Python which is slow, has a much smaller user base and far less consistent and well-documented standard library?
Perl whose readability for many coders is next to nothing?
C++ because we all know that more buffer overflows and random craziness is what OpenOffice needs to compete with Microsoft Office?
C# since 93-95% of the desktop users out there use Windows, why bother with the minority of others? (I actually quite like C# and am hopeful about Mono)
Ruby because a language that most coders have never even seen before is clearly the best way for a fresh start?
Objective-C because when Steve Jobs takes over the world, we'll need to be on his good side?
C, since objects really are overrated for anything that normal developers might want to maintain?
So seriously, of all of the major language choices, which would be better?
You have the fees for the record labels, $.30 + 1.5-3.0% for credit card processing and then it's a grand total of $5.00 a month. Add in that they don't provide it to sell hardware and you have a much smaller operation than what Apple has.
I have never bought into the myth that blogging is such a highly accountable medium, but this is precisely the reason why the "MSM" is losing ground to at least new media. How can you take seriously a publication that just makes up quotes? That's borderline illegal behavior.
He should be fired on the spot for this kind of behavior. Summary loss of employment is the only way that a media company like Wired can come out of this clean.
They're trying to associate google.com.net with them in an effort to confuse customers. Thus they are guilty of a trademark violation and Google can sue them.
doesn't mean that many or most of the Bible isn't meant to be taken literally. When Jesus said that if you lust after a woman you have committed adultery, was he speaking figuratively? I seriously doubt that...
How about Matt 7:1-6 where He explained part of the process of judgement? Most of Jesus' ministry was literal and meant to be taken as such. You can't read in multiple interpretations into most of what Jesus said because there is only 1 valid reading for most it, like much of the Bible.
Why would a woman who happens to be attractive catch shit from me for her beauty? If she were flaunting her looks, that'd be a different story. It's one thing to dress well, it's quite another for her to dress with the purpose of making men stare at her body and other women jealous.
As for the picture of the family, what's wrong with that? I don't know anyone who would actually bring in a picture of them doing more than hugging their wife. Most people, myself included, would not be offended by a picture of two gay men just hugging each other.
As for public displays of affection in the cafeteria, again people should be discrete. What sets most people off about homosexuals is their behavior is not normal and so many are not discrete about it.
Homosexuality is not normal, it is abberant behavior and ironically it is only religions like Christianity which give homosexuals inherent worth as humans. From a biological perspective, a homosexual is worthless because they are genetic dead ends. I am a conservative Christian and have been around many homosexuals. Some of them I really like as people, many I find are too sensitive, too quick to stereotype and too disrespectful of others. In a way though, they are just a canary in the coal mine about the direction that American society in general is headed.
I am a calvinist, not an arminian legalist. Homosexuality is not much of a moral problem because it is a "canary in the coal mine" moral problem for society. Romans 1 warns that as a nation turns away from God, it will become a major problem because God turns people over to their own evil lusts and allows them to grow even more depraved. We conservative Christians (that is a religious statement, not political) are not monolithic. The calvinist-leaning among us are the ones who tend to look at homosexuality's growth in America and say to America as a whole: repent.
The reason that homosexuality was not a problem in America for the first 100-150 years of its existance was that America was a more Godly nation. No amount of legislating morality will make us Godly, just legalistic and then we'll end up roasting alongside the Pharisees who did the same thing in ancient Israel. The rule of thumb is that the more a nation struggles with homosexuality, the more that the nation as a whole has moved away from God.
As a Christian, this saddens me because there is no easy solution for the masses. We aren't the "next Israel," we aren't the "greatest nation" and we most certainly aren't right with God. In the words of Paul, we "are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, 30slanderers, Godhaters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 31they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. 32Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them."
Look at the way we encourage sociopathic behavior in corporations and call it good. See how the corporate culture causes people to use and abuse each other for a mere bonus! Greed is held up as a virtue rather than vice, people toss out their children and spouses for "self-realization" with a newer, cheaper lover. We tolerate corruption that rots our nation's institutions like a termite-infected tree and we high five many of those who lead the way. Look at Donald Trump, the man is a monster according to the commandment to love others and keep them safe. He throws out little old ladies from their family homes so that he can build a limo parking lot for his casino! Yet many idolize him and he's actually got a modest following in our country.
