If a judge TRIES to take-away your right of free speech, his verdict has no meaning, and can be ignored. He has overstepped his authority because no one take away your rights. So I say - ignore the verdict and publish your story. If the judge continues down this path and still tries to take-away your inalienable right to use your own mouth to speak, then he needs to be imepached. And if he refuses to step down, then the People need to exercise their just authority, and remove him by force, and replace him with a new judge that understand he is a *servant* of the People, not a master.
So, you clearly have no understanding of the separation of powers, the role of an independent judiciary, or the structure of a parliamentary democracy then. I am guessing from your characterisation of "rights" that you are American and not from a Commonwealth country.
If a judge makes a ruling "taking away your free speech" then that is the law of the land and must be respected, no matter how much you disagree with it. It can be overturned in two ways, firstly on appeal to a superior court, and secondly, by act of parliament.
As a member of the public, your say over all of this is via the former, if you are the directly affected party and wish to invest the time and money in contesting the judgment directly, or via the latter by voting in elections every 3/4/5 years.
What you are talking about is not some heroic, patriotic act, it is mob rule. Once you disregard judicial determinations which you disagree with, you open the way for the rule of law to be replaced by a free for all in which the strongest, not the most meritorious, will likely win out. By your system, for example, Watergate would never have happened because Nixon would have gotten away with not handing over the tapes.
Another major problem with your proposal is that it undermines the key characteristic of the judiciary, which is independence. If individual judges were to live in fear of mobs like the one you propose hounding them out of office at the drop of a hat every time they made an unpopular decision, then they would naturally start to make decisions not based on what is right in a legal sense but what is likely to play well with the mob. I won't bother to list the numerous crucial legal decisions which would never have happened if this was how the judiciary actually worked.
In essence, what you propose is the opposite of freedom, because it replaces an intentionally balanced system with an unbalanced system. If your democractic entitlement to vote in elections does not give you the type of control you want over lawmaking, then it is the parliamentary, not judicial, branch which is broken and requires fixing.
I'd argue that albums where every song is solid is the exception, not the norm. In fact it's pretty rare. There are some famous albmus where everything was good, but far, far more where there are a couple of good songs at the front, a bunch of filler in the middle, then one good song at the end.
I see this sentiment quite a lot on./ - it makes me wonder where people here get their music from. I can only assume it is a mix of commercial radio and whatever happens to be on the shelf at your local corporate music outlet.
There are loads and loads of albums which are 70-100% gold. I would describe myself as a very discriminating listener (in every sense) and I have no time for singles, one-hit-wonders or anything you might call filler. Just flicking through the thirty or so albums I have on this particular computer, all of the following are more or less all quality from start to finish:
Art Brut - Bang Bang Rock'n'Roll Belle & Sebastian - Tigermilk Bob Dylan - 12 albums containing at most a handful of below-brilliant tracks The Decemberists - Castaways and Cutouts Elvis Costello - My Aim is True Interpol - Antics The Killers - Sam's Town Leonard Cohen - New Skin for the Old Ceremony Muse - Origin of Symmetry The National - Boxer Pink Floyd - 4 albums which do not contain a single track which is not exceptional Portishead - Portishead Pulp - This Is Hardcore Radiohead - OK Computer Smashing Pumpkins - Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness Spoon - Gimme Fiction The Tallest Man on Earth - Shallow Grave Tom Waits - Blood Money Tool - Lateralus
In summary - there are tonnes of great, consistent albums out there - go and find them, dammit!
Actually, the article summary is, as usual, incorrect. Specifically, it is not true that:
In Britain, libel laws don't have any presumption of innocence â" any statement made is assumed to be false unless you prove it's true.
Rather, in defamation cases in Britain (and Australia, New Zealand and AFAIK Canada) a statement is first considered in its own right to consider whether it carries any defamatory imputation. If there is no defamatory imputation, there is no libel or slander claim. However, if the Court determines that there is a defamatory imputation on the face of the statement, then it is for the maker of the statement to justify it.
Which is as it should be - if I write "Darkness404 molests goats" then unless it is true why should I not compensate you for the resulting harm to your reputation? Whereas if it is true, then I have done nothing but convey the truth of the situation to the audience. I think that many people here are confusing "free speech" with "freedom from liability for any consequences of my speech howsoever I choose to exercise it" which are two entirely different things.
