Unfortunately this is not true for emotionaly loaded crimes.
PA's in many jurisdictions want the 'big wins' or ones that paint them as hero's and champions.
Not to mention how in this particular case it's almost universally guilty untill proven innocent, in court, no proof of innocence possible outside court.
Someone once said 'It's convient to have a nation of criminals'. The quote may be imprecise, but gist is there.
The above post does a nice job of explaining why.
I won't say who, because mentioning a certain evil regime can be an invocation of a certain usenet/internet rule/law. And besides I don't remember specifically which of the evil leaders of said regime actually said it.
Unfortunately you are talking about reality, which has no bearing or relation to legality where some subjects are concerned.
In my state they have actually ruled something is child porn if it involves a picture of child (any picture of any person under 18) and the viewer is in least bit aroused. The viewer is then guilty of possion of child porn.
At least IIRC that is how they convicted some guy who had some NEWSPAPER clipings featuring adds with minors in pj's.
Problem is there would be no outcry over the brodcast flag (/. and simular asside, I mean popular public outcry) as long as you were alowed to make one original recording and no second gen recording, even if it was time limited to a week or two.
I wonder even if an absolutely NO recordings implementation would cause much grumbling.
People are being inundated with the concept that copying is always wrong. It started with the small, brief limits of copywright which were fair enough given the fair use limits thereon.
But incrementally this has erroded, slowly enough that only a minority has spotted the problem.
Two things to consider: How do you boil a live frog in an open pot? And why do people support a rotten empire?
The first is slowly enough he never notices till it's to late, the second is that once 'boiled' people tend to choose a known evil over the unknown wich may be evil.
I didn't find I robot all that bad. Who the badguy was and why they did what they did was suitable to Asimov's universe. Admitedly the whole thing was a little light and short on debth and one of buddies secrets was counter to Asimove's 'cannon'. But it wasn't terrible, just wasn't great.
Now what they did to Starship Troopers on the other hand pisses me off. It would have been o.k. if it was advertised as a spoof, but I went in expecting SOME attempt to follow the story.
Sorta, the All-In-Wonder line from ATI is moving to pci-e as the base cards do.
This is a bit sub-optimal as AIW cards 'honor' macro-vision crap (if the card detect macrovision it proceded to turn the resultant video into what looks like a scramble cable signal) and there is no fix for modern AIW's and drivers on this issue yet. There is a hack for 7k series and one 8k series radeon based AIW's that the creators are working on updating IIRC to more modern cards.
Can I point out interpreting vs making law assumes a clear line?
It's a bit fuzzy at times if you ask me, this is why I don't like how heavily precedent wieghs relative to the actual law. Rule a bit on a law in a grey area, then rule on grey area in precent, then on that ruling, and nauseum and soon you find your current grey area is actually way out in the no-no zone from the original law.
Minor nit. Seperation of church in state is not actually in the constitution. The doctrine comes from supreme court rulings on what is actually in there.
I only bring it up because I see so many arguments about the constitutional soundness of things based on interpretations of ruleing about interpretation ad nauseum.
I honestly believe whenever the courts rule on the constitution they should first try to resolve based on the constitution itself before relying on precedent. Elswise it's to easy to drift into some of the problems we have today where laws are considered constitutional that nonetheless say almost the exact opposite of what the founding fathers said, eigther in the constitution itself or in thier public explanations of what they wrote.
Not that I'm saying the behaviour of the school faculty were anything but wrong and complete asses to boot in your case.
The relevant section of Amendment 1:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...
Sadly it's necessarily something that was done deliberately.
People will tend to buy the cheapest thing they can that will get the job done. However they easilly miss/underestimate the down-the-road costs that buying cheapest will lead to.
So if manufacturer A sells something cheaper than Manufacturer B, B is pushed into dropping prices also to compete. Now in many cases this stops when the manufacturers are at a point were they can't sell cheaper without a loss. Thier only method of competeing then is to find a cheaper way to make the same goods. This is good in that the consumer benifits from droping prices for a given item.
The problem comes in when the product needs a consumable that is not a generic commodity, but only available from the manufacturer of the specific item. Even though his competor is producing the same kind of thing, if thier consumables are not interchangeable, he can procede to drop prices even farther than otherwise by raising profit on the consumeables to recover any losses on the item itself, and so can his competitor. This combined with peoples tendancy to weigh up-front costs much higher than ongoing costs leads to $99 printers that cost $200 to make and $45 ink cartridges that cost $.25 to make.
