"More efficient competition"? The only reason they were more efficient is because they were attempting to use carpooling as a loophole around proper licensing and safety regulations. In other words, they weren't competing, they were cheating. The OTB is simply making them play by the same rules as the rest.
I recommend reading the actual decision rather than the sensationalist blog interpretation.
Personally, I'm confused as to how they came to these regulations. It's built on a faulty foundation that they could define carpooling as a very strict set of conditions- and then disallow any activity that didn't meet those conditions.
They're not disallowing anything. They're simply defining a carpool. Something that doesn't fit into that definition isn't disallowed, it's just not officially a carpool.
If I want to share a ride with a complete stranger and split the gas, how is that any different from sharing a ride with a family member?
You're more than welcome to do that. The problem here isn't sharing a ride with a stranger. The problem here is a business facilitating that sharing. The decision is basically saying that they are not facilitating carpooling, by the legal definition of carpooling, and that therefore what they are doing is facilitating transportation of passengers in public vehicles. The problem is that operators of public transportation vehicles must be licensed to operate a public vehicle, which these drivers are not.
It's my car and I'd much prefer to do with it what I'd please- I see absolutely no reason the government has any say in this!!
They don't. Carry on transporting whoever you want. Even call it a carpool if you want. No one cares. But don't try to operate a business facilitating public transportation without the appropriate licenses.
actually their customers are Apple, and other product makers that paid a few bucks too much per panel and missed sales, not "consumers". So the public really doesn't see any of it as they paid the manufacturer and retailer of the product they bought a market price for the device.
A market price that was based, in part, on the cost of the materials which, it turns out, were overpriced due to illegal price fixing.
If they lost the trademark though, Mega Blocks can start marketing their product as lego. That would suck.
This is about a trademark on the design of the block, not a trademark on the name "Lego". Also, they didn't lose a trademark. They were applying for a new trademark on the design and it was turned down.
The choice of bricks in Lego's shop might seem large, but it's actually quite limited, compared to the number of types of bricks which have ever been products (over 10000 at a guess).
I suspect that most people who buy bricks by the bag are interested more in the standard generic bricks for multi-purpose building, rather than the bricks that are designed for a single specific use in a single specific set. Personally, I'd only be interested in few dozen different types of bricks.
"I'm not sure whether mine works or not.. how would you know? People are often saying that things like roses 'smell nice' when all I can smell is that slightly damp smell that all plants smell of...
I also can't smell body odour, but I'm not convinced half the people that say they can are able to.. they're conditioned to by advertising for deoderants etc. - they see someone that looks like they haven't washed for a few days and go 'they smell' without any other evidence."
Then allow me to confirm for you that your sense of smell is, indeed, not working.
Body odour really bothers me, as do perfume and cologne. I don't need to see what a person looks like to know what they smell like. I notice particularly smelly people walking behind me before I see them. I used to work with someone who drenched his self in cologne every day, and I knew he was approaching my desk 30 seconds before I could see or hear him. And don't even get me started on department stores that make you walk through the perfume section in order to get to the rest of the store.
Body odour exists. Roses do smell. Your sense of smell is defective.
Ok, first of all, emergency contraceptive pills are not prescribed drugs. Anyone can go to a pharmacy and get them over the shelf!
Well, sort of. Many places still refuse to take them out from behind the counter, and they insist on putting the patient through an "interview" before allowing them to purchase the drug. I'm not sure if they'll actually deny them the drug if they're not happy with the answers to the questions.
Second, if I read your post right, the idea that a pharmacist has the authority to deny me drugs that a doctor prescribed, based soly on their religious beliefs is complete and utter bullshit!
Does Adobe Reader come with a "safe mode" with just plain old PDF enabled?
If not, it should.
Agreed. And the same goes for every other application primarily designed to read documents (images, media files, whatever).
On the one hand, I find some of the functionality that is being embedded in various document types useful, but on the other hand I find it ridiculous that data can attack us.
