You might want to think harder about that third possibility... It's entirely possible to love the people, land, and culture of the United States yet disagree with the mistakes made by the leaders of the American plutocracy.
Specifically, having read some history it's pretty hard to avoid the conclusion that Cuba under Castro was better than Cuba under the prior US-supported Batista regime. The US embargo has obviously not caused the removal of Castro (or his brother) from power, and has obviously had a negative impact on the Cuban economy and thereby has had a negative impact on the Cuban people.
Looking at it objectively, though, the Chinese stance on Tibet and Taiwan is significantly worse than the US stance on Cuba - the US just wants Cuba to be another banana republic, whereas China wants complete authoritarian control over neighboring lands.
If GP is suggesting that Americans can't criticize China because our own government has screwed up and continues to do so, my response is that the best policy is to criticize our own government when appropriate, and also to criticize the Chinese government when appropriate. I can find fault with both of them, on various issues and with varying levels of severity.
Just because I can see that China is clearly worse than the United States doesn't mean that the United States is perfect and beyond criticism. The day we can't criticize our country is the day that our country will cease to improve, and this is one of the worst things about the Chinese government - it doesn't allow internal criticism.
This is why to me the Fourth Amendment implies that there should be a legal requirement to destroy biometric information collected on anyone who doesn't meet some kind of legitimate criteria (such as being convicted of a crime of at least a certain level of seriousness.)
The only thing that's holding them back right now is that it's expensive to book someone... you have to pay everyone involved, from the arresting officer to the officers running the facility, and pay for a larger facility if you're going to process more people.
If they had more resources, they'd undoubtedly be trumping up more charges to get more data. Data is power, and who doesn't like power? The only countervailing force is the Fourth Amendment and the courts' commitment to enforcing it.
Unix systems fundamentally expect multiple programs and multiple users - and, with the help of the X server, can even manage multiple graphical applications across a network.
Windows fundamentally expects only one user, and that one user running only one application with the focus at any one time.
Until that changes MS Windows will continue to have problems with multiple applications and with scaling. At this stage MS is still struggling to produce a headless multi-user/multitasking system that can run any application across a network.
MS has had a multi-user/multitasking system that can run any application (graphical or not) across a network since 1998, with the release of NT Server 4.0, Terminal Server Edition. Windows Server 2000 (and subsequent versions) have a built-in Terminal Services component which uses the same Citrix technology to provide thin-client support. The only limitation in most cases is the hardware, and the administrator's willingness to put up with Microsoft's pain-in-the-ass licensing... which reminds me of something Princess Leia once said to Darth Vader about the downside of tightening his grip.
That warning only appears on the special anti-viral Kleenex. The idea is that you should only use it to blow your nose, rather than eating the Kleenex in an attempt to fight off a viral infection, which wouldn't work and might be harmful.
If you look at the active ingredients (Citric Acid (7.51%) and Sodium Lauryl Sulfate (2.02%)) you'll notice that the average bottle of shampoo contains the exact same active ingredients.
So basically they're telling you not to eat soap, and that there is a Federal law out there somewhere that says "don't eat soap!"
Hopefully there isn't a law that says "don't eat paste or crayons" otherwise a good percentage of preschoolers are in violation.
Digital is more energy-efficient, too... I always know when I've strayed into an analog-only area when my phone heats up and my battery starts draining at an alarming rate.
Hopefully the death of analog will inspire the carriers to finally put digital towers up in rural areas so everyone can enjoy the benefits of digital (rather than merely enjoying the benefits of not being able to call or be called!)
Pretty much all generic drugs are sold without a crazy profit margin, since there's a competitive free market in the manufacture of generics.
For brand name drugs, good business sense would dictate that they set the profit margin wherever it nets them the highest total profit - too high and not enough people will buy it, too low and they don't make as much as they could per pill, but if they get it just right they make the most money. Apparently there is enough demand for some of these drugs in the current system to make that "optimum" price level pretty high.
I think the important question to ask is "what system for developing and distributing drugs could maximize innovation and at the same time maximize everyone's access to these products?"
