And who said it was a security study? All the paper says is that they're investigating the effectiveness of privacy settings of the major browsers.
"Bitch" and "moan" and "put stuff in quotes" as much as you want, but the study is perfectly fine. Even if somebody, somewhere did call it a security study--and I've seen no evidence of that anybody being anyone other than you thus far--the study remains just as valid as if nobody had. There's always a domain associated with studies, and this particular reports' domain is the major browsers.
If she had been claiming to unearth the Most Secure Browser In Existance(tm) and didn't study all possible alternatives, then you may have a point about the veracity of the study. As it stands, I don't think you've added anything at all of value to the discussion.
The study is what it is. Wishing it were something else doesn't make it a bad study. Maybe it's bad all on its own, but this ain't it.
I mean seriously, do these bureaucrats ACTUALLY believe sex offenders won't just make more accounts, or are they pretending to do something important(tm)?
Ohhh, I get it. You're taking them at their word that this is actually supposed to in some way stop sex offenders from preying on children.
Ignoring the fact that most sex offenders have nothing to do with abusing children, that's just what they say in public. The real justification is so that they can throw these people in jail again after they've served their sentence. Maybe in their minds that, too, is "protecting the children." Maybe it's more sinister.
In effect, by requiring these people to give their passwords away to third parties, they are giving sexual predators a free pass to do pretty much anything they want online....
I know what you're trying to say, and I agree that it is how it should be. However, I disagree with how it would happen. More likely it would be something like this:
Defense attorney: Your Honor, we object to this evidence being admitted. My client was forced to give up his login information to the government, and now we can't be sure who did anything under his account.
Judge: I'm sure you'll make that point clear to the jury. Denied.
And now it's in the jury's hands -- a group of men and woman designed to be a cross-section of the very society that elects the people passing these sorts of "think of the children!" laws and permits these sorts of infringements on civil liberties. How confident are you that they're going to believe a convicted sex offender accused of committing or trying to commit a similar crime against the word of the cops who, even if they are dirty in this particular case, are tasked with the job of protecting children against exactly these sorts of people? This is "random criminal versus the word of the police" syndrome, but with the deck stacked even more considerably against the defendant.
Personally, I think a convicted sex offender in a court accused of any sort of sex-related crime is going to be found guilty before a single piece of evidence has been presented. In this particular situation, though, there is also going to be other evidence -- like IP addresses and ISP logs. They're not really more authoritative than the other evidence, but the more you present a jury who probably wants to convict the guy as it is, the more likely they are to dismiss his defense as a crackpot conspiracy theory rather than 10% doubt. And even if you do get a holdout or two, they're just re-try him until they get their conviction. The odds that the entire jury would find him not guilty are low.
I just don't get this attitude that kids are somehow more valuable than adults, when it's logically the other way around.
Civil attorneys tend to agree with you; they can get a lot more money from a dead adult, where they can easily prove income and then demand that yearly income for decades to come as part of damages, whereas children have the "it was a child!" emotional side and then not much else. Certainly nothing verifiable that really can't be argued against.
But when we're talking about laws like this, it isn't a value judgment of child vs. adult, it's the idea that children need adults to protect them. To borrow back from the beginning of this thread, everybody knows that neither the Internet nor the world at large are entirely safe for children, they just break into two camps: (1) Let's do what we can to fix that! [the leave-it-to-government approach] and (2) You do what you can and I'll do what I can [the parenting approach].
I'm as tired of the "think of the children!" laws as anybody. It's not so much that I'm against the idea of government and society as a whole seeking to protect children, but the idiot ways they pretend to go about it while actually doing nothing except, perhaps, eroding civil liberties another notch. This measure would definitely be in that category.
I think what bothers me more than the idea that somebody who got a misdemeanor indecent exposure count would be subject to legislation like this is that anybody at all is subject to legislation like this, and that to argue against it most everybody feels the need to first include a paragraph about how they're not talking about "real" sex offenders. We're letting the greater moral victory slip by us by arguing the periphery. (Aside: Indeed, perhaps the worst part about the entire situation with sex offenders is illustrated in your first paragraph -- but that's an argument for a different time.)
Look, child sexual abuse is a horrible crime and a big deal -- but what ever happened to paying one's debt to society? Once you're let out of prison, that should be the end of it. Do we not find it at all strange that murderers aren't even subject to restrictions this bad? If we don't feel the jail term is sufficient punishment, let's increase the jail terms. If no jail term is enough, let's start executing.
The problem with that is then people would actually have to provide rational justifications for their actions. They'd have to argue with the low recidivism rates among sex offenders and how they automatically deserve to die. Instead they just continue to erode their liberties to "protect the children," though in reality it has little to do with protecting children and little ability to actually protect them. In fact, I would argue that it creates criminals; you put these people back on the streets and then say "go! But you can't live here or here or within 100 miles of here. Go tell your neighbors how awful you are. You can't have any job involving children, nor any job that asks if you've ever been accused of a felony. Turn over all of your Internet accounts, register your address with us." (And that's just so far.) I can't speak for anybody else, but that sure as hell wouldn't rehabilitate me -- it would make me even more of a criminal: Stealing to survive, maybe drugs to cope with the shitty life, or hell, violence as I lash back out against society as a whole.
I know some people will instantly retort "aww, the poor pedophiles!" But I also think a little rational thought applied to these situations--yes, even people accused of raping a child deserve their legal system to engage in rational thought--shows the lunacy and ineffectiveness of what they're trying to do. We don't need yet another sub-class of society in addition to those we already have. That doesn't protect anyone or anything. Everybody deserves the protections afforded by the Constitution, including against idiot measures like this.
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." -- H.L. Mencken
There are certainly risks involved with letting people store your credit card number, but I don't think the government needs to babysit us quite that much. That said, there are some similar measures I would support:
1. Minimum standards for the secure storage of those numbers. The most obvious requirement, if one doesn't yet exist, being that they can't be stored clear-text. There should probably be requirements about where it can be stored (eg, not on laptops), who can access them, etc as well.
2. A law requiring that the storage of your CC number be optional, and even default off. Too many services simply don't let you tell them not to store the number if you want to use that service, and even those that do tend to store it until you remove it. I don't think the government should be making our decisions for us--it certainly is more convenient to check out if the number is stored--but they should do what they can to let us make those decisions for ourselves if we believe the rewards outweigh the risks.
...and probably more, though that's what comes immediately to mind.
However, I still think there is a lot of silly hyperbole going around here about it.
You know, I had a rather long-winded retort post written, but it's not worth the breath. I'll just say this: Whatever the silly hyperbole going on here about the Internet filter, there's an awful lot of silly hyperbole and cherry-picked "issues" in your post as well. If you want to do ANY comparison of nations, for any purpose, you need to do so in a much more thoughtful manner and with a much better and more complete understanding of BOTH of their histories than this post exhibited. I deleted the contents of my post for precisely this reason; because I do not have and will not claim a complete-enough understanding of Australian history, regardless of whether my actual points were factual.
I like Australia; my best friends live there. Let's just try to hold ourselves to a more stringent degree of intellectual honesty.
