Is it fair when you shop around and go to a store that isn't in your neighborhood to buy something? The closer store you didn't go to opened specifically because you (and others like you) live in the area, and you're depriving them of your business.
Nope; that's a very flawed analogy.
There's no obligation upon me to support that particular business (unless I made some sort of promise to in advance). Granted, if they stop trading and I lose a convenient store near me, I probably don't have any moral right to whine about it. But that's beside the point- as I said, it's not a good analogy.
Google are the business, not the consumer.
Google are carrying out *their* business in one country, but exploiting loopholes in the system to pay virtually no business rates in that country. It's like your shop wanted to open a store in one area, but pay business rates in another totally different area- well, actually, a totally different country.
You could also argue that countries should remove certain legal allowances and deductions.
Indeed, I would.
But Google and other companies again are literally just shopping around to find the best deals on the products and services they need and using them.
As I said, your "shopping around" analogy above was poor. They're intentionally exploiting loopholes in the system.
If Google want to be taxed in the Republic of Ireland or any other country, I'm fine with that. Provided they only want to carry out business in that country. Others will take their place to fulfil the needs of UK businesses seeking to advertise.
If Starbucks want to pay the Netherlands' lower business rates instead of the UK, no problem. Let them close all their UK outlets and open them in the Netherlands instead. I'd require a subatomic-scale violin to express how "sad" I'd feel at this "loss" of an overpriced corporate chain whose position could easily be taken by another.
You see, this isn't about job-creating industry that we should be grateful to have in the country. This is about businesses that want to make money by trading with us, but aren't willing to pay their share.
You can say that it "unfair". You can say anything you like, but that does not make it so. However, when a company is taking advantage of a perfectly legal tax minimization plan, it is not fair to blame the company.
*You* can say that it's "not fair to blame the company", but that doesn't make it so either. (See, that's an obvious and easy argument that cuts both ways).
While I'm not accusing you of actually saying that "fair" and "legal" are technically synonymous, I think I'm right in saying that your underlying moral assumption is that anything within the *letter* of the law is inherently fair because it was set up by an elected government.
Disregarding the fact that the law is not perfect, and that the most egregious examples of tax avoidance are clearly seeking holes in a system that isn't- and can't ever be- a perfect implementation of what it was intended to do. This, of course, assumes that the law was written in good faith anyway. In practice, the same big business interests that stand to benefit from tax avoidance are also in a position to exert undue influence and pressure on those elected representatives directly or indirectly responsible for creating those laws.
The people you should be blaming are the people who wrote the law that makes it legal and the people who have the power to change the law so that it is no longer legal.
Aside from the fact that this is just a restatement of what you said in the first place, this isn't the case. It's impossible to create a tax regime that's entirely watertight from from *legal* abuse and loopholes without being unworkable. That is, from actions clearly not in the spirit of what was intended, but still within the legal wording. Of course, past experience can be used to spot obvious flaws, but no-one- and I mean *no-one* is going to be able to create something immune from hordes of highly-paid lawyers working for the vested interests of corporations working out how to exploit the system.
One can revise or improve the legislation- and failure to address loopholes being obviously exploited once they become obvious *is* a valid point of blame- but no system will ever perfect unless it's so tied down that businesses find it unworkable.
The "irony".... sorry, I meant "hypocrisy", is that the additional administration, red tape, restriction and general complexity required to address these loopholes being exploited will be complained about by the same corporate interests doing the exploiting.
At any rate, what you said is an attempt to absolve corporations and business of responsibility by shifting an unreasonable level of expectation onto the shoulders of the populace and their elected representatives, and I'm not buying it.
One thing to keep in mind is that these deductions may exist because they produce other benefits for the country that more than offset the "lost" revenue that comes from companies taking advantage of them (the word "lost" is in quotes because sometimes the only reason a company is doing business in a particular location is because of the tax deductions they receive for doing so).
In some circumstances, yes, this may be a fair use of a low tax regime.
On the other hand, if you (or anyone else) is trying to tell me that (e.g.) Starbucks arranging their UK operation such that the profits are effectively taxed elsewhere- as was in the news here recently- is "beneficial", or indeed anything short of exploiting loopholes in the system that benefits no-one but their shareholders, then you're full of it.
