You should first deal with the concept of precedence. Remove that, and all other evils will be massively diminished. While our founding fathers were amazingly farsighted in many things, in this aspect they should all have been hung for treason, exactly as they detailed explicitly in the Constitution.
It is 100% legal to rip CDs and DVDs, DMCA not withstanding. As decryption technologies for DVDs were available prior to the DMCA, those products and technologies were grandfathered in.
Got a cite for that? Also, you may be interested to know that the DMCA was enacted in late 1998. DeCSS didn't come out until about a year later.
Sure - got a cite for that it is not? Or is it now illegal to photocopy books? Because copyright was never about copying, only about distributing. Go read the original documentation.
Furthermore, it greatly expands and oversteps the original Constitutional clauses related to copyright. (someone would have to show me how the DMCA does not violate the copyright clause as it originally was stated in the Constitution, nor in what way the federal government has any right to interfere with individual actions that are akin to cutting up, say, a book for excerpts)
On the rare ocassions that it has seriously been discussed, the DMCA was generally felt to have been enacted pursuant to the commerce clause, rather than the copyright clause, IIRC. Post Eldred I don't think there have been or are likely to be serious attacks on its constitutionality.
The DMCA greatly restricts various aspects of established copyright law, and makes various obvious and legal activities potentially crimes. e.g., you're filming your kid's first steps. Mickey Mouse is in the background on an HDTV. That's already a violation. You post your kid's first steps on youtube because he falls face first into the dog - welcome to Gitmo.
If you don't see the absolute violations of various rights in there, I don't know what will convince you.
Man - the amount of disinformation here is immense. It is 100% legal to rip CDs and DVDs, DMCA not withstanding. As decryption technologies for DVDs were available prior to the DMCA, those products and technologies were grandfathered in. BluRay's are a different thing, although you can still easily defeat the tech if you were so minded, in any numbers of ways that are even legal AFAIK, without even defeating the encryption. All that aside, the DMCA is an incredibly horrible law that violates all sorts of common sense and existing law. Furthermore, it greatly expands and oversteps the original Constitutional clauses related to copyright. (someone would have to show me how the DMCA does not violate the copyright clause as it originally was stated in the Constitution, nor in what way the federal government has any right to interfere with individual actions that are akin to cutting up, say, a book for excerpts)
Because I don't believe wikipedia without backup on anything, nor should you.
I call them nutbags because they are. So should you.
For thousands of years, homeschooling largely failed. Just check the last 150 years to see what public education has done for society. Your kids not withstanding, and no proof offered. Anecdotes mean nothing.
And then you reveal yourself to be a nutbag as well, which explains your desire to convince others of the "worthiness" of your cause, because otherwise, you'd be.... a nutbag.
I'd be more willing to bet that by removing the publishers and end retailers 80% cut, these games are suddenly profitable to develop for the developers and they essentially get their money up front and can run per a true investment style - we invest in their product, they deliver, they gain credibility, their next enterprise will be easier to fund via investors. It's the same process for them, minus the headaches of an interfering publisher (investor) and being able to connect with some of their fans much more directly.
Your statement shows that you are largely ignorant about homeschooling, its reasons for being, and its effects.
I can tell you this because I'm closely involved with 3 groups of people, 2 that fall into the religious nutbag arena. 1 homeschools, and has a large group of associated homeschooled people that we know. Their children are largely unprepared for the world, and mostly go to bible colleges, if at all. Additionally, their emotional and social development is running anywhere from 2-5 years behind others their age that are not homeschooled. I have for comparison the other group, still religious nutjobs, but do not homeschooled. They are a good comparison because these two families are quite close, so close that they do bible studies together. The latter family's children have blossomed into real people with reasonable social skills and personalities over the past 8+ years (yes, this is not a short term exposure, and not a small group - both sets have associated groups that number more than 20 kids).
I'm under no misconceptions. homeschooling as you describe it is unknown for any of the homeschooled families I'm aware of, throughout my life. In fact, they're all largely reminiscent of what you picture as a one room school house back in the 1800s, one person trying to teach 3+ children all at the same time. Sounds like a great plan to me.