I don't mind conspiracy theories, but there needs to be something more than allegations, accusations and somebody's suspicion. Unfortunately, most conspiracy theorists tend to simply discount any evidence that goes against the beliefs they entrenched themselves in long before any evidence existed. Their conspiracies only grow as time goes on to encompass anything that doesn't fit in their theory. This means that even if they happen to hit on the truth--and I don't doubt that somewhere in the pantheon of conspiracy theories, there is truth--they lack any credibility to pursue it.
As an example, even in this thread, there are people saying "wait until the NTSB report comes out" and then obligatory responses about how the government can manipulate whatever answer they want. Bush doesn't want it to come out, Obama doesn't want it to distract from his policies, Rove did it -- so now we have a conspiracy that extends to two administrations, a former administration official, however many people on the state levels would need to be involved in being quiet about vote-rigging, all of an independent government agency's investigators, and god only knows who else. It's getting out of hand already, and its only been a couple days.
It's not that I think some politicians wouldn't stoop to murder, or even that it might not have happened in this case. But the more people you bring into this conspiracy without anything ever coming out, the more impractical it becomes. It reminds me of a quote from West Wing: "There is no group of people this large in the world that can keep a secret. I find it comforting. It's how I know for sure that the government isn't covering up aliens in New Mexico."
And as I said, it has already blown to these proportions just days after the accident occurred; without the NTSB having time to do much more than arrive, certainly not to do any serious investigation. Allegations, accusations and somebody's suspicion. That's all it is, and look how vehemently some people believe. That's why it's "always just a conspiracy theory."
This is untrue, and I can assure you that the amount of "actual damages" that Apple's very expensive and capable legal team would confront you with over OSX, would utterly dwarf even the "per infringement" maximum of statutory damages.
They can quote whatever number they want as compensatory damages, but the burden of proving those damages is on them. If they tried to approach a number exceeding the statutory damages, they would be facing an extremely angry judges. Judges are not a fan of being lied to, nor is it ethical for lawyers to even try. Push them too much and they might just throw you out on your nose.
The absolute most they would be able to realistically get is the average cost of an Apple machine + whatever profits Pystar has made so far from selling these machines. Clearly that's nothing to sneeze at, but pretending that just because Apple has a lot of lawyers that they're magically going to get some uber-ridiculous number isn't based in reality. They're not even likely to receive that much, frankly. I'd wager the number would be closer to the cost of copies of OS X * sales + profits than it is cost of apple machines * sales + profits.
Compensatory damages, which is what these are, are almost never that high. When you see "COMPANY Z ORDERED TO PAY ONE HUNDRED GAZILLION DOLLARS!" it's almost all punitive or statutory, neither of which Apple would be entitled to recover if Pystar is correct that they did not register their copyright prior to filing this lawsuit.
Based on what? That seems like something you can't test in any meaningful way. Are the testers going to take you outside and say, "okay, speed as much as you think you can?" If you just go the speed limit all the time and say "it didn't feel prudent and safe," do you get your "E?" There's no objective measurement to what "prudent and safe" means, and without an objective measure it's ripe for abuse and unfairness.
More to the point, they should not do this because the single most dangerous thing regarding driving and speed isn't the speed itself, it's the variance in speeds. The guy going way too slow is a danger to everybody the same as the guy going way too fast is. Your system of some sort of "I'm allowed to speed" designation simply codifies that. It gives you legal right to be dangerous by driving a different speed than everybody else.
It will. Because every step they take down that path incrementally loses people who decide that their cost savings is no longer worth the time, effort and headache.
Even in your example it's not clear what "server" means. Is there one huge server that runs everything? Or, and I consider it more likely, is there individual servers for games that come out, or at least some sort of "module" that plugs into an uber-server for that purpose? Even assuming that you get such a thing and the releases for games are timely and people don't mind doing it, how do you get these games to talk to your server instead of the main one? Do we now have to hack our consoles in addition to run our own servers? And then crack the games? Or are we talking about some sort of router tricks where you're going to redirect all outbound traffic to evil-gamer-server.com back locally?
How many of the pirates' friends are going to be able or willing to do this so that they can play with the pirate for any multi-player games? Have we reached the "not worth it" phase yet?
They're pretty much never going to knock out the hard-core pirates and uber-geeks, for reasons that you've probably seen on this site a million times. In that sense, it is and always will be an arms race that they can't possibly win. It won't ever be over. But so long as the causalties the pirates' side is taking in the form of people no longer willing to bother outweighs (in their minds!) the costs to their own side--even at some point down the road--they'll continue to do it and, frankly, be winning.
The man plead out after seeing the video. There was no jury, no trial, and the only ones convinced of anything was the criminal and perhaps his attorney -- convinced enough that they wouldn't be able to beat the charges based on this tape, if nothing else.
They survive even now, despite the fact that just about everybody blocks ads.
Citation please? More likely you're simply pulling it out of thin air. Nobody I know blocks in-page (versus popup) advertising, and having worked for a digital advertising agency (I didn't do any banner ads, so I'm not apologizing!) and hearing the kinds of numbers they get I feel pretty safe in calling this out as the nonsense it is. If "just about everybody" is blocking them, then those handful of people who aren't sure interact with the ads an awful lot, and they hit refresh the page an awful lot to download them again.
You're the same kind of person who claims that watching TV but going to take a whiz during commercials is stealing.
And you're the kind of person who makes a shitty analogy and then tries to bash somebody with it. Nobody claimed it was stealing. Not on this site. Broadcasting a TV signal costs the same amount of money whether one person tunes it in or one hundred million do. And for that matter, it costs the same whether 0% or 100% of the sets tuned in have anybody watching them. Moreover, the TV stations get paid the same amount of money whether you actually watch the ads or not.
The Internet doesn't work that way. The get paid based on impression or click-through. Worse, every time you visit a website you cost the person hosting it money either directly or by using a finite resource. Many choose to foot the bill and not use advertisements, you're right about that; I'm one of them. Those who don't are making a clear and conscious choice, one which should be respected. You do not have some inalienable right to view their content. In the case of ads they're making a trade with you, and you're welching on your part of the deal. Do it if that's who you are, I'm not your mother, but don't make bullshit excuses and shitty analogies to try to pretend that blocking their ads and taking their bandwidth doesn't directly affect their wallet line. Twice.
Of course given the fact that you've already been modded into oblivion so many times your posts start at zero, I'm not sure why I'm taking the time to feed the trolls.
I was actually struck by how similar your post is to the following quote. So much so that I wonder if you've seen it before?
Either way, both you--and he--are very much correct.
The quote:
The only freedom which counts is the freedom to do what some other people think to be wrong. There is no point in demanding freedom to do that which all will applaud. All the so-called liberties or rights are things which have to be asserted against others who claim that if such things are to be allowed their own rights are infringed or their own liberties threatened. This is always true, even when we speak of the freedom to worship, of the right of free speech or association, or of public assembly. If we are to allow freedoms at all there will constantly be complaints that either the liberty itself or the way in which it is exercised is being abused, and, if it is a genuine freedom, these complaints will often be justified. There is no way of having a free society in which there is not abuse. Abuse is the very hallmark of liberty. -- Lord Chief Justice Hailsham
Musicians wouldn't have to worry about marketing anymore, everyone would get a share and we could remove the drag on society that the RIAA has become.
