I'd say yes for the following reasons.
1) They sell a product which probably has a profit margin on it of at least $10-15k per unit. This means both that they have money and that they must have a credible name in the industry in order to have even foolish rich people shell out $30k for their product.
2) They are a legitimate licensee so the MPAA can't use it's usual stunts, if they come down too draconian on this company they might scare off future licenscees and therefor future profits.
3) This is probably a pretty good test case in general because unlike nearly every other MPAA/RIAA/etc lawsuit this is against a company which is at least on paper legal and whose clients are wealthy enough to object to being painted as criminals.
Using a similar feature in Opera seems to have the same effect "Block unwanted popups" does the same thing as "Smart".
Tragically I use firefox, but the fact that both these browsers can block it with existing code and settings means the vulnerability can't be a tough fix.
Ahh, but they are licensed to use CSS, they aren't some backyard group of people, they are smart people with lawyers and a valid license which they paid for with valid money and who will probably win.
First to be pedantic most of the things on that list are fully testable. Global warming is not.
Second, while I agree with you about the fact that even if the risk of global warming is low we shouldn't take that risk, I am very alarmed by the easy dismissal of non peer reviewed and crank journals/articles. Now admitedly non peer reviewed journals are less reliable, and cranks are often wrong, but at the same time the definition of a crank is someone who doesn't believe in what everyone else believes to be true, so by eliminating cranks you can easily eliminate all dissention on this subject.
Again I personally believe in global warming and am pretty sure that at the very least humans aren't making it any better, but statically these numbers mean nothing since anyone who disagrees is for one reason or another not counted. There have been a lot of ranks who have turned out to be right as well as a lot which have turned out to be wrong, but if we discount them then we're seriously into group think territory.
Personally I disagree with this for the most part. Generally test quoted in a reply is either as a reminder to you of what you said or as ancilliary information. The most importat part of an e-mail is the part which was most recently written.
I want to see what the new text first so I can then judge what to do with the rest of it. If it's something I wrote myself then I may just skim it to remind myself what I told the person before. If it's a request for action then I want to know that's what it is. I only care about what's quoted if it's useful to the job at hand.
As for long "tails" well I usually don't get e-mail which has passed through more than 3 replys at most, and I find it takes a bloody lot of text to make any serious dent in my bandwidth, but it is nice to have a record of what you have or have not said simply because otherwise it can be hard to remember.
There's nothing which should require employers to make work for their employees, if the market share of a company has decreased demonstrably then it's expected that they should lay off employees. When this happens someone must be gaining market share and so there should be jobs for these people somewhere(though non compete agreements may screw them over pretty badly).
To a certain extent the same is true when a job has been replaced by automation though in that case someone(ideally the company itself if possible and if not the government) should provide assistance paying for retraining so that the employees can still work.
In either of these situations or situations like them, laying off employees is understandable, if there isn't work there isn't work. However the idea that the moment our profit margins aren't quite what they might have been we lay off employees and force the ones who remain to work twice as hard is just plain wrong and in the long term destructive.There are plenty of ways to trim costs without firing the people who actually do things at your company.
I also think that a company should have at least as much responsibility to their employees as they do to stockholders. A minor fluctuation in profit margins is not a sign that the company is going under and shouldn't affect stock price to any great degree. There are essentially in my mind 3 kinds of stockholders, initial investors who have special deals and are usually well paid off for their risk by the time it gets to layoffs, long term investors who shouldn't be too bothered by minor fluctuations, and worthless parasites who make their money by screwing people. Day traders, this is you, the purpose of the stock market is to make it easier for companies to procure capital investment by spreading it out over more people, if you want to make 30 grand today you're helping no one but yourself.
Well even aside from that there are reasons to send one e-mail to multiple people, even to a large number of people. The problem is not mass e-mail, or even commercial e-mail it's UNSOLICITED commercial e-mail. If I want to get commercial e-mail from you you're not doing anything wrong.
The only solution to spam is what it's always been. We, or more precisely regular idiots, have to stop buying things which are advertised in e-mails we didn't ask for. If spamming no longer makes money, then companies will no longer pay spammers to spam and spammers won't spam.
That may be applicable in the states(well at least in some places), property values here in Australia are just a bit higher than that. You could live in the middle of nowhere with this, though you'd still have to pay for sewer hookups and everything else, but here abouts most houses cost significantly less than the property on which they sit.
I think you're unnecessarily insulting Ikea here, if CA companies had actually furnished themselves with Ikea rather than much much much more expensive, but equally ugly, furniture, they might still be in business.
