There is no crime in producing sub-$30 DVD players in China. The crime would be to refuse to buy these on grounds of "exploitation". Long live free trade.
You can't say it's a crime to refuse to buy something on *any* grounds, then say "long live free trade". Make up your mind which you want. "Free" trade means that people at *all* levels can buy what they want if someone's willing to sell it to them. It also means they can refuse.
Of course, free_trade --|--> democracy in the current sense of "free trade"; nor vice versa; democracy isn't liberty, it's the will of the majority of the people. Certain... groups of people seem to have trouble seeing this.
"Free" trade is meaningless bullshit unless the workers (and to some extent, consumers) at all levels are free to make their own choices.
Assuming you have an account of the form mr_foobar@theisp.com, some isps let you use email of the form anytext@mr_foobar.theisp.com
Possibly some spammers might realise you've done this when you give out your email, but if they don't, then you have instant traceability. Preferably, make it non-obvious what you've done when you choose the 'anytext' (where 'anytext' is disregarded).
I would ask somebody to inflate your doll with helium. Then I would release the beast in some dignified public place with very high celing - like bank or opera house
They'll get someone to shoot it down sooner rather than later. Of course, what you could do is to coat it with moderately-fast-drying glue (on both sides just to be sure), let it float up there, and *then* let them shoot it.
Sure, it'll deflate- but it won't come down:-) Merry Christmas!
How we laughed when Matthew Kelly (the child abuser!)
For the record, that case was dropped- there's not a sniff of evidence that it was true. Do you think they'd have let him back on TV if there was even an ounce of suspicion?
Very funny, with one serious flaw; no *way* would people who loved BSD be able to cooperate with the elves making Linux-based DVD players.
He'd sooner sell you a Windows-based palladium-enabled DVD player that sent a record of every film you watched to Bill Gates, who in turn would inform the MPAA or whoever that you'd attempted to skip the Basque-language copyright warning on your 'Fellowship of the Ring' 14-disc special edition DVD, and have your dog killed.
Some people *like* the idea of a free couple of hundred dollars. It's nice that you don't but don't condemn other people for liking free money......
And this one is free. It's like a free gift of $200. And they have to watch some ads.
Well, it's not free then. They get a computer in return for watching some ads. You can say that's an excellent deal and you may well be right, but it's not free.
Fact is, most "free" gifts aren't free at all, because you have to do something non-trivial to get them; often involving buying something else.
Anyway, you're right. These aren't for/. readers- advertising-subsidised PCs are soooo 1999. I hear they come with a free pair of cargo pants that are subsidised by advertising some 14-year-old whizz-kid's website that's had $1 billion invested, but will be worth more than Disney when we get to the IPO.
Is to make totally sure you've destroyed EVERY copy of a manuscript you never want to see the light of day, because after you're dead, some self-serving snot will publish it for the world to see and who cares about your wishes in the matter.
Hey, we're already at the stage where Douglas Adams had an unfinished book recovered from his hard drive and published.
If you want to be safe, use a word processor on a computer that never connects to a network (could recover data on the network), restrict your copies to removable disk to those you would be happy being published or are able to destroy, and at some stage physically destroy the hard drive beyond any possible recovery.
In fact, do the same to *any* part of the computer that might (even temporarily) have held your data, including the monitor.
Paranoid? Well, I'm trying to second-guess information recovery in 20-30 years time, and I defy anyone to say that this will never happen.
Of course, the radiation from your monitor probably induced microscopic interference in the TV signal your VCR is recording nearby, and with advanced signal-processing and pattern-recognition, your great lost tome is recovered from an episode of Dawson's Creek you taped back in 2003.
I think you have it backwards. Black is all colors (American version), and white is no color at all.
I know. I thought it was clear that I knew that from my reply.
Now, the guy who was offended...
You know, the parent article was obviously tongue-in-cheek as shown by the reference to "master" and "slave" drives and "Los Angeles City Council" (search Slashdot or the web if you didn't see it). Even without having read that, I don't think it came across particularly seriously.
It is offensive to all African-Americans and other People of Color.
Pure black is the absence of light and hence no colour; white is a mixture of all the different colours. Therefore, your use of the term "People of Color" is inaccurate.
Furthermore, it has come to my attention that the terms "black" and "white" are being used to describe people with lightish and darkish skin. This is offensive to people with truly white skin, such as a resident of the British Isles the day before they leave for their annual holiday in the sun (put that bloody t-shirt back on, the glare is blinding me).
The same people can claim to be the only true redskins, when they return home two weeks later, looking like lobsters.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, I'm hauling your sorry ass into court, pronto.
Back in the days of the government telephone monopoly, The city of Hull, for some reason, ran it's own telephone system.