Always ignore advice that begins with the word "always".;)
There is no "one size fits all" answer. There are arguments for and against coding from scratch in any given situation. A good developer evaluates all the options, weighs the pros and cons, and makes a decision that best suits their particular situation.
Sometimes, the time saved from using a tried-and-true library that comes complete with documentation that not only you but other developers can use to achieve a complete understanding of the code, plus the ability to go to forums and get advice from others who don't even know your particular application but can still help solve your problems because they're working with the same library that you are, is hard to describe.
You're kind of supporting the point. Tea is, as you said, "routinely" served much hotter than her cup of coffee. However, coffee is not "routinely" served at that temperature. Therefore, a tea drinker could reasonably be expected to be aware of the tea's temperature when it's being served that hot, whereas a coffee drinker could not reasonably be expected to be aware of it.
The point is reasonable expectation. You would handle a cup of room temperature water differently than you would handle a cup of scalding hot water. Similarly, you would handle a glass of hot water that would hurt if it was spilled on you differently than you would handle a glass of water so hot that a single drop would kill you instantly. Although this scenario is obviously exaggerated, the point is that this coffee was hotter than one could reasonably expect it to be.
It's worth noting that the jury found Ms. Liebeck partially responsible. It's also worth noting that prior to this case, McDonald's had spent half a million dollars settling 700 other similar cases (the reason people know about the Liebeck case is because it was the first to go to trial). Clearly, they were aware that their coffee was particularly dangerous, but chose to do nothing about it. That fact likely contributed to the jury's decision.
You expect hot coffee to be well, hot... If you pour hot coffee over yourself, you can expect to be burnt.
The point of the Liebeck case wasn't that the coffee was hot -- she expected that much -- but that it was significantly hotter than coffee is supposed to be. Coffee served at industry standard temperature can sit on bare skin for quite a while without causing more than a mild burn (redness and tenderness), whereas coffee served at the temperature that Ms. Liebeck's coffee was served at can cause third degree burns (requiring skin graft surgery) in as little as 2 seconds.
In other words, coffee is dangerous, but this coffee was significantly more dangerous, therefore she should have been warned.
To put it in perspective: everyone has spilled coffee on themselves at some point in their lives (I've done it, and I don't even drink coffee). Yet her coffee spill resulted in $11,000 in medical bills. Can you not see the difference between this and a normal coffee spill?
Open Office reads and writes Microsoft Office files. The real reason Open Source hasn't taken off is corporate FUD.
Or maybe it's that corporate users do some pretty complicated things with their Office documents. Sure, I could whip up a quick and simple Word document and be pretty confident that it'll look fine in OpenOffice, but I have Word documents that just crumble into a heap of chaos in OpenOffice due to fancy formatting features that just aren't properly supported.
It may be only a small percentage of documents that cause problems in OpenOffice, but until the percentage reaches zero, many businesses won't take that chance.
Full disclosure: I haven't tried OpenOffice 3 yet.
People think anything free must be crap, and the media (owned by money-worshipers) propagate this ignorant paradigm.
Actually, I think most people don't think OSS is crappy because it's free, they think it's crappy because so many others are willing to pay for the alternatives. I mean, imagine that you were not knowledgeable about a particular product, and you saw that there were two options, one free, and the other extremely expensive, and yet the majority of people using that product have chosen to use the expensive option, despite the existence of the free option. What would you think about that free option?
It's not that "free" == "crap", it's that "free, yet most people still prefer to use the expensive alternative" == "probably crap".
"Sure there are. You can play at most six notes at once on a guitar; besides that, there are plenty of notes that are off the bottom of the guitar's range."
That's assuming it's a six-string guitar, and it's tuned normally, neither of which are necessarily valid assumptions. Especially considering George did not play a six-string guitar (although, admittedly, a 12-string isn't that much different from a six-string, it just doubles 2 strings exactly and 4 of them an octave higher).
Not every one is motivated by the employer giving them a perk.... The only reward that is likely to be welcomed by a diverse group of people is vacation time or cash bonuses.
Absolutely.
The company I work for emphasizes the balance between work and life. One should enjoy their work, and want to do it, but should also enjoy their life, and want to participate in it as well.
