Well, since most humans don't really give a second thought to any of the other species on Earth until they're on the verge of extinction (and that concern only came about recently and still isn't universal), I hardly think we're in a position to judge how "advanced" an alien civilization is based on whether they care about us. As long as they don't use our planet as a toxic waste dump they're more advanced than we are, and even if they do we're not in a position to judge them until humanity is nearly extinct and they still don't care.
Fine. And any business or individual who can't protect their own property or life without the threat of armed police coming to arrest anyone who steals their stuff or kills them doesn't deserve to own anything or to live.
No, they support 2 browsers. They never claimed they were going to make their pages work on both of them by supporting actual standards; more likely they'll just use a bunch of ugly hacks so things work right on those 2 but may or may not horribly break under Safari or Opera.
If content providers and browser makers would have all supported standards in the first place, they wouldn't have to announce now that they were going to try to make everything work on the 2nd most popular browser, too.
Fair enough, but I doubt a large corporation like Apple would just shut down completely and erase all of the IP it owned. It seems a lot more likely someone would buy up their assets, including the rights to their DRM scheme, so as to be able to sell music to the huge installed base of iPod owners and players to the people who already bought music from Apple.
"The whole twisted idea of trying to disassociate ownership from original works is a very selfish position."
It's not selfish if you are the ceator of the original work
Well, duh. He's talking about dissociating ALL ownership from creation. Unless one person was responsible for creating every single original work in the history of mankind, your comment is a non sequitur.
No one has ever claimed that a creator shouldn't have the right to give away his or her work, but the existence of some creator who is willing to do so doesn't imply that all creators should be forced to create for free.
Well, first of all, your music won't magically stop working (you're thinking about when Napster goes out of business).
Sure, eventually you won't be able to get a new version of iTunes that works in Microsoft's new version of Windows that comes out after Apple's dead to play your existing music. But guess what... that version of Photoshop you just bought for your Mac will be worthless, too, and it costs a lot more than a song on iTunes. The "Apple might go out of business, and I won't be able to buy a new Mac after that" argument doesn't really hold water.
What are you going to do with your MP3s if an electro-magnetic pulse wipes out all of your hardware? What if the sun explodes?
I've got your hypothetical argument right here buddy.
The FCC's regulation of broadcasters has nothing to do with their business practices or anti-trust issues. The FCC regulates broadcasters because the government has granted those broadcasters exclusive use of certain electromagnetic frequencies, and they're supposed to be used for the public good.
Whether the current FCC is actually doing its job is debatable, but ownership rules aren't meant to protect advertisers from big, monopolistic media companies, they're meant to protect the people from having one company's viewpoints forced on us because they control the entire media.
Even if google controlled the search engine market, they could treat advertisers however they wanted. Smaller search engines would have a valid anti-trust complaint if they used their dominance to force advertisers to not place ads with their competitors, but a monopoly in one industry doesn't give you a responsibility toward companies you're not competing with in another industry.
Go start a shoe company and come back after you sue the NBA for not buying your shoes.
And through the miracle of compound interest, those extra 44 cents added to the budget deficit will one day cost your great-great-great-grandchildren another billion dollars when they finally decide to pay of the national debt.
I don't know what crack-smoking school you took Economics 101 at, but you've got no idea what you're talking about.
What you tax you get less of and what you subsidize you get more of. If you tax wealth and subsidize poverty, then you're going to get less wealth and more poverty.
Well, if we can blame your years of playing RPGs for your.sig spam, then we should probably worry that role players are all a bunch of friggin' morons who shouldn't be trusted with a net connection, much less a security clearance.
The only similarity to Magic is that each player draws a card at the beginning of the game that determines which type of alien you are and therefore your special abilities.
It's been close to 10 years since I've played Magic, but I'm certain I never drew a card to determine what type of alien I'd be.
Huh. When I install an application on my Mac, I download the.dmg file, which automatically opens after downloading, then drag the application over to "Applications" in the sidebar of the same window.
One click on the link in a webpage to download the thing, one drag to install.
On the other hand, ACLs may be undertood in theory, but they will turn into a terrible unmaintainable mess once you start to use them on a larger scale.
How large a scale do you propose this is going to take? CMU and MIT (and other, even bigger, users of AFS) have been using ACLs for years, and I don't think they'd describe it as creating an unmaintainable mess.
Please note that I'm not commenting about the right (or lack of it) of the company to fire whoever they will for whatever reason. I'm simply pointing out that the parent posters claim is completely nonsensical.
No, actually you're demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of basic principles of logic.
Freedom of speech does not mean that there are no consequences for speech. It means that some specific consequences (those imposed by government) don't apply. "Freedom from consequences" would imply that there are no consequences, whatsoever, at any time. I suggest you look up the difference between existential and universal qualifiers, and while you're at it, "nonsensical".
When I was recently interviewing people, I didn't ask a single one of them if they steal from their employers, rape small children, or toture animals. Does this mean that if I hire someone who does those things, I shouldn't be allowed to fire them because it's my own fault for not asking?
In the future, should I make a huge list of everything I find objectionable, and spend 10 to 11 hours grilling potential employees about them?
Sure, but can you say that Edison invented more things than Franklin because he was able to patent things, or that he invented fewer things than Leonardo for the same reason? It seems to me that there's no way to measure the effect patents had on any of them, because they were different people working in different eras. Who's to say whether someone with Leonardo's genius would have invented more or less if there were patents? There's no way to be sure one way or the other. You can't do the type of study the grandparent poster was asking about, because the situation is completely hypothetical.