IIRC this was true for a number of cities at one time (I *think* the regulations allowed cities to run their own telephone systems, but don't quote me on that). Eventually, all but one (Hull's) merged with the main Post-Office run service- that was eventually renamed British Telecom, privatised and later rebranded as BT.
I wouldn't swear that this is 100% right, but it's fairly close to the truth IIRC.
Yeah, here's a description of one particularly fanatical 'open-source supporter' (from PBS).
"If he was busy he didn't bathe, he didn't change clothes. We were in New York and the demo that we had crashed the evening before the announcement, and Bill worked all night with some other engineers to fix it. Well it didn't occur to him to take ten minutes for a shower after that, it just didn't occur to him that that was important, and he badly needed a shower that day."
Two hackers, uh, I mean crackers, erm... dammit! Two geeks meet in person for the first time.
Neo1337357: Trinity? [Blah... something about a bank IIRC, I can count the number of times I've seen The Matrix on two hands] I..... thought you were a girl.
Trinity9348: Most guys do.
'Neo' becomes very uncomfortable as he realises he is standing in an S&M club with a large, sweaty guy he has shared his most intimate fantasies with.
Somewhere in the background a Rob Zombie track is playing. Fade to black.
They're trying to sell you yummy steak sauce, duh!
(How the heck was this modded as flamebait?)
The ingredients are listed on the side of the bottle, but the recipe isn't- does this mean it qualifies as open sauce? Would Richard Stallman approve, or should we design our own sauce and post the recipe all over Usenet?
Then again, he mentions something about secret sauce halfway down, but tells us what it is. But not what's in it. Hmmmmmmmm....
BTW, for anyone in the United Kingdom, clicking on that link and seeing that mockney p***k Jamie Oliver halfway down is roughly on a par with clicking on a Goatse link.
The only thing stopping China from planting a Chinese flag and claiming the moon is a piece of paper that China may or may not have signed.
Meanwhile, Back In The Real World (TM), China will do what the hell they like if they can get away with it. Like some other countries (cough), they'll play with the rules when it benefits them and disregard them if they're inconvenient.
The only reason a piece of paper means shit is because enough people are prepared to back it up with force in whatever form (lawyers backed by money and armies). That's all legal agreements between countries are- a house of cards that it's in their interests to keep standing, until it isn't. The richer and more powerful your country, the more your laws are 'worth' (you can usually figure out some way of getting another country to obey your laws in such cases).
Is this making sense? Let me give you a patronising analogy- the real world is an old-fashioned computer without memory protection where every process is trying to attack every other process and grab its timeslice. Wake up and get real.
So basically now for 10 bucks I can get a 2 megapixel camera... well looks like i just wasted 200 bucks on getting a 4 megapixel camera.
Arf. Well, consider this- with film cameras, the equivalent to the CCD is the film. The camera is just a lens and case, so by that analogy, I should exchange my Nikon SLR for a cheap-ass compact that comes with a free roll of film.
Even if that 'gift set' has been sitting in the chemist's window for the past 18 months and the colour in the film now has a pretty purple cast.
I think only North American products do not come with batteries. Most European and Asian consumer products come with the batteries.
I noticed that. It never used to be the case, but now most battery-powered goods in the UK tend to come with them; often ready-installed (you pull out the small piece of plastic between the battery and one of the terminals).
Don't understand why the situation would be different in North America, or have people just failed to notice that things have changed since their childhood?
Guiness - "Guiness is good for you". Right then, next.
AFAIK they haven't been allowed to use that slogan in the UK for a long time. (Haven't heard 2 or 3 of the other ones, so I'd guess you're US-based, right?)
Still, good post. I couldn't believe the Ben and Jerry's example given elsewhere, considering Sainsbury's can say things like "Everyone's Favourite Ingredient" (and that's not the worst. Yeah, I know they changed their slogan, but that's because everyone hated it, not because it was deemed misleading).
Slashdot Mirror
There is no crime in producing sub-$30 DVD players in China. The crime would be to refuse to buy these on grounds of "exploitation".
Long live free trade.
You can't say it's a crime to refuse to buy something on *any* grounds, then say "long live free trade". Make up your mind which you want. "Free" trade means that people at *all* levels can buy what they want if someone's willing to sell it to them. It also means they can refuse.
Of course, free_trade --|--> democracy in the current sense of "free trade"; nor vice versa; democracy isn't liberty, it's the will of the majority of the people. Certain... groups of people seem to have trouble seeing this.
"Free" trade is meaningless bullshit unless the workers (and to some extent, consumers) at all levels are free to make their own choices.
1. Buy yourself a domain and setup a default alias that you check...
2. For each website you goto that needs an email, give them their own.
yahoo.com gets yahoo@yourdomain.com
cheaptickets.com gets cheaptickets@yourdomain.com
Assuming you have an account of the form mr_foobar@theisp.com, some isps let you use email of the form
anytext@mr_foobar.theisp.com
Possibly some spammers might realise you've done this when you give out your email, but if they don't, then you have instant traceability. Preferably, make it non-obvious what you've done when you choose the 'anytext' (where 'anytext' is disregarded).
