I'm sorry, but you clearly don't understand journalism.
Uh, who are you again?
Journalists have to decide which things are worth reporting and which aren't
Yes, in television and print media, and when determining what new stories to cover, journalists have limited resources (reporter time, air time, pages) and must make tough decisions. But we're talking about an interview that was already done and was going to air as a late-night rerun. It actually required more effort and more resources to re-edit the interview.
and which accusations are fair to allow.
No, journalists are not supposed to make this sort of judgment. If a journalist is attempting to ascertain the fairness of a third party's statement in order to decide whether or not to report that statement, they have already failed to be an impartial channel for delivering facts to the public.
Now, if a journalist hears the claim by some no-name crackpot on the street that UFOs abducted his goldfish, yes, there's no point in reporting that, because there's no question that it's not news. But when Bill Maher suggests on Larry King Live that the soon-to-step-down chairman of the RNC might be gay, there's a wealth of reasons why that might be considered news (several of them shown here in boldface). And if you've already reported it in a live interview, it's a disservice to the public to censor that interview in reruns.
Definitely the wrong decision for a profession that is supposed to serve the public.
Can't you do that without offsets, though? If each country agrees to a cap on its own pollution output without offsets, then the countries whose pollution must decrease the most will invest the most money in pollution control technology, from which the whole world can benefit. With offsets, the money will go first to non-industrialized countries who have no technology or research base, and only after those caps are filled will pollution control be invested in.
Really, offsets are more a veiled attempt to redistribute wealth than they are an attempt to control pollution.
On the other hand, as a news organization, doesn't CNN have a duty to report the news? It's anybody's guess as to whether Bill Maher claiming that Ken Mehlman is gay qualifies as news, of course, but if CNN is censoring itself by removing Maher's claim and presenting the rest of the interview in an incomplete fashion, that's certainly irresponsible of them.
Suppose Country A is a heavy polluter with money to blow. Country B is a small agricultural nation with very little money but very little pollution output.
Country B says to Country A, "We have a sizable pollution offset to sell you. We'll sell it to you for X dollars."
Now, Country A has a choice. Buy the offset for X dollars, or spend Y dollars updating pollution infrastructure. There are two cases here:
X < Y: The offset is cheaper than the infrastructure improvements, so Country A purchases Country B's offsets and continues polluting as much as it did before.
Y < X: The infrastructure improvements are cheaper than the offset, so Country A says, "No deal." Country B realizes that if they don't lower their price, they'll be sitting on an offset they aren't using. So, Country B lowers their price so that X < Y, at which point Country A buys the offset and continues polluting as much as it did before.
In other words, offsets really are crap, and all they do is transfer wealth.
After only four levels of sharing, there's N incidences which could not have happened (theoretically) if that first individual had not shared that content.
If that's the theory, then legally, the participants are all jointly and severally liable for the damages. That means that (a) the plaintiff can choose to sue any (one or more) of the participants for the full amount of the damages; (b) the people who get sued can then sue the other participants so that the damages are eventually split N ways; and (c) the plaintiff cannot claim further damages from any of the participants, because the plaintiff has already been compensated.
So, for each suit the ??AA wins, there's some large number of other file sharers whose liability has already been resolved.
People who take an ungodly amount of time to answer simple questions are among the most annoying people on the planet.
No kidding. These are the same people who make me spend all three hours proctoring a final exam, even though they do nothing but flip through the pages, nibble their pencil, sigh, look around the room, and don't actually answer any questions for the last 45 minutes of it.
Oh right, wise friend of the internet Ed "On Friday I urged the Bush Administration to 'apprehend' and shut down whoever had created a new website that enabled persons without a plane ticket to easily fake a boarding pass" Markey...
Markey was right. That website produced forged documents, where the express purpose for producing those documents is to evade federal law enforcement (specifically, the TSA). Both the forging and the use of the forged documents are crimes, and the federal government has every right both to shut down the site and to prosecute the site owner.