This is the real problem. Our corporate and political cultures revel in blatant evil and dare to call it righteousness. It is because we do this that we have forgotten the true righteous core of God's morality and God in His anger has basically walked away from America. It didn't begin with men secretly but
Unlike your skin color, it's not hard for a well-behaved homosexual to keep from getting fired in the vast majority of companies because of their sexuality. The key is being polite and well-behaved, two things that used to be common components of business decorum.
Your sexuality has no place in the office and it is common courtesy to leave it outside work. OMG did I just say that people should restrain themselves at work? Yes, I did. Your co-workers don't need to know who you like to fuck and if you genuinely respected them you wouldn't be talking about that sort of thing in mixed company.
Everytime someone says bullshit like "I'm here, I'm queer, get used to it" they are actually saying "I'm here, I'm not like you and I really don't give a flying fuck whether I am rude to you or not." The homosexuals I know that get along well in mixed company are the ones that feel that sexuality is personal. The ones that throw it in peoples' faces are the ones that catch shit from everyone, sometimes even other gays.
Most of the girls that try our program leave because they just don't like it. They don't like to write code. More power to them, let them find what they want to do. Most of the freshman going in have no idea how much work will be expected of them in their junior and senior years and when they get a taste of that, they quit for easier majors in the liberal arts, social sciences or business school. It's more a problem of laziness than anything else.
Why not provide free food to everyone, free clothes, video games, guns, cars, housing, etc.? At what point is it no longer a good idea for the government to provide a service? Traffic lights, streets, cops, etc. keep the city working and organized. Socialized WiFi just gives people free internet access.
The difference between this and a business is that the business has a good reason to keep costs down: to stay in business. When the WiFi project is in need of an upgrade, guess who pays? Everyone, regardless of whether they like it or not. Not only that, but knowing most government projects it'll cost more and be less useful than a private sector alternative.
Maybe that's because they're not able to hide behind "state" or "national" security like government agencies can. I'd rather have a private business provide internet service to me because at least I know for a fact that they won't let the police hop on their network anytime without a warrant. How do you know that the government's ISP is providing you that security?
The government would probably treat your internet usage with the same level of scrutiny you have going into an important government building. I don't know about your state, but in VA there are a number of restrictions on basic rights when you go into public buildings.
The public shouldn't be forced to pay for a service that will compete against private sector alternatives. Socialized internet services will only lower the quality of the service in general where they are implemented because people will go to them for the price: free or near free. It's one thing to provide broadband for free in public libraries or to subsidize a charity's computer lab for those without the money to own their own computer and broadband service. It's quite another to provide an entire service that competes against real providers.
I already pay $45 a month for Adelphia's cable service and it would make me quite mad to have to pay more taxes to subsidize someone else's connection to their home. I would mind a buck or two going to buy cable access for the local library since that is totally open to the public. Free wireless though, is something that people can use in their own homes and thus I oppose it. If they are going to get free access then it should be only in a public place where the government can scrutinize their use. The last thing I want to pay taxes for is a connection that lets some mooch run file sharing software off the public dime all day.
Oh and if the government is running the wireless service you can pretty much bet safely that the government will let the police play around with the ISP. They'll be free to log everything and scrutinize everything you do on it because it's a government resource owned and operated by a local government, not a private corporation. That means that if they want to log everything and periodically check to see who is doing what, well that's their prerogative. Your expectation of 4th amendment protection online will all but go out the window if you use the gubermint's service.
What most people are pissed off about is the fact that it does in fact regulate speech. You cannot run an ad in favor of or against a candidate within 60-90 days of an election. That means technically you can't run an ad in a local paper which might be something you and your buddies could easily pay for.
I could understand TV and radio ads that cost more than say.... $5,000 because you could argue that the average person couldn't be behind that. Yet the problem here is that eventually they can and will call your website hosting fees an expenditure for the purposes of this law. That means that if you make a flash ad for your site that's anti-Bush you're now in violation of the law.
The Supreme Court ruling that the existing legislation was constitutional? The precedent has sadly already been set, that's why this bill is trying to lessen the damage.
