I personally love the idea of building a sock-rolid bunker that is so perfect that I am 100% certain to survive the impact.
Then, when all my friends and relatives in my section of the hemisphere are dead, I'll enjoy struggling for my own survival without clean, readily available running water and food. And then when I get sick after running low on my own hefty (let's be generous and say it's a 12 week supply) of water, I'll be proud of how I struggle to survive with complications from even the most minor of ailments after my modern drug supply is exhausted or proves ineffective.
When I use my most awsome shortwave radio, I'll be pleased to see how my important politicains (those who lived, that is) are the ones who are rescued first, and will shrug my shoulders as I look at the wreckage of my antennea array from the blast, hoping my small antennea doesnt eat up my power supply before someone can here me.
I'll be happy to have fully productive days, too, fending off what might be left of others who managed to survive but were less planful as I, as I count my ammunation running lower every day. I'll be thankful my hungry neighbor (the one living in a bunker right next to me) doesn't have a bigger gun than me, either.
I for one agree that life after a massive asteroid blast would be well on the high odds of survival and most likely fully worth living. After all: With God, all things are possible 8-D.
Especially for those of us with newer motherboards who want a completely silent system with as few fans as possible
First it was CPUs with cooling and big/slow/no fans and big heatsinks, then PSUs GPUs and now MOBOs. My current custom box (now 14 months old) was built to be silent and I had a hard time settling on a motherboard that was state of the art, stable, and still used a passive heatsink to cool the board chipset fan-free. I finally settled on an Asus P4P800.
I can definately believe heat becoming even more of an issue. For those of us who want power/performance and quiet at the same time, this will become even more of a challenge as time goes on. I for one hope not to rely on expensive and/or complicated cooling devices, like peltier units, water pumps and the like. I hope the focus is on efficient chips that only clock up/power up as they need to, like the pentuim M.
I heard the same piece and was pretty dissapointed to hear the fairly slanted presentation.
A typical FUD tactic that was used in this litle gem of a story was the guy who had his tax return floating around on the internet, presumably because he was engaged in the evil perils of file sharing (or such as was implied between the lines).
The 'Beav: Gosh Wally! those P2P users sure are a careless bunch, huh? Wally: They sure are, Beav! Let that be a lesson to you: you need to be more careful than that; that P2P stuff is dangerous business.
This is why you see more and more products in the grocry store advertising: "Contains NO transfats!" or something to that effect (instead, look for it's evil twin: modified food starch).
Until January 1, 2006, the easiet way to tell if your favorite junk-food, er, I mean food product, contains trans fats is by looking at the list of ingredients. If it says anywhere on that list "partially hydrogenated X" (where X is basically anything) congratulations! It's got trans-fats!
The FDA has been under considerable pressure to enact this regulation for years, but it delayed having the regulation take effect until the year 2006 in order to allow the food lobby *cough, cough* I meant to say food industry, time to adjust their food content to find a viable alternative to trans-fats, which have the convenient holy trinity of:
A) making foods taste good B) being very cheap C) acting as a preservative
There is no free lunch: Eat less, exercise more, eat more greens, less meat and less fat.
Since it was a Democrat who first prosposed this particluar aspect of state internet taxation, we'll never know will we?
I do agree with your premise that/. has more of a democratic base than republican, but you can take comfort in knowing all federal branches of government, except possibly the judiciary (for now), are firmly in control of republicans. Then again, judging by your.sig, you probably already knew that, didn't you?
Another more interesting question is: why is it that so many more/.ers appear to be democrat than republican ? no snotty and/or sarcastic replies, please, and no I dont mean you, jhigh.
Still, if a republican governor had proposed this I'm sure that at least a few (albet less I'm sure)/.ers would have posted similarly insightful comments. Would they have been modded to a 5? Probably, IMO, but not not definitely.
"Hani Durzy, eBay spokesman, said the company has reviewed Ohio's law and is not concerned.
'We do not believe the law applies to people who sell items on eBay or to eBay itself,' he told the paper."
Oh, yeah. Like his *belief* has any bearing whatsoever on how the law will actually be enforced.
This law is an open invitation for governmental and citizen abuse.
