Particularly, it's discussion on the flaws of various studies.
Often people boil things down to a single number, and then misinterprete what it means.
The 'education' studies usually do things like compare US % of High School graduates going on to get a College degree with another country. Sounds like we are doing pretty bad, until you do a little bit more reasearch and find out that 85% of US citizens graduate high school, while only 30% of the other countries citizens get that far. Big surprise, there. They picked their richest and smartest 30% of the population and compared it to our "everyone except the worst 15%".
Then there are studies that show things like "US has worst prenatal care records in the world". But they leave out the obviously imporant fact that it is almost entirely caused by teenage mothers. If you ignore teenage mothers, the US has one of the best prenatal care records in the world. Our problem is entirely in the fact that we treat pregnant teenagers like scum instead of doing our best to help them.
You need to look beyond a single number, they are not helpfull.
The atmosphere is so thin, that the concept of a lunar air/gas plane is useless.
Surface pressure is 3 x 10 to -15 bar in the day, as compared to 1.014 bar high pressure for earth.
In fact, the atmosphere was increased by the moon landings by 30%.
Freakonomics did not actually do the correlation, they were simply the most popular book to mention the correlation, which has been well known for quite some time.
If all the traffic was illegal then RIAA would already be able to outlaw it.
They have repeatedly FAILED to do that against bit-torrent, because NO, all P2P is NOT illegal.
So you left out the following step:
2.5: Judge throws out Comcast entire argument because he declares that as per the precedent, P2P traffic has already been declared legal per se, while individual examples might contain illegal things, it is up to Comccast to prove that they are ONLYU blocking the illegal stuff, which they have totally failed to do.
step 3. (revised) Comcast gets a small fine and told "don't do that again".
Step 4. RIAA, BSA, etc. whine about how unfair the world is that they can't be even richer.
Instead you would have a thriving business of informing to the police.
No, telling people where copyrighted content is not illegal, in part because it may not be illegal for them to access it.
There are such things as fair use laws. Some countries have strict ones, some have loose ones. I can put a 5 second clip of Mickey Mouse in my documentary about Disney and guess what, Disney can not sue me. (Well, they can always sue, but they won't win.)
I agree with what the great master wrote. All jokes revolve around humans dealing with pain to other people. Humor is man kind's way of distancing ourselves so we don't go INSANE from the absolute horror that sometimes happens in this world.
EMAIL IS NOT THE SOLUTION FOR ALL YOUR BUSINESS NEEDS.
It is a person to person messaging system. It is NOT designed to be used by automated systems and anti-spam systesm should NOT take the needs of automated systems into account. Tough crap if it screws up your obnoxious mass mailing system that you CLAIM is not spam.
You want a way to send large emails to everyone? fine. YOU make it work. It is not our responsibility to help you do moronic jury rigged crap with email that is similar to spam.
You actually think this would affect the amount of spam you get? Or that spammers actually check the replies they get?
Sorry but in my experience neither of those things are true. Spammers do NOT have a problem getting 'confirmed workable emails'. Nor do they do crap with your replies.
Yeah, I was real smart.
You apparently need some real world experience.
We need a setting to block all mail that has an attachment that is NOT on your contacts list, with an auto-reply explaining this. They sender would then know to send a normal email first, requesting that you put them on your contact list.
If you pay for the full end crap, yeah. You can still get cable for 45/month, which works out to about 540/year.
No need to get that high end HBO/Showtime/etc. crap. You want to spend more per mont to get movies/'premium' crap, just get netflix or a similar service.
Look, you fool, I did not REQUIRE the victim to change his name, it is their option. Nor do I require it to be radically different. Just change the spelling of the last name and you can solve it.
You might be more attached to your name than your credit history, but can't you realize that SOMEONE might want to change their name to get out of this mess? And you won't let them do it easily? Not everyone is as silly as you.
2. No, I don't think only poor people steal. I do think that only poor people engage in IDENTITY THEFT. Because the more you steal here, the easier and quicker you get caught. It is not embezzlement. The amount of cash we are talking about here is generally so low. And no, people engaging in identity theft do not stop, but guess what, they spend their assets far quicker than they 'earn' them.
1. Allow the victim to easily establish a date of first victim hood and change his name.
2. Start new credit history using everything pre-date.
3. Prevent any mention of his old name for anything that happened post date from being connected to his new name.
THAT would be a real help. Money from thieves is not a reasonable idea. If they had money most would not be stealing, and any remaining assets will certainly be eaten up by court costs.
One of the reasons they have not been caught is BECAUSE it is a single person or small group.
