Only the Mob...I know it's hard to tell the difference between the Mob and their "opposite numbers" in the government. One of the tell tales is the Whack/Fry thing...If someone offends your wife, you whack him...if someone offends your sense of social stratification, you manufacture evidence and fry him.
Subtle difference, I know. But it's Jersey, whadda ya gonna do aboud id?
That was pretty much my point...I mean, things didn't work out...That happens. Sometimes doctors make mistakes, and as long as those mistakes aren't driven by negligence and neglect, then that just has to be accepted as a fact of life...If this stuff was easy, then anyone would be able to do it, and we wouldn't need doctors. There wasn't anything to be done for my mother regardless of the skill or lack of skill for the people involved (and they were damn skilled, I was crazy impressed), so why would I hold her death against the hospital?
I guess what bothers me is people suing for things that are either no one's fault, or their own fault, and trying to pin the blame anywhere but on themselves. Just makes me mad. Take some damn responsibility.
Eh. The theory is great: Give people recourse when they get screwed by other people/companies. These days, however, almost everything is actionable and the awards are way out of proportion to the injury.
So people sue for things that are just ridiculous. My mother died of brain cancer last year, and one of the neurosurgeon's did a procedure which was completely needed, but which ended up causing problems down the line, and wasn't quite covered by my instructions vis a vis her care...I'd talked to the guy, and it fell within the guidelines I'd set in our conversation, but it didn't fall within the stuff I'd signed in writing, and the hospital went nuts trying to do C.Y.A before I came in and confirmed that he was doing what I'd told him he could do if it were necessary.
Everyone's reaction in the situation was just so surreal. They were absolutely convinced I was going to sue over a necessary procedure which I'd verbally agreed to which had gone in one of the ways I'd been informed it could go. Blew my mind.
Legal or not, a raid that takes down a ton of sites as collateral damage is a fricking joke. What's the worst case scenario? They actually have to do an investigation, rather than just whacking a whole data center?
If I owned a site that was taken down for the crime of using the same host as TPB, I'd be assembling a team of rabid attack lawyers, and training them to go for the wallet.
On the other hand, if you can be proven to have not displayed due diligence, you run the risk of a substantial shareholder lawsuit, because your lack of due diligence can be seen as a type of actionable mismanagement.
I would argue that, by modern standards, failing to at least attempt to patent something like this could be argued to be in itself a failure of due diligence by a sufficiently informed shareholder possessed of the moral rectitude of a wood tick.
I agree...I think the TiVo model will be more along the line of what eventually emerges, kind of a tv-on-demand situation, where you pick what you want to watch, when you want to watch it. The problem, of course, is that the networks will lose their fricking minds, because they won't be able to claim numbers from mediocre shows sandwiched between more profitable shows.
That sort of thing is a hell of a long way off into the future, because of ad revenue supporting the tv, etc.
But for movies, why not? I'm thinking something along the lines of subscription to premium (new movies), second run (movies within a year of release), and an "everything else" category that covers, well, everything else. Pay-per-play isn't going to fly unless the amount per play is pretty damn low. I may have the desire to watch some dumbass movie from 10 years ago, but I sure as hell don't plan on paying 5 bucks to see it.
I don't think you can throw down on AAC...AAC is an open standard, developed by the same people who developed mp3 (technically AAC = mp4), and it's got substantially better quality than mp3 as well. AAC and ogg are the only two formats I'm willing to encode cd's into.
The fact that a lot of players choose to only support mp3 is a sign of their own shortsightedness, not some special virtue.
They're both going to lose to digital distribution once the telecoms get off their asses, so it's kind of a moot point. I think half the push toward HD is fueled by the content providers desire to make the files bigger and harder to download.
To be a pure creationist, you have to be willing to ignore the mountains of evidence that suggest that the earth is substantially older than the bible states, and all the evidence suggests that the creatures who exist on the earth started as very simple life forms and, over millions of years, evolved into the life forms we see today.