I don't think it does any good to try to tip the scales in favour of work by providing perks in the workplace. If you want to reward your employees, treat them to something that enhances their life outside of work.
The guy in this case did something stupid, and you're right that he should have expected some form of retaliation. But that doesn't make that retaliation right.
People have to take responsibility for their actions. In this case, that means both the man and and woman. He needs to accept that he did something stupid, which enabled what she did. However, she made her own choices. No one forced her to retaliate against him. Regardless of what her reasons were, or what he did to enable her actions, she still did something wrong and worthy of punishment.
In a civilized society, we don't let criminals off the hook just because the victim of their crime is an idiot.
I read your complaint. It took you ten minutes to find the "Save As" option. If you had taken 30 seconds to google for a quick "how to" on the ribbon, you'd learn about the great big "office button" on the top left of the window, right where the "File" menu used to be, which contains all the things that used to be in the "File" menu.
If you refuse to accept any change, then keep using the version you were using before. But if you're going to upgrade to a new version with a redesigned interface, then don't blame Microsoft because you can't be bothered to learn how to use that interface.
If you want to paid, provide something to people that is in limited supply.
Why? Why should we allow that? We have to decide what we will reward as a society...
It's not an issue of choosing what to reward, it's an issue of reality. You have every right to try to sell blades of grass for $100 each, but why the hell would I buy one when there's millions of them lying around all over the place that I can just pick for free? If you want to be paid $100 for something, it needs to be worth $100. Something that I can just pick from any random field can't possibly be worth $100 to me. It's not the result of a societal choice, nor a failure of capitalism, nor whatever else anyone might want to blame it on that this is the case. It's just simple reality.
If copyright is so unnecessary, how come most of our works are still copyright protected?
You're asking about copyright being necessary, but ignoring the more important question: necessary for what? Copyright's originally intended purpose differs from its current actual purpose. The purpose of copyright today is to guarantee virtually unlimited profit for companies that hoard copyrighted material. For that purpose, copyright is essential, and that's why most of our works are still copyright protected. The question is, is copyright necessary for the purpose that it was originally created to serve? That is open to debate.
To be clear, I don't advocate abolishing copyright, although I find the idea interesting and I like hearing people's arguments in favour of it. I do, however, think it needs to go back to its original purpose. I personally advocate a single short copyright term of maybe 10 years, possibly varying depending on the nature of the copyrighted work, with the option to renew for a price that increases with each renewal, but with a limited number of renewals allowed.
You see, too many people think that just because they created something, they deserve to be paid for it.
I think you'll find that to be incorrect if you actually talk to people who supposedly think that.
Actually, I've worked with people who think this way. Obviously, I don't claim that everyone or even most artists/musicians think this way, but they do exist. They figure that the fact that they invested time, effort, and money into a recording is reason enough for them to be able to recover their expenses and make a profit. Whether or not they actually have a market for their product is irrelevant to them. They put in the effort, therefore they should be paid for it.
Of course people should be allowed to charge for their recordings. But if other people aren't willing to pay what you're charging, then you'll simply have to look for better ways of making money.
The best way is to provide a product that isn't so easily reproduced. A live show is one example of that. If you're not able to do that, then you'll just have to accept that the product you are providing simply isn't as valuable as you'd like it to be, and look into finding a day job to support your musical hobby.
Slashdot Mirror
You have it backwards. The "Cheaters" are the ones who asked for the "rules" in the first place.
The "rules" aren't laws of nature. They didn't exist before the legislators created them.
If you ask why the rules are there in the first place you'll realize it is in fact to prevent competition.
The rules are in place to protect customers. They were not "asked for" by the bus companies, and they do nothing to prevent competition.
Again, I recommend reading the actual decision. It goes into some detail about why the rules exist.
"More efficient competition"? The only reason they were more efficient is because they were attempting to use carpooling as a loophole around proper licensing and safety regulations. In other words, they weren't competing, they were cheating. The OTB is simply making them play by the same rules as the rest.
