Say what you want about Apple but at least they're not bending over every time the RIAA/MPAA asks them to do something.
There isn't DRM on most iTunes tracks over Steve Jobs' apparent objections?
I'm glad they're pushing labels to get the DRM off entirely (their market position puts them in a fairly decent place to do so now), but I would still classify it in the "bending over when the RIAA asks them to" category.
For somebody going so far out of his way to bash the OP's intelligence, either your reading comprehension isn't anything to brag about either or you deliberately ignored anything that would get in the way of your insults.
Empirical evidence shows that there is a 90% performance hit. Microsoft says the performance hit is slight.
No. Microsoft said that in most cases the performance hit is slight but that in some cases it is much greater and needs to be fixed.
It doesn't "invalidate that [empirical] evidence," but neither does it make it the statements of "an M$ spin shill." ("M$" is a fantastic example of your objectivity, by the way.) Rudimentary knowledge of logic would tell you that both are possible.
Furthermore, since you keep alluding to science as if some forum posts is scientific evidence, this is hardly an unbiased sample. If Persons A-Y experience exactly the slight performance degredation that Microsoft admits they will, they might not even notice it. Those who do might notice it and not care enough to go Googling for answers. It's precisely the people experiencing the large problems that Microsoft is also admitting who are likely to search and then bitch about how bad it is. They admit a problem and say they are working on a solution. Shame on them for releasing a buggy product, but at least they are working on fixing it.
If you "possess[ed] the ability to think for yourself" rather than blindly obeying the "everything Microsoft = the suxxors" anti-MS FUD philosophy, you would have seen that. So which is it: Are you a troll or a "future janitor?"
Most college kids I know are whiney 18-20 somethings who seem to think they know everything when they are living off of mom and dads dollar.
Dead-on accurate, but missing a piece: Most college students are also politically active. They don't, you know, VOTE or anything, but they take up a lot of causes. I'm not sure why this is the case--perhaps any psychologists or people in related fields out there can can tell us--but it is definitely so. The zeal usually fades as they get older; some would say it's beaten out of them by reality.
That's why this campaign failed. Most college students aren't going to be interested in talking about dorm decorating. What that page WILL do is attract people who have chosen (perhaps among other things) being anti-Walmart as one of their causes.
I'm not saying it's bad, I'm not saying they shouldn't do it and I'm not even saying they're not right -- I'm saying it was an idea doomed to exactly this type of failure as soon as it started, and your insight + issues involvement of college students is the explanation.
(For what it's worth, college is also a time that a lot of people begin working out and taking better care of themselves as well, among other entirely positive things. Again, not sure why that is so but it is.)
The "music isn't good enough to justify paying for it" argument vanishes in a cloud of hypocrisy when people download the very music they disparage.
And then re-appears in a puff of logic once people understand basic economics.
The demand curve is formed by demand at a particular price point. The fact that I would download a song does not have any bearing on whether or not I would be willing to pay $12 for the CD it is on, or $0.99 for the iTunes track, or even if I would be willing to pay $0.01 for it. It's perfectly consistent to want something that is free and not want it at a given cost.
If I'm a billionaire, I might be willing to spend $1,000 on a pretzel. If I make $17,000 a year I wouldn't. I wouldn't be willing to be $100 for it. I probably wouldn't even pay $5 for it. Why? It's not good enough to pay the price for it. None of this has any bearing on whether or not I want the pretzel. Ethics aside, since the worth of a product (the definition of "good enough to pay for") is completely subjective, it is not hypocritical to take something for free that I would not pay for.
Here's some good advice for anyone - unless you've actually done a person's job, shut the hell up.
It's not good advice, it's idiotic advice.
The idea that I should not be able to criticize something because I haven't done it is absurd. Are you a politician? Then shut the hell up about politics. In fact you shouldn't even vote, because voting against somebody includes an implicit criticism of the other. The police beat the shit out of somebody on your doorstep for no reason? Shut the hell up. You're not a cop, you don't know how stressful it is. Shut the hell up when your favorite sports teams are playing shitty, because you have no idea how hard their job is since you're almost certainly not a professional athlete. Your surgeon leaves a sponge inside your wife and she develops an infection and dies? Shut the hell up, you probably couldn't even get into medical school. You hire somebody to clean your pool but when he's done there's a layer of slime on top of the water? Shut the hell up, you're not a pool boy!
I could go on and on, but I'll simply say this: I do not need to have done something to be able to determine whether or not somebody who has did a good job. To imply otherwise is worthless defensiveness and/or foolishness.
Here's a funny one, from his "ZOMG! YOU'RE BLOCKED!" message:
Netscape users can simply set their browser to IE mode to continue to enjoy the site that sent you here. FireFox users can use Internet Explorer, Opera or Netscape (in IE mode) to access it.
Alternately, I could use the Equally Super Dooper Evil(tm) Firefox extension "User Agent Switcher" to masquerade as IE if I cared that much about his blocked content.
If you look at this, though, it looks mostly like a couple sets of judges arguing back and forth.
It looks to me like the story went like this:
Jury/Trial Judge: $5 billion in punitive damages.
Exxon: That's too much!
Appeals Court: It's too much.
Trial Judge: $4 billion in punitive damages.
Exxon: A Supreme Court decision says that's still too much.
Appeals Court: Reevaluate it.
Trial Judge: Fine. $4.5 billion then, bitches! Plus interest!
Exxon: You're dumb. It's too much.
Appeals Court: Yeah, you are dumb. $2.5 billion is the limit according to the recent Supreme Court limits on punitive damages.