Justifying the statement is not an exercise in proving its absolute truth, either. Civil cases are determined on the balance of probabilities, not 'beyond reasonable doubt' or to some degree of logical or scientific certainty.
The suggestion in the article that all of this is new and has journalists "running scared" is bogus (ahem) too. Essentially the same principles have applied for several hundred years.
Richelieu needed those 6 lines written by the hand of a person, so he could forge evidence of some crime in the handwriting of some person.
Citation needed. You are the second person to suggest this - I would be most interested to see a definitive source for this interpretation of his statement.
Nothing in the link you provide backs up your assertion - there is a statement about another person using forged handwriting, but not Richelieu himself. Otherwise, Richelieu's words seem to have a plain meaning on their face which is equally plausible, which is that he prided himself on being able to twist any honest words to amount to a crime under the law at the time.
One additional point, while Google would have the rights to its scanned copies, I don't recall it being true that they have exclusive rights to the content itself. Other companies would then be free to replicate Google's activities, making their own databases of scanned books. I may be wrong...
I'm pretty sure that the deal is that anyone else who wants to do the same would have to come to terms with the writer's guild, which may or may not be on the same terms that Google's deal is on.
To my mind a much better solution (ignoring the problems with copyright law and the question of why the guild gets to negotiate these rights in the first place) would be a public schedule of fees that anyone can pay to reproduce any of those works electronically. That way the playing field is automatically level and Google gets no special advantage.
My guess is that it will only happen AFTER Google goes through all this legal crap to drag the books back into publication...
Oh, I doubt that very much. At the moment no-one really has a big vested interest in keeping these works subject to copyright restrictions - Google will invest billions in this, and then suddenly it will have exactly that kind of interest and will wail and gnash its teeth if any attempt is made to change the way the law works.
I dunno, obtaining a private court settlement which somehow gives it a private monopoly over works to which neither it nor the other party has any rights sounds pretty damn evil to me.
I won't claim intimate detail with the status of the "orphan books", but if what I've read is accurate, these are generally books that are out-of-print and not actively managed by the publisher or author. In this case, I say Google is doing a service by bringing to light a wide body of literature that would otherwise either remain unused or even disappear. Insisting on strict enforcement of copyright law leaves everyone worse off: the authors and publishers are still not getting anything because they have abandoned the works, and those who might have actually been interested in the material remain without access to it.
But this is effectively going to be 'strict enforcement of copyright law' - only Google will have the rights to electronically reproduce these works, unless of course they generously licence them to third parties (for a fee, naturally).
A much, much better solution would be to change copyright law so that if no rights holder can be identified after reasonable efforts, a work is deemed to be out of copyright.
You are clearly ignorant of the key problem with the Google books settlement (as it currently stands), which is that Google and only Google will be given the right to reproduce orphaned works.
This should be up to whoever holds the legal rights to decide. Their rights, their decision. If the rights-holder will only allow Google to reproduce the works, then that is their decision to make.
This is the problem - no-one can be found who legitimately holds the legal rights to orphaned works, that's why they're orphaned. But instead of anyone who wants to being allowed to use them, apparently the writers' guild gets to flog them to Google.
Why did you bother to comment on it? If you don't like it - don't use it.
You are clearly ignorant of the key problem with the Google books settlement (as it currently stands), which is that Google and only Google will be given the right to reproduce orphaned works. I assume the morons tagging this "caveat emptor" are also ignorant of this.
So your glib remark should more correctly read, "if you don't like it, never have access to millions of pages of orphaned copyright works again because Google has an exclusive licence to reproduce them electronically". Which doesn't quite work as well, really, does it?
And while they called out the SWAT team for a replica gun, people shrug their shoulders at Labor Day traffic, which kills a lot more people than any shooting spree. Human beings are absolutely terrible at risk assessment.
I disagree. A person wandering around with a gun is far more likely to kill someone than any given car on the road on Labor Day. Do you want people to phone the police and alert them to the existence of generalised traffic patterns?
Just because some generalised low risk trend kills more people does not mean that it is poor risk assessment to deal actively with a localised, high risk event.
I could be mistaken, but isn't the cost of this power plant versus a nuclear power plant (which many people argue is the cheapest form of electricity to produce) over 3 times more? Additionally, due to problems with this technology being in its infancy there will undoubtedly be additional costs that were not taken into consideration.
I'm sure everyone will talk about this new "green" for of energy and expect it to be cheap, but they would shit a brick if they found out the actual costs they will be paying for electricity generated in this fashion.