What you mean by that is that they should not take the deductions that the UK government has written into its tax code. It seems perfectly fair to me for a company to take advantage of every tax deduction it is legally eligible for.
Oh Jeez, not this libertarian bleating again. In most case, these companies are intentionally exploiting loopholes in one or more countries' systems to minimise tax. It's disingenuous to imply that this was by design or the intention (as "eligible for" might suggest).
One might argue that their behaviour is still perfectly legal. However, what you said was that it was "fair", which isn't a legal term, and when they're clearly playing the system and paying minimal tax for the facilities they're using, we can quite reasonably say that it's "unfair".
Now whether or not those deductions should exist is another question entirely, but the people to hold responsible for that are the members of Parliament who voted for those deductions in the first place (or failed to vote to eliminate them).
As stated above, this is as much exploitation of loopholes than use of explicitly-designed "deductions", and while they may be legally entitled to take advantage of them, we're free to call them out on it and paint them in a bad light. If they don't like it or that affects their business, tough shit, they can go fuck themselves.
By "Masters of the Universe", do they mean that they're cheap, plastic people only taken seriously by 8-year-old boys, 30 years out of date and the subject of cheesy nostalgia nowadays?
I think I saw one of those guys on YouTube covering that Four Non-Blondes song...
"we should not fault people who prefer the old way"
Oooh, how generously big-hearted and inclusive of them!
Yes, it does come across as... diplomatically condescending. Especially in context:-
And while we certainly hope that many users will find the new ways comfortable and refreshing after a short learning phase, we should not fault people who prefer the old way.
Yep, it's just that the users who preferred the old interface have been too old and stuck in their ways to bother with a "short learning phase".
What version of Windows Internet Explorer was the first to handle transparent PNGs correctly?
Off the top of my head, couldn't tell you, but I do know that older versions- IE6 certainly- had problems with them. IIRC the problem with GIFs was that they only supported one transparent colour, so you either couldn't anti-alias edges adjacent to the chosen background colour, or they'd have a jaggy/blocky "halo" around them (noticeable if the actual background colour was significantly different from the assumed background colour).
Whether that applies to mishandled PNGs in any browser at all, I can't remember- what I said might not have applied to Johnny O's comment if that was the case (though what he said still shouldn't apply to correctly-handled PNGs).
PNG is good if you dont mind blocky distortion around your line art too!
Huh? PNG supports 24 and 32-bit colour- more than enough for anti-aliasing- and 8-bit transparency so you're either assuming that the limitations of GIF are those of PNG, or you're using an old browser that doesn't handle transparent PNGs correctly and messes up the background.
No floppy drive and no connectivity other than USB! WTF?
If this is a reference to the original iMac, it's worth remembering that almost every one of them in existence seemed to have a colour-coordinated external floppy plugged in to it. This strongly suggests that Apple *did* jump the gun.
Fact was that in dial-up-era 1998, relying on transferring files over the Internet as one's only option was *not* practical; it wasn't always-on, it was slow, and a very large proportion of people didn't have it. Flash memory pen drives wouldn't be affordable for several years (*) and CD writers- although rapidly *becoming* more affordable by that point- weren't yet anywhere near cheap enough to be a universal alternative to the floppy.
So everyone stuck a floppy on because they needed it.
Granted, the iMac probably helped push USB (I'd bought a PC that same year with USB ports, but there seemed to be very little support for it at first. ) But it still jumped the gun with the omission of the floppy.
But this is why competition is so important, just look at how quickly prices are falling and sizes growing in SSDs whereas with HDDs they seem to be stagnant, that's because as long as they simply match each other's prices they don't have to worry about price wars since its only the two of them.
Isn't part of the lack of competition in the HDD market due to the fact that many companies see SSD as being the long-term future, and therefore wouldn't want to get into, or want to get out of, the HDD market, nor invest money in something they perceive as having no long-term future?
Of course, if the price of HDDs remains too high, then it will almost certainly hasten the demise of that market in the face of SSDs' increasing popularity, even if there will remain a smaller market for people who *need* the larger capacities that SSDs won't reach in the near future.
