I'll probably get modded up for starting off saying "I'll probably get modded down for defending Microsoft" (well, that's the way it seems to work around here), but...
"The most effective step that you can take to help protect yourself from malicious hyperlinks is not to click them."
That's a security trueism. It's like saying "The best way to help a high school drop-out is while he is still in school.".
What they're saying is that any method of security that only starts working after you have clicked on a spoofed link is going to be less effective than one implemented earlier. Whether Microsoft codes a better patch for this or a worse one, whether they fix this risk better than Opera or Firefox or worse than them, some risk will remain simply because the security is implemented later in the process.
It's like locking a malicious user out at log on is safer than letting him get on a machine and only run into security when he starts the browser.
Now how could this actually be put to use? A user could click on trusted sites, and type any URL they had doubts about, but obviously, a lot of users aren't going to go to all that trouble, and no one's sense of what's trustworthy is infaliable. So a user is likely to err on the side of caution and start typing in most links manually, or just quit worrying about browser redirects and such. Microsoft shouldn't use this as an excuse for inaction. Still, the point is true in principle - identifying a possible address spoofing exploit before it is ever offered up to be clicked on is a better option than checking it after the user has clicked.
1. Firefox is less bulky, mostly because it is a web browser, and doesn't add Mozilla's pop 3 mail and news functions. Mozilla is less bloated than IE, but not bloat free. Remember, IE loads a lot of itself with windows, so to see how much time loading takes, you have to enable Mozilla's functions to preload itself like IE, or you're comparing apples and oranges.
To do this: Start at the edit tab on the top row of Mozilla, pick preferences, and a new window will open. Look under categories - Advanced and there you will find a checkbox to "Keep Mozilla in memory to improve performance". It is off by default. Check it and then click "OK".
2. I don't think so. If there's an add on or something for this, I suspect it involves really removing IE and not just ignoring it, and then some registry patching, so it would be, at the least pretty complicated. If someone has implemented this and it has worked well, though, I'd love to see it.
3. Download manager (in 1.5 and up at least) is controlled by a radio button: Start at the edit tab on the top row of Mozilla, pick preferences, and a new window will open. Look under categories - Navigator -Downloads and there you will find three options "Open the Download Manager", "Open a Progress Dialog", and "Don't Open Anything". Pick one and click "OK"
1. Who does HQ listen to? Legal? Does legal have an opinion on whether this new statement by Homeland Security potentially affects corporate liability? Could an Outlook only policy jeopardize getting federal contracts (and does your company have or want federal contracts - many don't).
If your answer is "HQ doesn't listen to anybody", you need to go to Monster.com, and let the stockholders react whenever they get a clue.
Plus, it may accurately describe the situation for industry employees, i.e. the average Gaffer or Best Boy may get a credit and a base income that works out to about 75,000 $ a year, and that may not look like much from Jack's point of view, but he's asking a customer base that has an average income of about 31,000 $ a year to think of these employees as little guys, and that implies the customers themselves are sub-little. Doesn't sound very complementary does it? "Hey, you guys are making a third or so of what I consider a little guy's salary. Instead of me lobbying to get you all 75,000 $ a year, I want you to do the right thing no matter how much it hurts, and help these guys who are already making 2 1/2 times what you do. It's important that THEY don't get screwed." It sounds kind of like "Clean your plate, bankers in Switzerland are starving tonight".
Actually, I think the industry does conduct lots of detailed economic analysis to pick what they percieve as an optimum price point to maximize their total profits, and I'd even agree they update their models more frequently than most industries.
Stock prospecti and other such documents reveal many cases where the various RIAA members have often tried to include some sort of quantifiable and standardizeable assumptions that many other industries simply ignore, because those industries assume their impacts will be trivial. In a fast changing market such as music, this is very sensible.
However, I think the RIAA has also assumed some factors are trivial and not worth including in their price point calculations, and this is a largish to huge mistake. I think this mistake hurts their bottom line, and drives some of the social friction that inspires rabidity in a share of slashdotticus neophilus as well.
Here's why I think that. Several RIAA members around 1998 to 2000 wanted to expand their involvement in the rap market. Most of them put a heavy emphasis on signing some hip-hop or rap (or perhaps more accurately 'gangsta') artists who had a strong antiestablishment message, and urged their listeners to physically steal the music, not as in copying, but as in shoplifting. Frequently, they also signed other artists who got heavily involved in violent crimes and are not making more records until they get out of their respective medium security facilities.
Profits from these particular artists were frequently low to non-existant, and I'd argue it's largely because of the promoters not expecting trouble that I think should have been obvious, rather than these acts being particularly lacking in talent. (Of course, I have the advantage of 20-20 hindsight).
More recently, one RIAA member expected Michael Jackson's new album to have sales well above his last album, and basically committed all their descressionary resources and marketing for the whole year to support it, although there had been a very large time since the last album and M J was already under a cloud of highly negative publicity.
Given such examples, I think it is at least very probable that there are similar blind spots in the way various RIAA members have calculated price points. One of them may be that they work from the assumption that the current price is the optimum price point, because there is a cheap, effective way to stop bulk duplication and counterfitting without them having to keep pumping money into new DRM schemes to sustain it, and they just have to find it. In other words, they may be caught in a previous investment trap, where they keep trying something that is a holding action, because they are convinced there is a new solution comeing along that will make the holding action worthwhile, but if they quit now, that money already spent will have been wasted.