Exxon: TOO MUCH!
Appeals Court: TOO BAD!
Exxon: We're telling the Supreme Court on you!
And that's where we are. Assuming they fail in their Supreme Court bid (and there's a fairly good chance that the USSC won't even choose to hear the case) the $2.5 billion judgment will stand.
It seems to me that the judges bickering back and forth is what is dragging this out. If the appeals court had simply set punitive damages themselves rather than telling the original judge to revise his estimates, or if the original judge hadn't taken that opportunity to actually RAISE the penalties when it's pretty clear that's not what the appeals court intended, their final appeal would probably have been over with and they'd either be paying or we'd be talking about something else.
Who throws money at a company making outrageous claims like that with out doing some homework to see if they even have a shred of proof to stand on?
Short-term investors who think there will be a lot of other people doing the same thing.
Buy low, sell high. As long as you get out before the collapse, there is still the potential to earn some money as long as it goes up a little for you. You can check out their stock price chart and see some low points and high points an investor could have made it in and out on.
Then everyone and their mother will start laying wire
Exactly what companies do you think are going to start massively laying wire? The phone companies (the what, two that are left)? Already have. Maybe cable companies? Already have. The... ummm... newspaper industry? Cereal manufacturers? Who do you think is going to jump in the ring and change the world?
The government has nothing to do with the high barrier to entry to the telecommunications market. In fact, aside from the bureaucracy of having to get the permission of basically every local government you want to lay wire for, I don't believe that there ARE any laws restricting competition. It is simply ungodly expensive to lay wire and purchase all the devices necessary to connect those wires, and it's economically inefficient to run two or three or 15 pieces of wire to the same places when only one gets used at a time.
That these new entrants would have no interest in serving rural customers if not forced to is certainly something to consider. So is whether or not these people all scrambling to run wire in your scenario would bother to connect with each other and under what terms. Ultimately these are issues that will require government intervention.
You should acquaint yourself with the term Natural Monopoly and its implications. These issues are complicated, particularly if you go back in history to the time when things were just starting out. There really isn't an answer that is both simple and good. It may be that there is no good answer at all.
This is one of the problems of the Free software movement. It's true to some degree of just about any group, but it seems that arrogance is just part of the religion with most Free software zealots.
Very few people here would claim that Linus is not a smart individual, but if he doesn't buy into every aspect of the dogma, it must be because he simply doesn't understand it. There's this "holier than thou" attitude about the whole thing that clearly if you disagree you're too stupid to understand the issue properly. It can't be that Linus simply has weighed the issues and disagrees with you; clearly he's ignorant and making stupid decisions that leave him so blind he simply can not make the "right" decision.
Fuck! Give me a break. You're free to disagree about it, but the attitude that any smart person would have to side with you is pure arrogance.
I like open source/Free software in general. I run linux. I run a number of these tools on my Windows box as well. I do not think it is the best solution to every problem. I do not like the GPLv3. I do believe there are a number of problems with the implementations if not the philosophy behind them. More than anything I believe that this sort of arrogance is probably the biggest obstacle to more widespread adoption. The bottom line is that nobody likes to deal with people who have attitudes like this.
But I guess that just makes me ignorant of somethingorother. The availability of the Kool-Aid, probably.
If a handful companies have a monopoly on distribution (and they do)
They did. It used to be that it cost an awful lot of money to record a record, manufacture records or cassettes or what have you, get these shipped nationwide to radio stations, etc. That is not true anymore.
I'm not saying any Joe can start their own iTunes, but just about any Joe can start their own website and offer up their songs to download for a price. If the market is working in the way we say it should, iTunes sites would start popping up to aggregate and centralize these efforts.
Radio is more tricky, but largely because radio wants it to be more tricky. There's nothing stopping them from letting people upload MP3s through their website or mailing a CD-R in or anything like that. There's also nothing stopping consumers from not supporting stations that let big companies decide what gets played. We have the technology to do streaming Internet radio stations and things like that. As access becomes more ubiquitous the need for stations drops even more, but it's up to consumers to embrace the alternatives.
The reason labels hate downloading so much is precisely because they're not necessary anymore.
Re:Round 1 over; Now for round 2
on
SCO Loses
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· Score: 3, Informative
There's a reason the legal system was supposed to guarantee a quick and speedy trial.
Blarg, you're the second person I've seen say that so far in this discussion.
You are guaranteed the ability to get your trial in a speedy manner. There is no guarantee that the trial itself will be speedy.
it is [. ..] even rarer are the test administered randomly
The truth is actually one step further: Courts have ruled that it is illegal to administer a test randomly.
Presumably, this is because there's no way to detect if something is actually random. "Why yes your honor, this was a random test. It's not my fault that the randomness happened to fall on all black people..."
Even at the "random police checkpoints," when they are waving people aside it is not random. It is done at a fixed interval. I don't believe there's anything stopping them from making that interval "every car," but that's not random either.
If someone makes you feel dumb, you don't vote for them.
I do.
I consider myself a fairly smart guy, but if somebody running for office makes me feel smarter than them, now that is where I have a problem.
We're talking about powerful people here. In the case of the president, we're talking about quite possibly the single most powerful man in the world. I want him to be a fucking genius. I want him to be the smartest man that ever lived. I want to believe that when he decides something, it is because he sat down, listened to equally smart people, considered both sides and chose what he thinks is the best option. Or if all options sucked, and it was feasible to do so, that he actually decided NOT to decide just so he can look busy.
