"Anybody that didn't vote for Paul ought to be committed, as they cannot form simple value judgments without the support of the idiot-box?" Wow. Could it possibly be that not everybody thinks Libertarianism is the end-all-be-off of government philosophies? Maybe people place different importance on a different set of values than you do? Maybe? No?
You know one of the values that *I* place importance on? Not being a self-absorbed prick who thinks everybody who disagrees with him is an idiot or worse. Strange, I know, but that's just how I am.
Hey, according to you, I can price anything the way I want, and if I decide the price is too low today, cancel the order!
And that would be a mistake... how? Amazon didn't think the item was worth $30 and price it accordingly, then cancel the order when they found out it was actually worth ten times that. It was extremely clear via the MSRP what it was considered to be worth, and it somehow was entered incorrectly.
Your example is exactly what the Amazon customers tried to do: Screw somebody over when they should have known better.
Was a pretty cool jump in logic you had there, though. Complete with misplaced smug smartassness!
So basically you're saying people should not be held responsible for their mistakes.
People should be held responsible for their mistakes when it is appropriate to do so. For the record, even if this somehow WERE one of those appropriate times (and unless whoever entered the information has a history of fucking it up, it isn't,) taking advantage of a mistake is not holding them responsible for it. It's simply being an ass.
If I'm a cashier and give you too much back at the register, and you notice it and say nothing, you're not making me responsible for my mistake; you're stealing, plain and simple. It's not even the customers' place to hold the cashier (or Amazon) responsible. That's what managers and executives and HR departments are for.
If you want to hold Amazon responsible for handling it poorly, go right ahead and stick it to them: Don't shop there anymore. Done deal, and has the added bonus of being the mature, honest and appropriate way to handle things as opposed to trying to rip them off.
That post is very old and a copy-and-paste job; the last line talking about a poll that, from the context, clearly was a link originally but got lost in the paste is a dead giveaway.
That said, it's almost mostly wrong or misleading. Point by point:
1. Anecdotally, I think this is true. More mod points are spent on downmods than up. This is probably not optimal, but it's also not sinister. Once in a while I click into an article that's hot off the presses, so to speak. No comments have been moderated up to my threshold yet, so I click the "show all comments" link. Almost inevitably, most of those comments are troll posts from anonymous cowards; most of these have absolutely nothing to do with the story at hand. So on top of being trolls and probably flamebait, they're off-topic as well. They do deserve to be buried. The only argument against doing so is that the mod points are better spent modding good posts up, as is requested in the moderator fact. As I said, that is probably true but it doesn't necessarily make people who choose to spend the point burying a troll bad. For the record, yes, I have ABSOLUTELY seen (and been victim of) moderator abuse on posts--almost always with the overrated mod, so they can't be meta-moderated--usually because that post isn't spouting one of the/. lines such as "Apple is great," "Google is perfect" and "Microsoft and everything they touch is evil and shitty." (For what it's worth my opinions on those three are: "Get over them," "I <3 Google" and "I hate them, but no," so you can have an idea where I get in trouble myself.) For the record, none of my posts have been intended as trolls or trying to start a flamewar. A handful have been mean (usually when somebody is being an ass to begin with), but the vast majority have been reasoned opinions that go counter to the line. That said, while there is moderator abuse when people don't follow these "rules," my personal experiences say that the positive moderations still tend to outweigh the abuses.
2. I'm sure it's true that people who are logged in get moderated down faster than those who post anonymously. The ridiculous comparison to oppressive governments labeling people as bad should be a pretty prominent clue that the rest of the bullet is idiocy. Most of the people who downmod, right or wrong, are well-intentioned. They are not out to burn a user's karma and put them forever in the "bad" camp for public shaming. Why does it happen? Many (most?) users, like me, probably have a threshold, and most users have at least a 1 point starting score if not 2. I seldom actually spend my mod points, but I browse at a +3 threshold even when I have them, despite the moderator FAQ asking you to remove thresholds when you do. I use those posts as jumping points to delve into lower-moderated comments that I had interest in from earlier in the thread. So yes, logged in users tend to get moderated more, both up and down--their posts are more visible to begin with. It also easily explains the last part of the first bullet, that there are more +4 and +5 posts than +3. Again, yes, because they're more visible. The higher a post gets rated up the more likely any random person with mod points will see it--and be able to mod it up again if they happen to agree. +5 posts often stay at +5, but that's not necessarily because somebody hasn't tried to downmod yet. The increased visibility works for it even if it gets spanked a time or two with overrated mods.
3. Err, once you have a default -1 rating your trolls are no longer modded down? Yeah, that's true. Of course the system doesn't let you rate a post any lower than -1. Presumably, if he's actually making a point rather than, you know, trolling, he's referring to posts from -1 users that have first been modded up. See my second point for comments about how lower-rated posts get less attention overall. That's why I don't think this is true overall. He's trying to make it sound lik
The attempt to legitimise your censorship by saying that you've gone out of your way even more to provide a method of making the censorship usable is worse, because it shows more premeditation.
Of course it's premeditated. That's the entire purpose of any moderation system: to mod posts up that the moderator believes are good and down those he doesn't. Even if you eliminate downmods you're still "censoring" posts by virtue of choosing not to mod them up. The only way to eliminate that oh-so-abhorrent practice is to eliminate moderation entirely. I don't know about you, but I simply don't have the time to read every single comment on every single article I look at on Slashdot. I LIKE the fact that idiotic posts are hidden from my view by my viewing threshold, and that posts that SOMEBODY thought was good are highlighted for my attention. I'm happy to acknowledge that some downmods are undeserved, the same as some upmods are. I simply don't feel that the system not being perfect warrants scrapping it.
Luckily, as the grandparent post correctly pointed out, if you disagree with such a "censorship" regime you're free to disable it by browsing at -1 and ignoring any moderations that were made. You can read everything. Or if you've got a particular soft spot for people modded troll, you can even adjust the moderation for it in your profile such that it is a GOOD thing that brings it to you attention rather than hides it.
This might be censorship from a strict definition of the word, but the vast majority of people, were this system described to them, would not find it inappropriate in the least. Labeling it thus is just some sort of lame appeal to emotion. After all, hardly anybody will support censorship if that's what you ask them--even if they do in some cases. Personally I find it more akin to a tagging system; people decide if a post is funny or a troll or what, and I can decide whether those things are good or bad. And luckily, as has been said many times now, there are multiple options for anybody who disagrees with this system's existence to essentially opt out and see everything anyway. Those of us who find it useful may continue to use it as an aide to finding good posts and hiding bad. What's the problem here?
p.s.: added sarcasm doesn't make you any less wrong.
Nor do smartass remarks make you right. If what you're looking for is an intellectual snobbery win, pat yourself on the back; I'll admit downmodding may fit some of the broader definitions of censorship if you're insistent on considering it "devaluing some peoples' opinions" rather than trying to classify posts in certain ways. Personally though, I think you fail to make any worthwhile point about it.