Yes it's nice to have a cherry wood boardroom table, but only if you have the profits to justify the expense or you need it for your business.
That's what they used to be for. They used to give you just enough of the program to make you desperately want to play more of it. There are still a few like that, but not too many. Most of the time demos are either hideously crippled so that you don't really know what the game is like or so short they don't really give you a feel for the gameplay.
The last really good demo I remember was probably Diablo I. I downloaded it, I played it, I played it again, I went out and bought the game the day the retail version came out.
A Computer Science degree is probably the equivilant of no more than two years experience max, and that's assuming you knew bugger all about your job coming in. In most degree programs you get 3-4 years of pretty solid, but non proffessional coding experience, which is probably 1-2 years professional. There are additional benefits, but as far as experience goes that's about all you get, anything else is in knowing how to learn.
The question is not whether you would choose a 25 year veteran over a new grad, but whether you'd choose a self taught 20 something snot with 2 years experience over a college educated 20 something snot. Or whether you'd choose a self taught 25 year veteran over a college educated 25 year veteran(assuming any such actually exist).
It is used, primarily in the sort of grocery store which prides itself on being the sort of cheap, quick and dirty sort of store. The sort of place you go because you want to save 5 cents on the one brand of product they actually stock. Any place like that is going to pay cashiers bugger all anyway.
I've seen self bagging at some places, but even that wasn't too terribly popular.
1) Military jobs, if you think that AI is going to be good enough to have computers acting as soldiers any time soon then you either have a really unrealistic view of AI develop or you have an incredibly disrespect for what it takes to be a soldier. Added to that no one is going to trust intelligent robots with guns for a very long time. The military will probably end up using machines more rather than less(possibly to their detriment but that's another topic), but they'll still have to be controlled by someone.
2, 3) Construction and Manufacturing. Possibly though again AI is a long way off. I think this may eventually happen though.
4, 5) Service jobs are a bad idea for automation. It could be done, but won't be in anything but the cheapest of places. People want to buy from other people, get support from other people(preferably ones who speak their native language). I think it will be tried in a few places, but eventually companies will work out that people hate it and only places which would have paid you minimum wage will use it.
6) Drug testing. Unless you know something I don't this isn't even close to ready yet either. Drugs still need to be tested on people to see what actually happens as opposed to what is supposed to happen, and that requires a doctor, there is no script for doctor which works 100% of the time, if there were anyone could do it. As for research, as c omputers are not particularly good at innovation(seeing something other than what they're specifically testing for) it wouldn't be a very efficient process.
The jobs which get replaced are jobs which require repetetive manual labor(robots), or which can be predicted entirely and do not deal with people(scripts).
In general it is a fallacy to believe technology is the solution to every problem, or that it ever will be or should be. There is value in having a person do a job, even a job which you think is pointless and stupid, because people want to deal with other people.
Firstly, software and hardware are two entirely different kettles of fish. I could technically write an office replacement myself on my own home computer, it'd take me for bloody ever, but I could do it. I couldn't build a video board no matter how much I wanted to, even if I knew more than the very basic circuit design I do.
Second, OpenOffice is not a replacement for Word, it is an alternative, a free alternative, but not a replacement, a replacement would make it in some way better(other than the price tag) which it isn't. I love OO.org but it's not better. Sun also threw money down the drain for years developing it, partially because they needed an office suite for solaris, but in all likelihood mostly because Sun hates Microsoft almost as much as Slashdot. These people don't have money to throw away on developing this thing just to piss someone off.
No offense, I'm an American too, or was until a few months ago, but odds are you're already broadcasting your nationality to the world. We all do, in the way we dress, the way we talk, the way we act. You don't need an electronic transmission to do this.
When you put anything up on the web you are expecting people to see it and if it interests them to tell other people about it. Doesn't matter if you didn't want hordes of geeks, you put your stuff in the public domain and it's perfectly sensible to assume that the public who want to see it will come to see it.
The same could be said for the gay porn site, however we have a sort of different situation here because people didn't come to see the content, didn't stay to see the content and essentially racked up bandwidth to know purpose whatsoever.
Personally I don't think the site has much of a case and they may for that matter be just tickled pink with the amount of publicity they got for their subject. I can tell you I hadn't heard of Casey Donovan the gay porn star before this.
The lawsuit which would be interesting would be the one filed by parents against the advertiser. Admitedly Australian idol is on late enough over here to be mildly less censored(not so much as to have porn of course) and to filter out some younger viewers. However you could argue that by claiming this site was the site for the pop star when it was gay porn the advertiser interfered with the parents ability to control what their children are exposed to. Haven't been here long enough to know how that sort of thing would play out here, but it'd be interesting.
