.. any of you that get the chance ask Obama/McCain what they intend to do about this if elected.
As recent FISA vote would show you, asking the candidate what they intend to do is not good enough.
They might (and often are) simply lying to get elected.
I just don't get how people are stupid enough to fall for #1. A check is just a piece of paper until it's cashed
I feel that it is responsibility of the bank to authenticate the check in less than 3 weeks (which, according to grandparent
is what it takes). Or, notify you explicitly that the check will be fully cleared in 3 to 4 weeks.
Ah, how naive... what good is having DNC lists or new laws if I am unable
to identify the source of the call??
Caller ID comes up unknown, pressing 1 to reach them doesn't work. And these
are not even out-of-US companies. Of course I am not sure how they usually
make money as in order to buy that car warranty I'd have to have a way to reach
them.
If the customer choses to do chargeback, the small shop is already screwed. My dad runs a small time store and let me tell you - essentially you can almost always do a chargeback. And the merchant will pay a fee of $25 (or $35) for the privilege. The cards will almost always side with the buyer, because they can and because it doesn't cost them much (in fact, they make a profit by recovering money from the merchant and charging them a fee).
Even people who hand out these contracts should be incarcerated. They must be getting bribes. It seems a rather normal occurrence - some security expert finds a horrendous gaping flaw in voting machines or shady irregularities are reported. Conclusion: everything is denied, and then flaws become undeniable the machines are scrapped; for paper ballots or for a new set of machines. Whatever happened to holding people who provide these responsible? Like in every other business? Even vending machine vendor would be held responsible if their machine didn't work. Why are flaws in the voting machines treated as a natural disaster - unavoidable and apparently no one's fault?
It is a well known fact that ATM machines produced by Diebold are highly reliable. They are capable of
producing a product when they are held responsible for things going wrong.
Apparently banks insist on secure and flawless ATMs. Imagine that.
I am thrilled to hear that at least some places are trying to demand reliability and/or punitive damages.
Last I heard in other places, they were going to scrap the faulty systems and replace them by someone else,
effectively pouring millions of dollars into Diebold for a crap product.
Well, if a candidate making one decission the voter does not agree with is grounds for no longer support that candidate, then the voter will be out of any options, very soon.
I am outraged not so much by the decision that I disagree with, but at the fact that he explicitly promised to oppose that very immunity. For someone who ran as not your typical politician, he sure started backing off on his promises quickly. Even before he's elected, which might be some sort of a record.
Then again, I supported Hillary (who voted nay for this bill, I might add). I would not encourage you to vote for McCain, who's likely even worse than Obama, but I would encourage you to remember this during next primaries!. If people remembered that salesmen of hope good presidents do not make, we might have Clinton for the Democratic candidate. And I believe her to be a somewhat lesser evil than Obama...
I feel so naive for thinking there was a candidate from one of the two major parties who actually stood for what's right.
Oh, but there WAS! Hillary Clinton voted no. Amazingly, her promises of opposing the bill actually meant that she would. It is of small comfort that I was right for wanting her to be the Democratic nominee. If only America was not full of idiots easily swayed by bullshit rhetoric and "salesmen of hope"...
(Disclaimer: This is not to say that Hillary is not a politician like most others. However, she was clearly the lesser evil of the two and the proof is piling up as we speak)
I happen to believe that companies acting in good faith to help after 9/11, and who were given assurances that they would be immune from legal sanction, should in fact be immune from legal sanction.
I feel reasonable minds can disagree on matters of public policy. But to you I am a traitor?
That's why companies have lawyers on payroll, to advise them of legality of their actions. Assurances of immunity against
legal sanction should be no good against doing something illegal. Presumably, if the government agent comes to you and
asks you to kill someone promising legal immunity, that does not and should not make you immune in court of law. I hear
QWest refused the demands until a warrant is shown.
You might not be a traitor for thinking that, but anyone who swore to uphold the Constitution and serve their
district are pretty much traitors - yes. I would think upholding the Constitution would involve not sanctioning
and immunizing (allegedly) illegal behavior without even knowing what it involved. Not to mention Obama who explicitly
promised to oppose the immunity before his Democratic candidacy was ensured.