I'm debating or discussing the point here, where just possibly there are people intelligent enough to be open to arguement, or offer an intelligent rebuttal, instead of running. You condemn me for not doing that with the ex-friend, and for doing it here both, so I just have to ask, is there a single act I could perform in my entire life that would not reflexively draw your blanket condemnation and personal insults? No? You've already committed to simply hateing me, a person you never met, you are playing the damned if you do and damned if you don't game, and you're talking about who is the better person? You've simply assumed that I made no effort to talk over anything with a friend before giving up on a friendship, and then castigated me for your assumption, and you're taking about who is the better person? On top of that, you have the sheer gall to post your insult laden tirade as an AC rather than really stand up for any of the things you claim to believe in. OK, so we now know who is the better person here, and it ain't you.
Some people will automatically ignore all that and more, some will figure M.A.D. was a threat justifying more Machiavellian politics than usual, some will condemn automatically, and some will contend he could have gotten the positive results without the subterfuges and realpolitik. Like it or not, he is going to get at least a share of the credit for the end of the cold war happening as it did.
Look on the "bright" side. Bush 43 is there at the start of the "War on Terror", but does it really like like it will be over on his watch, even if he gets another turn?
If that's the most assinine thing you've ever seen on slashdot, I'd like to take this opportunity to welcome you, brand new reader. Personally, I see lots of reasons why it probably wouldn't work, starting with the massive effort in the north to collectivise the peasantry, to the corruption rampant in both the North and South Vietnamese governments, and so on, but the question is, compared to what? To what we did in Vietnam instead? Yeah, that worked real good.
If someone claimed in '64 that we would have had a better chance of winning in Vietnam by all clapping until Tinkerbell came back to life, they wouldn't have been any nuttier than the people most of the US thought were sane, wise and dedicated, and listened to for the next 4 years or so before it became more and more obvious it just wasn't working.
There was a british study about 1964 that claimed the cheapest way for the US to win in Vietnam was to buy both countries. The idea was to drop parachute equipped boxes instead of bombs. Boxes would be labeled in several languages - "This White box with the red cross contains medical supplies" - This Green box contains farm tools" - "This blue box contains a lathe that can be driven by a waterwheel" - "This orange box contains books for Elementary education", etc. Every box would also have a little US flag on a spring on a top corner.
The US was supposed to drop those in the same quantities as they would later end up dropping bombs, pay off any farmer who claimed his water buffalo got hit with a box, and in six months announce, "Hanoi, you get the Coca-Cola plant, Saigon, you get the Pepsi plant. By the way, you're all capitalists now, so we're hoping to start selling you hospitals and roads and things, as fast as you can start taxing those bottling plant workers. When the rest of the world starts making you the same offers, y'all be sure and remember them purty lil' flags, mkay?"
Projected costs worked out to about 10% of what the war ended up costing, but that's monitary only costs, and the cost in lives was expected to be incalcuably less. Of course, the US would have turned it over to defense contaracters who would have ended up charging 100,000 a box to stick the little flags on.
And if the Soviet Union had collapsed a few months or a few years later, the period of collapse could just have easily led to a Nuclear event or similar level of tragedy. President Reagan'as administration focused on using the collapse to get some real arms reductions (although we could use more). The Russians were allowed to destroy warheads and convert their missles to launch boosters, even though we actually destroyed our own first stages, precisely because they pointed out that this would help stabilize their new economy, and we chose to trust them that far.
How many US administrations would have put grabbing the former Soviet sattelites as new markets well ahead of helping them avoid paying the tremendous last ditch costs of propping the Soviet system up for just a few more years? Why did NATO quickly extend a hand of welcome to Poland? That initiative was originated and pushed by the US, paid for largely by the US, and the most significant opposition among the other NATO countries was all acompanied by attempts to simultaneously turn Poland into a captive market with economic leveraging tricks such as confiscatory tarrifs.
I agree with many of your points about China as a threat, Soviet institutional paranoia, and that the collapse was inevitable, _Eventually_ (as you point out Reagan may have at least accelerated the process), but they need to be qualified. Soviet Paranoia was largely driven by the German invasion of WW2, and strongly derived from the older Russian Paranoia, which had been amplified by Napolion's invasion, hence really dating back to well before the SU's inception. With France and (West) Germany part of NATO, Soviet Paranoia meant that they had a lot of incentive to fight their collapse bitterly, and export its consequences to the immediate west, and to focus on NATO disproportionately to China.
The US also took some actions to keep China from taking advantage of the situation, specifically by working with Soviet Intelligence to hide the timing of various agreements and hnad-overs of control from the Chinese until the deadlines were too short for the PRC to put together a coherent plan to exploit them, and encouraged the PRC to accept other benefits, such as better US trade status, instead. I'd submit that a. this was mostly a carrot instead of stick approach, and b. a "stick-heavy" approach would have been very foolish under the circumstances.
Just my guess, but in 50 years or so Reagan will probably be classed about with Truman. He will be considered to have done a good job, probably rated better than average, but some of his decisions will be analyzed the same way as Truman's decision to target cities with the A-bomb, and historians and pundits will split over whether those were good decisions, for much the same reasons.
The original laws on arms export classified many things as weapons that don't directly kill people. For example, a high strength aluminum alloy tube isn't a weapon, but one far above the grade needed for oil refinery tubing was on the list because the few known reasons anyone would pay 20x as much as the basic model for that precision grade included large rocket launcher tubes.