Maybe it's naive to assume that politicians ever have done or ever will do that, but the absolute first thing I look for in any candidate is whether they come off as smart enough to do the job well. I don't want average Americans running the country. I want the best we can churn out. To borrow a line from an episode of West Wing, "before I look for anything, I look for a mind at work."
Being a strong leader is important. Standing by your convictions is important. More important than both, however, is where you are leading and what convictions you are standing by. It's not an absolute rule that more intelligent people will make better decisions, but it's probably better than 50-50 odds, and it's certainly a good starting point.
That other Americans apparently vote for idiots because they make them feel better about themselves is only sad.
What it is really about is nobody taking responsibility for themselves and always looking to blame others. It's tangentially about productivity.
The solution to students wasting so much time on Myspace that they don't learn anything is: Let them. They will either still pass the classes, in which case they seem to either already know what you're teaching or picked it up on their own, or more likely they will fail the classes and should be made to repeat them. You can be pretty sure they will take things more seriously the second time around.
Of course that will never happen, because we've somehow shifted the burden of learning from the students where it actually is to the teachers. If a kid failed because he spent all day on Myspace, irate parents would be in the teachers' office barking at them about how s/he let their child fail.
Teachers present information; any learning takes place on the other side. I certainly think that teachers who are interesting and engaging help people learn, but the idea that they should waste their time (and thus the time of other students in the class) forcing you to try to learn is silly. Motivation should be from the student himself and his or her family. The teachers should concentrate their effort on presenting the information well and assessing the learning that is taking place.
But the Britneys and the Metallicas of the world have gotten rich off of simplistic musical drivel which caters to the lowest common denominator
By which you mean that your musical tastes are superior to that of the vast majority of other people.
I don't like any Brittney Spears music, I like a handful of Metallica tunes. Nonetheless I am willing to admit that if they have a million people who want to listen to their albums and Obscure Artist G has five--regardless of whether I like his music or I feel he is the modern equivalent of Mozart--they should be making more money for it. Demand isn't a perfect metric for everything, but it seems wholly appropriate here, particularly when it is each individual's decision whether or not to give a particular artist their money.
If they're not going to write a new album or perform for me, why should I have to pay them
Because they have produced a good that you want. While I'm not going to go so far as the RIAA does and call it stealing, I don't see how people justify taking something without compensating the creator with specious arguments like "somebody else already paid them 10 years ago."
If it isn't worth the price according to whatever criteria you choose to apply, don't buy it. If it is, buy it. Not only does that compensate artists whose music you like, it will work to drive down music prices or eliminate poor artists if enough people agree with you.
It seems so simple to us because we are around these terms on slashdot constantly
It's not simple at all. Start a discussion here about under what circumstances you do or do not need to distribute source and you'll still get a 20 post long thread with people going back and forth about who's right and who's wrong, debating what the words used in the license mean, etc.
And people here should be some of the "experts" on the license.
We're talking about the United States here. I can't speak to every ballot in every jurisdiction, but in mine (Cook County, Illinois, but not Chicago) there were at least 50 and probably closer to 100 things to vote on. Not only that, but the questions were different; there was the standard "select one candidate" lists, there were "select N of the Y below" lists, and there was page after page of "retain or not retain" (mostly for judgeships).
How many people do you know who can keep 50-100 different tallies going on in their heads independently without making a mistake, while simultaneously verifying that the "vote for N" questions in fact have no more than N votes? I'd be surprised if you could (honestly) say you know even one such person, but if you did they're fairly unlikely to work for $10/hr. If by some miracle you found such patriotic souls it's even more unlikely that you'll find enough to man even a handful of districts in one state, much less the entire nation.
Continuing with your hand-count methodology, this forces some sort of paper tallying system. Without getting into the unwieldyness of having a piece of paper with 50-100 different boxes you can tally votes up in (each large enough to hold however many votes you'll need to hold), you introduce an extra delay of finding the proper box and writing it down, and another much larger delay at the end where people tally up each box. Which itself is exceptionally easy to make a mistake doing, from losing count to double-counting to not counting to bad handwriting to things I can't even think of right now.
An electronic but manual tallying system (some sort of spreadsheet) is better, but is still vulnerable to typos, computer illiteracy and training costs, data retention problems (those spreadsheets ARE auto-saving every 5 or 10 seconds right?), etc, and doesn't eliminate the delays of finding the proper place to make your tally.
I'm not sure electronic voting machines are the best solution, but there are really problems with every potential method I can think of. Hand counting is okay provided you trust the counters and are willing to accept some degree of human error, but it's definitely not a fast method at least for districts that have many offices and issues to vote on. It may be that "shut up and deal with the time it takes" is the best solution though.
Despite your smartass response, what you quoted doesn't really answer the question.
If you get a 1% on an exam five times and a 2% the next time, you can claim a lot of things: 100% improvement over previous models, your most efficient study method ever, a method that was more efficient than all previous methods (heck, if you got 6% on your 6th try you could claim more efficient than all previous methods combined), and a lot of other things.
They're all, basically, marketing-speak phrases carefully designed to hide the fact that the results still were not good. He didn't ask if this method was the most efficient method yet, or if it worked more efficiently than previous attempts--he asked if it was efficient.
when someone brags of breaking the law, it's newsworthy, even if it's only talk
Something that is purely talk is newsworthy? I'm sorry, but you have a very strange idea of newsworthy and not.
