person you mentioned just seems to think Apple is evil. It's quite possible to hate them enough to bitch that it's locked down and then complain they'll probably just lock it back down once they open it up. The two aren't logically inconsistent. In fact they go together extremely well.
It will set a precedent, but probably not a binding one. For it to even have a shot at being binding the next case would have to be heard in front of the same court, and even then it's not hard to wiggle away.
The reason? A precedent applies to the exact same set of circumstances. If I punch you in the nose and you sue me for $5,000, then I punch you in the nose again and you sue me again there's a precedent that the reward should be $5,000 (and let's assume it's heard by the same court and the precedent is binding). But your lawyer could easily argue that I punched you harder, or your nose was still tender from last time, or I'm a repeat nose-punching offender, or any other number of reasonable or inane excuses for why this set of circumstances isn't the same as the previous set of circumstances and thus the previous precedent does not apply.
$54,000 for X songs? But your honor, Miss. Newrespondant pirated X+1 songs! Clearly the reward should be $108,000. Hmm? Why not ($54000/X) * (X + 1)? Well clearly this is a much worse crime and we need to clamp down harder in order to deter the ever-increasing number of songs people are pirating!
I fully support your right to fuck up your own life in whatever manner you want. Take drugs, hold your breath until you pass out, jump out of an airplane with no parachute -- whatever. But it gets far murkier for me when your actions start to mess with other peoples' lives, and that includes your own children.
Whatever our personal feelings about it, I think most people on Slashdot would support a parent's right to spank his child. Likewise I think they would find striking a child with a closed fist to be something that should be illegal. It's fairly arbitrary; either way the child is being hurt as a way of punishment and neither way is likely to leave any lasting consequences beyond that pain, but society has still seen fit to draw a line in the sand and say "this is too much. This is not how you raise children."
Is homeschooling like that? Not necessarily; it depends entirely on who is doing it, their qualifications, motivations and methodologies. Many home schooled students will do better than their peers in public education. That's great. But if we value education, doesn't the state have a right to step in at some point and say "this is too much. This is not how you raise children?" Should parents really be given unfettered ability to ruin their children's lives for eighteen years just because the damage isn't physical and leaves no marks? Just because you happened to stick your penis in somebody who pushed the child out years before? I think they do, and when they should be allowed to do that is just another arbitrary decision. Maybe the German position is too stringent, but that's what they have decided for themselves. Let them handle it through their elected officials. Or alternately, let Germans who have a problem with it move to Tennessee and have a judge grant them political asylum. I'm fine with both.
The problem does exist in IE6, IE7 and IE8. The problem is exploitable on Windows XP, and potentially exploitable with non-default settings in Vista and Win7.
My understanding is that IE8 on Win7 basically runs sandboxed with sub-user-level permissions. So while you can technically trigger the bug and exploit it for code execution, you cannot accomplish anything other than perhaps crashing the browser in that setup. Vulnerable? Technically. A concern? Not really.
Without conceding your point, I just want to point something out: You say that as if it is a bad thing. Eyeballs belonging to people with excess money are an advertisers' wet dream.
Some others have listed a lot of good reasons to be using Internet Explorer, but I want to address your point more directly.
Why should they be "eating their own dog food?" Or more specifically, why should they mandate their employees use any particular browser? I wouldn't if I were in charge at Google. Nor would I if I has in charge at Microsoft or the Mozilla Foundation. In fact I would prefer they use whichever browser they choose, if for no other reason than to see what drives user preferences and examine user perception as to what my product is and where they feel it falls short.
If the people have no relation to Chrome development, there's no reason to force it on them. And if they do, and they don't want to use it, the solution isn't to mandate that they do. It's to figure out what the problems are and hopefully fix them.
I don't care whether or not a company offers free coffee if we're evaluating it on the basis of coffee. The last place I worked on-site had a pretty hardcore one-cup coffee maker with all sorts of different varieties/flavors of coffee to choose from. I brought my own. They also had a water machine and soda available in the fridge, which I typically did take advantage of. No big deal either way.
