Yes, yes, simulated annealing too, I've worked with all these things. They don't count because they involve the computer either being taught or else doing something entirely or at least largely random and seeing how it works out. I don't really want my car having no clue what to do when it hits something unexpected and doing something totally insane.
The point of my comment is that computers cannot react well to unexpected circumstances, and I still hold to this.
Well, this assumes that computers can actually react quicker under driving circumstances than people can. Or for that matter that they can react well at all. The big difference between people and PC's(aside from the fact that pc's lack the processing capability to handle visual, auditory, tactile, etc data very well) is that PC's can't do anything they haven't been told how to do and people can. Perhaps not well, but they can react and maybe make a bad situation slightly better.
I don't really know, I have less experience than most of my coworkers, but I have a degree and they don't. I find that I'm catching on at a much faster rate so that while I'm in some ways still less experienced, my knowledge will catch up to theirs very quickly.
There's a major problem with this argument, which is to say that it doesn't really work that way in real life, at least not for coffee shops.
In my experience there are essentially three types of coffee drinkers, people who take coffee away, people who eat, and people who sit.
The take away crowd is usually an interval crowd, you either have lines out the door or you have none of them, they show up in the early mornings before work, during staff breaks etc, they are high turnover.
The people who eat are largely a lunch time and occasionally breakfast or dinner crowd and go to cafes. The amount of time they can spend is usually restricted by their schedules. They spend a reasonable amount of money because they buy lunch as well as coffee.
The remainder of customers tend to sit, whether they use wi-fi, or read, or study, or chat with friends. They spend a reasonable amount of time, and reasonably little money though they are sometimes quite regular.
Your average coffee shop is really only looking at two of these groups as cafes are really almost a seperate type of business. The take away group is the highest turnover/highest profit group, but it doesn't really use the seating so it doesn't interfere with those who do.
Now you might ask why does a coffee shop have seats if the highest turnover group doesn't need them. The reason is that there is a lot of gap between the high turnover groups. The purpose of the sitting group is to bring in enough money to cover the operating costs of keeping the place open, and hopefully make a bit of money on top. So even if you only pay $2.50 for a three hour stop, it doesn't really matter so long as the operating costs are covered.
Or a better question, how much IT productivity is lost trying to find the user who had the problem in the first place. I've had a job sitting in my queue for three weeks now because I can't get the user to take half an hour to actually work out if they got what they wanted. I'd close it out, but I have to give it to another user and they won't tell me which one.
It sort of depends, I haven't seen the site in question, but if he says "look here here's some pirated music, go get yourself some" or something to that effect maybe this argument is valid, but what if he linked to the site for another purpose?
Unless the links were labeled get music from here, you can't really establish his intent in placing the links so you can't really say he was guilting of abetting piracy. If I distract a guard so you can rob a bank I'm abetting you. However if I fall down and injure myself and a guard comes to help me, allowing you to rob the bank, am I still guilty?
I agree with some of this, but it's not really fair to base communal interaction on this sort of society because it's a very insular and homogenious society.
Every member of the Amish community is very much like every other member, religiously, ethnically, even gentically(hence this article). Those who disagree with their way of life probably leave the society, there is little conflict, but there is little difference also.
The big problem I have is not so much the $15/month it's that you have to pay $15/month(US dollars mind you so more for some of us), but you've got to buy the game first.
If I want a copy of WoW it'll cost me approximately $80, that's without actually being able to play the game, just to buy the software. Personally if I'm going to pay to play I don't think I should have to buy the game to start with, give me a minimum sign up time so you make some money, but don't make me pay you that much money just to have the right to pay you more money to actually play the game.
While I agree with you, this isn't really an applicable analogy for the case in question. This isn't someone breaking into your computer, this is something using a computer you lent them for additional purposes. They aren't invading your privacy, or going somewhere they aren't supposed to go, they are merely doing things with what you gave them that you don't like.
Technically you could argue that breaking this security involves learning, which is assumedly what these laptops were provided for in the first place, so it's not even really a misuse of resources.
I'm not entirely certain where you got that figure, and would appreciate some sort of source, but even if it's true it's not really that bad.