I leave as an exercise for the reader the task of finding in the Constitution language that grants the federal government the power to establish Social Security and other forms of welfare, the Federal Reserve, the Food and Drug Administration, and so on.
This sort of reasoning has always irked me. You're right that there is technically no such language in the Constitution. You may even be right that they should be prohibited. However, somebody obviously found language vague enough that let them take these actions--and more importantly, the body that the Constitution explicitly charges with interpreting the law (what higher law than the Constitution?) has thus far agreed with them.
Maybe all these decisions get overturned tomorrow--I doubt it, but maybe. Until then, the people who decide what the Constitution allows have stated that it does allow these things. (I'm pretty sure that every issue you raised has been challenged and brought before the USSC at some point in time.)
If you want to be really technical, the Constitution does not afford the USSC or any courts the power of judicial review; they interpret the laws, but there's no explicit power for them to void any. It was a power taken by the Court for itself by John Marshall, the first Chief Justice, to avoid having to rule in favor of Thomas Jefferson whom he hated. That creates an inherent conflict where something may technically not be a power of the federal government, but where nobody has the power to stop them from taking that power short of the states taking some sort of military action. That might be a workable system, but it's surely a bloody one and I personally prefer it the way it is. And yes, that means sometimes they use their judicial review to UPHOLD something that a strict Constitutional interpretation may not allow. Their upholding it to begin with wouldn't be allowed, so I personally don't think we should be splitting hairs.
When someone posts "trolling" comments on his blog, fine. But is this supposed to mean that I have to allow it or at least may not take legal steps against someone trying to troll on a board, message system or blog I am responsible for?
This isn't just directed at you; a lot of people misunderstand the Constitution and Bill of Rights. They are an enumeration and restriction on the powers of government. If you come on my lawn screaming advertisements at my window, I am fully within my rights to have the police issue you a trespass notice and escort you off. (Of course they could really only move the person to the sidewalk unless they tried to make it a disorderly conduct/disturbing the peace/noise violation, but still.)
Likewise, if you run a blog/website/forum, you're free to make whatever rules you want. If you want to restrict your website to only whites, it's impractacle as hell but you're free to try. If you want to ban anybody who says the word "dog," you're perfectly free to do so. I'm not sure that there is any legal action for you to take in any of these situations; even if they don't have the right to free speech on a private forum, that doesn't necessarily entitle you to legal recourse if they say something. You might try to push for some sort of unauthorized access charges or something if you ban them and they circumvent it, but that's pushing it. Restrictions yes, bans sure, legal action... questionable.
The exception is if you're a government agency or a pseudo-government agency (such as institutions that take federal money), like public schools--though in a way schools are a bad example because an entirely DIFFERENT and much more restrictive set of rules can be applied to public school students according to Supreme Court decisions. I seem to recall a court case where students wore black armbands to protest something, and administrators tried to punish them for it. The Court basically ruled that they weren't disrupting classes and it wasn't obscene, so it was a free speech issue. Aaanyway. Slightly more, these issues are beginning to apply to employers as well, but there's no really clear legal precedents that apply in all jurisdictions that I can think of. To use your examples, you're free to restrict speech on your private message boards or throw anybody you want out of your party as a private citizen.
This case isn't really an issue of restricting free speech, though. I didn't read the article, but it looks like it was a civil lawsuit claiming some combination of libel and maybe defamation of character. Libel is, of course, inherently NOT protected speech; I can't write an article about how Opportunist is a child molester and launch into a long story about how I saw you groping children on the sidewalk if it's not true. What the judges said is that the nature of what he said was a childish rant, which is immature but not libelous. For example, the child groping story would probably be libel; if I said "you're a stupid bastard, you bitch!" you can't sue me on the grounds that you weren't conceived out of wedlock, have a high IQ and aren't a female dog. In other words, that would make me an ass but not a liable for libel (I HAD to say that at least once); the ruling in this case, similarly, is that the speech did not rise to that level and thus could not be punished.
Clarification is always good. No problem with that.
However, it seems to me that the easiest and best solution is to simply add a field to a user's account: "Treat Facebook Applications as a [Friend|User|Guest|whatever other access levels they might have]." In other words, to pretend there's some "Facebook Applications" account. If you "friend" apps, they can see all the information that your friends could see if they went to your page. If they're a guest, they get whatever a guest can see based on your preferences. (Believe it or not I haven't used Facebook; I'm assuming it's much like MySpace in that you can choose whether everybody or just "friends" can see most of your information.) Set it to whatever Facebook likes best--I assume this would be "friend" or whatever the highest level of access to a person's profile is--and send out an email telling people they're free to change it.
I mean, Facebook is not not rummaging through your medical records to find out your sexuality or anything like that; if it knows that information, it's because you've chosen to enter it. The privacy issue is that you may have chosen to restrict that information to only friends. Why not mirror that choice to the applications? It seems like something that should make everybody happy.
It really depends on how "increase competition" is defined. More distinct competitors is MORE competition, but this merger theoretically could provide STRONGER competition. (We'll see if it actually does.)
They've pretty much proven that both gender and sexual preference are hardwired into the brain
I read the article you linked, but it dealt primarily with gender rather than sexual preference. So, for starters, do you have any more links to sources?
Also, by "hardwired," I assume you mean genetic? I know there are cases in which brains essentially re-wire themselves. I wonder if, regardless of whether or not sexual preference is hard-wired to begin with, psychological issues could play a strong enough role to change the setting, so to speak.
I seem to remember a pair of identical twins, one gay one straight, though (can't provide a link as it's too vague for even google to help) which would count against the genetic theory.
Ehh, sort of. It would if it were true, but sexual identity is a complicated and emotional issue. People lie about it all the time--sometimes even to themselves.
I'm not sure if sexual preference is genetic or psychological, but I absolutely do not believe it is a choice by any meaningful definition of the word.
The grandparent correctly notes all there has been is gain on the part of the kid, not loss on the part of the creator
The OP philosophy is basically one of the Kant's Categorical Imperative. Do we want this "there is no loss of the artist, only gain of the pirate" philosophy universalized? If not, they don't consider it to be right. Taken in that context ("should everybody be able to take non-tangible things without compensating their creator because the creator does not have less of it afterward?") it definitely seems wrong to me.
Close, but no. The pope is speaking on similar moral beliefs. Global warming is something that can be measured and tested. All but the most mule-headed among us know that things like emissions ARE having an effect. I'm not getting into the debate about whether or not humans are responsible for the whole phenomena, but we can test and measure to show that yes, greenhouse gases trap heat, among other things.
There is no single, obviously right answer to "when does life begin?" If there was the debate would be pretty much over. There's no obvious answer to at what point something becomes human. The fact that those who do not support abortions attempt to usurp morality and claim that anybody who doesn't agree with their particular definition is an immoral murderer doesn't make it so. In fact when one side needs to try to emotionally charge a debate I tend to think they must not have a good enough rational argument on its merits.
If allow ourselves to start restricting further and further the definition of life, it will become easier for us to eliminate everyone else that falls outside those boundaries.