If OOOE is out-of-order execution, itanium does oooe fine. It just expects compiler to tell more about it.
We learned more than a decade ago that relying on the compiler to tell the CPU how to work was insane.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but IIRC one very major problem with Itanium was that Intel, having designed it around this philosophy, never properly implemented (or were able to implement) the compilers it relied on to do this.
No... to really hammer it home as part of a judgement, it should be in two-inch tall Arial Bold. Have Apple suffer having to display some competitor's ugly font.
I take it that you felt Comic Sans would be *way* too sadistic?:-)
If the headline is a question, the answer is always "No".
Yeah, that's not actually how the quote goes.
It's obviously meant to refer to Betteridge's Law of Headlines- and whether the AC's paraphrasing it accurate or not, it certainly misses the both the spirit and the purpose of the original quote. (For those unaware of Betteridge, and- more importantly- those who think they have, but don't get why it doesn't apply here, read the linked article. Betteridge's Law doesn't refer to open questions like the one above, but to article headlines based on an attention-getting premise that there is insufficient evidence to back up as facts, e.g. "Have We Found the Cure for AIDS? (No; or you wouldn't have put the question mark in.)".)
Then again, while unfortunate, it's not surprising that Betteridge's Law has become the latest insightful observation/rule-of-thumb to fall victim to overuse and misuse by lazy posters who haul it out at every opportunity as a canned substitute for real insight or intelligence. Anyone could have seen that coming.
Some nerd had their bathroom tiled with 486 processors...
Do you have a link for that? While I can believe that some people *are* geeky anough to try such a thing, whether it would be practical is another question.
Aside from the fact that they're very unlikely to be suitable as tiles, even if the 486s were as close to free as makes no difference, I suspect it'd still be damn hard to get enough of them together in one place to make this idea worthwhile.
Oh, I'll admit I really hate it when people on Slashdot "helpfully" explain a joke or reference, especially when it's one that most people here will get (thus cheapening its appeal to those who got it, and not really making it funny to those who didn't).
But the infamous Turner the Worm being being sick incident is just too important to risk going over American Slashdotters' heads.:-)
(BTW, should I label the above as being "NSFW" bearing in mind it was aimed at *children*?!)
Eventually RAM got cheap enough that receivers would just cache the full set of pages.
Yes, I noticed that the TV I bought a couple of years ago had incredibly fast Teletext access, obviously because it was automatically caching every page as soon as it was received.
An obvious step, given that holding the complete output of one channel would be a low number of megabytes.
Of course, that would have been a ludicrously large and expensive amount of memory in the mid-70s (when even the kilobyte needed for a single page would have been a non-trivial cost), which is probably why those early sets didn't do any caching. But that much (or little) memory would be insignificantly cheap in an era where multi-gigabyte SD cards cost a few pounds. And ironically, it does make Teletext that much more usable than it was in its heyday.
Unfortunately, six weeks after I got that set, they switched off the old TV signal (and hence old-style Teletext along with it).:-(
Yes, I do. Iraq has "become" a significantly more dangerous place for homosexuals in the past few years. It's grossly blinkered to assume that the rest of the world has all followed the United States and Europe, and it's also dangerously naive to assume that the direction of public opinion couldn't change.
If a defense is impossible, you have to fall back on the next best defense. That doesn't change the best defense. The best defense against your parents finding out about your sexual orientation from someone else will always be to tell them yourself, from whatever distance is safe.
That's an idiotic comeback. If you live in a country where people are prepared to kill members of their own family over "honour" (translation; face-saving murder) and such things, then telling one's parents about such things isn't the "best defense".
Yeah, it'd be nice if everyone could tell their parents about such things, and it'd be nice if we all had a pony. Meanwhile, some people have to live in shitholes where a mentally-backward Christian girl in her early teens is threatened with her life because she allegedly burned a koran- though it's just as likely a witchhunt incited by religious leaders- or another teenage girl is shot for speaking up in favour of education for her peers.
Facebook is social networking, and people have to realize that their socializations will be revealed.