When you consider that an episode of "Friends" used to cost 6 million an episode just to pay the primary actors, 1.5 starts to look quite a bit smaller. It's not the red green show, but it's quite tolerable.
The beauty of shows like the Simpsons, and to an even greater extent South Park, is not so much that they deal with every single important issue, it's that they bring semi-important issues to viewers who would not otherwise be reached.
Most of my extended family are hard line Catholic republicans, they not only voted for Bush, but did so with joy in their hearts. They don't listen to much of anything anyone tried to tell them about either alternate viewpoints or even their own beliefs.
However, many of my younger cousins watch South Park and/or the Simpsons and are exposed to ideas which contradict their own, they may not immediately see it, but they are exposed to them without automatically tuning out. This is why these shows are great, because the gags allow a message to get across to people who don't listen to other sources.
Tragically it also has lots of hicks, and a higher incidence of really creepy serial killers(Jeffrey Dahmer, Ed Gein) than is natural for a state of it's size.
I could attack some of your best stuff list too, as I used to live there and have been to most of them, but I won't.
Actually history has shown this statement to be untrue. Most revolutions are a product of rising expectations, rather than absolute extremes of misery.
Most historical revolutions have occured when things were getting better, but not fast enough. When things are really bad people are too busy surviving, but when things start to get better they get the idea that perhaps they deserve more and the system isn't giving it to them fast enough.
That isn't to say some revolutions aren't sparked at the depths, but people tend to become animal like in those conditions and while animals are sometimes violent they are usually only violent in the protection of their little bit of survival rather than any grand ideas.
Of course the US has never really had a revolution, at least not a successful one(the civil war could almost count, though I don't agree with most of what they were fighting for), and has not progressed anywhere near as far as either the UK or most of the other Anglo nations. Though some of them are moving backward rather quickly.
This is not an argument against reducing pollution, there are thousands of entirely verifiable reasons why we should do this. Just the harm the pollution does to human beings, let alone the rest of nature is reason enough to stop polluting as much as is possible.
The point of this argument is that we know diddly squat about what actually goes on climatewise on this great orb of a world. Over the course of even the last few hundred years the world has been both substantially hotter and drier and substantially colder and wetter than it is now, and most of these changes occurred before our ancestors had even worked out how to poke things with pointy sticks, let alone burn large quantities of fossil fuels.
In all likelihood a climate change is coming, but how much of that climate change can actually be attributed to humanity, how much impact can we really have?
I love this sort of shit I really really do. Basically what you're saying is that the government shouldn't force companies to properly dispose of their sensitive information because most of them haven't actually had anyones identity stolen yet.
Anyone not properly disposing of their documents is "fucking up" whether there have been any negative consequences as yet or no. Since the only people not paying for this already are the companies which are "fucking up", I have no sympathy for them at all. This will if anything help companies who are doing things properly because it'll mean that their lazy competitors don't manage to undersell them since they have lower costs.
I didn't say information wanted to be free, or that piracy was morally viable, though I admit I have implied such in other posts, so you are entitled to your belief that I may have at times felt that way.
However in this instance I merely implied that copyright violation was not and could not be the same as theft. Murder isn't the same as theft either, though that doesn't make murder right either.
There is a failure in this argument. Yes cancer can be selected against, but unless it can pass successful genes on to the next generation it cannot become resistent in the way that a bacteria or a virus can.
There should be no marked increase in the number of odd cases which do not grow in this manner , though since the other varieties should decrease they should account for a larger percentage of total cases of cancer.
The "nature and better mouse" argument does hold that if we cure cancer something else will start to kill us, but we won't create resistent cancer because cancer only spreads within the host, which either dies or doesn't.
This is how Microsoft got into trouble, IE is not part of Windows, it is a separate product. Therefor the issue is not that Windows 2000 is not getting a new feature, it's that Microsofts new Internet Explorer is not supporting a wide enough installation base.
This is more like a Satelite Radio company not allowing you to use their product in your old Ford because they don't want to sell you a version. Fine and dandy for anyone not driving an old ford, but really shitty for anyone who is.
This is also a bad idea since corporate workstations are one of the areas where Microsoft is particularly vulnerable right now, especially since if the workstations go that way a lot of the servers they still have will go along with them.
