2010's - humankind lifts people to the edge of the atmosphere.
2010's - humankind lifts JOYRIDING NON-MILLIONAIRE CIVILIANS to the edge of the atmosphere.
You're trying to put things in perspective, but are only looking at how high up people are going, and not the expansion in breadth in both quantity of people and the types of people doing it. During Apollo, only the experienced Air Force pilots who then became highly trained Astronauts went into space. In the decades following a tiny number of civilians went to space for a specific mission. Recently a few very wealthy tourists have visited the ISS. Soon, ordinary people with the money for a reasonable vacation will be able to see the earth from space with a company dedicated solely to providing this service.
At this rate by the time I'm retired, humankind will have set its sights for the top of the stairs. It may make it - but only if its risk-free.
At this rate by the time I'm middle-aged, I, Chris Burke, regular dude, will be able to see our Mother Earth from fucking SPACE, and be able to afford to do it on an annual basis!
If you can't see how this is bringing us closer to our Sci-Fi dreams than Yet Another Moon Mission where another two of the handful of professional astronauts add some bootprints to the lunar surface, then I think it's you who lack perspective.
"By the way, I'm sending shitloads of free energy your way every day...why the fuck are you wasting it?"
You think the sun's trying to help us? Ha! The sun's been trying to murder us for as long as we've been around, but the stupid ozone layer and magnetosphere keep getting in the way!
You realize you're basically teasing it right? It's like you're wearing a bulletproof vest that turns impacts into electricity for your iphone, and you're telling the guy in the machinegun turret "Hey thanks for the free kinetic energy!"
Destroying animals that are no danger to others and would make suitable pets is one example.
It's a liability issue. My S.O. is taking a biotech course, and has learned that most animals in studies are euthanized as a matter of course. The reason is apparently the fear of lawsuits should the animal ever do anything and it being blamed on whatever treatments they gave it. This made her very sad. It sounds retarded and lazy to me. Is it not possible to sign a waiver that says "This animal was once treated with a new kind of doggie aspirin. It is completely safe as far as we know, but if somehow it turns the dog into Kujo in five years, you've been warned." No, just kill em and the problem goes away...
Kill the upper class and you kill the middle class.
That would be an interesting and relevant comment if MY WHOLE POINT wasn't that we AREN'T "killing" the upper class with progressive taxes. Not anywhere close! They aren't even paying the tax amount that they should be. And even if they were, it wouldn't even come close to ending the upper class. They'd still be ridiculously rich!
No, instead we're killing the middle class directly, and letting the rich shirk their responsibility with accounting tricks. Kinda makes your argument moot, in as much as it applied in the first place.
Class warfare never ends well.
Quoting Buffet again: "There's class warfare all right, and my class is winning."
But I forgot, the kind of class warfare where the wealthy suck up all wealth from the middle and lower class, creating ever-escalating concentration of wealth in their hands, is good for us. It's only when we want to stop this from happening that it's bad.
The current view of "spent" fuel is akin to refining crude oil to make gasoline and then having to store all the waste diesel, fuel oil and other petroleum byproducts until the end of time.
So to make sure I have this car analogy right... you're saying that these new reactors are like a Volkswagen Jetta?
which is why I started by saying, "assuming the mouse is on the right hand side..."
Which is why I said "Why would you assume that?":)
Why would the mouse tend to be towards the right-hand side of the screen? Is it because a control that gets used alot--like, say, a scrollbar--is over there? If all the controls for a window were on the left hand side, would the mouse tend to live over there?
The point is -- there's no natural reason, at least not suggested by Fitt's Law, for the scrollbar (or any other UI element) to be on the right. There's no relationship between right-handedness and having UI elements on the right -- which is actually what the OP was suggesting.
In that context the Fitt's Law argument is circular. The scrollbar is on the right because that's where the mouse is, and the mouse is on the right because that's where the scrollbar is.
Remember that close things are easier to hit than far away things and bigger things are easier to hit than small things. Scroll bars down the side of the window are pretty big things. The scrollbar on this window that I'm typing into is probably about 1400 pixels high.
Sure. But the argument would still be that it would be faster to access if it were on the left, and just as importantly moving from the large scroll bar to the smaller elements -- assuming the other UI elements I mentioned stayed where they are. There is a natural argument for that though, and it's our top-down left-right reading convention.