The risk will always exist. Facebook's behaviour is comptemptible because they pay lip service to mitigating it while (as you agree) intentionally undermining privacy and making things worse than they need be for their own self-interest.
Facebook's position is the only sane one in this case, since people do need to be educated about this sort of thing.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Is it that- given that Facebook are intentionally undermining privacy, because their business model depends on it- they should educate people about the privacy controls anyway.
While this might technically make logical sense at some level, it's absolutely fucked up. Nor does it take into account the fact that Facebook aren't being open- that is, they try to give the impression they care about privacy and giving people the tools to manage it, when they're not open about the fact they're really doing the complete opposite.
And soon it won't matter. Not soon enough, but tolerance is growing in general.
Indeed, and (for example) Jamaican society tolerates the burning and killing of gay men, so we should all encourage people there to come out to their parents.
When they're dead, it'll comfort them to know that tolerance is growing in general.
Maybe in 50 years time, things will be better there, but it takes a peculiarly tolerance-spoiled type of insensitivity to assume that this makes it okay for everyone around the world to have their secrets revealed today.
Frankly, I don't think we'll ever live in a world where we won't have the need- and shouldn't have the right- to some level of privacy. If Facebook wants to undermine our privacy while weasel-ishly pretending to do the opposite, I'm quite happy for people's attention to be drawn to this.
But there are a bunch of other considerations, like going to jail, having to take the time to pay out, and having the police find your drug trafficking operation, that aren't being figured in here. This is an analogy of what the business types are thinking.
So are you suggesting that the Amazon bosses *are* or *aren't* concerned about the police finding out about their secret drug trafficking operation?
Actually, they have a special "Drug Trafficking Department" page, but given the amount of time it takes to find *anything* on Amazon these days, I suspect that they're confident the police are unlikely to stumble across it;-)
Sexual orientation is becoming less important, especially to the younger generation.
Try telling that to someone who lives in a country where being gay can still get you killed, such as present-day Iraq, Pakistan or Jamaica.
As far as I'm concerned, it's far preferable (and I'd argue, desirable) that people like this girl get their fingers prominently burned so that people realise the dangers of organising one's life (and secrets) via Facebook.
While it could be argued that this wasn't directly Facebook's fault, and that social networking will never be risk-free when it comes to information sharing, it's a fact that Facebook have always paid lip service to privacy, while clearly holding it in contempt.
If they really cared, they could have made the privacy settings far simpler and more manageable, and would not have changed their behaviour without notice (as they've done in the past) to expose previously private information.
They make play of "helping" users manage the privacy complexities that are an (intentional) result of their policies. Most of us know how insincere this is, but I'm quite sure a lot of people out there *do* believe this.
So, as I said, better- and indeed a good thing- that people like this girl prominently suffer unpleasant- but not fatal- consequences and serve as an example to others. Particularly those to who a similar mistake *could* be fatal.
The best defense against your parents finding out about your sexual orientation from someone else will always be to tell them yourself, from whatever distance is safe.
That's not always practical if the "safe" distance is in another country.
If I were to write fanfic for Harry Potter, this is considered a derived work, even though Rowling has only copyright on a specific expression of an idea.
Even though I may have written 80% or more of the words myself, my "Harry Potter and the Mixed Blood Prince" will never be allowed on sale.
It will be, and in fact you'll clean up- *if* you change the characters' names and target the "Mommy porn" market.
Not that *anyone* has ever done anything like that, I just have a hunch that "Barry Gotter and the Fifty Shades of Beige" would sell well.:-)
Much as I appreciate your humorous intentional misunderstanding, some people *might* think you're being serious and get the wrong idea. So let's clear this up...
"CKEditor" is the latest fragrance from Calvin Klein, the people who brought you "CKOne".
There- I hope that corrects any misleading impression given.
Slashdot Mirror
Is it fair when you shop around and go to a store that isn't in your neighborhood to buy something? The closer store you didn't go to opened specifically because you (and others like you) live in the area, and you're depriving them of your business.
Nope; that's a very flawed analogy.
There's no obligation upon me to support that particular business (unless I made some sort of promise to in advance). Granted, if they stop trading and I lose a convenient store near me, I probably don't have any moral right to whine about it. But that's beside the point- as I said, it's not a good analogy.
