I think I'm one of very few people who liked Wesley Crusher a lot more than I like Wil Wheaton. Wesley Crusher was, ultimately, a confident, accomplished, geek. Wil Wheaton has always struck me as a whining sap. The whole "I just don't know who I really am, please read about me not knowing who I am!" thing just reeks of "I can't deal without daily affirmations in my inbox!"
Wil Wheaton is not a geek, he just played one on TV and didn't know how to stop.
You sure you RTFA? The computer doesn't learn how to play, it just learns how to determine who won. That's not very impressive at all, considering the game was played with cards instead of hands, and there are only 9 possible hands and three possible outcomes (Left wins, Right wins, or Draw).
So the computer sees "Scissors-Paper" a few times and then always queus up the "Left Wins" response when it sees "Scissors-Paper" in the future. That's just a different method of programming.
Now, if only 6 of the 9 possible hands had been played, and then a 7th hand the computer hadn't seen before was played and the computer could tell you who won that, that'd be something. This is just record and playback.
Data isn't "public domain" - it's free, because you can't copyright data at all.
What MAY be covered by copyright is a PRESENTATION of data - i.e. a photo, diagram, map, etc. I can freely distribute a list of temperatures at various coordinates if I can get a copy of it no matter who first obtained that data, but I can only distribute a color-coded map of that data with permission from that map's creator.
If the prices go up, then it becomes reasonable for another competitor to enter the market again, restoring competition. Microsoft isn't the only company with a war chest.
Driving your competition out of the marketplace isn't a PERMANENT condition - if it took below-cost prices to take over the market, it'll take below-market prices to keep control of the market.
Prices will go up not because competition got eliminated, but because you can't maintain those prices forever. The consumer benefits as long as manufacturers try though.
You're confusing OPEN immigration with ANONYMOUS immigration. You used to need a physical to get into the country, now they just want to know where you'll be staying.
Ever flown to a country where you were required to have a visa? Fortunately, being an American, I don't need a visa to go very many places, but this kind of information is NOTHING compared to what the destination country will want to know if you plan on getting into the country. I had to get a Visa for Germany since I was going to be there longer than 90 days, and they wanted to know my income, my parents income, where I was staying, what I would be doing, etc, etc. Countries like to keep tabs on foreigners, that's just the way it is.
I've also had to provide contact information pretty much every time I've flown into a European country from the US on even a US passport. And the US government strongly recommends you provide that same information to the local consulate as well.
Just because someone would like some information dosn't automatically mean it's malicious. Face it, you're just NOT THAT INTERESTING. Nobody gives a crap where you're staying, unless they figure out later that you're a terrorist, or your plane crashes, or your goverment's consulate calls up and says "Hey, this dude's mom can't find him, any idea where he is?" or they figure out it's been a year and you havn't left the country yet.
Can you imagine the outrage if people found out we knew nothing about where foreigners were going when they entered the country?
Nobody ever got killed because I wore my seatbelt, bought insurance, locked my door, took a self-defense course, wore a helmet, used a surge protector, used a firewall, installed a fire extinguisher, or bought a car with airbags.
Thousands of people are shot every year because people bought guns.
See the difference?
Guns have a downside. Everything you mentioned, aside from cost, has no downside.
Your insurance will never burn your house down, but your gun very well might be used to shoot you, your kid, or just some random person if it's stolen from you.
The issue is whether the plaintiff can compel the ISP to reveal the name of the person who may have committed the slander.
Using your analogy, let's say that I really don't like my neighbor, so I make an unflattering flyer, go to the printer and have them make a bunch of copies of it, and then distribute them to the neighborhood.
My neighbor figures out that the printer made the copies for me. Can the neighbor compel the printer to reveal who they made the copies for?
Now, let's say that shortly after I distribute the flyers, my neighbor is killed under questionable circumstances. Can the police, with a court order, compel the printer to reveal who had the flyers made as part of a criminal investigation?
Absolutely.
The question before the court is whether, in a civil suit, the plaintiff has the right to compel a 3rd party to reveal identifying information about a civil defendent. The plaintiff is also attempting to argue that they should be able to get the information because the defendant committed a criminal act, but criminal enforcement is the pervue of the prosecutor/criminal court, not a civil suit/court.
As for whether the picture is a "no-contest case of slander" (whatever that's supposed to mean), it certainly is NOT a clear-cut case of slander. An unflattering picture is merely unflattering. In order for it to constitute slander, the picture has to depict something which is not true, AND you must prove the author of the picture should have KNOWN is not true, AND a reasonable person, based on the picture, would have to believe the picture is true (i.e. the picture isn't satire).
The Yahoo account is an agreement between Yahoo and a person for limited access to Yahoo's storage system.
The copyright in the emails authored by the deceased is owned by the deceased's estate. Yahoo happens to own media on which a copy of the emails is stored.
