That's funny, because my first reaction was that this law sounded as sloppily written as Minnesota's recent concealed weapons legislation -- which was written in a way that left major ambiguities about who could provide the required safety courses, for one example.
We have a passel of state Reps I'd describe as "social right wingers" who put up stuff like death penalty legislation every term. They were behind the weapons bill: it was touted as making the law fairer by not leaving it up to individual sheriffs, but really it aimed at allowing more people to carry concealed guns. The bills these folks turn out seem to have been written by 10th graders who were unfamiliar with anything but the skeleton of the issue they're talking about, and they often have unintended consequences.
He's listed there as primary sponsor of a couple of other bills, including one that was presented as an "academic bill of rights for higher education." This bill was partly prompted by a story about a kid who wrote a "pro-America" paper and got a bad grade from his teacher... Oops, except the kid's paper was crap; he'd written a 1-page "report" that wasn't up-to-snuff, got a bad grade, and decided it was because he was patriotic that he'd been silenced. The bill itself reads like a wolf in sheep's clothing aimed at "protecting a plurality of opinion" by remaining neutral about crap like "intelligent design." It doesn't spell out how you'd decide when a topic was "controversial" -- gee, an ambiguity that could lead to unintended consequences.
Does this sound like exactly the sort of wingnut I'm seeing in Minnesota? I mean, this is a guy who says his law "might apply to anyone who sells a lot" and "If someone buys and sells on eBay on a regular basis as a type of business, then there is a need for regulation." "As a type of business"? No ambiguity there, is there?
The answer is: Yes, we're supposed to feel some sympathy for people who spend their lives training for an extraordinary and meaningful experience, but who may not see their dream fulfilled. No, we're not supposed to be completely callous to their aspirations.
I'm a much bigger fanboy for robotic space exploration, and not much of an advocate of the shuttle program. (Nixon basically pimped the shuttle by exaggerating how cost effective it could be, in a spectacular example of how much government largesse the 'Publicans are capable of when the military industrial complex stands to benefit. IMHO, of course.) That doesn't keep me from sympathizing with astronauts who are, by all accounts, pretty impressive people.
Putting yourself in other people's shoes isn't a weakness.
People who liked it didn't just watch once anyway
on
New Dr. Who Episode Leaked
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· Score: 2, Interesting
What did they lose, the ad revenue from one airing? In exchange for a big "tease" to whet the appetites of the fanatics?
People who loved this series were religious, they'd watch the thing over and over anyway. It's not quite on the level of The Simpsons, but expose any given fan to any three minutes of any episode, and it was "Hey, this is the one where... Oh, yeah, SHE was the Doctor's assistant then..."
That first EV was the game that started me actually registering shareware. Thanks, man. It was a pleasure.
(Coincidentally, I'm a little bit of a birder, and always identified with kestrels. That was the touch that put it over the top -- all your pirate kestrels, taking down a friend whose game I was overhearing in a shared apartment. Anyone who programs a kick-butt kestrel into something has my vote.)
The article here makes it pretty clear -- as another responder points out -- that studies performed by the industry slant heavily toward "No problem here... Keep moving, nothing to see!" whereas those carried out by third parties are predominantly (at a rate of about 3 to 1) showing biological effects.
In the case of global warming, of course, basically it's unanimous among scientists who aren't bought and paid for by the energy industry. (Even the Bush administration admits global warming is happening -- they just say we should "study" what to do about it for a few more decades.) The only holdouts are people susceptible to the industry's disinformation campaign.
My 11-year olds saw at least one R-rated movie years back. "Waiting for Guffman" was rated R (thanks to the totally surreal fundie/Catholic world of the MPAA's ratings board) but I thought it was watchable for them. Tonight we've got a copy of "The Big Night" from Netflix, and it also has an R, probably for language. I have no trouble letting them see that.
The limits on games right now are advisory, and stores sell according to them basically in order to keep their reputations. That's the way I want it. The power in this situation is with the parents if they will only exercise it. That's as much as we can really hope for.
(In general I think tons of social problems in the US today come down to economic pressures that force both parents to work without giving us as much flexibility as we need to raise families. Nothing against women working, it's not a gender thing -- but kids need adults in their lives, and it's just plain a bad economic situation when there's this much pressure drawing the attention of adults away. Personally, as someone who's benefitted from it, I think flex time is a much more effective solution to a variety of social ills than most of the "scary problem!" legislation that gets suggested.)