Google are the business, not the consumer.
Google are carrying out *their* business in one country, but exploiting loopholes in the system to pay virtually no business rates in that country. It's like your shop wanted to open a store in one area, but pay business rates in another totally different area- well, actually, a totally different country.
You could also argue that countries should remove certain legal allowances and deductions.
Indeed, I would.
But Google and other companies again are literally just shopping around to find the best deals on the products and services they need and using them.
As I said, your "shopping around" analogy above was poor. They're intentionally exploiting loopholes in the system.
If Google want to be taxed in the Republic of Ireland or any other country, I'm fine with that. Provided they only want to carry out business in that country. Others will take their place to fulfil the needs of UK businesses seeking to advertise.
If Starbucks want to pay the Netherlands' lower business rates instead of the UK, no problem. Let them close all their UK outlets and open them in the Netherlands instead. I'd require a subatomic-scale violin to express how "sad" I'd feel at this "loss" of an overpriced corporate chain whose position could easily be taken by another.
You see, this isn't about job-creating industry that we should be grateful to have in the country. This is about businesses that want to make money by trading with us, but aren't willing to pay their share.
You can say that it "unfair". You can say anything you like, but that does not make it so. However, when a company is taking advantage of a perfectly legal tax minimization plan, it is not fair to blame the company.
*You* can say that it's "not fair to blame the company", but that doesn't make it so either. (See, that's an obvious and easy argument that cuts both ways).
While I'm not accusing you of actually saying that "fair" and "legal" are technically synonymous, I think I'm right in saying that your underlying moral assumption is that anything within the *letter* of the law is inherently fair because it was set up by an elected government.
Disregarding the fact that the law is not perfect, and that the most egregious examples of tax avoidance are clearly seeking holes in a system that isn't- and can't ever be- a perfect implementation of what it was intended to do. This, of course, assumes that the law was written in good faith anyway. In practice, the same big business interests that stand to benefit from tax avoidance are also in a position to exert undue influence and pressure on those elected representatives directly or indirectly responsible for creating those laws.
The people you should be blaming are the people who wrote the law that makes it legal and the people who have the power to change the law so that it is no longer legal.
Aside from the fact that this is just a restatement of what you said in the first place, this isn't the case. It's impossible to create a tax regime that's entirely watertight from from *legal* abuse and loopholes without being unworkable. That is, from actions clearly not in the spirit of what was intended, but still within the legal wording. Of course, past experience can be used to spot obvious flaws, but no-one- and I mean *no-one* is going to be able to create something immune from hordes of highly-paid lawyers working for the vested interests of corporations working out how to exploit the system.
One can revise or improve the legislation- and failure to address loopholes being obviously exploited once they become obvious *is* a valid point of blame- but no system will ever perfect unless it's so tied down that businesses find it unworkable.
The "irony".... sorry, I meant "hypocrisy", is that the additional administration, red tape, restriction and general complexity required to address these loopholes being exploited will be complained about by the same corporate interests doing the exploiting.
At any rate, what you said is an attempt to absolve corporations and business of responsibility by shifting an unreasonable level of expectation onto the shoulders of the populace and their elected representatives, and I'm not buying it.
One thing to keep in mind is that these deductions may exist because they produce other benefits for the country that more than offset the "lost" revenue that comes from companies taking advantage of them (the word "lost" is in quotes because sometimes the only reason a company is doing business in a particular location is because of the tax deductions they receive for doing so).
In some circumstances, yes, this may be a fair use of a low tax regime.
On the other hand, if you (or anyone else) is trying to tell me that (e.g.) Starbucks arranging their UK operation such that the profits are effectively taxed elsewhere- as was in the news here recently- is "beneficial", or indeed anything short of exploiting loopholes in the system that benefits no-one but their shareholders, then you're full of it.
What you mean by that is that they should not take the deductions that the UK government has written into its tax code. It seems perfectly fair to me for a company to take advantage of every tax deduction it is legally eligible for.
Oh Jeez, not this libertarian bleating again. In most case, these companies are intentionally exploiting loopholes in one or more countries' systems to minimise tax. It's disingenuous to imply that this was by design or the intention (as "eligible for" might suggest).