The deceased has no right to access the copy of the material on Yahoo's media without Yahoo's permission. Yahoo gave the deceased permission to access the material on their media for a limited term, which ended with the deceased's death.
Owning the copyright in a particular material does not give someone the right to look at copies of that material on other people's media. If it did, the RIAA could force you to let them listen to your CD's. If the record company has a huge fire and all their copies of their copywritten material burns to a crisp, they can't compel someone else with a copy of that material to give them access to it.
In this case, the only thing the copyright ownership gives the estate the right to do is demand that Yahoo delete the copies of the email from their servers. And it CERTAINLY doesn't give them the right to look at emails in the account authored by other people which the estate does not have copyright ownership of.
If the deceased's estate has the right to access the deceased's account because they own the copyrights in the email, than any publisher would be able to look at any copy of anything they publish, which is obviously not the case. If the deceased's estate has the right to access the deceased's account because of the agreement between the deceased and Yahoo, then clauses which terminate a contract at one of the party's deaths would have to be invalid, which is also not the case.
No one has the right to access anyone else's property. It doesn't matter if the agreement between Yahoo and the deceased eliminated the "right" of the deceased's estate to access Yahoo's media - that right never existed in the first place. The estate has to prove that Yahoo agreed to give them that right, which they can not.
You have chosen to try to make her opinion invalid in everyone else's mind, simply because it differs from yours.
I have chosen to present her opinion as invalid because it is clearly wrong. Ms. Flower would have us believe that the gaming industry maintains a gender bias against women because girls in video games are hot and there are hot girls at vendor booths. Ms. Flower ignores that in order for a gender bias to exist, there must be an UNEQUAL treatment of people based on GENDER. This is not the case - the video game industry, as does the culture as a whole, has a bias towards ATTRACTIVE PEOPLE, regardless of gender.
Correlation is not causation.
As for the panties comment, I was just hoping for "+1 Skillful Placement of Troll Bait". How does it taste?
Why should it evolve?
on
Getting the Girl
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· Score: 4, Insightful
What makes Ms. Flower's opinion about what characters in video games should look like, "more" valid than anyone else's?
Nothing. Unfortunately, there are many more video game customers who would like their female characters to have cartoonishly large breasts than there are video game customers who would like their female characters to have folds and beards.
The difference is that guys don't get their panties in a bunch because all of the male video game characters have cartoonishly large muscles.
Ms. Flower is trying to manufacture a double standard where none exists - male and female characters are treated the same; they're made to look perfect.
As for video game themes, Ms. Flower is simply outvoted. Our culture uses sex to sell. We sell stuff using attractive people, choosing gender based on audience. Complaining that video game conferences have booth babes is like complaining that there are no fat guys in soap operas.
IBM is "giving" away their work for more software. If nobody uses their work, they've given away nothing, if someone does use their work, they just got more software that will work on their hardware WITHOUT having to pay to develop it. The NUMBER ONE thing you need to sell hardware? Software that will run on it. IBM is trading patents for real software.
But even in the general OSS sense, "giving away" your work doesn't mean you're doing it for free. If you're creating software solely to sell that software, then yeah, it doesn't make any sense. But if the only reason you have software is to accomplish some other task, giving away your software basically takes a lot of the expense of maintaining that software and move it to the community.
For example, we use some open source software at my job, and I also use a lot of it for other things personally. Although it's rare (as I'm not a huge software guy), I will make improvements to software, and submit them back to the community. Why would I give away my improvements for free? Because it is a lot more valuable for me to get my improvements included in the updates to the software (and thus keep my software freely maintained) instead of having to redo my fixes everytime there's a software upgrade than it is for me to try and sell those same fixes. (Whatever someone might pay for them is much less than the costs of me trying to market, sell, and collect the money for them).
On the same token, if I make a basic software package to perform some task, I can then release it to the community, where someone else will likely improve it. I can then have the benefits of those improvements without having to pay to have them made in-house.
Remember, software itself doesn't really have any value (except entertainment) - software is valuable because it allows you to do something else more efficiently. Releasing your software allows you to get better software later without having to invest your own capital in development.
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I think I'm one of very few people who liked Wesley Crusher a lot more than I like Wil Wheaton. Wesley Crusher was, ultimately, a confident, accomplished, geek. Wil Wheaton has always struck me as a whining sap. The whole "I just don't know who I really am, please read about me not knowing who I am!" thing just reeks of "I can't deal without daily affirmations in my inbox!"
Wil Wheaton is not a geek, he just played one on TV and didn't know how to stop.
The good casting decisions have agents who won't let them on Enterprise.
You sure you RTFA? The computer doesn't learn how to play, it just learns how to determine who won. That's not very impressive at all, considering the game was played with cards instead of hands, and there are only 9 possible hands and three possible outcomes (Left wins, Right wins, or Draw).