Small = harder to find unless you area a '133t' programer bragginb about how good youare.
You want to keep a secret you tell NO ONE, you don't go spreading it around.
The real way to kill storm is to basically start having interpol treat it like drug trafficking, getting real cooperation, fairly quickly, instead of just ignoring it as not important.
You have cops not investigate one crime then guess what happens - the criminals FLOURISH.
You start having cops arrest people start investigating and arresting people then it works. Yeah, you have to wait till they move the crime from cyber to real life (i.e. ask for money) but it can be done.
The first opinion appears to be solely based on prejudice: This thing is not for the heavy gamers.
HEY LISTEN UP!
1. You have not done a survey, you are just spouting out the same bullcrap PR produced by Sony and other companies, namely "our product is more expensive therefore better". You do NOT know what most serious gamers are doing, just what you personally are doing and from the fact that only about 50% of the posters here agree with you, I would assume that only about 50% of the 'serious gamers' agree with you that the Wii is not for them. While this is not a survey, it is a lot better than than blindly repeating your own impressions as if they belong to everyone.
2. Serious gamers don't give a crap about whether their grandma or little sister also likes it. They care about the games (see other opinion below). If Nintendo comes out with some kick ass games for the Wii, that take advantage of the cool interface instead of trying to take advantage of the high end graphics, then guess what, Serious Gamers will use it.
3. What makes you think that next year, they won't come out with a cool upgrade along the same lines that seriously boosts the popularity of the old system? Merely a new, better interface will probably be just as easy to create as creating a new game that goes with it.
--------------
The other opinion is basically that people really don't care that much about the system, they care about the games.
Yeah, one system might have better interface and the other better video and processing power, but the truth is that the differences between them are relatively MINOR compared to the differences between the games. That is, people would rather play a good game on a bad system than a bad game on a good system. If people were to take HALO 3 and downgrade the graphics etc. to make it work on Nintendo, People would rather play HALO 3 on Nintendo with BAD graphics than playing Tic Tac Toe on a Sony machine or an XBOX, even if it had incredibally detailed graphics and animation.
This means that the game companies have no one but themselves to blame If in fact Wii is dropping in popularity it is because the companies failed to put out good games.
There are only a few things that governments are asked to rule on:
1. Things that we don't know any answer to. Here, there is no merit, just partisanship arguing about which of several proposed hyopethical fixes we should attempt.
2. Things that we know the answer, but it is too expensive to do without sacrificing other things of value (which could mean effort/privacy as well as simply expensive in cash).
Here, partisanship again determines what we do, because while we know what to do, some are willing to spend the effort/cash/privacy others are not and the decisions about it being worth it or not is at the heart of the difference between the two political sides.
3. Things we know the answer to, it is not too expensive, but the costs are born by people other than those who benefit (and the those people have political power to fight the change). For example, Tobocco industry fighting against taxes and regulations. While 'partisanship' is not inherenent in this case, generally the entrenched interests will frame their lies to appeal to one side, over the other.
4. Things we know the answer to, is not too expensive, and no entrenched existing side supports the problem.
These things get done immediately, with no partisanship. They also tend to be obvious and small (remember, they must be relatively cheap).
This particular question is a mix of type 1 and type 3 questions. The existience of ignorance makes it dificult for merit to solve the issue, and the lies of the industry are focused on Republicans, beause of a general pro-business reputation (not really earned in my opinion) of Republicans.
A Kennedy shot Lincoln and Lincoln shot Kenedy. And there was no landing on the moon.
You really think someone is moronic enough to trust the RIAA on an under the table deal like this?
"Excuse me, but I know I just lost a no-brainer law suit against you, but if you don't pay me off like you promissed you would, then I am going to sue you."
Yeah right.
The kind of thing you are talking about pretty much requires payment up front.
I have to tell you that if you are smart, #2 is not as rare as you would think.
Look for used/damaged items. Look for spelling mistakes. I got a phone for cheaper by taking a used item with a bad battery. Bought a new battery and it lasted for 1 year, about as long as most people typically have a phone for anyway.
There are basically two good reasons to go to an auction instead of a regular internet store:
1. The item you desire is hard to find and you can not find a regular internet store that sells it. This is one of the reasons why art and antiques are often sold at auction. Also what happens when a hot toy (Wii, PSP, etc.) comes out in limited quantities. Typically what happens here is that the seller puts in a minimum price, which is often more expensive than a fair price would be if the item was in reasonable supply (see Wii, etc. early sales). Here you are willing to pay more money because you can not find it on a regular store.
