You're both wrong, corporations don't pay any taxes, that's just what social liberals want you to think. Those tax bill costs are passed directly to regular people everywhere in the form of:
(a) Fewer jobs (b) Lower paying jobs (c) Less profits to shareholders (your grandma is a shareholder if she has any stock) (d) Higher costs on goods and services
Think about that the next time you want corporations to "pay more taxes."
I am not sure if you're lumping me in with the prevailing attitude, but I will say:
(a) DRM is a bad idea, and it doesn't work. (b) It is unethical to break DRM if you agreed to those restrictions when you made the purchase. (c) Comparing ads on websites to restrictions on things you purchased is counterintuitive.
The reason I ask is because I agreed with your viewpoint when I had a 50" rear-projection HDTV (Toshiba).
But I upgraded recently to a 52" Sony 1080p Bravia LCD, and DVDs just do not hold a candle to HDTV quality any more. I even have an up-converting DVD player capable of 1080p upconversion, connected with HDMI. The quality is just not there. May I didn't notice it as much when there wasn't much HD content, but I have Dish Network HD, and I am watching HD all the time now.
I'm ready for 1080p movies at home... I just wish a combo HD/Bluray player would come out.
Re:Any consensus?
on
Blue Blu-ray
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Let me know when you've got a 50-70" widescreen TV.
It has nothing to do with extreme detail, it has to do with making giant TVs look just as sharp as your 20" TV... stretching a picture made for a small TV (SD) onto a large TV (HD) looks like shit.
how anyone could arrive at such a conclusion like republicans==democrats is beyond my understanding.
I agree with you completely -- it is beyond your understanding.
I and many others feel they are exactly the same, because they both are interested in increasing the power of the government, increasing their control over your life in some way (democrats: financially, republicans: socially). They also are almost universally corrupt, selling themselves to special interests in lobbyists.
When two groups of people have more in common than not, you can say those two groups are essentially the same. If you are truly interested in freedom, you would stop being pigeonholed into either of the two camps.
If this were true, then you would expect TiVo boxes to outsell Cable company rental boxes -- but they don't.
TiVo has a few features that I would like to have, but it also has costs that outweigh the benefits to me. In my area, TiVo is competing against the cable company's DVR, which is so-so, DirectTV's new non-tivo DVR (which blows goats), and Dish Network's DVR -- which is very good.
And the huge advantage all 3 of those have is the great integration with the service itself. No re-encoding of signals, etc. The guide is built in to the service. Cheaper monthly fees, even.
Check your headers and witness all the Received headers. Each one is a server handing the email off to another server. Email usually goes through several servers. Depending on the organizations doing the sending and receiving, they can be 3rd party servers doing some of the work (receiving, filtering, etc). The only time it's point to point is if you are connecting to an SMTP server that is going to take that email and stick it directly in an inbox (i.e. sending mail to a local user in your org).
Why should they fix it in the current version of Windows? There has to be a compelling reason to upgrade to the next version of Windows
That may have been true 5 years ago, but leaving Windows insecure gives people just one more reason to switch to Macs or Linux boxes, and pitch the same idea to their bosses. It did for me, and now our company has a Mac on every desk.
Anyone who has been to the area of the proposed bridge will agree that it needs to be built.
Agreed. But that isn't the problem. The problem is he was trying to build it with taxpayers money! Just as he does with all his pork projects.
Ketchikan is completely out of space. Land prices have skyrocketed because there is no land. On the other side of the proposed bridge is land just waiting to be developed.
Here's a brilliant idea, why don't we make the people that are going to benefit from the bridge pay for it! The developers that want to develop the land, and they'll pay the cost on to the people that buy the homes and businesses on the other side of the bridge. And if they can't make their money back then maybe they shouldn't develop it until they can?
But the far easier solution is to take some bribes and then re-route some taxpayer funds to do it "for free."
Where are you publishing from Excel? Presumaby you need to setup your own host, get it working with publishing, etc. With Google docs it's just right there, ready to go, 5 seconds later you're sending a link to your friend or posting on your site.
I am talking about a live view of your document from Google Docs. Set aside the awesome ability to be able to share it with collaborators where you're all editing it at the same time. This thing also lets you publish cells and cell ranges, for anyone to view or for only select people to view, and they are also LIVE. You change something in your doc, they are available within minutes.