Having candidate (a) hire a spammer to spam for candidate (b) just before an election comes to mind.
So if I'm, say, Bush, I could have my "Swift Boat Veterans" group, or the equivalent, SPAM in a deliberately offensive way 'on behalf of' John Kerry.
That's basically what Nixon used CREEP to do with paper materials: he had fake campaign literature to hand out at Muskie rallies, distorting Muskie's actual positions. (It's also what Karl Rove did in college; he describes that now as a "youthful indiscretion.")
Near as I can tell, though, SPAM isn't the issue. The abuse we've seen like this has been equivalent to the Swift Boat Vets' efforts -- like the Bob Jones University e-mails implying that John McCain had fathered a mixed-race child out of wedlock during the 2000 primaries. That kind of poison you want to target to a receptive audience, not SPAM to the world. So, back to building address lists...
Traveled to Paris last year with my two 11-year-olds. We could not have been more impressed with the friendliness and extreme politeness of the French people around us. We'd been conditioned to expect so much worse.
On the way home we had a Continental Airlines crew from New Jersey. They were almost unbelievably rude by comparison. Sitting amongst various French tourists, I felt embarrassed.
Honestly: what are traditional values? Some 1950's definition? An 1850's definition?
This is an extremely useful question to actually ask a socially conservative person. They have essentially no answer to it. They don't know what they're wanting to return to; they just know that they're scared of where they think we're going. They can list things they like -- respect for authority and so on -- but try getting them to commit to a historical period when they'd have been happier, and they become furtive and suddenly rather relativistic themselves.
For example: people who pine for "the way schools used to be" often have not a single clue about when they think that "used to be" was. Do they want to go back to 1950, before integration had happened? Oh, no, they won't commit to that. Would they like to go back to the era when the SAT was basically only taken by upper-class white males, to keep scores up? They don't really know. What they know is that the liberals are destroying our colleges, etc. etc.
This talk of traditional values is all about people maintaining their position of power and control over others.
Specifically about using the fear of change to keep people from questioning their power's legitimacy.
The equivalent of this method would be if the previews in the theater reflected your point of view. You'd see a great preview that reflected your tastes and perspective -- adjusted to your "wavelength."
The previews we see in theaters are more like the older, projection-based techniques -- in that studios "project" what they actually wanted onto every movie's trailer. We see a preview about the movie the studio execs paid to make, not about the movie that got made -- and we can't see much of the actual movie at all, so it may as well not exist.
(And what audiences apparently ask for is to see the entire stupid movie, including every turn of the plot, in the preview. Which is no kind of invisibility at all...)
Maybe we understand the word "spoiled" differently. A quick google of "windows drivers nightmare" gets me 122,000-some hits.
(Dvorak's a hack -- he's a sort of professionally-paid troll, with wannabe authoritarian leanings that make him consistently favor the usual industry juggernauts. His prognostications are almost all in a class with "There's no evidence that anyone wants to use these things" -- which is a paraphrase of his original reaction to a mouse.)
Asking us whether we're "wary" of doing something isn't the whole story.
I'd say I'm "wary" of giving a clerk personal information in a store checkout line -- but in order to get an occasional break on dog food, I've given a local store some address info. (Hey, she's a Newfie, she eats her share of food.) Lots of retail stores are collecting this type of information now, as part of their loyalty card programs partly.
If Web sites are vulnerable and could have their database compromised, so is the pet store. I take the risk because of the convenience and savings.
I'm wary that the sky might fall one day, but I'll still go outside today. It's worth it.
In the UK, the usual tactics are the sounds of household accidents (plates falling onto the floor, fork/knives falling onto plates, children screaming, the TV blinking out into silence or white noise).
My cousin Johnny worked in advertizing for a while. His company had a proposal out at one point to a company that made dog snacks. The idea was to include a whole lot of doorbell sound effects in the TV spot, which would target the commercial so that anyone who had a dog would go nuts when it came on. That'd get their attention, right?
Happily, the client chose not to annoy a huge share of its potential market.