I recommend reading the actual decision rather than the sensationalist blog interpretation.
Personally, I'm confused as to how they came to these regulations. It's built on a faulty foundation that they could define carpooling as a very strict set of conditions- and then disallow any activity that didn't meet those conditions.
They're not disallowing anything. They're simply defining a carpool. Something that doesn't fit into that definition isn't disallowed, it's just not officially a carpool.
If I want to share a ride with a complete stranger and split the gas, how is that any different from sharing a ride with a family member?
You're more than welcome to do that. The problem here isn't sharing a ride with a stranger. The problem here is a business facilitating that sharing. The decision is basically saying that they are not facilitating carpooling, by the legal definition of carpooling, and that therefore what they are doing is facilitating transportation of passengers in public vehicles. The problem is that operators of public transportation vehicles must be licensed to operate a public vehicle, which these drivers are not.
It's my car and I'd much prefer to do with it what I'd please- I see absolutely no reason the government has any say in this!!
They don't. Carry on transporting whoever you want. Even call it a carpool if you want. No one cares. But don't try to operate a business facilitating public transportation without the appropriate licenses.
actually their customers are Apple, and other product makers that paid a few bucks too much per panel and missed sales, not "consumers". So the public really doesn't see any of it as they paid the manufacturer and retailer of the product they bought a market price for the device.
A market price that was based, in part, on the cost of the materials which, it turns out, were overpriced due to illegal price fixing.
Where are Mega Bloks made? Perhaps they're manufactured in a 3rd world country? Where adding lead or poisonous chemicals is ok if it helps cut costs?
According to Wikipedia: "Most blocks are manufactured in Canada, but some of the more specialized elements are made in China."
If they lost the trademark though, Mega Blocks can start marketing their product as lego. That would suck.
This is about a trademark on the design of the block, not a trademark on the name "Lego". Also, they didn't lose a trademark. They were applying for a new trademark on the design and it was turned down.
The choice of bricks in Lego's shop might seem large, but it's actually quite limited, compared to the number of types of bricks which have ever been products (over 10000 at a guess).
I suspect that most people who buy bricks by the bag are interested more in the standard generic bricks for multi-purpose building, rather than the bricks that are designed for a single specific use in a single specific set. Personally, I'd only be interested in few dozen different types of bricks.
Doesn't seem that valuable to me... So now I'll be able to buy massive boxes of red 2X4 blocks. Big deal, I want more than just red!
You can already get whatever you want.
"I'm not sure whether mine works or not.. how would you know? People are often saying that things like roses 'smell nice' when all I can smell is that slightly damp smell that all plants smell of...
I also can't smell body odour, but I'm not convinced half the people that say they can are able to.. they're conditioned to by advertising for deoderants etc. - they see someone that looks like they haven't washed for a few days and go 'they smell' without any other evidence."
Then allow me to confirm for you that your sense of smell is, indeed, not working.
Body odour really bothers me, as do perfume and cologne. I don't need to see what a person looks like to know what they smell like. I notice particularly smelly people walking behind me before I see them. I used to work with someone who drenched his self in cologne every day, and I knew he was approaching my desk 30 seconds before I could see or hear him. And don't even get me started on department stores that make you walk through the perfume section in order to get to the rest of the store.
Body odour exists. Roses do smell. Your sense of smell is defective.
I'm all for a pharmacist giving an interview and refusing to sell the drugs if they are not happy with the answers given.
I'm not, when the drug in question has been approved for over the counter sale. The pharmacist shouldn't even be involved.
Ok, first of all, emergency contraceptive pills are not prescribed drugs. Anyone can go to a pharmacy and get them over the shelf!
Well, sort of. Many places still refuse to take them out from behind the counter, and they insist on putting the patient through an "interview" before allowing them to purchase the drug. I'm not sure if they'll actually deny them the drug if they're not happy with the answers to the questions.
Second, if I read your post right, the idea that a pharmacist has the authority to deny me drugs that a doctor prescribed, based soly on their religious beliefs is complete and utter bullshit!
