I've long felt that lawyers should be subject to the same outcome as their client. Don't want to get electrocuted, don't represent a murder. Don't want to end up a million dollars in the hole? Don't represent a doctor who's clearly guilty of malpractice.
Without diving into the specifics, I don't see a problem here. The iPhone was hugely innovative, and there was a lot there that was genuinely new. While in general I'm not a big fan of patents (often the 'innovations' covered are trivial), in this case I think that Apple sort of deserves to profit from their R&D. Clearly, some of the HTC phones are knockoffs.
Assuming that the problem is even real, or even related to content (I have my doubts, because this seems like a great marketing ploy)... Is it because it's a gay site or because it's a "hookup" site? As i read the front page, this is about meeting someone for a "hookup". From what I've heard, postings in such forums are often deceptive and/or fronts for other sorts of "opportunities". If that's the case, Citibank might legitimately wonder whether this is a good business for them to be involved with, if only because of the opportunity for chargebacks.
Standards change--if not the standards themselves, then at least the versions. We're now on HTML 5 and CSS3 (or is there a CSS4 now?). And, more importantly, the expectations we have of standards change. I don't recall ever hearing the words "acid test" applied to browsers until about 5 years after IE6 was released. The first browser to say, "to hell with standards, we're going to add some tags that make sense!" (i.e. to "embrace and extend") was netscape. And not many people saw a problem, then, as the standard was evolving too slowly to be useful. Second issue is that as a business decision, I want to let customers know that it's their browser that's broken and not my site. sorry, but that's just common sense. We can argue ideals all we want, but no company wants to take the rap for something that's broken because of a customer's browser. The real problem isn't the warning, it's the sites that won't work at all unless you have a "supported" browser.
These have been adopted by the medical system, regulated, and now most of what's left is the useless but harmless treatments. Beneficial herbs became pharmaceuticals, spinal manipulations that work are incorporated into osteopathic medicine and physical therapy, and even leeches and bloodletting are valid medical procedures.
On the whole, I agree with you. Most supplements do nothing useful, and may have serious side effects if misused. My favorite one to bitch about is "it boosts your immune system." Folks, what would happen if it really "boosted" your immune system in any significant way? A few diseases leap to mind... Psoriasis. Rheumatoid Arthritis. Asthma. Anaphyactic shock. If you could really "boost your immune system" you would be D-E-A-D.
However, from time to time there's an herbal remedy that turns out to be scientifically well-grounded. For example, Alpha Lipoic Acid has a real (and measurable--I've tested) effect on my blood sugar. Melatonic definitely really does make me sleepy. And there's so much evidence for the usefulness of Vitamin D supplementation it's not funny. And fish-oil is quite effective in lowering heart disease risk. All validated by scientific data in well-reviewed journals. As is always the case, it's better to go to specifics. In many cases, you're right--the "medicalized" versions are better. However, in other cases, they're just better advertised. And in still other cases, they're worse.
The most important skill is that of managing your own health by monitoring your own health. The time when we could trust doctors and the "health industry" to care for us is long over. The smart doctors know this and appreciate it when they see that you know it too. The ones who don't like it... you didn't want to deal with them anyway, did you?
I was aware of this (and other issues with the roots of public education) but didn't want to go there. The truth is that the system has always been corrupt.
If this were a private school, you'd be right. The student is free to go elsewhere. However, this is a public school, paid for with tax dollars, and numerous court rulings have found that such are at least in some respects agents of state. This is why school prayer, for example, is not allowed. Accordingly, this is a punitive government action taken against a citizen, without due process, for expressing an unfavorable view of a government functionary in a public forum. You could even mount a reasonable argument that publishing on Facebook is equivalent, in context, to "the press."
Blink.
How is the principal's action any better than Richard Nixon's enemy's list?
Maybe I'm missing something... but public schools can't have public prayer (in most cases--there are exceptions) because that would be government "establishment" of religion. Yet they're allowed to do other things that government is forbidden to do on grounds that they're in loco parentis--like radically restricting student's freedom of speech, against their real parents wishes. I understand that the processes and procedures that one would follow with adults are not necessarily appropriate to schools (I have four children, okay?) but it seems like the application of the bill of rights and the fourteenth amendment is rather selective--as if we as a society are trying to have it both ways.