After getting a harder spanking that did indeed hurt, children quickly learn to pretend to feel pain to avoid a worse punishment.
No, they threaten to shop their parents to the social services if they even think about doing something like that. Welcome to the 21st Century.
I would ask somebody to inflate your doll with helium. Then I would release the beast in some dignified public place with very high celing - like bank or opera house
:-) Merry Christmas!
They'll get someone to shoot it down sooner rather than later. Of course, what you could do is to coat it with moderately-fast-drying glue (on both sides just to be sure), let it float up there, and *then* let them shoot it.
Sure, it'll deflate- but it won't come down
It's looking for the fence sitters to give them a good push.
That would make sense, except I don't see a fence-sitter really being bothered about downloading trailers to films that are already on DVD.
They still have a dvd to sell that, judging by the attendance, not so many people care to buy at the moment.
True, but anyone who cares enough about this to download the trailers will already have Reloaded on DVD and will have seen Revolutions.
I honestly don't think it'll make that much difference to DVD sales for the hardcore fans.
I did that last night to the actual movies, which are now availiable (sic) to download from a P2P client near you.
*Spoiler warning*
The second and third movies are shit.
Moderated -1, Troll?! Who was the humorless geek who moderated this down? It's funny, dammit... even the second bit.
More importantly, it seems every post in this thread that dares criticise the Matrix sequels is getting marked down, troll or not.
The third Matrix movie sucked (not the second IMHO)- you're entitled to disagree, but it's what a lot of people honestly think, like it or not.
How we laughed when Matthew Kelly (the child abuser!)
For the record, that case was dropped- there's not a sniff of evidence that it was true. Do you think they'd have let him back on TV if there was even an ounce of suspicion?
Very funny, with one serious flaw; no *way* would people who loved BSD be able to cooperate with the elves making Linux-based DVD players.
He'd sooner sell you a Windows-based palladium-enabled DVD player that sent a record of every film you watched to Bill Gates, who in turn would inform the MPAA or whoever that you'd attempted to skip the Basque-language copyright warning on your 'Fellowship of the Ring' 14-disc special edition DVD, and have your dog killed.
All I want is the parts to build my new robot... My female robot... This is going to be the be best prom ever!
You meant pr0n, right?
Otherwise.... man, you're going to get your ass kicked.
Some people *like* the idea of a free couple of hundred dollars. It's nice that you don't but don't condemn other people for liking free money...... And this one is free. It's like a free gift of $200. And they have to watch some ads.
/. readers- advertising-subsidised PCs are soooo 1999. I hear they come with a free pair of cargo pants that are subsidised by advertising some 14-year-old whizz-kid's website that's had $1 billion invested, but will be worth more than Disney when we get to the IPO.
Well, it's not free then. They get a computer in return for watching some ads. You can say that's an excellent deal and you may well be right, but it's not free.
Fact is, most "free" gifts aren't free at all, because you have to do something non-trivial to get them; often involving buying something else.
Anyway, you're right. These aren't for
Whoah, sorry dude. Nasty flashback...
Is to make totally sure you've destroyed EVERY copy of a manuscript you never want to see the light of day, because after you're dead, some self-serving snot will publish it for the world to see and who cares about your wishes in the matter.
Hey, we're already at the stage where Douglas Adams had an unfinished book recovered from his hard drive and published.
If you want to be safe, use a word processor on a computer that never connects to a network (could recover data on the network), restrict your copies to removable disk to those you would be happy being published or are able to destroy, and at some stage physically destroy the hard drive beyond any possible recovery.
In fact, do the same to *any* part of the computer that might (even temporarily) have held your data, including the monitor.
Paranoid? Well, I'm trying to second-guess information recovery in 20-30 years time, and I defy anyone to say that this will never happen.
Of course, the radiation from your monitor probably induced microscopic interference in the TV signal your VCR is recording nearby, and with advanced signal-processing and pattern-recognition, your great lost tome is recovered from an episode of Dawson's Creek you taped back in 2003.
Yuk.
I think you have it backwards. Black is all colors (American version), and white is no color at all.
I know. I thought it was clear that I knew that from my reply.
Now, the guy who was offended...
You know, the parent article was obviously tongue-in-cheek as shown by the reference to "master" and "slave" drives and "Los Angeles City Council" (search Slashdot or the web if you didn't see it). Even without having read that, I don't think it came across particularly seriously.
It is offensive to all African-Americans and other People of Color.
Pure black is the absence of light and hence no colour; white is a mixture of all the different colours. Therefore, your use of the term "People of Color" is inaccurate.