That said, I would be worried about a company who used to offer it no longer doing so. Are their profit margins really so thin that they have to cut an expense as small as coffee, with all the potential drawbacks that might entail? It doesn't sound like a company in good financial condition, and as somebody who worked freelance at a place swirling the drain, I can tell you it has a MASSIVE effect on just about EVERYTHING. (I think the company ultimately survived, though since I left I obviously have no idea what kind of financial shape they are in these days; whether they're back to a comfortable level or still struggling.)
If a company never offered it to begin with, I suppose I wouldn't read into it one way or another. As I said, it's not a big deal taken by itself -- only if you ask yourself what it might mean.
Those entities where they do it are done on a country level, which is fairly simple.
I won't claim that Amazon can't get it done, because they're smart people with incredible infrastructure and metric crap-tons of money that they could throw at the problem if they so desired. I can tell you that I live in Cook County, Illinois where Amazon would be forced to collect not only the Illinois state sales tax, but also a Cook County sales tax. I can tell you that since they sell cigarettes, that county sales tax is different for that product versus others. I can tell you that while I myself do not live in Chicago, if I did and I ordered from Amazon they would also then be obligated to collect yet another sales tax. And that, you guessed it, Chicago also levies "sin taxes" on certain products including cigarettes, soft drinks and--don't ask me why--bottled water. And I can tell you that the tax rates are scheduled to change in July 2010.
That is, of course, one potential set of jurisdictions for one potential customer. Now multiply that ridiculous level of legal complexity for every possible combination of city, county and state that are applicable and you're quickly arriving at a system of rather ridiculous proportion. Better that we not bother, in my mind.
Before anybody says "but we're only talking about state taxes!" I'll head it off by saying two things: First, that if we're going to make them collect state taxes you can bet the next debate is going to be about other levels of government as counties* and cities all complain about how their budgets are struggling too. And second, that it only helps marginally. In my example, about half of those county and city taxes are actually collected and administered by the state of Illinois, essentially making them state taxes that are only applicable in certain areas.
I understand the plight of the brick-and-mortars who not only have to compete on price but also on a lack of sales tax. I also understand the struggles of many cities and states with their budgets for the past decade or so now. But this is a ridiculously complicated system, far different from the "ZOMG X% VAT" that Amazon deals with in other countries. Setup would be bad enough, much less maintaining compliance with all such systems.
Impossible? No. Unwieldy? Definitely. Worthwhile? Not in my mind.
* I think Cook County may be the only county in the country that is legally permitted to levy its own sales tax, but I'm not sure.
I remember a story on the news some time ago--I don't remember when, but it would have been at least five years ago and probably closer to ten--that claimed that washing your hands with (regular) soap and hot water was almost no different than washing your hands with anti-bacterial soap in terms of killing bacteria. So in addition to all of the negatives of using so much anti-bacterial crap in general, it's entirely possible it's not even making a difference in how "clean" you are.
If there's *any* sort of speech that needs protecting, it's "controversial" political speech
I'm all for protecting free speech, but that does not mean we need to protect every manner of expressing that speech. You don't get to go through town on a loudspeaker at 2am without getting cited for noise ordinances just because your message happens to be "VOTE OUT OBAMA!" You don't get to spray paint your message on my garage. We already accept sensible limits on these means of expression without necessarily supporting censorship of the message, and that is rightly so.
In that same vein, I have absolutely no problem with the website saying WHATEVER it wants about Senator Conroy and his Internet filtering crap. In fact I applaud it. I do NOT think that having something to say about him entitles them to a domain name compromised entirely of his name, particularly when registering such a domain appears to be in violation of the registration rules. If they want to create an organization called No To Conroy or some such, and register notoconroy.com.au or notoconroy.org.au or what-have-you, more power to them. Keep the message out there. Just not like this.
Alright, but so what? I suppose nobody likes to see preferential treatment, especially when they're not the ones receiving it, but I don't see a particularly big deal about it. In fact, I think you could argue that it's more important and thus should be a higher priority for them to act in a case where a famous person or government officer is involved, since the potential damage to both that person and others is greater than if it was your name or mine that was misappropriated.
