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User: fugu13

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  1. Re:Considering that it took them 17 years to ... on 10th Anniversary Of Supreme Court's Daubert Ruling · · Score: 2, Informative

    Actually, no. The court was very specific in Lawrence v Texas that "[t]he liberty protected by the Constitution allows homosexual couples the right to choose to enter upon relationships in the confines of their homes and their own private lives and still retain their dignity as free persons." That is reiterated over and over in the decision. To boil it down, they said that it hasn't been legal to restrict heterosexual people from doing it for a while ( since Griswold v Connecticut ), and that homosexual couples enjoyed the same protection (under the due process clause). What you stated would be consistent with O'Connor's concurring opinion, which was based on equal protection, but not with the majority opinion of the court, which argued (as noted above) based on due process.

  2. Re:is it really still a rip off on CD Price-Fixing Suit Ruling · · Score: 1

    Accepting micropayments is mainly what I was thinking of. Other costs include the general overhead of managing a more complex and much larger inventory.

  3. Re:is it really still a rip off on CD Price-Fixing Suit Ruling · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Not quite. A large part of the single song price is convenience-- it increases apple's costs significantly to offer single songs. If you want to buy an album through the iTMS, you'll pay (for almost all albums) approx. $10.

  4. Re:And it continues...As the Apple turns. on Lessig And RIAA Answer NewsHour Questions · · Score: 1

    I bet this has already been corrected by the time I post, but suffice it say that music downloaded from the iTMS can be burnt to CD.

  5. Re:Dissolve Clearchannel on More on Media Consolidation · · Score: 1

    This is one argument from the efficiency of market economics that's false. It's one of the few ways in which free market economies produce undesirable results. Essentially, what matters isn't just the quality of product (that is, just the demand for the product), but the ease of producing the product (think intersection of supply and demand curves). A product that is in high demand, but expensive to produce, will not be produced much compared to a product that is in less demand, but is much cheaper to produce. In an unlimited market this effect doesn't matter so much, because it's still possible to find those desirable but expensive to produce products, though the market is mostly filled by the slightly less desirable much easier to produce products. That there is any demand for a product (at a price greater than the cost to produce it) will cause there to be a supply. However, radio is not an unlimited market. Radio is a very limited market (for multiple products), and the products that win out are the somewhat desirable, easy to produce ones (the clear channel stations). The radio waves are a wonderful example of a public resource that must be managed to some extent for the public good to be maximized (market economics won't create the worst situation, but it won't maximize public good). Now, this is hardly the be-all end-all argument that can be made, and there is in particular a very good argument that can be made saying that the social good from used resources is maximized across markets in a market economy. I disagree with this argument, because I think lack of a perfect conversion between resources (or any conversion, in the case of radio frequencies) means that the limiting factor for market growth is the available public resource (in this case radio frequencies), not the effects of the market economy, but this is far from proven.

  6. Re:Small shops? on Dan Bricklin: Democratizing the Web · · Score: 1, Insightful

    The second sentence is the rough spot. You may be able to use Frontpage or Dreamweaver to create a home page that looks nice, attracts customers, is easy to use, etc, but I would hazard to say that most small business owners aren't.

    Even fewer are able to create a homepage that loads quickly, ranks well in search engines, displays on a number of devices (cell phones . . .), is easily expandable, is well commented (so anyone who knows basic html can immediately jump in and start maintaining it), and works smoothly across browsers (especially using FrontPage!).

    Yet for online stores, these things are almost all crucial to keeping sales up! There are so many places online to buy things, if a store's homepage doesn't raise itself above the flock, it's not getting many sales.

    A competent web designer, building a page on the scale you seem to be indicating (online shopping), will likely charge at least $700-1000. That's several times what you had been estimating for first year startup costs.

    However, in the long run, time saved (the web site should be quick and easy to update, and not need it very often except for news and new products), bandwidth saved (often there will be hundreds of k difference between an amateur designed web page and a page the looks exactly the same done by an experienced web designer), and smooth experience for the shoppers (leading to extra sales), hiring a competent web designer from the start will likely make a small business money.

  7. This makes me think on Blackboard Campus IDs: Security Thru Cease & Desist · · Score: 0

    This side discussion on police states made me wonder, is it illegal to distribute this information to the government? IANAL, but perhaps the DMCA (or whatever laws were applicable in this case) doesn't prevent distribution to the government, particularly parts of it with the power to investigate the company. If thats the case, I'd recommend a simple course of action whenever a company prevents disclosure of a security vulnerability: send copies of the writeup, with a nice cover letter requesting an investigation, to all appropriate places, such as state legislatures, state AG offices, city councils, any official related to where the company does business that might possibly be able to investigate.

  8. Slashdot spelling... on All-New PowerBooks, Web Browser Featured at Macworld · · Score: 0

    Its w00t, not w00p. Get it right.




    And to be clear, I was actually quite impressed with the diction shown in this story. Who are you and what have you done with the editors?

  9. Theater says no. on Will CGI Collapse the Hollywood Economy? · · Score: 0

    Movies never managed to replace theater, or even come close. They did change the market, and the customer bases shifted, sometimes signicantly, but Broadway is still a big part of American culture.

    I do think we will see movies becoming cheaper, but actors are not just placeholders. An animation will always retain some of its animatronic qualities unless its movements are being mapped from someone real anyways, and that means hiring an actor.

    Another large cost of a movie is shooting on location. All who saw The FOTR can vouch that real scenery is still damn impressive, and I would guess unlikely to be replaced completely. After all, while one can add details to digital scenes (IE the recent Star Wars movies), those details tend to look repetitive. I really enjoyed Star Wars' digital scenery, but it had an artificial look, and it only worked for me because Star Wars is at heart a fantasy, a somewhat whimsical one in fact. And I doubt there are many movies that had more time and money spent on them.

    And of course, time is one of the biggest issues. If you want a complex and non-artificial looking scene, you need to create hundreds, or even thousands of elements uniquely for every scene. That takes time, and time is money (or so I have been told).