By that logic I assume the "I'm sorry, we're idiots, we were duped by a hacker who knew reporters were coming undercover to try to get them to confess" retraction would be equally newsworthy, right? Do you think that would even get aired? Or would they just let their first, wholly irresponsible piece of journalism stand and have whatever negative effects it has on that person's life?
If I say "I banged 50 women last night!" I don't get on the news. I don't even get on the news if I say "I banged the following 50 celebrities last night!" (at least until the lawsuits start flying). Do you think "I raped the following 50 celebrities last night" would get me on the news? Why not? I'm bragging about committing 50 very serious crimes.
Talk is talk. Responsible journalism is the search for the truth, not the search for a sensationalist headline. Using the video as a springboard into an investigation is one thing. Throwing it up on television without any proof that what they said is true is idiocy, and so far from newsworthy it blows my mind to think anybody could feel otherwise.
If I were a news director, I would fire reporters who pulled that kind of thing. Not because they did something illegal or even immoral, but because of what shitty journalism they just tried to feed me.
The quality of journalism has gone decidedly downhill in the past decade or two. I'm not willing to give them a free pass on that.
An online auction and a real, physical auction should probably be considered the same thing.
However, I could understand the argument if somebody wanted to make a distinction. While I suppose it's possible that you put up a webpage about your auction item in advance or something and just happen to get a phone call as the auctioneer is talking, it's not very likely.
In a real auction, your item is up on a table for a few minutes. (Well, it may sit on a table for a few days in advance but the auction itself lasts only a few minutes, and I think if you wanted to pull it off the table prior to the actual auction you'd be allowed to do so.) If there's a sale (above the reserve), it's over; they hand your item to the bidder. If not you walk away with your item. By contrast with eBay, the auction can last days and the physical item remains with you. This gives rise to situations like the article describes. Or more reasonably, it would give rise to a shop owner putting some merchandise up on ebay but ending up selling it from his shop first.
It's not FAIR, but I'm not sure it rises to the level of being a civil tort that the courts should intervene in.
Why do you think they forbid sexual preitors from having porn in their homes?
Because America has become a very conservative and frankly sexually repressed nation, and pedophiles are the boogeyman that government uses to justify absolutely anything they want. Terrorism is another.
I mean lets call that unconsitutional too and let the pervert down the street have picture of little kids on his computer after he gets early release for violating your neighbors daughter just to see your son about the right age to attract his attention.
Sounds good to me. Sex offenders should be permitted to have porn with no restrictions that any other group of adults (and frankly, probably even groups of children) do. We should not be legislating morality, and we should not be treating different groups of people worse than any others--even if they are the dreaded p-word. If you're complaining about early release, then you have a problem with the parole system and it has nothing at all to do with constitutionality, pedophilia or whether or not pictures of little kids should be illegal. (I presume you mean sexually explicit pictures--though you never say that, which I think just goes to show exactly how effective this particular boogeyman is.)
While we're at it, I think sex offender registries should be unconstitutional. I think the "sex offenders can't live within 100 miles of a school, library or park" laws should be unconstitutional as well. When you get out of jail, your punishment should be OVER. You've served your debt to society. If that's not true, then let's simply never release these people to begin with--though I think you're going to be hard-pressed to explain why they shouldn't be released when sex offenders' rate of recidivism isn't very high.
I don't want to see children abused sexually, so you can put the brakes on that particular ad hominem retort right now. I'm simply not willing to single out groups of people for harsher, increasingly worse and unending punishment because society happens to think their crimes are particularly bad, and I am not willing to trample anybody's rights after their release AT ALL, much less in a vain attempt to prevent recidivism.
More than anything we, as a society, need to figure out what the hell prison is for. Punishment and deterrence are well and good, but since the majority of criminals DO end up getting out eventually there needs to be much more focus on rehabilitation. And politicians need to stop throwing people under the bus to show they're "tough on crime."
Perhaps you don't realize the extent of liberalism in the way the American people embraced rushing to save the rest of the world in the 1940's.
Likely because we did no such thing. The vast majority of Americans wanted nothing to do with the war. We were, we thought, safely cocooned in our isolationism, and after the hundreds of thousands of sons we lost too few years ago to a European war we were largely content to let the rest of the world handle its own affairs. That is why we permitted the war to rage on for several years before we had anything to do with it. It's true that our president realized we had to get involved, and was steering public opinion in that way, but he was having a tough time of it. He had to invent programs such as the Lend-Lease act just so he could offer what aid he could.
We got involved when we were attacked. What you really saw was a groundswell of indignation and patriotism, rather than a concern for others. We got involved, we did a good job and turned the tide of the war. As we found out more and more about what was going on we were probably very happy that we did, but to imply Americans were just rising up to save the world is demonstrably false.
But when pushed, even those of us that are fat and comfortable will fight to stay free. It just takes a while to wake us up.
I disagree, or else we are very slow to wake up. We can hardly be bothered--to the tune of some 62% turnout--to vote when the elections have important implications on our freedom. Even last election, after the Patriot Act, and Guantanamo Bay, and domestic spying, and Valerie Plame, and even the Iraq War itself, retention for our Congressmen was nearly 90%. At least in my estimation we are already given up too much freedom with too little fight.
As far as the Founders go, I think they tended on the liberal side of things for their time. Many of their ideas were certainly revolutionary. It was, for example, the first time in history that, enshrined in a document (constitution), was the idea that a government's power came from the people it governs. Today that gets a resounding "duh," but it was liberal back then.