What I'm much more interested in is whether or not they got the decision right, and if the OP is correct that you're only allowed to register business names you own or your personal name--and I'm fairly certain that is correct--then it certainly seems to me to be the correct decision. And what's more, the people who registered the name almost certainly knew that in advance.
Did Conroy or one of his staffers put the whole thing in motion? I can almost guarantee that they did, and it is the proper thing to due if there are registration rules that have been broken and they want it corrected. Did they twist any arms for quick action? Probably not. I can't necessarily explain why, but people tend to fall all over themselves to help important, famous or otherwise powerful people, no threats or bribes needed.
NONE of this, by the way, should be construed to be anything resembling support from me for Senator Conroy or the entire Internet filtering scheme. I do NOT support it, and I applaud protest and protest sites.
Your experiences are exactly right, but if I might be so bold I think your conclusions are wrong.
Somewhere along the line, parents have come to believe that it is their job to protect children. It's not. A parent's job is to prepare their child. I'm not saying you don't hold a two-year-old's hand crossing the street, or that you introduce them to a pedophile so that they can learn about them, but I AM saying that you also teach that two-year-old to look both ways and you teach your children what sorts of information they should and should not give on the Internet.
Even if your children are not actively trying to bypass you--and at eleven years old she has probably already begun--you simply can't be there to protect them all the time. Nor, frankly, would you want to be; that's not a recipe for raising a child who is going to go off and do well on their own as an adult. Instead, you want to give them the tools and the knowledge they need to protect themselves. Talking to adults is not a problem. Hell, frankly talking to a pedophile is not a problem -- the problem is in what gets said and done. Teach them about that and you don't need to police who they speak to. Teach them your morality with regards to things like sex and you don't have to concern yourself with whether or not a penis or boobs flash on the television. Teach them about appropriate language for situations and you don't have to care if some guy in an MMO swears a lot. Be open and honest and respectful and it will be reciprocated, much more so than if you're not. They won't always listen. They won't always do the right thing, but short of locking them in a bedroom until their brains are fully developed that's always going to be the case. Part of life, part of growing up, is making mistakes and learning from them, not being hidden away from real life and then thrust upon the world at eighteen.
And if I might throw in a bit of a personal touch, teach them carefully. Maybe it says something about me, but I met my best friend online. A friend who I literally have flown across the world to meet and spend time with. His friendship has been great for me and I hope mine has been for him as well. Neither of us ended up raped or beaten or murdered, and our friendship is stronger for it. What I'm saying is this: There are meaningful relationships to be had online, which both you and your child should not only be open to but embrace when they come around. Yes, you have to be careful; you have to be careful in person too. Just being able to see somebody is a shallow evaluation of whether or not they are who and what they claim to be. But there are far more good and honest people online than bad people, regardless of how the media portrays things. It shouldn't be so much a boogeyman that people are afraid to ever be open or honest with another person online -- like everything else, it just needs to be done smart.
I'm not one of those people who think it's amoral to censor what kids watch or anything like that. I just think it's incomplete; parents need to be educating their children in the ways I discussed regardless of whether they're keeping an eye on what they watch and listen to and see and who they talk to, or those children are little better off. With that the case, I find the actual censorship to be unnecessary. Teach them and trust them; ultimately, what else can you do?
For the record, most of this wasn't targeted directly at you. I don't know you, the child or any particulars about your situation. In fact since you said "gained an eleven year old" I suspect you either adopted or something happened to somebody close to you and you ended up a guardian, and either way the situation is entirely more complex than with your own child whom you get to start with from birth. I just used your commentary as a bit of a jumping off point.
What do you call maligning a product that doesn't yet exist over claims about what it is going to do that you don't even try to substantiate, other than trolling? The mods got it right. They will have gotten it right even if it turns out to be exactly the truth.
Being a good father isn't about micro-managing your child's day to day activities (and let's face it, if they're being dropped off at a party that has booze, chances are they aren't all that young). It's about teaching that same child that whether there's booze there or not that he shouldn't partake. And that, worst case, if he is going to drink that he needs to do so in a responsible way.
