It's guaranteed to work with Windows since it was developed for it.
You'd think so, but no, not really. I was having a problem with Starcraft after I upgraded to W2K from 98. Apparently my sound card support went from 'working' to 'not' between kernels.
As for testing, you could always 'borrow the game from a friend' and then buy a legit copy once you know it works.
Don't forget the added HDD space you'll need to install Windows. XP and 2K are both rather large installations.
1)a webpage should have no more than 6 colors.
2)a webpage should have fewer than 6 colors.
These two statements contradict each other moron!
That's funny, because they don't. Maybe you were trying to be funny and failed miserably, but if you're going to make fun of someone, at least make sure you're not making a stupid mistake.
1) Webpage.color <= 6 colors
2) Webpage.color < 6 colors
Comment two is simply a stricter version of comment one. The only contradiction to comment one would be
Webpage.color > 6 colors, or "A webpage should have more than six colors."
As for your last paragraph, I feel obligated to be tolerant of you... that doesn't mean I can't point out that you're a tool.
You want me to tolerate child molestors and faggots and blacks and other people who lead vile lifestyles?
Damn those blacks for living! How dare they claim they have a fundamental right to exist?
What if the required restrictions were clearly inferior and worse for the product?
The best analogy I can think of is changing the oil on the car. It has to be done, right? What if the warranty mandated that you had to have it done with craptacular oil that was known to shorten the life of your car.
Would it be legal / ethical for the car company to have such a warranty? I would say certainly not to the second part, and possibly to the first.
There's a difference between a guy working for a living, and a guy who sits on welfare, eats prime rib everyday, drives a BMW, and has a big-screen TV.
I call bullshit. Facts about welfare. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt, and assume that you have sincere compassion for the disadvantaged. Why then would you make outlandish claims which are clearly not the mean of the people on welfare? I'd argue, though without anything to back it up with at this moment, that people like that are at least 2 standard deviations out from the mean.
In fact, I've met many who state flat out that they have no intention but to live on welfare; they get more money from welfare than they could earn.
My understanding is that this is true, albeit misrepresented. Yes, people can often make more money on welfare than they can by working, but they are not often happy about it. Most people have well-established morals, and truly want to work. But when working puts them below the already meager state of living they are at, what do you expect? Asceticism is all well and good, but there's a line.
The real problem is that they can't get a job that pays well enough; either they are unskilled or, more often, have employers who don't pay them what they are worth....The employer is unwilling to pay their workers enough, so people have to depend on welfare; because people depend on welfare, the employer (either company, or personally) ends up paying the difference in taxes.
Interesting argument... I like it. Would be a good point for raising the minimum wage, since theoretically poverty would go down and we could cut the budget accordingly, thus lowering taxes.
I was talking in generalities, as were you. If you were to electrically charge the air, you would cause a magnetic force on any of air particles that were moving.
As for "definitely"... I typed too quickly, probably since I had just read it mispelled above. You know how someone mispronounces a word a few times, and then you do it too? Shit happens. It doesn't change the fact that F = qv x B, or the fact that your analogy sucked.
No, I'd rather observe it to definately move air, just as you have suggested.
Let me give you another example: take two magnets. One attracts the other, right? Yes, and with a force a lot stronger than your spoon attracts the water. Now take a room full of magnets... and brace yourself for a major magnet hurricane!
Both you and I know that won't happen. But, according to your reasoning, that's exactly what we are supposed to expect. How's that?
Let's here it for the strawman! Here's what's going on in the original situation:
1) Air is electrically charged
2) Air goes through plates of opposite charge
Question: Is air attracted to plates?
So here's the analogy for magnetism. If you magnetized the air (impossible, since the magnetic dipoles are randomly distributed), and then put magnets all over the room, would you get air movement? Yes, yes you would.
Hell, electrically charging the air (definately possible) would even cause a force to be exerted on the air particle (so long as it was initially moving). F = qv x B, where F is force, q is the charge of the point charge, v is the velocity, and B is the vector magnetic field.
Actually, the costs aren't that high. We paid around $1000 for the installation though, because we got an additional PVR receiver (I think we could have had the base installation for $400), and we pay $100 for internet and TV. We pay less per month now, because we could get rid of the two additional phone lines, the ISP charges, and the cable bill.