Since when has the public had a right to know about product specs that haven't been released and are being held under a NDA? This is not some Pentagon Paper revelation or finding out that an employee under a NDA saw dumping of toxic chemicals or a warning sticker on the product saying that exposure lead to cancer. This was an attempt to get people to violate their NDA so that these apple rumor sites could get the inside scoop before the mainstream media.
A lot of these chicken littles are focusing on this to exclusion of the FEC's remarks about federal regulation of online speech. How quickly the tune would change for bloggers like Michelle Malkin, if someone did this to them. Imagine if someone paid your spouse to take your journal information and then published your secrets online. You'd be livid too.
The problem with these rumor mills is that they make money by reporting on this that they have no intention of scrutinizing for accuracy whilst coyly suggesting that, "this is the unofficial truth from inside the company." It's one thing to make conjectures, to spout off and things like that. It is quite another to make a business out of what amounts to low-key libel. Apple's sales of the iPod shuffle according to one source I read may have been damaged because sites like ThinkSecret reported a price that Apple never claimed was possible and had no intention of selling at, thus creating an expectation that they themselves had never tried to create. That's not free speech, that's bordering on libel.
That's why they found enough money to add a $521B boondoggle medicare package that not even AARP supported, but when the time came to fund 10,000 new border patrol agents they said they didn't have the money for more than 210, right?
of what happens when the government locks out private competition and runs its own service. It costs $0.37 to send a single letter and by law, UPS and Fedex cannot send first class mail. So what that means is that you have to pay more for a service the government provides because it doesn't give you a choice. It's either the government's service or no service at all.
Where I live in Virginia, you can get free or low cost WiFi in any of the coffee shops, and eventually other places will no doubt start providing it. I don't want my local government providing socialized WiFi in my area because local governments are notorious for being inept at spending control and quality of service. I'd rather pay adelphia for my access, have a wireless router on the connection and be able to go to a coffee shop and get free when I'm out and about. Barnes & Nobles' starbucks cafe charges $4.00 for 2 hours, but it's a good quality of service.
Next thing you know, though, it won't be the government picking up trash, but government telling you that you cannot compete with it. That's the way it works. There is nothing that pissess off government bureaucrats than the idea that the citizenry can go elsewhere and completely ignore them.
Oh and add in the fact that government-run Wifi will probably be completely open to law enforcement since it's a government service, not a private service. Watch the local cops argue that since it is a government utility, they don't need a warrant to log every action you take and periodically scan through them for criminal violations. That's one thing you really don't ever have to worry about the private sector allowing.
Maybe it's a good thing they failed
on
The Baby Bootstrap?
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· Score: 1, Troll
Skynet anyone? The problem with any project like this is, what happens when the program learns about hacking? If it is as adaptive as a child, then it should be able to mature and pretty soon you have a terribly devious artificial blackhat hacker on your hands.
Artificial intelligence is not bad in and of itself at all. The problem is when we want a machine that thinks like humans, especially a program that could potentially control our military. Given the record of flesh and blood humans toward each other in the 20th century alone, an artificial life form with the same basic psychological makeup as a human would be potentially an evil that'd make Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot look like church ladies.
AI that is capable of adapting to only one scenario is probably for all intents and purposes totally safe. AI that is capable of adapting in general and learning like a human will probably ultimately have the same psychological defects as a human, including a propensity for violence.
The tools need to be the best you can get for the price. Sometimes that may mean foregoing open source software, at others it means using it. What I'd like to see is a survey which compares the effectiveness of well-designed open source and closed source IT systems in business use. Take the top 5% of them that can be found and then see which is the most reliable, how much they cost and what is involved in keeping them working.
They were also professions largely consisting of two classes of people: the idle rich and the dedicated artist who was willing to live in poverty. Copyright law has made it possible for normal people to at least make some money off of their creative works.
The question is to what degree should we give legal protections? I happen to support the RIAA lawsuits since I realized that most of the people who I saw doing the file sharing when I lived on campus were students who could afford the real deal.
Go ahead, get rid of copyright law and you'll not just get rid of Brittney Spears, but also probably every band you like. Without copyright law, people would have no incentive at all to write music since anyone could play it without paying them. So much music today is written by separate song writers who aren't affiliated with the band that you're basically proposing that we give legitimacy to fucking over the little guy.