He engenders the degree of hate (particularly on the internet) that he does for a couple of reasons. The first is that his movies are bad -- and I mean really, painfully, teeth-grindingly bad. Of course that alone doesn't generate that much hate; there are, after all, an endless supply of incredibly bad movies and abysmal movie makers in the world. The second point is that Uwe Boll has a great love of "adapting" computer games for the screen, and he is highly prolific at doing so
If only all that hate could be harnessed to finance a good adaption of a game (and finding a person to direct it).
I am yet to see a good one, and I would argue that Bloodrayne was of similar quality as, say, Hitman... Despite of IMDB rating it as 2.6 vs 6.3:)
A file title is not evidence of actual copyrighted infringement. I haven't heard a copyrighted single song the RIAA downloaded from a defendant played as evidence in a court of law. If I write BritneySpearsToxic.mp3 in this post, that is *not* evidence of copyright infringement no matter how many people link to this post from other sites, no matter how many screenshots the RIAA makes of files with any titles whatsoever.
It is my impression that these are all civil cases, meaning that RIAA does not have to prove their case beyond a shadow of a doubt. Therefore unless you have a convincing argument as to why you had dozens of files that matched song titles/sizes you might not have the 51% argument required to win civil cases.
If it were a murder trial, this would be plenty. But in civil cases, if jury thinks you're just making far-fetched excuses I think you're going to lose. (Disclamer: IANAL, this is layman understanding of the situation).
I'm more interested to see how this affects the adoption rate... or doesn't. It's been said businesses have been waiting for SP1 to make the move. The question is: was that all just talk or is it going to actually happen?
Someone had pointed it out in the previous discussion - the businesses were not waiting for SP1 to blindly adopt Vista, they were waiting for SP1 to seriously evaluate Vista. Pre-SP1 version was not mature enough to spend a lot of resources evaluating it.
Wait, last time I checked Facebook doesn't automaticly install apps you have to do it and confirm you are allowing this app to acccess some of your information. They don't give third parties your info, you do.
RTFA (and I quote:)
To restate things--if you set your profile to private, and one of your friends adds an application, most of your profile information that is visible to your friend is also available to the application developer--even if you yourself have not installed the application.
It seems that they do give my info to third parties - third parties being all the stupid applications that my friends installed. I keep very minimal info on my facebook account and don't install any apps because they require full access to my profile, but I still went and turned this sharing off just now. WTF, why did I just learn that every application that any of the 60 of my networked friends has installed could have been happily roaming through my account without my knowledge?
What reason does a seller have for charging more than the actual shipping costs, other than making up for the too small selling price? (And therefore showing up more positively in the search results)
While I understand this practice very well, it remains a misleading practice which eBay should prohibit.
This is not the primary motivation (although it helps). The primary motivation is that eBay will take 10% from sale price in addition to all insertion fees. So for every dollar that is charged as shipping 10c is saved by the seller. Some sellers operate on thin margins - selling low cost items with 15/20c insertion fee and 10% final fee gets pricey.
Best use for linux in my experience is the wireless "internet and email only" laptop. Only potential tripping point is which wireless card you decided on. Take my word for it however, I and my friends all became linux fans because that is all we use on our laptops, even if we use windows on our desktops for gaming.
Dude, you gotta be kidding me. The only tripping point is the wireless card?? I spend a lot of time coding in Linux, but I can NEVER setup the frigging wireless card. I know that my own laptop (Fujitsu) is compatible with Linux up to wireless card. But I couldn't get it setup - I've looked through a dozen pages talking about downloading a dozen source code packages recompiling the kernel with some module, etc. Why can't it JUST WORK? And at my company (where I consult) my laptop is setup with wireless. Well, I've tried to connect to other wireless networks and all I achieved was to break the original setup... I am told by my coworkers that it takes weeks and a few pounds of flesh to setup another wireless connection even when one is already setup by a tech guy.
I am going to assume that an average user (not slashdot, average Joe user) knows less than me about Linux and thus has absolutely no chance of getting wireless to work on a linux laptop. There's other issues with Linux, but wireless is a bit more than a tripping point - it is a nightmare even on "supported" hardware
I'm kind of hard-pressed to find a game that's like reading a book
It is hard to come by, but certainly possible.
Planescape: The Torment is one of those. Got my non-game-playing brother (who has two children) to play it.