Which, leading me back to Web ads, only makes me feel a little grateful that they haven't generally used sounds. (The equivalent level of obnoxiousness might be the faux Windows dialog ads: "Your computer may be infected. Click YES to download our spyware!")
It's a step up from a storage dump for photos
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Apple Updates iPod
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Personally I'm thinking about the new 30 gig model. It's getting toward that "sweet spot" you hear so much about, and it wasn't there before at all.
I have a Sony digital camera, just an old 3.2 MP model. On my annual 2-week vacation with the kids to our CO cabin, the pictures still pile up at that file size. Sony's proprietary memory format (did I mention this was Sony?) means memory sticks are pricier than flash memory, and while I have a few I'm not really wanting to load up on them any more, especially because I'd like to switch to a Digital Rebel sometime here.
Personally I don't want to lug my laptop on vacation. That's a leash and something else to worry about packing well. The new 30 GB with a direct camera-to-iPod cable would let me dump photos without the to-laptop (and later to-home-box) deal. Along the way I could hook the little thing up to my relations' TVs and show them whatever little set of images I wanted, mostly of shots from home they haven't seen.
For me the high-res monitor seems a little much, that's mostly redundant to the camera, yep. But as a little utility added to my regular iPod, this makes a lot of sense the way Apple did it up. I have a 10 GB iPod, 3rd generation, right now, and it's not pushed for space, so I think the 30 GB model would take my books on tape (for the long drive) and music along with whatever photos I decided to keep, no problem.
So there you go. Maybe I'm the market. And I didn't consider it before, either; I'm betting the price difference was a killer for sales, at first.
This one was even posted by an AC, and still it shows up on the home page. Where is that mod option??
My God, for Americans at this point to be whining about French people's cultural bigotry is about as stark ironic as anything ever has been.
In response to an editorial that says, basically, "If only English-language works are scanned, that'll skew the world view shown in the results," and that encourages funding scanning of other languages, we get -- ta dum! -- people who didn't read the article saying those French sure are biased dorks. (And we get puerile insults. "Surrender Monkeys." That's right up there with "Freedom Fries" on the list of mature arguments, people.)
Ahem. Reading the article -- leaving alone the editorial, which I can only stumble through en Francais:
In the subsequent weeks after the editorial was published, Jeanneney has toned down his statements made in the French media,
but remains the leading proponent for mobilizing funding for the digitalization of European libraries. A Google spokesperson told BetaNews that Jeanneney's remarks were a reflection of his fundraising efforts. (That's my emphasis.)
The whole point of the guy's editorial was: if English language works are the only ones that become searchable this way, that's going to make those works more influential. He's trying to get funding to do exactly what you're talking about -- granted, not to give to Google gratis.
I love how/. readers who didn't even bother reading the story are now accusing him of cultural bigotry, though. Very edifying -- though not in the way our posters intend. It's not like the guy is, oh, a librarian who actually considers what he's saying because he's trying to provoke a response in order to get funding, or anything. Must just be jealous of America. Yeah, that's it...
Okay, fine -- but the vendors are very knowingly selling to people with this as a selling point. If you want to stop it happening, you go after them for damages, and maybe the individuals who bought the stuff.
Seems like disproportionate justice in which the "little people" are easy targets, to me, and that feels like something I'd want my elected representatives to be wary of.
You nailed that. The hallmark of any decent system of justice is its sense of proportion.
As a nation, the US is struggling with that "proportionate" part.
Think of all the ways in which we're drifting, semi-consciously, toward authoritarian responses to crime. The death penalty, "three strikes" mandatory sentencing rules that take sentencing away from judges in order for politicians to appear "tough on crime," drug sentences that put people away for disproportionate sentences compared with the punishment violent criminals get hit with. Any sense of proportion goes out the window once you've got the public responding to politicians who'll play to that. We've got plenty of/. posters who reacted to the "webcam break-in" story last week by saying "throw away the key" when they found out the guy only got 11 months in prison. Politicians eat that stuff up.
(Or take a look at Martha Stewart; it's completely freaking clear that she didn't do anything other big stock players aren't doing right now. She's being made into an example. Meanwhile Ken Lay? Connected to our President, and I don't notice him doing crime for destroying countless Enron employees' retirements through his quite extreme reckless behavior and that of his entire energy junta. That's not proportionate justice.)