So the computer sees "Scissors-Paper" a few times and then always queus up the "Left Wins" response when it sees "Scissors-Paper" in the future. That's just a different method of programming.
Now, if only 6 of the 9 possible hands had been played, and then a 7th hand the computer hadn't seen before was played and the computer could tell you who won that, that'd be something. This is just record and playback.
Data our taxes pay for, is public domain.
Data isn't "public domain" - it's free, because you can't copyright data at all.
What MAY be covered by copyright is a PRESENTATION of data - i.e. a photo, diagram, map, etc. I can freely distribute a list of temperatures at various coordinates if I can get a copy of it no matter who first obtained that data, but I can only distribute a color-coded map of that data with permission from that map's creator.
And why expect the prices to go up?
If the prices go up, then it becomes reasonable for another competitor to enter the market again, restoring competition. Microsoft isn't the only company with a war chest.
Driving your competition out of the marketplace isn't a PERMANENT condition - if it took below-cost prices to take over the market, it'll take below-market prices to keep control of the market.
Prices will go up not because competition got eliminated, but because you can't maintain those prices forever. The consumer benefits as long as manufacturers try though.
Hi, I'm the RIAAlippy. It looks like you are able to block copyright infringers from your system. Would you like me to sue you?
When a nice 44 year old gentleman helping a troubled 14 year old girl regain her self confidence is "illegal".
The price of soylent green is at an all-time low.
The good news is that we have invented a way to fax people by sending multiple slices.
The bad news is the people-slicer that feeds the fax machine keeps jamming.
No, nobody should care about this. It is simply silly to have an expectation of being able to anonymously enter and move about a foreign country.
You're confusing OPEN immigration with ANONYMOUS immigration. You used to need a physical to get into the country, now they just want to know where you'll be staying.
Ever flown to a country where you were required to have a visa? Fortunately, being an American, I don't need a visa to go very many places, but this kind of information is NOTHING compared to what the destination country will want to know if you plan on getting into the country. I had to get a Visa for Germany since I was going to be there longer than 90 days, and they wanted to know my income, my parents income, where I was staying, what I would be doing, etc, etc. Countries like to keep tabs on foreigners, that's just the way it is.
I've also had to provide contact information pretty much every time I've flown into a European country from the US on even a US passport. And the US government strongly recommends you provide that same information to the local consulate as well.
Just because someone would like some information dosn't automatically mean it's malicious. Face it, you're just NOT THAT INTERESTING. Nobody gives a crap where you're staying, unless they figure out later that you're a terrorist, or your plane crashes, or your goverment's consulate calls up and says "Hey, this dude's mom can't find him, any idea where he is?" or they figure out it's been a year and you havn't left the country yet.
Can you imagine the outrage if people found out we knew nothing about where foreigners were going when they entered the country?
What percentage of intentional deaths were caused by cards? 1%? By guns? 40%?
While limiting the scope of your statistic may make it seem to support your view, it really just makes it worthless.
Nobody ever got killed because I wore my seatbelt, bought insurance, locked my door, took a self-defense course, wore a helmet, used a surge protector, used a firewall, installed a fire extinguisher, or bought a car with airbags.
Thousands of people are shot every year because people bought guns.
See the difference?
Guns have a downside. Everything you mentioned, aside from cost, has no downside.
Your insurance will never burn your house down, but your gun very well might be used to shoot you, your kid, or just some random person if it's stolen from you.
Is the burglar going to see your gun and say "Well, there's only a 90% chance it'll go off...."
If it doesn't work, just say really confidentally "Don't MAKE me enter the manual circuitry override code!"
YANAL.
The issue is whether the plaintiff can compel the ISP to reveal the name of the person who may have committed the slander.
Using your analogy, let's say that I really don't like my neighbor, so I make an unflattering flyer, go to the printer and have them make a bunch of copies of it, and then distribute them to the neighborhood.
My neighbor figures out that the printer made the copies for me. Can the neighbor compel the printer to reveal who they made the copies for?
Now, let's say that shortly after I distribute the flyers, my neighbor is killed under questionable circumstances. Can the police, with a court order, compel the printer to reveal who had the flyers made as part of a criminal investigation?
Absolutely.
The question before the court is whether, in a civil suit, the plaintiff has the right to compel a 3rd party to reveal identifying information about a civil defendent. The plaintiff is also attempting to argue that they should be able to get the information because the defendant committed a criminal act, but criminal enforcement is the pervue of the prosecutor/criminal court, not a civil suit/court.
