In this particular case there are repercussions which cannot be righted in a court of law. If you are harassed or blackballed as a result of some particular belief you privately hold or some personal practice of yours then perhaps you can sue the person who started the whole mess but that won't fix the problem.
Look at OJ Simpson. The court cleared him, but what is public opinion of him? Would suing anyone help him now? Does it matter whether he did it or not? The stigma, the bad press will always follow him, no matter the court's decision. If you're given such bad press, nevermind for what, you'll be followed by the same unshakeable curse.
Try clearing your credit after a case of identity theft and then tell me how convicting the criminal made all the problems go away.
Your example happened in Germany recently. They're charging a tax on PC's to cover the cost of piracy. So anyone who buys a PC for any purpose gets charged for copying music.
They are pre-emptively assessing fines against all computer users.
Your argument definitely has some merit. Learning languages, particularly unrelated ones is a sort of mental calisthenics which really should be encouraged. I've got some German classes behind me, not fluent by any means and closely related to English but I do know how it slips in here and there. Taking lecture notes sometimes it's a matter of which language has the smaller word for a given concept as to which language winds up in my notes.
I'm not sure all the same arguments exist for a dead or soon to be dead language as for a living one. If there's no one to speak it with, then how much do you get to practice it? Knowing that perfect word for something that doesn't work well in your native tongue is helpful but mostly in a purist academic sense.
The chosen example was perhaps bad but only because it was so specific as to trigger your sensibility-filters.
The point was only to ask whether it is worthwhile to preserve the language of a culture who has left us either no heritage or no heritage we want to preserve and so lacks any relevance to us.
Nitpicking about whether that language is Swahili or those people were cannibals or where the lived is worthlessly tangential.
All the teachers I know would like to be able to fail kids and have it do some good but the administration doesn't agree.
At least here in California the prevailing theory is that kids belong in a class of their peers with kids close to their own age. What this means is that you can give all the F grades you want and in 2 years they'll be moved on anyway if they don't pass, maybe to a remedial class, maybe not.
This carries over to kids with serious disabilities as well. We're "mainstreaming" everyone so that in an "ideal" class setting the teacher has to deal with the smart kid asking uncomfortable questions about God, the jackass jumping around on top of his desk and the changing the diapers of the kid in the wheelchair who doesn't understand any of it.
At the same time we're "clustering" which means we group kids according to ability, interest and sometimes even handicap. What this means is that, far from the ideal, we're giving teachers a group of problem kids whose parents don't give a damn, handicapped kids who need special attention or smart/normal kids who can be dealt with using traditional teaching/discipline. Far from *truly* mainstreaming, we're just tracking the kids but call it mainstreaming because we're not giving them "special" teachers. We just expect that any given education major can graduate and be prepared to change diapers and mop up drool in the classroom.
Parents don't get to "sign off" as soon as the kids are school age. If you want that, send them to prep school somewhere. Our schools are a nightmare and the teachers haven't gotten worse, the kids have because parents are out working to get by instead of being home with kids teaching them basic civics. We complain that we don't want the teacher teaching the kids values because those belong in the home and then we neglect to teach kids values and complain that the teachers aren't doing anything to "fix" our kids.
Whoa, Reason #1 has some serious weaknesses to it. Do you automatically assume that all households should be dual income on the basis of married parents? Or that marriage makes you a viable parent? Obviously it is more legally binding but it would be assuming the worst of unmarried fathers to make the automatic decision that unmarried mothers are inevitably poor and that child support is not forthcoming.
Personally the trend to insist on all households being dual income sickens me. I really believe that children benefit more from having a stay at home parent than they do from having money. Likewise the American view of extended family is somewhat odd as well, implying that sisters, brothers, uncles, aunts, etc. are all autonomous entitities who visit and give you presents sometimes, denying the possibility of being functioning, contributing members of a single household.
I know single mothers who are making it and I know those who aren't making it. In all it is easier to survive with a contributing partner but it isn't vital and married or unmarried doesn't automatically imply any level of financial support.
What the hell is anti-Semitic about "Arbeit Macht Frei"? There's nothing Semitic or Anti about it. That's the same as implying that voting is racist because it was once used by a racist instituition.