I remember when the Mozilla 'help' menu was on the right... Barely, because it was only after someone asked aloud (er atype?) why it was over there that I ever noticed it in the first place.
There's also a question of the algorithm used to control the mouse. Most systems do not use a 1:1 ratio (ie, move the mouse 1 inch to move the pointer 1 inch). It usually depends on the acceleration of the mouse.
Which WP mentions Fitt's Law doesn't take into account. At least in the equation. The principles behind it make sense in broader circumstances, just the calculation gets more complicated.
It seems like part of the problem is that unless you're starting from scratch, you're going to need more data to figure out what Fitt's suggests. Assume you can't move either the scrollbar from it's traditional right side, or the menu/toolbar elements from the left side. Where should the window controls be? You'd need actual usage data to figure out what people interact with most often just prior to using said controls, and vice versa. My intuition says people are more likely to hit the 'save' key and then minimize or close a window than they are to scroll a bit then minimize. But "programmer's intuition" has led to a lot of shitty UIs so who am I to say?
P.S. Forgot to mention this before, but I do not think the mouse scroll wheel, or as I call it "The Carpal-Tunnelator", are good reasons to get rid of scroll bars.:P
How can millions of people who cannot afford health care get free health care?
By waiting until their conditions are serious or critical and then going to the ER, which is much more expensive than traditional care for the same condition, and ludicrously more expensive than preventative care. And that's not even counting that prices are already higher for the uninsured!
The added costs by the health care companies will be passed down to the customers.
You mean they are passed down to the paying customers. You and I are already paying for the uninsured! So given that, would you rather pay for ultra-expensive emergency care, or pay for cheaper regular care?
Locking people out of the regular health care system and forcing them to use emergency services because they can't afford insurance is a serious case of cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Health care costs could have been cut more by stopping all the frivolous health care related law suites.
I'm not saying it isn't a good cause, but that is a trivial amount of savings.
No, we're going to save more money by reducing the amount we are paying for health care for the poor. Just because that cost is now coming out in the open doesn't mean we weren't paying for it before. We were, and paying more at that.
Heck they used to say no more taxes for those making less than $250K (per couple I think). Well, in many parts of the US, that is NOT being wealthy. I think those living in SF and NYC might could vouch for that.
Whereas I think being able to afford to live in the parts of SF or NYC that cost that much means you're wealthy. If you make $250k you're wealthy. If you choose to spend most of that on an apartment in lower Manhattan, that's your choice.
I forget the exact statistic, but something along the lines of the top 10%-15% or so already pay > 80% of the US's taxes.
Yes but they also have over 90% of the wealth. Funny how that works out.
At some point, you can't squeeze more money out of them and have to hit lower hanging fruit.
We aren't even squeezing them. They sure as fuck aren't paying 80% of their own income as taxes if that's what that factoid above was meant to imply. They aren't even paying the proportionally greater amount that our progressive taxation system is supposed to make them pay!
As Warren Buffet noted, he pays less in taxes than his secretary.
There's plenty of squeezing left that can be done, and Mr. Buffet agrees. But really, I'd be happy just ensuring that our tax system is in fact progressive.
Pfft. Great! There goes your chance to sound smarter than the professional researchers. Now you only sound smarter than the slashdotters racing to sound smarter than the researchers. Some accomplishment!
Volunteers [were] told they were either leaders or subordinates. The leaders were given a large office, and the subordinates given a small windowless space.
Ha! That doesn't solve the problem, there's still an issue here that started with the second run of the trial.
Researcher: "Okay, now for control purposes we need to switch the groups. Now, who hasn't been a 'leader' yet?" Sociopath: "Oh, not me!" Researcher: "Wait, weren't a leader last time?" Sociopath: "Golly, no! I swear!" Researcher: "Okay then."
See? The good liars are still more likely to be leaders.;)
1. Things that are closer to the mouse are quicker to access than things far away from the mouse
From this, assuming that the mouse is on the right hand side of the screen, accessing a same-sized scrollbar would be quicker if it is on the right than if it were on the left.
Why would you assume the mouse pointer is on the right-hand side of the screen? Because the mouse itself is on the right-hand side of the keyboard (for right-handed folks)? The mouse is always on the right side, regardless of where the pointer is!