There's a problem with your analogy, "Guns don't kill people, personal computers do?" the idea is more like Guns don't kill people, guns plus bullets do, and guns plus bullets plus teflon coatings mean going to a lot of extra trouble to preferentially kill people with protective vests. And P4 chip plus CD-ROM drive, 40 Gb Hard drive, Asus MoBo, and a few cards may equal a nice PC, but the question is does P4 + something else = weapon? (and the real decision makers are at least supposed to be thinking of weapons significant enough to matter in war, not weapons as in throw it hard enough and it can do the same damage as a $1.98 glass ashtray).
With that said, the inclusion is wrong. P4s are far too easy to obtain to be an effective choke point even if there is some particular use where a cluster of cheaper chips won't do, and that should be enough reason not to include them right there.
It also looks like the the person adding it to the list does not know of a specific use, but is reacting from a general sense of nebulous potential risks, and that he is responding that way because he is ignorant of many basic facts which he should know and fully comprehend the ramifications of to be competent for his jjob description. (Yes, that last sentence IS awkward as hell, and yes I AM feeling to lazy to rephrase it right now).
Batman just may be a special case there, in that the 60's TV series was largely driven by new villians and a lot of hollywood star's agents actually called up and asked for a shot at a particular part just to get publicity for their star(that's why there were three different Catwomen and Vincent Price playing Egghead. They mostly took the role with a series or a new film coming out soon). The series was supposedly a fun thing to film too, a lot of clowning around on the set and a light shooting schedule.
We can hope this is why the Batman franchise is still Supervillian (tm) heavy, and that it's not a general trend, but frankly, I trust Hollywood to get it right like I trust my cat to organize my file cabinets.
If it follows the usual pattern for superhero flicks, Spiderman 3 will have several villains and not just the 2nd Green Goblin. Remember how many bad guys show up in Batman and Robin or Batman Forever? Let's see, we have the Rhino, Sandman, Mysterio and Electro from the early Spiderman comics, or Venom the living spidy suit from the later years. Or maybe Spiderman 3 will also be X-men 3.
Earrghh! I thought I'd outgrown this stuff 20 years ago. Why do I even remember the names of a bunch of Spiderman villians?
You're quite right - the Hutu-Tutsi conflict is spilling over into the countries immediately around Ruanda, in roughly the center of Africa, and not Liberia, which is well west of there. Sorry about the miss-information. If I'm not still confused, I gather from the CIA factbook and UN WHO sources that Liberian life exopectancies are impacted mostly by their own civil war and a fairly average 9% adult HIV rate, tragic, but much less than the worst AIDS situations in sub-saharan Africa, and somewhat by political unrest in their neighbors (cif. president Taylor's UN sanction for meddeling in Sierra Leone's civil war, which was the one I conflated with the even larger and more devastating Hutu-Tutsi war. I'm still unsure if the Sierra Leone clash is second largest currently in Africa or farther down the list) Again, let me appologise.
Whether Liberian life expectancies actually rose higher than Russia's somewhere in 1999-2003 depends in large part on whether the estimated 200,000 + Liberians living as refugees in other countries is accurate, and whether the low reported deaths/incidence for HIV (5,000 deaths for 125,000 infected), is reasonably accurate as well. Some WHO estimates may be substantially different because they count Liberia's share of the 2,000,000 + refugees that have fled Sierra Leone.
The CIA's own life expectancy estimate for Russia is only 59 for males and is a much higher 73 for females, raising their average to 66, but this huge disparity in the gender survival rates has itself been questioned by many trained in logistics and geopolitics. For such reasons, it is hard to avoid risking comparing apples to oranges.
"While you're busy criticizing Fox News, be sure to eat your own too."
1. I simply agreed that the friend cited in the original post was wrong to judge Fox news as anything except a news agency, as opposed to judging it as a dry cleaners, a small brown bird, or the reflection of Venus off swamp gas. If you think, like him, Fox news should be judged by a different standard than the other news broadcasters, please show why instead of resorting to personal attacks. My criticising the poster's friend's judgement =! my criticising Fox.
2. The new York times is far from my preferred news source, and I have absolutly no intention of eating it. You evidently like creating straw men rather than using reason, as that's two such in your post so far.
3. Your information about the origin of the quote is actually quite interesting, and I would have modded that informative if it had been possible. It's a pity that the rest of your post falls short of that, but I really think you are leaping to a lot of conclusions about me that you lack any evidence for.
I think you're begging the question with the last sentence. If a poster agrees that the sight of boobies isn't really likely to harm a child, then you're going to use it as evidence for your first contention, that pornography in general doesn't harm children.
This is not about Janet jackson's nipple or something similarly trivial (No offense Janet), it's about depictions of all sorts, from basic hetero or homo-sex to beastiality, S & M, and scat, and beyond.
How many people fixate during their earliest sexual experiences? Most of them. Males vey often end up being leg men or breast men, preferring blondes or redheads, or having a phillia for garterbelts or high heels because such things are mentally connected to their first masturbatory or intercourse experiences. (It's just a harmless philia if you find high heels an interesting addition to a woman, whereas it's pathological if you desire sex with your collection of stolen high heels).
A significant percentage of males who fixate do so to an extreme. These range from rapists, who generally have a fixation on proving power or status that can easly be aggrevated by non-sexual stressors, to those pathetic types who keep looking for the cynical hooker with the heart of gold and just can't believe that she's a million to one shot at best, to all the guys who keep dating women who wreck their car, run up their long distance bill, and beat their dog.