Now, if one believes the site owner's reasons for making it - to show how gaping a security hole this is - then he doesn't deserve to spend the next 20 years in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison. Hopefully he can make a deal with prosecutors for some sort of probation, at the end of which this incident gets expunged from his record.
Also hopefully, federal regulators will take this as the lesson it was meant to be, and beef up security around this whopper of a hole.
They already put big honkin' screens on those things. They should just make the buttons as big as possible. It'd also make things a lot easier for amputees and people with tremors.
Okay, so we have a story on a political website ("Friends of Liberty") with a link only to published comments by another political website ("PapersPlease.org") concerning a proposal where the original RFP was posted July 14 of this year. Where was the outrage then, where was the irate Slashdot article then?
Could it possibly be that this regulation would not have the effect that the far left claims that it would have?
If you read the regulation proposal, what this regulation change would actually do is require manifests to be transmitted to US Customs before the aircraft pushes back from the gate, rather than 15 minutes after takeoff (which is the current regulation), so that DHS can have do-not-fly list passengers removed from the flight before it takes off rather than causing a possible situation in the air.
This attempt at political chicanery on Slashdot's part is so transparent it's laughable.
The answer here is pretty simple. As long as YouTube complies with DMCA takedown requests, they're safe. So, whenever someone files a takedown request, take down the content (temporarily) and negotiate a deal with them.
Oh, and YouTube should be careful about this. I'm sure there are lots of folks out there (RIAA included) who will happily file takedown requests and then take money to put the content back up when they don't even hold the copyright in the first place.
Voted FOR investigating "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas"
Actually, he voted against that resolution. The CNet article was incredibly unclear in how checks and X's were assigned to the votes, but as the sibling to this post suggests, the check mark indicates that they voted in the tech-friendly way, which wasn't necessarily "yes".
That's what voter-verified paper trails are all about, except instead of letting the voter handle the paper ballot (and potentially walk out with the thing), most machines with VVPT print out the receipt behind a window, allow the voter to inspect and confirm/reject the ballot, and then drop the receipt into an internal ballot box.
This story (sans lawsuit) hit the big time October 12-ish. It's amusing to note that while Universal Tube foolishly complained to the press before looking into other opportunities, there's at least one person out there who was paying a bit more attention:
$ whois universal-tube.com
Donald Tang
360 W 43rd St, S-8E
New York, New York 10036
United States
Domain Name: UNIVERSAL-TUBE.COM
Created on: 12-Oct-06
Expires on: 12-Oct-07
Last Updated on:
Out of curiosity, why didn't you go ahead and file a suit anyway? It costs a day off work plus a small fee ($50 in City of Dayton small claims) to file the suit, a cost which automatically gets reimbursed if you win, and since the would-be defendant is a landlord, it would be easy to have them served by mail (see TFA for info on that).
Something else to consider is that the candidates are most likely always listed in the same order for every voter. Depending on the facing of the screen, it may cause problems for tall users, short users, or people on the extremes of each, and the errors will always be in the same direction for each of those groups.
In the case of short people, for example, if Crist is listed first and Davis is second, then the alignment of the image with the touchscreen is likelier to be such that attempting to select Davis will lead to actually selecting Crist. Short people attempting to vote for Crist won't have the problem of accidentally voting for Davis, because they'd already be either off the top of the list of names or at the top of the touchscreen.
One solution would be an adjustable screen that can be pivoted to face the user. If the screens are LCD, then the feature is self-managing, because users wouldn't be able to see a screen that's not adjusted to face them. Of course, a cheaper solution would be to make the selectable regions as large as possible. ("The fingers you are using to dial this phone are too fat. If you would like to order a special phone, please mash the keypad with your palm now.")
Believe it or not, we have this parallax problem in our D&D group. We use a 1/4" sheet of clear plexiglass on our tabletop for mapping dungeons, and under that we put a grid mat (the grid mat sucks for writing on with markers, but the plexi works great). The only problem is that, depending on where you're sitting, the grid lines on the mat appear to match up with a different spot on the plexi, so if two people on opposite sides of the table are cooperating to draw out a map, sometimes their lines won't match up.