Btw, getting rid of copyrights will also destroy every open source project as some greedy company would be able to easily rip off the hard work of the developers. They come in once the project is mature, make it proprietary, close the source and sell it at a profit tied to something cool that sells. The small developer has then no legal recourse since there is no copyright law at all to protect their creation.
Can we assume that WordPress **users** are not going to be targeted by Google as a result of this? According to the WordPress site there have been about 100,000 downloads of version 1.5 and that means that a whole swath of legitimate users could get taken down by association if someone gets vindictive.
What the developer did was wrong, but no offense to Google, stop playing favorites here. Ban casinos and porn before you ban wordpress for spam because 90% of the spamming out there is done by gamblers and pornographers. This is such a small "victory" against spammers on Google that it's akin to marching a foot inside a country's sovereign territory and declaring victory over the enemy. Online casinos and pornographers do the most damage to Google so it's only appropriate for Google to go after them first.
Again, it's good of them to punish this developer, but let's be honest. In and of itself it won't be worth jack shit to stopping spammers or even slowing them down. If Google really wants to stop the problem, it needs to exclude any page with pornography, gambling and get rich schemes from its ranking system. Not saying it shouldn't index them, but when it scans the pages periodically, if it finds any comment or trackback spam on any blog or forum, it should disregard that page for the purpose of its ranking system.
You give more and more power to companies to "defend their IP" and you end up having the little guy run over like this. When CherryOS originally came out it was booting verbatim like PearPC and now you have this. They stole the PearPC developers' code and now costly litigation will probably be necessary. On top of that, where is the liability for those who may have funded the company responsible here?
There was a case recently where a small American company got royally screwed over by Toshiba too. Toshiba took the technology that was being developed for flash memory and practically gave it to San Disk. Does the government itself go tooth and nail after the big company? Of course not because "we can't punish the entire company for a few men's actions..."
Since most of the innovation comes from small time companies and individuals, those are the ones that the government should be putting the most effort into protecting from theft of their hard work. That means better protection from big companies using IP to crush them so they can rape and pillage the innovations of the smaller companies.
Everytime that the Congress drafts a law that will give an agency any meaningful rule-making power it is delegating its authority to that agency. No one elected the FEC, they were appointed by a group of politicians from two large parties whose ideological differences, in practice, are weak at best. This alone is the big problem. Can anyone, really say that Bush has change the course of the federal government enough to be a meaningful departure from Clinton? America is effectively living under a 1 party system where the two wings of the same ideology work together through compromise. The Republicans are effectively our Menshaviks and the Democrats our Bolsheviks because the course of the Republican Party has been to advance more slowly the same agenda that the Democrats will take on rapidly. The Republicans are only better at it because they know how to "temporarily" roll back government while setting the stage for permanent involvement from Iraq to gun control to abortion to medicare.
I think that you don't give people enough credit here. It takes a lot of effort to start a blog that gets any meaningful number of visitors. The crowd of bigger blogs are in essence the gatekeepers of blogging in the sense that it can be quite hard to get a lot of regular readers (thousands to tens of thousands) without being on their good side. Well, some GOP or Democratic Party hack isn't going to waltz in before an election and get there overnight because the last thing the bigger blogs want is to be caught with their pants down like Rather, especially after some of them made such a big stink about how they took Rather down. What an irony that would be, eh?
Here is something that might work. Get rid of all of the individual campaign finance regulations, and then require that politicians do two things. First, require by law that all campaign funds be accounted for. Second, require the politicians to donate all of the money that is left over to charity. The problem is that a politician can become fabulously wealthy because the law lets them keep their extra campaign dollars. In Senate races, that can literally be tens of millions of dollars. Make it illegal for incorporated entities to give money, but allow them to run ads otherwise eventually your ability to make a Flash ad lampooning Bush, Kerry, whoever will become a "loophole." That was my prediction, anyway.
MSN, Yahoo and Google need to blacklist any company that sues them over something this stupid from ever being returned favorably in their results again. There is no reason that this French company's news should be returned now when any source from the U.S., Canada, Britain, Germany, etc. is availible on the same topic.
They are directly responsible. Instead of spamming themselves, they are hiring others to do their dirty work for them. How exactly is this any different from a country hiring a band of mercenaries to fight rather than send its own army into battle? We don't blame the mercenaries nearly as much as those who hired them.