Yes they would, because even with some sort of taxpayer-supported system the only fair way to get it done is to have some sort of tracking. Otherwise what's to stop me--a person with absolutely no musical talent--from banging a spoon on a pan for 3.5 minutes, chanting some nonsense and calling it music to not only get an ill-gotten share of the pot, but to dilute actual, talented artists' shares as well? And how do we determine how much more (if any) Artist A with 50 songs registered with the copyright office gets than Artist B with 1? Would it matter if all 50 of them were pot-spoon-bang-chanting and the other one was one of those songs that pervades a culture?
Moreover, unless the copyright registrations become free it's entirely possible that good, popular artists would never make their money back without such a system of tracking. There's only so much money going into the pot; the more ways it has to be split, however that is determined, the less there is for everybody. I could pretty easily see it being less than $45/song it looks like it would currently cost to register. And who gets the money, anyway? If I write the song and copyright the lyrics, do I get a share of the pot from somebody else recording it or do they buy it from me?
Once you introduce any sort of tracking system, which I hope you'd agree would be a requirement, the need to get exposure to a wider audience (aka marketing) is just as strong as before. Digital music essentially eliminates DISTRIBUTION costs of music, but other things still cost money. Even if production and marketing cost less than before--and they may or may not, depending on what we're talking about--they're still just as important.
It's not that I'm morally against an idea like this, but I can't think of a fair implementation. Whenever I run through the list of problems in my head and try to come up with a solution, it's essentially a market-based one. That's basically what we've got now; rather than taking every taxpayer's money and completely changing the system, perhaps we'd be better off trying to come up with ways to make the problems we're having today disappear. Start with disbanding the RIAA; all the major record labels banding together for ANY purpose smells fishy to me, legally speaking. Since they've been charged with (and convicted? or did they settle?) price fixing a number of times as well, it's pretty clear they ARE conspiring together.
I'm not a lawyer and I can't quote you any case law, but I would be absolutely ASTONISHED if nobody in the last 30-whatever years arrested on drug charges every tried to challenge the constitutionality of the the laws. In fact I'm pretty sure that's lawyer SOP as part of the throw-shit-at-the-wall-and-see-if-any-sticks approach to appeals.
The answer to your question is probably simple: The courts began to allow it. We've seen time and again where courts reverse each other and even themselves. Indeed, there's a saying that the US Supreme Court likes to reverse itself once every 10 years or so. A lot of people are deathly afraid of that coming with Roe, just as an example. You'd have to find the case law and see for yourself if you could determine the WHY of it, but the bottom line is that the people whose job it is to determine constitutionality appear to have said drug prohibitions are fine without an amendment these days.
Parents are given the legal right to make decisions on behalf of their children and, shockingly, act like parents. If you start advocating that just because some parent has a different experience or opinion, educated or not, and should have their children taken away, this opens the door to no parent having the right to choose for their child.
That's a fair point, but it's also your own little bit of fear mongering. If you hand Little Timmy your perfectly-legally-acquired handgun and he blows his head off, expect to get charged. Or, with any luck, expect to go the jail and lose your children before he has a chance to do so. I doubt any reasonable person would say that is wrong or unreasonable. Or if you want an example closer to reality, if you put your child on a ridiculously stupid diet and it turns out they end up in the hospital because of it, you could be charged with child endangerment -- even if you were relying on the advice of your parents or neighbors and it worked great for them. (Did they forget to tell you about the vitamin supplements? Hmmm.)
In other words, society has already decided there's limits to how stupid a person can be while making legal decisions about their children, regardless of the fact that our default position is to try to let parents make them. The slippery slope argument is a logical fallacy for a reason; if society deemed it in the best interest of all children that parents NOT be permitted to choose whether or not to vaccinate, it doesn't suddenly slide into "ZOMG I'M NOT ALLOWED TO CHOOSE ANYTHING!" Nor, frankly, would we have any logical reason to believe it ever would slide to that.
In some ways, it reminds me of the "debate" on global warming that largely exists only in uninformed peoples' heads. There's not much in the way of disagreement within the communities of people whose job it is to study things like this, but the couple of dissenting voices are artificially amplified and people find a source they want to believe regardless.
In the same way, there's not a lot of debate about whether or not children should receive vaccines in the medical community. Should vaccinations be one of those things parents aren't allowed to choose? I'm not sure, though I would learn more toward yes than no. I wish I could find the statistic that has been used as far as how many vaccinated people you'd need to surround an unvaccinated one with to be safe, but I can't do it. Either way it seems to me that there's more considerations than simply the health of one particular person (and I'm by no means conceding that there ARE health concerns for the person being vaccinated) and that seems like the point where society needs to get together and make a choice one way or another.
the source was a non-revenue transaction as far as the record co is concerned, yet I bet they'd argue that they 'lost money' with all the copies of that cd.
They would indeed. They'll claim just about anything if it means they make some more money.
However, there's a distinction to what you're talking about and unfortunately your parent poster made a point ambiguous enough that I saw a response like this coming. Copyright controls, among other things, copying. In fact it grants to the copyright holder the exclusive right to determine who can copy it when and where and under what conditions. First sale doctrine exhausts their control of that copy, but it does not exhaust their over-arching right to control copying. Therefore if you copy a CD, even if it was a used CD that the record labels and artist would never make another cent from again, you are violating copyright. You are, in essence, violating the law.*
Record labels would call it a lost sale. They're wrong in many ways, including the one you pointed out, but it's nice rhetoric for them to get some support particularly among lawmakers for whatever measures they want put in place. Whether lawmakers who buy this argument are ignorant, in the pocket of the RIAA, making a moral decision for themselves or thinking about potential tax revenues is essentially irrelevant. In that sense the truth of the matter is also irrelevant.
That's to your specific point, but let's ramble into the more generalities of pirating.
but it does not account for the fact that not all digital copies *would* have resulted in actual real revenue; and its also not clear how much more sales (real sales) they would get *due* to the free exposure of file trading.
Absolutely. In fact very few of those pirated copies would have resulted in sales, and according to at least one research report it generates more sales than it costs for all but the topmost artists in popularity, who lose extremely small margins.
That said, "I wasn't going to buy it anyway" isn't a justification for taking something for free that you're supposed to pay for. (I specifically avoided the word "stealing" here for reasons that should be obvious to a/.'er, and with which I agree.) Taken to its conclusion, that argument essentially puts artists into a situation worse than waitresses have; where you only "tip" them some money for a song if you like it enough, and almost certainly without the social stigmas that currently surround stiffing a waitress of a tip even if everything sucked and she was a bitch.