The Starband forums have people who have written progs to run the modem in Linux, but for now, we're just using my old K6-2 500 box in W2K.
Sometimes they yell at you to stop poking them. Or to stop rocking the boat, because you're making them seasick. I guess that footman is glad he's not sailing when you do that.
You've missed one of the biggest problems with this model, in my opinion. Think Social Darwinism doesn't exist anymore? Take a look at a public school sometime.
Children are allowed to be absolutely awful to one another, so long as they don't fight. Once they do fight, they both get suspended for equal amounts of time, no matter who started it, or if one person was attacked and didn't even fight back. Teachers have learned to simply ignore all of this, and pretend it's not going on.
I'm willing to bet there's a sizable number of/.ers who were picked on / teased / bullied in school. Yet that's seen as a 'kids will be kids' thing that will go away. No one things about the lessons that are learned.
Personally, the school system as it stands now reminds me of the Drow justice system. Do what you want to each other, so long as it's not heinous enough to force the administrators to take action.
I've got one that's like this for PC: the Gravis Xterminator Dual-Control gamepad. It's got a standard D pad and a Proportional joystick (a disk mounted on a ball). It rocks for emulation, since you can use either control; whichever feels more natural for the game.
Your humor is so high-brow, only elite people like yourself could *possibly* hope to say something even remotely as funny. Your clever use of a quote from South Park, without attributing it, marks you as a true master of comedy.
I can only long to be like you. If I were a woman, I would want to bear your children.
Hello Multiproxy... If you're that concerned about being tracked, odds are you're bouncing signals between at least 5 proxy servers, several of which don't give a fuck what the U.S. government says. Therefore, I doubt that you'd have issues giving out your IP.
Ok, let's run with that. So you're saying that if you know it's going to cause third degree burns that you'll be careful but if it'll just hurt like hell and make your pants wet then you don't really avoid coffee spills?
No... if I knew it was going to cause third-degree burns, I'd buy it somewhere else.
Poundstone recognizes that the flashes of insight that Fixx describes, and that Microsoft interviewers expect, are more of a hit-or-miss thing than the inevitable result of hard thinking by an intelligent person: "What is particularly troubling is how little 'logic' seems to be involved in some phases of problem solving. Difficult problems are often solved via a sudden, intuitive insight. One moment you're stuck; the next moment this insight has popped into your head, though not by any step-by-step logic that can be recounted."
That's the problem with these sort of questions used exclusively. Logic is important in CS. Sure, being able to think logically 'outside the box' is good, but you also need skilled implementers; people who can take an idea for a program and program it well.
Coffee I brew at home is not hot enough to give me major burns if I spill it on myself. Trust me, I've done it. Why would I expect to recieve *third degree* burns from coffee I buy at a restaurant?
If the coffee was a reasonable temperature, then yeah, I'd buy the "Shit happens" defense. But when you given a non-standard item, with more risks than the standard item, without being warned, I'd say the company is to blame. If I sold you a program that had a chance of formatting your hard drive when you ran it, and didn't tell you about it, would you sue for the lost work and time?
This is the same logic that allows someone that trips and falls on the sidewalk in front of a business to sue that business because the person in question wasn't capable of walking.
Umm... no. In that case, there was no negligence by the business. Now, if the business rinsed the sidewalk with water in subzero temperatures without warning anyone, then there'd be a reasonable case. It's one thing when you fall on your ass because the road is slippery. It's entirely another when you fall because some dumbass made it slippery without warning anyone.
I'm sorry, but I can't agree with the "Life's not fair" defense. "Shit happens", in my book, is not a legitimate excuse for failing to clean up shit that you caused.
The settlement offer quote was not to demonstrate McD's was guilty, but that the woman was not greedy. She didn't pull a Kramer and try to sue the company for everything it had. No, she just wanted to cover her medical bills.
No, you can't legislate risk out of life, but you certainly should be able to sue morons for doing something stupid that hurt you severely. If you read the page that I've cited twice now, you'd see that the women only got 80% of the compensatory damages, because the jury found she was 20% to blame for the accident (she had to take some responsibility for spilling the ridiculously overheated coffee in the first place).
