They'll quickly realize that the loss in revenue caused by the huge drop in sales is not worth it in the least, and the price will come right back down.
Or more likely, they'd blame the drop in sales on piracy and direct their wholly-owned subsidiary members of Congress to push yet more ridiculous legislation through in support of their dying business model at the expense of the citizenry.
From TFA: Official sources said Google Earth would distort building plans by adding structures where none existed or masking certain aspects of a facility. This could be done without attracting attention to such establishments, which range from laboratories, mines, military sites, space and atomic centres and residences of high-profile VVIPs.
Which shows are available on TV isn't something that concerns me enough to be willing to pay $150 or more per year just to exert some miniscule amount of influence.
But this isn't a problem with Thompson per se, it's a problem with a large segment of the public accepting what he says without applying any critical thought to it. Certainly Thompson's disbarment should serve as a very public indication that the guy was totally off-base, but that won't change the minds of people that don't know how to apply any kind of analysis to what they're told. For those people that support his point of view, successful action against him will be seen merely as a victory by the evil forces he was ranting against.
The difference is that he's before the FL Supreme Court now, the same people that just two months ago fired a renegade district judge for egregious behavior when no one else would. They don't seem to tolerate such misbehavior very much, especially when presented with a record like Thompson's. Here's hoping he's forced to find an alternate career.:-D
That's actually a very appealing idea, but I suspect the number of us Myth-ers is small enough to be statistically insignificant, and wouldn't result in enough money per participant to make it worth the effort.
Sure feel free to get up in arms about marketing companies knowing what an anonymous hashed identity is watching.
I get up in arms because TiVo expects me to PAY for the privilege of giving them commercially valuable information. "Oh, but they give you program listings!" Yeah, so does Zap2It, but they only ask for a couple of brief survey questions every few months and otherwise get no information from me. What's TiVo's problem with that?
Please note, that the supermarkets do exactly the same thing.
You're mostly right, except that such stores penalize customers that refuse to give them usable data by charging artificially higher prices. I refuse to patronize supermarkets that implement such programs, and fortunately in my area it's not hard to find a supermarket that doesn't. I'm not necessarily against the idea of selling data on buying habits, but I'll be damned if I have to pay extra in addition to giving them data.
I'm in total agreement. I thought it was common knowledge from the start that this was part of TiVo's business model, and is a large part of the reason I've never entertained a TiVo purchase. I just can't see paying a monthly fee to provide a company with data that they're going to turn around and sell. I'll stay with my MythTV system, thanks, and the more-than-reasonable terms that Zap2It offers for providing program listings.
20. REVOCATION. We, in our sole discretion, reserve the right to deny, cancel, suspend, transfer or modify any domain name registration to correct a mistake, protect the integrity and stability of the company and any applicable registry, to comply with any applicable laws, government rules, or requirements, requests of law enforcement, in compliance with any dispute resolution process, or to avoid any liability, civil or criminal. You agree that we shall not be liable to you for loss or damages that may result from our refusal to register or cancel, suspend, transfer or modify your domain name registration. (emphasis mine)
I just thought I'd point that out, as it sounds to me like they're reserving the right to drop you even if they think they might get sued over something you did. On the positive side, the word "maintain" isn't in the list in the last sentence.
I've spent the past few months working with a few different phones in an Asterisk environment. First off, I agree with your assessment of the Zyxel - the P2000W looks pretty but is dogshit when it comes to being functional. I've also worked with Ascom i75 phones, and have only a slightly higher opinion of them. Fortunately the UTStarcom phones work and they work well. They associate and register quickly, sound quality is okay, and the battery life isn't too bad. I think they'd fit your uptime requirements, as I've often left them on standby for a few days at a time, and while I don't spend much time on them, it seems they hold up pretty well on talk time. I've never had one lock up on me, and they've gotten dropped a few times with no apparent ill effect. It's also a tiny little thing that fits easily in a shirt pocket
Okay, now here's what I don't like:
Ping response times are ridiculously long (sometimes as long as 10 seconds), although it seems WiFi SIP phones in general are like that. You'll need to adjust your "qualify" statements in sip.conf to account for that or else you'll find Asterisk constantly loses the corresponding extension.