Is there a more fair solution? Probably, but it's not clear to me what that is. Most solutions I've heard tend too far to one side or another; toward the copyright holder, with crazy-long copyright terms, laws tailor-made for them and outrageous statutory penalties, or too far toward--let's call it as it is--the pirates; too far toward "I don't care if you created something, I'm taking it in the name of society and you take the scraps I give you and you like it." Addressing copyright terms and statutory penalties is a good start, but I don't think goes far enough. I just really don't know what the step after that is.
(* All of this is predicated, of course, on what you're doing not being covered by fair use.)
I don't think they're saying it's any worse, but they seem to be saying that it's no better. Hypothetically speaking, I think you would have seen the same level of outrage from people and zeal to prosecute from the government had this situation played out face-to-face.
The issue, of course, as it pertains to this case is that the Internet offers an anonymity that allowed this to occur while it would have had to take an entirely different form in person. A middle-aged mother isn't very likely to fool a girl into thinking she's a teenage boy in person, after all.
I don't think Lori Drew should go to prison, nor should she have been charged or convicted -- but only because there didn't appear to be any laws intended to punish the behavior. There should be one made now, if they can find some way to word it that isn't overly broad. I also struggle with the responsibilities; it's pretty clear to me that this despicable woman set out to emotionally hurt a teenage girl. Whether she knew that girl was depressed or whether she had any inkling that the girl may ultimately kill herself, I have no idea.
Ultimately, I think I agree with what another poster said: This should have been handled as a civil matter. Sue the woman into the ground. I don't think there's any question they have a rock-solid case for intentional infliction of emotional distress and pain and suffering. I personally would have no question that Lori Drew also shares some portion of liability for the girl's death, so a wrongful death suit would be appropriate as well. (For those who aren't aware, juries are able to aportion liability; Drew wouldn't have to be 100% responsible to be found liable and have to pay.)
As for the decision itself, I mostly dislike it. I don't like the idea that, essentially, website operators are allowed to create law that exists on their site and is backed by the authority of the government, with jail time. On the other hand I know what a PITA it can be to remove people from a website if they break those terms or you otherwise simply no longer want them there, and a little help in that regard could be good. Just doesn't outweigh the cons.
For starters, do you honestly believe that poor blacks are diagnosed MORE often with psychological conditions than affluent whites? Really? You really believe that someone trying to be both racist and politically correct at the same time is going to give these people an excuse for their behavior rather than simply throwing them in jail?
Second, when your getting high takes the place of working I'm pretty sure you ARE an addict, by definition. Your "hobby" is interfering with your life. This would be true of people playing video games as well, and you'll note that the article never stated that video game addiction is not real or that nobody who came into their clinic was, in their estimation, legitimately addicted to video games. Just that the majority of them weren't. (That's also not to say that they were what psychologists would consider to be mentally well; but being unwell and being addicted are not necessarily one in the same.)
More importantly, addiction is (among other things) an inability to stop your behavior. If that druggie really can stop doing drugs tomorrow, he's not addicted--same with a video game addict. The distinction the article seems to be drawing is that being unable to stop a behavior and not having another choice available due to other psychological issues aren't the same. These people fill their lives with video games because they have no other social interactions to fill them with. It's bad, maybe worse than addiction--but I would agree that it is not, in itself, actually addiction.
Do you have any proof of this, or are you simply pulling it out of your ass based on assumptions from 1996?
As a "webmaster," and more importantly a professional web developer, I can tell you I do development exactly opposite of what you describe, and so does every other developer I know: We build in Firefox, and automagically it works 99% correctly in Opera, Safari and others. Then we go back and tweak for IE7 and IE6. Thus far I've been blessed to not work for anybody who cares about IE5, but the process would be largely the same.
Microsoft owns too much of the market to ignore, but there is ALWAYS value in coding to the standards and fixing the ones who can't keep up. If you code for IE and try to hack it into Firefox, you'll never get it working. If you code to standards, you usually don't spend more than a couple hours (depending on the size of your site of course) tweaking things around to work in IE6 and even less time than that for IE7. With a 20% market share, Firefox is too big to ignore as well.
Unless something huge happens, a common web developer who is writing applications that will not run well on a browser that maintains around an 80% global market share is still asking for trouble. Even assuming Mozilla, Apple and Opera continue chipping away at Microsoft's lead at the rates they have been the last year or two, you're still looking at something in the vicinity of decades before it is sufficiently low for most people (and pretty much all professionals, including many of the people who might be running such huge applications that they would need this power) to even consider ignoring it.
In short, Microsoft is still the 800 pound gorilla. It will take either a long time or some fairly major gaffe before it even approaches becoming obsolete.
Why? It's mediocre as a music player. A list with a little display and some controls at the top? Color me impressed! Every music player has this. That's what makes it a music player at all.
The only advantages it has are its tight integrations with iPods and iTunes Store, which is hardly impressive when you consider that's why Apple bothers with it at all. (As an aside, I've always found the store integration felt clunky--but that's neither here nor there.) And the fact that so many other players have similar integrations, at least with iPods. Will they always work with the latest and greatest? No. Apple isn't going to give them a head's up to change their software, so they need time to actually get their hands on a new device, figure out the changes and code to them. If inside knowledge of a particular product line is your definition of better than average, well... okay.
Secondly, how exactly do the "latest music files" get into this monitored folder? If you manually dragged them there, then you might as well have just manually dragged them onto the itunes window.
You're kidding, right? Most of us have some sort of music or mp3 directories, potentially with any number of subdirectories under it for organization. Personally I have mp3/[Genre]/[Artist] and potentially/[Album] if I ripped the whole thing rather than downloaded particular songs. I'm going to put these files into this structure regardless of how it gets into my music player. To claim I should have just dropped it into iTunes itself is disengenuous fanboi rationalization. I don't want my music strewn all over my system, I want it in one place of my choosing. Of course having my player realize to look there periodically is better than it staring dumbly at me until I tell it to.
The truly sad part about your comment is that Apple could probably have this "advanced" feature added in two hours of work. They already have the core of it with the ability to import a folder. Now all they have to do is keep a list of them and monitor. Chances are it's already built into the kernel and just needs to be tapped into. If not I guess they'll need to poll some directory mtimes.
If they arrived there through any other means, that just further underscores that its an advanced feature.
You're right. Downloading or ripping the music directly into a destination folder is voodoo magic.
I'd like iTunes to support automatically syncing with non-Apple players. I'd like iTunes to support syncing with programs other than Outlook on Windows.
And you won't get it, because Apple has no interest in it. You almost certainly would have it if others were allowed to write plugins, but they aren't. Do you really consider this request advanced?
I don't necessarily blame Apple for not providing plugin interfaces; that's their prerogative. The fact that so many other music players have it and iTunes doesn't does go to validate the submitter's point about iTunes lacking functionality that many others have though, does it not?
I call that a feature. I'm not 13 anymore. I am happy to let my programs to feature well designed UI, without delegating the task to other 13 year olds who variously have an unhealthy fascination with celebrities, movies, or just want everything to be some sort of gothic red and black
Congratulations. I'm happy you like people making your UI decisions for you, but not everybody agrees. To insult them by pretending that must mean they're 13-year-old goths or have "unhealthy fascination[s]" just makes you an asshat. Period.