Part of making informed judgements is just that: being informed. It'd be nice to know that the coffee was far hotter than anything you could normally expect to drink before buying it, and certainly before putting it between your legs and opening it. I agree, if she knew the coffee was hot enough to cause third-degree burns, it would be her fault. The fact was simply that there was no warning.
Anyway, we've debated this entirely too long for something that was probably just a throwaway comment to an article. Ahhh, the joy of entirely too much free time.
If that's how you feel, then either you've completely missed my point, or I've done an abysmal job of making it. Either way, I'm sorry.
No, downloading music without paying for it is *not* the same as shoplifing. One is theft, the other is copyright infringement. Are you, perhaps, trying to say that they are morally, rather than logically, equivalent? That I can maybe agree with, depending on the scenario.
You seem to miss the point that most of the people working on Open Source have good paying day jobs funding their activities.
Right. That was kind of my point. It's the same as a musician taking a second job to support his/her art.
The middle men are generally the ones that get rich.
That's the whole point of P2P: Get rid of the middle man. Was it badly executed with Napster? Certainly. Don't paint with such a wide brush.
Sorry about the inferiority complex comment, but I still stand by the fact that you constantly assumed that others were mocking you / deriding your work when they were not. It's sad that you feel that no one values your work, and I'm sorry if I made you feel that way. Artists are just as important as anyone else in our society.
I know I'm probably going to get modded down to -1 Offtopic for every one of these posts, but it was worth it: you've raised some interesting points. Good luck with your art.
1) Not everyone has insurance.
2) If it wasn't the woman's fault, why should her insurance company have to pay the bills? Sure, I have home owner's insurance, but that doesn't mean I don't sue the bastard who damages it.
3) How the fuck am I, as a Computer Science major, a "fucking lawyer parasite"? The American Heritage Dictionary defines libel as "A false publication, as in writing, print, signs, or pictures, that damages a person's reputation." How is calling someone an "... opprunistic, money grubbing, self-centered, ego-centric, bitch" not damaging the women's reputation?
It's a travesty that McDonalds had to pay even one penny to this stupid old cow and her filthy leech lawyers. I don't care if they served the fucking coffee at a full rolling boil.
That's *real* nice. I guess it'd be ok if instead of you accidently spilling coffee on yourself, someone not looking where they were driving and driving their car into you? Negligence is negligence. Being a company and being negligent doesn't make it right.
Limits on punitive damages, punitives paid to the state general fund instead of the scum sucking lawyers, loser-pays rules, no more contingency fees. Just for a start. Drive them out of business by the hundreds of thousands.
Limits on punitive damages, perhaps. However, you're complaining about compensatory damges, which are different. Perhaps McDonalds should not have been fined 2.7 million dollars (for the record, we don't know if they were or not; the case was settled outside of court). But arguing that she should not have been awarded compensatory damages when the jury ruled that McDonalds was negligent is just ludicrious.
Loser-pays rules are absolutely ridiculous in all cases, and in this one would actually be forcing McDonalds to pay those 'scum sucking lawyers'. Wouldn't that be a bad thing? The court can force legal fees to be paid if it finds that the case was completely unreasonable already. No reason to remove discretion from the bench.
I honestly don't understand the problem with contingency fees. What's wrong with saying that you'll work for free unless you produce results?
As for punitive damages being paid to the state rather than the victim, I say: Not a bad idea... instead of the state propping the company up with corporate welfare, the misbehaving corporation can help the greater community that it wronged.
I want to see them unemployed, selling apples on the street corner, and hear the lamentations of their homeless wives and children.
Why hate the lawyers so much? Did you forget that they're people? Or is it easier to just blanketly declare that most are just scum and forget that fact. I'm amazed you respect corporations (entities in only a legal sense) more than living, breathing people. Oh well... to each his own, I guess.
Firstly, I stand by my comment that you have an inferiority complex. What other reason would you have for constantly assuming that people think less of you because you're an artist?
Another thing. When did I say "true artists should work for free?" Seriously? I never said that. I believe I said that "I sincerly hope that all musicians that create for the sole purpose of making money quit too." See... that's different. My point was simply that art is *art*, not business. If you're going to be an artist, be an artist because you love what you do, not because you want to make mad cash and be on MTV. Is that really such a horrible viewpoint?