You're basically making a slippery-slope argument. Those are logical errors for a reason; unless you can somehow show with a reasonable degree of authority that "killing" whatever clump of cells exists at 3 months into a pregnancy will mean we're going to commit genocide, let's keep that sort of junk out of the debate.
Abortion and murder aren't the same thing, regardless of whether or not you believe they should ever be performed. Forbidding abortion isn't saying "we won't let you kill babies!" even if that is what many people may want you to believe. Forbidding abortion is saying that a woman has to let something grow inside of her and feed off of her for 9 months so it can survive on its own. My position on abortion is that I don't know from where anybody feels they derive the moral authority to say THAT to somebody. Agree or not, hopefully you can understand there are different issues involved between the two camps.
Humans can't be trusted to decide who lives and who dies.
Then God should come on down from his cloud and take over. Or push a software update to our brains that makes us simply not ever want to have an abortion or kill anybody for any reason. Barring that, we decide it every day and we will continue to do so. There's nobody else to do it.
(My argument focused on the abortion portion of his comments, but apply extremely closely to the stem-cell argument. I honestly have no idea why he feels artificial insemination is immoral. Frankly, if letting couples who couldn't have a baby of their own have one is immoral then I'm fine with being so.)
We want to build a road here" is reason enough to overrule real property while "25% of our population will die if they don't get this treatment" is not reason enough to overrule so-called "intellectual" property.
It's about money. I'm going to be generous and not presume any corruption on the part of politicians to illustrate how even trying to do good can end up in decision like this.
Okay, so the government ways to build a road and a house is in the way. They buy the house, say for $300,000. The homeowner is annoyed, but $300,000 richer. They almost certainly go buy another house. Whether it costs $300k or not, most of the payment was returned to the economy and the rest is likely to be returned in some fashion as well. The government then pays to build the road, dropping increased money into the economy that wouldn't have been there without the construction. Presumably, the road serves some purpose; for example, (better) connecting a suburb with businesses downtown. That spurs movement and development of these suburbs that adds money to the economy, which spurs new businesses that wouldn't have existed otherwise to pop up there to serve the needs of that new or burgeoning community--and that adds more money. Money upon money upon money into the economy from the simple act of using eminent domain to force somebody from their home for a road.
Now let's apply that to a pharmaceutical patent. Let's say the government buys it for $5 billion. How much would the drug companies have made selling it themselves? Five billion? Ten? Fifteen? The most likely scenario is that potential money is actually removed from the economy in this transaction. Presumably, the government would either be giving it away or selling it ridiculously cheap to make this worth doing in the first place, so they make very little back there. The ripple effect--if any--is depending on what drug it is, people may live (marginally?) longer and be able to consume more.
Which comes out on top in terms of money? It's pretty hard to say, but I suspect the ripple effects of that road would come out ahead. Not to mention it provides tangible improvements that can be used and built upon at the same time.
I realize my focus was on money and yours was on morality, but even without presupposing the decision makers are evil, corrupt, greedy bastards, the two can not necessarily be separated. Utilitarianism would simply state "the greatest good for the greatest number." It happily lets slide any number of tremendous moral atrocities so long as the effective good done by lots of tiny moral benefits outweighs them. There are, of course, many other theories on morality and even twists on utilitarianism; I'm not attempting to comment on moral theory or even put forth any particular position on where I would stand on such things. I'm merely saying that things aren't always simple, black-and-white decisions.
If you're interested, I think I would support your idea or some variation on it for life-saving medications because I don't think not being able to afford a drug should ever cost somebody their life. I do understand alternate viewpoints, though.
If someone cannot take the time to devote a minimum amount of effort to fill out a ballot properly, perhaps they should not vote at all.
You're on an awfully high horse, and for no particular reason. Mistakes happen every day. Ask a teacher how often a student accidentally skips a question, particularly on forms like the Scantron where they are often presented with large vertical lists of bubbles. Ask them how many times they've seen a student accidentally bubble in two options on the same line. You're going to get a lot of observations of these mistakes and more.
It doesn't make these people idiots or mean they were careless. It doesn't mean they aren't passionate, informed voters. It certainly doesn't mean that their votes shouldn't be counted. That's what the ACLU is fighting for. They want every vote possible to be counted. They want a system where a ballot is verified at the polling place where it can be corrected before it is sent along to be counted, where any errors would be final and potentially fatal for the ballot.
This system exists already. Cook County in Illinois uses punch-card ballots, but at the end you fed your ballot into a machine for validation. It would alert you to both an overvote (you voted more than once for something) and an undervote (you didn't vote for something). At that point it was your option: you could drop the ballot in the box, not casting your vote for a position (undervote) or having one discarded (due to overvote), or you could correct the problem, at worst, by being provided another ballot.
What exactly is wrong with that? Ensuring that every vote possible be counted is central to democracy, and it's certainly not frivolous. (Don't get me started about how they treat absentee ballots.)
I can't play, however, materials that the copyright holder has chosen to restrict to a digital path
I think many peoples' problem with DRM is the implication of that point. It's the movement to a society where nobody owns anything, and customers become renters subject to whatever whims the licensor wants to make--even if we "purchased" our product before they had those whims.
In other words, it's the issue of license versus ownership. If I own something, for example my copy of an HD DVD, then nobody has any say in how I view it. I can view it on my computer or my PS3. I can loan it to a friend who can do the same. I can make myself a backup. I can shift the format and put it on my iPod. It's nobody's business but my own.
The implication of "the copyright holder [choosing to] restrict to a digital path" is that I don't own what I paid for. Here I have, in my hands, an HD DVD. But I don't own that copy of the movie; I have a license, revokable at the holders' discretion, with whatever conditions they want to attach to it at the time of purchase or in the future. Hypothetically speaking, if they could find a technological answer to require me to do ten jumping jacks before the video would play, that would be doable. While that may seem a whole lot stupider than restricting what path I can watch the video on, it's really the same concept. Either the copyright holder has a right to tell me the conditions I can watch his content that I have purchased under, or he doesn't.
Personally, I think he shouldn't and I care very little for what justification copyright holders in the guise of the RIAA/MPAA/etc use. If the MPAA tries to screw me in that manner, at least I would expect it and understand. They have their own interests and they obviously feel DRM helps them accomplish those. Microsoft, however, did not produce the movies or the protected content, so why are they selling out their customer for the MPAA? At the very least, I will never approve such a move.
What is needed is a dual pass phrase encryption application. Enter the legit code and you get access to your data. Enter an alternate and it opens a volume with 'manufactured' information.
That is what TrueCrypt does. Or rather, there is a password to the outer volume and the inner volume. If you enter the outer volume password, you get that information--your "manufactured" information. The inner volume contains the stuff you truly want hidden. Supposedly, without knowing the inner volume password, there's no way to distinguish the inner volume from random data.
There are 10 million people willing to pay to play a game they already payed once for?
Nobody likes continuing to pay for a game, but most of us understand that it costs money to buy, maintain and run these servers and bandwidth that make the game actually work.