It's not so much that going in, seeing alcohol and dragging him back home is such an awful thing to do. It's that all you're teaching him is to resent you. There will be other parties, there will be booze, and one way or another it's going to happen sometimes when you don't or can't stop it. Better to deal with that inevitability than to pretend you can control the circumstances.
Personally I find your post to be completely trollish, but let's go ahead and assume everything you've said is correct.
So what?
I don't personally find web-based tools better than ones I install on my own system. Let's go ahead and assume that nobody does and nobody ever will. Why is it wrong or in any way bad that web sites want to push as close as they can to that functionality, either as a replacement for it or simply to enhance their own users' experience? If it becomes the problem you're oh-so-afraid of, it means that people actually like what's going on. I know that's nasty to some geeks who think they know best and anybody who doesn't agree are worthless peasants treading on their turf, but to more reasonable people it's a good thing.
Yes, people will make bad decisions in when, where and how they use JavaScript tools. That's true of any tool. It doesn't devalue it.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't read the study either, so maybe I'm going to be an idiot here, but...
What makes you think they're claiming that the Internet contributes to depression? Speaking as somebody who has been depressed (and frankly probably still is more than I admit sometimes), one of the main symptoms of depression is withdrawal from ordinary life. Withdrawal in particular from social contact, which at least in my case actually tends to make the depression worse.
At the same time, humans are social creatures. We all want to be left alone sometimes, but anybody who claims they legitimately want no social contact is probably just trying to cover for the fact that they don't have any. For me, and probably others, it was always easier to communicate on the Internet, and far more easy to be open with people on the Internet. That's probably doubly true of people who are depressed and who, accurately or not, see all sorts of problems with themselves and their lives and become self-conscious and self-obsessed about them.
In other words, I doubt they're claiming the Internet causes you to be depressed. Frankly I doubt they're even claiming spending lots of time on the Internet makes it worse. I suspect they're claiming a correlation: Depressed people spend more time online. To me, that's not saying anything new. Of course they do. They're trying to get some degree of social contact that they're otherwise denying themselves. It's actually a good thing, because it means at least they're trying to cope. It only turns bad, in my mind, if they don't manage to fix or get help to fix whatever their underlying problems are.
But as I said, I didn't read the article. Maybe they really are claiming something else.
As an aside...
I'm no expert, but I believe the answer is yes. You've established a weak negative correlation. Apparently convicted murderers are slightly less likely to use the Internet, if those numbers are accurate. (I assume "people who used the Internet" and "general population" are sufficiently random samples to draw a conclusion from.)
The problem is that some people assign much more meaning to such a correlation than is worthwhile.
Fair enough I suppose. On the other hand, maybe it also goes to show that people without enough resources start with things that are easier, faster and cheaper and only come to care whether or not they are brute-forcing a problem while they're rolling around in their piles of money?
I don't agree with having more fun as one ages; I think children have much more fun on average than adults.
I do, however, agree that the more responsibility part is a major factor. I also think it's compounded by the fact that not only is one more busy on average, but the events are less remarkable. At some point, a person is probably working five days a week. The details of what exactly they're doing may change, but by and large it's the same thing, folded in their head into "work." It takes a particularly eventful day to stick out in one's mind, and there's not that many of them. When somebody stops to look back they don't realize how far they've come because all of the days blur together.
Even the respites from the work drudgery tend to be the same sets of thing: Working around the house, shopping, watching television. All things unlikely to stick out in your mind.
I do give the article some credit, however. I do agree that there's something to the novelty of a situation sticking out more for a small time around the event. I don't particularly remember learning to read, for example, but I'm sure it was a really exciting moment for me when it was happening; as were any number of other events that were new in childhood and old hat now.
I agree that the decision is dumb, if for no other reason than it punishes the wrong person.
However, you're spinning "unduly contentious" an awful lot. There's a difference between saying "you're wrong" and "you fucking scrub motherfucker, how can you be so fucking stupid?!@" even if both ultimately say the same thing. In other words, you can do your job to the exact same degree and still have multiple possible ways to have conducted yourself.
