it's illegal to go 70 mph; nobody would ever find out about it if Ford did that since we all would obey the law. The posted limit on many US interstate highways is 75, you fucking dunce.
OTOH, why even showcase it running on such an ugly device? Because they're showcasing the software? Because they're not hardware manufacturers? Because this isn't going to be a piece of locked down, locked out, single provider hardwae like the iPhone, but an open platform available on all sorts of devices by a myriad of developers? Seriously, are you that dense?
Now as far as the story is concerned. I've pointed this out in the past. People who behave with the attitude mentioned grow up to become adults who can't be trusted. Trust is not what someone gives you when they can see you, but what you get when their backs are turned. Can I trust the public to respect my wishes when I can't observe them 24/7? Why should they in turn be respected and trusted? Do you all even see the corrosive effect the attitude has on the cohesiveness of society?...
Keep believing that your senses define right and wrong and "thou shall not" is some arbitrary concept and you'll get the foundationless society you all deserve. Inevitably, some fucking tard like you comes up with this exact counter-argument every time someone suggests that perhaps it is the law that is wrong if the majority of people disagree with it. Your presumption that such folks are for completely throwing out all aspects of law and morality just because they disagree with one very narrow aspect is a straw man. With such ill-reasoned logic, it's no wonder you post as AC.
Something tells me that if someone was having sex with you or our friends wife/husband/boyfriend/girlfriend that they would be upset. Why? After all nothing was taken... They're upset because they (presumably) had a bond of trust and an underlying assumption of monogamy with this person, who then had consensual sex with a third party. This, of course, has fuck-all to do with someone copying information in contravention of copyright law, you moronic toad. Why doncha' come up with a nice car analogy next time?
Where is it written that
The point of patents and copyrights are to promote the publics best interest by creating an incentive to create new works that benefit all. ??
I think that patent law is there to protect the inventor. While "all" may benefit, this is a secondary result, sometimes. You think wrong. God almighty, it's in the fucking US Constitution. Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
No, anyone who talks about how great a shit sandwich tastes is either a tool or a troll. And Vista is a shit sandwich. See, it's dumbfucks like you that can't tell the difference between arguable fact ("anyone who talks about how great a shit sandwich tastes is...a troll") and opinion ("Vista is a shit sandwich") that fuck up the moderation system. In reality, it's shit-sucking toads like you that are the trolls. And, of course, foul mouthed asshole like me. The difference is that I just call people names rather than try to silence them.
Naturally. Find a work around for your driver issue and upgrade it to XP. You'll notice the difference. Fuckin' tard. What part of "not saturating any of the machine's bottlenecks" did you not understand? It works nigh-instantaneously already. There's really no room for improvement.
Probably going to get modded "-1 Troll" for this, Indeed, two or three fuckwad asshat groupthink mods have modded you "-1 Troll" for daring to civilly express the opinion that Vista is not all that bad in your experience. Good old Slashdot.
but having seen and used the product, I don't think Vista is all that bad. I would have to agree. I was going to load XP on my new machine--- until I got to the part where I needed to load a driver for the RAID controller and it said "Insert floppy into drive A:"! FLOPPY?!?! What is this, the middle ages? So I loaded on Vista (site licensed version for the university where my wife works) just to have something windows enough to do what little I find inconvenient to do under Debian Linux. I don't see what people's issues are. Seems to work just fine. Of course, my new machine is a Core2 Quad 2.4GHz (OC'd to 3.2GHz) with 4GB RAM and four 250GB hard drives in a RAID10 array, so there's probably little out there that could choke it. Even Unreal Tournament 3 doesn't push the cumulative CPU usage past 45%.