Let's say I'm a prominent government official or, worse, I am *not* a prominent government official but know someone who is. Now as an Ohio resident you just happen to sell something on eBay just *once* and I know about it. You did something to really annoy me and a dedicated (read as: threatened, bribed, or owned) prosecutor from any juris-my-dick-shun in the great state of Ohio takes you to court over it. Now you have to defend yourself. And even if the case could be dismissed as meritless, you would still have to come up with a plausible explination as to why the law should not apply to you in this specific instance (hope that the judge is not in anyone's pocket too, by the way).
Or, worse yet, some yahoo citizen bought something from you (the seller in Ohio) and is greatly displeased for (insert reason here) and files a civil suit on the basis of the law in Ohio. Now not only do you have to defend yoursef but the standard of proof to get a verdict vs. you is lower (9 of 12 jurors instead of 12 of 12).
Now I know that the odds of this kind of abuse are low and there are plenty of dumb laws on the books that are never enforced, but... That doesnt mean we need another one.
P.S. now when you sell on eBay as an Ohio resident you can add a clause that you won't sell or ship to those with a user rating below "X" or a bad reputation to protect yourself from abuse.
If you RTFA you wouold see that the EULAs mentioned there, including gator, are very plain about what they do and are in "plain english" that mere mortals like you and I can understand.
Many EULAs are, as you say, legal fluff, but they made the point of showing that many are not, and when the user is capable of understanding what he should have read when he just skipped the whole thing and clicked on "I AGREE", then that was the end of the whole debate right there (legally, anyway, and that's all that counts in the end).
Again, don't misundertand me, most EULAs are just a hop, skip-and-a-jump away from selling your computer into zombie-land slavery and your privacy to the highest bidder, but many appear to be quite legal, as nasty as they are.
The EFF was a part of preveting yet another case of the DMCA being used to quash innovation.
This is a perfect example of what the EFF has been trying to do on our behalf: and by "our" I especially mean the/. crowd: http://www.eff.org/endangered/list.php#toner
The relevent text from the page:
Species: Static Control Components remanufactured Lexmark toner cartridge Genus: Printer toner cartridge Threat averted: Overreaching claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
What it is: A printer toner cartridge refurbished by Static Control Components, sold more cheaply than new Lexmark-branded cartridges. What it lets you do: Toner cartridges are among the most expensive consumables of a laser printer. Lexmark's cartridges include chips with little bits of code that report back to the printer about toner-fill level -- but they also reveal whether or not the cartridge is "Lexmark authorized." The printer will refuse to print if the cartridge isn't "authorized," so Static Control replaced the chips so its refilled cartridges would work in Lexmark printers and report themselves "full of ink." Why it was endangered: Lexmark wasn't very happy about competing with Static Control for cartridge sales. It sued, claiming that the cartridge-printer "handshake" was a mechanism protecting a copyrighted work, so circumventing the mechanism violated the DMCA. The copyrighted work in question? The "toner loader program" in the cartridge chip.
How EFF helped save it: EFF filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting Static Control Components. We argued that the software was no more than a lock-out code, and that the DMCA explicitly permits the creation of interoperable software. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed.
I for one do NOT understand how he can trademark the MAME logo if he
A) had nothing to do with the years of work that went into the coding of the free softwareby the authors and the, collectively speaking, decades of beta testing by those who play MAME games. The players/beta-testers discover a new bug, report the error to the MAME designers and the emulation becomes that much more stable. What right does Mr. Foley have to what would amount to vicarious ownership of the decades of collective work of what is perfectly legal software?
B) He did not and has nothing to do with the creation of the MAME logo, so how can he have a legal right to trademark it? IANAL, so could someone please explain this one to me?
I CAN understand Mr. Foley's concern as a businessman wanting to stop Illegal ROM distribution, especially by vendors who flagrantly break the law or deliberately encourage it. However, he is going about it in what certainly looks to me like typical, lazy corporate bullying: make a poor pretense at taking the moral high ground by claiming to be merely be fighting piracy to protect his legitimate business, finding the best lawyers money can buy, and then quashing software innovation when copyright-infringement is not relevant to the logo (since it was not created/taken by such means...yet).
I have no problem with his current efforts to stop illegal ROM distribution: it's the legal and correct way to go, but he just lost all moral high ground and became as bad as the lawbreakers he wants to stop with this corporate trademark SNAFU (pun intended).