BTW, being college educated in no way shape or form makes you qualified for being a teacher. It's not even requirement to be honest but gives you a better perspective. I personally would suck at lower grade levels, or various topics, but excel at others. Yes, I have taught also, and have done post graduate work, some at the post-doctoral level in the technical world.
The only reason home schooling hasn't been shut down completely is because.... George Bush. You know, the brainiac that came up with "No Child Left Behind" that resulted in all children being left behind the rest of the world, and the same that pushed school vouchers so schools could worry about "making money" instead of teaching children. BTW, that was started in a state where schools are run by localities, so the real reason behind vouchers wasn't to allow students to move to better public schools, but to fund these private indoctrination farms. (Yes, I'm probably showing far too much disdain here, but honestly, if you don't think those private religiously based schools are free from indoctrination, there's no reason to continue talking.)
I'd need citations for homeschoolers being better off. Fair citations that aren't run by a religious entity or anyone else (mostly conservatives) that desire some form of private indoctrination for their children. They would also have to compare like children by test over significant periods, with further tests to compare them by as they progressed. We've all heard about the home-schooled spelling bee champ. There was also Einstein, one among many many many successful brilliant people that were not home-schooled. The list of accomplished home-schooled people is astonishingly short. I just provided it. You may add to it if you can.
I'll support homeschooling when the "teacher" completes 4 years of college at an accredited university, passes accreditation for each year and course they will teach within a 5 year period for the intended teaching stint, passes an inspection for the location that will serve as the "school" and has all materials on hand and validated. After that, they must also have regular tests in all subjects, taken at a testing center, perhaps 4 times during the "school year". They must also bear all costs for all aspects of these certifications.
Oh my, why must I be so unfair? It's not. It's what we demand of our schools, should we demand any less of our "home schools"?
Last point - I'm not against home-schooling. I think home-schooling is fine, and I engage in that activity every day after my kids come home... from school.
It's not a strawman. It was a reductio ad absurdum of your absolutist statements. You are confusing "price" with "cost". Yes, this is semantics, but the two are very different.
So, I needed a special lightbulb for a car. $250 at the dealer, $150 at an independent, $50 from Amazon. What's the price? (Snide comments aside, this is an actual scenario, not a strawman. Reliable HID bulbs can be very expensive, and the Amazon and dealer bulbs were OEM, don't know about the independent)
The price for you is what you paid at the register. It has little bearing on the "price" of an item. What if a mistake was made, and you were buying 2 hard drives but they only charged you for one? The price to you was 50% of stated price. Or did you have 2 prices, full and 0? If the latter, is the price of the object 0? How about if you bought a slew of things, and only 1 hard drive? After all, it's "what was paid, period" at the register.
Semantics is what you're using to try to make your point that the sale price is the "real price". It's no such thing in the general case, it just happened to be your price. No one else may get that price, nor, perhaps, will you at a different time. And just to throw a wrinkle in it, what's the value of said item?
I'd argue that it's a discount. The price was still the price, but there was a discount. See, today, it's $10, but you have a 10% discount, so can buy it for $9. The price is still $10. The sale ends. The price is still $10, except now you pay $10. Versus, the price was $9, you pay $9, and now we're raising the price to $10.... From the view of what you paid on day 1 vs 2, there is an increase. From the perspective of price, only in the second case was there an increase.
True, but it's not an increase in price if it was merely discounted to begin with. There was a price, it was discounted for a bit, but the price was still the price. The discount ended. Your cost increased, the price did not. Semantics.
Only because we include buildings, airplanes, and cars. Remove those, and we have next to 0 in manufacturing.
For instance, where do your clothes come from? Shoes? Wallet? Toys? Components in your cars, if not the cars themselves? Electronics? CDs, DVDs, and BDs? Rubber Balls?
If that (incomplete) list doesn't get you thinking, nothing else I say will start that process. Essentially almost everything we use daily, including some food, comes from outside the country. That is a REAL problem. If you don't think it is, then you are part of the problem.
RTFA, and am still left with a host of questions. The linked article is about as informative as the summary (unusual, how'd that happen?) and as bereft of any real information. The core issue though, the lack of an American manufacturing base for consumer goods, should worry everyone. I mean, dog food made in China? Why?