I didn't see programers working for free during the dotcom boom.
You must have missed that whole Open Source / Free Software thing that's going around. Amazing, since you happen to be on/.!
I don't agree with public domain of a work where the family wishes to retain rights. The only one that benefits from public domain are the publishers. They still get paid just the artists don't.
Well, then you disagree with the fundamental nature of copyright and patents. That's fine, but you should point that out when you debate about the system. I'd also like to mention the society as a whole benefits from the arts; hence the purpose of copyright. Also, you're flat-out wrong that only publishers can get paid when a work goes public domain. All that means is that the artist is no longer the *only* one capable of selling a work. Unless I am mistaken (and I could be on this), you can still sell a public domain work... just that no one has to pay you. Just like you can sell copies of public domain books, but you can also find those books online. You want to sell your songs that have gone public domain? Fine... burn them on CD and set up a booth somewhere.
Even your beloved Napster was a business hoping to turn a profit by effectively publishing work without paying the artist. Saying that they only provided access is a symatec. It's rationalizing what was done because it benefits you.
Firstly... WTF is a symatec? I looked it up, no results. Maybe my dictionary sucks. Anyhow: When did I say I loved Napster? Oh wait.. there's another one of those assumptions. And as for "publishing work without paying the artist": isn't that what the radio does? Sure, there are royalties, but my understanding of the payola system is that it generally *costs* money to get something played on the radio.
I say again. Grow up and pay an artist for his work. You're no longer a kid shoving candy into his pockets in a candy store. It's the real world.
I say again: I have no problem paying an artist for his work, but I'm not going to do so into eternity, nor do I expect to be paid into eternity. For the record, I've never shoplifted, and I resent the implication that I have.
I take from this quote that you believe true artists should work for free.
Um... no. I believe true artists would be willing to work for free, not that they would reject money that is offered them. Art for the sake of art and all. Then again, I consider writing code for the sake of writing code to be fun and artistic.
I have no problem paying artists for music, during a limited amount of time. Natural Life + 50 != a reasonably limited time. My children don't continue to *get paid* for my work. Your kids can reap the benefits of your work, not by royalties, but by your inheritance, just like the rest of us.
Oh... wait? Was that another example of thinking that "the public owns the work, not the artist"? If you think so, you're wrong. Artists make things of value, just like everyone else. I have no issue with your getting paid for your work for a reasonable amount of time. After a time, and this is where the subjectiveness comes into play, you should no longer be allowed to exercise a monopoly over an idea.
You've got a serious inferiority complex going on. I consider most programmers to be artists too, and trust me, I wouldn't enjoy having something I'm selling taken for free by millions. However, if I was at the same time gouging my customers, I would maybe think about lowering my prices before I decided to simply sue everyone in sight.
From the same page I quoted before: Liebeck, who also underwent debridement
treatments, sought to settle her claim for $20,000, but McDonalds
refused.
$20,000 is *not* excessive for hospital bills. If you think it is, obviously you haven't looked at your bills lately. Good god, I had a CAT-scan last week that cost $2,500 by itself.
Any coffee that could be described by a reasonable person as hot coffee Will burn the hell out of you.
Did you even read the page? Again, quoting: ... coffee served at home is
generally 135 to 140 degrees.... Plaintiffs' expert, a scholar in thermodynamics applied to human skin
burns, testified that liquids, at 180 degrees, will cause a full
thickness burn to human skin in two to seven seconds. Other testimony
showed that as the temperature decreases toward 155 degrees, the extent
of the burn relative to that temperature decreases exponentially. Thus,
if Liebeck's spill had involved coffee at 155 degrees, the liquid would
have cooled and given her time to avoid a serious burn.
I don't get fucking third-degree burns from spilling coffee from home on myself.
I am claiming she was an opprunistic, money grubbing, self-centered, ego-centric, bitch.
Really? Do you know her? Or do you just prefer to libel innocent people who get hurt by corporations?
I sincerly hope that all musicians that create for the sole purpose of making money quit too. It'd make for a higher signal-to-noise ratio.
Read the Constitution sometime. If you have, read it again. Specifically, Article 1, Section 8.