Web interface is very slow
Display is *way* too small, particularly if you're trying to do your SIP setup via the phone itself - you often can't even tell which parameter you're selecting because there aren't enough characters visible on the display
Keypad is too small, making it really easy to fat-finger stuff
Parts of the UI are non-intuitive/clumsy
With all of that said, I'd consider one for personal use if I was in the market for such a beast. While there's plenty I don't like about it, it's always worked and that's the fundamental thing for me.
I agree with the sentiment that online voting is just asking for problems, and regarding the parent post, it points to the need for a [-1, Unintelligible] mod selection on Slashdot, particularly for the post that responded to yours.
barring someone from a job based on how they voted would be just as illegal as barring them based on religion, gender, origin or any other personal trait that doesn't directly affect their performance on the job
And just like religious, gender, racial, age, or any other illegal discrimination, it'd still be pretty easy to get away with. That's not to say that what you suggest wouldn't be good in an ideal world, but this isn't an ideal world. About the only workable way I can think of offhand for maintaining voting records would be to create a pair of keys, with one given to the government and one to the voter. Together, the keys could be used to reconstruct the vote so that the voter could verify it, but separately they'd be useless. The government key would have to remain secret, so the voter would have to work in concert with a poll worker in private to validate his vote. Even then, there's not much preventing someone else from taking the voter's key and checking the vote themselves.
If nobody knows about these bills, then they are probably not important, and don't deserve to be made into laws to begin with.
That's a dangerous assumption, and pretty much eliminates any Federal appropriations for anything that isn't widely known about. ARPANET wasn't very widely known among the public back in the 70's, but I think you'd agree that it could hardly be considered unimportant.
Nothing in our laws requires the T.V. news to inform us of the election results within 15 minutes of the polls closing.
I would think it'd actually be beneficial for the process to prohibit any reporting of election results until after *all* polls are in the affected area have closed. The free availability of information is such now that people's votes can be easily swayed by how a particular candidate is performing at the polls at that moment, and people will sometimes vote for their second-choice candidate if it appears their first choice isn't performing well.
When I leave somewhere, I almost always give two weeks' notice, but that's more for the benefit of my co-workers as opposed to the company. At one job, I'd been there for approximately five weeks when the lead engineer quit with no notice and I was expected to pick up the ball and run with it - not fun.
As I said above, if the Constitution, the way the ACLU interprets it, does not give the right to bear arms, then why would they fight for that right?
Perhaps because the Constitution *gives* no rights at all, but rather clearly spells out the limits of what the government is allowed to do. Given that gun control isn't enumerated among those governmental powers, there's no good argument for *any* gun control, at the federal level at least. Just the same, let's look at the Bill of Rights, setting aside the Second Amendment for a moment:
Amendment I - Freedom of speech & press
Amendment III - No quartering of troops
Amendment IV - No unreasonable search/seizure
Amendment V - No forced self-incrimination, no testimony against oneself, eminent domain
Amendment VI - Right to speedy & public trial, right to cross-examine witnesses, right to counsel
Amendment VII - Right of trial by jury
Amendment VIII - No excessive bail or cruel & unusual punishment
Amendment XI - Enumeration of rights not to be construed to deny others
Amendment X - Powers not delegated to be reserved to states or to the people
Now, every single one of those outlines individual rights, and the Tenth additionally mentions the states. It's not consistent that the framers would have intended the Second Amendment to refer to the only collective right in a surrounding sea of individual rights, and there's no evidence to my knowledge in the Federalist Papers or any of the other documents of the period to indicate that it was intended to be anything other than an individual right. For those that point toward the National Guard as the "organized militia", I'd say that any organization that is in part funded by the federal government, and whose members the federal government can send halfway around the world to fight in an undeclared war against another country that represents little to no danger to the U.S., on their own soil, simply doesn't qualify as such. The National Guard is a militia, but it's a select militia, in real terms no different than a standing army under the control of the government, and certainly not a militia organized and maintained by the people.
This article goes into a bit more depth regarding U.S. vs. Miller for those that think the decision unquestionably represents a Supreme Court interpretation of the Second Amendment as being a collective right.