That said, in a bang-for-my-buck evaluation, WoW rates very highly. I probably play about 10 hours a week, which is about 40 hours a month. $15 / 40 = $0.38 per hour of entertainment. To rent a movie from Blockbuster costs $4.29. Even if we're generous and assumed every movie was three hours long, that comes out to $1.43 an hour. Going TO a movie is... gosh, I don't even know it's been so long, but it was about $10 last time I went. Using the same assumption that rings up at $3.33 cents per hour of entertainment (with no popcorn or drinks!). Buying a game is better and the play time certainly varies, but I think 100 hours of play-time in a game is a generous enough estimate most of the time. Game prices are typically over $50, but even at $50 / 100 hours = $0.50 an hour.
So all in all, it's not so bad. And if I get sick of it, I stop paying. If I want to come back later, I can do that too.
And all they get out of it is to complain about gold farmers and griding hours of their life away for another item that the company can just create (which in of itself is utterly useless to the rest of their life)?
Well you're either completely missing the point or you're a horrible, horrible troll. Clearly that's not all they get. Complaining about gold farmers is certainly not something anybody is going to pay for, and presupposing that "grinding hours of their life away for another item" is automatically bad is erroneous at best.
I, and the other people who play, are getting entertainment value equal to or exceeding the ongoing costs of the game. That's basic economics; we pay it because it's worth the money to us. Maybe it's not worth $15 a month to you, but it clearly is to, well, I guess 10 million others.
Why should we be working around Microsoft's bugs for them?
We're not. We're working around Microsoft's bugs for our customers (clients), and our customers' customers. If we're not professionals, we're working around their bugs because we want people to be able to see the content we've worked pretty hard to create.
If Microsoft and its employees were the only ones affected by such a decision, it would be a no-brainer. I'd do it out of spite in absence of any other benefits. But so long as it would hurt well over 1 in every 2 people on the Web, I'll continue to bitch at my monitor as I work around them.
Third, this is a continuation of the complaints of years past where people lamented the disappearance of 5.25" floppies, then 3.5" floppies, etc. It's a wireless world now
Undoubtedly, some people are change-adverse. From an objective standpoint though, each iteration was a marked improvement over its predecessors. 3.5" floppies were smaller, more durable and had larger capacity than their 5.25" counterparts. CDs had significantly larger capacities and faster access times than did the 3.5"s.
Wireless... well, I love the convenience. I hate the poor speeds I get most of the time. 54Mbps, which is fairly standard speed, is only half the standard of 100Mbps that wired lines get. The disparity gets even larger if you talk about the faster wireless variations compared to the faster wired variations. Not to mention contention for services, significant interference issues and all the other problems that wireless is either more susceptible to or there are more horrible implementations of than wired. The fact that even on my home network I never get even NEAR the theoretical transfer rate is another step backwards, despite the fact there is only one other AP in the area and it's on a different channel.
The fact that some places just can't or won't bother installing wireless, or have wireless coverage that is not optimal even compared to their wired, just adds to the rest to make not including a simple RJ-45 stupid, regardless of whether or not they're happy to sell me a USB adapter (which, so far as I am concerned, is also stupid).
Let's not kid ourselves and pretend this is Apple's way of pushing wireless technology, either. It's certainly not because Mac users would be adverse to paying the extra $2 or whatever it would have cost to have one. This was a purely aesthetic choice wrapped in marketing hype.
Wireless is neat, but it and its implementations aren't ready to be called wired networking's replacement yet. I'll cheer the day when they are, but it's not now.
First, let me start by saying that there is only one place prices can rise in WoW and that's the auction house (or, I suppose, player-to-player sales). Vendor items are basically fixed price. You do get a discount based on how well the faction of people you're buying from like you, but it's always from a fixed base price.
I would assume, though, that if money growth exceeds population/player growth, prices would tend to rise. Is this the case?
The answer is... kind of. There are definite and noticeable price fluctuations on some things in the auction house, but they tend to be largely time-limited because they're usually self-correcting. That is to say, if Person A puts up a stack of Silk Cloth for 1 gold, there's an incentive for the next person to price theirs at 99 silver (or less). 1s certainly is not a big difference, but at the same time people won't pay more if they don't have to pay more. So person two prices at, say, 95s, and somebody comes along at 90s and so on. Eventually there's a floor where people simply won't go lower due to the perceived value of the item, and the prices tend to stay at the floor while there is a decent supply.
Naturally, if supply ever runs low/out for some reason the first person to put more in will probably price it high--maybe 2 or 3g. Then the process repeats again. This isn't always the case; sometimes, for whatever reason, the prices of a certain item tend to stay mostly flat. It's not always explicable. Using my Silk Cloth example, I tend to see variations between about 60s and 2g for 20. Wool Cloth, which is actually a lower-level cloth, is almost always constantly between 2g and 2.5g. As would be expected, truly rare items see much less fluctuation in price because of their rarity.
All that said, I have characters on two different servers. The first server has a decent mix of level ranges. The second server is disproportionately level 70 (currently max) characters. Money can't be transfered from server to server, so price differences are definitely noticeable. I haven't played the guys on the cheaper server in a while, but I remember when I first started characters on this second server that I was a little shocked to see prices often 200% of what the same thing would have cost on the other server.
I don't think truly new (ie, not transferred) characters have much effect because of item levels. Generally speaking a high-level character won't want low-level items unless they're buying it for a friend or alternate character, so while there is fluctuation everywhere the lower-level stuff tends to fluctuate less. (The exception tends to be twink gear, but I doubt you're interested in that.)
I assume he means something like "if the field is varchar(50) and you dump a 58-character string into it, it should fail rather than truncate." In which case I'm sure you can get that behavior by turning the database on to strict mode.
That said, you can't sign away your rights, and the right to sue is certainly one that Americans are fond of.
It depends on jurisdiction, wording and, as all judicial matters do, interpretation. I can tell you that in Illinois, disclaimers of liability carry legal weight. In that sense you can indeed sign away your right to sue.
Of course a good lawyer can probably help you get around that.
How about instead of ignoring their denial, you take it for face value until, you know, they actually do it.
Well, two reasons.
For starters, statements from a corporation are worth only slightly more than the nothing that statements from politicians are. They both lie all the time for various reasons, some reasonable and some not. I'm a fan of following MLB trade rumors, and they're almost always denied right up until they're confirmed.
Second, because corporations have people whose entire job it is to write statements like this. They are not stupid; they know very well that words have meaning. "Paramount's current plan" is language that lets them say something without actually saying anything. Why not "Paramount is committed to...?" It's far stronger and still allows them PR wiggle room. Or if they actually ARE going to stick by it, "Paramount products will remain exclusively on HD-DVD." No ambiguity there. The fact that they BUILT AMBIGUITY into their public statement means one of two things: They don't even know themselves if they're going to stick by HD-DVD or they're not and aren't prepared to announce it yet. Knowing you're going to stick by something doesn't produce a statement like that.