One of the things I observed a number of years back, while taking a course (for my B.A. in Philosophy/Religious Studies concentration) called Religious Freedom and the Law was that most of the modern conflict over the Bill of Rights comes up as we see government involved in things that simply were not part of Government's mandate when the Bill of Rights was written. In 1789, there was no public education to speak of. Unfortunately, government run education has become a place in which children are "socialized" with little regard for the wishes of their parents, especially when those parents are an ethnic or religious minority. Simply put, "civic virtue" is only "virtue" for the "civic"--for the insiders and the establishment. Public schooling is, by its very nature, an assault on freedom.
This to me is one of the best arguments for vouchers--not that children will necessarily get a better education, but people of modest income will be able to get an education that reflects their values and beliefs rather than the beliefs and values of the establishment. If you say, "but I don't like the choices some people will make, so let's keep the current system!" you're kind of proving my point.
Look... not to be a spoil sport, but who cares? So you don't have any privacy... is it costing you money? Is it costing you jobs? Is it harming you? The alternative is to go "off the grid"... and you *can* do that if it's worth it to you. It's not to me. So just accept that companies will look over your shoulder and don't do stuff that you're going to be ashamed of, counting on the fact that the law of averages will shield you. This is no different, really, than living in a small town.
What limits my book purchases is not my ability to afford books. It is having time to read books. The biggest cost of the book, for me, is the 5-10 hours of my time (at an arbitrary $50/hour) that I'll spend reading it. Most books, I will only read once. In this way, books are fundamentally different from Music, and that's why they've taken so long to "go digital" (and why libraries seem to work so much better for books than for other "media.") I don't particularly care about eBooks being cheaper. What I care about is being able to access them anywhere I have a computer, make notes, care a library in my pocket, etc. Books are not music, and not movies.
Yeah.. and let us recall that Jefferson was the most radically non-Christian of the founding fathers and he was in France when the Constitution was being written! Moreover, he was the kind of guy who could and would reshape things to fit his vision, well after the fact.
Jefferson had a beef with organized religion. That doesn't prove that anyone else did.
At least for me... I invest a lot more in the books I read than in the music I listen to, and I care very much about reading *one* *particular* book. This means that there's not a lot of competition. I think part of the reason is that, for all the categories of books, the purchase price is the smallest part of the investment I make in the book. My major investment in the book is the time and energy I spend reading it. Ideas are not really fungible when they're new--and even when they're old, there's a lot to be said for getting the ideas from the source instead of from the imitators. In fiction, I'd much rather read Heinlein than an imitator of Heinlein. And if it costs a couple of bukcs more? Oh well.
I certainly recognize that some might be just as passionate about one particular song or one particular album. But it still seems to me, intuitively, that the music market is a little bit more competitive and dynamic than the book market is.
Everbody's focused on the cube. It's not about the cube. It's about the tech--the cube is really just a case. This is a novel form of performance art. Would I pay to "see" it? No. Do I think it's particularly interesting? No. But think of it as an Internet play or something along those lines.
You point out correctly that revolution (and government in general) only succeeds when it has the support, or at least the tolerance, of the vast majority of the people. Now... think about this for a minute. How many people want to live in a "war-torn" country? How many people want to live in fear of arbitrary violence? How many people want to be around violence of any kind? How people *respect* those who use violence as a means of social change?
The answer is "very few". Which is why a government generally has to be rotten from the inside for a revolution to succeed, and it's very difficult for a violent revolution to overtake a competent, powerful government. People just don't want to deal with that much violence and aren't willing to put up with the level of violence that would be required. On the other hand, most people respect non-violent means, and non-violence doesn't cause anything like the alienation that violence does. Properly done, in a non-violent revolution the "revolutionary" looks sane and reasonable and the government looks like bloody-handed thugs. The net effect is that the people decide that they'd rather be governed by the revolutionary.
Think about it... would you *really* want to be governed by the IRA? Or Al Quaida? Or the Basque Separatists? Or the Nation of Islam? On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that I could reasonably handle Gandhi or Martin Luther King. So, at some point during the conflict, people end up deciding that the "new" government is what they want. And that's when the revolution starts to grow and win.