Anyway, it bears mentioning that this was the same problem that led zillions of Floridians to accidentally vote for Pat Buchanan, and was partly to blame for the dramatic push toward "modern" voting machines. At least you don't get hanging chads with a touchscreen, I guess.
Also, the political and economical situation in Africa is much more complex than the image of starving children.
I was very careful not to mention starving children, not even once, in my earlier post for this very reason. I still managed to come up with a bunch of reasons why a reasonable person might think their money could be better spent.
I know this is getting way off-topic here, but judges (especially in small-claims court) are usually unwilling to give a plaintiff a bonanza (that is, damages in excess of actual damage suffered). Small-claims court is about making the plaintiff "whole", allowing them to recoup money to cover the damages they have suffered. When there is no indication of any actual damages, a small-claims judge is unlikely to award statutory damages unless the defendant's behavior was malicious or grossly negligent.
In the particular case of the law you mentioned, the law says that you are entitled to receive your property/money in addition to "damages equal to the amount wrongfully withheld". Judges will usually look at the situation and determine whether you were actually damaged by the landlord's behavior, because the law is there to motivate the landlord to return your security deposit in a timely fashion, not to create a payday for the tenant.
Since, as you described it, the landlord actually did remit the security deposit, just 7 days late, it's unlikely that a judge would be willing to award damages on top of the security deposit that you actually got back. If the landlord takes long enough that s/he hasn't returned the deposit before the suit is actually heard, that's another matter entirely.
Slashdot Mirror
He'll never truly be discorporated, as long as we continue to grok him.
Now you can LARP without leaving your house!
Let's let the folks with the mod points decide.
I'm sorry, but you clearly don't understand journalism.
Uh, who are you again?
Journalists have to decide which things are worth reporting and which aren't
Yes, in television and print media, and when determining what new stories to cover, journalists have limited resources (reporter time, air time, pages) and must make tough decisions. But we're talking about an interview that was already done and was going to air as a late-night rerun. It actually required more effort and more resources to re-edit the interview.
and which accusations are fair to allow.
No, journalists are not supposed to make this sort of judgment. If a journalist is attempting to ascertain the fairness of a third party's statement in order to decide whether or not to report that statement, they have already failed to be an impartial channel for delivering facts to the public.
Now, if a journalist hears the claim by some no-name crackpot on the street that UFOs abducted his goldfish, yes, there's no point in reporting that, because there's no question that it's not news. But when Bill Maher suggests on Larry King Live that the soon-to-step-down chairman of the RNC might be gay, there's a wealth of reasons why that might be considered news (several of them shown here in boldface). And if you've already reported it in a live interview, it's a disservice to the public to censor that interview in reruns.
Definitely the wrong decision for a profession that is supposed to serve the public.
Can't you do that without offsets, though? If each country agrees to a cap on its own pollution output without offsets, then the countries whose pollution must decrease the most will invest the most money in pollution control technology, from which the whole world can benefit. With offsets, the money will go first to non-industrialized countries who have no technology or research base, and only after those caps are filled will pollution control be invested in.
Really, offsets are more a veiled attempt to redistribute wealth than they are an attempt to control pollution.
On the other hand, as a news organization, doesn't CNN have a duty to report the news? It's anybody's guess as to whether Bill Maher claiming that Ken Mehlman is gay qualifies as news, of course, but if CNN is censoring itself by removing Maher's claim and presenting the rest of the interview in an incomplete fashion, that's certainly irresponsible of them.
Suppose Country A is a heavy polluter with money to blow. Country B is a small agricultural nation with very little money but very little pollution output.
Country B says to Country A, "We have a sizable pollution offset to sell you. We'll sell it to you for X dollars."
Now, Country A has a choice. Buy the offset for X dollars, or spend Y dollars updating pollution infrastructure. There are two cases here:
X < Y: The offset is cheaper than the infrastructure improvements, so Country A purchases Country B's offsets and continues polluting as much as it did before.