The problem with any loser-pays system is it substantially favors corporations and other interests with big dollars, moreso than the system already does. They are already behind the eight ball by (probably) having an inferior legal team and far fewer resources. Under your system, they also have to operate under the threat of being forced to pay three times that massive legal team's expenses? Remember, 3 * $1,000,000 for a regular person is a crippling sum of money. 3 * $100,000 for a corporation is nothing.
Even if you were right and should win, what kind of odds would it take for you to bring suit with that possibility hanging over your head? Is a 20% chance of ruining your life (80% chance of victory) small enough? 10%?
I'd start with the Veil of Ignorance. It's a social theory that basically says, "imagine you know nothing about what you're going to be like or your station in life. How should society work?" His basic conclusion is that we would do a lot to protect the people on the lowest rungs of society for fear that is where we might end up.
Congress is inclined to do whatever gets them re-elected. Right now, the money some of them take from groups like the RIAA and the advertising they can buy with it provides the biggest advantage. If people started to actually care, become informed and get involved, that would change pretty quickly.
So the point of the musings, I suppose, is to try to get people active. It won't work, of course. I'm not sure what will, but I highly doubt we're at that tipping point yet.
Slashdot Mirror
With all due respect, you're a smug asshole.
"Anybody that didn't vote for Paul ought to be committed, as they cannot form simple value judgments without the support of the idiot-box?" Wow. Could it possibly be that not everybody thinks Libertarianism is the end-all-be-off of government philosophies? Maybe people place different importance on a different set of values than you do? Maybe? No?
You know one of the values that *I* place importance on? Not being a self-absorbed prick who thinks everybody who disagrees with him is an idiot or worse. Strange, I know, but that's just how I am.
Do us all a favor and get over yourself.
And that would be a mistake... how? Amazon didn't think the item was worth $30 and price it accordingly, then cancel the order when they found out it was actually worth ten times that. It was extremely clear via the MSRP what it was considered to be worth, and it somehow was entered incorrectly.
Your example is exactly what the Amazon customers tried to do: Screw somebody over when they should have known better.
Was a pretty cool jump in logic you had there, though. Complete with misplaced smug smartassness!
People should be held responsible for their mistakes when it is appropriate to do so. For the record, even if this somehow WERE one of those appropriate times (and unless whoever entered the information has a history of fucking it up, it isn't,) taking advantage of a mistake is not holding them responsible for it. It's simply being an ass.
If I'm a cashier and give you too much back at the register, and you notice it and say nothing, you're not making me responsible for my mistake; you're stealing, plain and simple. It's not even the customers' place to hold the cashier (or Amazon) responsible. That's what managers and executives and HR departments are for.
If you want to hold Amazon responsible for handling it poorly, go right ahead and stick it to them: Don't shop there anymore. Done deal, and has the added bonus of being the mature, honest and appropriate way to handle things as opposed to trying to rip them off.
Warning: Long post!
That post is very old and a copy-and-paste job; the last line talking about a poll that, from the context, clearly was a link originally but got lost in the paste is a dead giveaway.
That said, it's almost mostly wrong or misleading. Point by point:
1. Anecdotally, I think this is true. More mod points are spent on downmods than up. This is probably not optimal, but it's also not sinister. Once in a while I click into an article that's hot off the presses, so to speak. No comments have been moderated up to my threshold yet, so I click the "show all comments" link. Almost inevitably, most of those comments are troll posts from anonymous cowards; most of these have absolutely nothing to do with the story at hand. So on top of being trolls and probably flamebait, they're off-topic as well. They do deserve to be buried. The only argument against doing so is that the mod points are better spent modding good posts up, as is requested in the moderator fact. As I said, that is probably true but it doesn't necessarily make people who choose to spend the point burying a troll bad. For the record, yes, I have ABSOLUTELY seen (and been victim of) moderator abuse on posts--almost always with the overrated mod, so they can't be meta-moderated--usually because that post isn't spouting one of the /. lines such as "Apple is great," "Google is perfect" and "Microsoft and everything they touch is evil and shitty." (For what it's worth my opinions on those three are: "Get over them," "I <3 Google" and "I hate them, but no," so you can have an idea where I get in trouble myself.) For the record, none of my posts have been intended as trolls or trying to start a flamewar. A handful have been mean (usually when somebody is being an ass to begin with), but the vast majority have been reasoned opinions that go counter to the line. That said, while there is moderator abuse when people don't follow these "rules," my personal experiences say that the positive moderations still tend to outweigh the abuses.
2. I'm sure it's true that people who are logged in get moderated down faster than those who post anonymously. The ridiculous comparison to oppressive governments labeling people as bad should be a pretty prominent clue that the rest of the bullet is idiocy. Most of the people who downmod, right or wrong, are well-intentioned. They are not out to burn a user's karma and put them forever in the "bad" camp for public shaming. Why does it happen? Many (most?) users, like me, probably have a threshold, and most users have at least a 1 point starting score if not 2. I seldom actually spend my mod points, but I browse at a +3 threshold even when I have them, despite the moderator FAQ asking you to remove thresholds when you do. I use those posts as jumping points to delve into lower-moderated comments that I had interest in from earlier in the thread. So yes, logged in users tend to get moderated more, both up and down--their posts are more visible to begin with. It also easily explains the last part of the first bullet, that there are more +4 and +5 posts than +3. Again, yes, because they're more visible. The higher a post gets rated up the more likely any random person with mod points will see it--and be able to mod it up again if they happen to agree. +5 posts often stay at +5, but that's not necessarily because somebody hasn't tried to downmod yet. The increased visibility works for it even if it gets spanked a time or two with overrated mods.
3. Err, once you have a default -1 rating your trolls are no longer modded down? Yeah, that's true. Of course the system doesn't let you rate a post any lower than -1. Presumably, if he's actually making a point rather than, you know, trolling, he's referring to posts from -1 users that have first been modded up. See my second point for comments about how lower-rated posts get less attention overall. That's why I don't think this is true overall. He's trying to make it sound lik
Of course it's premeditated. That's the entire purpose of any moderation system: to mod posts up that the moderator believes are good and down those he doesn't. Even if you eliminate downmods you're still "censoring" posts by virtue of choosing not to mod them up. The only way to eliminate that oh-so-abhorrent practice is to eliminate moderation entirely. I don't know about you, but I simply don't have the time to read every single comment on every single article I look at on Slashdot. I LIKE the fact that idiotic posts are hidden from my view by my viewing threshold, and that posts that SOMEBODY thought was good are highlighted for my attention. I'm happy to acknowledge that some downmods are undeserved, the same as some upmods are. I simply don't feel that the system not being perfect warrants scrapping it.
Luckily, as the grandparent post correctly pointed out, if you disagree with such a "censorship" regime you're free to disable it by browsing at -1 and ignoring any moderations that were made. You can read everything. Or if you've got a particular soft spot for people modded troll, you can even adjust the moderation for it in your profile such that it is a GOOD thing that brings it to you attention rather than hides it.