Even real psychos, such as Ted Bundy, usually have more normal fixations as well, (Bundy had a thing for long, straight haired bruinettes). If Bundy hadn't decided to become a serial killer (or been exposed to whatever influences made him one if you prefer) he would still likely have been the type to focus really hard on just one physical type of woman.
I haven't discussed female fixations in all this, as the evidence is more mixed, and conventional wisdom is women don't have as much of a tendency to fixate visually at least. I haven't much discussed homosex, as some of those same limits on what we know apply.
All of this suggests some pornography can well be harmful to minors. It is quite possible that it does damage to children who are passing through one of their sexual development phases, or who have a more than average tendency to fixate, and it could be argued that some children are at relatively little risk, but the high risk group is a sizable one (estimated at around 30% of the current population of children), the risks there are clear,and the best guess is that little risk for the other 70% does not translate to no risk. That estimate is based on children who are no more than 2 years beyond puberty as measured by first ejaculation, rather than treating a lot of 16 and 17 years olds as part of the at risk population, as the percentages probably get lower pretty rapidly once a male has gone through a few formative sexual experiences, so make of it what you will. Again, it may be giving false comfort to assume the period around the first masturbatory experiences is a more powerful influence than the period around the first sex with a partner, so if anything, I'd argue the risks are more likely higher rather than lower.
Why is the US civil war sometimes described as brother against brother? It's not because "all americans are symbolicly brothers", but because that situation happened literally, real brothers taking opposite sides, real fathers fighting against real sons. That's a politcal difference with a very high priority indeed.
I'm not sure if the OP is entirely serious, but I am - I have broken up with a couple of friends because they had political views I disagreed with enough. The most recent of them was in favor of the torture going on in Iraq by US occuping forces, and said, about the possibility of some of those victims being innocent "You can't make an omelet without breaking a few towelheads".
I don't think I would go that far just for the kind of idiocy the OP's friend displayed, but really, a person who can excuse Fox new's missreporting by their not being judgeable by the standards of a real news source shows every sign of willfully giveing any people he agrees with unlimited slack no matter what they do. Sure, maybe he'd even go as far as to give me a false alibi if I committed a murder, but I don't really need that.
Most of my friends would put truth (as they see it) ahead of cutting me unlimited slack, and I actually like the idea that they would tell me straight up if they thought I had a drinking problem or something instead of making excuses for me.
Often, a piece passes through a stage, or several, where it grows by becoming more specific. When an author takes a rough draft, and trys to cut it down to a required size, for example, that's all about becoming more specific. Some authors concentrate whole writing sessions on finding just the right word over and over, while others enter that mode sporadically, for a few minutes as they continue to work on on other parts of the book.
Other changes simply aren't about distilation. What happens when an author introduces a spear carrier character such as a coach driver, and polishes the character a bit, and suddenly realizes there's the possibility to work a romance between that character and another into the story and that in turn will even let her comment on social issues in her fictitious society that she will otherwise not get to address?
"After RingTFA I realized that Open Source is a paradigm shift in computer technology."
That's what seems overstated. OS represents a significant change in the computer programming meta-environment more than in the actual act of programming itself or of computer technology. OS might be a very small part of a paradigm shift in economics, but it sure isn't a whole shift by itself, and most of the other pieces needed aren't happening yet, if at all.
A paradigm shift in computer technology might be more along the lines of hardware changes, i.e. using cheap clusters in place of expensive mainframes. Mostly people (as opposed to advertising dweebs) wouldn't want to make that claim until the vast majority of mainframe uses were being supplanted by cluster computing.
A paradigm shift in programming might be object oriented programming or the first scripting language, but again, most people would not feel the phrase fit unless the next generation of programmers switched overwhelmingly to the new system.
OS will have to increasingly dominate the economic and technological structures that support programming, to the point that it becomes the default, before a phrase such as paradigm shift is at all appropriate, even as an analogy.
I'm starting to think there's reasons this should be allowed (although I'm far from convinced it meets the inobviousless test).
First, the patent in this case is very narrowly defined and specific. It's not going to be much if any use in sueing a competitor except where the competitor deliberately copies a lot of details exactly rather than just borrowing broad ideas, so presumably the bank wanted it for another reason, like it gets added to their IP portfolio and that's reflected in their stock price. That's not good, but it is essentially harmless except just possibly if it misleads ignorant investors.
Second, the design is supposed to improve function in concrete, measurable ways. This principle at least is in keeping with patent law, in that patents are generally about quantifiables.
If you read some of the instructions for running an IHOP franchise, there are all these incredibly minute details, such as painting a particular mark on the floor and training your watresses to stand exactly on that mark when they call out an order to the cook. Supposedly, the cook has a better chance of hearing the order if it comes from exactly the same place every time, and so fewer ordwers get garbled, etc. Normally, manuals like this are protected by copyright. A copyright doesn't stop another company from rewriting part or all of that manual and using it as part of their business model or selling it to franchisees - only a particular expression of ideas is covered by copyright, not the ideas themselves. Copyrighting a process manual doesn't give that much real protection, as it is just the sort of thing that can be expressed in substantially different terms while still remaining essentially the same in application or construction. So I can see why a company would want to use a method that would give some protection against an exact swipe.
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I'll probably get modded up for starting off saying "I'll probably get modded down for defending Microsoft" (well, that's the way it seems to work around here), but...
"The most effective step that you can take to help protect yourself from malicious hyperlinks is not to click them."