There are branches of christianity that are fine with evolution and the fact that the earth is older than the bible suggests...I would consider them to be "smart" creationists, because they understand that evolution and all that jazz are not incompatible with god, but only with a very strict read of a very old book.
All the other ones, who think that the world is 6000 years old and everythign on it was created in it's current form? Stupid.
Well, sure, but I don't think it takes a lot of brains to say, "Well this guy's got hair like a used car salesman, and acts like a bit of a freak, and he says evolution's wrong, and I'm going to hell if I don't give him all my savings...And this guy's a doctor that came up with a cancer drug that saved my momma's life, and he's says evolution's right, I guess I'm going to go with the guy who actually DOES things."
Seriously. To me it's a no-brainer. This isn't some country where there isn't evidence of science everywhere...How damn dumb do you have to be to decide that all that stuff is perfectly logical...except when it comes to evolution.
Gotta put it in bold, right, otherwise no one would take it seriously.
First: you're completely wrong. If 1% of scientists actively reject evolution as absolutely the best answer for the origin and evolution of life on this planet, I'd be utterly stunned..01% would still be pretty damn surprising.
Second: You're misrepresenting the arguments made by people who support evolution. Yes, it does happen all the time, and no, it's not easy to spot, except in life forms like bacteria and fruit flies that have extremely short life cycles. It is, however easy to spot over time, and we have millions of years of fossils that support the theory of evolution.
Third: You misrepresent science in general. Science isn't like religion. When scientists don't believe what another scientist says, they point out the flaws. If that scientist is right, then either the first scientist corrects his theory to account for those flaws, or the whole thing gets scrapped. If even 1% of scientists disbelieved evolution, there would be a competing theory that explains the facts...and there isn't one. The only people who object to evolution do so on the grounds that it doesn't agree with their narrow-minded religious beliefs, and that is hardly a problem with evolution.
To an ignorant person, it would be just as impossible for them to believe that we created plastic, spaceflight, and nuclear power. Surely it must be the work of God or Demons!
And don't demean philosophy by attributing religious doctrine to it. That argument is purely theistic, and relies on a hilariously poor understanding of the difference between the workings of a mechanical thing like a watch (or a 747 if you want the updated version), and the workings of the sort of life you find on this planet, which is not in any way inconsistent with our understanding of organic chemistry.
Sure, no one was around to watch it happen, but looking at the fossil record we can watch hugely simple creatures in the deepest strata being replaced by more and more complex creatures that become more and more familiar to us as they evolve. We can see the mechanisims at work all the way up to the current day, with every succeeding generation of bacteria becoming more resistant to our efforts to kill them off...That's evolution at work.
I find it absolutely hilarious that a person can live in the modern world and see, every day, around them everywhere, evidence that science is capable of some truly amazing stuff, and that the scientific method is the most powerful tool we've ever built for ourselves in the entire history of our race...And still be willing to discard all the mountains of evidence for a book written by some primitive Hebrews thousands of years ago...No questions asked.
Well, theoretically, if rational thought breaks down, then why not? They won't have the intellectual toolkit to disbelieve a notion that they're predisposed to believe in.
I just find the whole thing kinda depressing. There are some damn stupid people in this country, that's always been obvious. But close to half? That sucks.
Sure sure, people who go to church are so wise and well educated...It's just a huge coincidence that they effectively disbelieve biology. It could happen to anyone.
BTW, in case you were unaware, your argument is based on a well known subset of the fallacy: Appeal to Irrelevant Authority. The fact that an otherwise intelligent person believes something stupid is not actually relevant to this discussion.
I like the idea of services like Rhapsody, but I hate their insistence on crappy codecs and heavy drm...If I want to pay for a monthly service, I want to be able to listen to that music anywhere, on any format...It's doable in some ways, but it's not seamless, and it is annoying.