Meanwhile, the corporate influence on government is simultaneously de-fanging potential civil suits against big corporations and giving them those corporate entities the ability to completely ream individuals who can't defend themselves in any real way against the money the big players can array against them.
This guy sounds like a fool -- the "I'm not hiring a lawyer" idiocy that some posters here are backing has partly gotten him into this spot. ("The person who represents himself as a lawyer has a fool for a client.") But he shouldn't be destroyed. He should be made aware that he has to think about what he's doing, and he needs to feel that message.
What needs to happen is that he gets a lawyer, Apple makes a big show of being amiable about this but also bares its teeth for a while, and everybody goes home with the usual "undisclosed settlement" -- equivalent to a month's salary for him, or something like, but never to be disclosed.
How this public letter approach is going to play will be interesting. Apple doesn't want to take bad PR, no -- so they need a way to come out of this as the Good Company.
In general NPR does provide context and detail other news sources don't bother with -- especially broadcast media. In this case, though, the FreeP did at least mention that detail. It was from 1949:
The collection of purchasers' names is allowed by a 1949 federal law called the Jenkins Act, according to Terry Stanton, spokesman for the Department of Treasury.
They didn't actually explain what the Jenkins Act did, though.
In this case the earlier back story should be there too: in August of 2002 the General Accounting Office reports on non-compliance with the Jenkins Act by internet vendors.
My question is: why is the state of Michigan going after buyers (not vendors) in restrospect rather than trying to enforce the law better? I don't find that out in the FreeP article.
This does seem like just a bush way to get revenue. Sure, they don't have jurisdiction over the vendors in other states -- but this is almost like a cop who pulled my brother over once: there was a garage sale sign obscuring a stop sign, and he was ticketing people for running the intersection. Take down the garage sale sign, bub.
BTW, what does bravery have anything to do with this?
You know, that was an offhand title... Actually I don't think the "lock 'em away, they're subhuman" response is brave at all, so maybe it was ironic. When you start talking about what would happen if someone's wife was home, that's terror, not courage.
(Incidentally, it so happened that my little sister was housesitting when we were robbed, so she stumbled into the trashed house first. Which is scary to think about.)
I totally agree that major news sources have become degrading to watch for all the fear fanning. My kids are 11. They've seen some R-rated movies, particularly where it was just language or skin that got the rating. I won't let them watch the evening news on TV, though. Too exploitive. We watch "The American Experience" instead.
But what happens when you let people choose their news, slashdot style? Do we not get a ton of "Microsoft is after world domination" items here? There's at least a serious echo chamber for scary news about the RIAA and the MPAA.
Aside: We have a local radio station, WCCO, that's only recently stopped using this fabulous "tag line" in its on-air jingle:
News you want!
People you know!
W-C-C-O!
If you knew the station, you'd know how that played. Yes, folks, it's just the news you want to hear, and it's only about the white people. They know their market.
"Shock and Awe" only really came into popular journalistic use during Gulf War II -- This Time It's Personal. Not that I'm necessarily panning your argument about the cancer coming from the industrial sites -- I'm just saying we didn't hear that term back then. Did we?
The major reason is the war crime idea of "Shock and Awe" in first place.
Aw, what's the matter? You don't get a cathartic thrill out of the idea of inflicting "shock and awe" on a massive scale, just like the 9/11 attacks inflicted it on US citizens? You think there's maybe a little moral problem with the means and ends, there, and a resulting risk of becoming the thing you're fighting against?
The lack of human reflection shown in the excited use of that New Cool Term was appalling. (As a strategy, too, it sure worked to make the Iraqi army commanders come over to our side... didn't it? And telegraphing the whole thing by talking about it in the media sure made it more effective... didn't it? Or no. Maybe not. Maybe the whole thing was one more example of the US Air Power fallacy, Vietnam B52 carpet bombing-style.)
If I am held liable for what is done with my electronic communications equipment, I should have the legal right to ensure that it is being properly used.
And let's imagine that wife catches husband doing something actually illegal because she's installed this spyware, which maybe was meant to keep an eye on her kids. Apparently this precedent would mean that a) the evidence of his wrongdoing isn't admissible in court (or at least not civil court?) because it's been collected by electronic eavesdropping; but b) she's potentially liable for his behavior on her computer, so reporting it may get her in trouble, both for the spyware and for the crimes he's committing?