As the owner of a MAME arcade control panel who legally bought the rights to a collection of CAPCOM games on a single CD, I am left incredulous at the hypocrisy of Mr. Foley's efforts to fight copyright infingement by doing what is, for all practical purposes the same thing: TAKING SOMETHING THAT DOESN'T BELONG TO HIM THAT IS ASSOCIATED WITH YEARS OF WORK AND THEN MAKING A PROFIT ON IT.
Sounds like the pot calling the kettle black to me. .
Or you could always use Norton Ghost to restore the whole drive from the last known safe/good configuration and save yourself a really big pain in the ass.
Unless you think it's not worth spending the, say $100.00, of money upfront to be basically headache free forever not only from r00tkits but a corrupt registry or any other malady where only a complete re-install or its equivilant will do.
I condsider my time valuable, and to spend X number of hours at Y dollars per hour to solve the problem of being p0wned is not worth it when Ghost makes it so easy to deal with on a Windows system.
I personally agree with what you are saying, but please remember this:
you may be sorely misunderestimating (and I use that word intentionally here) the power and connections of the *AA & Entertainment Industry.
Doubt me? Remember this:
* We now have a Federal Government firmly in control of one party (with the possible exception of the Judiciary, for now) with a clear favor towards corporate interests. * Even under the Clinton Administration, the mother-of-all-evil, you-just-lost-your-previously-held-consumer-rights , criminalize-thought DMCA was passed * The FCC passed the Broadcast Flag regulation despite the clear objections of consumers * Congress decided to extend Copyright (Copywrong?) protections well beyond what most mere mortals consider neccessary to encourage and protect creative works (even the supreme court found the law to be dumb but still within the power of congress to extend it) Thanks, Sonny! * Other seemingly more reasonable countries are being/have-been adopting DMCA like legislation under pressure from Uncle Sam and his corporate-leveraging trade interests (think Australia and the previous slashdot story where a fellow was found guilty of piracy-by-hyperlinking, amoung what I'm sure are countless other stories I cant recall)
The thing that may stop this cute little idea is ISPs that could-give-a-sh*t-less about implementing a policy that will only cost them more money choosing to ignore digital fingerprints because there is no law requiring them to do so in their host country (think of Demonoid.com's shut down and re-launching just one month later under similar circumstances). But don't you worry - Uncle Sam and his corporate sponsors are working on that one....
That could be, but at least he demonstrated that he does have taste. This is not to say that you don't, but I think it was pretty clear that he was talking about GOOD Sci-Fi.
He made his point with constructive criticism, whereas it looks like you got hit by a pet peeve and nit-picked even though you are, techincally, correct. .
Statistics are fun and all, but we have to take the time to look at what generated the numbers behind them if we really want to understand why things happen.
We can have the best reasoning and statistical analysis skills in the world, and unless our underlying assumtions/facts are correct, our conclusions will be wrong every time...
In one of the examples cited by the parent post, the Woman driver (e.g. cutting off the driver in front) would be the cause of the accident in the eyes of many drivers, but unless it was bltatantly obvious, the other driver (often a man, statistically speaking) would be found at fault for following too closely.
Another case I see Women do much more often than Men (Elderly Men being the noteable exception) is make exceptionally slow turns, which can cause drivers who assume she's turning faster to slam right into her cars rear-end.
My Point: Many women who are piss-poor drivers may not be causes of accidents in the eyes of the law, but they are when it comes to common sense and reasonable driving practices.
I'm not saying men don't do dumb things while driving, but men are usually guilty of aggressive driving, where women who are bad drivers (and there are quite a few from what I've seen and heard) are more often simply careless/inattentive, a behavior often missed in traffic citations and accident reports, and therefore missed in statisics and the analysis of them. .
An exellent post and exellent point. I just wish you didnt feel the need to have to do it anonymously. Most people here (I would hope anyway) clearly agreed with you - at least the moderators did. .
The article makes vague claims as to payments, but really... from who? Where is the revenue source? Where is the Advertising?
I wonder if ASCAP and/or the RIAA will tolerate it and for how long? Considering how ASCAP sued the Girl Scouts for singing copyrighted songs around the campfire (and won), I dont think it will be tolerated as legal-eagle for long.
I dont think it will be attacked as vigorously as P2P MP3 distribution since keeping a copy for yourself involves time consuming use of the anologue hole, but I really don't see this as the free and legal alternative it seems to be presented as.