Businesses actively work to prevent other sites from scraping content. They certainly aren't going to spend extra effort to support it!
Give me a break... Have you ever heard of RSS feeds? Cutting edge companies ARE already supporting this, including giants like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.
In fact, Google is a model here. They are making it ridiculously easy to get access to data in all kinds of formats. I can create a google spreadsheet and actually share individual cells and ranges of cells with anyone else on the internet, and it even retains the dynamic calculations from the main spreadsheet even when you aren't displaying the rest of the cells. It's actually ridiculously cool if you think about it.
The smart companies absolutely will make it easier and easier to access their data in all kinds of formats.
But face it, that's not the system we have. Do the best you can with what you've got.
Trust me, the only way this will ever change is if the two big parties keep thinking the third party voters are spoiling things.
"Ruin" enough election outcomes, and the big two parties may finally realize their best bet is to improve the voting methods so they don't get "screwed" by third party voters.
I use Bank of America. And while it's great to be able to use these features from my phone, they might want to re-design their interface. Here are the steps you need to follow each time you want to check your latest checking transactions:
1. Click your bookmark to BofA.
2. Click the sign-in link on their "mobile page." (C'mon, how many people are going to this mobile interface and not signing on?
3. Fill in your user id only, no password yet, and click the "Sign In" button.
4. Verify your sitekey picture is correct, enter your passcode, and click "Sign In." Seriously, SiteKey is a 'decent' security mechanism for normal web browsing, but shouldn't I be able to bypass this if I am absolutely positive I entered the right URL?
5. This is my favorite... a page comes up with the Bank of America logo on it, and a button that says "Enter." You do nothing else on this page but click Enter. What on earth is the point of this page? Are they getting paid per click?
6. A 4 item list appears, with Accounts, Bill Pay, Transfer Funds, etc. Click on Accounts. (Mind you... you're logged in already, they could just show you your account numbers and let you choose one now.)
7. Now you see a list of your accounts, click one to open it.
8. Oops, still no transactions appear. You now need to click whether you want to view Pending or Cleared transactions!!!
And it's as easy as that. Simply travel through 8 pages on your slow ass mobile phone (and fill in various passcodes along the way) to view your latest transactions. Every time. And yes, I've tried bookmarking various pages, but if your session times out you're starting over no matter what.
You know, you can live in a fantasy world or you can make the most of a situation. Some people live in a world where they can understand that sometimes you have to make a choice that isn't perfect.
Talk about a fantasy world. That's the one where we 3rd party voters only need to make the imperfect choice "sometimes." Give me a break. I make this imperfect choice every election. Yes, it pisses me off. But what happens if 3rd party voters vote instead for one of the big two parties? Nothing. The two big parties are equally corrupt, just in different ways.
And it sure doesn't make sense to convince otherwise reasonable voters that Gore and Bush were fungible.
Hindsight is 20/20, the grass is greener on the other side, and you can't predict the future of America if Al Gore had won. Perhaps instead of dumping our money into the war, we'd be dumping it on further social security and medicare waste, and imposing draconian environmental laws to curb greenhouse gases, economy be damned. You know, people die due to bad economies as well as wars.
In my view, the big parties are one giant party designed to increase their power and decrease ours. One side wants to limit what you. The other side wants to limit what you can do with the money you earn. Both increase taxes and spending and the size of government. Both parties want to infantilize the citizens so that they rely on bigger and bigger government -- which provides them with more power.
So yes, I do blame Nader as a spoiler, and the nuckleheads who helped him along.
You can continue to blame them all you want. I'll continue to vote my conscience. That means I'll be voting for Ron Paul. If he doesn't win, I don't care who wins.
You are absolutely correct, they cannot prove a negative.
On the flip side, research has been done on prison populations, and the number of people in jail that are here illegally is very high. This doesn't prove anything about the general population of illegals, but it does indicate to me that if there were no illegal aliens in the US, we'd have less criminals in America.