I was running on 9GB SCSI drives... apparently you were not. In 91 or 92 I was running on 1GB SCSI drives, and yes, I had 2, at a 10% off of $1K price each. They were pricey, but worth every $ at work, in 94 I was working with 400MB files, uncompressed. I had 2 500MB drives in 95 @ home, also SCSI, along with an assortment of IDE for mass store. Not all of us were playing Zork, Myst, or playing with GIFs and AOL.
The real point is don't think what you were doing was cutting edge, unless you were in the $100K+ per machine. I still remember RAID rack architecture design where we first built walls of 1GB and 4GB drives to gain larger stores, and then switched to 9GB drives, and had to properly design the system for performance in degraded states along with maintaining relatively high performance during nightly backups. We had 400GB tape capability on the first setup, and a little over a TB on the second per tape library, and we rotated those out weekly, and tested our backups quarterly, because you can never be too sure, especially in those days with flaky hardware that absolutely would fail.
I'll go 2 for two - automatic castration for those that commit rape in prison seems justified. Mod me flame bait, whatever, but it appears a just penalty.
Perhaps automatic castration for all prisoners found raping anyone? Sounds justified, and might solve that high testosterone level aggression issue at the same time.
I'd say they're just as good at doing evil as before, they just don't have the leverage they used to, that, and there's a lot more better options out there. Well, that, and the fact that there is a truly absolutely evil ass-clown out there known as Sony, and even Oracle has been jumping through hoops to make them selves look more evil.
... I certainly don't know the ratio of good and bad patent grants. Alas as far as patents are concerned, Slashdot crown will accept nothing but impossible perfection.
In the realm of software patents,/. is pretty much "Patents == bad". Perfection would be NO patents.
Slashdot Mirror
You should first deal with the concept of precedence. Remove that, and all other evils will be massively diminished. While our founding fathers were amazingly farsighted in many things, in this aspect they should all have been hung for treason, exactly as they detailed explicitly in the Constitution.
It is 100% legal to rip CDs and DVDs, DMCA not withstanding. As decryption technologies for DVDs were available prior to the DMCA, those products and technologies were grandfathered in.
Got a cite for that? Also, you may be interested to know that the DMCA was enacted in late 1998. DeCSS didn't come out until about a year later.
Sure - got a cite for that it is not? Or is it now illegal to photocopy books? Because copyright was never about copying, only about distributing. Go read the original documentation.
Furthermore, it greatly expands and oversteps the original Constitutional clauses related to copyright. (someone would have to show me how the DMCA does not violate the copyright clause as it originally was stated in the Constitution, nor in what way the federal government has any right to interfere with individual actions that are akin to cutting up, say, a book for excerpts)
On the rare ocassions that it has seriously been discussed, the DMCA was generally felt to have been enacted pursuant to the commerce clause, rather than the copyright clause, IIRC. Post Eldred I don't think there have been or are likely to be serious attacks on its constitutionality.
The DMCA greatly restricts various aspects of established copyright law, and makes various obvious and legal activities potentially crimes. e.g., you're filming your kid's first steps. Mickey Mouse is in the background on an HDTV. That's already a violation. You post your kid's first steps on youtube because he falls face first into the dog - welcome to Gitmo.
If you don't see the absolute violations of various rights in there, I don't know what will convince you.
Man - the amount of disinformation here is immense. It is 100% legal to rip CDs and DVDs, DMCA not withstanding. As decryption technologies for DVDs were available prior to the DMCA, those products and technologies were grandfathered in. BluRay's are a different thing, although you can still easily defeat the tech if you were so minded, in any numbers of ways that are even legal AFAIK, without even defeating the encryption. All that aside, the DMCA is an incredibly horrible law that violates all sorts of common sense and existing law. Furthermore, it greatly expands and oversteps the original Constitutional clauses related to copyright. (someone would have to show me how the DMCA does not violate the copyright clause as it originally was stated in the Constitution, nor in what way the federal government has any right to interfere with individual actions that are akin to cutting up, say, a book for excerpts)
Because I don't believe wikipedia without backup on anything, nor should you.