It is absolutely bullshit. And yet it happens.
Is there a schizophrenics-exploited-by-unscrupulous-lawyers.slashdot.org?
Actually, he writes (by hand) his own briefs. No lawyers are involved.
Does Adobe Reader come with a "safe mode" with just plain old PDF enabled?
If not, it should.
Agreed. And the same goes for every other application primarily designed to read documents (images, media files, whatever).
On the one hand, I find some of the functionality that is being embedded in various document types useful, but on the other hand I find it ridiculous that data can attack us.
Always code from scratch.
Always ignore advice that begins with the word "always". ;)
There is no "one size fits all" answer. There are arguments for and against coding from scratch in any given situation. A good developer evaluates all the options, weighs the pros and cons, and makes a decision that best suits their particular situation.
Sometimes, the time saved from using a tried-and-true library that comes complete with documentation that not only you but other developers can use to achieve a complete understanding of the code, plus the ability to go to forums and get advice from others who don't even know your particular application but can still help solve your problems because they're working with the same library that you are, is hard to describe.
You're kind of supporting the point. Tea is, as you said, "routinely" served much hotter than her cup of coffee. However, coffee is not "routinely" served at that temperature. Therefore, a tea drinker could reasonably be expected to be aware of the tea's temperature when it's being served that hot, whereas a coffee drinker could not reasonably be expected to be aware of it.
The point is reasonable expectation. You would handle a cup of room temperature water differently than you would handle a cup of scalding hot water. Similarly, you would handle a glass of hot water that would hurt if it was spilled on you differently than you would handle a glass of water so hot that a single drop would kill you instantly. Although this scenario is obviously exaggerated, the point is that this coffee was hotter than one could reasonably expect it to be.
It's worth noting that the jury found Ms. Liebeck partially responsible. It's also worth noting that prior to this case, McDonald's had spent half a million dollars settling 700 other similar cases (the reason people know about the Liebeck case is because it was the first to go to trial). Clearly, they were aware that their coffee was particularly dangerous, but chose to do nothing about it. That fact likely contributed to the jury's decision.
These necessities aren't going to disappear because Amazon's mail order business isn't bound by those necessities.
Until the B&M retailers start watching their sales migrating to Amazon and begin rethinking their necessities.
You expect hot coffee to be well, hot... If you pour hot coffee over yourself, you can expect to be burnt.
The point of the Liebeck case wasn't that the coffee was hot -- she expected that much -- but that it was significantly hotter than coffee is supposed to be. Coffee served at industry standard temperature can sit on bare skin for quite a while without causing more than a mild burn (redness and tenderness), whereas coffee served at the temperature that Ms. Liebeck's coffee was served at can cause third degree burns (requiring skin graft surgery) in as little as 2 seconds.
In other words, coffee is dangerous, but this coffee was significantly more dangerous, therefore she should have been warned.
To put it in perspective: everyone has spilled coffee on themselves at some point in their lives (I've done it, and I don't even drink coffee). Yet her coffee spill resulted in $11,000 in medical bills. Can you not see the difference between this and a normal coffee spill?
Open Office reads and writes Microsoft Office files. The real reason Open Source hasn't taken off is corporate FUD.
Or maybe it's that corporate users do some pretty complicated things with their Office documents. Sure, I could whip up a quick and simple Word document and be pretty confident that it'll look fine in OpenOffice, but I have Word documents that just crumble into a heap of chaos in OpenOffice due to fancy formatting features that just aren't properly supported.
It may be only a small percentage of documents that cause problems in OpenOffice, but until the percentage reaches zero, many businesses won't take that chance.
Full disclosure: I haven't tried OpenOffice 3 yet.
People think anything free must be crap, and the media (owned by money-worshipers) propagate this ignorant paradigm.
Actually, I think most people don't think OSS is crappy because it's free, they think it's crappy because so many others are willing to pay for the alternatives. I mean, imagine that you were not knowledgeable about a particular product, and you saw that there were two options, one free, and the other extremely expensive, and yet the majority of people using that product have chosen to use the expensive option, despite the existence of the free option. What would you think about that free option?