What, exactly, did NYCL do that was "unduly contentious?" I don't know. I do know it has nothing to do with "working harder" or "successfully [wearing] down the representatives of a large monopoly" like you suggest. It has something to do with the way he went about his business. Maybe the decision goes into specifics (I really don't care enough to bother reading it) or maybe you'd have to delve through all of the filings yourself to get a clue, but there was one party who was there the whole time and heard it all: The judge.
Stupid decision? Yes. Some sort of anti-individual, pro-monopolistic corporation perversion of the legal system conspiracy? No.
He's probably right; the case is highly unlikely to be refiled.
However it is still a bad precedent to allow somebody to file a lawsuit, string it out for five years and then withdraw it and not have to pay the other party for their expenses. Five years of lawyer fees x1 is better than five years of lawyers fees x2, but only marginally. A group as well-financed as the RIAA could surely bankrupt people without any bother of actually proceeding to trial and they don't need to continuously re-file the lawsuit to accomplish it.
That's hardly proof of anything without some context. All I can see from the screenshot is that there are a shit-ton of toolbars. Whether this person deliberately installed them (intentionally or to make FF look bad), they were installed as part of some third-party program (optionally or otherwise) or they are the result of some sort of malware infection(s) isn't clear.
In fact, a lot of the toolbars strike me as horribly suspicious to be anything related to malware. Google Toolbar, Netcraft, Facebook? These certainly don't seem like sites that malware would bother installing toolbars for. Somebody just went out of their way to cram as many stupid toolbars as possible into their browser for some reason.
It's easy to score cheap points with statements like this--or in Slashdot terms, an easy way to get some quick karma--but let's be realistic. Imagine a world where these entities do not exert any undue influence. That is, they are who they are and they want what they want, but they do not lobby, they do not make campaign contributions, they accept any decisions without commentary. In other words, the politicans get to decide all of the issues purely on their merits without any other considerations.
Do you really think they're going to side with you? Do you really think any significant number of politicians are going to decide that more good is done by a person's right to create a Mickey Mouse porno or what-have-you than is generated by allowing Disney to continue to use it to generate wealth? Hell, let's assume that's exactly the case and it WILL do more good (and it very well might)-- do you believe you can convince enough politicians of that to make it matter? Disney has balance sheets and accounting books and X number of employees to show what IT'S doing with the IP. What do you have? Other than "but but but feudal system!?"
It's not as clear-cut an issue as Slashdotters make it out to be, and I'm frankly getting awfully tired of the constant, unending suggestions that every time somebody disagrees with somebody on Slashdot it must be because they're in some corporation's pocket. The concept of IP, at least in the form of copyright, has existed literally as long as the US has existed under its Constitution. Private interests, interjecting their power into the secret drafting process? I don't think so. Maybe smart people just find value in it that you don't.
There's a LOT wrong with many of the things going on right now, not the least of which are the crazy awards these lawsuits have been garnering, but let's not pretend there can only be one possible sane view of the issue. Sometimes smart people disagree. And it doesn't even take a bribe.
Why do you have a problem with that? The hypothetical person you mentioned just seems to think Apple is evil. It's quite possible to hate them enough to bitch that it's locked down and then complain they'll probably just lock it back down once they open it up. The two aren't logically inconsistent. In fact they go together extremely well.
It will set a precedent, but probably not a binding one. For it to even have a shot at being binding the next case would have to be heard in front of the same court, and even then it's not hard to wiggle away.
The reason? A precedent applies to the exact same set of circumstances. If I punch you in the nose and you sue me for $5,000, then I punch you in the nose again and you sue me again there's a precedent that the reward should be $5,000 (and let's assume it's heard by the same court and the precedent is binding). But your lawyer could easily argue that I punched you harder, or your nose was still tender from last time, or I'm a repeat nose-punching offender, or any other number of reasonable or inane excuses for why this set of circumstances isn't the same as the previous set of circumstances and thus the previous precedent does not apply.
$54,000 for X songs? But your honor, Miss. Newrespondant pirated X+1 songs! Clearly the reward should be $108,000. Hmm? Why not ($54000/X) * (X + 1)? Well clearly this is a much worse crime and we need to clamp down harder in order to deter the ever-increasing number of songs people are pirating!