Turn down the sensitivity knob a little and get back down to the reality the rest of us know and love.
Why do you people keep insisting that it's okay for an incumbent company to kill the employees of incoming challengers in its market?
Full deregulation *only* benefits incumbent players and cannot possibly solve any problems that exist in the system now. If we restarted everyone from zero and let them compete freely that *might* have the effect you think it would have now. That means what? Well, it means sell *all* of the lines and equipment to the government, liquidate all of the assets of all the phone companies, lay off all of the workers and knockdown the buildings that house the telecom equipment. Then we let anyone who wants to start a telecom build their own buildings, buy/build their equipment and lines and run the company as they see fit.
De-regulating businesses incumbent in an industry means only bad things for competition and for consumers.
I worked for a company who was "incorporated" in Delaware but to the best of my knowledge had no operations in the state. I assume it was for this kind of purpose.
The weirdest thing has been happening to me in ICQ lately, I get the typical "I'm hot for you" spam, but they don't follow up with an URL, email addy, snail mail addy or anything else that would normally be advertised, just this random message. Is there some angle I'm not seeing as to how they're advertising? So far it's just entertaining to get these funky one-liners from nobody in particular with no ad attached.
Re:They've made a mistake.
on
AOL Patents IM
·
· Score: 1
That's really what I got out of it. ICQ will be around forever, even if it's permanently on the back burner. Microsoft pretty much can't be challenged in court, as we've well noted. The ones they're after will be Jabber or anyone else making a free IM system or client.
Maybe we should lobby the EFF or some other organization with some cajones to sue them for anti-competitive practices in the IM arena. While a patent isn't typically an illegal form of anti-competitive practice in this case it's intentionally over-broad.
Has nobody in corporate America heard the phrase "You don't shit where you eat"? They will screw their own company, co-workers, employees and such, risk going to jail and paying fines in the millions because they want to feel extra special important and make some fraction of their insane income *more* in self-awarded bonuses?
Publicly Nintendo has said previously that they have nothing against "mature" games but that they themselves have not made any. In light of that, this seems to be a statement that Nintendo won't put out any in the future, not that their platform won't be the target of any such development.
The story as posted seems to frame it as "The Gamecube will never have a mature game on it." which is already untrue. Look at Resident Evil or BMX XXX.
We just in the past couple of months switched from AT&T cable to Pacbell DSL which within a month was saying we had to fill out their forms re: Yahoo and this wasn't such an issue. What bothers me is I've already done the Yahoo thing and they're still sending mail to our house advertising this crap.
Worse yet, we just recently had our router up and die and I didn't have the password handy so I called their tech support. Part of the reason we switched to the DSL service was because they were "router friendly" and would let my household all connect without freaking out and wanting $10/head or what-have-you. In this latest call I asked the guy what the password was, mentioned that it was so I could put the data into the new router. As soon as I said the word "router" he told us flatly "we don't support routers, you'll have to talk to your router manufacturer". A previous tech support guy had even suggested what brand of router to buy and now *this* guy stonewalls a question about account information because I said the word "router".
If they change policy's they could at least be courteous about it. Better yet their "free self nistall" cost $500 for "line checks". Now we forfeit $500 if we want to back out and sign up with someone who won't pull this crap.
Let the people who want the bandwidth buy it. Simple answer, drop the restrictions that keep me from buying some lines and setting up a broadband provider to compete with the local telco which isn't getting the job done.
Anyone know how that case in Virginia is working out with the municipality which set up their own broadband and are getting sued by the telco to shut it down and wait patiently for them to get around to making a similar offering?
I'm in the SF Bay area and the most interesting thing in regards to ads is that the Animal Planet channel cuts out an hour earlier than it's program listings for the cable company to run an infomercial. I've been trying to figure if Animal Planet is getting screwed out of an hour of their broadcast time or if there's something else at work.
My most frustrating experience with support was submitting a bug report and having the developers tell me that the bug simply didn't exist.
Specifically I was dealing with MoodLogic (not OSS but useful) support. I unchecked the box that says "change all by artist" and it went ahead and changed all by that artist anyway. When I wrote in, support intentionally misunderstood and told me not to check the box as, obviously I must have done because there was no bug.