I use the Gmail web client, and back in the day I ran over 1,000 SMTP servers responsible for delivering over 1 billion messages a day. I came up with the sendmail config, then migrated us to postfix, etc. etc.--wasn't just maintaining something that someone else created. I'm perfectly capable, if I so choose, of connecting via POP/IMAP and SMTP to a mail server and reading my mail THAT way (although I'd rather not, and SSL would be a bit challenging--I think I'd need some scratch paper at the very least!:> )
So, I think I rather "have the brains to set up" your aundry list of clients. Here's a clue: maybe I don't *want* my mail stored on whatever random computer I happen to be using at the moment? Maybe I *like* having it stored on Google's servers? Maybe I *like* being able to access it from anywhere with no setup, no hassles, and a consistent interface?
Webmail rocks for what I do, and when you grow up you'll realize that people might do things differently from how you do them for reasons other than they're just not as smart as you.
Hmmm... and so I look to see whether you wrote this as an anonymous coward and saw the "alter relationship" button next to your name. I found myself wishing I could alter the relationship to, "Don't know him."
Yet, oddly enough, this page places the intentional murder rate in England at 2.03 per 100,000 vs. 5.4 in the U.S. Better, yes, but hardly a factor of 17 better. What accounts for the difference, do you suppose? It seems to me that you've either selected cities (Atlanta and London) that are not representative, or there's some other sort of slight-of-hand going on.
Look... I'm not gun nut, in fact don't even own one even though I'm a Southerner and my family always has. But I don't think blaming murder on guns is helpful. I think it's got a lot more to do with an ineffective social safety net, ineffective policing, and (in the case of places like Atlanta) the foolhardy "war on drugs" that uses drug money to turn inner cities into war zone.
It's not trespassing if you give somebody written permission to be on your land. It's not trespass on a computer system if you give them permission to be on your computer system.
The problem is module dependencies... any non-trivial module now has so many dependencies now that it is almost inevitable one will fail to install. And than you're kind of screwed (unless you go and build it b hand.) And then there's the insanity of auto-updating perl itself to get a module. CPAN's badly broken and needs to be replaced entirely, which is a lot of why I pretty much quit using perl for a long time. Recently, my job changed and I got a lot of perl code. Man, I miss Ruby now.
I'd like to receive my $16, as I was unable to download numerous hit Hollywood movies and popular music at acceptable speeds while on your service. I was affected while using such protocols as E-donkey, Bittorrent, Limewire, Gnutella, and anything else that might get me sued. Please send the check to my address above.
Slashdot Mirror
Want to get laid? Become a divorce lawyer.
Without diving into the specifics, I don't see a problem here. The iPhone was hugely innovative, and there was a lot there that was genuinely new. While in general I'm not a big fan of patents (often the 'innovations' covered are trivial), in this case I think that Apple sort of deserves to profit from their R&D. Clearly, some of the HTC phones are knockoffs.
Assuming that the problem is even real, or even related to content (I have my doubts, because this seems like a great marketing ploy)... Is it because it's a gay site or because it's a "hookup" site? As i read the front page, this is about meeting someone for a "hookup". From what I've heard, postings in such forums are often deceptive and/or fronts for other sorts of "opportunities". If that's the case, Citibank might legitimately wonder whether this is a good business for them to be involved with, if only because of the opportunity for chargebacks.
Standards change--if not the standards themselves, then at least the versions. We're now on HTML 5 and CSS3 (or is there a CSS4 now?). And, more importantly, the expectations we have of standards change. I don't recall ever hearing the words "acid test" applied to browsers until about 5 years after IE6 was released. The first browser to say, "to hell with standards, we're going to add some tags that make sense!" (i.e. to "embrace and extend") was netscape. And not many people saw a problem, then, as the standard was evolving too slowly to be useful. Second issue is that as a business decision, I want to let customers know that it's their browser that's broken and not my site. sorry, but that's just common sense. We can argue ideals all we want, but no company wants to take the rap for something that's broken because of a customer's browser. The real problem isn't the warning, it's the sites that won't work at all unless you have a "supported" browser.
On the whole, I agree with you. Most supplements do nothing useful, and may have serious side effects if misused. My favorite one to bitch about is "it boosts your immune system." Folks, what would happen if it really "boosted" your immune system in any significant way? A few diseases leap to mind... Psoriasis. Rheumatoid Arthritis. Asthma. Anaphyactic shock. If you could really "boost your immune system" you would be D-E-A-D.