As for the more on-topic issue here of "should he get a fine for evading fuel taxes"... If you brew your own beer, you don't need to pay the alcohol tax on it. Why wouldn't noncommercial low-volume biodiesel production fall into the category? For the same reason that home brewing beer remained illegal until 1978. They claim it was an "error" that the repeal of the 21st amendment failed to include the phrase "and/or beer" after the part legalizing home wine making, but I know the stink of a Big Alcohol payoff when I smell it. No, the government is generally rife with busybody pricks who like to tell other people what to do. That's why they go into government. They believe that there are many things that should be wholly prohibited without paying Uncle Sucker a big cut of the profits or at least an arbitrarily large licensing fee. The fact that many of these activities have a lower threshold of production (e.g. brewing a 5gal carboy of beer at home) below which licensing and taxation is preposterous doesn't seem to concern them--- unless the public becomes aware of it and calls them on their bullshit. With any luck, that'll happen here.
if your argument is going to be "if they've got nothing to hide, they shouldn't mind", then you cannot complain when the police themselves turn that argument around on you. Wrong. We are not public employees. We are not granted special powers above those of ordinary citizens like they are. They have a gun, a baton, and the power of the state behind them. This alone is justification for watching them. As private citizens, the state has no right to arbitrarily watch us. The state (through its agents) must justify its surveillance.
While I'm generally totally in favor of sticking it to the police, editing your clips pretty much removes 100% credibility. For all we know the dyed-hair camera boy was swearing at them and and wearing a t-shirt that says allah hates niggers. Tell your buddy he'll get a lot more sympathy if he releases the entire tape, unedited with unobscured audio. Someone should mod you "-1, idiot talking out of his ass". It doesn't sound like you even watched the videos. The first video isn't "edited" beyond the minor addition of footage, in the form of black screens with white text explaining the context of the video. The second is a news report from a local station, with clips from the first and an interview with the cameraman. If you had watched it, you might've noticed he didn't have dyed hair, nor an "allah hates niggers" T-shirt; not that having either of those, or even swearing at police, is legal justification for a cop threatening to break someone's camera.
in general there will be a shift to lower quality movies with smaller budgets. Made-for-tv and direct-to-DVD movies are GENERALLY of less quality and use less production values than theatrical releases. You are confusing cause and effect. The quality of the bad films doesn't come from the low budget, the low budget comes from the film being obviously bad, even when it was only a script. If the big production bucks aren't there, good films will still be good, you just won't see many more 9/10 scale model models of the Titanic*.
If people were not willing to pay even the $1 rental rate they can get now, then the quality of movies will suffer. Production values will be crap. Most movies will be of the "made-for-tv" quality. Think Lifetime movies and those produced by the Sci-Fi channel. Bullcrap. Production budget doesn't determine entertainment quality. How much did it cost to film Rear Window? or The Big Sleep? or Young Frankenstein? or Taxi Driver? Compared to nowadays, even adjusted for inflation, it was chump change.
On the flip side, how many times have modern big budget movie turned out to be big, stinking turds? Remember Battlefield Earth, The Postman, Godzilla, Lost in Space, and the infamous Waterworld? I think movie quality might actually improve, on the whole, if production was mostly focussed on getting a compelling story on [film/disc/RAM/punch card], rather than throwing out shovels full of eye-candy.
in small claims court, doesn't the complaintant always represent themselves? And that court is structured to deal with such? Yes, but you can bring a lawyer to represent you if you want, and corporations essentially have no one BUT a lwayer to send. Small claims judges don't like lawyer bullshit gamesmanship, though. If Gateway sends a slick lawyer to try to bring a "world of hurt" down on Sheehan, the judge will tear him (the lawyer) a new asshole. Likely the appeal will consist of the judge telling Gateway "show me proof you didn't sell him a fucked up computer and then try to weasel out of refunding the purchase price, or crawl up your own asshole and die".