Newsflash: new technologies often cost more initially, before dropping in price as they become more refined and efficiencies of scale kick in.
You can't expect an orbital solar power station with a novel transmission technology to be competitive with nuclear power (which has been refined for 50 odd years now) or coal/gas/oil (100+ years).
How cost effective was the first nuclear power plant compared to what was available at the time?
Depression when half your family just died in a car wreck and your life is in turmoil is a normal part of coping, depression all the time when nothing is particularly wrong is a disease.
Good point. Now if non-depressed people could accept that since the dawn of human society there has not yet been a point when "nothing is particularly wrong" we'd finally be getting somewhere.
approximately equivalent to Comcast announcing "we'll give everyone free MP3s" and thereby driving Itunes.com out of business
I'm sure I'm not the only person who read this and thought "that would be fantastic".
You could look at the death of Netscape (the cause of which is more debatable than you suggest) as beneficial, in that it's eventually led to the development of Firefox.
FOX News definitely isn't balanced, but it's more balanced than the "we need more government control and bigger Congress-controlled programs"-biased CNN or MSNBC or ABC or CBS. I get tired of these channels' constant pushing to give the silk-suited incompetents in D.C. even more power to run our lives. As government grows, individual liberty wanes.
Why do conservative Americans fear giving the state the 'power' to provide decent healthcare, but embrace giving the state the power to indefinitely detain and torture people who are accused of no crime?
As a non-American who generally looks down on all US television media as infotainment garbage I can assure you that if you honestly believe that Fox is "more balanced" than any of the other news networks there then you are living in a paranoid fantasy world, not reality.
At first I was tempted to reply to you but later realized it's useless replying to people who claim to know Windows but can't distinguish between a shell and a web browser.
You're right, me misreading one part of your post definitely invalidates all of my points. Nice one!
All the studies I have seen show W7 as being the same speed, or slightly faster than Vista, on the same hardware, even for gaming.
Actually, "all the studies" I have read show that Vista tends to be a tad worse for gaming, whereas Win 7 is back to parity with XP on the same hardware. Which is not bad considering all the supposedly intensive bells and whistles the UI includes.
There is no speed increase with W7, more likely you are using a newer computer.
Hey, you're right! I AM a total moron! How stupid of me!
No, wait... hang on... I installed it on the same machine which had previously been running Vista, then XP... maybe I have an actual basis for my opinion? Nah, couldn't be.
you forgot to mention that it also does a lot of things worse
Which you then fail to list?
...but requiring hardware produced in 2010s. switch the aero off and the remains will not even equal the clean nice look of windows 2000
Utter b.s., it runs perfectly well on a two year old laptop.
you probably meant most amateur computer users.
Yeah, you know, those people who buy and use a product and make it profitable and the de facto standard? Yeah them. Also me.
being hdmi is irrelevant. resetting display settings is not that annoying. moreover, most good cards come with utilities that overcome this xp bug and you switch the monitor and resolution on the fly from cards' utility
No, resetting the display settings IS annoying and, furthermore, bullshit. But that's what happens when you are using an ancient OS to run hardware that didn't even exist when it was made.
LOL. on my old 1GHz/512ram/pata hdd i have 22 seconds from ntldr to busy cursor gone. windows 7 doesn't even install on that
Funny you should mention installing, Win 7 installed in maybe half the time that XP takes for me. I don't know what you're doing at bootup but mine takes about 20-25 seconds in Win 7.
I'm well aware of mpc homecinema, I use it as my primary video player. However, the media centre in Win 7 has a nice media library built into it which is designed to look good and work well on a plasma, and to be used with a remote if you have one.
then you're probably not using windows explorer at all. and right clicking on taskbar items to bring up the applications' system menu, neither. and the start menu shutdown-confirmationless item, also
No, I am not using IE, I didn't realise I had to use it if I wanted to use Windows.
As an XP user all I can say is GO TO HELL Microsoft. I am done with your carnival sideshow of needless upgrades and pointless eye candy.
Once XP is completely dead, then I guess I'm done with Windows entirely.
I'm also a dedicated XP user. You are being unreasonable.
I have been using Windows 7 for a couple of months. Without having metrics to back up my personal experience, I find that it does everything at least as well as XP, and many things better.
Most noticeably, it has a user interface which doesn't look like it was designed in the mid 1990s. It looks and 'feels' a hell of a lot better, as well as being vastly more customizable. Maybe this doesn't matter to you, but it does to me and I would suggest to most computer users. Overall the UI in Windows 7 looks good and is very responsive.