I call them nutbags because they are. So should you.
For thousands of years, homeschooling largely failed. Just check the last 150 years to see what public education has done for society. Your kids not withstanding, and no proof offered. Anecdotes mean nothing.
And then you reveal yourself to be a nutbag as well, which explains your desire to convince others of the "worthiness" of your cause, because otherwise, you'd be.... a nutbag.
I'd be more willing to bet that by removing the publishers and end retailers 80% cut, these games are suddenly profitable to develop for the developers and they essentially get their money up front and can run per a true investment style - we invest in their product, they deliver, they gain credibility, their next enterprise will be easier to fund via investors. It's the same process for them, minus the headaches of an interfering publisher (investor) and being able to connect with some of their fans much more directly.
PHP is good for one thing - the trash can.
Your statement shows that you are largely ignorant about homeschooling, its reasons for being, and its effects.
I can tell you this because I'm closely involved with 3 groups of people, 2 that fall into the religious nutbag arena. 1 homeschools, and has a large group of associated homeschooled people that we know. Their children are largely unprepared for the world, and mostly go to bible colleges, if at all. Additionally, their emotional and social development is running anywhere from 2-5 years behind others their age that are not homeschooled. I have for comparison the other group, still religious nutjobs, but do not homeschooled. They are a good comparison because these two families are quite close, so close that they do bible studies together. The latter family's children have blossomed into real people with reasonable social skills and personalities over the past 8+ years (yes, this is not a short term exposure, and not a small group - both sets have associated groups that number more than 20 kids).
I'm under no misconceptions. homeschooling as you describe it is unknown for any of the homeschooled families I'm aware of, throughout my life. In fact, they're all largely reminiscent of what you picture as a one room school house back in the 1800s, one person trying to teach 3+ children all at the same time. Sounds like a great plan to me.
BTW, being college educated in no way shape or form makes you qualified for being a teacher. It's not even requirement to be honest but gives you a better perspective. I personally would suck at lower grade levels, or various topics, but excel at others. Yes, I have taught also, and have done post graduate work, some at the post-doctoral level in the technical world.
The only reason home schooling hasn't been shut down completely is because.... George Bush. You know, the brainiac that came up with "No Child Left Behind" that resulted in all children being left behind the rest of the world, and the same that pushed school vouchers so schools could worry about "making money" instead of teaching children. BTW, that was started in a state where schools are run by localities, so the real reason behind vouchers wasn't to allow students to move to better public schools, but to fund these private indoctrination farms. (Yes, I'm probably showing far too much disdain here, but honestly, if you don't think those private religiously based schools are free from indoctrination, there's no reason to continue talking.)
I'd need citations for homeschoolers being better off. Fair citations that aren't run by a religious entity or anyone else (mostly conservatives) that desire some form of private indoctrination for their children. They would also have to compare like children by test over significant periods, with further tests to compare them by as they progressed. We've all heard about the home-schooled spelling bee champ. There was also Einstein, one among many many many successful brilliant people that were not home-schooled. The list of accomplished home-schooled people is astonishingly short. I just provided it. You may add to it if you can.
I'll support homeschooling when the "teacher" completes 4 years of college at an accredited university, passes accreditation for each year and course they will teach within a 5 year period for the intended teaching stint, passes an inspection for the location that will serve as the "school" and has all materials on hand and validated. After that, they must also have regular tests in all subjects, taken at a testing center, perhaps 4 times during the "school year". They must also bear all costs for all aspects of these certifications.
Oh my, why must I be so unfair? It's not. It's what we demand of our schools, should we demand any less of our "home schools"?
Last point - I'm not against home-schooling. I think home-schooling is fine, and I engage in that activity every day after my kids come home... from school.
... So yeah, run them out of business and they can find a new career parking cars.
Not sure I'd trust them with my car, either, given their track record.
It's not a strawman. It was a reductio ad absurdum of your absolutist statements. You are confusing "price" with "cost". Yes, this is semantics, but the two are very different.