The problem with your analysis is that you(along with every single web advertiser in the entire universe) have forgotten what makes advertising work.
The purpose of advertising is not to cause you to immediately buy a product. Its purpose is to increase your desire for a certain type of product and far more importantly to make it so that when you start looking for that type of product, you think of them first. To do this they need to repeat the ad enough times to get it into your subconscious.
Now personally, I like pretty much every other man on the face of the planet, channel surf during tv commercials, I don't really enjoy watching them, but they are nice to have since they allow me to go check my dinner, go to the bathroom, or in general take a break from the tv.
That said, I'd like to make a quick point about radio broadcasts, and to a lesser extent tv, and say I'd rather listen to one ad every few songs than 15 minutes of back to back ads every hour or so.
Well, as far as I'm concerned all tail gaters(people who drive too close) ought to be shot anyway. So no real loss if he got charged for an unrelated crime.
Well first of all unless you're connecting through the server(which is only really a problem for those of use using gaim and it's vastly old ICQ protocol) they probably can't log you, because they never even see you.
Secondly, let's take a look at AIM for a second, how much storage space would you need just to store a days worth of aim conversations? How much processor power to search through it all? Unless you're redflagged somewhere, or the government is watching the connection the odds of anyone seeing what you say or caring are pretty low.
I mean can you imagine trying to look at the chatspeak of millions of teenage girls without going mad?
This is true, and I should have been clearer, but this is just an additional example of people who need the code. This doesn't change the fact that there are a large number of people who believe that the GPL is the be all and end all of software licenses and refuse to use anything which doesn't use it.
Lightening doesn't really jump at all. If you see close up photographs of it(there are only a few people insane enough to actually do this), there are visible trailers moving up from objects as well as a trailer moving down from the cloud. When these trailers(wish I could remember what they're made of, but you can see em so they're there) connect the electricity travels down the path created.
It's quite probable that a properly insulated object(though admitedly a car may or may not qualify here) will be less likely to create a trailer or that the trailer will not be the first to reach connect.
I don't think that this is the posters original point. There is nothing wrong with losing customers because they want to modify the source and you don't want to let them do that, that's market economics in it's purest form and it's something you have to accept when you choose to enter that market. If people want a service you don't want to deliver, odds are they'll find someone who will.
The problem in question here, and I tend to agree, is with the idea that you don't use software which isn't GPL even if you don't need to modify the code, know how to modify the code, or really care much about modifying the code. The problem is in essence zealotry.
As has been expressed earlier, the GPL is not really a free as in speech license, and is viral in nature(by design). There are some very nice things about the GPL, but it deliberately screws over anyone trying to make a living coding and selling software(again by design.
Now it's perfectly alright to design a license this way, you can make any license you want, so long as it's not patently ridiculous or unenforcable. The problem is that a large number of people think that the GPL is other than what it is.
I use GPL products, and I use proprietary products. I know what they both actually are, and accept that both have a place in the world, but I don't decide what software I use based on whether it's GPL or BSD or Proprietary or what. I use what does the job and what I can afford.
Actually I use gentoo. Nor did I say that it was a good thing that a MS license is a necessary thing for a PC purchase, nor for that matter did I say it was necessary for all users, just most.
I love linux, but it isn't ready for normal users, true it's more secure, but most of them couldn't get it to work without someone doing all the background work for them(anyone who has swapped a regular user over to linux and isn't taking care of the configuration and updating for them, raise your hand). Until it "just works" even in the mediocre fashion Windows "just works" with anything right out of the box, it's nto ready.
Since you need an OS of some sort, and since the majority of computers out there these days are PC's, that basically means you need to buy windows to run your computer.
Personally if Microsoft offered me a job, I'd probably take it, but I've been unemployed since graduation and am a little desperate to have some money again.
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I'd say yes for the following reasons. 1) They sell a product which probably has a profit margin on it of at least $10-15k per unit. This means both that they have money and that they must have a credible name in the industry in order to have even foolish rich people shell out $30k for their product. 2) They are a legitimate licensee so the MPAA can't use it's usual stunts, if they come down too draconian on this company they might scare off future licenscees and therefor future profits. 3) This is probably a pretty good test case in general because unlike nearly every other MPAA/RIAA/etc lawsuit this is against a company which is at least on paper legal and whose clients are wealthy enough to object to being painted as criminals.
Tragically I use firefox, but the fact that both these browsers can block it with existing code and settings means the vulnerability can't be a tough fix.