Various other things work a lot better than they used to - for instance, my laptop has an HDMI port. This was a constant nightmare on XP, and frequently didn't work at all or did weird things like resetting my display settings for the laptop itself whenever it was connected to a TV. Windows 7 just figures out what it is plugged into and switches to the most appropriate video-out mode. Similarly, whereas switching screens under XP frequently causes issues with a video that was playing fine on one screen not transferring to another without restarting playback, in Win 7 this seems to happen seamlessly. Audio likewise is a lot simpler and easier to configure.
Unlike Vista, MS seems to have done a good job of working out when additional security is appropriate - e.g. when software wants to actually make changes to installed components or add drivers to the system, a password or fingerprint scan is required, but I am yet to be annoyed at an inappropriate time as I was in Vista.
Games seem to work just as well as they do in XP, which is a huge contrast to Vista (which came with my laptop and ran games like an absolute dog).
It starts up and shuts down a lot more quickly than XP.
The media centre (can't remember what it's called) is actually pretty good for use on a plasma TV.
However, most noticeable is that most of the time I DON'T notice that I'm using Win 7, or any particular OS - stuff just works properly without any real need for fiddling around.
So, from one XP adherent to another, I say: maybe you should give it a go. Vista was a horror from the pits of hell as far as I am concerned. MS may be a big evil lumbering corporate monster, but someone there appears to have taken the problems with Windows by the balls and actually focused on making an operating system that has the following features: modern; actually works even on modest hardware; good user experience. My experience so far indicates that they have largely succeeded.
[sigh] "Intelligence has no track record of X" is always true until the first time intelligence (specifically, in our experience, human intelligence) actually does X. We've done quite a bit of this over our history... which is one reason that you can sit here on/. typing illogical blather, I can point out the glaring flaws in your argument, and you can respond with more blather plus a side of misplaced condescension.
That's fine, but the assertion was made in TFA - "once we develop a computer of intelligence level X, it will inevitably be able to design another computer of intelligence level >X". So the burden of proof in a sense is on that (completely baseless) assertion. What you have succeeded in doing is disproving the assertion that this impossible, not supported the original assertion. Your argument is rather like that used by religions - you can't disprove it, so you must be wrong.
The point is still a good one that there is no evidence to date that a being (human, snail, computer) of a particular level of intelligence can and will design a being of superior intelligence. So although not expressed all that well I don't think that the point was "illogical blather" as you so politely put it.
..the google apps contract is fine. IAAL and i use google apps for all my stuff. i DO maintain a separate backup but everything goes on google. the bar is also fine with it.
IAAL (who isn't posting anonymously). The Google Apps contract is not fine. For example, Google expressly reserves the right to fuck with your data, and potentially to report you to the powers that be if they don't like what they find:
Google reserves the right (but shall have no obligation) to pre-screen, review, flag, filter, modify, refuse or remove any or all Content from any Service.
Whatever soothing noises Google might make about the purpose of this, what matters is the words in the contract. The words in the contract are a problem.
Google's privacy policy should also set alarm bells ringing:
We may also use personal information for auditing, research and analysis to operate and improve Google technologies and services.
They also expressly state that they will share your data when 'complying with legal processes', which could include discovery:
We may also share information with third parties in limited circumstances, including when complying with legal process, preventing fraud or imminent harm, and ensuring the security of our network and services.
You are also reliant on Google's "good faith" interpretation of its own agreement:
We have a good faith belief that access, use, preservation or disclosure of such information is reasonably necessary to (a) satisfy any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request, (b) enforce applicable Terms of Service, including investigation of potential violations thereof, (c) detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues, or (d) protect against harm to the rights, property or safety of Google, its users or the public as required or permitted by law.
Finally, Google washes its hands of protecting your information:
Unless you have agreed otherwise in writing with Google, you agree that you are responsible for protecting and enforcing those rights and that Google has no obligation to do so on your behalf.
Certainly the firm I work for would never in a million years put confidential client information of any kind on this system, nor would any of the serious firms we come up against.
Slashdot Mirror
If a judge TRIES to take-away your right of free speech, his verdict has no meaning, and can be ignored. He has overstepped his authority because no one take away your rights. So I say - ignore the verdict and publish your story. If the judge continues down this path and still tries to take-away your inalienable right to use your own mouth to speak, then he needs to be imepached. And if he refuses to step down, then the People need to exercise their just authority, and remove him by force, and replace him with a new judge that understand he is a *servant* of the People, not a master.