One might argue that their behaviour is still perfectly legal. However, what you said was that it was "fair", which isn't a legal term, and when they're clearly playing the system and paying minimal tax for the facilities they're using, we can quite reasonably say that it's "unfair".
Now whether or not those deductions should exist is another question entirely, but the people to hold responsible for that are the members of Parliament who voted for those deductions in the first place (or failed to vote to eliminate them).
As stated above, this is as much exploitation of loopholes than use of explicitly-designed "deductions", and while they may be legally entitled to take advantage of them, we're free to call them out on it and paint them in a bad light. If they don't like it or that affects their business, tough shit, they can go fuck themselves.
By "Masters of the Universe", do they mean that they're cheap, plastic people only taken seriously by 8-year-old boys, 30 years out of date and the subject of cheesy nostalgia nowadays?
I think I saw one of those guys on YouTube covering that Four Non-Blondes song...
"we should not fault people who prefer the old way"
Oooh, how generously big-hearted and inclusive of them!
Yes, it does come across as... diplomatically condescending. Especially in context:-
And while we certainly hope that many users will find the new ways comfortable and refreshing after a short learning phase, we should not fault people who prefer the old way.
Yep, it's just that the users who preferred the old interface have been too old and stuck in their ways to bother with a "short learning phase".
What version of Windows Internet Explorer was the first to handle transparent PNGs correctly?
Off the top of my head, couldn't tell you, but I do know that older versions- IE6 certainly- had problems with them. IIRC the problem with GIFs was that they only supported one transparent colour, so you either couldn't anti-alias edges adjacent to the chosen background colour, or they'd have a jaggy/blocky "halo" around them (noticeable if the actual background colour was significantly different from the assumed background colour).
Whether that applies to mishandled PNGs in any browser at all, I can't remember- what I said might not have applied to Johnny O's comment if that was the case (though what he said still shouldn't apply to correctly-handled PNGs).
PNG is good if you dont mind blocky distortion around your line art too!
Huh? PNG supports 24 and 32-bit colour- more than enough for anti-aliasing- and 8-bit transparency so you're either assuming that the limitations of GIF are those of PNG, or you're using an old browser that doesn't handle transparent PNGs correctly and messes up the background.
I am wondering: will the Zelda Twilight Princess run in full HDMI resolution on new Wii U? Or it will have the "original" pretty low resolution?
I don't think so. It will probably only run exactly the way it did on the Wii [..] It's possible they might do some upscaling or antialiasing, though.
I believe that's what he was suggesting anyway.
No floppy drive and no connectivity other than USB! WTF?
If this is a reference to the original iMac, it's worth remembering that almost every one of them in existence seemed to have a colour-coordinated external floppy plugged in to it. This strongly suggests that Apple *did* jump the gun.
Fact was that in dial-up-era 1998, relying on transferring files over the Internet as one's only option was *not* practical; it wasn't always-on, it was slow, and a very large proportion of people didn't have it. Flash memory pen drives wouldn't be affordable for several years (*) and CD writers- although rapidly *becoming* more affordable by that point- weren't yet anywhere near cheap enough to be a universal alternative to the floppy.
So everyone stuck a floppy on because they needed it.
Granted, the iMac probably helped push USB (I'd bought a PC that same year with USB ports, but there seemed to be very little support for it at first. ) But it still jumped the gun with the omission of the floppy.
Yeah, luckily all the online storage doesn't use hard drives!
You're very clever young man, very clever... but it's clouds all the way down.
But this is why competition is so important, just look at how quickly prices are falling and sizes growing in SSDs whereas with HDDs they seem to be stagnant, that's because as long as they simply match each other's prices they don't have to worry about price wars since its only the two of them.
Isn't part of the lack of competition in the HDD market due to the fact that many companies see SSD as being the long-term future, and therefore wouldn't want to get into, or want to get out of, the HDD market, nor invest money in something they perceive as having no long-term future?
Of course, if the price of HDDs remains too high, then it will almost certainly hasten the demise of that market in the face of SSDs' increasing popularity, even if there will remain a smaller market for people who *need* the larger capacities that SSDs won't reach in the near future.