If that's not clear some others have posted essentialy the same explanation elsewhere in these threads and likely did a better job of explaining it (at least better for some peoples understanding).
Ahh, thanks for clearing that up. The basic emphasis is simular (given how long better laser printers are kept in service and relative markup of toner), but I'm still guilty of not readingtfa and spouting off.
Your use of we implies you work for Lexmark (or perhaps the printer industry in general), any other insight into this you can/care to share?
At any rate I assume you speak as private individual and not for Lexmark.
That's not evidence, that is lack of evidence, therefore proving nothing.
Just because you haven't seen it doesn't mean I don't have a time machine that can also make good coffee. See how that arguement goes?
I once got some lexmark ink for just nine dollars for the pair of them after rebate, even came with a lexmark printer.
Someone started the sale the day before a rebate offer expired.
First off, as others pointed out it continuing AFTER 'no thanks' that was mentioned.
Second off, look into that 'warrenty' a little closer. What it actually is, is an insurance policy (by law in many states, and is regulated as such) and is seldom worth the paper it's printed on. The ONLY time an 'extended warrenty' is worth buying is when it's a 'no fault' policy. Meaning they can't refuse to fix/replace for ANY reason durring the covered period.
Generally speaking they ARE an attempt to 'wrench money' from the customer, maybe not a concious attempt on the unknowing employee's part, but most certainly on the companies part.
Don't for minute think it's just one of the two major political parties.
They're both selling us down the river. We need to toss both groups out and elect some of the other parties.
Between them they've got the people so convinced that thier only choices are tweedle dee and tweedle dum that thier quite happy to share despite the show of partisian politics they put on every few years, and even then it's only the elected officials and those in the public spotlight who pretend anymore.
Because they make no money when you buy other than thier cartridges. I don't mean no money other than for the printer, those are sold very near or below cost, they make up the difference by selling a the cartridge to you at several hundred percent markup.
So if you buy thier printer then use other peoples ink carts, or just refill thiers, you are litteraly an expense and not a customer.
Of course they're in the same boat if you just buy a new printer everytime you run out of ink, so the cost of a new printer is usually just above the cost of a new cartridge.
Personally I'd assume someone was yanking my chain and be anoyed as well, but if it was real I'd just be impressed at the odds of that actually occuring.
The problem is it's all guesswork. We only have just this ONE planet to base guessework on. And while relatively speaking some of the animals here are very different seeming, thier still MUCH more alike than different.
Parrot and cephalopod brains are still composed of neurons built up from the instructions encoded in DNA and such. The layout may be different, and some other functional details may very, but what about the other ways it might work? Or are there any? Who knows, not us, not yet.
To put it bluntly most speculation about alien life and or intelligences is just that, pure speculation.
About the only thing we can say is it happened once, and space is huge with lots of stars like ours, and some other stars do have planets. All this proves however is that there is no reason yet known to say categorically we're the only ones out there. Sofar there isn't even that much data to suggest we are alone.
But are those things needed? My experiences with flash have uniformly been crap that slows things down and provides NOTHING I haven't seen done elsewhere without flash. I haven't had flash for some time now and the only thing I've noticed is a few idiotic sites like the one I mentioned and some missing adds or eyecandy that the site didn't need.
Yes calling it evil is hyperboly. I intended the comment as such and did lable it opinion. What it really is is anoying and uneeded. As an option for users with broadband who want the extra eyecandy and the (admitedly slight) risk increase that's fine. I have neigther the desire for that sort of eyecandy nor the bandwith to be wasted.
You are of course perfectly entiteled to a differing opinion, but web designers really should not cause a site to fail for lack of flash. That's just bad web design.
Even if the gamma rays did point strait down, we would be wondering why there was an occasional case of natural combustion, not the extiction of the human race.
The first thing that came to mind when I read that was Spontaneous Human Combustion.
Not to mention flash is evil (ok ok just my opinion) but I hate sites that INSIST on flash, not only because it's bad for the blin) but because web developers who use it never seem to understand that some people (try a great many) do not have a huge pipe to download all that crap. Another minor ding against it is that it's proprietary(sp?) IIRC.