This is one of those items where every post should use "IANAL" as the sig line. I hope we're all just mistaken about the basics, here.
Granted, if you need to resort to this in marriage, there is already something seriously wrong with your marriage.
People who advocate the end of "no fault" divorces because it'd help marriage (cue heavenly choir) might want to think about how whacked out situations like this are. In a world without no fault, every split would take on this logic. She caught him, they both know it -- but is the evidence admissible? Lawyers debate the evidentiary precedents... That's kind of nuts.
Bleeding heart liberals need to be victimized more often...
What a totally senseless, trolling thing to say. I could see "If you'd been victimized yourself you'd feel differently." (Personally, I have. It was really jarring, and nobody was ever caught, and I eventually got over it.)
We all know there's difference between a justice system and a revenge system, but you haven't quite gone there. Instead you're talking about potential consequences that need to be prevented.
Do you recommend that we sentence people based on the potential consequences that might result from their crimes -- if they'd happened under different circumstances? That's what you seem to be saying. ("What if the wife [if there was one] of the owner was home at the time -- alone" is particularly rich. Ooh, what if it was the daughter? What if it was a troop of Girl Scouts and he took their cookies??)
You want to be tough on crime. Tell us: what sentence do you recommend? Is this going to turn into one of those "three strikes" laws that take sentencing out of the judge's hands, or what? I want a specific recommendation. It's pretty easy to moan about sentences not being tough enough.
Slashdot Mirror
We have a passel of state Reps I'd describe as "social right wingers" who put up stuff like death penalty legislation every term. They were behind the weapons bill: it was touted as making the law fairer by not leaving it up to individual sheriffs, but really it aimed at allowing more people to carry concealed guns. The bills these folks turn out seem to have been written by 10th graders who were unfamiliar with anything but the skeleton of the issue they're talking about, and they often have unintended consequences.
So, who is this guy?
Senator Larry A. Mumper, Ohio Senate Republican.
He's listed there as primary sponsor of a couple of other bills, including one that was presented as an "academic bill of rights for higher education." This bill was partly prompted by a story about a kid who wrote a "pro-America" paper and got a bad grade from his teacher... Oops, except the kid's paper was crap; he'd written a 1-page "report" that wasn't up-to-snuff, got a bad grade, and decided it was because he was patriotic that he'd been silenced. The bill itself reads like a wolf in sheep's clothing aimed at "protecting a plurality of opinion" by remaining neutral about crap like "intelligent design." It doesn't spell out how you'd decide when a topic was "controversial" -- gee, an ambiguity that could lead to unintended consequences.
Does this sound like exactly the sort of wingnut I'm seeing in Minnesota? I mean, this is a guy who says his law "might apply to anyone who sells a lot" and "If someone buys and sells on eBay on a regular basis as a type of business, then there is a need for regulation." "As a type of business"? No ambiguity there, is there?
I'm a much bigger fanboy for robotic space exploration, and not much of an advocate of the shuttle program. (Nixon basically pimped the shuttle by exaggerating how cost effective it could be, in a spectacular example of how much government largesse the 'Publicans are capable of when the military industrial complex stands to benefit. IMHO, of course.) That doesn't keep me from sympathizing with astronauts who are, by all accounts, pretty impressive people.
Putting yourself in other people's shoes isn't a weakness.
People who loved this series were religious, they'd watch the thing over and over anyway. It's not quite on the level of The Simpsons, but expose any given fan to any three minutes of any episode, and it was "Hey, this is the one where... Oh, yeah, SHE was the Doctor's assistant then..."
(Coincidentally, I'm a little bit of a birder, and always identified with kestrels. That was the touch that put it over the top -- all your pirate kestrels, taking down a friend whose game I was overhearing in a shared apartment. Anyone who programs a kick-butt kestrel into something has my vote.)
In the case of global warming, of course, basically it's unanimous among scientists who aren't bought and paid for by the energy industry. (Even the Bush administration admits global warming is happening -- they just say we should "study" what to do about it for a few more decades.) The only holdouts are people susceptible to the industry's disinformation campaign.