However, from time to time there's an herbal remedy that turns out to be scientifically well-grounded. For example, Alpha Lipoic Acid has a real (and measurable--I've tested) effect on my blood sugar. Melatonic definitely really does make me sleepy. And there's so much evidence for the usefulness of Vitamin D supplementation it's not funny. And fish-oil is quite effective in lowering heart disease risk. All validated by scientific data in well-reviewed journals. As is always the case, it's better to go to specifics. In many cases, you're right--the "medicalized" versions are better. However, in other cases, they're just better advertised. And in still other cases, they're worse.
The most important skill is that of managing your own health by monitoring your own health. The time when we could trust doctors and the "health industry" to care for us is long over. The smart doctors know this and appreciate it when they see that you know it too. The ones who don't like it... you didn't want to deal with them anyway, did you?
I was aware of this (and other issues with the roots of public education) but didn't want to go there. The truth is that the system has always been corrupt.
If this were a private school, you'd be right. The student is free to go elsewhere. However, this is a public school, paid for with tax dollars, and numerous court rulings have found that such are at least in some respects agents of state. This is why school prayer, for example, is not allowed. Accordingly, this is a punitive government action taken against a citizen, without due process, for expressing an unfavorable view of a government functionary in a public forum. You could even mount a reasonable argument that publishing on Facebook is equivalent, in context, to "the press."
Blink.
How is the principal's action any better than Richard Nixon's enemy's list?
Maybe I'm missing something... but public schools can't have public prayer (in most cases--there are exceptions) because that would be government "establishment" of religion. Yet they're allowed to do other things that government is forbidden to do on grounds that they're in loco parentis--like radically restricting student's freedom of speech, against their real parents wishes. I understand that the processes and procedures that one would follow with adults are not necessarily appropriate to schools (I have four children, okay?) but it seems like the application of the bill of rights and the fourteenth amendment is rather selective--as if we as a society are trying to have it both ways.
One of the things I observed a number of years back, while taking a course (for my B.A. in Philosophy/Religious Studies concentration) called Religious Freedom and the Law was that most of the modern conflict over the Bill of Rights comes up as we see government involved in things that simply were not part of Government's mandate when the Bill of Rights was written. In 1789, there was no public education to speak of. Unfortunately, government run education has become a place in which children are "socialized" with little regard for the wishes of their parents, especially when those parents are an ethnic or religious minority. Simply put, "civic virtue" is only "virtue" for the "civic"--for the insiders and the establishment. Public schooling is, by its very nature, an assault on freedom.
This to me is one of the best arguments for vouchers--not that children will necessarily get a better education, but people of modest income will be able to get an education that reflects their values and beliefs rather than the beliefs and values of the establishment. If you say, "but I don't like the choices some people will make, so let's keep the current system!" you're kind of proving my point.
Look... not to be a spoil sport, but who cares? So you don't have any privacy... is it costing you money? Is it costing you jobs? Is it harming you? The alternative is to go "off the grid"... and you *can* do that if it's worth it to you. It's not to me. So just accept that companies will look over your shoulder and don't do stuff that you're going to be ashamed of, counting on the fact that the law of averages will shield you. This is no different, really, than living in a small town.
Yet, at the time they were an enormous success and people were really excited about getting computers in colors.
What limits my book purchases is not my ability to afford books. It is having time to read books. The biggest cost of the book, for me, is the 5-10 hours of my time (at an arbitrary $50/hour) that I'll spend reading it. Most books, I will only read once. In this way, books are fundamentally different from Music, and that's why they've taken so long to "go digital" (and why libraries seem to work so much better for books than for other "media.") I don't particularly care about eBooks being cheaper. What I care about is being able to access them anywhere I have a computer, make notes, care a library in my pocket, etc. Books are not music, and not movies.
Yeah.. and let us recall that Jefferson was the most radically non-Christian of the founding fathers and he was in France when the Constitution was being written! Moreover, he was the kind of guy who could and would reshape things to fit his vision, well after the fact.
Jefferson had a beef with organized religion. That doesn't prove that anyone else did.
At least for me... I invest a lot more in the books I read than in the music I listen to, and I care very much about reading *one* *particular* book. This means that there's not a lot of competition. I think part of the reason is that, for all the categories of books, the purchase price is the smallest part of the investment I make in the book. My major investment in the book is the time and energy I spend reading it. Ideas are not really fungible when they're new--and even when they're old, there's a lot to be said for getting the ideas from the source instead of from the imitators. In fiction, I'd much rather read Heinlein than an imitator of Heinlein. And if it costs a couple of bukcs more? Oh well.