Ahh, but they are licensed to use CSS, they aren't some backyard group of people, they are smart people with lawyers and a valid license which they paid for with valid money and who will probably win.
First to be pedantic most of the things on that list are fully testable. Global warming is not.
Second, while I agree with you about the fact that even if the risk of global warming is low we shouldn't take that risk, I am very alarmed by the easy dismissal of non peer reviewed and crank journals/articles. Now admitedly non peer reviewed journals are less reliable, and cranks are often wrong, but at the same time the definition of a crank is someone who doesn't believe in what everyone else believes to be true, so by eliminating cranks you can easily eliminate all dissention on this subject.
Again I personally believe in global warming and am pretty sure that at the very least humans aren't making it any better, but statically these numbers mean nothing since anyone who disagrees is for one reason or another not counted. There have been a lot of ranks who have turned out to be right as well as a lot which have turned out to be wrong, but if we discount them then we're seriously into group think territory.
I want to see what the new text first so I can then judge what to do with the rest of it. If it's something I wrote myself then I may just skim it to remind myself what I told the person before. If it's a request for action then I want to know that's what it is. I only care about what's quoted if it's useful to the job at hand.
As for long "tails" well I usually don't get e-mail which has passed through more than 3 replys at most, and I find it takes a bloody lot of text to make any serious dent in my bandwidth, but it is nice to have a record of what you have or have not said simply because otherwise it can be hard to remember.
To a certain extent the same is true when a job has been replaced by automation though in that case someone(ideally the company itself if possible and if not the government) should provide assistance paying for retraining so that the employees can still work.
In either of these situations or situations like them, laying off employees is understandable, if there isn't work there isn't work. However the idea that the moment our profit margins aren't quite what they might have been we lay off employees and force the ones who remain to work twice as hard is just plain wrong and in the long term destructive.There are plenty of ways to trim costs without firing the people who actually do things at your company.
I also think that a company should have at least as much responsibility to their employees as they do to stockholders. A minor fluctuation in profit margins is not a sign that the company is going under and shouldn't affect stock price to any great degree. There are essentially in my mind 3 kinds of stockholders, initial investors who have special deals and are usually well paid off for their risk by the time it gets to layoffs, long term investors who shouldn't be too bothered by minor fluctuations, and worthless parasites who make their money by screwing people. Day traders, this is you, the purpose of the stock market is to make it easier for companies to procure capital investment by spreading it out over more people, if you want to make 30 grand today you're helping no one but yourself.
The only solution to spam is what it's always been. We, or more precisely regular idiots, have to stop buying things which are advertised in e-mails we didn't ask for. If spamming no longer makes money, then companies will no longer pay spammers to spam and spammers won't spam.
That may be applicable in the states(well at least in some places), property values here in Australia are just a bit higher than that. You could live in the middle of nowhere with this, though you'd still have to pay for sewer hookups and everything else, but here abouts most houses cost significantly less than the property on which they sit.
Yes it's nice to have a cherry wood boardroom table, but only if you have the profits to justify the expense or you need it for your business.
The last really good demo I remember was probably Diablo I. I downloaded it, I played it, I played it again, I went out and bought the game the day the retail version came out.
A Computer Science degree is probably the equivilant of no more than two years experience max, and that's assuming you knew bugger all about your job coming in. In most degree programs you get 3-4 years of pretty solid, but non proffessional coding experience, which is probably 1-2 years professional. There are additional benefits, but as far as experience goes that's about all you get, anything else is in knowing how to learn.
The question is not whether you would choose a 25 year veteran over a new grad, but whether you'd choose a self taught 20 something snot with 2 years experience over a college educated 20 something snot. Or whether you'd choose a self taught 25 year veteran over a college educated 25 year veteran(assuming any such actually exist).
I've seen self bagging at some places, but even that wasn't too terribly popular.
2, 3) Construction and Manufacturing. Possibly though again AI is a long way off. I think this may eventually happen though.
4, 5) Service jobs are a bad idea for automation. It could be done, but won't be in anything but the cheapest of places. People want to buy from other people, get support from other people(preferably ones who speak their native language). I think it will be tried in a few places, but eventually companies will work out that people hate it and only places which would have paid you minimum wage will use it.
6) Drug testing. Unless you know something I don't this isn't even close to ready yet either. Drugs still need to be tested on people to see what actually happens as opposed to what is supposed to happen, and that requires a doctor, there is no script for doctor which works 100% of the time, if there were anyone could do it. As for research, as c omputers are not particularly good at innovation(seeing something other than what they're specifically testing for) it wouldn't be a very efficient process.