Fitt's law says that minimizing total distance traveled is good. This means moving the mouse minimally, which means moving the mouse pointer minimally, irrespective of the absolute position of your hand relative to the screen. Why does that matter? It looks like an argument for clustering UI elements together, not an argument that scroll bars belong on the right side of the window to account for right-handedness.
In fact, since most active UI elements in a window (menu items, tool bar icons) are on the left side, it sounds to me that Fitt's Law is an argument for having the scroll bars and window controls on the left.
Of course they get a vote. Most of them choose to vote for less ego stroking and stupid political infighting so they cast their vote for Windows. Believe it or not, most people don't like software that changes every time you try to use it, regardless of the reasons behind the changes.
Ah, so they vote for having the ego stroking and political infighting happen behind closed doors in a process they are never allowed to even watch, much less participate in. They get the sudden changes handed down from on high without even knowing that there were dissenting opinions. I can see the advantage.
I don't get what the big deal is. So you don't get to tell Mark Shuttleworth what to do. When was that ever an advertised feature of Ubuntu? You can submit bug reports or observations or your comments on how things should be, but when has that ever been implied to be a mandate for developers to go do it?
Where was the implication that Ubuntu was a Democracy?
Ubuntu is as Open and Free as ever. The community is as strong as ever (and you can have strong communities around completely proprietary software).
It sounds like the real problem is that they wanted something, and didn't get it, but thought they should. Which means guess what, welcome to ego stroking and political infighting.
The U.S. is a republic because it's leader is a President, not a Monarch.
The comparison you meant to make is "The US is a Representative Democracy, not a Direct Democracy."
Both are kinds of Democracy.
My schooling did not gloss over the differences, it actually taught them correctly.
The only one who uses "republic" and "democracy" like you do is the CIA World Factbook, and it's wildly inconsistent and basically random in how it applies its terms. Don't learn civics from the CIA.
Now, however, the second you become an adult in this country you have to pony up money to the government or insurance company, or else you will be fined.
If you had to pay income taxes even if you earned no money, but the government actually paid it for you in that case, would that be okay?
That's basically what's happening here. You have to have insurance, but you only pay for it if you make money.
Indeed, calling an Objectivist a Libertarian is far too kind. Libertarians don't preach selfishness as a virtue. Only the Randians who have mostly hijacked the movement would find that a complement.
Your point is exactly that there's basically no evil except where one guy chose to violate copyright on purpose and was bitched out by the others for it, demonstrating their lack of evilness?
I don't think so.
If they find nothing at all, it shows that Google failed at proper due diligence prior to buying YouTube.
The implication being that Google should have discovered this one instance of actual evil and based on that refused to buy Youtube. "Proper due diligence" is reading every internal email ever, and if you find one instance of something bad, no sale?
Makes no sense to me. Precious few purchases would ever be made if that was the case. Or, alternatively, practically every company ever fails your definition of due diligence.
But let's say they did see that email, and said to themselves "well that guy did this, but he stopped when told to, so no biggie." That's how I feel about it. And what would be the horrible crime here exactly?
Either way, it's bad.
I'm not seeing it. A few instances of actual copyright infringement would not be the end of the world for Google. It'd barely be anything.
The rest, hey maybe legally it's an issue, but I don't think it should be. I don't want every hosting service to have to act as copyright police as well. I think that's nuts, and bound to result in over-aggressive policies that stifle free speech.
Wha? You mean physicists don't REALLY measure data in terms of books stacked up in a barn, and Germans don't use barns as libraries? I never would have guessed that I was actually just making a "How many Libraries of Congress is that?" joke!
However, I absolutely demand that others respect the licensing terms I distribute my materials under, and I respect the licenses chosen by others. Violating that is absolutely inexcusable. It irritates me to no end that the open source community will frequently scream bloody murder over a GPL violation, then turn around and say stuff like this "isn't evil."
If ever there were a case for RTFA, this is surely it.
Okay I did, and the only truly Evil part was where that Jawed guy was actually posting copyrighted videos himself to drive hits, and the other founders told him to knock it off. As they should have, because that just sucks.
The rest is basically them making a conscious decision to not care that a lot of user-uploaded videos were copyrighted, and to put the onus on the copyright holder to send them take down notices.