My preferred solution, which I know the libertarians here would hate, is to take a page from the past. Throughout most of history, art in all forms was sponsored by the government. All of the Rennaisance greats -- musicians, artists, sculptors, etc -- had government sponsors. Ehhhhh...... that's a somewhat twisted view of the Renaissance. Artists didn't so much have government sponsors as they had the sponsorship of rich and powerful men who were the de facto autocratic sovereigns of their city states through threats, bribes, and city council proxies. Michaelangelo, for example, wasn't sponsored by the government, but rather by Lorenzo de Medici, and then he didn't create works for the city-state of Florence, but rather for associates of Lorenzo de Medici. Lorenzo's sponsorship consisted largely of giving him room and board and recommending his artistic talents to others.
Ok, so let's wave a magic wand and nullify all IP laws. No more 'intellectual property'. Great! What have we done? Strawman argument. Either through ignorance or sophistry you have completely deviated from the subject of debate. The call is not for the elimination of the loose collection of vaguely related things called "intellectual property", but rather simply for the elimination of the term "intellectual property" itself, as it confuses the issue. The term conflates the government granted monopoly of patent, copyright, trademark, etc. with the legal possession and control of real property. This confusion is propaganda, intentionally introduced in the 19th century, to generate a more sympathetic public opinion of copyright holders.
No...the "47" in the name is the year of adoption by the Red Army, its first customer. The first batch of AK-47's did not spring fully formed from the void, into the hands of the Red Army infantry in 1949. Mikhail Kalashnikov conceived the design in 1941, in the hospital recovering from wounds... during WW2. 1947 was just when the design was accepted and frozen for production by the Soviet military.
Given that this is a Russian patent, Russia gets to decide when the patents expire. Sure...in Russia! But as far as AK's being manufactured in Romania, China, etc., that's just tough fucking nuts. Go back to the beginning and present an applicable argument.
I believe that the most common surname in the world is "Chang" (or "Zhang" depending on how you transliterate the name)
You believe incorrectly. "Chang" is a last name, but not a surname. In China, as in most of east asia, you give your family name first, and your individual name last. This causes a bit of confusion with immigrants, as they end up having to use their individual name as their family name in western countries because the name order is reversed on all the forms. But in China, a person whose name is "Sun-Yung Chang" might have a brother named "Sun-Yung Fong". Get it?
The most common male first name worldwide is Mohammed. The most common last name is Chang.
Chang isn't a "last name" in that sense. The east asian tradition is to say your family name first, followed by your individual name. "Chang" is an individual names just like "Mohammed". I have long suspected that "example" was coined by one of those typical smug dolt newspaper columnist types.
Why so quick to say Afghans stole it? How do you know Joe Dropout didn't try pawning them for some heroin?
First, if by "dropout" you refer to some civilian employee of a contractor providing base services, then yes, perhaps. If you're referring to members of the military, then you need to start getting your information about the military from somewhere other than old Vietnam war movies. This ain't yer pappy's military no more, full of convicts and no-loads. "Dropouts" are considered Tier 3 enlistment material-- in other words you'll need phone calls from a senator or two before they'll even consider making an exception. Even GEDs and other HS diploma equivalents are only considered Tier 2. The Army, the most lenient of the services, has a hard cap of 1 in 10 enlistees being Tier 2.
Second, you obviously also have no idea how ridiculously cheap heroin is there. No one needs to sell stolen USB drives to feed a heroin habit in Afghanistan.
An ethnobotanist is interested in how natural plants affect people.
A good ethnobotanist will take you places that very few pshchopharmacologists will ever get right.
True, but a good ethnobotanist will probably also lead to a lot more vomiting. Vomiting is, of course, a necessary part of the recreation of an authentic siberian shaman experience...
I am perfectly aware of this. I am, however, also perfectly aware that America has achieved this on the back of those same native coal fires.
I daresay nothing at all is being achieved "on the back" of those coal fires, with the possible exception of some occasional advances in mine fire extinguishing technology.
Keep in mind that the hole in the o-zone layer down in the southern hemisphere has a greater effect on Australia than anywhere on Earth (except for Antarctica). So if the treaty [Kyoto] was really worth something, it seems they would be a country more than willing to sign, uphold and promote it.