So, you clearly have no understanding of the separation of powers, the role of an independent judiciary, or the structure of a parliamentary democracy then. I am guessing from your characterisation of "rights" that you are American and not from a Commonwealth country.
If a judge makes a ruling "taking away your free speech" then that is the law of the land and must be respected, no matter how much you disagree with it. It can be overturned in two ways, firstly on appeal to a superior court, and secondly, by act of parliament.
As a member of the public, your say over all of this is via the former, if you are the directly affected party and wish to invest the time and money in contesting the judgment directly, or via the latter by voting in elections every 3/4/5 years.
What you are talking about is not some heroic, patriotic act, it is mob rule. Once you disregard judicial determinations which you disagree with, you open the way for the rule of law to be replaced by a free for all in which the strongest, not the most meritorious, will likely win out. By your system, for example, Watergate would never have happened because Nixon would have gotten away with not handing over the tapes.
Another major problem with your proposal is that it undermines the key characteristic of the judiciary, which is independence. If individual judges were to live in fear of mobs like the one you propose hounding them out of office at the drop of a hat every time they made an unpopular decision, then they would naturally start to make decisions not based on what is right in a legal sense but what is likely to play well with the mob. I won't bother to list the numerous crucial legal decisions which would never have happened if this was how the judiciary actually worked.
In essence, what you propose is the opposite of freedom, because it replaces an intentionally balanced system with an unbalanced system. If your democractic entitlement to vote in elections does not give you the type of control you want over lawmaking, then it is the parliamentary, not judicial, branch which is broken and requires fixing.
I'd argue that albums where every song is solid is the exception, not the norm. In fact it's pretty rare. There are some famous albmus where everything was good, but far, far more where there are a couple of good songs at the front, a bunch of filler in the middle, then one good song at the end.
I see this sentiment quite a lot on ./ - it makes me wonder where people here get their music from. I can only assume it is a mix of commercial radio and whatever happens to be on the shelf at your local corporate music outlet.
There are loads and loads of albums which are 70-100% gold. I would describe myself as a very discriminating listener (in every sense) and I have no time for singles, one-hit-wonders or anything you might call filler. Just flicking through the thirty or so albums I have on this particular computer, all of the following are more or less all quality from start to finish:
Art Brut - Bang Bang Rock'n'Roll
Belle & Sebastian - Tigermilk
Bob Dylan - 12 albums containing at most a handful of below-brilliant tracks
The Decemberists - Castaways and Cutouts
Elvis Costello - My Aim is True
Interpol - Antics
The Killers - Sam's Town
Leonard Cohen - New Skin for the Old Ceremony
Muse - Origin of Symmetry
The National - Boxer
Pink Floyd - 4 albums which do not contain a single track which is not exceptional
Portishead - Portishead
Pulp - This Is Hardcore
Radiohead - OK Computer
Smashing Pumpkins - Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
Spoon - Gimme Fiction
The Tallest Man on Earth - Shallow Grave
Tom Waits - Blood Money
Tool - Lateralus
In summary - there are tonnes of great, consistent albums out there - go and find them, dammit!
How appropriate - XKCD truly is the comic for people who don't get it.
Actually, the article summary is, as usual, incorrect. Specifically, it is not true that:
Rather, in defamation cases in Britain (and Australia, New Zealand and AFAIK Canada) a statement is first considered in its own right to consider whether it carries any defamatory imputation. If there is no defamatory imputation, there is no libel or slander claim. However, if the Court determines that there is a defamatory imputation on the face of the statement, then it is for the maker of the statement to justify it.
Which is as it should be - if I write "Darkness404 molests goats" then unless it is true why should I not compensate you for the resulting harm to your reputation? Whereas if it is true, then I have done nothing but convey the truth of the situation to the audience. I think that many people here are confusing "free speech" with "freedom from liability for any consequences of my speech howsoever I choose to exercise it" which are two entirely different things.
Justifying the statement is not an exercise in proving its absolute truth, either. Civil cases are determined on the balance of probabilities, not 'beyond reasonable doubt' or to some degree of logical or scientific certainty.
The suggestion in the article that all of this is new and has journalists "running scared" is bogus (ahem) too. Essentially the same principles have applied for several hundred years.