2. You wish to save money and believe the auction site will sell it to you for cheaper.
Now, stop and think about the ads. Let's do issue #2 first. If the guy is trying to save money, then unless he was an idiot, he already checked the commercial sites and is NOT interested in them. He will NOT look at the ads and will NOT click on them. He has already seen them and wants to get it for cheaper. So it is a non-issue for them. Also, the very nature of the fact that it IS being advertised means Issue #1 is NOT PRESENT. Chances are you could have found the item easily enough by doing a google search anyway, because hey, it was being heavily ADVERTISED, by the same people that run internet searches.
So the ebay auction sellers that are upset because they are losing people were in fact ripping them off. They were trying to sell things for MORE than they were worth by using an auction instead of trying to get a fair price. They were falsely trying to pretend the item was in short supply when it was not.
Was it illegal? No. Unethical? Well, let's say it is on the shadier side of the street.
The only time they ever lose a sale is if the buyer was a moron and they were trying to get this idiot to pay more from them for more than the item was worth. Sorry people, Ebay is NOT in the business to help you rip off fools. They are as much out their to help the buyers as to help the sellers, and you are basically complaining about ebay being fair to the buyers.
You totally misunderstood the problem and gave a very bad response. He does not care what the extension is used at all. He wants to use Calc to edit csv files. It won't let him do this. Excel can easily do this. So can any reasonably made spreadhseet program.
Not being able to open up a CSV file is sort of like making a word processor that can not open up txt files. I.E. CSV is to spreadsheets what TXT is to word processors: the simplest format that logically makes sense to save text in cell structure. Use new lines to indicate new rows, and comma's to indicate new columns.
Why would he want to do it? Because at heart csv is the easiest way to send someone spreadsheet type data if you don't know what the proper format for their program is.
Any spreadsheet program needs to be able to read in csv formated stuff. It also should be able to things in that format.
Everything I will say is USA specific. Other countries have different laws, so it does not apply to other countries.
You are correct. The act of registering the work makes it legally more dificult to claim that you do not know the object is copyrighted. But as the letter itself mentions the fact that it is copyrighted, it could be interpreted as being proven already.
But that is besides the point, as being copyrighted does not in any way prevent someone from posting the full work and commenting on it, as long as it is not being done in the same envirnonment.
I.E. You you post their letter on the internet for laughs, but not copy it word for word and use it as your own cease and desist letter against people that are doing something you do not like.
Slashdot Mirror
Often people boil things down to a single number, and then misinterprete what it means.
The 'education' studies usually do things like compare US % of High School graduates going on to get a College degree with another country. Sounds like we are doing pretty bad, until you do a little bit more reasearch and find out that 85% of US citizens graduate high school, while only 30% of the other countries citizens get that far. Big surprise, there. They picked their richest and smartest 30% of the population and compared it to our "everyone except the worst 15%".
Then there are studies that show things like "US has worst prenatal care records in the world". But they leave out the obviously imporant fact that it is almost entirely caused by teenage mothers. If you ignore teenage mothers, the US has one of the best prenatal care records in the world. Our problem is entirely in the fact that we treat pregnant teenagers like scum instead of doing our best to help them.
You need to look beyond a single number, they are not helpfull.
Actual numbers can be found here: at this NASA site
Freakonomics did not actually do the correlation, they were simply the most popular book to mention the correlation, which has been well known for quite some time.
If all the traffic was illegal then RIAA would already be able to outlaw it.
They have repeatedly FAILED to do that against bit-torrent, because NO, all P2P is NOT illegal.
So you left out the following step:
2.5: Judge throws out Comcast entire argument because he declares that as per the precedent, P2P traffic has already been declared legal per se, while individual examples might contain illegal things, it is up to Comccast to prove that they are ONLYU blocking the illegal stuff, which they have totally failed to do.
step 3. (revised) Comcast gets a small fine and told "don't do that again".
Step 4. RIAA, BSA, etc. whine about how unfair the world is that they can't be even richer.
Aren't they the people that typically investigate aviation accidents and make reports?
I don't think NADA should have anything to do with this.
If someone buys something in Canada and illegally imports something into the US, then you go after the person that IMPORTED it, not SOLD it.
The importning is done by the guy that downloads it, not the person that sells it.
Any other interpretation is bullcrap made up by people trying to change reality.
Instead you would have a thriving business of informing to the police.
No, telling people where copyrighted content is not illegal, in part because it may not be illegal for them to access it.