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
The current copyright system is tragically flawed. Since you like to use physical labor analogies even though they really don't apply well at all, here's one: I sell you a house. We agree to the terms of a common contract; the United States government controls the terms. Let's say that the terms stipulated you pay me for the house for 20 years, then it's yours to do whatever you want with. At 19 years, the government, at my request, changes the deal so now you pay me for 40 years. At 39, the government again increases the terms to 80 years. How would you feel? Cheated? Good.
Slashdot Mirror
It's guaranteed to work with Windows since it was developed for it.
You'd think so, but no, not really. I was having a problem with Starcraft after I upgraded to W2K from 98. Apparently my sound card support went from 'working' to 'not' between kernels.
As for testing, you could always 'borrow the game from a friend' and then buy a legit copy once you know it works.
Don't forget the added HDD space you'll need to install Windows. XP and 2K are both rather large installations.
2)a webpage should have fewer than 6 colors.
These two statements contradict each other moron!
That's funny, because they don't. Maybe you were trying to be funny and failed miserably, but if you're going to make fun of someone, at least make sure you're not making a stupid mistake.
1) Webpage.color <= 6 colors
2) Webpage.color < 6 colors
Comment two is simply a stricter version of comment one. The only contradiction to comment one would be
Webpage.color > 6 colors, or "A webpage should have more than six colors."
As for your last paragraph, I feel obligated to be tolerant of you... that doesn't mean I can't point out that you're a tool.
You want me to tolerate child molestors and faggots and blacks and other people who lead vile lifestyles?Damn those blacks for living! How dare they claim they have a fundamental right to exist?
What if the required restrictions were clearly inferior and worse for the product?
The best analogy I can think of is changing the oil on the car. It has to be done, right? What if the warranty mandated that you had to have it done with craptacular oil that was known to shorten the life of your car.
Would it be legal / ethical for the car company to have such a warranty? I would say certainly not to the second part, and possibly to the first.
I call bullshit. Facts about welfare. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt, and assume that you have sincere compassion for the disadvantaged. Why then would you make outlandish claims which are clearly not the mean of the people on welfare? I'd argue, though without anything to back it up with at this moment, that people like that are at least 2 standard deviations out from the mean.
In fact, I've met many who state flat out that they have no intention but to live on welfare; they get more money from welfare than they could earn.My understanding is that this is true, albeit misrepresented. Yes, people can often make more money on welfare than they can by working, but they are not often happy about it. Most people have well-established morals, and truly want to work. But when working puts them below the already meager state of living they are at, what do you expect? Asceticism is all well and good, but there's a line.
The real problem is that they can't get a job that pays well enough; either they are unskilled or, more often, have employers who don't pay them what they are worth.Interesting argument... I like it. Would be a good point for raising the minimum wage, since theoretically poverty would go down and we could cut the budget accordingly, thus lowering taxes.
I was talking in generalities, as were you. If you were to electrically charge the air, you would cause a magnetic force on any of air particles that were moving.
As for "definitely"... I typed too quickly, probably since I had just read it mispelled above. You know how someone mispronounces a word a few times, and then you do it too? Shit happens. It doesn't change the fact that F = qv x B, or the fact that your analogy sucked.
Let's here it for the strawman! Here's what's going on in the original situation:
1) Air is electrically charged
2) Air goes through plates of opposite charge
Question: Is air attracted to plates?
So here's the analogy for magnetism. If you magnetized the air (impossible, since the magnetic dipoles are randomly distributed), and then put magnets all over the room, would you get air movement? Yes, yes you would.
Hell, electrically charging the air (definately possible) would even cause a force to be exerted on the air particle (so long as it was initially moving). F = qv x B, where F is force, q is the charge of the point charge, v is the velocity, and B is the vector magnetic field.
Mmmmm... applied physics.
Actually, the costs aren't that high. We paid around $1000 for the installation though, because we got an additional PVR receiver (I think we could have had the base installation for $400), and we pay $100 for internet and TV. We pay less per month now, because we could get rid of the two additional phone lines, the ISP charges, and the cable bill. The Starband forums have people who have written progs to run the modem in Linux, but for now, we're just using my old K6-2 500 box in W2K.