I don't care if a program supports theming, but the appearance ABSOLUTELY affects my decisions on whether or not to use a program and I'm sure it affects yours as well. Having that support can
I'll concur with the AC. I have somewhere in the vicinity of 1500 songs in my playlist and haven't noticed any problems whatsoever. And you can definitely rate as you go.
If that's the only thing stopping you from giving it a shot, I'd say go ahead and try it.
That is still vulnerable to permitting people to sell their votes.
Here's what the electronic voting machine at my polling place (Cook County, IL) did:
You walked up, punched in all of your various choices. At the end of the process you had a few screens of bulk confirmations digitally. When you confirmed, it went to a second set of confirmations. In an enclosed case next to the screen was a receipt roll and printer. Page by page, it printed out your votes in plain text for you to review. For example:
CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION
NO
US PRESIDENT
BARAK OBAMA & JOE BIDEN
These receipts were never provided to you, meaning there was no way for you to verify to an outside party that you voted in any specific ways. However they were presented for your review, and presumably they would be used in any recount.
I've been thinking about this system since then, and it seems pretty solid from a paper trail/verifiability standpoint. Obviously with any digital system there is the issue of the code in the machines itself, machine tampering, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
And who said it was a security study? All the paper says is that they're investigating the effectiveness of privacy settings of the major browsers.
"Bitch" and "moan" and "put stuff in quotes" as much as you want, but the study is perfectly fine. Even if somebody, somewhere did call it a security study--and I've seen no evidence of that anybody being anyone other than you thus far--the study remains just as valid as if nobody had. There's always a domain associated with studies, and this particular reports' domain is the major browsers.
If she had been claiming to unearth the Most Secure Browser In Existance(tm) and didn't study all possible alternatives, then you may have a point about the veracity of the study. As it stands, I don't think you've added anything at all of value to the discussion.
The study is what it is. Wishing it were something else doesn't make it a bad study. Maybe it's bad all on its own, but this ain't it.
Ohhh, I get it. You're taking them at their word that this is actually supposed to in some way stop sex offenders from preying on children.
Ignoring the fact that most sex offenders have nothing to do with abusing children, that's just what they say in public. The real justification is so that they can throw these people in jail again after they've served their sentence. Maybe in their minds that, too, is "protecting the children." Maybe it's more sinister.
I know what you're trying to say, and I agree that it is how it should be. However, I disagree with how it would happen. More likely it would be something like this:
Defense attorney: Your Honor, we object to this evidence being admitted. My client was forced to give up his login information to the government, and now we can't be sure who did anything under his account.
Judge: I'm sure you'll make that point clear to the jury. Denied.
And now it's in the jury's hands -- a group of men and woman designed to be a cross-section of the very society that elects the people passing these sorts of "think of the children!" laws and permits these sorts of infringements on civil liberties. How confident are you that they're going to believe a convicted sex offender accused of committing or trying to commit a similar crime against the word of the cops who, even if they are dirty in this particular case, are tasked with the job of protecting children against exactly these sorts of people? This is "random criminal versus the word of the police" syndrome, but with the deck stacked even more considerably against the defendant.
Personally, I think a convicted sex offender in a court accused of any sort of sex-related crime is going to be found guilty before a single piece of evidence has been presented. In this particular situation, though, there is also going to be other evidence -- like IP addresses and ISP logs. They're not really more authoritative than the other evidence, but the more you present a jury who probably wants to convict the guy as it is, the more likely they are to dismiss his defense as a crackpot conspiracy theory rather than 10% doubt. And even if you do get a holdout or two, they're just re-try him until they get their conviction. The odds that the entire jury would find him not guilty are low.
Jeepers. Okay, I'll bite.
Civil attorneys tend to agree with you; they can get a lot more money from a dead adult, where they can easily prove income and then demand that yearly income for decades to come as part of damages, whereas children have the "it was a child!" emotional side and then not much else. Certainly nothing verifiable that really can't be argued against.
But when we're talking about laws like this, it isn't a value judgment of child vs. adult, it's the idea that children need adults to protect them. To borrow back from the beginning of this thread, everybody knows that neither the Internet nor the world at large are entirely safe for children, they just break into two camps: (1) Let's do what we can to fix that! [the leave-it-to-government approach] and (2) You do what you can and I'll do what I can [the parenting approach].
I'm as tired of the "think of the children!" laws as anybody. It's not so much that I'm against the idea of government and society as a whole seeking to protect children, but the idiot ways they pretend to go about it while actually doing nothing except, perhaps, eroding civil liberties another notch. This measure would definitely be in that category.
I think what bothers me more than the idea that somebody who got a misdemeanor indecent exposure count would be subject to legislation like this is that anybody at all is subject to legislation like this, and that to argue against it most everybody feels the need to first include a paragraph about how they're not talking about "real" sex offenders. We're letting the greater moral victory slip by us by arguing the periphery. (Aside: Indeed, perhaps the worst part about the entire situation with sex offenders is illustrated in your first paragraph -- but that's an argument for a different time.)
Look, child sexual abuse is a horrible crime and a big deal -- but what ever happened to paying one's debt to society? Once you're let out of prison, that should be the end of it. Do we not find it at all strange that murderers aren't even subject to restrictions this bad? If we don't feel the jail term is sufficient punishment, let's increase the jail terms. If no jail term is enough, let's start executing.
The problem with that is then people would actually have to provide rational justifications for their actions. They'd have to argue with the low recidivism rates among sex offenders and how they automatically deserve to die. Instead they just continue to erode their liberties to "protect the children," though in reality it has little to do with protecting children and little ability to actually protect them. In fact, I would argue that it creates criminals; you put these people back on the streets and then say "go! But you can't live here or here or within 100 miles of here. Go tell your neighbors how awful you are. You can't have any job involving children, nor any job that asks if you've ever been accused of a felony. Turn over all of your Internet accounts, register your address with us." (And that's just so far.) I can't speak for anybody else, but that sure as hell wouldn't rehabilitate me -- it would make me even more of a criminal: Stealing to survive, maybe drugs to cope with the shitty life, or hell, violence as I lash back out against society as a whole.
I know some people will instantly retort "aww, the poor pedophiles!" But I also think a little rational thought applied to these situations--yes, even people accused of raping a child deserve their legal system to engage in rational thought--shows the lunacy and ineffectiveness of what they're trying to do. We don't need yet another sub-class of society in addition to those we already have. That doesn't protect anyone or anything. Everybody deserves the protections afforded by the Constitution, including against idiot measures like this.
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." -- H.L. Mencken
There are certainly risks involved with letting people store your credit card number, but I don't think the government needs to babysit us quite that much. That said, there are some similar measures I would support:
1. Minimum standards for the secure storage of those numbers. The most obvious requirement, if one doesn't yet exist, being that they can't be stored clear-text. There should probably be requirements about where it can be stored (eg, not on laptops), who can access them, etc as well.