I get your point about the GPL. I too see a lot of hypocrisy in attitudes on/., though I do understand it has a lot to do with the very human notion that we don't care as much about doing evil to evil people. It may not be just, but it's human.
Anyway, would I really scream bloody murder over an ftp site that knew people were uploading stuff that violated the GPL, but decided not to care and just act as a neutral hosting service until a GPL software copyright holder contacted them? Even if the decision was made because "neutrality" benefited them? No, not really. I'd be pissed at the one who stripped the GPL notice off in the first place. Not the ftp site that decided not to get involved in the fight and just serve as an ftp site.
So yeah. Youtube was aware that copyrighted material appeared on their servers. As if there's anyone on earth who was not aware. So what? I'm not seeing the "evil" until they either start ignoring take down notices (which they haven't) or start actively engaging in violations themselves (Which they apparently did at one point and which may end up getting them/google nailed).
Well that's good, because in the article he says that they hope to have an "inverse femtobarn" of data. Femto is 10^-15, so an inverse femtobarn would be 10^15 barns full of data.
Which, okay, is a lot of data, but I still wouldn't be acting too pompous if I kept my data in a barn instead of a library like civilized people. I mean what if your sheep eat the data, huh?
Though it makes me wonder if the German Parliament has their own barn, and if its the largest data barn in
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, Windows ME dropped like a decade ago. Way too late for a preemptive strike.
If 2011 is early, doesn't that mean 2012 is not early?
Not necessarily and by most probable implication just plain no?
The quality of grammatical and semantic nitpicking has really gone downhill around here.
2010's - humankind lifts people to the edge of the atmosphere.
2010's - humankind lifts JOYRIDING NON-MILLIONAIRE CIVILIANS to the edge of the atmosphere.
You're trying to put things in perspective, but are only looking at how high up people are going, and not the expansion in breadth in both quantity of people and the types of people doing it. During Apollo, only the experienced Air Force pilots who then became highly trained Astronauts went into space. In the decades following a tiny number of civilians went to space for a specific mission. Recently a few very wealthy tourists have visited the ISS. Soon, ordinary people with the money for a reasonable vacation will be able to see the earth from space with a company dedicated solely to providing this service.
At this rate by the time I'm retired, humankind will have set its sights for the top of the stairs. It may make it - but only if its risk-free.
At this rate by the time I'm middle-aged, I, Chris Burke, regular dude, will be able to see our Mother Earth from fucking SPACE, and be able to afford to do it on an annual basis!
If you can't see how this is bringing us closer to our Sci-Fi dreams than Yet Another Moon Mission where another two of the handful of professional astronauts add some bootprints to the lunar surface, then I think it's you who lack perspective.
"By the way, I'm sending shitloads of free energy your way every day...why the fuck are you wasting it?"
You think the sun's trying to help us? Ha! The sun's been trying to murder us for as long as we've been around, but the stupid ozone layer and magnetosphere keep getting in the way!
You realize you're basically teasing it right? It's like you're wearing a bulletproof vest that turns impacts into electricity for your iphone, and you're telling the guy in the machinegun turret "Hey thanks for the free kinetic energy!"
Destroying animals that are no danger to others and would make suitable pets is one example.
It's a liability issue. My S.O. is taking a biotech course, and has learned that most animals in studies are euthanized as a matter of course. The reason is apparently the fear of lawsuits should the animal ever do anything and it being blamed on whatever treatments they gave it. This made her very sad. It sounds retarded and lazy to me. Is it not possible to sign a waiver that says "This animal was once treated with a new kind of doggie aspirin. It is completely safe as far as we know, but if somehow it turns the dog into Kujo in five years, you've been warned." No, just kill em and the problem goes away...
Kill the upper class and you kill the middle class.
That would be an interesting and relevant comment if MY WHOLE POINT wasn't that we AREN'T "killing" the upper class with progressive taxes. Not anywhere close! They aren't even paying the tax amount that they should be. And even if they were, it wouldn't even come close to ending the upper class. They'd still be ridiculously rich!
No, instead we're killing the middle class directly, and letting the rich shirk their responsibility with accounting tricks. Kinda makes your argument moot, in as much as it applied in the first place.
Class warfare never ends well.
Quoting Buffet again: "There's class warfare all right, and my class is winning."