That's a security trueism. It's like saying "The best way to help a high school drop-out is while he is still in school.".
What they're saying is that any method of security that only starts working after you have clicked on a spoofed link is going to be less effective than one implemented earlier. Whether Microsoft codes a better patch for this or a worse one, whether they fix this risk better than Opera or Firefox or worse than them, some risk will remain simply because the security is implemented later in the process.
It's like locking a malicious user out at log on is safer than letting him get on a machine and only run into security when he starts the browser.
Now how could this actually be put to use? A user could click on trusted sites, and type any URL they had doubts about, but obviously, a lot of users aren't going to go to all that trouble, and no one's sense of what's trustworthy is infaliable. So a user is likely to err on the side of caution and start typing in most links manually, or just quit worrying about browser redirects and such. Microsoft shouldn't use this as an excuse for inaction. Still, the point is true in principle - identifying a possible address spoofing exploit before it is ever offered up to be clicked on is a better option than checking it after the user has clicked.
1. Firefox is less bulky, mostly because it is a web browser, and doesn't add Mozilla's pop 3 mail and news functions. Mozilla is less bloated than IE, but not bloat free. Remember, IE loads a lot of itself with windows, so to see how much time loading takes, you have to enable Mozilla's functions to preload itself like IE, or you're comparing apples and oranges.
To do this: Start at the edit tab on the top row of Mozilla, pick preferences, and a new window will open. Look under categories - Advanced and there you will find a checkbox to "Keep Mozilla in memory to improve performance". It is off by default. Check it and then click "OK".
2. I don't think so. If there's an add on or something for this, I suspect it involves really removing IE and not just ignoring it, and then some registry patching, so it would be, at the least pretty complicated. If someone has implemented this and it has worked well, though, I'd love to see it.
3. Download manager (in 1.5 and up at least) is controlled by a radio button: Start at the edit tab on the top row of Mozilla, pick preferences, and a new window will open. Look under categories - Navigator -Downloads and there you will find three options "Open the Download Manager", "Open a Progress Dialog", and "Don't Open Anything". Pick one and click "OK"
1. Who does HQ listen to? Legal? Does legal have an opinion on whether this new statement by Homeland Security potentially affects corporate liability? Could an Outlook only policy jeopardize getting federal contracts (and does your company have or want federal contracts - many don't).
If your answer is "HQ doesn't listen to anybody", you need to go to Monster.com, and let the stockholders react whenever they get a clue.
This just proves the old adage "It's that 90% of politicians that give the other 10% a bad name".
Plus, it may accurately describe the situation for industry employees, i.e. the average Gaffer or Best Boy may get a credit and a base income that works out to about 75,000 $ a year, and that may not look like much from Jack's point of view, but he's asking a customer base that has an average income of about 31,000 $ a year to think of these employees as little guys, and that implies the customers themselves are sub-little. Doesn't sound very complementary does it? "Hey, you guys are making a third or so of what I consider a little guy's salary. Instead of me lobbying to get you all 75,000 $ a year, I want you to do the right thing no matter how much it hurts, and help these guys who are already making 2 1/2 times what you do. It's important that THEY don't get screwed." It sounds kind of like "Clean your plate, bankers in Switzerland are starving tonight".
Actually, I think the industry does conduct lots of detailed economic analysis to pick what they percieve as an optimum price point to maximize their total profits, and I'd even agree they update their models more frequently than most industries.
Stock prospecti and other such documents reveal many cases where the various RIAA members have often tried to include some sort of quantifiable and standardizeable assumptions that many other industries simply ignore, because those industries assume their impacts will be trivial. In a fast changing market such as music, this is very sensible.
However, I think the RIAA has also assumed some factors are trivial and not worth including in their price point calculations, and this is a largish to huge mistake. I think this mistake hurts their bottom line, and drives some of the social friction that inspires rabidity in a share of slashdotticus neophilus as well.
Here's why I think that. Several RIAA members around 1998 to 2000 wanted to expand their involvement in the rap market. Most of them put a heavy emphasis on signing some hip-hop or rap (or perhaps more accurately 'gangsta') artists who had a strong antiestablishment message, and urged their listeners to physically steal the music, not as in copying, but as in shoplifting. Frequently, they also signed other artists who got heavily involved in violent crimes and are not making more records until they get out of their respective medium security facilities.
Profits from these particular artists were frequently low to non-existant, and I'd argue it's largely because of the promoters not expecting trouble that I think should have been obvious, rather than these acts being particularly lacking in talent. (Of course, I have the advantage of 20-20 hindsight).
More recently, one RIAA member expected Michael Jackson's new album to have sales well above his last album, and basically committed all their descressionary resources and marketing for the whole year to support it, although there had been a very large time since the last album and M J was already under a cloud of highly negative publicity.
Given such examples, I think it is at least very probable that there are similar blind spots in the way various RIAA members have calculated price points. One of them may be that they work from the assumption that the current price is the optimum price point, because there is a cheap, effective way to stop bulk duplication and counterfitting without them having to keep pumping money into new DRM schemes to sustain it, and they just have to find it. In other words, they may be caught in a previous investment trap, where they keep trying something that is a holding action, because they are convinced there is a new solution comeing along that will make the holding action worthwhile, but if they quit now, that money already spent will have been wasted.