Not a big enough demographic to be a profitable business, though.
Given the RIAA guilty until proven innocent "John Doe" should be able to present what could be a landmark case against the RIAA. Though IANAL sticking to that basic premise would seem to be the most effective way to nullify the MAFIAA.
Bah, few people here are lawyers, but even a layman like me has learned that RIAA files civil lawsuits. In a civil lawsuit there is no "guilty until proven innocent" or "innocent until proven guilty". The burden of proof is to show 51% likelihood of one party being right (kinda like a speeding ticket decision made by a judge. There's no assumption you're innocent, he goes by who seems more credible).
A service that could keep the record companies afloat is if they opened their collections completely, flat rate.10$ per download. And if you lost the songs, another.10$. Dont keep records of who bought what, too much bookkeeping, and it's just a dime. I just wonder how much money they would make on that kind of deal...
Quite a bit, I think. I know that I have used allofmp3.com regularly. And I know I have downloaded some songs multiple times (sometimes at least 3 times) because at 10-15c a song it is easier to just download it again than to look for the place where I saved/downloaded it originally.
Diebold are going to have real trouble building their reputation back up after this; even though other machines may be vulnerable, the fact that this case has been so well publicised is seriously going to damage Diebold's public image.
And pigs are certain to fly anytime now. Some states appear to question their machines. Others don't. But I don't see anything about
states demanding their money back for the scrapped equipment. And therefore I don't think Diebold is too concerned! They already
sold the frigging machines. In fact, they probably prefer to have a chance of selling another round of machines in a few years
once the legislative body is changed (or better-bought) rather than simply do maintenance support on the machines already sold.
Of course, before every election you will hear how you should vote for one of the big candidates, because other votes don't matter. In actuality it is the opposite. Votes for big candidates don't matter since they are all votes for the same coin. They simply reinforce the opinions that the current politicians in power have.
But it is true that other votes don't matter. Until enough people vote for a 3rd party that it becomes viable, votes cast for a 3rd party don't matter. They would if you convert enough people, but until you do, you and a few other idealistic people are in fact throwing their votes away (in fact, it is even worse than that - only the few contested states decide between the two mainstream presidential candidates or a majority in congress, in most states which are heavily Democratic or Republican you're throwing your vote away no matter what you do).
There was an episode of ST:TNG which dealt with that idea, when a transporter beam was deflected by the oddball atmospherics of a hostile planet and the Riker who was beaming up got doubled
There was an even better Outer Limits episode ("Think like a dinosaur") that has dealt with a similar problem, where the teleportation process goes wrong and two copies of the traveler exist come into existence. The technician that was responsible for pressing the kill button after transmission process was confirmed (and the traveler has arrived at their destination) is now asked to "balance the equation" by killing the traveler at his end as having two copies of the individual is not allowed.
Who the fuck with a brain buys ringtones? Just drop a needle, take a sample and shuttle it off to your phone via USB... Jesus the RIAA are a bunch of fuckin' morons.
Good luck transferring audio to your phone. Motorolla phone software that does this (and other things) is sold for $30 last I checked a couple
years ago. And you have to know to look for it.
Not certain whether all other manufacturers even have such software for sale.
I won't claim that I own a CD for every song in my collection, but easily over 99% of them. I buy most of them used for a pittance, and rip them to my file server.
If that's the case, I think you're contributing very little to Sony. When you buy used CDs, you're only compensating the original purchaser that presumably already paid a full price. In fact, I believe there had been attempts to prevent re-sale of Music/Software/Books/etc, but for Music and Books it didn't work so well. Of course preventing you from buying used CDs might have forced you to buy some new ones for a much higher price (and what percentage of your collection would be legally owned if you had to buy only new CDs?)
That reducing the wealth of people in an area makes them more subservient and dependent on the wealthy? In this case, the state... Sanctions ironically simply cement the power of the powerful.
Bah, do you think that by buying from a Chinese company you somehow increase the wealth of anyone who isn't already wealthy?
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As recent FISA vote would show you, asking the candidate what they intend to do is not good enough. They might (and often are) simply lying to get elected.
I feel that it is responsibility of the bank to authenticate the check in less than 3 weeks (which, according to grandparent is what it takes). Or, notify you explicitly that the check will be fully cleared in 3 to 4 weeks.