I bought a game recently and went to thier site and the main page is just a big square block with a few trademarked logos on the bottom because I don't want to wast the time to download flash, then download thier intro.
I had to fiddle around guessing at the names of other possible web pages on thier site to find something readable.
Sorry, in reference to seti I was intending to refer only to the discovery of incedental radiations, not intentional 'hey we're here' signals and failed to say so, mea culpa.
Though to be honest finding those allows (as you rightly point out) much greater detection range, it also suffers from the enormity of space problem. In this case we have to be in the path of the beam. Still a better prospect since intelligent 'life as we know it' is likely to choose 'good' prospects to beam at and not empty slices of space or O supergiants to aim at.
We are tending towards technologies that reduce our levels of obvious emissions. Most terrestrial only radio brodcasts use patterned emissions that use most of the power to push the signal out along the ground and not wast any upwards toward space. Also we're using tech like spread spectrum (originally developed in part by Hedi Lemar IIRC the actress from the 30's-50's to help get around jamming and eavesdroping) that makes transmissions harder to detect from background noise unless your reciever knows the exact pattern used. Add in the amount of fiber being used that used to be copper and you get less singal leak there as well.
As to whether we've reached the point where these technologies are reducing emissions faster than rate at which our communications infrastructure is growing I don't know, but it shure looks like we'll eventualy reach a point where our total leakage to space will start delcining if it hasn't already.
Now as far as the problem with they've had time to colonize the galaxy at even sublight speeds at least with probes, I have no answer there other than ALL this assumes other civilisations would do these things. Though I don't know we would have enough in common with such a civilization to carry on a meaningfull dialog even should run into one by chance.
Your making the assumption only one can be done, his is false.
If fact it'd probably be foolish we just insisted on all reasearch of type x be about problem y. Shure we'd solve say herpes much faster, but in the meantime we get invaded by zergonians pissed off because we never answered thier galactic email.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately this is not true for emotionaly loaded crimes.
PA's in many jurisdictions want the 'big wins' or ones that paint them as hero's and champions.
Not to mention how in this particular case it's almost universally guilty untill proven innocent, in court, no proof of innocence possible outside court.
Mycroft
Someone once said 'It's convient to have a nation of criminals'. The quote may be imprecise, but gist is there.
The above post does a nice job of explaining why.
I won't say who, because mentioning a certain evil regime can be an invocation of a certain usenet/internet rule/law. And besides I don't remember specifically which of the evil leaders of said regime actually said it.
Mycroft
Unfortunately you are talking about reality, which has no bearing or relation to legality where some subjects are concerned.
In my state they have actually ruled something is child porn if it involves a picture of child (any picture of any person under 18) and the viewer is in least bit aroused. The viewer is then guilty of possion of child porn.
At least IIRC that is how they convicted some guy who had some NEWSPAPER clipings featuring adds with minors in pj's.
Mycroft
Problem is there would be no outcry over the brodcast flag (/. and simular asside, I mean popular public outcry) as long as you were alowed to make one original recording and no second gen recording, even if it was time limited to a week or two.
I wonder even if an absolutely NO recordings implementation would cause much grumbling.
People are being inundated with the concept that copying is always wrong. It started with the small, brief limits of copywright which were fair enough given the fair use limits thereon.
But incrementally this has erroded, slowly enough that only a minority has spotted the problem.
Two things to consider: How do you boil a live frog in an open pot? And why do people support a rotten empire?
The first is slowly enough he never notices till it's to late, the second is that once 'boiled' people tend to choose a known evil over the unknown wich may be evil.
Mycroft
I didn't find I robot all that bad. Who the badguy was and why they did what they did was suitable to Asimov's universe. Admitedly the whole thing was a little light and short on debth and one of buddies secrets was counter to Asimove's 'cannon'. But it wasn't terrible, just wasn't great.
Now what they did to Starship Troopers on the other hand pisses me off. It would have been o.k. if it was advertised as a spoof, but I went in expecting SOME attempt to follow the story.
Mycroft
Thanks, I've been trying to remember that quote of Heinlein's and which story it was in.
Not remembering is bit embarrising considering my nick.
Mycroft
Sorta, the All-In-Wonder line from ATI is moving to pci-e as the base cards do.