I'm debating or discussing the point here, where just possibly there are people intelligent enough to be open to arguement, or offer an intelligent rebuttal, instead of running. You condemn me for not doing that with the ex-friend, and for doing it here both, so I just have to ask, is there a single act I could perform in my entire life that would not reflexively draw your blanket condemnation and personal insults? No? You've already committed to simply hateing me, a person you never met, you are playing the damned if you do and damned if you don't game, and you're talking about who is the better person? You've simply assumed that I made no effort to talk over anything with a friend before giving up on a friendship, and then castigated me for your assumption, and you're taking about who is the better person? On top of that, you have the sheer gall to post your insult laden tirade as an AC rather than really stand up for any of the things you claim to believe in. OK, so we now know who is the better person here, and it ain't you.
Some people will automatically ignore all that and more, some will figure M.A.D. was a threat justifying more Machiavellian politics than usual, some will condemn automatically, and some will contend he could have gotten the positive results without the subterfuges and realpolitik. Like it or not, he is going to get at least a share of the credit for the end of the cold war happening as it did.
Look on the "bright" side. Bush 43 is there at the start of the "War on Terror", but does it really like like it will be over on his watch, even if he gets another turn?
If that's the most assinine thing you've ever seen on slashdot, I'd like to take this opportunity to welcome you, brand new reader. Personally, I see lots of reasons why it probably wouldn't work, starting with the massive effort in the north to collectivise the peasantry, to the corruption rampant in both the North and South Vietnamese governments, and so on, but the question is, compared to what? To what we did in Vietnam instead? Yeah, that worked real good.
If someone claimed in '64 that we would have had a better chance of winning in Vietnam by all clapping until Tinkerbell came back to life, they wouldn't have been any nuttier than the people most of the US thought were sane, wise and dedicated, and listened to for the next 4 years or so before it became more and more obvious it just wasn't working.
There was a british study about 1964 that claimed the cheapest way for the US to win in Vietnam was to buy both countries. The idea was to drop parachute equipped boxes instead of bombs. Boxes would be labeled in several languages - "This White box with the red cross contains medical supplies" - This Green box contains farm tools" - "This blue box contains a lathe that can be driven by a waterwheel" - "This orange box contains books for Elementary education", etc. Every box would also have a little US flag on a spring on a top corner.
The US was supposed to drop those in the same quantities as they would later end up dropping bombs, pay off any farmer who claimed his water buffalo got hit with a box, and in six months announce, "Hanoi, you get the Coca-Cola plant, Saigon, you get the Pepsi plant. By the way, you're all capitalists now, so we're hoping to start selling you hospitals and roads and things, as fast as you can start taxing those bottling plant workers. When the rest of the world starts making you the same offers, y'all be sure and remember them purty lil' flags, mkay?"
Projected costs worked out to about 10% of what the war ended up costing, but that's monitary only costs, and the cost in lives was expected to be incalcuably less. Of course, the US would have turned it over to defense contaracters who would have ended up charging 100,000 a box to stick the little flags on.
And if the Soviet Union had collapsed a few months or a few years later, the period of collapse could just have easily led to a Nuclear event or similar level of tragedy. President Reagan'as administration focused on using the collapse to get some real arms reductions (although we could use more). The Russians were allowed to destroy warheads and convert their missles to launch boosters, even though we actually destroyed our own first stages, precisely because they pointed out that this would help stabilize their new economy, and we chose to trust them that far.
How many US administrations would have put grabbing the former Soviet sattelites as new markets well ahead of helping them avoid paying the tremendous last ditch costs of propping the Soviet system up for just a few more years? Why did NATO quickly extend a hand of welcome to Poland? That initiative was originated and pushed by the US, paid for largely by the US, and the most significant opposition among the other NATO countries was all acompanied by attempts to simultaneously turn Poland into a captive market with economic leveraging tricks such as confiscatory tarrifs.
I agree with many of your points about China as a threat, Soviet institutional paranoia, and that the collapse was inevitable, _Eventually_ (as you point out Reagan may have at least accelerated the process), but they need to be qualified. Soviet Paranoia was largely driven by the German invasion of WW2, and strongly derived from the older Russian Paranoia, which had been amplified by Napolion's invasion, hence really dating back to well before the SU's inception. With France and (West) Germany part of NATO, Soviet Paranoia meant that they had a lot of incentive to fight their collapse bitterly, and export its consequences to the immediate west, and to focus on NATO disproportionately to China.
The US also took some actions to keep China from taking advantage of the situation, specifically by working with Soviet Intelligence to hide the timing of various agreements and hnad-overs of control from the Chinese until the deadlines were too short for the PRC to put together a coherent plan to exploit them, and encouraged the PRC to accept other benefits, such as better US trade status, instead. I'd submit that a. this was mostly a carrot instead of stick approach, and b. a "stick-heavy" approach would have been very foolish under the circumstances.
Just my guess, but in 50 years or so Reagan will probably be classed about with Truman. He will be considered to have done a good job, probably rated better than average, but some of his decisions will be analyzed the same way as Truman's decision to target cities with the A-bomb, and historians and pundits will split over whether those were good decisions, for much the same reasons.
The original laws on arms export classified many things as weapons that don't directly kill people. For example, a high strength aluminum alloy tube isn't a weapon, but one far above the grade needed for oil refinery tubing was on the list because the few known reasons anyone would pay 20x as much as the basic model for that precision grade included large rocket launcher tubes.