Ah, how naive... what good is having DNC lists or new laws if I am unable to identify the source of the call?? Caller ID comes up unknown, pressing 1 to reach them doesn't work. And these are not even out-of-US companies. Of course I am not sure how they usually make money as in order to buy that car warranty I'd have to have a way to reach them.
If the customer choses to do chargeback, the small shop is already screwed. My dad runs a small time store and let me tell you - essentially you can almost always do a chargeback. And the merchant will pay a fee of $25 (or $35) for the privilege. The cards will almost always side with the buyer, because they can and because it doesn't cost them much (in fact, they make a profit by recovering money from the merchant and charging them a fee).
Even people who hand out these contracts should be incarcerated. They must be getting bribes. It seems a rather normal occurrence - some security expert finds a horrendous gaping flaw in voting machines or shady irregularities are reported. Conclusion: everything is denied, and then flaws become undeniable the machines are scrapped; for paper ballots or for a new set of machines. Whatever happened to holding people who provide these responsible? Like in every other business? Even vending machine vendor would be held responsible if their machine didn't work. Why are flaws in the voting machines treated as a natural disaster - unavoidable and apparently no one's fault?
I am thrilled to hear that at least some places are trying to demand reliability and/or punitive damages. Last I heard in other places, they were going to scrap the faulty systems and replace them by someone else, effectively pouring millions of dollars into Diebold for a crap product.
I am outraged not so much by the decision that I disagree with, but at the fact that he explicitly promised to oppose that very immunity. For someone who ran as not your typical politician, he sure started backing off on his promises quickly. Even before he's elected, which might be some sort of a record.
Then again, I supported Hillary (who voted nay for this bill, I might add). I would not encourage you to vote for McCain, who's likely even worse than Obama, but I would encourage you to remember this during next primaries!. If people remembered that salesmen of hope good presidents do not make, we might have Clinton for the Democratic candidate. And I believe her to be a somewhat lesser evil than Obama...
Oh, but there WAS! Hillary Clinton voted no. Amazingly, her promises of opposing the bill actually meant that she would. It is of small comfort that I was right for wanting her to be the Democratic nominee. If only America was not full of idiots easily swayed by bullshit rhetoric and "salesmen of hope"...
(Disclaimer: This is not to say that Hillary is not a politician like most others. However, she was clearly the lesser evil of the two and the proof is piling up as we speak)
That's why companies have lawyers on payroll, to advise them of legality of their actions. Assurances of immunity against legal sanction should be no good against doing something illegal. Presumably, if the government agent comes to you and asks you to kill someone promising legal immunity, that does not and should not make you immune in court of law. I hear QWest refused the demands until a warrant is shown.
You might not be a traitor for thinking that, but anyone who swore to uphold the Constitution and serve their district are pretty much traitors - yes. I would think upholding the Constitution would involve not sanctioning and immunizing (allegedly) illegal behavior without even knowing what it involved. Not to mention Obama who explicitly promised to oppose the immunity before his Democratic candidacy was ensured.
If only all that hate could be harnessed to finance a good adaption of a game (and finding a person to direct it). I am yet to see a good one, and I would argue that Bloodrayne was of similar quality as, say, Hitman... Despite of IMDB rating it as 2.6 vs 6.3 :)
It is my impression that these are all civil cases, meaning that RIAA does not have to prove their case beyond a shadow of a doubt. Therefore unless you have a convincing argument as to why you had dozens of files that matched song titles/sizes you might not have the 51% argument required to win civil cases.
If it were a murder trial, this would be plenty. But in civil cases, if jury thinks you're just making far-fetched excuses I think you're going to lose. (Disclamer: IANAL, this is layman understanding of the situation).
Someone had pointed it out in the previous discussion - the businesses were not waiting for SP1 to blindly adopt Vista, they were waiting for SP1 to seriously evaluate Vista. Pre-SP1 version was not mature enough to spend a lot of resources evaluating it.
RTFA (and I quote:)
To restate things--if you set your profile to private, and one of your friends adds an application, most of your profile information that is visible to your friend is also available to the application developer--even if you yourself have not installed the application.