Leaving alone whether piracy is morally justifiable , these examples are invalid, because they imply "real" financial or other loss. The guy at the dealership paid for the car and the prostitute owns her own body(as a side note, if you ask the guy at the ferrari dealership will probably let you test drive the car for free, so you can just drive it around if you like). You can attribute a direct loss to these actions.
Copyright infringement however is about loss of "potential revenue". When someone downloads Ep3, no one is any worse off than they were before, they are simply worse off than they might have been. This is where the grey area comes in, and why the "piracy is theft" argument just doesn't hold up. This is not to say that piracy is necessarily right, though you could argue that those who hold it are abusing their part of the agreement, simply to say that it is not the same as theft. Not receiving something you might, or might not, have received later on is not the same as losing something you already have.
If you RTFA or even TF Summary, you'd note it explicitly says no court authorized the release of the clients information. If there were a subpoena they would have court authorization(even if it were just some clerk stamping a form).
They might even be able to get away with not having a subpoena by that clause if some law enforcement agency asked them directly, but the RIAA is not a law enforcement agency, and without a court order they don't have the authority of one either.
If any clause came into affect it's the second one, but that's not a particularly good defense in this case as, though you can stretch it almost infinitely far, if you stretch it too far a court is likely to declare it invalid. It's even probable(though IANAL)that for a system administrator to reveal information obtained this way without involving some sort of law enforcement agency and a warrant might be illegal, or at least a violation of the non disclosure portions of their employment contract.
I don't necessarily think that Americans(as much as I used to be and to a certain extent still am one) aren't stupid enough to vote him in. What I do believe however is that Jeb isn't stupid enough to let them.
From what I can tell Jeb is sort of like Ted Kennedy, both of them could theoretically run or have run for president, but they both have positions to which they will probably be elected until they die. People in that sort of position rarely take a shot at something like the presidency which has a maximum term of 8 years(well somewhat longer if you can go in as VP and experience a well timed assasination).
I've said it before and I'll say it again, you can't have a product be both a license and a physical product. You can't tell me I don't own the music and then not offer me a replacement copy whenever I like at cost(which is bugger all plus shipping for cd's/dvd's and less than that for downloads).
If it's a physical product then I own it, if it's a license then they have to replace it, you can't have both.
Society, both in and out of the US has to decide what they are buying when they buy a cd, and the various governments have to listen to that decision and enforce it instead of giving the **AA organizations the ability to pick and choose what they like.
True some people violate copyright, people have always violated copyright, they will, so long as they are free, continue to violate copyright. This basically leaves us all with two options, deal with the fact that people will violate copyright or take away freedom.
Personally I'd rather have everything I own stolen than lose my freedom, but maybe that's just me, and I think that even in today's apathetic and paranoid societies there is only so far the governments can push before people stop allowing themselves to be pushed.
That leaves only one remaining option, to deal with the fact that people will violate your copyright, which comes down to a balance of cost versus benefits, the higher you price yourself and the lower the value you give for that price, the more violations will occur.
Price your product at the optimal intersection of profit per sale and lost potential(I hate it when people see every single act of "piracy" as a lost sale) sales and you've got a winner.
It's like everything else, there's a point where you're not as happy as you might be and they aren't as happy as they might be, but you're neither of you too unhappy and you can both live with the results.
If they aren't required to provide it then I want to know what that universal service tax I paid on every phone line I ever had in the US(cell or land) was for.
Both of them were better in the beginning, a lot of shows are like that, they are technically children's shows so in order to cater to their core demographic they trim out all the stuff which was ever any good.
In essence it's cheaper to talk to puppets or children who can't act than it is to actually do anything cool especially if they can stay in the studio with the puppets/stupid ugly children.
Perhaps, but the j implies that this is the version bundled with java, which is as we all know large and annoying, last I checked firefox didn't come bundled with java so you need to find the link for just the browser itself.
Slashdot Mirror
The point of my comment is that computers cannot react well to unexpected circumstances, and I still hold to this.
Well, this assumes that computers can actually react quicker under driving circumstances than people can. Or for that matter that they can react well at all. The big difference between people and PC's(aside from the fact that pc's lack the processing capability to handle visual, auditory, tactile, etc data very well) is that PC's can't do anything they haven't been told how to do and people can. Perhaps not well, but they can react and maybe make a bad situation slightly better.