It's not that "free" == "crap", it's that "free, yet most people still prefer to use the expensive alternative" == "probably crap".
"Sure there are. You can play at most six notes at once on a guitar; besides that, there are plenty of notes that are off the bottom of the guitar's range."
That's assuming it's a six-string guitar, and it's tuned normally, neither of which are necessarily valid assumptions. Especially considering George did not play a six-string guitar (although, admittedly, a 12-string isn't that much different from a six-string, it just doubles 2 strings exactly and 4 of them an octave higher).
Not every one is motivated by the employer giving them a perk. ... The only reward that is likely to be welcomed by a diverse group of people is vacation time or cash bonuses.
Absolutely.
The company I work for emphasizes the balance between work and life. One should enjoy their work, and want to do it, but should also enjoy their life, and want to participate in it as well.
I don't think it does any good to try to tip the scales in favour of work by providing perks in the workplace. If you want to reward your employees, treat them to something that enhances their life outside of work.
The guy in this case did something stupid, and you're right that he should have expected some form of retaliation. But that doesn't make that retaliation right.
People have to take responsibility for their actions. In this case, that means both the man and and woman. He needs to accept that he did something stupid, which enabled what she did. However, she made her own choices. No one forced her to retaliate against him. Regardless of what her reasons were, or what he did to enable her actions, she still did something wrong and worthy of punishment.
In a civilized society, we don't let criminals off the hook just because the victim of their crime is an idiot.
I read your complaint. It took you ten minutes to find the "Save As" option. If you had taken 30 seconds to google for a quick "how to" on the ribbon, you'd learn about the great big "office button" on the top left of the window, right where the "File" menu used to be, which contains all the things that used to be in the "File" menu.
If you refuse to accept any change, then keep using the version you were using before. But if you're going to upgrade to a new version with a redesigned interface, then don't blame Microsoft because you can't be bothered to learn how to use that interface.
Why? Why should we allow that? We have to decide what we will reward as a society...
It's not an issue of choosing what to reward, it's an issue of reality. You have every right to try to sell blades of grass for $100 each, but why the hell would I buy one when there's millions of them lying around all over the place that I can just pick for free? If you want to be paid $100 for something, it needs to be worth $100. Something that I can just pick from any random field can't possibly be worth $100 to me. It's not the result of a societal choice, nor a failure of capitalism, nor whatever else anyone might want to blame it on that this is the case. It's just simple reality.
If copyright is so unnecessary, how come most of our works are still copyright protected?
You're asking about copyright being necessary, but ignoring the more important question: necessary for what? Copyright's originally intended purpose differs from its current actual purpose. The purpose of copyright today is to guarantee virtually unlimited profit for companies that hoard copyrighted material. For that purpose, copyright is essential, and that's why most of our works are still copyright protected. The question is, is copyright necessary for the purpose that it was originally created to serve? That is open to debate.
To be clear, I don't advocate abolishing copyright, although I find the idea interesting and I like hearing people's arguments in favour of it. I do, however, think it needs to go back to its original purpose. I personally advocate a single short copyright term of maybe 10 years, possibly varying depending on the nature of the copyrighted work, with the option to renew for a price that increases with each renewal, but with a limited number of renewals allowed.
I think you'll find that to be incorrect if you actually talk to people who supposedly think that.
Actually, I've worked with people who think this way. Obviously, I don't claim that everyone or even most artists/musicians think this way, but they do exist. They figure that the fact that they invested time, effort, and money into a recording is reason enough for them to be able to recover their expenses and make a profit. Whether or not they actually have a market for their product is irrelevant to them. They put in the effort, therefore they should be paid for it.
Of course people should be allowed to charge for their recordings. But if other people aren't willing to pay what you're charging, then you'll simply have to look for better ways of making money.
The best way is to provide a product that isn't so easily reproduced. A live show is one example of that. If you're not able to do that, then you'll just have to accept that the product you are providing simply isn't as valuable as you'd like it to be, and look into finding a day job to support your musical hobby.