There's always Satillite. You know your broadband options suXor when you're willing to put up with 750ms as a low ping time.
Sometimes they yell at you to stop poking them. Or to stop rocking the boat, because you're making them seasick. I guess that footman is glad he's not sailing when you do that.
You've missed one of the biggest problems with this model, in my opinion. Think Social Darwinism doesn't exist anymore? Take a look at a public school sometime.
/.ers who were picked on / teased / bullied in school. Yet that's seen as a 'kids will be kids' thing that will go away. No one things about the lessons that are learned.
Children are allowed to be absolutely awful to one another, so long as they don't fight. Once they do fight, they both get suspended for equal amounts of time, no matter who started it, or if one person was attacked and didn't even fight back. Teachers have learned to simply ignore all of this, and pretend it's not going on.
I'm willing to bet there's a sizable number of
Personally, the school system as it stands now reminds me of the Drow justice system. Do what you want to each other, so long as it's not heinous enough to force the administrators to take action.
Definately not an atheist.
Why? Why?
/.ed already.
I've been to the National Cathedral... it's a beautiful place, even for pagans such as myself. Why would they carve a Darth Vader into the arches?
I'm sorry, but I just find this amazingly stupid. Maybe someone could enlighten me as to why this was done? The page seems to be
I've got one that's like this for PC: the Gravis Xterminator Dual-Control gamepad. It's got a standard D pad and a Proportional joystick (a disk mounted on a ball). It rocks for emulation, since you can use either control; whichever feels more natural for the game.
Your humor is so high-brow, only elite people like yourself could *possibly* hope to say something even remotely as funny. Your clever use of a quote from South Park, without attributing it, marks you as a true master of comedy.
I can only long to be like you. If I were a woman, I would want to bear your children.
Hello Multiproxy... If you're that concerned about being tracked, odds are you're bouncing signals between at least 5 proxy servers, several of which don't give a fuck what the U.S. government says. Therefore, I doubt that you'd have issues giving out your IP.
No... if I knew it was going to cause third-degree burns, I'd buy it somewhere else.
That's the problem with these sort of questions used exclusively. Logic is important in CS. Sure, being able to think logically 'outside the box' is good, but you also need skilled implementers; people who can take an idea for a program and program it well.
Then again, maybe I just missed the point.
Coffee I brew at home is not hot enough to give me major burns if I spill it on myself. Trust me, I've done it. Why would I expect to recieve *third degree* burns from coffee I buy at a restaurant?
If the coffee was a reasonable temperature, then yeah, I'd buy the "Shit happens" defense. But when you given a non-standard item, with more risks than the standard item, without being warned, I'd say the company is to blame. If I sold you a program that had a chance of formatting your hard drive when you ran it, and didn't tell you about it, would you sue for the lost work and time?
This is the same logic that allows someone that trips and falls on the sidewalk in front of a business to sue that business because the person in question wasn't capable of walking.Umm... no. In that case, there was no negligence by the business. Now, if the business rinsed the sidewalk with water in subzero temperatures without warning anyone, then there'd be a reasonable case. It's one thing when you fall on your ass because the road is slippery. It's entirely another when you fall because some dumbass made it slippery without warning anyone.
I'm sorry, but I can't agree with the "Life's not fair" defense. "Shit happens", in my book, is not a legitimate excuse for failing to clean up shit that you caused.
The settlement offer quote was not to demonstrate McD's was guilty, but that the woman was not greedy. She didn't pull a Kramer and try to sue the company for everything it had. No, she just wanted to cover her medical bills.
No, you can't legislate risk out of life, but you certainly should be able to sue morons for doing something stupid that hurt you severely. If you read the page that I've cited twice now, you'd see that the women only got 80% of the compensatory damages, because the jury found she was 20% to blame for the accident (she had to take some responsibility for spilling the ridiculously overheated coffee in the first place).
Part of making informed judgements is just that: being informed. It'd be nice to know that the coffee was far hotter than anything you could normally expect to drink before buying it, and certainly before putting it between your legs and opening it. I agree, if she knew the coffee was hot enough to cause third-degree burns, it would be her fault. The fact was simply that there was no warning.
Anyway, we've debated this entirely too long for something that was probably just a throwaway comment to an article. Ahhh, the joy of entirely too much free time.