But I forgot, the kind of class warfare where the wealthy suck up all wealth from the middle and lower class, creating ever-escalating concentration of wealth in their hands, is good for us. It's only when we want to stop this from happening that it's bad.
The current view of "spent" fuel is akin to refining crude oil to make gasoline and then having to store all the waste diesel, fuel oil and other petroleum byproducts until the end of time.
So to make sure I have this car analogy right... you're saying that these new reactors are like a Volkswagen Jetta?
Come up with something that uses solar, ponies, or solar ponies and they might bite.
Your solar ponies are an affront to God, a crime against Nature, and completely Awesome. Please make more!
And for the record, they definitely bite.
which is why I started by saying, "assuming the mouse is on the right hand side..."
Which is why I said "Why would you assume that?" :)
Why would the mouse tend to be towards the right-hand side of the screen? Is it because a control that gets used alot--like, say, a scrollbar--is over there? If all the controls for a window were on the left hand side, would the mouse tend to live over there?
The point is -- there's no natural reason, at least not suggested by Fitt's Law, for the scrollbar (or any other UI element) to be on the right. There's no relationship between right-handedness and having UI elements on the right -- which is actually what the OP was suggesting.
In that context the Fitt's Law argument is circular. The scrollbar is on the right because that's where the mouse is, and the mouse is on the right because that's where the scrollbar is.
Remember that close things are easier to hit than far away things and bigger things are easier to hit than small things. Scroll bars down the side of the window are pretty big things. The scrollbar on this window that I'm typing into is probably about 1400 pixels high.
Sure. But the argument would still be that it would be faster to access if it were on the left, and just as importantly moving from the large scroll bar to the smaller elements -- assuming the other UI elements I mentioned stayed where they are. There is a natural argument for that though, and it's our top-down left-right reading convention.
I remember when the Mozilla 'help' menu was on the right... Barely, because it was only after someone asked aloud (er atype?) why it was over there that I ever noticed it in the first place.
There's also a question of the algorithm used to control the mouse. Most systems do not use a 1:1 ratio (ie, move the mouse 1 inch to move the pointer 1 inch). It usually depends on the acceleration of the mouse.
Which WP mentions Fitt's Law doesn't take into account. At least in the equation. The principles behind it make sense in broader circumstances, just the calculation gets more complicated.
It seems like part of the problem is that unless you're starting from scratch, you're going to need more data to figure out what Fitt's suggests. Assume you can't move either the scrollbar from it's traditional right side, or the menu/toolbar elements from the left side. Where should the window controls be? You'd need actual usage data to figure out what people interact with most often just prior to using said controls, and vice versa. My intuition says people are more likely to hit the 'save' key and then minimize or close a window than they are to scroll a bit then minimize. But "programmer's intuition" has led to a lot of shitty UIs so who am I to say?
P.S. Forgot to mention this before, but I do not think the mouse scroll wheel, or as I call it "The Carpal-Tunnelator", are good reasons to get rid of scroll bars. :P
What you really mean to say here is that what most people call Anarchy is not, and would be better described as Warlordism.
Or rather, Anarchy is only Anarchy for about ten minutes and then becomes Warlordism as a matter of course.
No system of "government" is more quickly and more completely corrupted into its opposite -- and this by design.
How can millions of people who cannot afford health care get free health care?
By waiting until their conditions are serious or critical and then going to the ER, which is much more expensive than traditional care for the same condition, and ludicrously more expensive than preventative care. And that's not even counting that prices are already higher for the uninsured!
The added costs by the health care companies will be passed down to the customers.
You mean they are passed down to the paying customers. You and I are already paying for the uninsured! So given that, would you rather pay for ultra-expensive emergency care, or pay for cheaper regular care?
Locking people out of the regular health care system and forcing them to use emergency services because they can't afford insurance is a serious case of cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Health care costs could have been cut more by stopping all the frivolous health care related law suites.
I'm not saying it isn't a good cause, but that is a trivial amount of savings.
No, we're going to save more money by reducing the amount we are paying for health care for the poor. Just because that cost is now coming out in the open doesn't mean we weren't paying for it before. We were, and paying more at that.
Heck they used to say no more taxes for those making less than $250K (per couple I think). Well, in many parts of the US, that is NOT being wealthy. I think those living in SF and NYC might could vouch for that.