There's a problem with your analogy, "Guns don't kill people, personal computers do?" the idea is more like Guns don't kill people, guns plus bullets do, and guns plus bullets plus teflon coatings mean going to a lot of extra trouble to preferentially kill people with protective vests. And P4 chip plus CD-ROM drive, 40 Gb Hard drive, Asus MoBo, and a few cards may equal a nice PC, but the question is does P4 + something else = weapon? (and the real decision makers are at least supposed to be thinking of weapons significant enough to matter in war, not weapons as in throw it hard enough and it can do the same damage as a $1.98 glass ashtray).
With that said, the inclusion is wrong. P4s are far too easy to obtain to be an effective choke point even if there is some particular use where a cluster of cheaper chips won't do, and that should be enough reason not to include them right there.
It also looks like the the person adding it to the list does not know of a specific use, but is reacting from a general sense of nebulous potential risks, and that he is responding that way because he is ignorant of many basic facts which he should know and fully comprehend the ramifications of to be competent for his jjob description. (Yes, that last sentence IS awkward as hell, and yes I AM feeling to lazy to rephrase it right now).
Batman just may be a special case there, in that the 60's TV series was largely driven by new villians and a lot of hollywood star's agents actually called up and asked for a shot at a particular part just to get publicity for their star(that's why there were three different Catwomen and Vincent Price playing Egghead. They mostly took the role with a series or a new film coming out soon). The series was supposedly a fun thing to film too, a lot of clowning around on the set and a light shooting schedule.
We can hope this is why the Batman franchise is still Supervillian (tm) heavy, and that it's not a general trend, but frankly, I trust Hollywood to get it right like I trust my cat to organize my file cabinets.
YADAJ - Yet Another Damned Acronym Junkie :-)
If it follows the usual pattern for superhero flicks, Spiderman 3 will have several villains and not just the 2nd Green Goblin. Remember how many bad guys show up in Batman and Robin or Batman Forever? Let's see, we have the Rhino, Sandman, Mysterio and Electro from the early Spiderman comics, or Venom the living spidy suit from the later years. Or maybe Spiderman 3 will also be X-men 3.
Earrghh! I thought I'd outgrown this stuff 20 years ago. Why do I even remember the names of a bunch of Spiderman villians?
You're quite right - the Hutu-Tutsi conflict is spilling over into the countries immediately around Ruanda, in roughly the center of Africa, and not Liberia, which is well west of there. Sorry about the miss-information. If I'm not still confused, I gather from the CIA factbook and UN WHO sources that Liberian life exopectancies are impacted mostly by their own civil war and a fairly average 9% adult HIV rate, tragic, but much less than the worst AIDS situations in sub-saharan Africa, and somewhat by political unrest in their neighbors (cif. president Taylor's UN sanction for meddeling in Sierra Leone's civil war, which was the one I conflated with the even larger and more devastating Hutu-Tutsi war. I'm still unsure if the Sierra Leone clash is second largest currently in Africa or farther down the list) Again, let me appologise.
Whether Liberian life expectancies actually rose higher than Russia's somewhere in 1999-2003 depends in large part on whether the estimated 200,000 + Liberians living as refugees in other countries is accurate, and whether the low reported deaths/incidence for HIV (5,000 deaths for 125,000 infected), is reasonably accurate as well. Some WHO estimates may be substantially different because they count Liberia's share of the 2,000,000 + refugees that have fled Sierra Leone.
The CIA's own life expectancy estimate for Russia is only 59 for males and is a much higher 73 for females, raising their average to 66, but this huge disparity in the gender survival rates has itself been questioned by many trained in logistics and geopolitics. For such reasons, it is hard to avoid risking comparing apples to oranges.
"While you're busy criticizing Fox News, be sure to eat your own too."
1. I simply agreed that the friend cited in the original post was wrong to judge Fox news as anything except a news agency, as opposed to judging it as a dry cleaners, a small brown bird, or the reflection of Venus off swamp gas. If you think, like him, Fox news should be judged by a different standard than the other news broadcasters, please show why instead of resorting to personal attacks. My criticising the poster's friend's judgement =! my criticising Fox.
2. The new York times is far from my preferred news source, and I have absolutly no intention of eating it. You evidently like creating straw men rather than using reason, as that's two such in your post so far.
3. Your information about the origin of the quote is actually quite interesting, and I would have modded that informative if it had been possible. It's a pity that the rest of your post falls short of that, but I really think you are leaping to a lot of conclusions about me that you lack any evidence for.
I think you're begging the question with the last sentence. If a poster agrees that the sight of boobies isn't really likely to harm a child, then you're going to use it as evidence for your first contention, that pornography in general doesn't harm children.
This is not about Janet jackson's nipple or something similarly trivial (No offense Janet), it's about depictions of all sorts, from basic hetero or homo-sex to beastiality, S & M, and scat, and beyond.
How many people fixate during their earliest sexual experiences? Most of them. Males vey often end up being leg men or breast men, preferring blondes or redheads, or having a phillia for garterbelts or high heels because such things are mentally connected to their first masturbatory or intercourse experiences. (It's just a harmless philia if you find high heels an interesting addition to a woman, whereas it's pathological if you desire sex with your collection of stolen high heels).
A significant percentage of males who fixate do so to an extreme. These range from rapists, who generally have a fixation on proving power or status that can easly be aggrevated by non-sexual stressors, to those pathetic types who keep looking for the cynical hooker with the heart of gold and just can't believe that she's a million to one shot at best, to all the guys who keep dating women who wreck their car, run up their long distance bill, and beat their dog.