There are such things as fair use laws. Some countries have strict ones, some have loose ones. I can put a 5 second clip of Mickey Mouse in my documentary about Disney and guess what, Disney can not sue me. (Well, they can always sue, but they won't win.)
The majority of identity theft is committed by illegal aliens attempting to get a job. They are not rich.
"We laugh because it hurts too much to cry"
I agree with what the great master wrote. All jokes revolve around humans dealing with pain to other people. Humor is man kind's way of distancing ourselves so we don't go INSANE from the absolute horror that sometimes happens in this world.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again:
EMAIL IS NOT THE SOLUTION FOR ALL YOUR BUSINESS NEEDS.
It is a person to person messaging system. It is NOT designed to be used by automated systems and anti-spam systesm should NOT take the needs of automated systems into account. Tough crap if it screws up your obnoxious mass mailing system that you CLAIM is not spam.
You want a way to send large emails to everyone? fine. YOU make it work. It is not our responsibility to help you do moronic jury rigged crap with email that is similar to spam.
You actually think this would affect the amount of spam you get? Or that spammers actually check the replies they get? Sorry but in my experience neither of those things are true. Spammers do NOT have a problem getting 'confirmed workable emails'. Nor do they do crap with your replies. Yeah, I was real smart. You apparently need some real world experience.
We need a setting to block all mail that has an attachment that is NOT on your contacts list, with an auto-reply explaining this. They sender would then know to send a normal email first, requesting that you put them on your contact list.
If you pay for the full end crap, yeah. You can still get cable for 45/month, which works out to about 540/year. No need to get that high end HBO/Showtime/etc. crap. You want to spend more per mont to get movies/'premium' crap, just get netflix or a similar service.
You might be more attached to your name than your credit history, but can't you realize that SOMEONE might want to change their name to get out of this mess? And you won't let them do it easily? Not everyone is as silly as you.
2. No, I don't think only poor people steal. I do think that only poor people engage in IDENTITY THEFT. Because the more you steal here, the easier and quicker you get caught. It is not embezzlement. The amount of cash we are talking about here is generally so low. And no, people engaging in identity theft do not stop, but guess what, they spend their assets far quicker than they 'earn' them.
1. Allow the victim to easily establish a date of first victim hood and change his name.
2. Start new credit history using everything pre-date.
3. Prevent any mention of his old name for anything that happened post date from being connected to his new name.
THAT would be a real help. Money from thieves is not a reasonable idea. If they had money most would not be stealing, and any remaining assets will certainly be eaten up by court costs.
Declare everyone that did not vote to be hereby removed AND forbidden from upgrading to P class within a period of 5 years.
Small = harder to find unless you area a '133t' programer bragginb about how good youare.
You want to keep a secret you tell NO ONE, you don't go spreading it around.
The real way to kill storm is to basically start having interpol treat it like drug trafficking, getting real cooperation, fairly quickly, instead of just ignoring it as not important.
You have cops not investigate one crime then guess what happens - the criminals FLOURISH.
You start having cops arrest people start investigating and arresting people then it works. Yeah, you have to wait till they move the crime from cyber to real life (i.e. ask for money) but it can be done.
HEY LISTEN UP!
1. You have not done a survey, you are just spouting out the same bullcrap PR produced by Sony and other companies, namely "our product is more expensive therefore better". You do NOT know what most serious gamers are doing, just what you personally are doing and from the fact that only about 50% of the posters here agree with you, I would assume that only about 50% of the 'serious gamers' agree with you that the Wii is not for them. While this is not a survey, it is a lot better than than blindly repeating your own impressions as if they belong to everyone.
2. Serious gamers don't give a crap about whether their grandma or little sister also likes it. They care about the games (see other opinion below). If Nintendo comes out with some kick ass games for the Wii, that take advantage of the cool interface instead of trying to take advantage of the high end graphics, then guess what, Serious Gamers will use it.
3. What makes you think that next year, they won't come out with a cool upgrade along the same lines that seriously boosts the popularity of the old system? Merely a new, better interface will probably be just as easy to create as creating a new game that goes with it. -------------- The other opinion is basically that people really don't care that much about the system, they care about the games. Yeah, one system might have better interface and the other better video and processing power, but the truth is that the differences between them are relatively MINOR compared to the differences between the games. That is, people would rather play a good game on a bad system than a bad game on a good system. If people were to take HALO 3 and downgrade the graphics etc. to make it work on Nintendo, People would rather play HALO 3 on Nintendo with BAD graphics than playing Tic Tac Toe on a Sony machine or an XBOX, even if it had incredibally detailed graphics and animation.