I wrote back in excrutiating detail how I understood the difference between a checked radio button and an unchecked radio button, explained precisely which songs I was attempting to fix and what the fix should have been. I then explained precisely the order in which I hit the buttons with which mouse button, and what state the checkbox was in at the time.
The reply again assumed I was an idiot and told me to uncheck the box because there was no bug.
Frustrating as hell to know what you're doing and deal with people who don't believe that you do.
My mom's still trying to convince AOL's billing department to leave her the hell alone. She had an account some 2 years ago but cancelled when she got a real ISP. All the paperwork was done, etc. and she went about her merry way.
In the last couple of months she took a closer look at her card statements and AOL is *still* billing her despite complete inactivity on her account and the fact that she cancelled the service 2 years ago. They want to deny the whole incident and keep the money, she wants a refund for every month they billed her since the account was cancelled. One would think a month over would be almost reasonable but to maintain a cancelled account with zero activity for 2 years and expect to get paid is just nuts.
As I recall, the modchips aren't 100% devoted to pirating. Some of them defeat region controls similar to DVD in order that people can play games from other regions i.e. that Japan-only release of Final Fantasy 5 that won't play on an unmodified US console. ( No, I don't know for a fact that FF5 in particular couldn't play on a US console, but off the top of my head it was the first game I thought of that wasn't released in the US.)
Price fixing and captive audiences are not cool by me and I would definitely be less judgemental about the modchips because they aren't just a pirating tool.
I can't wait for the follow-up contention from the foaming-at-the-mouth variety of feminist who's going to come screaming about how all of academia, biology and medicine has been so male dominated from the beginning of time as to invalidate any and all assumptions or observations of gender issues.
Bottom line is that we're going on what we know and when you can prove differently with a robust argument not based on simple denial of all pre-existing data is when I will change my view of the situation. Maybe everything we know is based on how it is and not on how it should be, but we can hardly be blamed for that can we?
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In this particular case there are repercussions which cannot be righted in a court of law. If you are harassed or blackballed as a result of some particular belief you privately hold or some personal practice of yours then perhaps you can sue the person who started the whole mess but that won't fix the problem.
Look at OJ Simpson. The court cleared him, but what is public opinion of him? Would suing anyone help him now? Does it matter whether he did it or not? The stigma, the bad press will always follow him, no matter the court's decision. If you're given such bad press, nevermind for what, you'll be followed by the same unshakeable curse.
Try clearing your credit after a case of identity theft and then tell me how convicting the criminal made all the problems go away.
Your example happened in Germany recently. They're charging a tax on PC's to cover the cost of piracy. So anyone who buys a PC for any purpose gets charged for copying music.
They are pre-emptively assessing fines against all computer users.
I thought the French were still on the gold standard, though I may be mistaken. They bought up a bunch of gold a while back just for that purpose.
Your argument definitely has some merit. Learning languages, particularly unrelated ones is a sort of mental calisthenics which really should be encouraged. I've got some German classes behind me, not fluent by any means and closely related to English but I do know how it slips in here and there. Taking lecture notes sometimes it's a matter of which language has the smaller word for a given concept as to which language winds up in my notes.
I'm not sure all the same arguments exist for a dead or soon to be dead language as for a living one. If there's no one to speak it with, then how much do you get to practice it? Knowing that perfect word for something that doesn't work well in your native tongue is helpful but mostly in a purist academic sense.
The chosen example was perhaps bad but only because it was so specific as to trigger your sensibility-filters. The point was only to ask whether it is worthwhile to preserve the language of a culture who has left us either no heritage or no heritage we want to preserve and so lacks any relevance to us. Nitpicking about whether that language is Swahili or those people were cannibals or where the lived is worthlessly tangential.
All the teachers I know would like to be able to fail kids and have it do some good but the administration doesn't agree.
At least here in California the prevailing theory is that kids belong in a class of their peers with kids close to their own age. What this means is that you can give all the F grades you want and in 2 years they'll be moved on anyway if they don't pass, maybe to a remedial class, maybe not.
This carries over to kids with serious disabilities as well. We're "mainstreaming" everyone so that in an "ideal" class setting the teacher has to deal with the smart kid asking uncomfortable questions about God, the jackass jumping around on top of his desk and the changing the diapers of the kid in the wheelchair who doesn't understand any of it.