Slashdot Mirror
Python which is slow, has a much smaller user base and far less consistent and well-documented standard library?
Perl whose readability for many coders is next to nothing?
C++ because we all know that more buffer overflows and random craziness is what OpenOffice needs to compete with Microsoft Office?
C# since 93-95% of the desktop users out there use Windows, why bother with the minority of others? (I actually quite like C# and am hopeful about Mono)
Ruby because a language that most coders have never even seen before is clearly the best way for a fresh start?
Objective-C because when Steve Jobs takes over the world, we'll need to be on his good side?
C, since objects really are overrated for anything that normal developers might want to maintain?
So seriously, of all of the major language choices, which would be better?
You have the fees for the record labels, $.30 + 1.5-3.0% for credit card processing and then it's a grand total of $5.00 a month. Add in that they don't provide it to sell hardware and you have a much smaller operation than what Apple has.
I have never bought into the myth that blogging is such a highly accountable medium, but this is precisely the reason why the "MSM" is losing ground to at least new media. How can you take seriously a publication that just makes up quotes? That's borderline illegal behavior.
He should be fired on the spot for this kind of behavior. Summary loss of employment is the only way that a media company like Wired can come out of this clean.
They're trying to associate google.com.net with them in an effort to confuse customers. Thus they are guilty of a trademark violation and Google can sue them.
doesn't mean that many or most of the Bible isn't meant to be taken literally. When Jesus said that if you lust after a woman you have committed adultery, was he speaking figuratively? I seriously doubt that...
How about Matt 7:1-6 where He explained part of the process of judgement? Most of Jesus' ministry was literal and meant to be taken as such. You can't read in multiple interpretations into most of what Jesus said because there is only 1 valid reading for most it, like much of the Bible.
Why would a woman who happens to be attractive catch shit from me for her beauty? If she were flaunting her looks, that'd be a different story. It's one thing to dress well, it's quite another for her to dress with the purpose of making men stare at her body and other women jealous.
As for the picture of the family, what's wrong with that? I don't know anyone who would actually bring in a picture of them doing more than hugging their wife. Most people, myself included, would not be offended by a picture of two gay men just hugging each other.
As for public displays of affection in the cafeteria, again people should be discrete. What sets most people off about homosexuals is their behavior is not normal and so many are not discrete about it.
Homosexuality is not normal, it is abberant behavior and ironically it is only religions like Christianity which give homosexuals inherent worth as humans. From a biological perspective, a homosexual is worthless because they are genetic dead ends. I am a conservative Christian and have been around many homosexuals. Some of them I really like as people, many I find are too sensitive, too quick to stereotype and too disrespectful of others. In a way though, they are just a canary in the coal mine about the direction that American society in general is headed.
I am a calvinist, not an arminian legalist. Homosexuality is not much of a moral problem because it is a "canary in the coal mine" moral problem for society. Romans 1 warns that as a nation turns away from God, it will become a major problem because God turns people over to their own evil lusts and allows them to grow even more depraved. We conservative Christians (that is a religious statement, not political) are not monolithic. The calvinist-leaning among us are the ones who tend to look at homosexuality's growth in America and say to America as a whole: repent.
The reason that homosexuality was not a problem in America for the first 100-150 years of its existance was that America was a more Godly nation. No amount of legislating morality will make us Godly, just legalistic and then we'll end up roasting alongside the Pharisees who did the same thing in ancient Israel. The rule of thumb is that the more a nation struggles with homosexuality, the more that the nation as a whole has moved away from God.
As a Christian, this saddens me because there is no easy solution for the masses. We aren't the "next Israel," we aren't the "greatest nation" and we most certainly aren't right with God. In the words of Paul, we "are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, 30slanderers, Godhaters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 31they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. 32Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them."
Look at the way we encourage sociopathic behavior in corporations and call it good. See how the corporate culture causes people to use and abuse each other for a mere bonus! Greed is held up as a virtue rather than vice, people toss out their children and spouses for "self-realization" with a newer, cheaper lover. We tolerate corruption that rots our nation's institutions like a termite-infected tree and we high five many of those who lead the way. Look at Donald Trump, the man is a monster according to the commandment to love others and keep them safe. He throws out little old ladies from their family homes so that he can build a limo parking lot for his casino! Yet many idolize him and he's actually got a modest following in our country.