This is a bit sub-optimal as AIW cards 'honor' macro-vision crap (if the card detect macrovision it proceded to turn the resultant video into what looks like a scramble cable signal) and there is no fix for modern AIW's and drivers on this issue yet. There is a hack for 7k series and one 8k series radeon based AIW's that the creators are working on updating IIRC to more modern cards.
Mycroft
Can I point out interpreting vs making law assumes a clear line?
It's a bit fuzzy at times if you ask me, this is why I don't like how heavily precedent wieghs relative to the actual law. Rule a bit on a law in a grey area, then rule on grey area in precent, then on that ruling, and nauseum and soon you find your current grey area is actually way out in the no-no zone from the original law.
Mycroft
I only bring it up because I see so many arguments about the constitutional soundness of things based on interpretations of ruleing about interpretation ad nauseum.
I honestly believe whenever the courts rule on the constitution they should first try to resolve based on the constitution itself before relying on precedent. Elswise it's to easy to drift into some of the problems we have today where laws are considered constitutional that nonetheless say almost the exact opposite of what the founding fathers said, eigther in the constitution itself or in thier public explanations of what they wrote.
Not that I'm saying the behaviour of the school faculty were anything but wrong and complete asses to boot in your case.
The relevant section of Amendment 1:
Mycroft
Sadly it's necessarily something that was done deliberately.
People will tend to buy the cheapest thing they can that will get the job done. However they easilly miss/underestimate the down-the-road costs that buying cheapest will lead to.
So if manufacturer A sells something cheaper than Manufacturer B, B is pushed into dropping prices also to compete. Now in many cases this stops when the manufacturers are at a point were they can't sell cheaper without a loss. Thier only method of competeing then is to find a cheaper way to make the same goods. This is good in that the consumer benifits from droping prices for a given item.
The problem comes in when the product needs a consumable that is not a generic commodity, but only available from the manufacturer of the specific item. Even though his competor is producing the same kind of thing, if thier consumables are not interchangeable, he can procede to drop prices even farther than otherwise by raising profit on the consumeables to recover any losses on the item itself, and so can his competitor. This combined with peoples tendancy to weigh up-front costs much higher than ongoing costs leads to $99 printers that cost $200 to make and $45 ink cartridges that cost $.25 to make.
If that's not clear some others have posted essentialy the same explanation elsewhere in these threads and likely did a better job of explaining it (at least better for some peoples understanding).
Mycroft
My point precisely. Thank you kindly for the added emphasis, and the succint summation.
Mycroft
Ahh, thanks for clearing that up. The basic emphasis is simular (given how long better laser printers are kept in service and relative markup of toner), but I'm still guilty of not readingtfa and spouting off.
Your use of we implies you work for Lexmark (or perhaps the printer industry in general), any other insight into this you can/care to share?
At any rate I assume you speak as private individual and not for Lexmark.
Mycroft
That's not evidence, that is lack of evidence, therefore proving nothing.
Just because you haven't seen it doesn't mean I don't have a time machine that can also make good coffee. See how that arguement goes?
Mycroft
Just me perhaps, but I thought he was going for +1 funny with a sarcastic remark. But then again maybe we're all three off our meds.
Mycroft
I once got some lexmark ink for just nine dollars for the pair of them after rebate, even came with a lexmark printer.
Someone started the sale the day before a rebate offer expired.
Mycroft
First off, as others pointed out it continuing AFTER 'no thanks' that was mentioned.
Second off, look into that 'warrenty' a little closer. What it actually is, is an insurance policy (by law in many states, and is regulated as such) and is seldom worth the paper it's printed on. The ONLY time an 'extended warrenty' is worth buying is when it's a 'no fault' policy. Meaning they can't refuse to fix/replace for ANY reason durring the covered period.
Generally speaking they ARE an attempt to 'wrench money' from the customer, maybe not a concious attempt on the unknowing employee's part, but most certainly on the companies part.
Mycroft
Don't for minute think it's just one of the two major political parties.
They're both selling us down the river. We need to toss both groups out and elect some of the other parties.
Between them they've got the people so convinced that thier only choices are tweedle dee and tweedle dum that thier quite happy to share despite the show of partisian politics they put on every few years, and even then it's only the elected officials and those in the public spotlight who pretend anymore.