It also bothers me that no one really has "all" the music because some goddamn content owners refuse to ever license their stuff for distribution.
In the end, I think that pay subscription services will end up dominating the market, but I think that the prices will have to equalize first, and I think when that happens, much of the market force that pushes people to piracy will fade and drm will become effectively a non-issue.
If you could pay 8-10 bucks a month and get all the music you'll ever want, anywhere you are, why would you bother to "steal" it. It'd be stupid.
DRM doesn't enable anything...All it does is restrict. So how can it possibly enable innovation? What would happen if there was no drm? Would music stagnate? Doesn't seem to have in the past.
I believe in limited copyrights to protect an artists ability to profit from his works. I don't believe those copyright should be transferable to corporations. I don't believe those copyrights should have anywhere near the duration that they currently enjoy, and I don't believe I'll pay a damn dime for drm encumbered crap that does nothing more than deprive me of rights that I should have by virtue of paying for the damn content...At least if I stole it, someone would have taken off the damn drm!
Nothing wrong with built in wifi...That's a solid feature, if it's not crippled. Imagine being able to really share music with people near you, or to do some limited web-browsing, or, even better, listen to internet radio (if there is any left), if you're near a hotspot.
Crippled as it is, though, it's worthless. It's always the same. Who wants to buy a player that gives you less than other players?
"I ran Nessus and then nmap, and this is what it said." Ooo, let me bow to your geekdom. And then he picks a raw version of XP...that's so unfair there aren't even words...Seriously, most of those flaws were fixed years ago, and you can't even buy XP like that anymore.
I don't mean, "Arsenic has no beneficial uses." I mean, literally, "Arsenic can't bring you back from the dead." Arsenic can cause death when applied to a living person. When applied to a dead person it can't cause life.
If B then A (If Light causes epileptic fits, then video games will cause epileptic fits) If D then C (If Light can shut down cells that cause epileptic fits, then light can cure epilepsy )
Therefore If B then C (If light can cause epilepsy, light can cure epilepsy).
Clearly doesn't follow. It's like saying, "If arsenic can cause death, then arsenic should be able to cure death."
Illegal? Oh come on! There isn't even a good analog for this in the world...What they should have done, if they were half intelligent, is made a copy of the image and kept it on THEIR site. What they did was just put a link on the site to a picture that someone else was hosting.
This is a terrible design practice...Not only can your content change in unexpected ways (this was intentional, but I've seen a lot of humorous unintentional stuff happen with this sort of nonsense) but you're also ripping off the guy who's actually paying for the bandwidth to host the content, because whenever someone goes to your page, he's the one uploading the picture. Total rip off!
In short, this is completely legitimate...The person who created, maintained, and hosted the image, changed his personal property, and you think that should be illegal?? If the author of the original stuff hadn't put his content out there to be used by other people, McCain's people could have been up for a breach of copyright.
Eh. It's possible. But it's all too likely they'll wed themselves to a video codec, a drm leash, a web browser or some other such annoying crap, and it'll all be for naught.
Eh, the mechanism probably wouldn't hold, but the fact that these shapes can be generated in a liquid by a rotating body is pretty suggestive, when we see the same thing writ large. Seems like it has to be the expression of a somewhat similar physical phenomenon, though how the hell we'll test it I have no idea.
Did you minor in bad science-ology? There are about ten links above you who show how the same shapes can be made in liquid water with a spinning plate...this suggests that the spinning of Saturn's core could very well be creating the same effect in the dense atmosphere.
But let's not waste any opportunity in jumping to conclusions, because, as everyone knows, there are nostraightlinesinnature.
Why is it all the UFO freaks have no grasp of science? Why does that follow?
Slashdot Mirror
Only the Mob...I know it's hard to tell the difference between the Mob and their "opposite numbers" in the government. One of the tell tales is the Whack/Fry thing...If someone offends your wife, you whack him...if someone offends your sense of social stratification, you manufacture evidence and fry him.