2. A law requiring that the storage of your CC number be optional, and even default off. Too many services simply don't let you tell them not to store the number if you want to use that service, and even those that do tend to store it until you remove it. I don't think the government should be making our decisions for us--it certainly is more convenient to check out if the number is stored--but they should do what they can to let us make those decisions for ourselves if we believe the rewards outweigh the risks.
...and probably more, though that's what comes immediately to mind.
You know, I had a rather long-winded retort post written, but it's not worth the breath. I'll just say this: Whatever the silly hyperbole going on here about the Internet filter, there's an awful lot of silly hyperbole and cherry-picked "issues" in your post as well. If you want to do ANY comparison of nations, for any purpose, you need to do so in a much more thoughtful manner and with a much better and more complete understanding of BOTH of their histories than this post exhibited. I deleted the contents of my post for precisely this reason; because I do not have and will not claim a complete-enough understanding of Australian history, regardless of whether my actual points were factual.
I like Australia; my best friends live there. Let's just try to hold ourselves to a more stringent degree of intellectual honesty.
I don't mind conspiracy theories, but there needs to be something more than allegations, accusations and somebody's suspicion. Unfortunately, most conspiracy theorists tend to simply discount any evidence that goes against the beliefs they entrenched themselves in long before any evidence existed. Their conspiracies only grow as time goes on to encompass anything that doesn't fit in their theory. This means that even if they happen to hit on the truth--and I don't doubt that somewhere in the pantheon of conspiracy theories, there is truth--they lack any credibility to pursue it.
As an example, even in this thread, there are people saying "wait until the NTSB report comes out" and then obligatory responses about how the government can manipulate whatever answer they want. Bush doesn't want it to come out, Obama doesn't want it to distract from his policies, Rove did it -- so now we have a conspiracy that extends to two administrations, a former administration official, however many people on the state levels would need to be involved in being quiet about vote-rigging, all of an independent government agency's investigators, and god only knows who else. It's getting out of hand already, and its only been a couple days.
It's not that I think some politicians wouldn't stoop to murder, or even that it might not have happened in this case. But the more people you bring into this conspiracy without anything ever coming out, the more impractical it becomes. It reminds me of a quote from West Wing: "There is no group of people this large in the world that can keep a secret. I find it comforting. It's how I know for sure that the government isn't covering up aliens in New Mexico."
And as I said, it has already blown to these proportions just days after the accident occurred; without the NTSB having time to do much more than arrive, certainly not to do any serious investigation. Allegations, accusations and somebody's suspicion. That's all it is, and look how vehemently some people believe. That's why it's "always just a conspiracy theory."
They can quote whatever number they want as compensatory damages, but the burden of proving those damages is on them. If they tried to approach a number exceeding the statutory damages, they would be facing an extremely angry judges. Judges are not a fan of being lied to, nor is it ethical for lawyers to even try. Push them too much and they might just throw you out on your nose.
The absolute most they would be able to realistically get is the average cost of an Apple machine + whatever profits Pystar has made so far from selling these machines. Clearly that's nothing to sneeze at, but pretending that just because Apple has a lot of lawyers that they're magically going to get some uber-ridiculous number isn't based in reality. They're not even likely to receive that much, frankly. I'd wager the number would be closer to the cost of copies of OS X * sales + profits than it is cost of apple machines * sales + profits.
Compensatory damages, which is what these are, are almost never that high. When you see "COMPANY Z ORDERED TO PAY ONE HUNDRED GAZILLION DOLLARS!" it's almost all punitive or statutory, neither of which Apple would be entitled to recover if Pystar is correct that they did not register their copyright prior to filing this lawsuit.
Based on what? That seems like something you can't test in any meaningful way. Are the testers going to take you outside and say, "okay, speed as much as you think you can?" If you just go the speed limit all the time and say "it didn't feel prudent and safe," do you get your "E?" There's no objective measurement to what "prudent and safe" means, and without an objective measure it's ripe for abuse and unfairness.
More to the point, they should not do this because the single most dangerous thing regarding driving and speed isn't the speed itself, it's the variance in speeds. The guy going way too slow is a danger to everybody the same as the guy going way too fast is. Your system of some sort of "I'm allowed to speed" designation simply codifies that. It gives you legal right to be dangerous by driving a different speed than everybody else.
It will. Because every step they take down that path incrementally loses people who decide that their cost savings is no longer worth the time, effort and headache.
Even in your example it's not clear what "server" means. Is there one huge server that runs everything? Or, and I consider it more likely, is there individual servers for games that come out, or at least some sort of "module" that plugs into an uber-server for that purpose? Even assuming that you get such a thing and the releases for games are timely and people don't mind doing it, how do you get these games to talk to your server instead of the main one? Do we now have to hack our consoles in addition to run our own servers? And then crack the games? Or are we talking about some sort of router tricks where you're going to redirect all outbound traffic to evil-gamer-server.com back locally?
How many of the pirates' friends are going to be able or willing to do this so that they can play with the pirate for any multi-player games? Have we reached the "not worth it" phase yet?
They're pretty much never going to knock out the hard-core pirates and uber-geeks, for reasons that you've probably seen on this site a million times. In that sense, it is and always will be an arms race that they can't possibly win. It won't ever be over. But so long as the causalties the pirates' side is taking in the form of people no longer willing to bother outweighs (in their minds!) the costs to their own side--even at some point down the road--they'll continue to do it and, frankly, be winning.
The man plead out after seeing the video. There was no jury, no trial, and the only ones convinced of anything was the criminal and perhaps his attorney -- convinced enough that they wouldn't be able to beat the charges based on this tape, if nothing else.
Citation please? More likely you're simply pulling it out of thin air. Nobody I know blocks in-page (versus popup) advertising, and having worked for a digital advertising agency (I didn't do any banner ads, so I'm not apologizing!) and hearing the kinds of numbers they get I feel pretty safe in calling this out as the nonsense it is. If "just about everybody" is blocking them, then those handful of people who aren't sure interact with the ads an awful lot, and they hit refresh the page an awful lot to download them again.
And you're the kind of person who makes a shitty analogy and then tries to bash somebody with it. Nobody claimed it was stealing. Not on this site. Broadcasting a TV signal costs the same amount of money whether one person tunes it in or one hundred million do. And for that matter, it costs the same whether 0% or 100% of the sets tuned in have anybody watching them. Moreover, the TV stations get paid the same amount of money whether you actually watch the ads or not.
The Internet doesn't work that way. The get paid based on impression or click-through. Worse, every time you visit a website you cost the person hosting it money either directly or by using a finite resource. Many choose to foot the bill and not use advertisements, you're right about that; I'm one of them. Those who don't are making a clear and conscious choice, one which should be respected. You do not have some inalienable right to view their content. In the case of ads they're making a trade with you, and you're welching on your part of the deal. Do it if that's who you are, I'm not your mother, but don't make bullshit excuses and shitty analogies to try to pretend that blocking their ads and taking their bandwidth doesn't directly affect their wallet line. Twice.
Of course given the fact that you've already been modded into oblivion so many times your posts start at zero, I'm not sure why I'm taking the time to feed the trolls.