Mycroft
Because they make no money when you buy other than thier cartridges. I don't mean no money other than for the printer, those are sold very near or below cost, they make up the difference by selling a the cartridge to you at several hundred percent markup.
So if you buy thier printer then use other peoples ink carts, or just refill thiers, you are litteraly an expense and not a customer.
Of course they're in the same boat if you just buy a new printer everytime you run out of ink, so the cost of a new printer is usually just above the cost of a new cartridge.
Mycroft
Personally I'd assume someone was yanking my chain and be anoyed as well, but if it was real I'd just be impressed at the odds of that actually occuring.
Mycroft
The problem is it's all guesswork. We only have just this ONE planet to base guessework on. And while relatively speaking some of the animals here are very different seeming, thier still MUCH more alike than different.
Parrot and cephalopod brains are still composed of neurons built up from the instructions encoded in DNA and such. The layout may be different, and some other functional details may very, but what about the other ways it might work? Or are there any? Who knows, not us, not yet.
To put it bluntly most speculation about alien life and or intelligences is just that, pure speculation.
About the only thing we can say is it happened once, and space is huge with lots of stars like ours, and some other stars do have planets. All this proves however is that there is no reason yet known to say categorically we're the only ones out there. Sofar there isn't even that much data to suggest we are alone.
Mycroft
But are those things needed? My experiences with flash have uniformly been crap that slows things down and provides NOTHING I haven't seen done elsewhere without flash. I haven't had flash for some time now and the only thing I've noticed is a few idiotic sites like the one I mentioned and some missing adds or eyecandy that the site didn't need.
Yes calling it evil is hyperboly. I intended the comment as such and did lable it opinion. What it really is is anoying and uneeded. As an option for users with broadband who want the extra eyecandy and the (admitedly slight) risk increase that's fine. I have neigther the desire for that sort of eyecandy nor the bandwith to be wasted.
You are of course perfectly entiteled to a differing opinion, but web designers really should not cause a site to fail for lack of flash. That's just bad web design.
Mycroft
The first thing that came to mind when I read that was Spontaneous Human Combustion.
Mycroft
Not to mention flash is evil (ok ok just my opinion) but I hate sites that INSIST on flash, not only because it's bad for the blin) but because web developers who use it never seem to understand that some people (try a great many) do not have a huge pipe to download all that crap. Another minor ding against it is that it's proprietary(sp?) IIRC.
I bought a game recently and went to thier site and the main page is just a big square block with a few trademarked logos on the bottom because I don't want to wast the time to download flash, then download thier intro.
I had to fiddle around guessing at the names of other possible web pages on thier site to find something readable.
Mycroft
Sorry, in reference to seti I was intending to refer only to the discovery of incedental radiations, not intentional 'hey we're here' signals and failed to say so, mea culpa.
Though to be honest finding those allows (as you rightly point out) much greater detection range, it also suffers from the enormity of space problem. In this case we have to be in the path of the beam. Still a better prospect since intelligent 'life as we know it' is likely to choose 'good' prospects to beam at and not empty slices of space or O supergiants to aim at.
We are tending towards technologies that reduce our levels of obvious emissions. Most terrestrial only radio brodcasts use patterned emissions that use most of the power to push the signal out along the ground and not wast any upwards toward space. Also we're using tech like spread spectrum (originally developed in part by Hedi Lemar IIRC the actress from the 30's-50's to help get around jamming and eavesdroping) that makes transmissions harder to detect from background noise unless your reciever knows the exact pattern used. Add in the amount of fiber being used that used to be copper and you get less singal leak there as well.
As to whether we've reached the point where these technologies are reducing emissions faster than rate at which our communications infrastructure is growing I don't know, but it shure looks like we'll eventualy reach a point where our total leakage to space will start delcining if it hasn't already.
Now as far as the problem with they've had time to colonize the galaxy at even sublight speeds at least with probes, I have no answer there other than ALL this assumes other civilisations would do these things. Though I don't know we would have enough in common with such a civilization to carry on a meaningfull dialog even should run into one by chance.
Mycroft
Your making the assumption only one can be done, his is false.
If fact it'd probably be foolish we just insisted on all reasearch of type x be about problem y. Shure we'd solve say herpes much faster, but in the meantime we get invaded by zergonians pissed off because we never answered thier galactic email.
Mycroft