Furthermore, it has come to my attention that the terms "black" and "white" are being used to describe people with lightish and darkish skin. This is offensive to people with truly white skin, such as a resident of the British Isles the day before they leave for their annual holiday in the sun (put that bloody t-shirt back on, the glare is blinding me).
The same people can claim to be the only true redskins, when they return home two weeks later, looking like lobsters.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, I'm hauling your sorry ass into court, pronto.
It lacks some features that you'll find yourself missing, like the ability to rewind the film without leaving the leed out.
Get yourself a film retriever. I have one, and they work, although they can be slightly fiddly. Not an ideal solution, but workable...
Actually, see this.
Back in the days of the government telephone monopoly, The city of Hull, for some reason, ran it's own telephone system.
IIRC this was true for a number of cities at one time (I *think* the regulations allowed cities to run their own telephone systems, but don't quote me on that). Eventually, all but one (Hull's) merged with the main Post-Office run service- that was eventually renamed British Telecom, privatised and later rebranded as BT.
I wouldn't swear that this is 100% right, but it's fairly close to the truth IIRC.
showering, maybe?
Yeah, here's a description of one particularly fanatical 'open-source supporter' (from PBS).
"If he was busy he didn't bathe, he didn't change clothes. We were in New York and the demo that we had crashed the evening before the announcement, and Bill worked all night with some other engineers to fix it. Well it didn't occur to him to take ten minutes for a shower after that, it just didn't occur to him that that was important, and he badly needed a shower that day."
Please step forward, Mr.Gates. But not too close.
There's a problem with that theory. Geeks don't have any taste.
That's interesting- I'd always wondered what geek tasted like. Do you have to marinade them for a few hours to give them better taste, or what?
Somewhere in the 'real' Real World.
Two hackers, uh, I mean crackers, erm... dammit! Two geeks meet in person for the first time.
Neo1337357: Trinity? [Blah... something about a bank IIRC, I can count the number of times I've seen The Matrix on two hands] I..... thought you were a girl.
Trinity9348: Most guys do.
'Neo' becomes very uncomfortable as he realises he is standing in an S&M club with a large, sweaty guy he has shared his most intimate fantasies with.
Somewhere in the background a Rob Zombie track is playing. Fade to black.
They're trying to sell you yummy steak sauce, duh!
(How the heck was this modded as flamebait?)
The ingredients are listed on the side of the bottle, but the recipe isn't- does this mean it qualifies as open sauce? Would Richard Stallman approve, or should we design our own sauce and post the recipe all over Usenet?
Then again, he mentions something about secret sauce halfway down, but tells us what it is. But not what's in it. Hmmmmmmmm....
BTW, for anyone in the United Kingdom, clicking on that link and seeing that mockney p***k Jamie Oliver halfway down is roughly on a par with clicking on a Goatse link.
The only thing stopping China from planting a Chinese flag and claiming the moon is a piece of paper that China may or may not have signed.
Meanwhile, Back In The Real World (TM), China will do what the hell they like if they can get away with it. Like some other countries (cough), they'll play with the rules when it benefits them and disregard them if they're inconvenient.
The only reason a piece of paper means shit is because enough people are prepared to back it up with force in whatever form (lawyers backed by money and armies). That's all legal agreements between countries are- a house of cards that it's in their interests to keep standing, until it isn't. The richer and more powerful your country, the more your laws are 'worth' (you can usually figure out some way of getting another country to obey your laws in such cases).
Is this making sense? Let me give you a patronising analogy- the real world is an old-fashioned computer without memory protection where every process is trying to attack every other process and grab its timeslice. Wake up and get real.
So basically now for 10 bucks I can get a 2 megapixel camera... well looks like i just wasted 200 bucks on getting a 4 megapixel camera.
Arf. Well, consider this- with film cameras, the equivalent to the CCD is the film. The camera is just a lens and case, so by that analogy, I should exchange my Nikon SLR for a cheap-ass compact that comes with a free roll of film.
Even if that 'gift set' has been sitting in the chemist's window for the past 18 months and the colour in the film now has a pretty purple cast.
I think only North American products do not come with batteries. Most European and Asian consumer products come with the batteries.
I noticed that. It never used to be the case, but now most battery-powered goods in the UK tend to come with them; often ready-installed (you pull out the small piece of plastic between the battery and one of the terminals).
Don't understand why the situation would be different in North America, or have people just failed to notice that things have changed since their childhood?
Guiness - "Guiness is good for you". Right then, next.
AFAIK they haven't been allowed to use that slogan in the UK for a long time. (Haven't heard 2 or 3 of the other ones, so I'd guess you're US-based, right?)
Still, good post. I couldn't believe the Ben and Jerry's example given elsewhere, considering Sainsbury's can say things like "Everyone's Favourite Ingredient" (and that's not the worst. Yeah, I know they changed their slogan, but that's because everyone hated it, not because it was deemed misleading).