Investors Business Daily reported in March 2005:
"The U.S. Justice Department estimated that 270,000 illegal immigrants served jail time nationally in 2003. Of those, 108,000 were in California. Some estimates show illegals now make up half of California's prison population, creating a massive criminal subculture that strains state budgets and creates a nightmare for local police forces."
Maybe instead of directing anger towards the few voters that actually exercised free will, you should instead point it towards (a) the sheep that stick to party lines, and (b) the fucked up voting process that forces you to vote for 'who you think can actually win' rather than who you actually want to represent you.
It shows Opera not passing it until April 20, 2006, and Safari passing it in October 2005 (and even back in April in non-public releases).
The only references to scroll bar hiding I can find is that the Konqueror browser didn't hide initially, and same for iCab. No reference info on Safari.
As long as Apple is sticking to web standards as well as or better than Firefox, and are not trying to pull a Microsoft in that regard, I don't care if Apple's goal is to have 100% of the browser market. WHO CARES? It's a goal, it's not a truth. Everyone using Firefox now can continue using Firefox.
BTW, as far as I know, Safari was the first browser to render the Acid 2 test accurately, the first one to have an official release that could render it accurately, over a year before Firefox 3 nightlies came out passing it. It seems they are doing an admirable job along with KDE on this.
Slavery in the US was rather efficient for the cotton industry, or so it seemed to them at the time. They had zero market incentive to give that up, and it require extra-market forces to ensure that they did.
Yes, that is how slavery ended in America, is that the only way slavery could have ended?
Or if we didn't go to war, and the distastefulness of slavery continued to foment in the North, could the North have said, we're no longer buying cotton-based goods from the South, if they're made with cotton from slave-worked plantations? There goes the demand for those that deal in slavery, and their competitors who don't use slaves suddenly see demand increase.
The slaveowners can either stop buying/using slaves, or have their markets overtaken by non-slave plantations.
That is how the free market can solve things that most of society finds distasteful.
But like I said, in most cases the people in charge don't have the stomach for short term market problems.
Am I saying Lincoln shouldn't have freed the slaves? No, I'm saying eventually markets can solve all problems. I'm not assuming some moral position here.
Slashdot Mirror
You're both wrong, corporations don't pay any taxes, that's just what social liberals want you to think. Those tax bill costs are passed directly to regular people everywhere in the form of:
(a) Fewer jobs
(b) Lower paying jobs
(c) Less profits to shareholders (your grandma is a shareholder if she has any stock)
(d) Higher costs on goods and services
Think about that the next time you want corporations to "pay more taxes."
I am not sure if you're lumping me in with the prevailing attitude, but I will say:
(a) DRM is a bad idea, and it doesn't work.
(b) It is unethical to break DRM if you agreed to those restrictions when you made the purchase.
(c) Comparing ads on websites to restrictions on things you purchased is counterintuitive.
And this is evil because... ?
In my opinion, it seems more 'evil' to freeload off a website providing a valuable service.
Then again, I wrote this on Slashdot and my subscription here expired over a year ago.
What kind of HDTV do you have?
The reason I ask is because I agreed with your viewpoint when I had a 50" rear-projection HDTV (Toshiba).
But I upgraded recently to a 52" Sony 1080p Bravia LCD, and DVDs just do not hold a candle to HDTV quality any more. I even have an up-converting DVD player capable of 1080p upconversion, connected with HDMI. The quality is just not there. May I didn't notice it as much when there wasn't much HD content, but I have Dish Network HD, and I am watching HD all the time now.
I'm ready for 1080p movies at home... I just wish a combo HD/Bluray player would come out.
Let me know when you've got a 50-70" widescreen TV.
It has nothing to do with extreme detail, it has to do with making giant TVs look just as sharp as your 20" TV... stretching a picture made for a small TV (SD) onto a large TV (HD) looks like shit.
Google has already addressed your misconceptions in their detailed explanation of "incumbent blocking premiums":
s toring-competitive-balance-to.html
http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2007/07/re
"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."
Sir Winston Churchill
how anyone could arrive at such a conclusion like republicans==democrats is beyond my understanding.
I agree with you completely -- it is beyond your understanding.
I and many others feel they are exactly the same, because they both are interested in increasing the power of the government, increasing their control over your life in some way (democrats: financially, republicans: socially). They also are almost universally corrupt, selling themselves to special interests in lobbyists.