I certainly recognize that some might be just as passionate about one particular song or one particular album. But it still seems to me, intuitively, that the music market is a little bit more competitive and dynamic than the book market is.
Everbody's focused on the cube. It's not about the cube. It's about the tech--the cube is really just a case. This is a novel form of performance art. Would I pay to "see" it? No. Do I think it's particularly interesting? No. But think of it as an Internet play or something along those lines.
You point out correctly that revolution (and government in general) only succeeds when it has the support, or at least the tolerance, of the vast majority of the people. Now... think about this for a minute. How many people want to live in a "war-torn" country? How many people want to live in fear of arbitrary violence? How many people want to be around violence of any kind? How people *respect* those who use violence as a means of social change?
The answer is "very few". Which is why a government generally has to be rotten from the inside for a revolution to succeed, and it's very difficult for a violent revolution to overtake a competent, powerful government. People just don't want to deal with that much violence and aren't willing to put up with the level of violence that would be required. On the other hand, most people respect non-violent means, and non-violence doesn't cause anything like the alienation that violence does. Properly done, in a non-violent revolution the "revolutionary" looks sane and reasonable and the government looks like bloody-handed thugs. The net effect is that the people decide that they'd rather be governed by the revolutionary.
Think about it... would you *really* want to be governed by the IRA? Or Al Quaida? Or the Basque Separatists? Or the Nation of Islam? On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that I could reasonably handle Gandhi or Martin Luther King. So, at some point during the conflict, people end up deciding that the "new" government is what they want. And that's when the revolution starts to grow and win.
Dude. You made it to my Facebook page. First time a Slashdot comment has *ever* done that. Well spoken, sir.
I use the Gmail web client, and back in the day I ran over 1,000 SMTP servers responsible for delivering over 1 billion messages a day. I came up with the sendmail config, then migrated us to postfix, etc. etc.--wasn't just maintaining something that someone else created. I'm perfectly capable, if I so choose, of connecting via POP/IMAP and SMTP to a mail server and reading my mail THAT way (although I'd rather not, and SSL would be a bit challenging--I think I'd need some scratch paper at the very least! :> )
So, I think I rather "have the brains to set up" your aundry list of clients. Here's a clue: maybe I don't *want* my mail stored on whatever random computer I happen to be using at the moment? Maybe I *like* having it stored on Google's servers? Maybe I *like* being able to access it from anywhere with no setup, no hassles, and a consistent interface?
Webmail rocks for what I do, and when you grow up you'll realize that people might do things differently from how you do them for reasons other than they're just not as smart as you.
Hmmm... and so I look to see whether you wrote this as an anonymous coward and saw the "alter relationship" button next to your name. I found myself wishing I could alter the relationship to, "Don't know him."
My sons Middle School is practically like that. They keep the kids from interacting wherever possible.
Well, of course you'll be more concerned with your successor government. Since, after all, you're probably a slave in the current scheme of things.
Yet, oddly enough, this page places the intentional murder rate in England at 2.03 per 100,000 vs. 5.4 in the U.S. Better, yes, but hardly a factor of 17 better. What accounts for the difference, do you suppose? It seems to me that you've either selected cities (Atlanta and London) that are not representative, or there's some other sort of slight-of-hand going on.
Look... I'm not gun nut, in fact don't even own one even though I'm a Southerner and my family always has. But I don't think blaming murder on guns is helpful. I think it's got a lot more to do with an ineffective social safety net, ineffective policing, and (in the case of places like Atlanta) the foolhardy "war on drugs" that uses drug money to turn inner cities into war zone.
It's not trespassing if you give somebody written permission to be on your land. It's not trespass on a computer system if you give them permission to be on your computer system.
The problem is module dependencies... any non-trivial module now has so many dependencies now that it is almost inevitable one will fail to install. And than you're kind of screwed (unless you go and build it b hand.) And then there's the insanity of auto-updating perl itself to get a module. CPAN's badly broken and needs to be replaced entirely, which is a lot of why I pretty much quit using perl for a long time. Recently, my job changed and I got a lot of perl code. Man, I miss Ruby now.
Dear Comcast's Lawyers,
I'd like to receive my $16, as I was unable to download numerous hit Hollywood movies and popular music at acceptable speeds while on your service. I was affected while using such protocols as E-donkey, Bittorrent, Limewire, Gnutella, and anything else that might get me sued. Please send the check to my address above.
Yours Truly,
Fished's Ex-Wife