So, I needed a special lightbulb for a car. $250 at the dealer, $150 at an independent, $50 from Amazon. What's the price? (Snide comments aside, this is an actual scenario, not a strawman. Reliable HID bulbs can be very expensive, and the Amazon and dealer bulbs were OEM, don't know about the independent)
The price for you is what you paid at the register. It has little bearing on the "price" of an item. What if a mistake was made, and you were buying 2 hard drives but they only charged you for one? The price to you was 50% of stated price. Or did you have 2 prices, full and 0? If the latter, is the price of the object 0? How about if you bought a slew of things, and only 1 hard drive? After all, it's "what was paid, period" at the register.
Semantics is what you're using to try to make your point that the sale price is the "real price". It's no such thing in the general case, it just happened to be your price. No one else may get that price, nor, perhaps, will you at a different time. And just to throw a wrinkle in it, what's the value of said item?
I'd argue that it's a discount. The price was still the price, but there was a discount. See, today, it's $10, but you have a 10% discount, so can buy it for $9. The price is still $10. The sale ends. The price is still $10, except now you pay $10. Versus, the price was $9, you pay $9, and now we're raising the price to $10.... From the view of what you paid on day 1 vs 2, there is an increase. From the perspective of price, only in the second case was there an increase.
True, but it's not an increase in price if it was merely discounted to begin with. There was a price, it was discounted for a bit, but the price was still the price. The discount ended. Your cost increased, the price did not. Semantics.
Only because we include buildings, airplanes, and cars. Remove those, and we have next to 0 in manufacturing.
For instance, where do your clothes come from? Shoes? Wallet? Toys? Components in your cars, if not the cars themselves? Electronics? CDs, DVDs, and BDs? Rubber Balls?
If that (incomplete) list doesn't get you thinking, nothing else I say will start that process. Essentially almost everything we use daily, including some food, comes from outside the country. That is a REAL problem. If you don't think it is, then you are part of the problem.
RTFA, and am still left with a host of questions. The linked article is about as informative as the summary (unusual, how'd that happen?) and as bereft of any real information. The core issue though, the lack of an American manufacturing base for consumer goods, should worry everyone. I mean, dog food made in China? Why?
I was running on 9GB SCSI drives... apparently you were not. In 91 or 92 I was running on 1GB SCSI drives, and yes, I had 2, at a 10% off of $1K price each. They were pricey, but worth every $ at work, in 94 I was working with 400MB files, uncompressed. I had 2 500MB drives in 95 @ home, also SCSI, along with an assortment of IDE for mass store. Not all of us were playing Zork, Myst, or playing with GIFs and AOL.
The real point is don't think what you were doing was cutting edge, unless you were in the $100K+ per machine. I still remember RAID rack architecture design where we first built walls of 1GB and 4GB drives to gain larger stores, and then switched to 9GB drives, and had to properly design the system for performance in degraded states along with maintaining relatively high performance during nightly backups. We had 400GB tape capability on the first setup, and a little over a TB on the second per tape library, and we rotated those out weekly, and tested our backups quarterly, because you can never be too sure, especially in those days with flaky hardware that absolutely would fail.
My nose works just fine thank you.
I'll go 2 for two - automatic castration for those that commit rape in prison seems justified. Mod me flame bait, whatever, but it appears a just penalty.
In 96 I was regularly backing up 60GB of data nightly. There were lots of options, and if you had the money to buy 1 9GB disk, you could buy 2....
Perhaps automatic castration for all prisoners found raping anyone? Sounds justified, and might solve that high testosterone level aggression issue at the same time.
I'd say they're just as good at doing evil as before, they just don't have the leverage they used to, that, and there's a lot more better options out there. Well, that, and the fact that there is a truly absolutely evil ass-clown out there known as Sony, and even Oracle has been jumping through hoops to make them selves look more evil.
Apparently they will :) Hooray!
Will generate a flood of clicks... but will people actually create logins and sign the petition?
I'm not sure where you got the implication that I was against "no software patents"?
... I certainly don't know the ratio of good and bad patent grants. Alas as far as patents are concerned, Slashdot crown will accept nothing but impossible perfection.
In the realm of software patents, /. is pretty much "Patents == bad". Perfection would be NO patents.