This is the real problem. Our corporate and political cultures revel in blatant evil and dare to call it righteousness. It is because we do this that we have forgotten the true righteous core of God's morality and God in His anger has basically walked away from America. It didn't begin with men secretly but
Unlike your skin color, it's not hard for a well-behaved homosexual to keep from getting fired in the vast majority of companies because of their sexuality. The key is being polite and well-behaved, two things that used to be common components of business decorum.
Your sexuality has no place in the office and it is common courtesy to leave it outside work. OMG did I just say that people should restrain themselves at work? Yes, I did. Your co-workers don't need to know who you like to fuck and if you genuinely respected them you wouldn't be talking about that sort of thing in mixed company.
Everytime someone says bullshit like "I'm here, I'm queer, get used to it" they are actually saying "I'm here, I'm not like you and I really don't give a flying fuck whether I am rude to you or not." The homosexuals I know that get along well in mixed company are the ones that feel that sexuality is personal. The ones that throw it in peoples' faces are the ones that catch shit from everyone, sometimes even other gays.
Most of the girls that try our program leave because they just don't like it. They don't like to write code. More power to them, let them find what they want to do. Most of the freshman going in have no idea how much work will be expected of them in their junior and senior years and when they get a taste of that, they quit for easier majors in the liberal arts, social sciences or business school. It's more a problem of laziness than anything else.
Why not provide free food to everyone, free clothes, video games, guns, cars, housing, etc.? At what point is it no longer a good idea for the government to provide a service? Traffic lights, streets, cops, etc. keep the city working and organized. Socialized WiFi just gives people free internet access.
The difference between this and a business is that the business has a good reason to keep costs down: to stay in business. When the WiFi project is in need of an upgrade, guess who pays? Everyone, regardless of whether they like it or not. Not only that, but knowing most government projects it'll cost more and be less useful than a private sector alternative.
Maybe that's because they're not able to hide behind "state" or "national" security like government agencies can. I'd rather have a private business provide internet service to me because at least I know for a fact that they won't let the police hop on their network anytime without a warrant. How do you know that the government's ISP is providing you that security?
The government would probably treat your internet usage with the same level of scrutiny you have going into an important government building. I don't know about your state, but in VA there are a number of restrictions on basic rights when you go into public buildings.
The public shouldn't be forced to pay for a service that will compete against private sector alternatives. Socialized internet services will only lower the quality of the service in general where they are implemented because people will go to them for the price: free or near free. It's one thing to provide broadband for free in public libraries or to subsidize a charity's computer lab for those without the money to own their own computer and broadband service. It's quite another to provide an entire service that competes against real providers.
I already pay $45 a month for Adelphia's cable service and it would make me quite mad to have to pay more taxes to subsidize someone else's connection to their home. I would mind a buck or two going to buy cable access for the local library since that is totally open to the public. Free wireless though, is something that people can use in their own homes and thus I oppose it. If they are going to get free access then it should be only in a public place where the government can scrutinize their use. The last thing I want to pay taxes for is a connection that lets some mooch run file sharing software off the public dime all day.
Oh and if the government is running the wireless service you can pretty much bet safely that the government will let the police play around with the ISP. They'll be free to log everything and scrutinize everything you do on it because it's a government resource owned and operated by a local government, not a private corporation. That means that if they want to log everything and periodically check to see who is doing what, well that's their prerogative. Your expectation of 4th amendment protection online will all but go out the window if you use the gubermint's service.
What most people are pissed off about is the fact that it does in fact regulate speech. You cannot run an ad in favor of or against a candidate within 60-90 days of an election. That means technically you can't run an ad in a local paper which might be something you and your buddies could easily pay for.
I could understand TV and radio ads that cost more than say.... $5,000 because you could argue that the average person couldn't be behind that. Yet the problem here is that eventually they can and will call your website hosting fees an expenditure for the purposes of this law. That means that if you make a flash ad for your site that's anti-Bush you're now in violation of the law.
The Supreme Court ruling that the existing legislation was constitutional? The precedent has sadly already been set, that's why this bill is trying to lessen the damage.