This might be censorship from a strict definition of the word, but the vast majority of people, were this system described to them, would not find it inappropriate in the least. Labeling it thus is just some sort of lame appeal to emotion. After all, hardly anybody will support censorship if that's what you ask them--even if they do in some cases. Personally I find it more akin to a tagging system; people decide if a post is funny or a troll or what, and I can decide whether those things are good or bad. And luckily, as has been said many times now, there are multiple options for anybody who disagrees with this system's existence to essentially opt out and see everything anyway. Those of us who find it useful may continue to use it as an aide to finding good posts and hiding bad. What's the problem here?
Nor do smartass remarks make you right. If what you're looking for is an intellectual snobbery win, pat yourself on the back; I'll admit downmodding may fit some of the broader definitions of censorship if you're insistent on considering it "devaluing some peoples' opinions" rather than trying to classify posts in certain ways. Personally though, I think you fail to make any worthwhile point about it.
This sort of reasoning has always irked me. You're right that there is technically no such language in the Constitution. You may even be right that they should be prohibited. However, somebody obviously found language vague enough that let them take these actions--and more importantly, the body that the Constitution explicitly charges with interpreting the law (what higher law than the Constitution?) has thus far agreed with them.
Maybe all these decisions get overturned tomorrow--I doubt it, but maybe. Until then, the people who decide what the Constitution allows have stated that it does allow these things. (I'm pretty sure that every issue you raised has been challenged and brought before the USSC at some point in time.)
If you want to be really technical, the Constitution does not afford the USSC or any courts the power of judicial review; they interpret the laws, but there's no explicit power for them to void any. It was a power taken by the Court for itself by John Marshall, the first Chief Justice, to avoid having to rule in favor of Thomas Jefferson whom he hated. That creates an inherent conflict where something may technically not be a power of the federal government, but where nobody has the power to stop them from taking that power short of the states taking some sort of military action. That might be a workable system, but it's surely a bloody one and I personally prefer it the way it is. And yes, that means sometimes they use their judicial review to UPHOLD something that a strict Constitutional interpretation may not allow. Their upholding it to begin with wouldn't be allowed, so I personally don't think we should be splitting hairs.
This isn't just directed at you; a lot of people misunderstand the Constitution and Bill of Rights. They are an enumeration and restriction on the powers of government. If you come on my lawn screaming advertisements at my window, I am fully within my rights to have the police issue you a trespass notice and escort you off. (Of course they could really only move the person to the sidewalk unless they tried to make it a disorderly conduct/disturbing the peace/noise violation, but still.)
Likewise, if you run a blog/website/forum, you're free to make whatever rules you want. If you want to restrict your website to only whites, it's impractacle as hell but you're free to try. If you want to ban anybody who says the word "dog," you're perfectly free to do so. I'm not sure that there is any legal action for you to take in any of these situations; even if they don't have the right to free speech on a private forum, that doesn't necessarily entitle you to legal recourse if they say something. You might try to push for some sort of unauthorized access charges or something if you ban them and they circumvent it, but that's pushing it. Restrictions yes, bans sure, legal action... questionable.
The exception is if you're a government agency or a pseudo-government agency (such as institutions that take federal money), like public schools--though in a way schools are a bad example because an entirely DIFFERENT and much more restrictive set of rules can be applied to public school students according to Supreme Court decisions. I seem to recall a court case where students wore black armbands to protest something, and administrators tried to punish them for it. The Court basically ruled that they weren't disrupting classes and it wasn't obscene, so it was a free speech issue. Aaanyway. Slightly more, these issues are beginning to apply to employers as well, but there's no really clear legal precedents that apply in all jurisdictions that I can think of. To use your examples, you're free to restrict speech on your private message boards or throw anybody you want out of your party as a private citizen.
This case isn't really an issue of restricting free speech, though. I didn't read the article, but it looks like it was a civil lawsuit claiming some combination of libel and maybe defamation of character. Libel is, of course, inherently NOT protected speech; I can't write an article about how Opportunist is a child molester and launch into a long story about how I saw you groping children on the sidewalk if it's not true. What the judges said is that the nature of what he said was a childish rant, which is immature but not libelous. For example, the child groping story would probably be libel; if I said "you're a stupid bastard, you bitch!" you can't sue me on the grounds that you weren't conceived out of wedlock, have a high IQ and aren't a female dog. In other words, that would make me an ass but not a liable for libel (I HAD to say that at least once); the ruling in this case, similarly, is that the speech did not rise to that level and thus could not be punished.
Clarification is always good. No problem with that.
However, it seems to me that the easiest and best solution is to simply add a field to a user's account: "Treat Facebook Applications as a [Friend|User|Guest|whatever other access levels they might have]." In other words, to pretend there's some "Facebook Applications" account. If you "friend" apps, they can see all the information that your friends could see if they went to your page. If they're a guest, they get whatever a guest can see based on your preferences. (Believe it or not I haven't used Facebook; I'm assuming it's much like MySpace in that you can choose whether everybody or just "friends" can see most of your information.) Set it to whatever Facebook likes best--I assume this would be "friend" or whatever the highest level of access to a person's profile is--and send out an email telling people they're free to change it.
I mean, Facebook is not not rummaging through your medical records to find out your sexuality or anything like that; if it knows that information, it's because you've chosen to enter it. The privacy issue is that you may have chosen to restrict that information to only friends. Why not mirror that choice to the applications? It seems like something that should make everybody happy.
It really depends on how "increase competition" is defined. More distinct competitors is MORE competition, but this merger theoretically could provide STRONGER competition. (We'll see if it actually does.)
I read the article you linked, but it dealt primarily with gender rather than sexual preference. So, for starters, do you have any more links to sources?
Also, by "hardwired," I assume you mean genetic? I know there are cases in which brains essentially re-wire themselves. I wonder if, regardless of whether or not sexual preference is hard-wired to begin with, psychological issues could play a strong enough role to change the setting, so to speak.
Ehh, sort of. It would if it were true, but sexual identity is a complicated and emotional issue. People lie about it all the time--sometimes even to themselves.
I'm not sure if sexual preference is genetic or psychological, but I absolutely do not believe it is a choice by any meaningful definition of the word.
The OP philosophy is basically one of the Kant's Categorical Imperative. Do we want this "there is no loss of the artist, only gain of the pirate" philosophy universalized? If not, they don't consider it to be right. Taken in that context ("should everybody be able to take non-tangible things without compensating their creator because the creator does not have less of it afterward?") it definitely seems wrong to me.
Close, but no. The pope is speaking on similar moral beliefs. Global warming is something that can be measured and tested. All but the most mule-headed among us know that things like emissions ARE having an effect. I'm not getting into the debate about whether or not humans are responsible for the whole phenomena, but we can test and measure to show that yes, greenhouse gases trap heat, among other things.
There is no single, obviously right answer to "when does life begin?" If there was the debate would be pretty much over. There's no obvious answer to at what point something becomes human. The fact that those who do not support abortions attempt to usurp morality and claim that anybody who doesn't agree with their particular definition is an immoral murderer doesn't make it so. In fact when one side needs to try to emotionally charge a debate I tend to think they must not have a good enough rational argument on its merits.