I don't get all upset when somebody drives by in a 1950's Studebaker all tricked out.
Neither do I, but it's annoying when you see someone selling some car with a non-descript frame/powertrain with a new body and trying to represent it as a Studebaker.:-) The Amiga was a great machine (I still have, er, more than one) and I'll always have a fond place in my heart for it, but what's being sold now isn't an Amiga as far as I'm concerned. Consequently, I really don't have much interest in exploring it as anything more than a curiosity.
But when you are in a partnership*, you are personally liable.
I'm aware of that, which is part of the reason that I do business as a corporation instead of as myself. Looking back on my post, I wasn't very clear in what I was trying to say - the first two sentences of my post should have been in a separate paragraph, as they addressed a situation where the limited liability offered by a corporation would not be available. The remainder of the post applied to things as they are now, where corporations do exist as separate entities that protect the shareholders' assets.
I was trying to say that the possibility of corporate dissolution as a potential punishment for corporate misdeeds might act as an incentive for corps to follow the law while still providing limited liability for the shareholders. Sorry for the confusion.:-)
There wouldn't be a lot of people willing to invest in those partnerships.
I agree absolutely that this would be the case, but I don't think the market would be totally bereft of people willing to assume the risk for a big payoff. I do think that it would result in fewer but better quality products (so as to avoid lawsuits) and better conformance with the law. As it is now, many corporations are willing to break the law simply because after the fines are paid there's still a net gain. There's no financial incentive to obey the law in many cases. Threatening the corporation with dissolution and the shareholders with the unconditional loss of their investment under our current system would go a long way towards keeping them in line. Let's see how much Bill Gates is willing to let Microsoft strong-arm people when he's faced with the possibility that his shares could just vanish if the company doesn't abide by the law.
They're penny stocks to begin with, so it's unlikely that the company would be suffering greatly once the stock price corrects itself. On the contrary, if they have any outstanding shares left to sell after the pump, they're probably welcoming the influx of cash.
Slashdot Mirror
17 U.S.C. 115 compulsory royalties ($.91) low end cost.
Why are indie artists paying royalties on their own work?
They'll quickly realize that the loss in revenue caused by the huge drop in sales is not worth it in the least, and the price will come right back down.
Or more likely, they'd blame the drop in sales on piracy and direct their wholly-owned subsidiary members of Congress to push yet more ridiculous legislation through in support of their dying business model at the expense of the citizenry.
From TFA: Official sources said Google Earth would distort building plans by adding structures where none existed or masking certain aspects of a facility. This could be done without attracting attention to such establishments, which range from laboratories, mines, military sites, space and atomic centres and residences of high-profile VVIPs.
Which shows are available on TV isn't something that concerns me enough to be willing to pay $150 or more per year just to exert some miniscule amount of influence.
But this isn't a problem with Thompson per se, it's a problem with a large segment of the public accepting what he says without applying any critical thought to it. Certainly Thompson's disbarment should serve as a very public indication that the guy was totally off-base, but that won't change the minds of people that don't know how to apply any kind of analysis to what they're told. For those people that support his point of view, successful action against him will be seen merely as a victory by the evil forces he was ranting against.
He won't get disbarred unfortunately
:-D
The difference is that he's before the FL Supreme Court now, the same people that just two months ago fired a renegade district judge for egregious behavior when no one else would. They don't seem to tolerate such misbehavior very much, especially when presented with a record like Thompson's. Here's hoping he's forced to find an alternate career.
That's actually a very appealing idea, but I suspect the number of us Myth-ers is small enough to be statistically insignificant, and wouldn't result in enough money per participant to make it worth the effort.
I'm just going to add this to the list of reasons I prefer MythTV. My device, my control, my privacy.
;-)
And a automatic commercial-skip function that works remarkably well.
Sure feel free to get up in arms about marketing companies knowing what an anonymous hashed identity is watching.
I get up in arms because TiVo expects me to PAY for the privilege of giving them commercially valuable information. "Oh, but they give you program listings!" Yeah, so does Zap2It, but they only ask for a couple of brief survey questions every few months and otherwise get no information from me. What's TiVo's problem with that?