It seems that they do give my info to third parties - third parties being all the stupid applications that my friends installed. I keep very minimal info on my facebook account and don't install any apps because they require full access to my profile, but I still went and turned this sharing off just now. WTF, why did I just learn that every application that any of the 60 of my networked friends has installed could have been happily roaming through my account without my knowledge?
This is not the primary motivation (although it helps). The primary motivation is that eBay will take 10% from sale price in addition to all insertion fees. So for every dollar that is charged as shipping 10c is saved by the seller. Some sellers operate on thin margins - selling low cost items with 15/20c insertion fee and 10% final fee gets pricey.
Dude, you gotta be kidding me. The only tripping point is the wireless card?? I spend a lot of time coding in Linux, but I can NEVER setup the frigging wireless card. I know that my own laptop (Fujitsu) is compatible with Linux up to wireless card. But I couldn't get it setup - I've looked through a dozen pages talking about downloading a dozen source code packages recompiling the kernel with some module, etc. Why can't it JUST WORK? And at my company (where I consult) my laptop is setup with wireless. Well, I've tried to connect to other wireless networks and all I achieved was to break the original setup... I am told by my coworkers that it takes weeks and a few pounds of flesh to setup another wireless connection even when one is already setup by a tech guy.
I am going to assume that an average user (not slashdot, average Joe user) knows less than me about Linux and thus has absolutely no chance of getting wireless to work on a linux laptop. There's other issues with Linux, but wireless is a bit more than a tripping point - it is a nightmare even on "supported" hardware
It is hard to come by, but certainly possible.
Planescape: The Torment is one of those. Got my non-game-playing brother (who has two children) to play it.
Not a big enough demographic to be a profitable business, though.
Bah, few people here are lawyers, but even a layman like me has learned that RIAA files civil lawsuits. In a civil lawsuit there is no "guilty until proven innocent" or "innocent until proven guilty". The burden of proof is to show 51% likelihood of one party being right (kinda like a speeding ticket decision made by a judge. There's no assumption you're innocent, he goes by who seems more credible).
Quite a bit, I think. I know that I have used allofmp3.com regularly. And I know I have downloaded some songs multiple times (sometimes at least 3 times) because at 10-15c a song it is easier to just download it again than to look for the place where I saved/downloaded it originally.
And pigs are certain to fly anytime now.
Some states appear to question their machines. Others don't. But I don't see anything about states demanding their money back for the scrapped equipment. And therefore I don't think Diebold is too concerned! They already sold the frigging machines. In fact, they probably prefer to have a chance of selling another round of machines in a few years once the legislative body is changed (or better-bought) rather than simply do maintenance support on the machines already sold.
But it is true that other votes don't matter. Until enough people vote for a 3rd party that it becomes viable, votes cast for a 3rd party don't matter. They would if you convert enough people, but until you do, you and a few other idealistic people are in fact throwing their votes away (in fact, it is even worse than that - only the few contested states decide between the two mainstream presidential candidates or a majority in congress, in most states which are heavily Democratic or Republican you're throwing your vote away no matter what you do).
There was an even better Outer Limits episode ("Think like a dinosaur") that has dealt with a similar problem, where the teleportation process goes wrong and two copies of the traveler exist come into existence. The technician that was responsible for pressing the kill button after transmission process was confirmed (and the traveler has arrived at their destination) is now asked to "balance the equation" by killing the traveler at his end as having two copies of the individual is not allowed.
Good luck transferring audio to your phone. Motorolla phone software that does this (and other things) is sold for $30 last I checked a couple years ago. And you have to know to look for it. Not certain whether all other manufacturers even have such software for sale.
If that's the case, I think you're contributing very little to Sony. When you buy used CDs, you're only compensating the original purchaser that presumably already paid a full price. In fact, I believe there had been attempts to prevent re-sale of Music/Software/Books/etc, but for Music and Books it didn't work so well. Of course preventing you from buying used CDs might have forced you to buy some new ones for a much higher price (and what percentage of your collection would be legally owned if you had to buy only new CDs?)
That reducing the wealth of people in an area makes them more subservient and dependent on the wealthy? In this case, the state... Sanctions ironically simply cement the power of the powerful.
Bah, do you think that by buying from a Chinese company you somehow increase the wealth of anyone who isn't already wealthy?
Very happy with it, too...