I fully support your right to fuck up your own life in whatever manner you want. Take drugs, hold your breath until you pass out, jump out of an airplane with no parachute -- whatever. But it gets far murkier for me when your actions start to mess with other peoples' lives, and that includes your own children.
Whatever our personal feelings about it, I think most people on Slashdot would support a parent's right to spank his child. Likewise I think they would find striking a child with a closed fist to be something that should be illegal. It's fairly arbitrary; either way the child is being hurt as a way of punishment and neither way is likely to leave any lasting consequences beyond that pain, but society has still seen fit to draw a line in the sand and say "this is too much. This is not how you raise children."
Is homeschooling like that? Not necessarily; it depends entirely on who is doing it, their qualifications, motivations and methodologies. Many home schooled students will do better than their peers in public education. That's great. But if we value education, doesn't the state have a right to step in at some point and say "this is too much. This is not how you raise children?" Should parents really be given unfettered ability to ruin their children's lives for eighteen years just because the damage isn't physical and leaves no marks? Just because you happened to stick your penis in somebody who pushed the child out years before? I think they do, and when they should be allowed to do that is just another arbitrary decision. Maybe the German position is too stringent, but that's what they have decided for themselves. Let them handle it through their elected officials. Or alternately, let Germans who have a problem with it move to Tennessee and have a judge grant them political asylum. I'm fine with both.
They're just lines in the sand.
Because you're all partially correct.
The problem does exist in IE6, IE7 and IE8. The problem is exploitable on Windows XP, and potentially exploitable with non-default settings in Vista and Win7.
My understanding is that IE8 on Win7 basically runs sandboxed with sub-user-level permissions. So while you can technically trigger the bug and exploit it for code execution, you cannot accomplish anything other than perhaps crashing the browser in that setup. Vulnerable? Technically. A concern? Not really.
Without conceding your point, I just want to point something out: You say that as if it is a bad thing. Eyeballs belonging to people with excess money are an advertisers' wet dream.
Some others have listed a lot of good reasons to be using Internet Explorer, but I want to address your point more directly.
Why should they be "eating their own dog food?" Or more specifically, why should they mandate their employees use any particular browser? I wouldn't if I were in charge at Google. Nor would I if I has in charge at Microsoft or the Mozilla Foundation. In fact I would prefer they use whichever browser they choose, if for no other reason than to see what drives user preferences and examine user perception as to what my product is and where they feel it falls short.
If the people have no relation to Chrome development, there's no reason to force it on them. And if they do, and they don't want to use it, the solution isn't to mandate that they do. It's to figure out what the problems are and hopefully fix them.
3D porn is not a joke, sir.
I don't care whether or not a company offers free coffee if we're evaluating it on the basis of coffee. The last place I worked on-site had a pretty hardcore one-cup coffee maker with all sorts of different varieties/flavors of coffee to choose from. I brought my own. They also had a water machine and soda available in the fridge, which I typically did take advantage of. No big deal either way.
That said, I would be worried about a company who used to offer it no longer doing so. Are their profit margins really so thin that they have to cut an expense as small as coffee, with all the potential drawbacks that might entail? It doesn't sound like a company in good financial condition, and as somebody who worked freelance at a place swirling the drain, I can tell you it has a MASSIVE effect on just about EVERYTHING. (I think the company ultimately survived, though since I left I obviously have no idea what kind of financial shape they are in these days; whether they're back to a comfortable level or still struggling.)
If a company never offered it to begin with, I suppose I wouldn't read into it one way or another. As I said, it's not a big deal taken by itself -- only if you ask yourself what it might mean.
And we got a suddenly very, very straight northern border.
Then again that was 200 or so years ago. Things have a tendency to change in time spans that long, so perhaps it's not entirely relevant.
Those entities where they do it are done on a country level, which is fairly simple.