Whereas I think being able to afford to live in the parts of SF or NYC that cost that much means you're wealthy. If you make $250k you're wealthy. If you choose to spend most of that on an apartment in lower Manhattan, that's your choice.
I forget the exact statistic, but something along the lines of the top 10%-15% or so already pay > 80% of the US's taxes.
Yes but they also have over 90% of the wealth. Funny how that works out.
At some point, you can't squeeze more money out of them and have to hit lower hanging fruit.
We aren't even squeezing them. They sure as fuck aren't paying 80% of their own income as taxes if that's what that factoid above was meant to imply. They aren't even paying the proportionally greater amount that our progressive taxation system is supposed to make them pay!
As Warren Buffet noted, he pays less in taxes than his secretary.
There's plenty of squeezing left that can be done, and Mr. Buffet agrees. But really, I'd be happy just ensuring that our tax system is in fact progressive.
But, i actually rtfa
Pfft. Great! There goes your chance to sound smarter than the professional researchers. Now you only sound smarter than the slashdotters racing to sound smarter than the researchers. Some accomplishment!
Volunteers [were] told they were either leaders or subordinates. The leaders were given a large office, and the subordinates given a small windowless space.
Ha! That doesn't solve the problem, there's still an issue here that started with the second run of the trial.
Researcher: "Okay, now for control purposes we need to switch the groups. Now, who hasn't been a 'leader' yet?"
Sociopath: "Oh, not me!"
Researcher: "Wait, weren't a leader last time?"
Sociopath: "Golly, no! I swear!"
Researcher: "Okay then."
See? The good liars are still more likely to be leaders. ;)
1. Things that are closer to the mouse are quicker to access than things far away from the mouse
From this, assuming that the mouse is on the right hand side of the screen, accessing a same-sized scrollbar would be quicker if it is on the right than if it were on the left.
Why would you assume the mouse pointer is on the right-hand side of the screen? Because the mouse itself is on the right-hand side of the keyboard (for right-handed folks)? The mouse is always on the right side, regardless of where the pointer is!
Fitt's law says that minimizing total distance traveled is good. This means moving the mouse minimally, which means moving the mouse pointer minimally, irrespective of the absolute position of your hand relative to the screen. Why does that matter? It looks like an argument for clustering UI elements together, not an argument that scroll bars belong on the right side of the window to account for right-handedness.
In fact, since most active UI elements in a window (menu items, tool bar icons) are on the left side, it sounds to me that Fitt's Law is an argument for having the scroll bars and window controls on the left.
Of course they get a vote. Most of them choose to vote for less ego stroking and stupid political infighting so they cast their vote for Windows. Believe it or not, most people don't like software that changes every time you try to use it, regardless of the reasons behind the changes.
Ah, so they vote for having the ego stroking and political infighting happen behind closed doors in a process they are never allowed to even watch, much less participate in. They get the sudden changes handed down from on high without even knowing that there were dissenting opinions. I can see the advantage.
I don't get what the big deal is. So you don't get to tell Mark Shuttleworth what to do. When was that ever an advertised feature of Ubuntu? You can submit bug reports or observations or your comments on how things should be, but when has that ever been implied to be a mandate for developers to go do it?
Where was the implication that Ubuntu was a Democracy?
Ubuntu is as Open and Free as ever. The community is as strong as ever (and you can have strong communities around completely proprietary software).
It sounds like the real problem is that they wanted something, and didn't get it, but thought they should. Which means guess what, welcome to ego stroking and political infighting.
The US is a republic, not a democracy.
The U.S. is a republic because it's leader is a President, not a Monarch.
The comparison you meant to make is "The US is a Representative Democracy, not a Direct Democracy."
Both are kinds of Democracy.
My schooling did not gloss over the differences, it actually taught them correctly.
The only one who uses "republic" and "democracy" like you do is the CIA World Factbook, and it's wildly inconsistent and basically random in how it applies its terms. Don't learn civics from the CIA.
Eh, how would I have a tax on zero income? And would I care if the government gave itself some money? Not really.
Exactly.
Remember, the insurance premium I HAVE TO PAY isn't going to the government... it is going to a private company.
What's the difference if the government is paying it to a private company or to themselves?
Point is - YOU don't necessarily have to pay anything. So your basic complaint that you HAVE TO PAY is moot, because you don't.