So hey -- good analogy, way to go.
My 11-year olds saw at least one R-rated movie years back. "Waiting for Guffman" was rated R (thanks to the totally surreal fundie/Catholic world of the MPAA's ratings board) but I thought it was watchable for them. Tonight we've got a copy of "The Big Night" from Netflix, and it also has an R, probably for language. I have no trouble letting them see that.
The limits on games right now are advisory, and stores sell according to them basically in order to keep their reputations. That's the way I want it. The power in this situation is with the parents if they will only exercise it. That's as much as we can really hope for.
(In general I think tons of social problems in the US today come down to economic pressures that force both parents to work without giving us as much flexibility as we need to raise families. Nothing against women working, it's not a gender thing -- but kids need adults in their lives, and it's just plain a bad economic situation when there's this much pressure drawing the attention of adults away. Personally, as someone who's benefitted from it, I think flex time is a much more effective solution to a variety of social ills than most of the "scary problem!" legislation that gets suggested.)
So if I'm, say, Bush, I could have my "Swift Boat Veterans" group, or the equivalent, SPAM in a deliberately offensive way 'on behalf of' John Kerry.
That's basically what Nixon used CREEP to do with paper materials: he had fake campaign literature to hand out at Muskie rallies, distorting Muskie's actual positions. (It's also what Karl Rove did in college; he describes that now as a "youthful indiscretion.")
Near as I can tell, though, SPAM isn't the issue. The abuse we've seen like this has been equivalent to the Swift Boat Vets' efforts -- like the Bob Jones University e-mails implying that John McCain had fathered a mixed-race child out of wedlock during the 2000 primaries. That kind of poison you want to target to a receptive audience, not SPAM to the world. So, back to building address lists...
On the way home we had a Continental Airlines crew from New Jersey. They were almost unbelievably rude by comparison. Sitting amongst various French tourists, I felt embarrassed.
This is an extremely useful question to actually ask a socially conservative person. They have essentially no answer to it. They don't know what they're wanting to return to; they just know that they're scared of where they think we're going. They can list things they like -- respect for authority and so on -- but try getting them to commit to a historical period when they'd have been happier, and they become furtive and suddenly rather relativistic themselves.
For example: people who pine for "the way schools used to be" often have not a single clue about when they think that "used to be" was. Do they want to go back to 1950, before integration had happened? Oh, no, they won't commit to that. Would they like to go back to the era when the SAT was basically only taken by upper-class white males, to keep scores up? They don't really know. What they know is that the liberals are destroying our colleges, etc. etc.
This talk of traditional values is all about people maintaining their position of power and control over others.
Specifically about using the fear of change to keep people from questioning their power's legitimacy.
The previews we see in theaters are more like the older, projection-based techniques -- in that studios "project" what they actually wanted onto every movie's trailer. We see a preview about the movie the studio execs paid to make, not about the movie that got made -- and we can't see much of the actual movie at all, so it may as well not exist.
(And what audiences apparently ask for is to see the entire stupid movie, including every turn of the plot, in the preview. Which is no kind of invisibility at all...)
(Dvorak's a hack -- he's a sort of professionally-paid troll, with wannabe authoritarian leanings that make him consistently favor the usual industry juggernauts. His prognostications are almost all in a class with "There's no evidence that anyone wants to use these things" -- which is a paraphrase of his original reaction to a mouse.)
I'd say I'm "wary" of giving a clerk personal information in a store checkout line -- but in order to get an occasional break on dog food, I've given a local store some address info. (Hey, she's a Newfie, she eats her share of food.) Lots of retail stores are collecting this type of information now, as part of their loyalty card programs partly.
If Web sites are vulnerable and could have their database compromised, so is the pet store. I take the risk because of the convenience and savings.
I'm wary that the sky might fall one day, but I'll still go outside today. It's worth it.
My cousin Johnny worked in advertizing for a while. His company had a proposal out at one point to a company that made dog snacks. The idea was to include a whole lot of doorbell sound effects in the TV spot, which would target the commercial so that anyone who had a dog would go nuts when it came on. That'd get their attention, right?
Happily, the client chose not to annoy a huge share of its potential market.