It would be impossible to do such a study, because there's no available control group.
Thomas Edison innovated, and he had lots of patents. Is that good enough for you? It shouldn't be, because you can't point to a truly analagous inventor who worked in a climate with no patents and compare the effects.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I hope you shorted lots of Microsoft stock some time in the past 20 years.
Well, since most humans don't really give a second thought to any of the other species on Earth until they're on the verge of extinction (and that concern only came about recently and still isn't universal), I hardly think we're in a position to judge how "advanced" an alien civilization is based on whether they care about us. As long as they don't use our planet as a toxic waste dump they're more advanced than we are, and even if they do we're not in a position to judge them until humanity is nearly extinct and they still don't care.
Fine. And any business or individual who can't protect their own property or life without the threat of armed police coming to arrest anyone who steals their stuff or kills them doesn't deserve to own anything or to live.
If content providers and browser makers would have all supported standards in the first place, they wouldn't have to announce now that they were going to try to make everything work on the 2nd most popular browser, too.
Fair enough, but I doubt a large corporation like Apple would just shut down completely and erase all of the IP it owned. It seems a lot more likely someone would buy up their assets, including the rights to their DRM scheme, so as to be able to sell music to the huge installed base of iPod owners and players to the people who already bought music from Apple.
Person 1: Hitler was evil. He killed 500 billion people.
Person 2: No he didn't. More like 12 million.
Person 3: Oh, so you must think we wasn't evil.
Moderators: How insightful!
It's not selfish if you are the ceator of the original work
Well, duh. He's talking about dissociating ALL ownership from creation. Unless one person was responsible for creating every single original work in the history of mankind, your comment is a non sequitur.
No one has ever claimed that a creator shouldn't have the right to give away his or her work, but the existence of some creator who is willing to do so doesn't imply that all creators should be forced to create for free.
Well, first of all, your music won't magically stop working (you're thinking about when Napster goes out of business).
Sure, eventually you won't be able to get a new version of iTunes that works in Microsoft's new version of Windows that comes out after Apple's dead to play your existing music. But guess what... that version of Photoshop you just bought for your Mac will be worthless, too, and it costs a lot more than a song on iTunes. The "Apple might go out of business, and I won't be able to buy a new Mac after that" argument doesn't really hold water.
What are you going to do with your MP3s if an electro-magnetic pulse wipes out all of your hardware? What if the sun explodes?
I've got your hypothetical argument right here buddy.
Wait, what's this about refresh rates?
Good argument. Let's get rid of the military right away.
Whether the current FCC is actually doing its job is debatable, but ownership rules aren't meant to protect advertisers from big, monopolistic media companies, they're meant to protect the people from having one company's viewpoints forced on us because they control the entire media.
Even if google controlled the search engine market, they could treat advertisers however they wanted. Smaller search engines would have a valid anti-trust complaint if they used their dominance to force advertisers to not place ads with their competitors, but a monopoly in one industry doesn't give you a responsibility toward companies you're not competing with in another industry.
Go start a shoe company and come back after you sue the NBA for not buying your shoes.
And through the miracle of compound interest, those extra 44 cents added to the budget deficit will one day cost your great-great-great-grandchildren another billion dollars when they finally decide to pay of the national debt.
What you tax you get less of and what you subsidize you get more of. If you tax wealth and subsidize poverty, then you're going to get less wealth and more poverty.
I suggest you take a 101-level logic course too.
Unless, of course, the moderator considers jerks who spam slashdot with their .sigs to all be flamebait, in which case, yes, he's flamebait.
Well, if we can blame your years of playing RPGs for your .sig spam, then we should probably worry that role players are all a bunch of friggin' morons who shouldn't be trusted with a net connection, much less a security clearance.
How does Linus using Apple hardware create publicity for MAC addresses? Even PC users with Ethernet use them.
Of course, it also usually moves quite a bit slower.
It's been close to 10 years since I've played Magic, but I'm certain I never drew a card to determine what type of alien I'd be.
Comment Zap.
One click on the link in a webpage to download the thing, one drag to install.
geez, strange Linux trolls.
How large a scale do you propose this is going to take? CMU and MIT (and other, even bigger, users of AFS) have been using ACLs for years, and I don't think they'd describe it as creating an unmaintainable mess.
No, actually you're demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of basic principles of logic.
Freedom of speech does not mean that there are no consequences for speech. It means that some specific consequences (those imposed by government) don't apply. "Freedom from consequences" would imply that there are no consequences, whatsoever, at any time. I suggest you look up the difference between existential and universal qualifiers, and while you're at it, "nonsensical".
In the future, should I make a huge list of everything I find objectionable, and spend 10 to 11 hours grilling potential employees about them?
Unless, of course, you want your music to sound better and/or take up less space.
Sure, but can you say that Edison invented more things than Franklin because he was able to patent things, or that he invented fewer things than Leonardo for the same reason? It seems to me that there's no way to measure the effect patents had on any of them, because they were different people working in different eras. Who's to say whether someone with Leonardo's genius would have invented more or less if there were patents? There's no way to be sure one way or the other. You can't do the type of study the grandparent poster was asking about, because the situation is completely hypothetical.
Thomas Edison innovated, and he had lots of patents. Is that good enough for you? It shouldn't be, because you can't point to a truly analagous inventor who worked in a climate with no patents and compare the effects.