Civ I was great Civ II was even better; not a new concept but an improvement, and the clear best seller of the three CIV III looked great but just didn't catch my interest as much (and apparently didnt sell as well as Civ II either). Maybe it was just too sophisticated for me, but I find that unlikely because I loved Alpha Centauri (another game that didn not sell well), which was not a light game.
Increased Security at Nuclear Power Plants is all well and good but I for one would like to see increased security in the following areas as well or instead
1) All US international shipping ports: plenty of room for trouble there (the Sum of All Fears, anyone?) 2) Water/Sewage treatment plants: one of the best ways to spread pathogens (or scare a whole lot or ppl) 3) Major Power line junctions to help prevent another power outage like the one we had thew hit most of the Northeast in 2003 (thanks, Ohio!) 4) the Coast Guard.
Nukes catch poeple's attention and imagination, but there's penty of room for trouble elsewhere that is just as potentially damadging.
"There already are ratings systems. I remember two when I was growing up. Mom and Dad."
Yeah. When those rating systems actually CARE and are working properly.
Remember that many who want to legislate morality often dont TRUST us to do the same.
And I say that as a Father.
It is more important to teach, and show by example, morality and trust to our children if we expect them to exhibit these behaviors as adults.
If we want our youth to become responsible, moral, tolarant, compassionate adults, we had better be prepared to treat them in kind. If we honestly expect that legislating morality in this way (e.g. making pr0n illegal) will keep them safe from becoming corrupted, in the abscence of other forms of guidance-by-example, we are only lying to ourselves.
The method your parents demonstrated with you was/is one of the right ways (assuming they bothered to explain why it was indecent, that is.)
Slashdot Mirror
I personally love the idea of building a sock-rolid bunker that is so perfect that I am 100% certain to survive the impact.
Then, when all my friends and relatives in my section of the hemisphere are dead, I'll enjoy struggling for my own survival without clean, readily available running water and food. And then when I get sick after running low on my own hefty (let's be generous and say it's a 12 week supply) of water, I'll be proud of how I struggle to survive with complications from even the most minor of ailments after my modern drug supply is exhausted or proves ineffective.
When I use my most awsome shortwave radio, I'll be pleased to see how my important politicains (those who lived, that is) are the ones who are rescued first, and will shrug my shoulders as I look at the wreckage of my antennea array from the blast, hoping my small antennea doesnt eat up my power supply before someone can here me.
I'll be happy to have fully productive days, too, fending off what might be left of others who managed to survive but were less planful as I, as I count my ammunation running lower every day. I'll be thankful my hungry neighbor (the one living in a bunker right next to me) doesn't have a bigger gun than me, either.
I for one agree that life after a massive asteroid blast would be well on the high odds of survival and most likely fully worth living. After all: With God, all things are possible 8-D.
Especially for those of us with newer motherboards who want a completely silent system with as few fans as possible
First it was CPUs with cooling and big/slow/no fans and big heatsinks, then PSUs GPUs and now MOBOs. My current custom box (now 14 months old) was built to be silent and I had a hard time settling on a motherboard that was state of the art, stable, and still used a passive heatsink to cool the board chipset fan-free. I finally settled on an Asus P4P800.
I can definately believe heat becoming even more of an issue. For those of us who want power/performance and quiet at the same time, this will become even more of a challenge as time goes on. I for one hope not to rely on expensive and/or complicated cooling devices, like peltier units, water pumps and the like. I hope the focus is on efficient chips that only clock up/power up as they need to, like the pentuim M.
my 2 cents.
That was one of the more thought provoking, insightful posts on this subject that I have seen in a while (and I use adblock).
Thanks for your two cents.
I heard the same piece and was pretty dissapointed to hear the fairly slanted presentation.
A typical FUD tactic that was used in this litle gem of a story was the guy who had his tax return floating around on the internet, presumably because he was engaged in the evil perils of file sharing (or such as was implied between the lines).
The 'Beav: Gosh Wally! those P2P users sure are a careless bunch, huh?
Wally: They sure are, Beav! Let that be a lesson to you: you need to be more careful than that; that P2P stuff is dangerous business.
"There are no FDA regulations that say you have to show the amount of transfatty acids, unlike everything else you see in the package."
Oh?
Maybe not, but there will be as of Januray 1, 2006:
http://www.fda.gov/oc/initiatives/transfat/
This is why you see more and more products in the grocry store advertising: "Contains NO transfats!" or something to that effect (instead, look for it's evil twin: modified food starch).