If that's how you feel, then either you've completely missed my point, or I've done an abysmal job of making it. Either way, I'm sorry.
No, downloading music without paying for it is *not* the same as shoplifing. One is theft, the other is copyright infringement. Are you, perhaps, trying to say that they are morally, rather than logically, equivalent? That I can maybe agree with, depending on the scenario.
You seem to miss the point that most of the people working on Open Source have good paying day jobs funding their activities.
Right. That was kind of my point. It's the same as a musician taking a second job to support his/her art.
The middle men are generally the ones that get rich.
That's the whole point of P2P: Get rid of the middle man. Was it badly executed with Napster? Certainly. Don't paint with such a wide brush.
Sorry about the inferiority complex comment, but I still stand by the fact that you constantly assumed that others were mocking you / deriding your work when they were not. It's sad that you feel that no one values your work, and I'm sorry if I made you feel that way. Artists are just as important as anyone else in our society.
I know I'm probably going to get modded down to -1 Offtopic for every one of these posts, but it was worth it: you've raised some interesting points. Good luck with your art.
-- K0
2) If it wasn't the woman's fault, why should her insurance company have to pay the bills? Sure, I have home owner's insurance, but that doesn't mean I don't sue the bastard who damages it.
3) How the fuck am I, as a Computer Science major, a "fucking lawyer parasite"? The American Heritage Dictionary defines libel as "A false publication, as in writing, print, signs, or pictures, that damages a person's reputation." How is calling someone an "... opprunistic, money grubbing, self-centered, ego-centric, bitch" not damaging the women's reputation?
It's a travesty that McDonalds had to pay even one penny to this stupid old cow and her filthy leech lawyers. I don't care if they served the fucking coffee at a full rolling boil.
That's *real* nice. I guess it'd be ok if instead of you accidently spilling coffee on yourself, someone not looking where they were driving and driving their car into you? Negligence is negligence. Being a company and being negligent doesn't make it right.
Limits on punitive damages, punitives paid to the state general fund instead of the scum sucking lawyers, loser-pays rules, no more contingency fees. Just for a start. Drive them out of business by the hundreds of thousands.Limits on punitive damages, perhaps. However, you're complaining about compensatory damges, which are different. Perhaps McDonalds should not have been fined 2.7 million dollars (for the record, we don't know if they were or not; the case was settled outside of court). But arguing that she should not have been awarded compensatory damages when the jury ruled that McDonalds was negligent is just ludicrious.
Loser-pays rules are absolutely ridiculous in all cases, and in this one would actually be forcing McDonalds to pay those 'scum sucking lawyers'. Wouldn't that be a bad thing? The court can force legal fees to be paid if it finds that the case was completely unreasonable already. No reason to remove discretion from the bench.
I honestly don't understand the problem with contingency fees. What's wrong with saying that you'll work for free unless you produce results?
As for punitive damages being paid to the state rather than the victim, I say: Not a bad idea... instead of the state propping the company up with corporate welfare, the misbehaving corporation can help the greater community that it wronged.
I want to see them unemployed, selling apples on the street corner, and hear the lamentations of their homeless wives and children.
Why hate the lawyers so much? Did you forget that they're people? Or is it easier to just blanketly declare that most are just scum and forget that fact. I'm amazed you respect corporations (entities in only a legal sense) more than living, breathing people. Oh well... to each his own, I guess.
Firstly, I stand by my comment that you have an inferiority complex. What other reason would you have for constantly assuming that people think less of you because you're an artist?
Another thing. When did I say "true artists should work for free?" Seriously? I never said that. I believe I said that "I sincerly hope that all musicians that create for the sole purpose of making money quit too." See... that's different. My point was simply that art is *art*, not business. If you're going to be an artist, be an artist because you love what you do, not because you want to make mad cash and be on MTV. Is that really such a horrible viewpoint?
I didn't see programers working for free during the dotcom boom.You must have missed that whole Open Source / Free Software thing that's going around. Amazing, since you happen to be on /.!