If OOOE is out-of-order execution, itanium does oooe fine. It just expects compiler to tell more about it.
We learned more than a decade ago that relying on the compiler to tell the CPU how to work was insane.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but IIRC one very major problem with Itanium was that Intel, having designed it around this philosophy, never properly implemented (or were able to implement) the compilers it relied on to do this.
No... to really hammer it home as part of a judgement, it should be in two-inch tall Arial Bold. Have Apple suffer having to display some competitor's ugly font.
I take it that you felt Comic Sans would be *way* too sadistic? :-)
[Reference to Betteridge's Law of Headlines]
Yawn.
If the headline is a question, the answer is always "No".
Yeah, that's not actually how the quote goes.
It's obviously meant to refer to Betteridge's Law of Headlines- and whether the AC's paraphrasing it accurate or not, it certainly misses the both the spirit and the purpose of the original quote. (For those unaware of Betteridge, and- more importantly- those who think they have, but don't get why it doesn't apply here, read the linked article. Betteridge's Law doesn't refer to open questions like the one above, but to article headlines based on an attention-getting premise that there is insufficient evidence to back up as facts, e.g. "Have We Found the Cure for AIDS? (No; or you wouldn't have put the question mark in.)".)
Then again, while unfortunate, it's not surprising that Betteridge's Law has become the latest insightful observation/rule-of-thumb to fall victim to overuse and misuse by lazy posters who haul it out at every opportunity as a canned substitute for real insight or intelligence. Anyone could have seen that coming.
Some nerd had their bathroom tiled with 486 processors...
Do you have a link for that? While I can believe that some people *are* geeky anough to try such a thing, whether it would be practical is another question.
Aside from the fact that they're very unlikely to be suitable as tiles, even if the 486s were as close to free as makes no difference, I suspect it'd still be damn hard to get enough of them together in one place to make this idea worthwhile.
EAT THEM!
Not a good idea- I tried eating one and it took me an eternity. At a guess, I'd say it had around four billion bites' worth.
And they named her Venus.
It might be spelled "Venus, the luxury yacht", but it's pronounced "Throatwarbler mangrove".
The real Turner The Worm being sick.
Oh, I'll admit I really hate it when people on Slashdot "helpfully" explain a joke or reference, especially when it's one that most people here will get (thus cheapening its appeal to those who got it, and not really making it funny to those who didn't).
:-)
But the infamous Turner the Worm being being sick incident is just too important to risk going over American Slashdotters' heads.
(BTW, should I label the above as being "NSFW" bearing in mind it was aimed at *children*?!)
Eventually RAM got cheap enough that receivers would just cache the full set of pages.
Yes, I noticed that the TV I bought a couple of years ago had incredibly fast Teletext access, obviously because it was automatically caching every page as soon as it was received.
An obvious step, given that holding the complete output of one channel would be a low number of megabytes.
Of course, that would have been a ludicrously large and expensive amount of memory in the mid-70s (when even the kilobyte needed for a single page would have been a non-trivial cost), which is probably why those early sets didn't do any caching. But that much (or little) memory would be insignificantly cheap in an era where multi-gigabyte SD cards cost a few pounds. And ironically, it does make Teletext that much more usable than it was in its heyday.
Unfortunately, six weeks after I got that set, they switched off the old TV signal (and hence old-style Teletext along with it). :-(
Surely you recognise the word "becoming"
Yes, I do. Iraq has "become" a significantly more dangerous place for homosexuals in the past few years. It's grossly blinkered to assume that the rest of the world has all followed the United States and Europe, and it's also dangerously naive to assume that the direction of public opinion couldn't change.
If a defense is impossible, you have to fall back on the next best defense. That doesn't change the best defense. The best defense against your parents finding out about your sexual orientation from someone else will always be to tell them yourself, from whatever distance is safe.
That's an idiotic comeback. If you live in a country where people are prepared to kill members of their own family over "honour" (translation; face-saving murder) and such things, then telling one's parents about such things isn't the "best defense".