Subtle difference, I know. But it's Jersey, whadda ya gonna do aboud id?
I wasn't looking for sympathy, but thanks.
That was pretty much my point...I mean, things didn't work out...That happens. Sometimes doctors make mistakes, and as long as those mistakes aren't driven by negligence and neglect, then that just has to be accepted as a fact of life...If this stuff was easy, then anyone would be able to do it, and we wouldn't need doctors. There wasn't anything to be done for my mother regardless of the skill or lack of skill for the people involved (and they were damn skilled, I was crazy impressed), so why would I hold her death against the hospital?
I guess what bothers me is people suing for things that are either no one's fault, or their own fault, and trying to pin the blame anywhere but on themselves. Just makes me mad. Take some damn responsibility.
Eh. The theory is great: Give people recourse when they get screwed by other people/companies. These days, however, almost everything is actionable and the awards are way out of proportion to the injury.
So people sue for things that are just ridiculous. My mother died of brain cancer last year, and one of the neurosurgeon's did a procedure which was completely needed, but which ended up causing problems down the line, and wasn't quite covered by my instructions vis a vis her care...I'd talked to the guy, and it fell within the guidelines I'd set in our conversation, but it didn't fall within the stuff I'd signed in writing, and the hospital went nuts trying to do C.Y.A before I came in and confirmed that he was doing what I'd told him he could do if it were necessary.
Everyone's reaction in the situation was just so surreal. They were absolutely convinced I was going to sue over a necessary procedure which I'd verbally agreed to which had gone in one of the ways I'd been informed it could go. Blew my mind.
Legal or not, a raid that takes down a ton of sites as collateral damage is a fricking joke. What's the worst case scenario? They actually have to do an investigation, rather than just whacking a whole data center?
If I owned a site that was taken down for the crime of using the same host as TPB, I'd be assembling a team of rabid attack lawyers, and training them to go for the wallet.
Technically there isn't one.
On the other hand, if you can be proven to have not displayed due diligence, you run the risk of a substantial shareholder lawsuit, because your lack of due diligence can be seen as a type of actionable mismanagement.
I would argue that, by modern standards, failing to at least attempt to patent something like this could be argued to be in itself a failure of due diligence by a sufficiently informed shareholder possessed of the moral rectitude of a wood tick.
I agree...I think the TiVo model will be more along the line of what eventually emerges, kind of a tv-on-demand situation, where you pick what you want to watch, when you want to watch it. The problem, of course, is that the networks will lose their fricking minds, because they won't be able to claim numbers from mediocre shows sandwiched between more profitable shows.
That sort of thing is a hell of a long way off into the future, because of ad revenue supporting the tv, etc.
But for movies, why not? I'm thinking something along the lines of subscription to premium (new movies), second run (movies within a year of release), and an "everything else" category that covers, well, everything else. Pay-per-play isn't going to fly unless the amount per play is pretty damn low. I may have the desire to watch some dumbass movie from 10 years ago, but I sure as hell don't plan on paying 5 bucks to see it.
I don't think you can throw down on AAC...AAC is an open standard, developed by the same people who developed mp3 (technically AAC = mp4), and it's got substantially better quality than mp3 as well. AAC and ogg are the only two formats I'm willing to encode cd's into.
The fact that a lot of players choose to only support mp3 is a sign of their own shortsightedness, not some special virtue.
They're both going to lose to digital distribution once the telecoms get off their asses, so it's kind of a moot point. I think half the push toward HD is fueled by the content providers desire to make the files bigger and harder to download.
To be a pure creationist, you have to be willing to ignore the mountains of evidence that suggest that the earth is substantially older than the bible states, and all the evidence suggests that the creatures who exist on the earth started as very simple life forms and, over millions of years, evolved into the life forms we see today.