As for whether the picture is a "no-contest case of slander" (whatever that's supposed to mean), it certainly is NOT a clear-cut case of slander. An unflattering picture is merely unflattering. In order for it to constitute slander, the picture has to depict something which is not true, AND you must prove the author of the picture should have KNOWN is not true, AND a reasonable person, based on the picture, would have to believe the picture is true (i.e. the picture isn't satire).
The Yahoo account is an agreement between Yahoo and a person for limited access to Yahoo's storage system.
The copyright in the emails authored by the deceased is owned by the deceased's estate. Yahoo happens to own media on which a copy of the emails is stored.
The deceased has no right to access the copy of the material on Yahoo's media without Yahoo's permission. Yahoo gave the deceased permission to access the material on their media for a limited term, which ended with the deceased's death.
Owning the copyright in a particular material does not give someone the right to look at copies of that material on other people's media. If it did, the RIAA could force you to let them listen to your CD's. If the record company has a huge fire and all their copies of their copywritten material burns to a crisp, they can't compel someone else with a copy of that material to give them access to it.
In this case, the only thing the copyright ownership gives the estate the right to do is demand that Yahoo delete the copies of the email from their servers. And it CERTAINLY doesn't give them the right to look at emails in the account authored by other people which the estate does not have copyright ownership of.
If the deceased's estate has the right to access the deceased's account because they own the copyrights in the email, than any publisher would be able to look at any copy of anything they publish, which is obviously not the case. If the deceased's estate has the right to access the deceased's account because of the agreement between the deceased and Yahoo, then clauses which terminate a contract at one of the party's deaths would have to be invalid, which is also not the case.
No one has the right to access anyone else's property. It doesn't matter if the agreement between Yahoo and the deceased eliminated the "right" of the deceased's estate to access Yahoo's media - that right never existed in the first place. The estate has to prove that Yahoo agreed to give them that right, which they can not.
They're either single or maried, but never have a girlfriend.
Because I'm still pretty sure my wife is a troll.
I guess that means I lose my +1 INT, DEX and WIS. On the upside, the -2 STR was getting rather annoying.
I tried, but my number is always busy.
You have chosen to try to make her opinion invalid in everyone else's mind, simply because it differs from yours.
I have chosen to present her opinion as invalid because it is clearly wrong. Ms. Flower would have us believe that the gaming industry maintains a gender bias against women because girls in video games are hot and there are hot girls at vendor booths. Ms. Flower ignores that in order for a gender bias to exist, there must be an UNEQUAL treatment of people based on GENDER. This is not the case - the video game industry, as does the culture as a whole, has a bias towards ATTRACTIVE PEOPLE, regardless of gender.
Correlation is not causation.
As for the panties comment, I was just hoping for "+1 Skillful Placement of Troll Bait". How does it taste?
What makes Ms. Flower's opinion about what characters in video games should look like, "more" valid than anyone else's?
Nothing. Unfortunately, there are many more video game customers who would like their female characters to have cartoonishly large breasts than there are video game customers who would like their female characters to have folds and beards.
The difference is that guys don't get their panties in a bunch because all of the male video game characters have cartoonishly large muscles.
Ms. Flower is trying to manufacture a double standard where none exists - male and female characters are treated the same; they're made to look perfect.
As for video game themes, Ms. Flower is simply outvoted. Our culture uses sex to sell. We sell stuff using attractive people, choosing gender based on audience. Complaining that video game conferences have booth babes is like complaining that there are no fat guys in soap operas.
Because he's not being charged with a criminal offense. You don't get extradited for civil suits.
IBM is "giving" away their work for more software. If nobody uses their work, they've given away nothing, if someone does use their work, they just got more software that will work on their hardware WITHOUT having to pay to develop it. The NUMBER ONE thing you need to sell hardware? Software that will run on it. IBM is trading patents for real software.
But even in the general OSS sense, "giving away" your work doesn't mean you're doing it for free. If you're creating software solely to sell that software, then yeah, it doesn't make any sense. But if the only reason you have software is to accomplish some other task, giving away your software basically takes a lot of the expense of maintaining that software and move it to the community.
For example, we use some open source software at my job, and I also use a lot of it for other things personally. Although it's rare (as I'm not a huge software guy), I will make improvements to software, and submit them back to the community. Why would I give away my improvements for free? Because it is a lot more valuable for me to get my improvements included in the updates to the software (and thus keep my software freely maintained) instead of having to redo my fixes everytime there's a software upgrade than it is for me to try and sell those same fixes. (Whatever someone might pay for them is much less than the costs of me trying to market, sell, and collect the money for them).
On the same token, if I make a basic software package to perform some task, I can then release it to the community, where someone else will likely improve it. I can then have the benefits of those improvements without having to pay to have them made in-house.
Remember, software itself doesn't really have any value (except entertainment) - software is valuable because it allows you to do something else more efficiently. Releasing your software allows you to get better software later without having to invest your own capital in development.