I don't really know, I have less experience than most of my coworkers, but I have a degree and they don't. I find that I'm catching on at a much faster rate so that while I'm in some ways still less experienced, my knowledge will catch up to theirs very quickly.
In my experience there are essentially three types of coffee drinkers, people who take coffee away, people who eat, and people who sit.
The take away crowd is usually an interval crowd, you either have lines out the door or you have none of them, they show up in the early mornings before work, during staff breaks etc, they are high turnover.
The people who eat are largely a lunch time and occasionally breakfast or dinner crowd and go to cafes. The amount of time they can spend is usually restricted by their schedules. They spend a reasonable amount of money because they buy lunch as well as coffee.
The remainder of customers tend to sit, whether they use wi-fi, or read, or study, or chat with friends. They spend a reasonable amount of time, and reasonably little money though they are sometimes quite regular.
Your average coffee shop is really only looking at two of these groups as cafes are really almost a seperate type of business. The take away group is the highest turnover/highest profit group, but it doesn't really use the seating so it doesn't interfere with those who do.
Now you might ask why does a coffee shop have seats if the highest turnover group doesn't need them. The reason is that there is a lot of gap between the high turnover groups. The purpose of the sitting group is to bring in enough money to cover the operating costs of keeping the place open, and hopefully make a bit of money on top. So even if you only pay $2.50 for a three hour stop, it doesn't really matter so long as the operating costs are covered.
Or a better question, how much IT productivity is lost trying to find the user who had the problem in the first place. I've had a job sitting in my queue for three weeks now because I can't get the user to take half an hour to actually work out if they got what they wanted. I'd close it out, but I have to give it to another user and they won't tell me which one.
Unless the links were labeled get music from here, you can't really establish his intent in placing the links so you can't really say he was guilting of abetting piracy. If I distract a guard so you can rob a bank I'm abetting you. However if I fall down and injure myself and a guard comes to help me, allowing you to rob the bank, am I still guilty?
Every member of the Amish community is very much like every other member, religiously, ethnically, even gentically(hence this article). Those who disagree with their way of life probably leave the society, there is little conflict, but there is little difference also.
If I want a copy of WoW it'll cost me approximately $80, that's without actually being able to play the game, just to buy the software. Personally if I'm going to pay to play I don't think I should have to buy the game to start with, give me a minimum sign up time so you make some money, but don't make me pay you that much money just to have the right to pay you more money to actually play the game.
Technically you could argue that breaking this security involves learning, which is assumedly what these laptops were provided for in the first place, so it's not even really a misuse of resources.
When you consider that an episode of "Friends" used to cost 6 million an episode just to pay the primary actors, 1.5 starts to look quite a bit smaller. It's not the red green show, but it's quite tolerable.
Most of my extended family are hard line Catholic republicans, they not only voted for Bush, but did so with joy in their hearts. They don't listen to much of anything anyone tried to tell them about either alternate viewpoints or even their own beliefs.
However, many of my younger cousins watch South Park and/or the Simpsons and are exposed to ideas which contradict their own, they may not immediately see it, but they are exposed to them without automatically tuning out. This is why these shows are great, because the gags allow a message to get across to people who don't listen to other sources.
I could attack some of your best stuff list too, as I used to live there and have been to most of them, but I won't.
Most historical revolutions have occured when things were getting better, but not fast enough. When things are really bad people are too busy surviving, but when things start to get better they get the idea that perhaps they deserve more and the system isn't giving it to them fast enough.
That isn't to say some revolutions aren't sparked at the depths, but people tend to become animal like in those conditions and while animals are sometimes violent they are usually only violent in the protection of their little bit of survival rather than any grand ideas.
Of course the US has never really had a revolution, at least not a successful one(the civil war could almost count, though I don't agree with most of what they were fighting for), and has not progressed anywhere near as far as either the UK or most of the other Anglo nations. Though some of them are moving backward rather quickly.