Y < X: The infrastructure improvements are cheaper than the offset, so Country A says, "No deal." Country B realizes that if they don't lower their price, they'll be sitting on an offset they aren't using. So, Country B lowers their price so that X < Y, at which point Country A buys the offset and continues polluting as much as it did before.
In other words, offsets really are crap, and all they do is transfer wealth.
After only four levels of sharing, there's N incidences which could not have happened (theoretically) if that first individual had not shared that content.
If that's the theory, then legally, the participants are all jointly and severally liable for the damages. That means that (a) the plaintiff can choose to sue any (one or more) of the participants for the full amount of the damages; (b) the people who get sued can then sue the other participants so that the damages are eventually split N ways; and (c) the plaintiff cannot claim further damages from any of the participants, because the plaintiff has already been compensated.
So, for each suit the ??AA wins, there's some large number of other file sharers whose liability has already been resolved.
All good and fine, but if you can't compute exact damages, that doesn't mean that damage wasn't done.
Well, on the People's Court*, that's the kind of situation where they do a little "rough justice".
In other words, the judge can make a reasonable estimate of the actual damage done to the plaintiff.
(*That's a Judge Milian line, not Wapner or Koch.)
In response to #16788379:
People who take an ungodly amount of time to answer simple questions are among the most annoying people on the planet.
No kidding. These are the same people who make me spend all three hours proctoring a final exam, even though they do nothing but flip through the pages, nibble their pencil, sigh, look around the room, and don't actually answer any questions for the last 45 minutes of it.
In response to #16789247:
Oh right, wise friend of the internet Ed "On Friday I urged the Bush Administration to 'apprehend' and shut down whoever had created a new website that enabled persons without a plane ticket to easily fake a boarding pass" Markey...
Markey was right. That website produced forged documents, where the express purpose for producing those documents is to evade federal law enforcement (specifically, the TSA). Both the forging and the use of the forged documents are crimes, and the federal government has every right both to shut down the site and to prosecute the site owner.
Now, if one believes the site owner's reasons for making it - to show how gaping a security hole this is - then he doesn't deserve to spend the next 20 years in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison. Hopefully he can make a deal with prosecutors for some sort of probation, at the end of which this incident gets expunged from his record.
Also hopefully, federal regulators will take this as the lesson it was meant to be, and beef up security around this whopper of a hole.
Why only focus on the past six years when there are four Presidencies' worth of history on the subject?
They're spending $50 million to do the same thing that spyware authors make money doing.
They already put big honkin' screens on those things. They should just make the buttons as big as possible. It'd also make things a lot easier for amputees and people with tremors.
They'd better - I voted for him!
Okay, so we have a story on a political website ("Friends of Liberty") with a link only to published comments by another political website ("PapersPlease.org") concerning a proposal where the original RFP was posted July 14 of this year. Where was the outrage then, where was the irate Slashdot article then?
Could it possibly be that this regulation would not have the effect that the far left claims that it would have?
If you read the regulation proposal, what this regulation change would actually do is require manifests to be transmitted to US Customs before the aircraft pushes back from the gate, rather than 15 minutes after takeoff (which is the current regulation), so that DHS can have do-not-fly list passengers removed from the flight before it takes off rather than causing a possible situation in the air.
This attempt at political chicanery on Slashdot's part is so transparent it's laughable.
The answer here is pretty simple. As long as YouTube complies with DMCA takedown requests, they're safe. So, whenever someone files a takedown request, take down the content (temporarily) and negotiate a deal with them.
Oh, and YouTube should be careful about this. I'm sure there are lots of folks out there (RIAA included) who will happily file takedown requests and then take money to put the content back up when they don't even hold the copyright in the first place.
Voted FOR investigating "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas"
Actually, he voted against that resolution. The CNet article was incredibly unclear in how checks and X's were assigned to the votes, but as the sibling to this post suggests, the check mark indicates that they voted in the tech-friendly way, which wasn't necessarily "yes".