At the same time we're "clustering" which means we group kids according to ability, interest and sometimes even handicap. What this means is that, far from the ideal, we're giving teachers a group of problem kids whose parents don't give a damn, handicapped kids who need special attention or smart/normal kids who can be dealt with using traditional teaching/discipline. Far from *truly* mainstreaming, we're just tracking the kids but call it mainstreaming because we're not giving them "special" teachers. We just expect that any given education major can graduate and be prepared to change diapers and mop up drool in the classroom.
Parents don't get to "sign off" as soon as the kids are school age. If you want that, send them to prep school somewhere. Our schools are a nightmare and the teachers haven't gotten worse, the kids have because parents are out working to get by instead of being home with kids teaching them basic civics. We complain that we don't want the teacher teaching the kids values because those belong in the home and then we neglect to teach kids values and complain that the teachers aren't doing anything to "fix" our kids.
Freenet's a beautiful thing but the encryption and such bring everything to a crawl, i.e. Cable connection->28.8k.
It's probably worth pouring some volunteer effort into improving though.
Whoa, Reason #1 has some serious weaknesses to it. Do you automatically assume that all households should be dual income on the basis of married parents? Or that marriage makes you a viable parent? Obviously it is more legally binding but it would be assuming the worst of unmarried fathers to make the automatic decision that unmarried mothers are inevitably poor and that child support is not forthcoming.
Personally the trend to insist on all households being dual income sickens me. I really believe that children benefit more from having a stay at home parent than they do from having money. Likewise the American view of extended family is somewhat odd as well, implying that sisters, brothers, uncles, aunts, etc. are all autonomous entitities who visit and give you presents sometimes, denying the possibility of being functioning, contributing members of a single household.
I know single mothers who are making it and I know those who aren't making it. In all it is easier to survive with a contributing partner but it isn't vital and married or unmarried doesn't automatically imply any level of financial support.
What the hell is anti-Semitic about "Arbeit Macht Frei"? There's nothing Semitic or Anti about it. That's the same as implying that voting is racist because it was once used by a racist instituition.
Turn down the sensitivity knob a little and get back down to the reality the rest of us know and love.
Why do you people keep insisting that it's okay for an incumbent company to kill the employees of incoming challengers in its market?
Full deregulation *only* benefits incumbent players and cannot possibly solve any problems that exist in the system now. If we restarted everyone from zero and let them compete freely that *might* have the effect you think it would have now. That means what? Well, it means sell *all* of the lines and equipment to the government, liquidate all of the assets of all the phone companies, lay off all of the workers and knockdown the buildings that house the telecom equipment. Then we let anyone who wants to start a telecom build their own buildings, buy/build their equipment and lines and run the company as they see fit.
De-regulating businesses incumbent in an industry means only bad things for competition and for consumers.
I worked for a company who was "incorporated" in Delaware but to the best of my knowledge had no operations in the state. I assume it was for this kind of purpose.
The weirdest thing has been happening to me in ICQ lately, I get the typical "I'm hot for you" spam, but they don't follow up with an URL, email addy, snail mail addy or anything else that would normally be advertised, just this random message. Is there some angle I'm not seeing as to how they're advertising? So far it's just entertaining to get these funky one-liners from nobody in particular with no ad attached.
That's really what I got out of it. ICQ will be around forever, even if it's permanently on the back burner. Microsoft pretty much can't be challenged in court, as we've well noted. The ones they're after will be Jabber or anyone else making a free IM system or client.
Maybe we should lobby the EFF or some other organization with some cajones to sue them for anti-competitive practices in the IM arena. While a patent isn't typically an illegal form of anti-competitive practice in this case it's intentionally over-broad.
Has nobody in corporate America heard the phrase "You don't shit where you eat"? They will screw their own company, co-workers, employees and such, risk going to jail and paying fines in the millions because they want to feel extra special important and make some fraction of their insane income *more* in self-awarded bonuses?
Publicly Nintendo has said previously that they have nothing against "mature" games but that they themselves have not made any. In light of that, this seems to be a statement that Nintendo won't put out any in the future, not that their platform won't be the target of any such development.
The story as posted seems to frame it as "The Gamecube will never have a mature game on it." which is already untrue. Look at Resident Evil or BMX XXX.