This means that the game companies have no one but themselves to blame If in fact Wii is dropping in popularity it is because the companies failed to put out good games.
The game is king, not the system.
1. Things that we don't know any answer to. Here, there is no merit, just partisanship arguing about which of several proposed hyopethical fixes we should attempt.
2. Things that we know the answer, but it is too expensive to do without sacrificing other things of value (which could mean effort/privacy as well as simply expensive in cash). Here, partisanship again determines what we do, because while we know what to do, some are willing to spend the effort/cash/privacy others are not and the decisions about it being worth it or not is at the heart of the difference between the two political sides.
3. Things we know the answer to, it is not too expensive, but the costs are born by people other than those who benefit (and the those people have political power to fight the change). For example, Tobocco industry fighting against taxes and regulations. While 'partisanship' is not inherenent in this case, generally the entrenched interests will frame their lies to appeal to one side, over the other.
4. Things we know the answer to, is not too expensive, and no entrenched existing side supports the problem. These things get done immediately, with no partisanship. They also tend to be obvious and small (remember, they must be relatively cheap).
This particular question is a mix of type 1 and type 3 questions. The existience of ignorance makes it dificult for merit to solve the issue, and the lies of the industry are focused on Republicans, beause of a general pro-business reputation (not really earned in my opinion) of Republicans.
You really think someone is moronic enough to trust the RIAA on an under the table deal like this?
"Excuse me, but I know I just lost a no-brainer law suit against you, but if you don't pay me off like you promissed you would, then I am going to sue you."
Yeah right.
The kind of thing you are talking about pretty much requires payment up front.
Look for used/damaged items. Look for spelling mistakes. I got a phone for cheaper by taking a used item with a bad battery. Bought a new battery and it lasted for 1 year, about as long as most people typically have a phone for anyway.
There are basically two good reasons to go to an auction instead of a regular internet store:
1. The item you desire is hard to find and you can not find a regular internet store that sells it. This is one of the reasons why art and antiques are often sold at auction. Also what happens when a hot toy (Wii, PSP, etc.) comes out in limited quantities. Typically what happens here is that the seller puts in a minimum price, which is often more expensive than a fair price would be if the item was in reasonable supply (see Wii, etc. early sales). Here you are willing to pay more money because you can not find it on a regular store.
2. You wish to save money and believe the auction site will sell it to you for cheaper.
Now, stop and think about the ads. Let's do issue #2 first. If the guy is trying to save money, then unless he was an idiot, he already checked the commercial sites and is NOT interested in them. He will NOT look at the ads and will NOT click on them. He has already seen them and wants to get it for cheaper. So it is a non-issue for them. Also, the very nature of the fact that it IS being advertised means Issue #1 is NOT PRESENT. Chances are you could have found the item easily enough by doing a google search anyway, because hey, it was being heavily ADVERTISED, by the same people that run internet searches.
So the ebay auction sellers that are upset because they are losing people were in fact ripping them off. They were trying to sell things for MORE than they were worth by using an auction instead of trying to get a fair price. They were falsely trying to pretend the item was in short supply when it was not.
Was it illegal? No. Unethical? Well, let's say it is on the shadier side of the street.
The only time they ever lose a sale is if the buyer was a moron and they were trying to get this idiot to pay more from them for more than the item was worth. Sorry people, Ebay is NOT in the business to help you rip off fools. They are as much out their to help the buyers as to help the sellers, and you are basically complaining about ebay being fair to the buyers.
You totally misunderstood the problem and gave a very bad response. He does not care what the extension is used at all. He wants to use Calc to edit csv files. It won't let him do this. Excel can easily do this. So can any reasonably made spreadhseet program. Not being able to open up a CSV file is sort of like making a word processor that can not open up txt files. I.E. CSV is to spreadsheets what TXT is to word processors: the simplest format that logically makes sense to save text in cell structure. Use new lines to indicate new rows, and comma's to indicate new columns. Why would he want to do it? Because at heart csv is the easiest way to send someone spreadsheet type data if you don't know what the proper format for their program is. Any spreadsheet program needs to be able to read in csv formated stuff. It also should be able to things in that format.
But that is besides the point, as being copyrighted does not in any way prevent someone from posting the full work and commenting on it, as long as it is not being done in the same envirnonment.
I.E. You you post their letter on the internet for laughs, but not copy it word for word and use it as your own cease and desist letter against people that are doing something you do not like.
Impervious to the bites of their pets.
French Connection United Kingdom'ing parrot can't learn what is OK to bite and what is not OK to bite.