It's probably not the current system, and a lot of different factors are involved here - the nature of corporate-university relationships, current FDA regulations for testing (some of which are neither efficient nor safe), advertising, the influence of the corporate drive for profit on the actions of pharma companies, and the nature of the insurance industry.
Good luck getting all of that straightened out in our lifetimes...
That's just more evidence in favor of GP's argument... The Incas, Vikings, and other disappeared civilizations have all been smitten by the almighty and displeased finger of YHWH! Praise be!
The first rule of the super-secret anti-spam mailing list, which you have just broken, is that you do not talk about the super-secret anti-spam mailing list!
Stories like this only help highlight the differences between musicians and corporate leeches that exploit musicians.
If you live in a city with a local music scene, support your local independent bands, and support the independent bands that come through directly by buying CDs from them. No musician has ever attempted to extort 1.5 million from their audience. There is plenty of great content out there without having to go to the RIAA and their ilk.
You're right - Lance Ulanoff, author of TFA, doesn't seem to have a clue about what DRM-free music is like... take this quote from TFA:
Worse yet, if you sign up for a subscription, you're saying that it's okay for the music service to wipe out your music collection if you cancel.
This is what happens with DRM-crippled music services. With a DRM-free service like emusic, the music you download will live as long as your hard drive (or any other hard drive or other storage media you copy the music files onto.)
However, in civil suits, which is all the RIAA files, it's "not liable" until 51% likely. There's a much lower standard of proof for civil cases - "a preponderance of the evidence."
It's simple, really: We need a megalithic music industry because without it, the demand for cocaine would plummet. This would cause organized crime families to need to find another way to make money, which would most likely be kidnapping and harvesting organs from innocent children for sale on the black market. For goodness sake, won't somebody think of the children?!
Or better yet, they could just use a simple, inexpensive megaphone. Because everyone knows that if you just speak LOUDER and LOUDER, eventually you will reach a volume where the non-English-speaking person will finally understand you!
That reminds me of the program "microMovie" for the TRS-80. It was an animation program that let you use ASCII characters and chunky block graphics to make little movies. It was horrendously crude by today's standards, but I had hours of fun with it.
And then there was conversing with the TRS-80 version of ELIZA. "...and how does that make you feel?"
I hate to break it to you, but most fish don't screw. They do feel pain, though. And chickens definitely "give a fuck" how they live - they are widely considered to be as intelligent as mammals, with a complex social structure and capacity for learning.
Once scientists have perfected vat-grown meat, you'll be able to eat meat without concern for the ethical implications. Until then, human consumption of meat will continue to cause unnecessary harm to living, feeling animals, among whom are included chickens and fish.
Exactly! That's why I have always avoided iTunes (which has until recently based their business around DRM-encrusted tracks) yet I love emusic. Once I pay for the download, I can listen to it in my car, at work, at the gym, all with no hassle and no extra payments, and I can use it on whatever future device I may happen to buy, without worrying if some stupid DRM method is implemented on that device. Devices come and go, but the music, if it is good, should last my lifetime.
DRM is about giving a downloaded track a short, inconvenient lifetime of its own, which might be OK for a teenybopper buying a Britney Spears track for her iPod, but it really chaps my long-term-music-fan ass!
Numerous investigations have shown that "Free range" and "animal care certified" are often fraudulent terms. "Free range" animals may have never seen real sunlight, been subjected to painful debeaking, overcrowding, and disease.
Confinement and slaughter of animals is inherently cruel. It's pretty simple - if it had eyes and a brain, it probably didn't want to have its throat cut so you could be spared the inconvenience of having to order a veggie burger.
When I watch movies online from Netflix, the movies start playing after about 10 or 15 seconds. I suspect that you might have worse bandwidth from your ISP than I do, causing the app to want to get the movie downloaded before starting playing, because it doesn't think it can download it fast enough to play it without running out of video, which would be annoying.