Until January 1, 2006, the easiet way to tell if your favorite junk-food, er, I mean food product, contains trans fats is by looking at the list of ingredients. If it says anywhere on that list "partially hydrogenated X" (where X is basically anything) congratulations! It's got trans-fats!
The FDA has been under considerable pressure to enact this regulation for years, but it delayed having the regulation take effect until the year 2006 in order to allow the food lobby *cough, cough* I meant to say food industry, time to adjust their food content to find a viable alternative to trans-fats, which have the convenient holy trinity of:
A) making foods taste good
B) being very cheap
C) acting as a preservative
There is no free lunch: Eat less, exercise more, eat more greens, less meat and less fat.
not foolproof, since phishing works just fine here.
An improvement? maybe. Foolproof? only a fool would make that claim.
.
Since it was a Democrat who first prosposed this particluar aspect of state internet taxation, we'll never know will we?
/. has more of a democratic base than republican, but you can take comfort in knowing all federal branches of government, except possibly the judiciary (for now), are firmly in control of republicans. Then again, judging by your .sig, you probably already knew that, didn't you?
/.ers appear to be democrat than republican ? no snotty and/or sarcastic replies, please, and no I dont mean you, jhigh.
/.ers would have posted similarly insightful comments. Would they have been modded to a 5? Probably, IMO, but not not definitely.
I do agree with your premise that
Another more interesting question is: why is it that so many more
Still, if a republican governor had proposed this I'm sure that at least a few (albet less I'm sure)
and if you RTFA, you would see that it goes into effect on May 2nd, 2005.
"Hani Durzy, eBay spokesman, said the company has reviewed Ohio's law and is not concerned.
'We do not believe the law applies to people who sell items on eBay or to eBay itself,' he told the paper."
Oh, yeah. Like his *belief* has any bearing whatsoever on how the law will actually be enforced.
This law is an open invitation for governmental and citizen abuse.
Let's say I'm a prominent government official or, worse, I am *not* a prominent government official but know someone who is. Now as an Ohio resident you just happen to sell something on eBay just *once* and I know about it. You did something to really annoy me and a dedicated (read as: threatened, bribed, or owned) prosecutor from any juris-my-dick-shun in the great state of Ohio takes you to court over it. Now you have to defend yourself. And even if the case could be dismissed as meritless, you would still have to come up with a plausible explination as to why the law should not apply to you in this specific instance (hope that the judge is not in anyone's pocket too, by the way).
Or, worse yet, some yahoo citizen bought something from you (the seller in Ohio) and is greatly displeased for (insert reason here) and files a civil suit on the basis of the law in Ohio. Now not only do you have to defend yoursef but the standard of proof to get a verdict vs. you is lower (9 of 12 jurors instead of 12 of 12).
Now I know that the odds of this kind of abuse are low and there are plenty of dumb laws on the books that are never enforced, but...
That doesnt mean we need another one.
P.S. now when you sell on eBay as an Ohio resident you can add a clause that you won't sell or ship to those with a user rating below "X" or a bad reputation to protect yourself from abuse.
OK...
;-)
THAT WAS FUNNY!
(bangs hand on desk laughing out loud; glad that the store is closed)
thank-you for that!
If you RTFA you wouold see that the EULAs mentioned there, including gator, are very plain about what they do and are in "plain english" that mere mortals like you and I can understand.
Many EULAs are, as you say, legal fluff, but they made the point of showing that many are not, and when the user is capable of understanding what he should have read when he just skipped the whole thing and clicked on "I AGREE", then that was the end of the whole debate right there (legally, anyway, and that's all that counts in the end).
Again, don't misundertand me, most EULAs are just a hop, skip-and-a-jump away from selling your computer into zombie-land slavery and your privacy to the highest bidder, but many appear to be quite legal, as nasty as they are.
IANAL.
.
The EFF was a part of preveting yet another case of the DMCA being used to quash innovation.
/. crowd: http://www.eff.org/endangered/list.php#toner
This is a perfect example of what the EFF has been trying to do on our behalf: and by "our" I especially mean the
The relevent text from the page:
Species: Static Control Components remanufactured Lexmark toner cartridge
Genus: Printer toner cartridge
Threat averted: Overreaching claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
What it is: A printer toner cartridge refurbished by Static Control Components, sold more cheaply than new Lexmark-branded cartridges.