We just in the past couple of months switched from AT&T cable to Pacbell DSL which within a month was saying we had to fill out their forms re: Yahoo and this wasn't such an issue. What bothers me is I've already done the Yahoo thing and they're still sending mail to our house advertising this crap.
Worse yet, we just recently had our router up and die and I didn't have the password handy so I called their tech support. Part of the reason we switched to the DSL service was because they were "router friendly" and would let my household all connect without freaking out and wanting $10/head or what-have-you. In this latest call I asked the guy what the password was, mentioned that it was so I could put the data into the new router. As soon as I said the word "router" he told us flatly "we don't support routers, you'll have to talk to your router manufacturer". A previous tech support guy had even suggested what brand of router to buy and now *this* guy stonewalls a question about account information because I said the word "router".
If they change policy's they could at least be courteous about it. Better yet their "free self nistall" cost $500 for "line checks". Now we forfeit $500 if we want to back out and sign up with someone who won't pull this crap.
Let the people who want the bandwidth buy it. Simple answer, drop the restrictions that keep me from buying some lines and setting up a broadband provider to compete with the local telco which isn't getting the job done.
Anyone know how that case in Virginia is working out with the municipality which set up their own broadband and are getting sued by the telco to shut it down and wait patiently for them to get around to making a similar offering?
I'm in the SF Bay area and the most interesting thing in regards to ads is that the Animal Planet channel cuts out an hour earlier than it's program listings for the cable company to run an infomercial. I've been trying to figure if Animal Planet is getting screwed out of an hour of their broadcast time or if there's something else at work.
My most frustrating experience with support was submitting a bug report and having the developers tell me that the bug simply didn't exist.
Specifically I was dealing with MoodLogic (not OSS but useful) support. I unchecked the box that says "change all by artist" and it went ahead and changed all by that artist anyway. When I wrote in, support intentionally misunderstood and told me not to check the box as, obviously I must have done because there was no bug.
I wrote back in excrutiating detail how I understood the difference between a checked radio button and an unchecked radio button, explained precisely which songs I was attempting to fix and what the fix should have been. I then explained precisely the order in which I hit the buttons with which mouse button, and what state the checkbox was in at the time.
The reply again assumed I was an idiot and told me to uncheck the box because there was no bug.
Frustrating as hell to know what you're doing and deal with people who don't believe that you do.
My mom's still trying to convince AOL's billing department to leave her the hell alone. She had an account some 2 years ago but cancelled when she got a real ISP. All the paperwork was done, etc. and she went about her merry way.
In the last couple of months she took a closer look at her card statements and AOL is *still* billing her despite complete inactivity on her account and the fact that she cancelled the service 2 years ago. They want to deny the whole incident and keep the money, she wants a refund for every month they billed her since the account was cancelled. One would think a month over would be almost reasonable but to maintain a cancelled account with zero activity for 2 years and expect to get paid is just nuts.
As I recall, the modchips aren't 100% devoted to pirating. Some of them defeat region controls similar to DVD in order that people can play games from other regions i.e. that Japan-only release of Final Fantasy 5 that won't play on an unmodified US console. ( No, I don't know for a fact that FF5 in particular couldn't play on a US console, but off the top of my head it was the first game I thought of that wasn't released in the US.) Price fixing and captive audiences are not cool by me and I would definitely be less judgemental about the modchips because they aren't just a pirating tool.
Not sure voting will work these days. If any of you happen to have multi-billions to contribute to a campaign, I'm sure they'll listen to you.
I can't wait for the follow-up contention from the foaming-at-the-mouth variety of feminist who's going to come screaming about how all of academia, biology and medicine has been so male dominated from the beginning of time as to invalidate any and all assumptions or observations of gender issues.
Bottom line is that we're going on what we know and when you can prove differently with a robust argument not based on simple denial of all pre-existing data is when I will change my view of the situation. Maybe everything we know is based on how it is and not on how it should be, but we can hardly be blamed for that can we?
What is really nice about this particular quote is that it's honest. Obviously Gates screwed up with his wording for that to be the case.
Don't release code under GPL if you don't like it and don't try to restrict my freedom to choose to release under GPL as I see fit.