It can go even further: an act which, as far as you can tell, is purely beneficial may end up having negative consequences. You could help an old lady across the street and she could therefore avoid getting run over, and two weeks later she might introduce two people who end up being the parents of the next EVILPERSON$. So unless you are willing to put a limit on the length of the chain of consequences you consider, you end up being unable to make any moral decisions, because any seemingly good decision could have severe negative consequences.
This is easily remedied by only considering the reasonably foreseeable consequences of your actions, which is what GP was suggesting.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting... kind of like the plot of The Producers!
You might want to think harder about that third possibility... It's entirely possible to love the people, land, and culture of the United States yet disagree with the mistakes made by the leaders of the American plutocracy.
Specifically, having read some history it's pretty hard to avoid the conclusion that Cuba under Castro was better than Cuba under the prior US-supported Batista regime. The US embargo has obviously not caused the removal of Castro (or his brother) from power, and has obviously had a negative impact on the Cuban economy and thereby has had a negative impact on the Cuban people.
Looking at it objectively, though, the Chinese stance on Tibet and Taiwan is significantly worse than the US stance on Cuba - the US just wants Cuba to be another banana republic, whereas China wants complete authoritarian control over neighboring lands.
If GP is suggesting that Americans can't criticize China because our own government has screwed up and continues to do so, my response is that the best policy is to criticize our own government when appropriate, and also to criticize the Chinese government when appropriate. I can find fault with both of them, on various issues and with varying levels of severity.
Just because I can see that China is clearly worse than the United States doesn't mean that the United States is perfect and beyond criticism. The day we can't criticize our country is the day that our country will cease to improve, and this is one of the worst things about the Chinese government - it doesn't allow internal criticism.
This is why to me the Fourth Amendment implies that there should be a legal requirement to destroy biometric information collected on anyone who doesn't meet some kind of legitimate criteria (such as being convicted of a crime of at least a certain level of seriousness.)
The only thing that's holding them back right now is that it's expensive to book someone... you have to pay everyone involved, from the arresting officer to the officers running the facility, and pay for a larger facility if you're going to process more people.
If they had more resources, they'd undoubtedly be trumping up more charges to get more data. Data is power, and who doesn't like power? The only countervailing force is the Fourth Amendment and the courts' commitment to enforcing it.
"an action that causes direct harm to another" is a tort, which is handled by civil, not criminal, law.
Do you have a hyperlink for that?
Or did you mean to say that some right-wing commentator erroneously stated that Michael Moore said that Cuba was paradise?
Small correction: members of the RIAA distribute music; members of the MPAA distribute movies.
That warning only appears on the special anti-viral Kleenex. The idea is that you should only use it to blow your nose, rather than eating the Kleenex in an attempt to fight off a viral infection, which wouldn't work and might be harmful.
If you look at the active ingredients (Citric Acid (7.51%) and Sodium Lauryl Sulfate (2.02%)) you'll notice that the average bottle of shampoo contains the exact same active ingredients.
So basically they're telling you not to eat soap, and that there is a Federal law out there somewhere that says "don't eat soap!"
Hopefully there isn't a law that says "don't eat paste or crayons" otherwise a good percentage of preschoolers are in violation.
Mmm, paste!
Digital is more energy-efficient, too... I always know when I've strayed into an analog-only area when my phone heats up and my battery starts draining at an alarming rate.
Hopefully the death of analog will inspire the carriers to finally put digital towers up in rural areas so everyone can enjoy the benefits of digital (rather than merely enjoying the benefits of not being able to call or be called!)
Pretty much all generic drugs are sold without a crazy profit margin, since there's a competitive free market in the manufacture of generics.
For brand name drugs, good business sense would dictate that they set the profit margin wherever it nets them the highest total profit - too high and not enough people will buy it, too low and they don't make as much as they could per pill, but if they get it just right they make the most money. Apparently there is enough demand for some of these drugs in the current system to make that "optimum" price level pretty high.
I think the important question to ask is "what system for developing and distributing drugs could maximize innovation and at the same time maximize everyone's access to these products?"