You're basically making a slippery-slope argument. Those are logical errors for a reason; unless you can somehow show with a reasonable degree of authority that "killing" whatever clump of cells exists at 3 months into a pregnancy will mean we're going to commit genocide, let's keep that sort of junk out of the debate.
Abortion and murder aren't the same thing, regardless of whether or not you believe they should ever be performed. Forbidding abortion isn't saying "we won't let you kill babies!" even if that is what many people may want you to believe. Forbidding abortion is saying that a woman has to let something grow inside of her and feed off of her for 9 months so it can survive on its own. My position on abortion is that I don't know from where anybody feels they derive the moral authority to say THAT to somebody. Agree or not, hopefully you can understand there are different issues involved between the two camps.
Then God should come on down from his cloud and take over. Or push a software update to our brains that makes us simply not ever want to have an abortion or kill anybody for any reason. Barring that, we decide it every day and we will continue to do so. There's nobody else to do it.
(My argument focused on the abortion portion of his comments, but apply extremely closely to the stem-cell argument. I honestly have no idea why he feels artificial insemination is immoral. Frankly, if letting couples who couldn't have a baby of their own have one is immoral then I'm fine with being so.)
It's about money. I'm going to be generous and not presume any corruption on the part of politicians to illustrate how even trying to do good can end up in decision like this.
Okay, so the government ways to build a road and a house is in the way. They buy the house, say for $300,000. The homeowner is annoyed, but $300,000 richer. They almost certainly go buy another house. Whether it costs $300k or not, most of the payment was returned to the economy and the rest is likely to be returned in some fashion as well. The government then pays to build the road, dropping increased money into the economy that wouldn't have been there without the construction. Presumably, the road serves some purpose; for example, (better) connecting a suburb with businesses downtown. That spurs movement and development of these suburbs that adds money to the economy, which spurs new businesses that wouldn't have existed otherwise to pop up there to serve the needs of that new or burgeoning community--and that adds more money. Money upon money upon money into the economy from the simple act of using eminent domain to force somebody from their home for a road.
Now let's apply that to a pharmaceutical patent. Let's say the government buys it for $5 billion. How much would the drug companies have made selling it themselves? Five billion? Ten? Fifteen? The most likely scenario is that potential money is actually removed from the economy in this transaction. Presumably, the government would either be giving it away or selling it ridiculously cheap to make this worth doing in the first place, so they make very little back there. The ripple effect--if any--is depending on what drug it is, people may live (marginally?) longer and be able to consume more.
Which comes out on top in terms of money? It's pretty hard to say, but I suspect the ripple effects of that road would come out ahead. Not to mention it provides tangible improvements that can be used and built upon at the same time.
I realize my focus was on money and yours was on morality, but even without presupposing the decision makers are evil, corrupt, greedy bastards, the two can not necessarily be separated. Utilitarianism would simply state "the greatest good for the greatest number." It happily lets slide any number of tremendous moral atrocities so long as the effective good done by lots of tiny moral benefits outweighs them. There are, of course, many other theories on morality and even twists on utilitarianism; I'm not attempting to comment on moral theory or even put forth any particular position on where I would stand on such things. I'm merely saying that things aren't always simple, black-and-white decisions.
If you're interested, I think I would support your idea or some variation on it for life-saving medications because I don't think not being able to afford a drug should ever cost somebody their life. I do understand alternate viewpoints, though.
You're on an awfully high horse, and for no particular reason. Mistakes happen every day. Ask a teacher how often a student accidentally skips a question, particularly on forms like the Scantron where they are often presented with large vertical lists of bubbles. Ask them how many times they've seen a student accidentally bubble in two options on the same line. You're going to get a lot of observations of these mistakes and more.
It doesn't make these people idiots or mean they were careless. It doesn't mean they aren't passionate, informed voters. It certainly doesn't mean that their votes shouldn't be counted. That's what the ACLU is fighting for. They want every vote possible to be counted. They want a system where a ballot is verified at the polling place where it can be corrected before it is sent along to be counted, where any errors would be final and potentially fatal for the ballot.
This system exists already. Cook County in Illinois uses punch-card ballots, but at the end you fed your ballot into a machine for validation. It would alert you to both an overvote (you voted more than once for something) and an undervote (you didn't vote for something). At that point it was your option: you could drop the ballot in the box, not casting your vote for a position (undervote) or having one discarded (due to overvote), or you could correct the problem, at worst, by being provided another ballot.
What exactly is wrong with that? Ensuring that every vote possible be counted is central to democracy, and it's certainly not frivolous. (Don't get me started about how they treat absentee ballots.)
I think many peoples' problem with DRM is the implication of that point. It's the movement to a society where nobody owns anything, and customers become renters subject to whatever whims the licensor wants to make--even if we "purchased" our product before they had those whims.
In other words, it's the issue of license versus ownership. If I own something, for example my copy of an HD DVD, then nobody has any say in how I view it. I can view it on my computer or my PS3. I can loan it to a friend who can do the same. I can make myself a backup. I can shift the format and put it on my iPod. It's nobody's business but my own.
The implication of "the copyright holder [choosing to] restrict to a digital path" is that I don't own what I paid for. Here I have, in my hands, an HD DVD. But I don't own that copy of the movie; I have a license, revokable at the holders' discretion, with whatever conditions they want to attach to it at the time of purchase or in the future. Hypothetically speaking, if they could find a technological answer to require me to do ten jumping jacks before the video would play, that would be doable. While that may seem a whole lot stupider than restricting what path I can watch the video on, it's really the same concept. Either the copyright holder has a right to tell me the conditions I can watch his content that I have purchased under, or he doesn't.
Personally, I think he shouldn't and I care very little for what justification copyright holders in the guise of the RIAA/MPAA/etc use. If the MPAA tries to screw me in that manner, at least I would expect it and understand. They have their own interests and they obviously feel DRM helps them accomplish those. Microsoft, however, did not produce the movies or the protected content, so why are they selling out their customer for the MPAA? At the very least, I will never approve such a move.
That is what TrueCrypt does. Or rather, there is a password to the outer volume and the inner volume. If you enter the outer volume password, you get that information--your "manufactured" information. The inner volume contains the stuff you truly want hidden. Supposedly, without knowing the inner volume password, there's no way to distinguish the inner volume from random data.
Nobody likes continuing to pay for a game, but most of us understand that it costs money to buy, maintain and run these servers and bandwidth that make the game actually work.
That said, in a bang-for-my-buck evaluation, WoW rates very highly. I probably play about 10 hours a week, which is about 40 hours a month. $15 / 40 = $0.38 per hour of entertainment. To rent a movie from Blockbuster costs $4.29. Even if we're generous and assumed every movie was three hours long, that comes out to $1.43 an hour. Going TO a movie is... gosh, I don't even know it's been so long, but it was about $10 last time I went. Using the same assumption that rings up at $3.33 cents per hour of entertainment (with no popcorn or drinks!). Buying a game is better and the play time certainly varies, but I think 100 hours of play-time in a game is a generous enough estimate most of the time. Game prices are typically over $50, but even at $50 / 100 hours = $0.50 an hour.