What it lets you do: Toner cartridges are among the most expensive consumables of a laser printer. Lexmark's cartridges include chips with little bits of code that report back to the printer about toner-fill level -- but they also reveal whether or not the cartridge is "Lexmark authorized." The printer will refuse to print if the cartridge isn't "authorized," so Static Control replaced the chips so its refilled cartridges would work in Lexmark printers and report themselves "full of ink."
Why it was endangered: Lexmark wasn't very happy about competing with Static Control for cartridge sales. It sued, claiming that the cartridge-printer "handshake" was a mechanism protecting a copyrighted work, so circumventing the mechanism violated the DMCA. The copyrighted work in question? The "toner loader program" in the cartridge chip.
How EFF helped save it: EFF filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting Static Control Components. We argued that the software was no more than a lock-out code, and that the DMCA explicitly permits the creation of interoperable software. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed.
Have *you* joined yet?
.
I for one do NOT understand how he can trademark the MAME logo if he
A) had nothing to do with the years of work that went into the coding of the free softwareby the authors and the, collectively speaking, decades of beta testing by those who play MAME games. The players/beta-testers discover a new bug, report the error to the MAME designers and the emulation becomes that much more stable. What right does Mr. Foley have to what would amount to vicarious ownership of the decades of collective work of what is perfectly legal software?
B) He did not and has nothing to do with the creation of the MAME logo, so how can he have a legal right to trademark it? IANAL, so could someone please explain this one to me?
I CAN understand Mr. Foley's concern as a businessman wanting to stop Illegal ROM distribution, especially by vendors who flagrantly break the law or deliberately encourage it. However, he is going about it in what certainly looks to me like typical, lazy corporate bullying:
make a poor pretense at taking the moral high ground by claiming to be merely be fighting piracy to protect his legitimate business, finding the best lawyers money can buy, and then quashing software innovation when copyright-infringement is not relevant to the logo (since it was not created/taken by such means...yet).
I have no problem with his current efforts to stop illegal ROM distribution: it's the legal and correct way to go, but he just lost all moral high ground and became as bad as the lawbreakers he wants to stop with this corporate trademark SNAFU (pun intended).
As the owner of a MAME arcade control panel who legally bought the rights to a collection of CAPCOM games on a single CD, I am left incredulous at the hypocrisy of Mr. Foley's efforts to fight copyright infingement by doing what is, for all practical purposes the same thing: TAKING SOMETHING THAT DOESN'T BELONG TO HIM THAT IS ASSOCIATED WITH YEARS OF WORK AND THEN MAKING A PROFIT ON IT.
Sounds like the pot calling the kettle black to me.
.
Hydrogen is Da Bomb!
Oh, wait...
Or you could always use Norton Ghost to restore the whole drive from the last known safe/good configuration and save yourself a really big pain in the ass.
Unless you think it's not worth spending the, say $100.00, of money upfront to be basically headache free forever not only from r00tkits but a corrupt registry or any other malady where only a complete re-install or its equivilant will do.
I condsider my time valuable, and to spend X number of hours at Y dollars per hour to solve the problem of being p0wned is not worth it when Ghost makes it so easy to deal with on a Windows system.
.
I personally agree with what you are saying, but please remember this:
s , criminalize-thought DMCA was passed
you may be sorely misunderestimating (and I use that word intentionally here) the power and connections of the *AA & Entertainment Industry.
Doubt me? Remember this:
* We now have a Federal Government firmly in control of one party (with the possible exception of the Judiciary, for now) with a clear favor towards corporate interests.
* Even under the Clinton Administration, the mother-of-all-evil, you-just-lost-your-previously-held-consumer-right
* The FCC passed the Broadcast Flag regulation despite the clear objections of consumers
* Congress decided to extend Copyright (Copywrong?) protections well beyond what most mere mortals consider neccessary to encourage and protect creative works (even the supreme court found the law to be dumb but still within the power of congress to extend it) Thanks, Sonny!
* Other seemingly more reasonable countries are being/have-been adopting DMCA like legislation under pressure from Uncle Sam and his corporate-leveraging trade interests (think Australia and the previous slashdot story where a fellow was found guilty of piracy-by-hyperlinking, amoung what I'm sure are countless other stories I cant recall)
The thing that may stop this cute little idea is ISPs that could-give-a-sh*t-less about implementing a policy that will only cost them more money choosing to ignore digital fingerprints because there is no law requiring them to do so in their host country (think of Demonoid.com's shut down and re-launching just one month later under similar circumstances). But don't you worry - Uncle Sam and his corporate sponsors are working on that one....