The problem is really our complacency. We are so very proud of our Constitution and our Founders and the ideas we introduced to the world--and rightly so, I think--that we focus on it and lose sight of the fact that other countries have made progress and we really haven't. It reminds me of the quote, "it only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea."
America has become a conservative nation, and I think that is a travesty.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, wrote Thomas Jefferson. We've done it a great disservice by providing only complacency and living in our past successes.
Authorities with a warrant can threaten you with jail to make you give up the keys
Coincidentally, I was just playing with TrueCrypt yesterday for virtually this reason.
With it, you can create a hidden volume within an encrypted volume, and if what they say is true, assuming you take precautions not to break it (which basically involves either not adding data to the outer volume or only doing so when you also explicitly mount the inner volume at the same time), there is no way to tell that there is a hidden volume at all.
If you're forced to give up your keys, you can give the key to the outer volume. Their recommendation is to store some private-looking files there, but ones you don't necessarily care about being seen in a case such as this. They see those files, but not the files in the hidden volume or even the existence of a hidden volume.
Slashdot Mirror
There isn't DRM on most iTunes tracks over Steve Jobs' apparent objections?
I'm glad they're pushing labels to get the DRM off entirely (their market position puts them in a fairly decent place to do so now), but I would still classify it in the "bending over when the RIAA asks them to" category.
For somebody going so far out of his way to bash the OP's intelligence, either your reading comprehension isn't anything to brag about either or you deliberately ignored anything that would get in the way of your insults.
No. Microsoft said that in most cases the performance hit is slight but that in some cases it is much greater and needs to be fixed.
It doesn't "invalidate that [empirical] evidence," but neither does it make it the statements of "an M$ spin shill." ("M$" is a fantastic example of your objectivity, by the way.) Rudimentary knowledge of logic would tell you that both are possible.
Furthermore, since you keep alluding to science as if some forum posts is scientific evidence, this is hardly an unbiased sample. If Persons A-Y experience exactly the slight performance degredation that Microsoft admits they will, they might not even notice it. Those who do might notice it and not care enough to go Googling for answers. It's precisely the people experiencing the large problems that Microsoft is also admitting who are likely to search and then bitch about how bad it is. They admit a problem and say they are working on a solution. Shame on them for releasing a buggy product, but at least they are working on fixing it.
If you "possess[ed] the ability to think for yourself" rather than blindly obeying the "everything Microsoft = the suxxors" anti-MS FUD philosophy, you would have seen that. So which is it: Are you a troll or a "future janitor?"
Dead-on accurate, but missing a piece: Most college students are also politically active. They don't, you know, VOTE or anything, but they take up a lot of causes. I'm not sure why this is the case--perhaps any psychologists or people in related fields out there can can tell us--but it is definitely so. The zeal usually fades as they get older; some would say it's beaten out of them by reality.
That's why this campaign failed. Most college students aren't going to be interested in talking about dorm decorating. What that page WILL do is attract people who have chosen (perhaps among other things) being anti-Walmart as one of their causes.
I'm not saying it's bad, I'm not saying they shouldn't do it and I'm not even saying they're not right -- I'm saying it was an idea doomed to exactly this type of failure as soon as it started, and your insight + issues involvement of college students is the explanation.
(For what it's worth, college is also a time that a lot of people begin working out and taking better care of themselves as well, among other entirely positive things. Again, not sure why that is so but it is.)
And then re-appears in a puff of logic once people understand basic economics.
The demand curve is formed by demand at a particular price point. The fact that I would download a song does not have any bearing on whether or not I would be willing to pay $12 for the CD it is on, or $0.99 for the iTunes track, or even if I would be willing to pay $0.01 for it. It's perfectly consistent to want something that is free and not want it at a given cost.
If I'm a billionaire, I might be willing to spend $1,000 on a pretzel. If I make $17,000 a year I wouldn't. I wouldn't be willing to be $100 for it. I probably wouldn't even pay $5 for it. Why? It's not good enough to pay the price for it. None of this has any bearing on whether or not I want the pretzel. Ethics aside, since the worth of a product (the definition of "good enough to pay for") is completely subjective, it is not hypocritical to take something for free that I would not pay for.
It's not good advice, it's idiotic advice.
The idea that I should not be able to criticize something because I haven't done it is absurd. Are you a politician? Then shut the hell up about politics. In fact you shouldn't even vote, because voting against somebody includes an implicit criticism of the other. The police beat the shit out of somebody on your doorstep for no reason? Shut the hell up. You're not a cop, you don't know how stressful it is. Shut the hell up when your favorite sports teams are playing shitty, because you have no idea how hard their job is since you're almost certainly not a professional athlete. Your surgeon leaves a sponge inside your wife and she develops an infection and dies? Shut the hell up, you probably couldn't even get into medical school. You hire somebody to clean your pool but when he's done there's a layer of slime on top of the water? Shut the hell up, you're not a pool boy!
I could go on and on, but I'll simply say this: I do not need to have done something to be able to determine whether or not somebody who has did a good job. To imply otherwise is worthless defensiveness and/or foolishness.
Here's a funny one, from his "ZOMG! YOU'RE BLOCKED!" message:
Alternately, I could use the Equally Super Dooper Evil(tm) Firefox extension "User Agent Switcher" to masquerade as IE if I cared that much about his blocked content.
Talk about futile.
If you look at this, though, it looks mostly like a couple sets of judges arguing back and forth.
It looks to me like the story went like this:
Jury/Trial Judge: $5 billion in punitive damages.
Exxon: That's too much!
Appeals Court: It's too much.
Trial Judge: $4 billion in punitive damages.