So all in all, it's not so bad. And if I get sick of it, I stop paying. If I want to come back later, I can do that too.
Well you're either completely missing the point or you're a horrible, horrible troll. Clearly that's not all they get. Complaining about gold farmers is certainly not something anybody is going to pay for, and presupposing that "grinding hours of their life away for another item" is automatically bad is erroneous at best.
I, and the other people who play, are getting entertainment value equal to or exceeding the ongoing costs of the game. That's basic economics; we pay it because it's worth the money to us. Maybe it's not worth $15 a month to you, but it clearly is to, well, I guess 10 million others.
We're not. We're working around Microsoft's bugs for our customers (clients), and our customers' customers. If we're not professionals, we're working around their bugs because we want people to be able to see the content we've worked pretty hard to create.
If Microsoft and its employees were the only ones affected by such a decision, it would be a no-brainer. I'd do it out of spite in absence of any other benefits. But so long as it would hurt well over 1 in every 2 people on the Web, I'll continue to bitch at my monitor as I work around them.
Undoubtedly, some people are change-adverse. From an objective standpoint though, each iteration was a marked improvement over its predecessors. 3.5" floppies were smaller, more durable and had larger capacity than their 5.25" counterparts. CDs had significantly larger capacities and faster access times than did the 3.5"s.
Wireless... well, I love the convenience. I hate the poor speeds I get most of the time. 54Mbps, which is fairly standard speed, is only half the standard of 100Mbps that wired lines get. The disparity gets even larger if you talk about the faster wireless variations compared to the faster wired variations. Not to mention contention for services, significant interference issues and all the other problems that wireless is either more susceptible to or there are more horrible implementations of than wired. The fact that even on my home network I never get even NEAR the theoretical transfer rate is another step backwards, despite the fact there is only one other AP in the area and it's on a different channel.
The fact that some places just can't or won't bother installing wireless, or have wireless coverage that is not optimal even compared to their wired, just adds to the rest to make not including a simple RJ-45 stupid, regardless of whether or not they're happy to sell me a USB adapter (which, so far as I am concerned, is also stupid).
Let's not kid ourselves and pretend this is Apple's way of pushing wireless technology, either. It's certainly not because Mac users would be adverse to paying the extra $2 or whatever it would have cost to have one. This was a purely aesthetic choice wrapped in marketing hype.
Wireless is neat, but it and its implementations aren't ready to be called wired networking's replacement yet. I'll cheer the day when they are, but it's not now.
First, let me start by saying that there is only one place prices can rise in WoW and that's the auction house (or, I suppose, player-to-player sales). Vendor items are basically fixed price. You do get a discount based on how well the faction of people you're buying from like you, but it's always from a fixed base price.
The answer is... kind of. There are definite and noticeable price fluctuations on some things in the auction house, but they tend to be largely time-limited because they're usually self-correcting. That is to say, if Person A puts up a stack of Silk Cloth for 1 gold, there's an incentive for the next person to price theirs at 99 silver (or less). 1s certainly is not a big difference, but at the same time people won't pay more if they don't have to pay more. So person two prices at, say, 95s, and somebody comes along at 90s and so on. Eventually there's a floor where people simply won't go lower due to the perceived value of the item, and the prices tend to stay at the floor while there is a decent supply.
Naturally, if supply ever runs low/out for some reason the first person to put more in will probably price it high--maybe 2 or 3g. Then the process repeats again. This isn't always the case; sometimes, for whatever reason, the prices of a certain item tend to stay mostly flat. It's not always explicable. Using my Silk Cloth example, I tend to see variations between about 60s and 2g for 20. Wool Cloth, which is actually a lower-level cloth, is almost always constantly between 2g and 2.5g. As would be expected, truly rare items see much less fluctuation in price because of their rarity.
All that said, I have characters on two different servers. The first server has a decent mix of level ranges. The second server is disproportionately level 70 (currently max) characters. Money can't be transfered from server to server, so price differences are definitely noticeable. I haven't played the guys on the cheaper server in a while, but I remember when I first started characters on this second server that I was a little shocked to see prices often 200% of what the same thing would have cost on the other server.
I don't think truly new (ie, not transferred) characters have much effect because of item levels. Generally speaking a high-level character won't want low-level items unless they're buying it for a friend or alternate character, so while there is fluctuation everywhere the lower-level stuff tends to fluctuate less. (The exception tends to be twink gear, but I doubt you're interested in that.)
I assume he means something like "if the field is varchar(50) and you dump a 58-character string into it, it should fail rather than truncate." In which case I'm sure you can get that behavior by turning the database on to strict mode.
It depends on jurisdiction, wording and, as all judicial matters do, interpretation. I can tell you that in Illinois, disclaimers of liability carry legal weight. In that sense you can indeed sign away your right to sue.
Of course a good lawyer can probably help you get around that.
Well, two reasons.
For starters, statements from a corporation are worth only slightly more than the nothing that statements from politicians are. They both lie all the time for various reasons, some reasonable and some not. I'm a fan of following MLB trade rumors, and they're almost always denied right up until they're confirmed.
Second, because corporations have people whose entire job it is to write statements like this. They are not stupid; they know very well that words have meaning. "Paramount's current plan" is language that lets them say something without actually saying anything. Why not "Paramount is committed to...?" It's far stronger and still allows them PR wiggle room. Or if they actually ARE going to stick by it, "Paramount products will remain exclusively on HD-DVD." No ambiguity there. The fact that they BUILT AMBIGUITY into their public statement means one of two things: They don't even know themselves if they're going to stick by HD-DVD or they're not and aren't prepared to announce it yet. Knowing you're going to stick by something doesn't produce a statement like that.
The problem with any loser-pays system is it substantially favors corporations and other interests with big dollars, moreso than the system already does. They are already behind the eight ball by (probably) having an inferior legal team and far fewer resources. Under your system, they also have to operate under the threat of being forced to pay three times that massive legal team's expenses? Remember, 3 * $1,000,000 for a regular person is a crippling sum of money. 3 * $100,000 for a corporation is nothing.
Even if you were right and should win, what kind of odds would it take for you to bring suit with that possibility hanging over your head? Is a 20% chance of ruining your life (80% chance of victory) small enough? 10%?
I'd start with the Veil of Ignorance. It's a social theory that basically says, "imagine you know nothing about what you're going to be like or your station in life. How should society work?" His basic conclusion is that we would do a lot to protect the people on the lowest rungs of society for fear that is where we might end up.
Congress is inclined to do whatever gets them re-elected. Right now, the money some of them take from groups like the RIAA and the advertising they can buy with it provides the biggest advantage. If people started to actually care, become informed and get involved, that would change pretty quickly.
So the point of the musings, I suppose, is to try to get people active. It won't work, of course. I'm not sure what will, but I highly doubt we're at that tipping point yet.