Please note, that the supermarkets do exactly the same thing.
You're mostly right, except that such stores penalize customers that refuse to give them usable data by charging artificially higher prices. I refuse to patronize supermarkets that implement such programs, and fortunately in my area it's not hard to find a supermarket that doesn't. I'm not necessarily against the idea of selling data on buying habits, but I'll be damned if I have to pay extra in addition to giving them data.
There is nothing to see here
I'm in total agreement. I thought it was common knowledge from the start that this was part of TiVo's business model, and is a large part of the reason I've never entertained a TiVo purchase. I just can't see paying a monthly fee to provide a company with data that they're going to turn around and sell. I'll stay with my MythTV system, thanks, and the more-than-reasonable terms that Zap2It offers for providing program listings.
From iPower's domain registration ToS:
20. REVOCATION. We, in our sole discretion, reserve the right to deny, cancel, suspend, transfer or modify any domain name registration to correct a mistake, protect the integrity and stability of the company and any applicable registry, to comply with any applicable laws, government rules, or requirements, requests of law enforcement, in compliance with any dispute resolution process, or to avoid any liability, civil or criminal. You agree that we shall not be liable to you for loss or damages that may result from our refusal to register or cancel, suspend, transfer or modify your domain name registration. (emphasis mine)
I just thought I'd point that out, as it sounds to me like they're reserving the right to drop you even if they think they might get sued over something you did. On the positive side, the word "maintain" isn't in the list in the last sentence.
Lest there be any confusion, the Zyxel P2000W that I referred to in less-than-glowing terms was the newer v2 phone. :-)
Okay, now here's what I don't like:
- Ping response times are ridiculously long (sometimes as long as 10 seconds), although it seems WiFi SIP phones in general are like that. You'll need to adjust your "qualify" statements in sip.conf to account for that or else you'll find Asterisk constantly loses the corresponding extension.
- Web interface is very slow
- Display is *way* too small, particularly if you're trying to do your SIP setup via the phone itself - you often can't even tell which parameter you're selecting because there aren't enough characters visible on the display
- Keypad is too small, making it really easy to fat-finger stuff
- Parts of the UI are non-intuitive/clumsy
With all of that said, I'd consider one for personal use if I was in the market for such a beast. While there's plenty I don't like about it, it's always worked and that's the fundamental thing for me.I agree with the sentiment that online voting is just asking for problems, and regarding the parent post, it points to the need for a [-1, Unintelligible] mod selection on Slashdot, particularly for the post that responded to yours.
barring someone from a job based on how they voted would be just as illegal as barring them based on religion, gender, origin or any other personal trait that doesn't directly affect their performance on the job
And just like religious, gender, racial, age, or any other illegal discrimination, it'd still be pretty easy to get away with. That's not to say that what you suggest wouldn't be good in an ideal world, but this isn't an ideal world. About the only workable way I can think of offhand for maintaining voting records would be to create a pair of keys, with one given to the government and one to the voter. Together, the keys could be used to reconstruct the vote so that the voter could verify it, but separately they'd be useless. The government key would have to remain secret, so the voter would have to work in concert with a poll worker in private to validate his vote. Even then, there's not much preventing someone else from taking the voter's key and checking the vote themselves.
If nobody knows about these bills, then they are probably not important, and don't deserve to be made into laws to begin with.
That's a dangerous assumption, and pretty much eliminates any Federal appropriations for anything that isn't widely known about. ARPANET wasn't very widely known among the public back in the 70's, but I think you'd agree that it could hardly be considered unimportant.
Nothing in our laws requires the T.V. news to inform us of the election results within 15 minutes of the polls closing.
I would think it'd actually be beneficial for the process to prohibit any reporting of election results until after *all* polls are in the affected area have closed. The free availability of information is such now that people's votes can be easily swayed by how a particular candidate is performing at the polls at that moment, and people will sometimes vote for their second-choice candidate if it appears their first choice isn't performing well.
They sound like something out of a Monty Python skit!
So does that mean I can quit for having excessive spam in my inbox? I was told it's not got much spam, but I was lied to.