Exxon: A Supreme Court decision says that's still too much.
Appeals Court: Reevaluate it.
Trial Judge: Fine. $4.5 billion then, bitches! Plus interest!
Exxon: You're dumb. It's too much.
Appeals Court: Yeah, you are dumb. $2.5 billion is the limit according to the recent Supreme Court limits on punitive damages.
Exxon: TOO MUCH!
Appeals Court: TOO BAD!
Exxon: We're telling the Supreme Court on you!
And that's where we are. Assuming they fail in their Supreme Court bid (and there's a fairly good chance that the USSC won't even choose to hear the case) the $2.5 billion judgment will stand.
It seems to me that the judges bickering back and forth is what is dragging this out. If the appeals court had simply set punitive damages themselves rather than telling the original judge to revise his estimates, or if the original judge hadn't taken that opportunity to actually RAISE the penalties when it's pretty clear that's not what the appeals court intended, their final appeal would probably have been over with and they'd either be paying or we'd be talking about something else.
Short-term investors who think there will be a lot of other people doing the same thing.
Buy low, sell high. As long as you get out before the collapse, there is still the potential to earn some money as long as it goes up a little for you. You can check out their stock price chart and see some low points and high points an investor could have made it in and out on.
Exactly what companies do you think are going to start massively laying wire? The phone companies (the what, two that are left)? Already have. Maybe cable companies? Already have. The... ummm... newspaper industry? Cereal manufacturers? Who do you think is going to jump in the ring and change the world?
The government has nothing to do with the high barrier to entry to the telecommunications market. In fact, aside from the bureaucracy of having to get the permission of basically every local government you want to lay wire for, I don't believe that there ARE any laws restricting competition. It is simply ungodly expensive to lay wire and purchase all the devices necessary to connect those wires, and it's economically inefficient to run two or three or 15 pieces of wire to the same places when only one gets used at a time.
That these new entrants would have no interest in serving rural customers if not forced to is certainly something to consider. So is whether or not these people all scrambling to run wire in your scenario would bother to connect with each other and under what terms. Ultimately these are issues that will require government intervention.
You should acquaint yourself with the term Natural Monopoly and its implications. These issues are complicated, particularly if you go back in history to the time when things were just starting out. There really isn't an answer that is both simple and good. It may be that there is no good answer at all.
This is one of the problems of the Free software movement. It's true to some degree of just about any group, but it seems that arrogance is just part of the religion with most Free software zealots.
Very few people here would claim that Linus is not a smart individual, but if he doesn't buy into every aspect of the dogma, it must be because he simply doesn't understand it. There's this "holier than thou" attitude about the whole thing that clearly if you disagree you're too stupid to understand the issue properly. It can't be that Linus simply has weighed the issues and disagrees with you; clearly he's ignorant and making stupid decisions that leave him so blind he simply can not make the "right" decision.
Fuck! Give me a break. You're free to disagree about it, but the attitude that any smart person would have to side with you is pure arrogance.
I like open source/Free software in general. I run linux. I run a number of these tools on my Windows box as well. I do not think it is the best solution to every problem. I do not like the GPLv3. I do believe there are a number of problems with the implementations if not the philosophy behind them. More than anything I believe that this sort of arrogance is probably the biggest obstacle to more widespread adoption. The bottom line is that nobody likes to deal with people who have attitudes like this.
But I guess that just makes me ignorant of somethingorother. The availability of the Kool-Aid, probably.
They did. It used to be that it cost an awful lot of money to record a record, manufacture records or cassettes or what have you, get these shipped nationwide to radio stations, etc. That is not true anymore.
I'm not saying any Joe can start their own iTunes, but just about any Joe can start their own website and offer up their songs to download for a price. If the market is working in the way we say it should, iTunes sites would start popping up to aggregate and centralize these efforts.
Radio is more tricky, but largely because radio wants it to be more tricky. There's nothing stopping them from letting people upload MP3s through their website or mailing a CD-R in or anything like that. There's also nothing stopping consumers from not supporting stations that let big companies decide what gets played. We have the technology to do streaming Internet radio stations and things like that. As access becomes more ubiquitous the need for stations drops even more, but it's up to consumers to embrace the alternatives.
The reason labels hate downloading so much is precisely because they're not necessary anymore.
Blarg, you're the second person I've seen say that so far in this discussion.
You are guaranteed the ability to get your trial in a speedy manner. There is no guarantee that the trial itself will be speedy.
The truth is actually one step further: Courts have ruled that it is illegal to administer a test randomly.
Presumably, this is because there's no way to detect if something is actually random. "Why yes your honor, this was a random test. It's not my fault that the randomness happened to fall on all black people..."
Even at the "random police checkpoints," when they are waving people aside it is not random. It is done at a fixed interval. I don't believe there's anything stopping them from making that interval "every car," but that's not random either.
I do.
I consider myself a fairly smart guy, but if somebody running for office makes me feel smarter than them, now that is where I have a problem.
We're talking about powerful people here. In the case of the president, we're talking about quite possibly the single most powerful man in the world. I want him to be a fucking genius. I want him to be the smartest man that ever lived. I want to believe that when he decides something, it is because he sat down, listened to equally smart people, considered both sides and chose what he thinks is the best option. Or if all options sucked, and it was feasible to do so, that he actually decided NOT to decide just so he can look busy.
Maybe it's naive to assume that politicians ever have done or ever will do that, but the absolute first thing I look for in any candidate is whether they come off as smart enough to do the job well. I don't want average Americans running the country. I want the best we can churn out. To borrow a line from an episode of West Wing, "before I look for anything, I look for a mind at work."