I won't claim that Amazon can't get it done, because they're smart people with incredible infrastructure and metric crap-tons of money that they could throw at the problem if they so desired. I can tell you that I live in Cook County, Illinois where Amazon would be forced to collect not only the Illinois state sales tax, but also a Cook County sales tax. I can tell you that since they sell cigarettes, that county sales tax is different for that product versus others. I can tell you that while I myself do not live in Chicago, if I did and I ordered from Amazon they would also then be obligated to collect yet another sales tax. And that, you guessed it, Chicago also levies "sin taxes" on certain products including cigarettes, soft drinks and--don't ask me why--bottled water. And I can tell you that the tax rates are scheduled to change in July 2010.
That is, of course, one potential set of jurisdictions for one potential customer. Now multiply that ridiculous level of legal complexity for every possible combination of city, county and state that are applicable and you're quickly arriving at a system of rather ridiculous proportion. Better that we not bother, in my mind.
Before anybody says "but we're only talking about state taxes!" I'll head it off by saying two things: First, that if we're going to make them collect state taxes you can bet the next debate is going to be about other levels of government as counties* and cities all complain about how their budgets are struggling too. And second, that it only helps marginally. In my example, about half of those county and city taxes are actually collected and administered by the state of Illinois, essentially making them state taxes that are only applicable in certain areas.
I understand the plight of the brick-and-mortars who not only have to compete on price but also on a lack of sales tax. I also understand the struggles of many cities and states with their budgets for the past decade or so now. But this is a ridiculously complicated system, far different from the "ZOMG X% VAT" that Amazon deals with in other countries. Setup would be bad enough, much less maintaining compliance with all such systems.
Impossible? No. Unwieldy? Definitely. Worthwhile? Not in my mind.
* I think Cook County may be the only county in the country that is legally permitted to levy its own sales tax, but I'm not sure.
I remember a story on the news some time ago--I don't remember when, but it would have been at least five years ago and probably closer to ten--that claimed that washing your hands with (regular) soap and hot water was almost no different than washing your hands with anti-bacterial soap in terms of killing bacteria. So in addition to all of the negatives of using so much anti-bacterial crap in general, it's entirely possible it's not even making a difference in how "clean" you are.
I'm all for protecting free speech, but that does not mean we need to protect every manner of expressing that speech. You don't get to go through town on a loudspeaker at 2am without getting cited for noise ordinances just because your message happens to be "VOTE OUT OBAMA!" You don't get to spray paint your message on my garage. We already accept sensible limits on these means of expression without necessarily supporting censorship of the message, and that is rightly so.
In that same vein, I have absolutely no problem with the website saying WHATEVER it wants about Senator Conroy and his Internet filtering crap. In fact I applaud it. I do NOT think that having something to say about him entitles them to a domain name compromised entirely of his name, particularly when registering such a domain appears to be in violation of the registration rules. If they want to create an organization called No To Conroy or some such, and register notoconroy.com.au or notoconroy.org.au or what-have-you, more power to them. Keep the message out there. Just not like this.
Alright, but so what? I suppose nobody likes to see preferential treatment, especially when they're not the ones receiving it, but I don't see a particularly big deal about it. In fact, I think you could argue that it's more important and thus should be a higher priority for them to act in a case where a famous person or government officer is involved, since the potential damage to both that person and others is greater than if it was your name or mine that was misappropriated.
What I'm much more interested in is whether or not they got the decision right, and if the OP is correct that you're only allowed to register business names you own or your personal name--and I'm fairly certain that is correct--then it certainly seems to me to be the correct decision. And what's more, the people who registered the name almost certainly knew that in advance.
Did Conroy or one of his staffers put the whole thing in motion? I can almost guarantee that they did, and it is the proper thing to due if there are registration rules that have been broken and they want it corrected. Did they twist any arms for quick action? Probably not. I can't necessarily explain why, but people tend to fall all over themselves to help important, famous or otherwise powerful people, no threats or bribes needed.
NONE of this, by the way, should be construed to be anything resembling support from me for Senator Conroy or the entire Internet filtering scheme. I do NOT support it, and I applaud protest and protest sites.
Your experiences are exactly right, but if I might be so bold I think your conclusions are wrong.