Richelieu needed those 6 lines written by the hand of a person, so he could forge evidence of some crime in the handwriting of some person.
Citation needed. You are the second person to suggest this - I would be most interested to see a definitive source for this interpretation of his statement.
Nothing in the link you provide backs up your assertion - there is a statement about another person using forged handwriting, but not Richelieu himself. Otherwise, Richelieu's words seem to have a plain meaning on their face which is equally plausible, which is that he prided himself on being able to twist any honest words to amount to a crime under the law at the time.
One additional point, while Google would have the rights to its scanned copies, I don't recall it being true that they have exclusive rights to the content itself. Other companies would then be free to replicate Google's activities, making their own databases of scanned books. I may be wrong...
I'm pretty sure that the deal is that anyone else who wants to do the same would have to come to terms with the writer's guild, which may or may not be on the same terms that Google's deal is on.
To my mind a much better solution (ignoring the problems with copyright law and the question of why the guild gets to negotiate these rights in the first place) would be a public schedule of fees that anyone can pay to reproduce any of those works electronically. That way the playing field is automatically level and Google gets no special advantage.
I'd love to, but when is that going to happen?
My guess is that it will only happen AFTER Google goes through all this legal crap to drag the books back into publication...
Oh, I doubt that very much. At the moment no-one really has a big vested interest in keeping these works subject to copyright restrictions - Google will invest billions in this, and then suddenly it will have exactly that kind of interest and will wail and gnash its teeth if any attempt is made to change the way the law works.
Being less evil again.
I dunno, obtaining a private court settlement which somehow gives it a private monopoly over works to which neither it nor the other party has any rights sounds pretty damn evil to me.
I won't claim intimate detail with the status of the "orphan books", but if what I've read is accurate, these are generally books that are out-of-print and not actively managed by the publisher or author. In this case, I say Google is doing a service by bringing to light a wide body of literature that would otherwise either remain unused or even disappear. Insisting on strict enforcement of copyright law leaves everyone worse off: the authors and publishers are still not getting anything because they have abandoned the works, and those who might have actually been interested in the material remain without access to it.
But this is effectively going to be 'strict enforcement of copyright law' - only Google will have the rights to electronically reproduce these works, unless of course they generously licence them to third parties (for a fee, naturally).
A much, much better solution would be to change copyright law so that if no rights holder can be identified after reasonable efforts, a work is deemed to be out of copyright.
You are clearly ignorant of the key problem with the Google books settlement (as it currently stands), which is that Google and only Google will be given the right to reproduce orphaned works.
This should be up to whoever holds the legal rights to decide. Their rights, their decision. If the rights-holder will only allow Google to reproduce the works, then that is their decision to make.
This is the problem - no-one can be found who legitimately holds the legal rights to orphaned works, that's why they're orphaned. But instead of anyone who wants to being allowed to use them, apparently the writers' guild gets to flog them to Google.
Why did they bother?
Why did you bother to comment on it? If you don't like it - don't use it.
You are clearly ignorant of the key problem with the Google books settlement (as it currently stands), which is that Google and only Google will be given the right to reproduce orphaned works. I assume the morons tagging this "caveat emptor" are also ignorant of this.
So your glib remark should more correctly read, "if you don't like it, never have access to millions of pages of orphaned copyright works again because Google has an exclusive licence to reproduce them electronically". Which doesn't quite work as well, really, does it?
And while they called out the SWAT team for a replica gun, people shrug their shoulders at Labor Day traffic, which kills a lot more people than any shooting spree. Human beings are absolutely terrible at risk assessment.
I disagree. A person wandering around with a gun is far more likely to kill someone than any given car on the road on Labor Day. Do you want people to phone the police and alert them to the existence of generalised traffic patterns?
Just because some generalised low risk trend kills more people does not mean that it is poor risk assessment to deal actively with a localised, high risk event.
I could be mistaken, but isn't the cost of this power plant versus a nuclear power plant (which many people argue is the cheapest form of electricity to produce) over 3 times more? Additionally, due to problems with this technology being in its infancy there will undoubtedly be additional costs that were not taken into consideration.
I'm sure everyone will talk about this new "green" for of energy and expect it to be cheap, but they would shit a brick if they found out the actual costs they will be paying for electricity generated in this fashion.
Newsflash: new technologies often cost more initially, before dropping in price as they become more refined and efficiencies of scale kick in.
You can't expect an orbital solar power station with a novel transmission technology to be competitive with nuclear power (which has been refined for 50 odd years now) or coal/gas/oil (100+ years).