That's what voter-verified paper trails are all about, except instead of letting the voter handle the paper ballot (and potentially walk out with the thing), most machines with VVPT print out the receipt behind a window, allow the voter to inspect and confirm/reject the ballot, and then drop the receipt into an internal ballot box.
This story (sans lawsuit) hit the big time October 12-ish. It's amusing to note that while Universal Tube foolishly complained to the press before looking into other opportunities, there's at least one person out there who was paying a bit more attention:
$ whois universal-tube.com
Donald Tang
360 W 43rd St, S-8E
New York, New York 10036
United States
Domain Name: UNIVERSAL-TUBE.COM
Created on: 12-Oct-06
Expires on: 12-Oct-07
Last Updated on:
Out of curiosity, why didn't you go ahead and file a suit anyway? It costs a day off work plus a small fee ($50 in City of Dayton small claims) to file the suit, a cost which automatically gets reimbursed if you win, and since the would-be defendant is a landlord, it would be easy to have them served by mail (see TFA for info on that).
Something else to consider is that the candidates are most likely always listed in the same order for every voter. Depending on the facing of the screen, it may cause problems for tall users, short users, or people on the extremes of each, and the errors will always be in the same direction for each of those groups.
In the case of short people, for example, if Crist is listed first and Davis is second, then the alignment of the image with the touchscreen is likelier to be such that attempting to select Davis will lead to actually selecting Crist. Short people attempting to vote for Crist won't have the problem of accidentally voting for Davis, because they'd already be either off the top of the list of names or at the top of the touchscreen.
One solution would be an adjustable screen that can be pivoted to face the user. If the screens are LCD, then the feature is self-managing, because users wouldn't be able to see a screen that's not adjusted to face them. Of course, a cheaper solution would be to make the selectable regions as large as possible. ("The fingers you are using to dial this phone are too fat. If you would like to order a special phone, please mash the keypad with your palm now.")
Believe it or not, we have this parallax problem in our D&D group. We use a 1/4" sheet of clear plexiglass on our tabletop for mapping dungeons, and under that we put a grid mat (the grid mat sucks for writing on with markers, but the plexi works great). The only problem is that, depending on where you're sitting, the grid lines on the mat appear to match up with a different spot on the plexi, so if two people on opposite sides of the table are cooperating to draw out a map, sometimes their lines won't match up.
Anyway, it bears mentioning that this was the same problem that led zillions of Floridians to accidentally vote for Pat Buchanan, and was partly to blame for the dramatic push toward "modern" voting machines. At least you don't get hanging chads with a touchscreen, I guess.
Also, the political and economical situation in Africa is much more complex than the image of starving children.
I was very careful not to mention starving children, not even once, in my earlier post for this very reason. I still managed to come up with a bunch of reasons why a reasonable person might think their money could be better spent.
I know this is getting way off-topic here, but judges (especially in small-claims court) are usually unwilling to give a plaintiff a bonanza (that is, damages in excess of actual damage suffered). Small-claims court is about making the plaintiff "whole", allowing them to recoup money to cover the damages they have suffered. When there is no indication of any actual damages, a small-claims judge is unlikely to award statutory damages unless the defendant's behavior was malicious or grossly negligent.
In the particular case of the law you mentioned, the law says that you are entitled to receive your property/money in addition to "damages equal to the amount wrongfully withheld". Judges will usually look at the situation and determine whether you were actually damaged by the landlord's behavior, because the law is there to motivate the landlord to return your security deposit in a timely fashion, not to create a payday for the tenant.
Since, as you described it, the landlord actually did remit the security deposit, just 7 days late, it's unlikely that a judge would be willing to award damages on top of the security deposit that you actually got back. If the landlord takes long enough that s/he hasn't returned the deposit before the suit is actually heard, that's another matter entirely.
They eventually patched Darwinia so you could just click a menu to run the "programs" in the game.