Since when has the public had a right to know about product specs that haven't been released and are being held under a NDA? This is not some Pentagon Paper revelation or finding out that an employee under a NDA saw dumping of toxic chemicals or a warning sticker on the product saying that exposure lead to cancer. This was an attempt to get people to violate their NDA so that these apple rumor sites could get the inside scoop before the mainstream media.
A lot of these chicken littles are focusing on this to exclusion of the FEC's remarks about federal regulation of online speech. How quickly the tune would change for bloggers like Michelle Malkin, if someone did this to them. Imagine if someone paid your spouse to take your journal information and then published your secrets online. You'd be livid too.
The problem with these rumor mills is that they make money by reporting on this that they have no intention of scrutinizing for accuracy whilst coyly suggesting that, "this is the unofficial truth from inside the company." It's one thing to make conjectures, to spout off and things like that. It is quite another to make a business out of what amounts to low-key libel. Apple's sales of the iPod shuffle according to one source I read may have been damaged because sites like ThinkSecret reported a price that Apple never claimed was possible and had no intention of selling at, thus creating an expectation that they themselves had never tried to create. That's not free speech, that's bordering on libel.
MacOS X which has 64-bit support. Besides what does it matter since the Mac Mini uses a 32bit processor...
That's why they found enough money to add a $521B boondoggle medicare package that not even AARP supported, but when the time came to fund 10,000 new border patrol agents they said they didn't have the money for more than 210, right?
of what happens when the government locks out private competition and runs its own service. It costs $0.37 to send a single letter and by law, UPS and Fedex cannot send first class mail. So what that means is that you have to pay more for a service the government provides because it doesn't give you a choice. It's either the government's service or no service at all.
Where I live in Virginia, you can get free or low cost WiFi in any of the coffee shops, and eventually other places will no doubt start providing it. I don't want my local government providing socialized WiFi in my area because local governments are notorious for being inept at spending control and quality of service. I'd rather pay adelphia for my access, have a wireless router on the connection and be able to go to a coffee shop and get free when I'm out and about. Barnes & Nobles' starbucks cafe charges $4.00 for 2 hours, but it's a good quality of service.
Next thing you know, though, it won't be the government picking up trash, but government telling you that you cannot compete with it. That's the way it works. There is nothing that pissess off government bureaucrats than the idea that the citizenry can go elsewhere and completely ignore them.
Oh and add in the fact that government-run Wifi will probably be completely open to law enforcement since it's a government service, not a private service. Watch the local cops argue that since it is a government utility, they don't need a warrant to log every action you take and periodically scan through them for criminal violations. That's one thing you really don't ever have to worry about the private sector allowing.
Skynet anyone? The problem with any project like this is, what happens when the program learns about hacking? If it is as adaptive as a child, then it should be able to mature and pretty soon you have a terribly devious artificial blackhat hacker on your hands.
Artificial intelligence is not bad in and of itself at all. The problem is when we want a machine that thinks like humans, especially a program that could potentially control our military. Given the record of flesh and blood humans toward each other in the 20th century alone, an artificial life form with the same basic psychological makeup as a human would be potentially an evil that'd make Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot look like church ladies.
AI that is capable of adapting to only one scenario is probably for all intents and purposes totally safe. AI that is capable of adapting in general and learning like a human will probably ultimately have the same psychological defects as a human, including a propensity for violence.
The tools need to be the best you can get for the price. Sometimes that may mean foregoing open source software, at others it means using it. What I'd like to see is a survey which compares the effectiveness of well-designed open source and closed source IT systems in business use. Take the top 5% of them that can be found and then see which is the most reliable, how much they cost and what is involved in keeping them working.
They were also professions largely consisting of two classes of people: the idle rich and the dedicated artist who was willing to live in poverty. Copyright law has made it possible for normal people to at least make some money off of their creative works.
The question is to what degree should we give legal protections? I happen to support the RIAA lawsuits since I realized that most of the people who I saw doing the file sharing when I lived on campus were students who could afford the real deal.
Go ahead, get rid of copyright law and you'll not just get rid of Brittney Spears, but also probably every band you like. Without copyright law, people would have no incentive at all to write music since anyone could play it without paying them. So much music today is written by separate song writers who aren't affiliated with the band that you're basically proposing that we give legitimacy to fucking over the little guy.