I was actually struck by how similar your post is to the following quote. So much so that I wonder if you've seen it before?
Either way, both you--and he--are very much correct. The quote:
Yes they would, because even with some sort of taxpayer-supported system the only fair way to get it done is to have some sort of tracking. Otherwise what's to stop me--a person with absolutely no musical talent--from banging a spoon on a pan for 3.5 minutes, chanting some nonsense and calling it music to not only get an ill-gotten share of the pot, but to dilute actual, talented artists' shares as well? And how do we determine how much more (if any) Artist A with 50 songs registered with the copyright office gets than Artist B with 1? Would it matter if all 50 of them were pot-spoon-bang-chanting and the other one was one of those songs that pervades a culture?
Moreover, unless the copyright registrations become free it's entirely possible that good, popular artists would never make their money back without such a system of tracking. There's only so much money going into the pot; the more ways it has to be split, however that is determined, the less there is for everybody. I could pretty easily see it being less than $45/song it looks like it would currently cost to register. And who gets the money, anyway? If I write the song and copyright the lyrics, do I get a share of the pot from somebody else recording it or do they buy it from me?
Once you introduce any sort of tracking system, which I hope you'd agree would be a requirement, the need to get exposure to a wider audience (aka marketing) is just as strong as before. Digital music essentially eliminates DISTRIBUTION costs of music, but other things still cost money. Even if production and marketing cost less than before--and they may or may not, depending on what we're talking about--they're still just as important.
It's not that I'm morally against an idea like this, but I can't think of a fair implementation. Whenever I run through the list of problems in my head and try to come up with a solution, it's essentially a market-based one. That's basically what we've got now; rather than taking every taxpayer's money and completely changing the system, perhaps we'd be better off trying to come up with ways to make the problems we're having today disappear. Start with disbanding the RIAA; all the major record labels banding together for ANY purpose smells fishy to me, legally speaking. Since they've been charged with (and convicted? or did they settle?) price fixing a number of times as well, it's pretty clear they ARE conspiring together.
I'm not a lawyer and I can't quote you any case law, but I would be absolutely ASTONISHED if nobody in the last 30-whatever years arrested on drug charges every tried to challenge the constitutionality of the the laws. In fact I'm pretty sure that's lawyer SOP as part of the throw-shit-at-the-wall-and-see-if-any-sticks approach to appeals.
The answer to your question is probably simple: The courts began to allow it. We've seen time and again where courts reverse each other and even themselves. Indeed, there's a saying that the US Supreme Court likes to reverse itself once every 10 years or so. A lot of people are deathly afraid of that coming with Roe, just as an example. You'd have to find the case law and see for yourself if you could determine the WHY of it, but the bottom line is that the people whose job it is to determine constitutionality appear to have said drug prohibitions are fine without an amendment these days.
That's a fair point, but it's also your own little bit of fear mongering. If you hand Little Timmy your perfectly-legally-acquired handgun and he blows his head off, expect to get charged. Or, with any luck, expect to go the jail and lose your children before he has a chance to do so. I doubt any reasonable person would say that is wrong or unreasonable. Or if you want an example closer to reality, if you put your child on a ridiculously stupid diet and it turns out they end up in the hospital because of it, you could be charged with child endangerment -- even if you were relying on the advice of your parents or neighbors and it worked great for them. (Did they forget to tell you about the vitamin supplements? Hmmm.)
In other words, society has already decided there's limits to how stupid a person can be while making legal decisions about their children, regardless of the fact that our default position is to try to let parents make them. The slippery slope argument is a logical fallacy for a reason; if society deemed it in the best interest of all children that parents NOT be permitted to choose whether or not to vaccinate, it doesn't suddenly slide into "ZOMG I'M NOT ALLOWED TO CHOOSE ANYTHING!" Nor, frankly, would we have any logical reason to believe it ever would slide to that.
In some ways, it reminds me of the "debate" on global warming that largely exists only in uninformed peoples' heads. There's not much in the way of disagreement within the communities of people whose job it is to study things like this, but the couple of dissenting voices are artificially amplified and people find a source they want to believe regardless.
In the same way, there's not a lot of debate about whether or not children should receive vaccines in the medical community. Should vaccinations be one of those things parents aren't allowed to choose? I'm not sure, though I would learn more toward yes than no. I wish I could find the statistic that has been used as far as how many vaccinated people you'd need to surround an unvaccinated one with to be safe, but I can't do it. Either way it seems to me that there's more considerations than simply the health of one particular person (and I'm by no means conceding that there ARE health concerns for the person being vaccinated) and that seems like the point where society needs to get together and make a choice one way or another.
They would indeed. They'll claim just about anything if it means they make some more money.
However, there's a distinction to what you're talking about and unfortunately your parent poster made a point ambiguous enough that I saw a response like this coming. Copyright controls, among other things, copying. In fact it grants to the copyright holder the exclusive right to determine who can copy it when and where and under what conditions. First sale doctrine exhausts their control of that copy, but it does not exhaust their over-arching right to control copying. Therefore if you copy a CD, even if it was a used CD that the record labels and artist would never make another cent from again, you are violating copyright. You are, in essence, violating the law.*
Record labels would call it a lost sale. They're wrong in many ways, including the one you pointed out, but it's nice rhetoric for them to get some support particularly among lawmakers for whatever measures they want put in place. Whether lawmakers who buy this argument are ignorant, in the pocket of the RIAA, making a moral decision for themselves or thinking about potential tax revenues is essentially irrelevant. In that sense the truth of the matter is also irrelevant.
That's to your specific point, but let's ramble into the more generalities of pirating.
Absolutely. In fact very few of those pirated copies would have resulted in sales, and according to at least one research report it generates more sales than it costs for all but the topmost artists in popularity, who lose extremely small margins.
That said, "I wasn't going to buy it anyway" isn't a justification for taking something for free that you're supposed to pay for. (I specifically avoided the word "stealing" here for reasons that should be obvious to a /.'er, and with which I agree.) Taken to its conclusion, that argument essentially puts artists into a situation worse than waitresses have; where you only "tip" them some money for a song if you like it enough, and almost certainly without the social stigmas that currently surround stiffing a waitress of a tip even if everything sucked and she was a bitch.
Is there a more fair solution? Probably, but it's not clear to me what that is. Most solutions I've heard tend too far to one side or another; toward the copyright holder, with crazy-long copyright terms, laws tailor-made for them and outrageous statutory penalties, or too far toward--let's call it as it is--the pirates; too far toward "I don't care if you created something, I'm taking it in the name of society and you take the scraps I give you and you like it." Addressing copyright terms and statutory penalties is a good start, but I don't think goes far enough. I just really don't know what the step after that is.
(* All of this is predicated, of course, on what you're doing not being covered by fair use.)
I don't think they're saying it's any worse, but they seem to be saying that it's no better. Hypothetically speaking, I think you would have seen the same level of outrage from people and zeal to prosecute from the government had this situation played out face-to-face.