How cost effective was the first nuclear power plant compared to what was available at the time?
Depression when half your family just died in a car wreck and your life is in turmoil is a normal part of coping, depression all the time when nothing is particularly wrong is a disease.
Good point. Now if non-depressed people could accept that since the dawn of human society there has not yet been a point when "nothing is particularly wrong" we'd finally be getting somewhere.
approximately equivalent to Comcast announcing "we'll give everyone free MP3s" and thereby driving Itunes.com out of business
I'm sure I'm not the only person who read this and thought "that would be fantastic".
You could look at the death of Netscape (the cause of which is more debatable than you suggest) as beneficial, in that it's eventually led to the development of Firefox.
FOX News definitely isn't balanced, but it's more balanced than the "we need more government control and bigger Congress-controlled programs"-biased CNN or MSNBC or ABC or CBS. I get tired of these channels' constant pushing to give the silk-suited incompetents in D.C. even more power to run our lives. As government grows, individual liberty wanes.
Why do conservative Americans fear giving the state the 'power' to provide decent healthcare, but embrace giving the state the power to indefinitely detain and torture people who are accused of no crime?
As a non-American who generally looks down on all US television media as infotainment garbage I can assure you that if you honestly believe that Fox is "more balanced" than any of the other news networks there then you are living in a paranoid fantasy world, not reality.
Has Canada gotten so messed up that they actually believe the dead have privacy rights?
Why not? Copyright doesn't expire on death so why should privacy?
(I think you're using humour to make a point but...)
Because copyright attaches to the work whereas privacy rights attach to the individual?
I can't transfer my privacy rights to you so that you can exercise them instead of me, but I can transfer my copyright in something I created.
For mysterious reasons, Sony is slugging those of us in the EU and Australia an extra US$120 for the honour of buying their console.
When you do the maths based on the prices in each area then they work out at:
US: US$299
EU: US$422
AU: US$413
Converting to local currency, it should really be costing about AU$360 in Australia (not $499, as it will) and 211 euros in Europe (not 299 euros).
Sony, you've done it again!
At first I was tempted to reply to you but later realized it's useless replying to people who claim to know Windows but can't distinguish between a shell and a web browser.
You're right, me misreading one part of your post definitely invalidates all of my points. Nice one!
All the studies I have seen show W7 as being the same speed, or slightly faster than Vista, on the same hardware, even for gaming.
Actually, "all the studies" I have read show that Vista tends to be a tad worse for gaming, whereas Win 7 is back to parity with XP on the same hardware. Which is not bad considering all the supposedly intensive bells and whistles the UI includes.
There is no speed increase with W7, more likely you are using a newer computer.
Hey, you're right! I AM a total moron! How stupid of me!
No, wait... hang on... I installed it on the same machine which had previously been running Vista, then XP... maybe I have an actual basis for my opinion? Nah, couldn't be.
you forgot to mention that it also does a lot of things worse
Which you then fail to list?
...but requiring hardware produced in 2010s. switch the aero off and the remains will not even equal the clean nice look of windows 2000
Utter b.s., it runs perfectly well on a two year old laptop.
you probably meant most amateur computer users.
Yeah, you know, those people who buy and use a product and make it profitable and the de facto standard? Yeah them. Also me.
being hdmi is irrelevant. resetting display settings is not that annoying. moreover, most good cards come with utilities that overcome this xp bug and you switch the monitor and resolution on the fly from cards' utility
No, resetting the display settings IS annoying and, furthermore, bullshit. But that's what happens when you are using an ancient OS to run hardware that didn't even exist when it was made.
LOL. on my old 1GHz/512ram/pata hdd i have 22 seconds from ntldr to busy cursor gone. windows 7 doesn't even install on that
Funny you should mention installing, Win 7 installed in maybe half the time that XP takes for me. I don't know what you're doing at bootup but mine takes about 20-25 seconds in Win 7.
so does media player classic home cinema. even better.
I'm well aware of mpc homecinema, I use it as my primary video player. However, the media centre in Win 7 has a nice media library built into it which is designed to look good and work well on a plasma, and to be used with a remote if you have one.
then you're probably not using windows explorer at all. and right clicking on taskbar items to bring up the applications' system menu, neither. and the start menu shutdown-confirmationless item, also
No, I am not using IE, I didn't realise I had to use it if I wanted to use Windows.
does this (1Gb ram, 16 Gb hdd) look modest to you ?