When I leave somewhere, I almost always give two weeks' notice, but that's more for the benefit of my co-workers as opposed to the company. At one job, I'd been there for approximately five weeks when the lead engineer quit with no notice and I was expected to pick up the ball and run with it - not fun.
As I said above, if the Constitution, the way the ACLU interprets it, does not give the right to bear arms, then why would they fight for that right?
Perhaps because the Constitution *gives* no rights at all, but rather clearly spells out the limits of what the government is allowed to do. Given that gun control isn't enumerated among those governmental powers, there's no good argument for *any* gun control, at the federal level at least. Just the same, let's look at the Bill of Rights, setting aside the Second Amendment for a moment:
Amendment I - Freedom of speech & press
Amendment III - No quartering of troops
Amendment IV - No unreasonable search/seizure
Amendment V - No forced self-incrimination, no testimony against oneself, eminent domain
Amendment VI - Right to speedy & public trial, right to cross-examine witnesses, right to counsel
Amendment VII - Right of trial by jury
Amendment VIII - No excessive bail or cruel & unusual punishment
Amendment XI - Enumeration of rights not to be construed to deny others
Amendment X - Powers not delegated to be reserved to states or to the people
Now, every single one of those outlines individual rights, and the Tenth additionally mentions the states. It's not consistent that the framers would have intended the Second Amendment to refer to the only collective right in a surrounding sea of individual rights, and there's no evidence to my knowledge in the Federalist Papers or any of the other documents of the period to indicate that it was intended to be anything other than an individual right. For those that point toward the National Guard as the "organized militia", I'd say that any organization that is in part funded by the federal government, and whose members the federal government can send halfway around the world to fight in an undeclared war against another country that represents little to no danger to the U.S., on their own soil, simply doesn't qualify as such. The National Guard is a militia, but it's a select militia, in real terms no different than a standing army under the control of the government, and certainly not a militia organized and maintained by the people.
This article goes into a bit more depth regarding U.S. vs. Miller for those that think the decision unquestionably represents a Supreme Court interpretation of the Second Amendment as being a collective right.
I don't get all upset when somebody drives by in a 1950's Studebaker all tricked out.
:-) The Amiga was a great machine (I still have, er, more than one) and I'll always have a fond place in my heart for it, but what's being sold now isn't an Amiga as far as I'm concerned. Consequently, I really don't have much interest in exploring it as anything more than a curiosity.
Neither do I, but it's annoying when you see someone selling some car with a non-descript frame/powertrain with a new body and trying to represent it as a Studebaker.
But when you are in a partnership*, you are personally liable.
:-)
I'm aware of that, which is part of the reason that I do business as a corporation instead of as myself. Looking back on my post, I wasn't very clear in what I was trying to say - the first two sentences of my post should have been in a separate paragraph, as they addressed a situation where the limited liability offered by a corporation would not be available. The remainder of the post applied to things as they are now, where corporations do exist as separate entities that protect the shareholders' assets.
I was trying to say that the possibility of corporate dissolution as a potential punishment for corporate misdeeds might act as an incentive for corps to follow the law while still providing limited liability for the shareholders. Sorry for the confusion.
There wouldn't be a lot of people willing to invest in those partnerships.
I agree absolutely that this would be the case, but I don't think the market would be totally bereft of people willing to assume the risk for a big payoff. I do think that it would result in fewer but better quality products (so as to avoid lawsuits) and better conformance with the law. As it is now, many corporations are willing to break the law simply because after the fines are paid there's still a net gain. There's no financial incentive to obey the law in many cases. Threatening the corporation with dissolution and the shareholders with the unconditional loss of their investment under our current system would go a long way towards keeping them in line. Let's see how much Bill Gates is willing to let Microsoft strong-arm people when he's faced with the possibility that his shares could just vanish if the company doesn't abide by the law.
For now you can. No telling what the RIAA has up its sleeve in that regard, though.
They're penny stocks to begin with, so it's unlikely that the company would be suffering greatly once the stock price corrects itself. On the contrary, if they have any outstanding shares left to sell after the pump, they're probably welcoming the influx of cash.