Yeah, it'd be nice if everyone could tell their parents about such things, and it'd be nice if we all had a pony. Meanwhile, some people have to live in shitholes where a mentally-backward Christian girl in her early teens is threatened with her life because she allegedly burned a koran- though it's just as likely a witchhunt incited by religious leaders- or another teenage girl is shot for speaking up in favour of education for her peers.
Facebook is social networking, and people have to realize that their socializations will be revealed.
The risk will always exist. Facebook's behaviour is comptemptible because they pay lip service to mitigating it while (as you agree) intentionally undermining privacy and making things worse than they need be for their own self-interest.
Facebook's position is the only sane one in this case, since people do need to be educated about this sort of thing.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Is it that- given that Facebook are intentionally undermining privacy, because their business model depends on it- they should educate people about the privacy controls anyway.
While this might technically make logical sense at some level, it's absolutely fucked up. Nor does it take into account the fact that Facebook aren't being open- that is, they try to give the impression they care about privacy and giving people the tools to manage it, when they're not open about the fact they're really doing the complete opposite.
And soon it won't matter. Not soon enough, but tolerance is growing in general.
Indeed, and (for example) Jamaican society tolerates the burning and killing of gay men, so we should all encourage people there to come out to their parents.
When they're dead, it'll comfort them to know that tolerance is growing in general.
Maybe in 50 years time, things will be better there, but it takes a peculiarly tolerance-spoiled type of insensitivity to assume that this makes it okay for everyone around the world to have their secrets revealed today.
Frankly, I don't think we'll ever live in a world where we won't have the need- and shouldn't have the right- to some level of privacy. If Facebook wants to undermine our privacy while weasel-ishly pretending to do the opposite, I'm quite happy for people's attention to be drawn to this.
But there are a bunch of other considerations, like going to jail, having to take the time to pay out, and having the police find your drug trafficking operation, that aren't being figured in here. This is an analogy of what the business types are thinking.
So are you suggesting that the Amazon bosses *are* or *aren't* concerned about the police finding out about their secret drug trafficking operation?
;-)
Actually, they have a special "Drug Trafficking Department" page, but given the amount of time it takes to find *anything* on Amazon these days, I suspect that they're confident the police are unlikely to stumble across it
Sexual orientation is becoming less important, especially to the younger generation.
Try telling that to someone who lives in a country where being gay can still get you killed, such as present-day Iraq, Pakistan or Jamaica.
As far as I'm concerned, it's far preferable (and I'd argue, desirable) that people like this girl get their fingers prominently burned so that people realise the dangers of organising one's life (and secrets) via Facebook.
While it could be argued that this wasn't directly Facebook's fault, and that social networking will never be risk-free when it comes to information sharing, it's a fact that Facebook have always paid lip service to privacy, while clearly holding it in contempt.
If they really cared, they could have made the privacy settings far simpler and more manageable, and would not have changed their behaviour without notice (as they've done in the past) to expose previously private information.
They make play of "helping" users manage the privacy complexities that are an (intentional) result of their policies. Most of us know how insincere this is, but I'm quite sure a lot of people out there *do* believe this.
So, as I said, better- and indeed a good thing- that people like this girl prominently suffer unpleasant- but not fatal- consequences and serve as an example to others. Particularly those to who a similar mistake *could* be fatal.
The best defense against your parents finding out about your sexual orientation from someone else will always be to tell them yourself, from whatever distance is safe.
That's not always practical if the "safe" distance is in another country.
If I were to write fanfic for Harry Potter, this is considered a derived work, even though Rowling has only copyright on a specific expression of an idea. Even though I may have written 80% or more of the words myself, my "Harry Potter and the Mixed Blood Prince" will never be allowed on sale.
It will be, and in fact you'll clean up- *if* you change the characters' names and target the "Mommy porn" market.
:-)
Not that *anyone* has ever done anything like that, I just have a hunch that "Barry Gotter and the Fifty Shades of Beige" would sell well.
When did this happen?
Much as I appreciate your humorous intentional misunderstanding, some people *might* think you're being serious and get the wrong idea. So let's clear this up...
"CKEditor" is the latest fragrance from Calvin Klein, the people who brought you "CKOne".
There- I hope that corrects any misleading impression given.