There are branches of christianity that are fine with evolution and the fact that the earth is older than the bible suggests...I would consider them to be "smart" creationists, because they understand that evolution and all that jazz are not incompatible with god, but only with a very strict read of a very old book.
All the other ones, who think that the world is 6000 years old and everythign on it was created in it's current form? Stupid.
Well, sure, but I don't think it takes a lot of brains to say, "Well this guy's got hair like a used car salesman, and acts like a bit of a freak, and he says evolution's wrong, and I'm going to hell if I don't give him all my savings...And this guy's a doctor that came up with a cancer drug that saved my momma's life, and he's says evolution's right, I guess I'm going to go with the guy who actually DOES things."
Seriously. To me it's a no-brainer. This isn't some country where there isn't evidence of science everywhere...How damn dumb do you have to be to decide that all that stuff is perfectly logical...except when it comes to evolution.
Gotta put it in bold, right, otherwise no one would take it seriously.
.01% would still be pretty damn surprising.
First: you're completely wrong. If 1% of scientists actively reject evolution as absolutely the best answer for the origin and evolution of life on this planet, I'd be utterly stunned.
Second: You're misrepresenting the arguments made by people who support evolution. Yes, it does happen all the time, and no, it's not easy to spot, except in life forms like bacteria and fruit flies that have extremely short life cycles. It is, however easy to spot over time, and we have millions of years of fossils that support the theory of evolution.
Third: You misrepresent science in general. Science isn't like religion. When scientists don't believe what another scientist says, they point out the flaws. If that scientist is right, then either the first scientist corrects his theory to account for those flaws, or the whole thing gets scrapped. If even 1% of scientists disbelieved evolution, there would be a competing theory that explains the facts...and there isn't one. The only people who object to evolution do so on the grounds that it doesn't agree with their narrow-minded religious beliefs, and that is hardly a problem with evolution.
To an ignorant person, it would be just as impossible for them to believe that we created plastic, spaceflight, and nuclear power. Surely it must be the work of God or Demons!
And don't demean philosophy by attributing religious doctrine to it. That argument is purely theistic, and relies on a hilariously poor understanding of the difference between the workings of a mechanical thing like a watch (or a 747 if you want the updated version), and the workings of the sort of life you find on this planet, which is not in any way inconsistent with our understanding of organic chemistry.
Sure, no one was around to watch it happen, but looking at the fossil record we can watch hugely simple creatures in the deepest strata being replaced by more and more complex creatures that become more and more familiar to us as they evolve. We can see the mechanisims at work all the way up to the current day, with every succeeding generation of bacteria becoming more resistant to our efforts to kill them off...That's evolution at work.
I find it absolutely hilarious that a person can live in the modern world and see, every day, around them everywhere, evidence that science is capable of some truly amazing stuff, and that the scientific method is the most powerful tool we've ever built for ourselves in the entire history of our race...And still be willing to discard all the mountains of evidence for a book written by some primitive Hebrews thousands of years ago...No questions asked.
Well, theoretically, if rational thought breaks down, then why not? They won't have the intellectual toolkit to disbelieve a notion that they're predisposed to believe in.
I just find the whole thing kinda depressing. There are some damn stupid people in this country, that's always been obvious. But close to half? That sucks.
Sure sure, people who go to church are so wise and well educated...It's just a huge coincidence that they effectively disbelieve biology. It could happen to anyone.
BTW, in case you were unaware, your argument is based on a well known subset of the fallacy: Appeal to Irrelevant Authority. The fact that an otherwise intelligent person believes something stupid is not actually relevant to this discussion.
I like the idea of services like Rhapsody, but I hate their insistence on crappy codecs and heavy drm...If I want to pay for a monthly service, I want to be able to listen to that music anywhere, on any format...It's doable in some ways, but it's not seamless, and it is annoying.
It also bothers me that no one really has "all" the music because some goddamn content owners refuse to ever license their stuff for distribution.