Which, leading me back to Web ads, only makes me feel a little grateful that they haven't generally used sounds. (The equivalent level of obnoxiousness might be the faux Windows dialog ads: "Your computer may be infected. Click YES to download our spyware!")
I have a Sony digital camera, just an old 3.2 MP model. On my annual 2-week vacation with the kids to our CO cabin, the pictures still pile up at that file size. Sony's proprietary memory format (did I mention this was Sony?) means memory sticks are pricier than flash memory, and while I have a few I'm not really wanting to load up on them any more, especially because I'd like to switch to a Digital Rebel sometime here.
Personally I don't want to lug my laptop on vacation. That's a leash and something else to worry about packing well. The new 30 GB with a direct camera-to-iPod cable would let me dump photos without the to-laptop (and later to-home-box) deal. Along the way I could hook the little thing up to my relations' TVs and show them whatever little set of images I wanted, mostly of shots from home they haven't seen.
For me the high-res monitor seems a little much, that's mostly redundant to the camera, yep. But as a little utility added to my regular iPod, this makes a lot of sense the way Apple did it up. I have a 10 GB iPod, 3rd generation, right now, and it's not pushed for space, so I think the 30 GB model would take my books on tape (for the long drive) and music along with whatever photos I decided to keep, no problem.
So there you go. Maybe I'm the market. And I didn't consider it before, either; I'm betting the price difference was a killer for sales, at first.
My God, for Americans at this point to be whining about French people's cultural bigotry is about as stark ironic as anything ever has been.
In response to an editorial that says, basically, "If only English-language works are scanned, that'll skew the world view shown in the results," and that encourages funding scanning of other languages, we get -- ta dum! -- people who didn't read the article saying those French sure are biased dorks. (And we get puerile insults. "Surrender Monkeys." That's right up there with "Freedom Fries" on the list of mature arguments, people.)
The whole point of the guy's editorial was: if English language works are the only ones that become searchable this way, that's going to make those works more influential. He's trying to get funding to do exactly what you're talking about -- granted, not to give to Google gratis.
I love how /. readers who didn't even bother reading the story are now accusing him of cultural bigotry, though. Very edifying -- though not in the way our posters intend. It's not like the guy is, oh, a librarian who actually considers what he's saying because he's trying to provoke a response in order to get funding, or anything. Must just be jealous of America. Yeah, that's it...
Seems like disproportionate justice in which the "little people" are easy targets, to me, and that feels like something I'd want my elected representatives to be wary of.
As a nation, the US is struggling with that "proportionate" part.
Think of all the ways in which we're drifting, semi-consciously, toward authoritarian responses to crime. The death penalty, "three strikes" mandatory sentencing rules that take sentencing away from judges in order for politicians to appear "tough on crime," drug sentences that put people away for disproportionate sentences compared with the punishment violent criminals get hit with. Any sense of proportion goes out the window once you've got the public responding to politicians who'll play to that. We've got plenty of /. posters who reacted to the "webcam break-in" story last week by saying "throw away the key" when they found out the guy only got 11 months in prison. Politicians eat that stuff up.
(Or take a look at Martha Stewart; it's completely freaking clear that she didn't do anything other big stock players aren't doing right now. She's being made into an example. Meanwhile Ken Lay? Connected to our President, and I don't notice him doing crime for destroying countless Enron employees' retirements through his quite extreme reckless behavior and that of his entire energy junta. That's not proportionate justice.)
Meanwhile, the corporate influence on government is simultaneously de-fanging potential civil suits against big corporations and giving them those corporate entities the ability to completely ream individuals who can't defend themselves in any real way against the money the big players can array against them.
This guy sounds like a fool -- the "I'm not hiring a lawyer" idiocy that some posters here are backing has partly gotten him into this spot. ("The person who represents himself as a lawyer has a fool for a client.") But he shouldn't be destroyed. He should be made aware that he has to think about what he's doing, and he needs to feel that message.
What needs to happen is that he gets a lawyer, Apple makes a big show of being amiable about this but also bares its teeth for a while, and everybody goes home with the usual "undisclosed settlement" -- equivalent to a month's salary for him, or something like, but never to be disclosed.
How this public letter approach is going to play will be interesting. Apple doesn't want to take bad PR, no -- so they need a way to come out of this as the Good Company.