The "ozone hole"/reduction of CFC output debate is wholly unrelated to the "global warming"/reduction of CO2 output debate, other than that both are perennial causes celebre of the environmentalist movement.
Slashdot Mirror
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
Naturally. Find a work around for your driver issue and upgrade it to XP. You'll notice the difference. Fuckin' tard. What part of "not saturating any of the machine's bottlenecks" did you not understand? It works nigh-instantaneously already. There's really no room for improvement.
From the "tagging beta" line: navalgazing
Is that, like, sitting on the beach watching ships go by?
but having seen and used the product, I don't think Vista is all that bad. I would have to agree. I was going to load XP on my new machine--- until I got to the part where I needed to load a driver for the RAID controller and it said "Insert floppy into drive A:"! FLOPPY?!?! What is this, the middle ages? So I loaded on Vista (site licensed version for the university where my wife works) just to have something windows enough to do what little I find inconvenient to do under Debian Linux. I don't see what people's issues are. Seems to work just fine. Of course, my new machine is a Core2 Quad 2.4GHz (OC'd to 3.2GHz) with 4GB RAM and four 250GB hard drives in a RAID10 array, so there's probably little out there that could choke it. Even Unreal Tournament 3 doesn't push the cumulative CPU usage past 45%.
* this, in my opinion, is a good thing
On the flip side, how many times have modern big budget movie turned out to be big, stinking turds? Remember Battlefield Earth, The Postman, Godzilla, Lost in Space, and the infamous Waterworld? I think movie quality might actually improve, on the whole, if production was mostly focussed on getting a compelling story on [film/disc/RAM/punch card], rather than throwing out shovels full of eye-candy.
It's directional.
No...the "47" in the name is the year of adoption by the Red Army, its first customer. The first batch of AK-47's did not spring fully formed from the void, into the hands of the Red Army infantry in 1949. Mikhail Kalashnikov conceived the design in 1941, in the hospital recovering from wounds... during WW2. 1947 was just when the design was accepted and frozen for production by the Soviet military.
You believe incorrectly. "Chang" is a last name, but not a surname. In China, as in most of east asia, you give your family name first, and your individual name last. This causes a bit of confusion with immigrants, as they end up having to use their individual name as their family name in western countries because the name order is reversed on all the forms. But in China, a person whose name is "Sun-Yung Chang" might have a brother named "Sun-Yung Fong". Get it?
Chang isn't a "last name" in that sense. The east asian tradition is to say your family name first, followed by your individual name. "Chang" is an individual names just like "Mohammed". I have long suspected that "example" was coined by one of those typical smug dolt newspaper columnist types.
First, if by "dropout" you refer to some civilian employee of a contractor providing base services, then yes, perhaps. If you're referring to members of the military, then you need to start getting your information about the military from somewhere other than old Vietnam war movies. This ain't yer pappy's military no more, full of convicts and no-loads. "Dropouts" are considered Tier 3 enlistment material-- in other words you'll need phone calls from a senator or two before they'll even consider making an exception. Even GEDs and other HS diploma equivalents are only considered Tier 2. The Army, the most lenient of the services, has a hard cap of 1 in 10 enlistees being Tier 2.
Second, you obviously also have no idea how ridiculously cheap heroin is there. No one needs to sell stolen USB drives to feed a heroin habit in Afghanistan.
True, but a good ethnobotanist will probably also lead to a lot more vomiting. Vomiting is, of course, a necessary part of the recreation of an authentic siberian shaman experience...
I daresay nothing at all is being achieved "on the back" of those coal fires, with the possible exception of some occasional advances in mine fire extinguishing technology.
The "ozone hole"/reduction of CFC output debate is wholly unrelated to the "global warming"/reduction of CO2 output debate, other than that both are perennial causes celebre of the environmentalist movement.