Yes. Yes it does. It's 2009 for Christ's sake. You can build a system with 4 gigs of ram and a 500 gig hdd for a few hundred bucks.
... at making impression to home users. in enterprise, this is just a second vista. joining a samba/nt4 domain is a pain in the ass or impossible.
Amazingly, most of the people in these enterprises you speak of are the same 'casual users' you dismissed earlier.
As an XP user all I can say is GO TO HELL Microsoft. I am done with your carnival sideshow of needless upgrades and pointless eye candy.
Once XP is completely dead, then I guess I'm done with Windows entirely.
I'm also a dedicated XP user. You are being unreasonable.
I have been using Windows 7 for a couple of months. Without having metrics to back up my personal experience, I find that it does everything at least as well as XP, and many things better.
Most noticeably, it has a user interface which doesn't look like it was designed in the mid 1990s. It looks and 'feels' a hell of a lot better, as well as being vastly more customizable. Maybe this doesn't matter to you, but it does to me and I would suggest to most computer users. Overall the UI in Windows 7 looks good and is very responsive.
Various other things work a lot better than they used to - for instance, my laptop has an HDMI port. This was a constant nightmare on XP, and frequently didn't work at all or did weird things like resetting my display settings for the laptop itself whenever it was connected to a TV. Windows 7 just figures out what it is plugged into and switches to the most appropriate video-out mode. Similarly, whereas switching screens under XP frequently causes issues with a video that was playing fine on one screen not transferring to another without restarting playback, in Win 7 this seems to happen seamlessly. Audio likewise is a lot simpler and easier to configure.
Unlike Vista, MS seems to have done a good job of working out when additional security is appropriate - e.g. when software wants to actually make changes to installed components or add drivers to the system, a password or fingerprint scan is required, but I am yet to be annoyed at an inappropriate time as I was in Vista.
Games seem to work just as well as they do in XP, which is a huge contrast to Vista (which came with my laptop and ran games like an absolute dog).
It starts up and shuts down a lot more quickly than XP.
The media centre (can't remember what it's called) is actually pretty good for use on a plasma TV.
However, most noticeable is that most of the time I DON'T notice that I'm using Win 7, or any particular OS - stuff just works properly without any real need for fiddling around.
So, from one XP adherent to another, I say: maybe you should give it a go. Vista was a horror from the pits of hell as far as I am concerned. MS may be a big evil lumbering corporate monster, but someone there appears to have taken the problems with Windows by the balls and actually focused on making an operating system that has the following features: modern; actually works even on modest hardware; good user experience. My experience so far indicates that they have largely succeeded.
[sigh] "Intelligence has no track record of X" is always true until the first time intelligence (specifically, in our experience, human intelligence) actually does X. We've done quite a bit of this over our history ... which is one reason that you can sit here on /. typing illogical blather, I can point out the glaring flaws in your argument, and you can respond with more blather plus a side of misplaced condescension.
That's fine, but the assertion was made in TFA - "once we develop a computer of intelligence level X, it will inevitably be able to design another computer of intelligence level >X". So the burden of proof in a sense is on that (completely baseless) assertion. What you have succeeded in doing is disproving the assertion that this impossible, not supported the original assertion. Your argument is rather like that used by religions - you can't disprove it, so you must be wrong.
The point is still a good one that there is no evidence to date that a being (human, snail, computer) of a particular level of intelligence can and will design a being of superior intelligence. So although not expressed all that well I don't think that the point was "illogical blather" as you so politely put it.
..the google apps contract is fine. IAAL and i use google apps for all my stuff. i DO maintain a separate backup but everything goes on google. the bar is also fine with it.
IAAL (who isn't posting anonymously). The Google Apps contract is not fine. For example, Google expressly reserves the right to fuck with your data, and potentially to report you to the powers that be if they don't like what they find:
Whatever soothing noises Google might make about the purpose of this, what matters is the words in the contract. The words in the contract are a problem.
Google's privacy policy should also set alarm bells ringing:
They also expressly state that they will share your data when 'complying with legal processes', which could include discovery:
You are also reliant on Google's "good faith" interpretation of its own agreement:
Finally, Google washes its hands of protecting your information:
Certainly the firm I work for would never in a million years put confidential client information of any kind on this system, nor would any of the serious firms we come up against.
And what exactly would LexisNexis have which would be remotely relevant to a particular client of a law firm?