Being a strong leader is important. Standing by your convictions is important. More important than both, however, is where you are leading and what convictions you are standing by. It's not an absolute rule that more intelligent people will make better decisions, but it's probably better than 50-50 odds, and it's certainly a good starting point.
That other Americans apparently vote for idiots because they make them feel better about themselves is only sad.
What it is really about is nobody taking responsibility for themselves and always looking to blame others. It's tangentially about productivity.
The solution to students wasting so much time on Myspace that they don't learn anything is: Let them. They will either still pass the classes, in which case they seem to either already know what you're teaching or picked it up on their own, or more likely they will fail the classes and should be made to repeat them. You can be pretty sure they will take things more seriously the second time around.
Of course that will never happen, because we've somehow shifted the burden of learning from the students where it actually is to the teachers. If a kid failed because he spent all day on Myspace, irate parents would be in the teachers' office barking at them about how s/he let their child fail.
Teachers present information; any learning takes place on the other side. I certainly think that teachers who are interesting and engaging help people learn, but the idea that they should waste their time (and thus the time of other students in the class) forcing you to try to learn is silly. Motivation should be from the student himself and his or her family. The teachers should concentrate their effort on presenting the information well and assessing the learning that is taking place.
Ignore him. The first article on his website is "Is it time for an ABM (Anyone But Microsoft) license?"
By which you mean that your musical tastes are superior to that of the vast majority of other people.
I don't like any Brittney Spears music, I like a handful of Metallica tunes. Nonetheless I am willing to admit that if they have a million people who want to listen to their albums and Obscure Artist G has five--regardless of whether I like his music or I feel he is the modern equivalent of Mozart--they should be making more money for it. Demand isn't a perfect metric for everything, but it seems wholly appropriate here, particularly when it is each individual's decision whether or not to give a particular artist their money.
Because they have produced a good that you want. While I'm not going to go so far as the RIAA does and call it stealing, I don't see how people justify taking something without compensating the creator with specious arguments like "somebody else already paid them 10 years ago."
If it isn't worth the price according to whatever criteria you choose to apply, don't buy it. If it is, buy it. Not only does that compensate artists whose music you like, it will work to drive down music prices or eliminate poor artists if enough people agree with you.
It's not simple at all. Start a discussion here about under what circumstances you do or do not need to distribute source and you'll still get a 20 post long thread with people going back and forth about who's right and who's wrong, debating what the words used in the license mean, etc.
And people here should be some of the "experts" on the license.
We're talking about the United States here. I can't speak to every ballot in every jurisdiction, but in mine (Cook County, Illinois, but not Chicago) there were at least 50 and probably closer to 100 things to vote on. Not only that, but the questions were different; there was the standard "select one candidate" lists, there were "select N of the Y below" lists, and there was page after page of "retain or not retain" (mostly for judgeships).
How many people do you know who can keep 50-100 different tallies going on in their heads independently without making a mistake, while simultaneously verifying that the "vote for N" questions in fact have no more than N votes? I'd be surprised if you could (honestly) say you know even one such person, but if you did they're fairly unlikely to work for $10/hr. If by some miracle you found such patriotic souls it's even more unlikely that you'll find enough to man even a handful of districts in one state, much less the entire nation.
Continuing with your hand-count methodology, this forces some sort of paper tallying system. Without getting into the unwieldyness of having a piece of paper with 50-100 different boxes you can tally votes up in (each large enough to hold however many votes you'll need to hold), you introduce an extra delay of finding the proper box and writing it down, and another much larger delay at the end where people tally up each box. Which itself is exceptionally easy to make a mistake doing, from losing count to double-counting to not counting to bad handwriting to things I can't even think of right now.
An electronic but manual tallying system (some sort of spreadsheet) is better, but is still vulnerable to typos, computer illiteracy and training costs, data retention problems (those spreadsheets ARE auto-saving every 5 or 10 seconds right?), etc, and doesn't eliminate the delays of finding the proper place to make your tally.
I'm not sure electronic voting machines are the best solution, but there are really problems with every potential method I can think of. Hand counting is okay provided you trust the counters and are willing to accept some degree of human error, but it's definitely not a fast method at least for districts that have many offices and issues to vote on. It may be that "shut up and deal with the time it takes" is the best solution though.
Despite your smartass response, what you quoted doesn't really answer the question.
If you get a 1% on an exam five times and a 2% the next time, you can claim a lot of things: 100% improvement over previous models, your most efficient study method ever, a method that was more efficient than all previous methods (heck, if you got 6% on your 6th try you could claim more efficient than all previous methods combined), and a lot of other things.
They're all, basically, marketing-speak phrases carefully designed to hide the fact that the results still were not good. He didn't ask if this method was the most efficient method yet, or if it worked more efficiently than previous attempts--he asked if it was efficient.
Something that is purely talk is newsworthy? I'm sorry, but you have a very strange idea of newsworthy and not.
By that logic I assume the "I'm sorry, we're idiots, we were duped by a hacker who knew reporters were coming undercover to try to get them to confess" retraction would be equally newsworthy, right? Do you think that would even get aired? Or would they just let their first, wholly irresponsible piece of journalism stand and have whatever negative effects it has on that person's life?
If I say "I banged 50 women last night!" I don't get on the news. I don't even get on the news if I say "I banged the following 50 celebrities last night!" (at least until the lawsuits start flying). Do you think "I raped the following 50 celebrities last night" would get me on the news? Why not? I'm bragging about committing 50 very serious crimes.