When two groups of people have more in common than not, you can say those two groups are essentially the same. If you are truly interested in freedom, you would stop being pigeonholed into either of the two camps.
If this were true, then you would expect TiVo boxes to outsell Cable company rental boxes -- but they don't.
TiVo has a few features that I would like to have, but it also has costs that outweigh the benefits to me. In my area, TiVo is competing against the cable company's DVR, which is so-so, DirectTV's new non-tivo DVR (which blows goats), and Dish Network's DVR -- which is very good.
And the huge advantage all 3 of those have is the great integration with the service itself. No re-encoding of signals, etc. The guide is built in to the service. Cheaper monthly fees, even.
Classism? What does that have to do with anything. Let me simplify the story for you:
CATS == POLITICIANS
MICE == REGULAR PEOPLE
Point to point protocol?
Check your headers and witness all the Received headers. Each one is a server handing the email off to another server. Email usually goes through several servers. Depending on the organizations doing the sending and receiving, they can be 3rd party servers doing some of the work (receiving, filtering, etc). The only time it's point to point is if you are connecting to an SMTP server that is going to take that email and stick it directly in an inbox (i.e. sending mail to a local user in your org).
Why should they fix it in the current version of Windows? There has to be a compelling reason to upgrade to the next version of Windows
That may have been true 5 years ago, but leaving Windows insecure gives people just one more reason to switch to Macs or Linux boxes, and pitch the same idea to their bosses. It did for me, and now our company has a Mac on every desk.
That same amount of money would have a much greater return on investment if used for other things
Yeah, such as not having been taken from the people that earned it in the first place.
Anyone who has been to the area of the proposed bridge will agree that it needs to be built.
Agreed. But that isn't the problem. The problem is he was trying to build it with taxpayers money! Just as he does with all his pork projects.
Ketchikan is completely out of space. Land prices have skyrocketed because there is no land. On the other side of the proposed bridge is land just waiting to be developed.
Here's a brilliant idea, why don't we make the people that are going to benefit from the bridge pay for it! The developers that want to develop the land, and they'll pay the cost on to the people that buy the homes and businesses on the other side of the bridge. And if they can't make their money back then maybe they shouldn't develop it until they can?
But the far easier solution is to take some bribes and then re-route some taxpayer funds to do it "for free."
Where are you publishing from Excel? Presumaby you need to setup your own host, get it working with publishing, etc. With Google docs it's just right there, ready to go, 5 seconds later you're sending a link to your friend or posting on your site.
I am talking about a live view of your document from Google Docs. Set aside the awesome ability to be able to share it with collaborators where you're all editing it at the same time. This thing also lets you publish cells and cell ranges, for anyone to view or for only select people to view, and they are also LIVE. You change something in your doc, they are available within minutes.
Businesses actively work to prevent other sites from scraping content. They certainly aren't going to spend extra effort to support it!
... Have you ever heard of RSS feeds? Cutting edge companies ARE already supporting this, including giants like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.
Give me a break
In fact, Google is a model here. They are making it ridiculously easy to get access to data in all kinds of formats. I can create a google spreadsheet and actually share individual cells and ranges of cells with anyone else on the internet, and it even retains the dynamic calculations from the main spreadsheet even when you aren't displaying the rest of the cells. It's actually ridiculously cool if you think about it.
The smart companies absolutely will make it easier and easier to access their data in all kinds of formats.
But face it, that's not the system we have. Do the best you can with what you've got.
Trust me, the only way this will ever change is if the two big parties keep thinking the third party voters are spoiling things.
"Ruin" enough election outcomes, and the big two parties may finally realize their best bet is to improve the voting methods so they don't get "screwed" by third party voters.
I use Bank of America. And while it's great to be able to use these features from my phone, they might want to re-design their interface. Here are the steps you need to follow each time you want to check your latest checking transactions:
... you're logged in already, they could just show you your account numbers and let you choose one now.)
1. Click your bookmark to BofA.
2. Click the sign-in link on their "mobile page." (C'mon, how many people are going to this mobile interface and not signing on?