It's probably not the current system, and a lot of different factors are involved here - the nature of corporate-university relationships, current FDA regulations for testing (some of which are neither efficient nor safe), advertising, the influence of the corporate drive for profit on the actions of pharma companies, and the nature of the insurance industry.
Good luck getting all of that straightened out in our lifetimes...
That's just more evidence in favor of GP's argument... The Incas, Vikings, and other disappeared civilizations have all been smitten by the almighty and displeased finger of YHWH! Praise be!
/sarcasm
The first rule of the super-secret anti-spam mailing list, which you have just broken, is that you do not talk about the super-secret anti-spam mailing list!
Stories like this only help highlight the differences between musicians and corporate leeches that exploit musicians.
If you live in a city with a local music scene, support your local independent bands, and support the independent bands that come through directly by buying CDs from them. No musician has ever attempted to extort 1.5 million from their audience. There is plenty of great content out there without having to go to the RIAA and their ilk.
Mod parent underrated... that post was as redundant as RAID 0.
However, in civil suits, which is all the RIAA files, it's "not liable" until 51% likely. There's a much lower standard of proof for civil cases - "a preponderance of the evidence."
It's simple, really: We need a megalithic music industry because without it, the demand for cocaine would plummet. This would cause organized crime families to need to find another way to make money, which would most likely be kidnapping and harvesting organs from innocent children for sale on the black market. For goodness sake, won't somebody think of the children?!
Or better yet, they could just use a simple, inexpensive megaphone. Because everyone knows that if you just speak LOUDER and LOUDER, eventually you will reach a volume where the non-English-speaking person will finally understand you!
That reminds me of the program "microMovie" for the TRS-80. It was an animation program that let you use ASCII characters and chunky block graphics to make little movies. It was horrendously crude by today's standards, but I had hours of fun with it.
And then there was conversing with the TRS-80 version of ELIZA. "...and how does that make you feel?"
I hate to break it to you, but most fish don't screw. They do feel pain, though. And chickens definitely "give a fuck" how they live - they are widely considered to be as intelligent as mammals, with a complex social structure and capacity for learning.
Once scientists have perfected vat-grown meat, you'll be able to eat meat without concern for the ethical implications. Until then, human consumption of meat will continue to cause unnecessary harm to living, feeling animals, among whom are included chickens and fish.
Exactly! That's why I have always avoided iTunes (which has until recently based their business around DRM-encrusted tracks) yet I love emusic. Once I pay for the download, I can listen to it in my car, at work, at the gym, all with no hassle and no extra payments, and I can use it on whatever future device I may happen to buy, without worrying if some stupid DRM method is implemented on that device. Devices come and go, but the music, if it is good, should last my lifetime.
DRM is about giving a downloaded track a short, inconvenient lifetime of its own, which might be OK for a teenybopper buying a Britney Spears track for her iPod, but it really chaps my long-term-music-fan ass!
Numerous investigations have shown that "Free range" and "animal care certified" are often fraudulent terms. "Free range" animals may have never seen real sunlight, been subjected to painful debeaking, overcrowding, and disease.
Confinement and slaughter of animals is inherently cruel. It's pretty simple - if it had eyes and a brain, it probably didn't want to have its throat cut so you could be spared the inconvenience of having to order a veggie burger.
I believe this is the cookie story you are thinking of.
When I watch movies online from Netflix, the movies start playing after about 10 or 15 seconds. I suspect that you might have worse bandwidth from your ISP than I do, causing the app to want to get the movie downloaded before starting playing, because it doesn't think it can download it fast enough to play it without running out of video, which would be annoying.
FWIW, my ISP is Cox Cable.
It can go even further: an act which, as far as you can tell, is purely beneficial may end up having negative consequences. You could help an old lady across the street and she could therefore avoid getting run over, and two weeks later she might introduce two people who end up being the parents of the next EVILPERSON$. So unless you are willing to put a limit on the length of the chain of consequences you consider, you end up being unable to make any moral decisions, because any seemingly good decision could have severe negative consequences.
This is easily remedied by only considering the reasonably foreseeable consequences of your actions, which is what GP was suggesting.