"aaaactually, mr wizard taught me that it's just the water's skin that's really wet--that is, it's self-adhesive properties..."
I guess you might say, on this Valentine's Day, that water is "stuck on you." (I'm sorry...)
Wa Alaikum Salaam!
Because loaded questions like this don't serve as a reasonable base for a conversation.
/. Where many the de-facto backround noise is anti-MS and Pro-Linux by default.
But hey, this is
That could be, but at least he demonstrated that he does have taste. This is not to say that you don't, but I think it was pretty clear that he was talking about GOOD Sci-Fi.
He made his point with constructive criticism, whereas it looks like you got hit by a pet peeve and nit-picked even though you are, techincally, correct.
.
Statistics are fun and all, but we have to take the time to look at what generated the numbers behind them if we really want to understand why things happen.
We can have the best reasoning and statistical analysis skills in the world, and unless our underlying assumtions/facts are correct, our conclusions will be wrong every time...
In one of the examples cited by the parent post, the Woman driver (e.g. cutting off the driver in front) would be the cause of the accident in the eyes of many drivers, but unless it was bltatantly obvious, the other driver (often a man, statistically speaking) would be found at fault for following too closely.
Another case I see Women do much more often than Men (Elderly Men being the noteable exception) is make exceptionally slow turns, which can cause drivers who assume she's turning faster to slam right into her cars rear-end.
My Point: Many women who are piss-poor drivers may not be causes of accidents in the eyes of the law, but they are when it comes to common sense and reasonable driving practices.
I'm not saying men don't do dumb things while driving, but men are usually guilty of aggressive driving, where women who are bad drivers (and there are quite a few from what I've seen and heard) are more often simply careless/inattentive, a behavior often missed in traffic citations and accident reports, and therefore missed in statisics and the analysis of them.
.
An exellent post and exellent point. I just wish you didnt feel the need to have to do it anonymously. Most people here (I would hope anyway) clearly agreed with you - at least the moderators did.
.
They don't.
The article makes vague claims as to payments, but really... from who? Where is the revenue source? Where is the Advertising?
I wonder if ASCAP and/or the RIAA will tolerate it and for how long? Considering how ASCAP sued the Girl Scouts for singing copyrighted songs around the campfire (and won), I dont think it will be tolerated as legal-eagle for long.
I dont think it will be attacked as vigorously as P2P MP3 distribution since keeping a copy for yourself involves time consuming use of the anologue hole, but I really don't see this as the free and legal alternative it seems to be presented as.
I played Civ I, II and III
Civ I was great
Civ II was even better; not a new concept but an improvement, and the clear best seller of the three
CIV III looked great but just didn't catch my interest as much (and apparently didnt sell as well as Civ II either). Maybe it was just too sophisticated for me, but I find that unlikely because I loved Alpha Centauri (another game that didn not sell well), which was not a light game.
Go figure.
Increased Security at Nuclear Power Plants is all well and good but I for one would like to see increased security in the following areas as well or instead
1) All US international shipping ports: plenty of room for trouble there (the Sum of All Fears, anyone?)
2) Water/Sewage treatment plants: one of the best ways to spread pathogens (or scare a whole lot or ppl)
3) Major Power line junctions to help prevent another power outage like the one we had thew hit most of the Northeast in 2003 (thanks, Ohio!)
4) the Coast Guard.
Nukes catch poeple's attention and imagination, but there's penty of room for trouble elsewhere that is just as potentially damadging.
my 2 cents.
"There already are ratings systems. I remember two when I was growing up. Mom and Dad."
Yeah. When those rating systems actually CARE and are working properly.
Remember that many who want to legislate morality often dont TRUST us to do the same.
And I say that as a Father.
It is more important to teach, and show by example, morality and trust to our children if we expect them to exhibit these behaviors as adults.
If we want our youth to become responsible, moral, tolarant, compassionate adults, we had better be prepared to treat them in kind. If we honestly expect that legislating morality in this way (e.g. making pr0n illegal) will keep them safe from becoming corrupted, in the abscence of other forms of guidance-by-example, we are only lying to ourselves.
The method your parents demonstrated with you was/is one of the right ways (assuming they bothered to explain why it was indecent, that is.)