Even real psychos, such as Ted Bundy, usually have more normal fixations as well, (Bundy had a thing for long, straight haired bruinettes). If Bundy hadn't decided to become a serial killer (or been exposed to whatever influences made him one if you prefer) he would still likely have been the type to focus really hard on just one physical type of woman.
I haven't discussed female fixations in all this, as the evidence is more mixed, and conventional wisdom is women don't have as much of a tendency to fixate visually at least. I haven't much discussed homosex, as some of those same limits on what we know apply.
All of this suggests some pornography can well be harmful to minors. It is quite possible that it does damage to children who are passing through one of their sexual development phases, or who have a more than average tendency to fixate, and it could be argued that some children are at relatively little risk, but the high risk group is a sizable one (estimated at around 30% of the current population of children), the risks there are clear,and the best guess is that little risk for the other 70% does not translate to no risk. That estimate is based on children who are no more than 2 years beyond puberty as measured by first ejaculation, rather than treating a lot of 16 and 17 years olds as part of the at risk population, as the percentages probably get lower pretty rapidly once a male has gone through a few formative sexual experiences, so make of it what you will. Again, it may be giving false comfort to assume the period around the first masturbatory experiences is a more powerful influence than the period around the first sex with a partner, so if anything, I'd argue the risks are more likely higher rather than lower.
Why is the US civil war sometimes described as brother against brother? It's not because "all americans are symbolicly brothers", but because that situation happened literally, real brothers taking opposite sides, real fathers fighting against real sons. That's a politcal difference with a very high priority indeed.
I'm not sure if the OP is entirely serious, but I am - I have broken up with a couple of friends because they had political views I disagreed with enough. The most recent of them was in favor of the torture going on in Iraq by US occuping forces, and said, about the possibility of some of those victims being innocent "You can't make an omelet without breaking a few towelheads".
I don't think I would go that far just for the kind of idiocy the OP's friend displayed, but really, a person who can excuse Fox new's missreporting by their not being judgeable by the standards of a real news source shows every sign of willfully giveing any people he agrees with unlimited slack no matter what they do. Sure, maybe he'd even go as far as to give me a false alibi if I committed a murder, but I don't really need that.
Most of my friends would put truth (as they see it) ahead of cutting me unlimited slack, and I actually like the idea that they would tell me straight up if they thought I had a drinking problem or something instead of making excuses for me.
First we have the French intellectuals, now it's Carlos Casteneda. I love this thread!
Often, a piece passes through a stage, or several, where it grows by becoming more specific. When an author takes a rough draft, and trys to cut it down to a required size, for example, that's all about becoming more specific. Some authors concentrate whole writing sessions on finding just the right word over and over, while others enter that mode sporadically, for a few minutes as they continue to work on on other parts of the book.
Other changes simply aren't about distilation. What happens when an author introduces a spear carrier character such as a coach driver, and polishes the character a bit, and suddenly realizes there's the possibility to work a romance between that character and another into the story and that in turn will even let her comment on social issues in her fictitious society that she will otherwise not get to address?
"After RingTFA I realized that Open Source is a paradigm shift in computer technology."
That's what seems overstated. OS represents a significant change in the computer programming meta-environment more than in the actual act of programming itself or of computer technology. OS might be a very small part of a paradigm shift in economics, but it sure isn't a whole shift by itself, and most of the other pieces needed aren't happening yet, if at all.
A paradigm shift in computer technology might be more along the lines of hardware changes, i.e. using cheap clusters in place of expensive mainframes. Mostly people (as opposed to advertising dweebs) wouldn't want to make that claim until the vast majority of mainframe uses were being supplanted by cluster computing.
A paradigm shift in programming might be object oriented programming or the first scripting language, but again, most people would not feel the phrase fit unless the next generation of programmers switched overwhelmingly to the new system.
OS will have to increasingly dominate the economic and technological structures that support programming, to the point that it becomes the default, before a phrase such as paradigm shift is at all appropriate, even as an analogy.
I'm starting to think there's reasons this should be allowed (although I'm far from convinced it meets the inobviousless test).
First, the patent in this case is very narrowly defined and specific. It's not going to be much if any use in sueing a competitor except where the competitor deliberately copies a lot of details exactly rather than just borrowing broad ideas, so presumably the bank wanted it for another reason, like it gets added to their IP portfolio and that's reflected in their stock price. That's not good, but it is essentially harmless except just possibly if it misleads ignorant investors.
Second, the design is supposed to improve function in concrete, measurable ways. This principle at least is in keeping with patent law, in that patents are generally about quantifiables.
If you read some of the instructions for running an IHOP franchise, there are all these incredibly minute details, such as painting a particular mark on the floor and training your watresses to stand exactly on that mark when they call out an order to the cook. Supposedly, the cook has a better chance of hearing the order if it comes from exactly the same place every time, and so fewer ordwers get garbled, etc. Normally, manuals like this are protected by copyright. A copyright doesn't stop another company from rewriting part or all of that manual and using it as part of their business model or selling it to franchisees - only a particular expression of ideas is covered by copyright, not the ideas themselves. Copyrighting a process manual doesn't give that much real protection, as it is just the sort of thing that can be expressed in substantially different terms while still remaining essentially the same in application or construction. So I can see why a company would want to use a method that would give some protection against an exact swipe.
S. Aureus? What the? Ohmy-fricken-Ghod! They're all over me! Geddum-off! Aaaaaaaaaaaauuuuuuuuugggggggghhhh!