Btw, getting rid of copyrights will also destroy every open source project as some greedy company would be able to easily rip off the hard work of the developers. They come in once the project is mature, make it proprietary, close the source and sell it at a profit tied to something cool that sells. The small developer has then no legal recourse since there is no copyright law at all to protect their creation.
Can we assume that WordPress **users** are not going to be targeted by Google as a result of this? According to the WordPress site there have been about 100,000 downloads of version 1.5 and that means that a whole swath of legitimate users could get taken down by association if someone gets vindictive.
What the developer did was wrong, but no offense to Google, stop playing favorites here. Ban casinos and porn before you ban wordpress for spam because 90% of the spamming out there is done by gamblers and pornographers. This is such a small "victory" against spammers on Google that it's akin to marching a foot inside a country's sovereign territory and declaring victory over the enemy. Online casinos and pornographers do the most damage to Google so it's only appropriate for Google to go after them first.
Again, it's good of them to punish this developer, but let's be honest. In and of itself it won't be worth jack shit to stopping spammers or even slowing them down. If Google really wants to stop the problem, it needs to exclude any page with pornography, gambling and get rich schemes from its ranking system. Not saying it shouldn't index them, but when it scans the pages periodically, if it finds any comment or trackback spam on any blog or forum, it should disregard that page for the purpose of its ranking system.
You give more and more power to companies to "defend their IP" and you end up having the little guy run over like this. When CherryOS originally came out it was booting verbatim like PearPC and now you have this. They stole the PearPC developers' code and now costly litigation will probably be necessary. On top of that, where is the liability for those who may have funded the company responsible here?
There was a case recently where a small American company got royally screwed over by Toshiba too. Toshiba took the technology that was being developed for flash memory and practically gave it to San Disk. Does the government itself go tooth and nail after the big company? Of course not because "we can't punish the entire company for a few men's actions..."
Since most of the innovation comes from small time companies and individuals, those are the ones that the government should be putting the most effort into protecting from theft of their hard work. That means better protection from big companies using IP to crush them so they can rape and pillage the innovations of the smaller companies.
Everytime that the Congress drafts a law that will give an agency any meaningful rule-making power it is delegating its authority to that agency. No one elected the FEC, they were appointed by a group of politicians from two large parties whose ideological differences, in practice, are weak at best. This alone is the big problem. Can anyone, really say that Bush has change the course of the federal government enough to be a meaningful departure from Clinton? America is effectively living under a 1 party system where the two wings of the same ideology work together through compromise. The Republicans are effectively our Menshaviks and the Democrats our Bolsheviks because the course of the Republican Party has been to advance more slowly the same agenda that the Democrats will take on rapidly. The Republicans are only better at it because they know how to "temporarily" roll back government while setting the stage for permanent involvement from Iraq to gun control to abortion to medicare.
I think that you don't give people enough credit here. It takes a lot of effort to start a blog that gets any meaningful number of visitors. The crowd of bigger blogs are in essence the gatekeepers of blogging in the sense that it can be quite hard to get a lot of regular readers (thousands to tens of thousands) without being on their good side. Well, some GOP or Democratic Party hack isn't going to waltz in before an election and get there overnight because the last thing the bigger blogs want is to be caught with their pants down like Rather, especially after some of them made such a big stink about how they took Rather down. What an irony that would be, eh?
Here is something that might work. Get rid of all of the individual campaign finance regulations, and then require that politicians do two things. First, require by law that all campaign funds be accounted for. Second, require the politicians to donate all of the money that is left over to charity. The problem is that a politician can become fabulously wealthy because the law lets them keep their extra campaign dollars. In Senate races, that can literally be tens of millions of dollars. Make it illegal for incorporated entities to give money, but allow them to run ads otherwise eventually your ability to make a Flash ad lampooning Bush, Kerry, whoever will become a "loophole." That was my prediction, anyway.
MSN, Yahoo and Google need to blacklist any company that sues them over something this stupid from ever being returned favorably in their results again. There is no reason that this French company's news should be returned now when any source from the U.S., Canada, Britain, Germany, etc. is availible on the same topic.
They are directly responsible. Instead of spamming themselves, they are hiring others to do their dirty work for them. How exactly is this any different from a country hiring a band of mercenaries to fight rather than send its own army into battle? We don't blame the mercenaries nearly as much as those who hired them.