The point of this argument is that we know diddly squat about what actually goes on climatewise on this great orb of a world. Over the course of even the last few hundred years the world has been both substantially hotter and drier and substantially colder and wetter than it is now, and most of these changes occurred before our ancestors had even worked out how to poke things with pointy sticks, let alone burn large quantities of fossil fuels.
In all likelihood a climate change is coming, but how much of that climate change can actually be attributed to humanity, how much impact can we really have?
Anyone not properly disposing of their documents is "fucking up" whether there have been any negative consequences as yet or no. Since the only people not paying for this already are the companies which are "fucking up", I have no sympathy for them at all. This will if anything help companies who are doing things properly because it'll mean that their lazy competitors don't manage to undersell them since they have lower costs.
However in this instance I merely implied that copyright violation was not and could not be the same as theft. Murder isn't the same as theft either, though that doesn't make murder right either.
There should be no marked increase in the number of odd cases which do not grow in this manner , though since the other varieties should decrease they should account for a larger percentage of total cases of cancer.
The "nature and better mouse" argument does hold that if we cure cancer something else will start to kill us, but we won't create resistent cancer because cancer only spreads within the host, which either dies or doesn't.
This is more like a Satelite Radio company not allowing you to use their product in your old Ford because they don't want to sell you a version. Fine and dandy for anyone not driving an old ford, but really shitty for anyone who is.
This is also a bad idea since corporate workstations are one of the areas where Microsoft is particularly vulnerable right now, especially since if the workstations go that way a lot of the servers they still have will go along with them.
Copyright infringement however is about loss of "potential revenue". When someone downloads Ep3, no one is any worse off than they were before, they are simply worse off than they might have been. This is where the grey area comes in, and why the "piracy is theft" argument just doesn't hold up. This is not to say that piracy is necessarily right, though you could argue that those who hold it are abusing their part of the agreement, simply to say that it is not the same as theft. Not receiving something you might, or might not, have received later on is not the same as losing something you already have.
They might even be able to get away with not having a subpoena by that clause if some law enforcement agency asked them directly, but the RIAA is not a law enforcement agency, and without a court order they don't have the authority of one either.
If any clause came into affect it's the second one, but that's not a particularly good defense in this case as, though you can stretch it almost infinitely far, if you stretch it too far a court is likely to declare it invalid. It's even probable(though IANAL)that for a system administrator to reveal information obtained this way without involving some sort of law enforcement agency and a warrant might be illegal, or at least a violation of the non disclosure portions of their employment contract.
From what I can tell Jeb is sort of like Ted Kennedy, both of them could theoretically run or have run for president, but they both have positions to which they will probably be elected until they die. People in that sort of position rarely take a shot at something like the presidency which has a maximum term of 8 years(well somewhat longer if you can go in as VP and experience a well timed assasination).
If it's a physical product then I own it, if it's a license then they have to replace it, you can't have both.
Society, both in and out of the US has to decide what they are buying when they buy a cd, and the various governments have to listen to that decision and enforce it instead of giving the **AA organizations the ability to pick and choose what they like.
True some people violate copyright, people have always violated copyright, they will, so long as they are free, continue to violate copyright. This basically leaves us all with two options, deal with the fact that people will violate copyright or take away freedom.
Personally I'd rather have everything I own stolen than lose my freedom, but maybe that's just me, and I think that even in today's apathetic and paranoid societies there is only so far the governments can push before people stop allowing themselves to be pushed.
That leaves only one remaining option, to deal with the fact that people will violate your copyright, which comes down to a balance of cost versus benefits, the higher you price yourself and the lower the value you give for that price, the more violations will occur.
Price your product at the optimal intersection of profit per sale and lost potential(I hate it when people see every single act of "piracy" as a lost sale) sales and you've got a winner.
It's like everything else, there's a point where you're not as happy as you might be and they aren't as happy as they might be, but you're neither of you too unhappy and you can both live with the results.
If they aren't required to provide it then I want to know what that universal service tax I paid on every phone line I ever had in the US(cell or land) was for.
In essence it's cheaper to talk to puppets or children who can't act than it is to actually do anything cool especially if they can stay in the studio with the puppets/stupid ugly children.
Perhaps, but the j implies that this is the version bundled with java, which is as we all know large and annoying, last I checked firefox didn't come bundled with java so you need to find the link for just the browser itself.