They didn't actually explain what the Jenkins Act did, though.
In this case the earlier back story should be there too: in August of 2002 the General Accounting Office reports on non-compliance with the Jenkins Act by internet vendors.
My question is: why is the state of Michigan going after buyers (not vendors) in restrospect rather than trying to enforce the law better? I don't find that out in the FreeP article.
This does seem like just a bush way to get revenue. Sure, they don't have jurisdiction over the vendors in other states -- but this is almost like a cop who pulled my brother over once: there was a garage sale sign obscuring a stop sign, and he was ticketing people for running the intersection. Take down the garage sale sign, bub.
You know, that was an offhand title... Actually I don't think the "lock 'em away, they're subhuman" response is brave at all, so maybe it was ironic. When you start talking about what would happen if someone's wife was home, that's terror, not courage.
(Incidentally, it so happened that my little sister was housesitting when we were robbed, so she stumbled into the trashed house first. Which is scary to think about.)
Maybe you should have told him you were going to do it ahead of time, like "Shock and Awe."
I totally agree that major news sources have become degrading to watch for all the fear fanning. My kids are 11. They've seen some R-rated movies, particularly where it was just language or skin that got the rating. I won't let them watch the evening news on TV, though. Too exploitive. We watch "The American Experience" instead.
But what happens when you let people choose their news, slashdot style? Do we not get a ton of "Microsoft is after world domination" items here? There's at least a serious echo chamber for scary news about the RIAA and the MPAA.
Aside: We have a local radio station, WCCO, that's only recently stopped using this fabulous "tag line" in its on-air jingle:
If you knew the station, you'd know how that played. Yes, folks, it's just the news you want to hear, and it's only about the white people. They know their market.
The major reason is the war crime idea of "Shock and Awe" in first place.
Aw, what's the matter? You don't get a cathartic thrill out of the idea of inflicting "shock and awe" on a massive scale, just like the 9/11 attacks inflicted it on US citizens? You think there's maybe a little moral problem with the means and ends, there, and a resulting risk of becoming the thing you're fighting against?
The lack of human reflection shown in the excited use of that New Cool Term was appalling. (As a strategy, too, it sure worked to make the Iraqi army commanders come over to our side... didn't it? And telegraphing the whole thing by talking about it in the media sure made it more effective... didn't it? Or no. Maybe not. Maybe the whole thing was one more example of the US Air Power fallacy, Vietnam B52 carpet bombing-style.)
And let's imagine that wife catches husband doing something actually illegal because she's installed this spyware, which maybe was meant to keep an eye on her kids. Apparently this precedent would mean that a) the evidence of his wrongdoing isn't admissible in court (or at least not civil court?) because it's been collected by electronic eavesdropping; but b) she's potentially liable for his behavior on her computer, so reporting it may get her in trouble, both for the spyware and for the crimes he's committing?
This is one of those items where every post should use "IANAL" as the sig line. I hope we're all just mistaken about the basics, here.
Granted, if you need to resort to this in marriage, there is already something seriously wrong with your marriage.
People who advocate the end of "no fault" divorces because it'd help marriage (cue heavenly choir) might want to think about how whacked out situations like this are. In a world without no fault, every split would take on this logic. She caught him, they both know it -- but is the evidence admissible? Lawyers debate the evidentiary precedents... That's kind of nuts.
What a totally senseless, trolling thing to say. I could see "If you'd been victimized yourself you'd feel differently." (Personally, I have. It was really jarring, and nobody was ever caught, and I eventually got over it.)
We all know there's difference between a justice system and a revenge system, but you haven't quite gone there. Instead you're talking about potential consequences that need to be prevented.
Do you recommend that we sentence people based on the potential consequences that might result from their crimes -- if they'd happened under different circumstances? That's what you seem to be saying. ("What if the wife [if there was one] of the owner was home at the time -- alone" is particularly rich. Ooh, what if it was the daughter? What if it was a troop of Girl Scouts and he took their cookies??)
You want to be tough on crime. Tell us: what sentence do you recommend? Is this going to turn into one of those "three strikes" laws that take sentencing out of the judge's hands, or what? I want a specific recommendation. It's pretty easy to moan about sentences not being tough enough.