Somewhere along the line, parents have come to believe that it is their job to protect children. It's not. A parent's job is to prepare their child. I'm not saying you don't hold a two-year-old's hand crossing the street, or that you introduce them to a pedophile so that they can learn about them, but I AM saying that you also teach that two-year-old to look both ways and you teach your children what sorts of information they should and should not give on the Internet.
Even if your children are not actively trying to bypass you--and at eleven years old she has probably already begun--you simply can't be there to protect them all the time. Nor, frankly, would you want to be; that's not a recipe for raising a child who is going to go off and do well on their own as an adult. Instead, you want to give them the tools and the knowledge they need to protect themselves. Talking to adults is not a problem. Hell, frankly talking to a pedophile is not a problem -- the problem is in what gets said and done. Teach them about that and you don't need to police who they speak to. Teach them your morality with regards to things like sex and you don't have to concern yourself with whether or not a penis or boobs flash on the television. Teach them about appropriate language for situations and you don't have to care if some guy in an MMO swears a lot. Be open and honest and respectful and it will be reciprocated, much more so than if you're not. They won't always listen. They won't always do the right thing, but short of locking them in a bedroom until their brains are fully developed that's always going to be the case. Part of life, part of growing up, is making mistakes and learning from them, not being hidden away from real life and then thrust upon the world at eighteen.
And if I might throw in a bit of a personal touch, teach them carefully. Maybe it says something about me, but I met my best friend online. A friend who I literally have flown across the world to meet and spend time with. His friendship has been great for me and I hope mine has been for him as well. Neither of us ended up raped or beaten or murdered, and our friendship is stronger for it. What I'm saying is this: There are meaningful relationships to be had online, which both you and your child should not only be open to but embrace when they come around. Yes, you have to be careful; you have to be careful in person too. Just being able to see somebody is a shallow evaluation of whether or not they are who and what they claim to be. But there are far more good and honest people online than bad people, regardless of how the media portrays things. It shouldn't be so much a boogeyman that people are afraid to ever be open or honest with another person online -- like everything else, it just needs to be done smart.
I'm not one of those people who think it's amoral to censor what kids watch or anything like that. I just think it's incomplete; parents need to be educating their children in the ways I discussed regardless of whether they're keeping an eye on what they watch and listen to and see and who they talk to, or those children are little better off. With that the case, I find the actual censorship to be unnecessary. Teach them and trust them; ultimately, what else can you do?
For the record, most of this wasn't targeted directly at you. I don't know you, the child or any particulars about your situation. In fact since you said "gained an eleven year old" I suspect you either adopted or something happened to somebody close to you and you ended up a guardian, and either way the situation is entirely more complex than with your own child whom you get to start with from birth. I just used your commentary as a bit of a jumping off point.
What do you call maligning a product that doesn't yet exist over claims about what it is going to do that you don't even try to substantiate, other than trolling? The mods got it right. They will have gotten it right even if it turns out to be exactly the truth.
Being a good father isn't about micro-managing your child's day to day activities (and let's face it, if they're being dropped off at a party that has booze, chances are they aren't all that young). It's about teaching that same child that whether there's booze there or not that he shouldn't partake. And that, worst case, if he is going to drink that he needs to do so in a responsible way.
It's not so much that going in, seeing alcohol and dragging him back home is such an awful thing to do. It's that all you're teaching him is to resent you. There will be other parties, there will be booze, and one way or another it's going to happen sometimes when you don't or can't stop it. Better to deal with that inevitability than to pretend you can control the circumstances.
Personally I find your post to be completely trollish, but let's go ahead and assume everything you've said is correct.
So what?
I don't personally find web-based tools better than ones I install on my own system. Let's go ahead and assume that nobody does and nobody ever will. Why is it wrong or in any way bad that web sites want to push as close as they can to that functionality, either as a replacement for it or simply to enhance their own users' experience? If it becomes the problem you're oh-so-afraid of, it means that people actually like what's going on. I know that's nasty to some geeks who think they know best and anybody who doesn't agree are worthless peasants treading on their turf, but to more reasonable people it's a good thing.
Yes, people will make bad decisions in when, where and how they use JavaScript tools. That's true of any tool. It doesn't devalue it.
The irony abounds.