The jobs which get replaced are jobs which require repetetive manual labor(robots), or which can be predicted entirely and do not deal with people(scripts).
In general it is a fallacy to believe technology is the solution to every problem, or that it ever will be or should be. There is value in having a person do a job, even a job which you think is pointless and stupid, because people want to deal with other people.
Not all Americans are arrogant assholes, doesn't mean we don't all stand out as Americans.
Second, OpenOffice is not a replacement for Word, it is an alternative, a free alternative, but not a replacement, a replacement would make it in some way better(other than the price tag) which it isn't. I love OO.org but it's not better. Sun also threw money down the drain for years developing it, partially because they needed an office suite for solaris, but in all likelihood mostly because Sun hates Microsoft almost as much as Slashdot. These people don't have money to throw away on developing this thing just to piss someone off.
No offense, I'm an American too, or was until a few months ago, but odds are you're already broadcasting your nationality to the world. We all do, in the way we dress, the way we talk, the way we act. You don't need an electronic transmission to do this.
The same could be said for the gay porn site, however we have a sort of different situation here because people didn't come to see the content, didn't stay to see the content and essentially racked up bandwidth to know purpose whatsoever.
Personally I don't think the site has much of a case and they may for that matter be just tickled pink with the amount of publicity they got for their subject. I can tell you I hadn't heard of Casey Donovan the gay porn star before this.
The lawsuit which would be interesting would be the one filed by parents against the advertiser. Admitedly Australian idol is on late enough over here to be mildly less censored(not so much as to have porn of course) and to filter out some younger viewers. However you could argue that by claiming this site was the site for the pop star when it was gay porn the advertiser interfered with the parents ability to control what their children are exposed to. Haven't been here long enough to know how that sort of thing would play out here, but it'd be interesting.
Well there's always port forwarding which can reenable direct connections.
The purpose of advertising is not to cause you to immediately buy a product. Its purpose is to increase your desire for a certain type of product and far more importantly to make it so that when you start looking for that type of product, you think of them first. To do this they need to repeat the ad enough times to get it into your subconscious.
Now personally, I like pretty much every other man on the face of the planet, channel surf during tv commercials, I don't really enjoy watching them, but they are nice to have since they allow me to go check my dinner, go to the bathroom, or in general take a break from the tv.
That said, I'd like to make a quick point about radio broadcasts, and to a lesser extent tv, and say I'd rather listen to one ad every few songs than 15 minutes of back to back ads every hour or so.
Well, as far as I'm concerned all tail gaters(people who drive too close) ought to be shot anyway. So no real loss if he got charged for an unrelated crime.
Secondly, let's take a look at AIM for a second, how much storage space would you need just to store a days worth of aim conversations? How much processor power to search through it all? Unless you're redflagged somewhere, or the government is watching the connection the odds of anyone seeing what you say or caring are pretty low.
I mean can you imagine trying to look at the chatspeak of millions of teenage girls without going mad?
This is true, and I should have been clearer, but this is just an additional example of people who need the code. This doesn't change the fact that there are a large number of people who believe that the GPL is the be all and end all of software licenses and refuse to use anything which doesn't use it.
It's quite probable that a properly insulated object(though admitedly a car may or may not qualify here) will be less likely to create a trailer or that the trailer will not be the first to reach connect.
The problem in question here, and I tend to agree, is with the idea that you don't use software which isn't GPL even if you don't need to modify the code, know how to modify the code, or really care much about modifying the code. The problem is in essence zealotry.
As has been expressed earlier, the GPL is not really a free as in speech license, and is viral in nature(by design). There are some very nice things about the GPL, but it deliberately screws over anyone trying to make a living coding and selling software(again by design.
Now it's perfectly alright to design a license this way, you can make any license you want, so long as it's not patently ridiculous or unenforcable. The problem is that a large number of people think that the GPL is other than what it is.
I use GPL products, and I use proprietary products. I know what they both actually are, and accept that both have a place in the world, but I don't decide what software I use based on whether it's GPL or BSD or Proprietary or what. I use what does the job and what I can afford.
I love linux, but it isn't ready for normal users, true it's more secure, but most of them couldn't get it to work without someone doing all the background work for them(anyone who has swapped a regular user over to linux and isn't taking care of the configuration and updating for them, raise your hand). Until it "just works" even in the mediocre fashion Windows "just works" with anything right out of the box, it's nto ready.
Since you need an OS of some sort, and since the majority of computers out there these days are PC's, that basically means you need to buy windows to run your computer.
Personally if Microsoft offered me a job, I'd probably take it, but I've been unemployed since graduation and am a little desperate to have some money again.