The issue, of course, as it pertains to this case is that the Internet offers an anonymity that allowed this to occur while it would have had to take an entirely different form in person. A middle-aged mother isn't very likely to fool a girl into thinking she's a teenage boy in person, after all.
I don't think Lori Drew should go to prison, nor should she have been charged or convicted -- but only because there didn't appear to be any laws intended to punish the behavior. There should be one made now, if they can find some way to word it that isn't overly broad. I also struggle with the responsibilities; it's pretty clear to me that this despicable woman set out to emotionally hurt a teenage girl. Whether she knew that girl was depressed or whether she had any inkling that the girl may ultimately kill herself, I have no idea.
Ultimately, I think I agree with what another poster said: This should have been handled as a civil matter. Sue the woman into the ground. I don't think there's any question they have a rock-solid case for intentional infliction of emotional distress and pain and suffering. I personally would have no question that Lori Drew also shares some portion of liability for the girl's death, so a wrongful death suit would be appropriate as well. (For those who aren't aware, juries are able to aportion liability; Drew wouldn't have to be 100% responsible to be found liable and have to pay.)
As for the decision itself, I mostly dislike it. I don't like the idea that, essentially, website operators are allowed to create law that exists on their site and is backed by the authority of the government, with jail time. On the other hand I know what a PITA it can be to remove people from a website if they break those terms or you otherwise simply no longer want them there, and a little help in that regard could be good. Just doesn't outweigh the cons.
For starters, do you honestly believe that poor blacks are diagnosed MORE often with psychological conditions than affluent whites? Really? You really believe that someone trying to be both racist and politically correct at the same time is going to give these people an excuse for their behavior rather than simply throwing them in jail?
Second, when your getting high takes the place of working I'm pretty sure you ARE an addict, by definition. Your "hobby" is interfering with your life. This would be true of people playing video games as well, and you'll note that the article never stated that video game addiction is not real or that nobody who came into their clinic was, in their estimation, legitimately addicted to video games. Just that the majority of them weren't. (That's also not to say that they were what psychologists would consider to be mentally well; but being unwell and being addicted are not necessarily one in the same.)
More importantly, addiction is (among other things) an inability to stop your behavior. If that druggie really can stop doing drugs tomorrow, he's not addicted--same with a video game addict. The distinction the article seems to be drawing is that being unable to stop a behavior and not having another choice available due to other psychological issues aren't the same. These people fill their lives with video games because they have no other social interactions to fill them with. It's bad, maybe worse than addiction--but I would agree that it is not, in itself, actually addiction.
Do you have any proof of this, or are you simply pulling it out of your ass based on assumptions from 1996?
As a "webmaster," and more importantly a professional web developer, I can tell you I do development exactly opposite of what you describe, and so does every other developer I know: We build in Firefox, and automagically it works 99% correctly in Opera, Safari and others. Then we go back and tweak for IE7 and IE6. Thus far I've been blessed to not work for anybody who cares about IE5, but the process would be largely the same.
Microsoft owns too much of the market to ignore, but there is ALWAYS value in coding to the standards and fixing the ones who can't keep up. If you code for IE and try to hack it into Firefox, you'll never get it working. If you code to standards, you usually don't spend more than a couple hours (depending on the size of your site of course) tweaking things around to work in IE6 and even less time than that for IE7. With a 20% market share, Firefox is too big to ignore as well.
Unless something huge happens, a common web developer who is writing applications that will not run well on a browser that maintains around an 80% global market share is still asking for trouble. Even assuming Mozilla, Apple and Opera continue chipping away at Microsoft's lead at the rates they have been the last year or two, you're still looking at something in the vicinity of decades before it is sufficiently low for most people (and pretty much all professionals, including many of the people who might be running such huge applications that they would need this power) to even consider ignoring it.
In short, Microsoft is still the 800 pound gorilla. It will take either a long time or some fairly major gaffe before it even approaches becoming obsolete.
Why? It's mediocre as a music player. A list with a little display and some controls at the top? Color me impressed! Every music player has this. That's what makes it a music player at all.
The only advantages it has are its tight integrations with iPods and iTunes Store, which is hardly impressive when you consider that's why Apple bothers with it at all. (As an aside, I've always found the store integration felt clunky--but that's neither here nor there.) And the fact that so many other players have similar integrations, at least with iPods. Will they always work with the latest and greatest? No. Apple isn't going to give them a head's up to change their software, so they need time to actually get their hands on a new device, figure out the changes and code to them. If inside knowledge of a particular product line is your definition of better than average, well... okay.
You're kidding, right? Most of us have some sort of music or mp3 directories, potentially with any number of subdirectories under it for organization. Personally I have mp3/[Genre]/[Artist] and potentially /[Album] if I ripped the whole thing rather than downloaded particular songs. I'm going to put these files into this structure regardless of how it gets into my music player. To claim I should have just dropped it into iTunes itself is disengenuous fanboi rationalization. I don't want my music strewn all over my system, I want it in one place of my choosing. Of course having my player realize to look there periodically is better than it staring dumbly at me until I tell it to.
The truly sad part about your comment is that Apple could probably have this "advanced" feature added in two hours of work. They already have the core of it with the ability to import a folder. Now all they have to do is keep a list of them and monitor. Chances are it's already built into the kernel and just needs to be tapped into. If not I guess they'll need to poll some directory mtimes.
You're right. Downloading or ripping the music directly into a destination folder is voodoo magic.
And you won't get it, because Apple has no interest in it. You almost certainly would have it if others were allowed to write plugins, but they aren't. Do you really consider this request advanced?
I don't necessarily blame Apple for not providing plugin interfaces; that's their prerogative. The fact that so many other music players have it and iTunes doesn't does go to validate the submitter's point about iTunes lacking functionality that many others have though, does it not?
Congratulations. I'm happy you like people making your UI decisions for you, but not everybody agrees. To insult them by pretending that must mean they're 13-year-old goths or have "unhealthy fascination[s]" just makes you an asshat. Period.
I don't care if a program supports theming, but the appearance ABSOLUTELY affects my decisions on whether or not to use a program and I'm sure it affects yours as well. Having that support can
I'll concur with the AC. I have somewhere in the vicinity of 1500 songs in my playlist and haven't noticed any problems whatsoever. And you can definitely rate as you go.
If that's the only thing stopping you from giving it a shot, I'd say go ahead and try it.
That is still vulnerable to permitting people to sell their votes.
Here's what the electronic voting machine at my polling place (Cook County, IL) did:
You walked up, punched in all of your various choices. At the end of the process you had a few screens of bulk confirmations digitally. When you confirmed, it went to a second set of confirmations. In an enclosed case next to the screen was a receipt roll and printer. Page by page, it printed out your votes in plain text for you to review. For example:
CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION
NO
US PRESIDENT
BARAK OBAMA & JOE BIDEN
These receipts were never provided to you, meaning there was no way for you to verify to an outside party that you voted in any specific ways. However they were presented for your review, and presumably they would be used in any recount.
I've been thinking about this system since then, and it seems pretty solid from a paper trail/verifiability standpoint. Obviously with any digital system there is the issue of the code in the machines itself, machine tampering, etc.