In the end, I think that pay subscription services will end up dominating the market, but I think that the prices will have to equalize first, and I think when that happens, much of the market force that pushes people to piracy will fade and drm will become effectively a non-issue.
If you could pay 8-10 bucks a month and get all the music you'll ever want, anywhere you are, why would you bother to "steal" it. It'd be stupid.
DRM doesn't enable anything...All it does is restrict. So how can it possibly enable innovation? What would happen if there was no drm? Would music stagnate? Doesn't seem to have in the past.
I believe in limited copyrights to protect an artists ability to profit from his works. I don't believe those copyright should be transferable to corporations. I don't believe those copyrights should have anywhere near the duration that they currently enjoy, and I don't believe I'll pay a damn dime for drm encumbered crap that does nothing more than deprive me of rights that I should have by virtue of paying for the damn content...At least if I stole it, someone would have taken off the damn drm!
Innovate that.
Nothing wrong with built in wifi...That's a solid feature, if it's not crippled. Imagine being able to really share music with people near you, or to do some limited web-browsing, or, even better, listen to internet radio (if there is any left), if you're near a hotspot.
Crippled as it is, though, it's worthless. It's always the same. Who wants to buy a player that gives you less than other players?
THAT is what I was thinking.
"I ran Nessus and then nmap, and this is what it said." Ooo, let me bow to your geekdom. And then he picks a raw version of XP...that's so unfair there aren't even words...Seriously, most of those flaws were fixed years ago, and you can't even buy XP like that anymore.
I don't mean, "Arsenic has no beneficial uses." I mean, literally, "Arsenic can't bring you back from the dead." Arsenic can cause death when applied to a living person. When applied to a dead person it can't cause life.
My statement was a bit ambiguous, I apologize.
It's the Fallacy of the Irrelevant Conclusion.
Basically you're saying:
If B then A (If Light causes epileptic fits, then video games will cause epileptic fits)
If D then C (If Light can shut down cells that cause epileptic fits, then light can cure epilepsy )
Therefore If B then C (If light can cause epilepsy, light can cure epilepsy).
Clearly doesn't follow. It's like saying, "If arsenic can cause death, then arsenic should be able to cure death."
Re-Thinking? Well, hell if you knew it wasn't right, why didn't you say so before?
Jeez.
See, this is why Creationism is right...No rethinking required. Ever.
Illegal? Oh come on! There isn't even a good analog for this in the world...What they should have done, if they were half intelligent, is made a copy of the image and kept it on THEIR site. What they did was just put a link on the site to a picture that someone else was hosting.
This is a terrible design practice...Not only can your content change in unexpected ways (this was intentional, but I've seen a lot of humorous unintentional stuff happen with this sort of nonsense) but you're also ripping off the guy who's actually paying for the bandwidth to host the content, because whenever someone goes to your page, he's the one uploading the picture. Total rip off!
In short, this is completely legitimate...The person who created, maintained, and hosted the image, changed his personal property, and you think that should be illegal?? If the author of the original stuff hadn't put his content out there to be used by other people, McCain's people could have been up for a breach of copyright.
Eh. It's possible. But it's all too likely they'll wed themselves to a video codec, a drm leash, a web browser or some other such annoying crap, and it'll all be for naught.
Eh, the mechanism probably wouldn't hold, but the fact that these shapes can be generated in a liquid by a rotating body is pretty suggestive, when we see the same thing writ large. Seems like it has to be the expression of a somewhat similar physical phenomenon, though how the hell we'll test it I have no idea.
Did you minor in bad science-ology? There are about ten links above you who show how the same shapes can be made in liquid water with a spinning plate...this suggests that the spinning of Saturn's core could very well be creating the same effect in the dense atmosphere.
But let's not waste any opportunity in jumping to conclusions, because, as everyone knows, there are no straight lines in nature.
Why is it all the UFO freaks have no grasp of science? Why does that follow?