Income taxes: Only if you earn money
Now, however, the second you become an adult in this country you have to pony up money to the government or insurance company, or else you will be fined.
If you had to pay income taxes even if you earned no money, but the government actually paid it for you in that case, would that be okay?
That's basically what's happening here. You have to have insurance, but you only pay for it if you make money.
Indeed, calling an Objectivist a Libertarian is far too kind. Libertarians don't preach selfishness as a virtue. Only the Randians who have mostly hijacked the movement would find that a complement.
I prefer the more accurate term, Sociopath.
I'm going to have to try this with beer. For science, of course.
Me too. But I lack the equipment for carbon dating, so I'll have to skip that part. I guess I'll have to make up for it with volume!
What is this, Logan's Run? Just because something is over 30 doesn't mean it's not relevant.
Oh yeah? Then why did I receive an official Certificate of Irrelevance on my 30th birthday?
Oh wait. I just checked the date on it. Turns out it was caught in the mail system for fifteen years. Never mind.
That is exactly my point.
Your point is exactly that there's basically no evil except where one guy chose to violate copyright on purpose and was bitched out by the others for it, demonstrating their lack of evilness?
I don't think so.
If they find nothing at all, it shows that Google failed at proper due diligence prior to buying YouTube.
The implication being that Google should have discovered this one instance of actual evil and based on that refused to buy Youtube. "Proper due diligence" is reading every internal email ever, and if you find one instance of something bad, no sale?
Makes no sense to me. Precious few purchases would ever be made if that was the case. Or, alternatively, practically every company ever fails your definition of due diligence.
But let's say they did see that email, and said to themselves "well that guy did this, but he stopped when told to, so no biggie." That's how I feel about it. And what would be the horrible crime here exactly?
Either way, it's bad.
I'm not seeing it. A few instances of actual copyright infringement would not be the end of the world for Google. It'd barely be anything.
The rest, hey maybe legally it's an issue, but I don't think it should be. I don't want every hosting service to have to act as copyright police as well. I think that's nuts, and bound to result in over-aggressive policies that stifle free speech.
Wha? You mean physicists don't REALLY measure data in terms of books stacked up in a barn, and Germans don't use barns as libraries? I never would have guessed that I was actually just making a "How many Libraries of Congress is that?" joke!
However, I absolutely demand that others respect the licensing terms I distribute my materials under, and I respect the licenses chosen by others. Violating that is absolutely inexcusable. It irritates me to no end that the open source community will frequently scream bloody murder over a GPL violation, then turn around and say stuff like this "isn't evil."
If ever there were a case for RTFA, this is surely it.
Okay I did, and the only truly Evil part was where that Jawed guy was actually posting copyrighted videos himself to drive hits, and the other founders told him to knock it off. As they should have, because that just sucks.
The rest is basically them making a conscious decision to not care that a lot of user-uploaded videos were copyrighted, and to put the onus on the copyright holder to send them take down notices.
I get your point about the GPL. I too see a lot of hypocrisy in attitudes on /., though I do understand it has a lot to do with the very human notion that we don't care as much about doing evil to evil people. It may not be just, but it's human.
Anyway, would I really scream bloody murder over an ftp site that knew people were uploading stuff that violated the GPL, but decided not to care and just act as a neutral hosting service until a GPL software copyright holder contacted them? Even if the decision was made because "neutrality" benefited them? No, not really. I'd be pissed at the one who stripped the GPL notice off in the first place. Not the ftp site that decided not to get involved in the fight and just serve as an ftp site.
So yeah. Youtube was aware that copyrighted material appeared on their servers. As if there's anyone on earth who was not aware. So what? I'm not seeing the "evil" until they either start ignoring take down notices (which they haven't) or start actively engaging in violations themselves (Which they apparently did at one point and which may end up getting them/google nailed).
Well that's good, because in the article he says that they hope to have an "inverse femtobarn" of data. Femto is 10^-15, so an inverse femtobarn would be 10^15 barns full of data.
Which, okay, is a lot of data, but I still wouldn't be acting too pompous if I kept my data in a barn instead of a library like civilized people. I mean what if your sheep eat the data, huh?
Though it makes me wonder if the German Parliament has their own barn, and if its the largest data barn in