I don't agree with public domain of a work where the family wishes to retain rights. The only one that benefits from public domain are the publishers. They still get paid just the artists don't.Well, then you disagree with the fundamental nature of copyright and patents. That's fine, but you should point that out when you debate about the system. I'd also like to mention the society as a whole benefits from the arts; hence the purpose of copyright. Also, you're flat-out wrong that only publishers can get paid when a work goes public domain. All that means is that the artist is no longer the *only* one capable of selling a work. Unless I am mistaken (and I could be on this), you can still sell a public domain work... just that no one has to pay you. Just like you can sell copies of public domain books, but you can also find those books online. You want to sell your songs that have gone public domain? Fine... burn them on CD and set up a booth somewhere.
Even your beloved Napster was a business hoping to turn a profit by effectively publishing work without paying the artist. Saying that they only provided access is a symatec. It's rationalizing what was done because it benefits you.Firstly... WTF is a symatec? I looked it up, no results. Maybe my dictionary sucks. Anyhow: When did I say I loved Napster? Oh wait.. there's another one of those assumptions. And as for "publishing work without paying the artist": isn't that what the radio does? Sure, there are royalties, but my understanding of the payola system is that it generally *costs* money to get something played on the radio.
I say again. Grow up and pay an artist for his work. You're no longer a kid shoving candy into his pockets in a candy store. It's the real world.I say again: I have no problem paying an artist for his work, but I'm not going to do so into eternity, nor do I expect to be paid into eternity. For the record, I've never shoplifted, and I resent the implication that I have.
Um... no. I believe true artists would be willing to work for free, not that they would reject money that is offered them. Art for the sake of art and all. Then again, I consider writing code for the sake of writing code to be fun and artistic.
I have no problem paying artists for music, during a limited amount of time. Natural Life + 50 != a reasonably limited time. My children don't continue to *get paid* for my work. Your kids can reap the benefits of your work, not by royalties, but by your inheritance, just like the rest of us.
Oh... wait? Was that another example of thinking that "the public owns the work, not the artist"? If you think so, you're wrong. Artists make things of value, just like everyone else. I have no issue with your getting paid for your work for a reasonable amount of time. After a time, and this is where the subjectiveness comes into play, you should no longer be allowed to exercise a monopoly over an idea.
You've got a serious inferiority complex going on. I consider most programmers to be artists too, and trust me, I wouldn't enjoy having something I'm selling taken for free by millions. However, if I was at the same time gouging my customers, I would maybe think about lowering my prices before I decided to simply sue everyone in sight.
From the same page I quoted before:
Liebeck, who also underwent debridement treatments, sought to settle her claim for $20,000, but McDonalds refused.
$20,000 is *not* excessive for hospital bills. If you think it is, obviously you haven't looked at your bills lately. Good god, I had a CAT-scan last week that cost $2,500 by itself.
Any coffee that could be described by a reasonable person as hot coffee Will burn the hell out of you.
Did you even read the page? Again, quoting:
... coffee served at home is
generally 135 to 140 degrees. ... Plaintiffs' expert, a scholar in thermodynamics applied to human skin
burns, testified that liquids, at 180 degrees, will cause a full
thickness burn to human skin in two to seven seconds. Other testimony
showed that as the temperature decreases toward 155 degrees, the extent
of the burn relative to that temperature decreases exponentially. Thus,
if Liebeck's spill had involved coffee at 155 degrees, the liquid would
have cooled and given her time to avoid a serious burn.
I don't get fucking third-degree burns from spilling coffee from home on myself.
I am claiming she was an opprunistic, money grubbing, self-centered, ego-centric, bitch.
Really? Do you know her? Or do you just prefer to libel innocent people who get hurt by corporations?
I sincerly hope that all musicians that create for the sole purpose of making money quit too. It'd make for a higher signal-to-noise ratio.
Read the Constitution sometime. If you have, read it again. Specifically, Article 1, Section 8.
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;The current copyright system is tragically flawed. Since you like to use physical labor analogies even though they really don't apply well at all, here's one: I sell you a house. We agree to the terms of a common contract; the United States government controls the terms. Let's say that the terms stipulated you pay me for the house for 20 years, then it's yours to do whatever you want with. At 19 years, the government, at my request, changes the deal so now you pay me for 40 years. At 39, the government again increases the terms to 80 years. How would you feel? Cheated? Good.