Talk is talk. Responsible journalism is the search for the truth, not the search for a sensationalist headline. Using the video as a springboard into an investigation is one thing. Throwing it up on television without any proof that what they said is true is idiocy, and so far from newsworthy it blows my mind to think anybody could feel otherwise.
If I were a news director, I would fire reporters who pulled that kind of thing. Not because they did something illegal or even immoral, but because of what shitty journalism they just tried to feed me.
The quality of journalism has gone decidedly downhill in the past decade or two. I'm not willing to give them a free pass on that.
An online auction and a real, physical auction should probably be considered the same thing.
However, I could understand the argument if somebody wanted to make a distinction. While I suppose it's possible that you put up a webpage about your auction item in advance or something and just happen to get a phone call as the auctioneer is talking, it's not very likely.
In a real auction, your item is up on a table for a few minutes. (Well, it may sit on a table for a few days in advance but the auction itself lasts only a few minutes, and I think if you wanted to pull it off the table prior to the actual auction you'd be allowed to do so.) If there's a sale (above the reserve), it's over; they hand your item to the bidder. If not you walk away with your item. By contrast with eBay, the auction can last days and the physical item remains with you. This gives rise to situations like the article describes. Or more reasonably, it would give rise to a shop owner putting some merchandise up on ebay but ending up selling it from his shop first.
It's not FAIR, but I'm not sure it rises to the level of being a civil tort that the courts should intervene in.
Because America has become a very conservative and frankly sexually repressed nation, and pedophiles are the boogeyman that government uses to justify absolutely anything they want. Terrorism is another.
Sounds good to me. Sex offenders should be permitted to have porn with no restrictions that any other group of adults (and frankly, probably even groups of children) do. We should not be legislating morality, and we should not be treating different groups of people worse than any others--even if they are the dreaded p-word. If you're complaining about early release, then you have a problem with the parole system and it has nothing at all to do with constitutionality, pedophilia or whether or not pictures of little kids should be illegal. (I presume you mean sexually explicit pictures--though you never say that, which I think just goes to show exactly how effective this particular boogeyman is.)
While we're at it, I think sex offender registries should be unconstitutional. I think the "sex offenders can't live within 100 miles of a school, library or park" laws should be unconstitutional as well. When you get out of jail, your punishment should be OVER. You've served your debt to society. If that's not true, then let's simply never release these people to begin with--though I think you're going to be hard-pressed to explain why they shouldn't be released when sex offenders' rate of recidivism isn't very high.
I don't want to see children abused sexually, so you can put the brakes on that particular ad hominem retort right now. I'm simply not willing to single out groups of people for harsher, increasingly worse and unending punishment because society happens to think their crimes are particularly bad, and I am not willing to trample anybody's rights after their release AT ALL, much less in a vain attempt to prevent recidivism.
More than anything we, as a society, need to figure out what the hell prison is for. Punishment and deterrence are well and good, but since the majority of criminals DO end up getting out eventually there needs to be much more focus on rehabilitation. And politicians need to stop throwing people under the bus to show they're "tough on crime."
Likely because we did no such thing. The vast majority of Americans wanted nothing to do with the war. We were, we thought, safely cocooned in our isolationism, and after the hundreds of thousands of sons we lost too few years ago to a European war we were largely content to let the rest of the world handle its own affairs. That is why we permitted the war to rage on for several years before we had anything to do with it. It's true that our president realized we had to get involved, and was steering public opinion in that way, but he was having a tough time of it. He had to invent programs such as the Lend-Lease act just so he could offer what aid he could.
We got involved when we were attacked. What you really saw was a groundswell of indignation and patriotism, rather than a concern for others. We got involved, we did a good job and turned the tide of the war. As we found out more and more about what was going on we were probably very happy that we did, but to imply Americans were just rising up to save the world is demonstrably false.
I disagree, or else we are very slow to wake up. We can hardly be bothered--to the tune of some 62% turnout--to vote when the elections have important implications on our freedom. Even last election, after the Patriot Act, and Guantanamo Bay, and domestic spying, and Valerie Plame, and even the Iraq War itself, retention for our Congressmen was nearly 90%. At least in my estimation we are already given up too much freedom with too little fight.
As far as the Founders go, I think they tended on the liberal side of things for their time. Many of their ideas were certainly revolutionary. It was, for example, the first time in history that, enshrined in a document (constitution), was the idea that a government's power came from the people it governs. Today that gets a resounding "duh," but it was liberal back then.
The problem is really our complacency. We are so very proud of our Constitution and our Founders and the ideas we introduced to the world--and rightly so, I think--that we focus on it and lose sight of the fact that other countries have made progress and we really haven't. It reminds me of the quote, "it only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea."
America has become a conservative nation, and I think that is a travesty.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, wrote Thomas Jefferson. We've done it a great disservice by providing only complacency and living in our past successes.
Coincidentally, I was just playing with TrueCrypt yesterday for virtually this reason.
With it, you can create a hidden volume within an encrypted volume, and if what they say is true, assuming you take precautions not to break it (which basically involves either not adding data to the outer volume or only doing so when you also explicitly mount the inner volume at the same time), there is no way to tell that there is a hidden volume at all.
If you're forced to give up your keys, you can give the key to the outer volume. Their recommendation is to store some private-looking files there, but ones you don't necessarily care about being seen in a case such as this. They see those files, but not the files in the hidden volume or even the existence of a hidden volume.