3. Fill in your user id only, no password yet, and click the "Sign In" button.
4. Verify your sitekey picture is correct, enter your passcode, and click "Sign In." Seriously, SiteKey is a 'decent' security mechanism for normal web browsing, but shouldn't I be able to bypass this if I am absolutely positive I entered the right URL?
5. This is my favorite... a page comes up with the Bank of America logo on it, and a button that says "Enter." You do nothing else on this page but click Enter. What on earth is the point of this page? Are they getting paid per click?
6. A 4 item list appears, with Accounts, Bill Pay, Transfer Funds, etc. Click on Accounts. (Mind you
7. Now you see a list of your accounts, click one to open it.
8. Oops, still no transactions appear. You now need to click whether you want to view Pending or Cleared transactions!!!
And it's as easy as that. Simply travel through 8 pages on your slow ass mobile phone (and fill in various passcodes along the way) to view your latest transactions. Every time. And yes, I've tried bookmarking various pages, but if your session times out you're starting over no matter what.
You know, you can live in a fantasy world or you can make the most of a situation. Some people live in a world where they can understand that sometimes you have to make a choice that isn't perfect.
Talk about a fantasy world. That's the one where we 3rd party voters only need to make the imperfect choice "sometimes." Give me a break. I make this imperfect choice every election. Yes, it pisses me off. But what happens if 3rd party voters vote instead for one of the big two parties? Nothing. The two big parties are equally corrupt, just in different ways.
And it sure doesn't make sense to convince otherwise reasonable voters that Gore and Bush were fungible.
Hindsight is 20/20, the grass is greener on the other side, and you can't predict the future of America if Al Gore had won. Perhaps instead of dumping our money into the war, we'd be dumping it on further social security and medicare waste, and imposing draconian environmental laws to curb greenhouse gases, economy be damned. You know, people die due to bad economies as well as wars.
In my view, the big parties are one giant party designed to increase their power and decrease ours. One side wants to limit what you. The other side wants to limit what you can do with the money you earn. Both increase taxes and spending and the size of government. Both parties want to infantilize the citizens so that they rely on bigger and bigger government -- which provides them with more power.
So yes, I do blame Nader as a spoiler, and the nuckleheads who helped him along.
You can continue to blame them all you want. I'll continue to vote my conscience. That means I'll be voting for Ron Paul. If he doesn't win, I don't care who wins.
You are absolutely correct, they cannot prove a negative.
On the flip side, research has been done on prison populations, and the number of people in jail that are here illegally is very high. This doesn't prove anything about the general population of illegals, but it does indicate to me that if there were no illegal aliens in the US, we'd have less criminals in America.
Investors Business Daily reported in March 2005:
"The U.S. Justice Department estimated that 270,000 illegal immigrants served jail time nationally in 2003. Of those, 108,000 were in California. Some estimates show illegals now make up half of California's prison population, creating a massive criminal subculture that strains state budgets and creates a nightmare for local police forces."
Maybe those Nader voters had principles?
Maybe instead of directing anger towards the few voters that actually exercised free will, you should instead point it towards (a) the sheep that stick to party lines, and (b) the fucked up voting process that forces you to vote for 'who you think can actually win' rather than who you actually want to represent you.
Sorry, that line of thinking is absolutely not why we have these sex vs. violence issues in America.
It has to do with our puritan background, and the religious nutjobs that populate our country and our government, at all levels.
Are you sure? I realize wikipedia is not the end-all be-all, but this is the best info I can find on it:
c cessful_browsers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid2#Timeline_of_su
It shows Opera not passing it until April 20, 2006, and Safari passing it in October 2005 (and even back in April in non-public releases).
The only references to scroll bar hiding I can find is that the Konqueror browser didn't hide initially, and same for iCab. No reference info on Safari.
I use Firefox, and I say WTF?
As long as Apple is sticking to web standards as well as or better than Firefox, and are not trying to pull a Microsoft in that regard, I don't care if Apple's goal is to have 100% of the browser market. WHO CARES? It's a goal, it's not a truth. Everyone using Firefox now can continue using Firefox.
BTW, as far as I know, Safari was the first browser to render the Acid 2 test accurately, the first one to have an official release that could render it accurately, over a year before Firefox 3 nightlies came out passing it. It seems they are doing an admirable job along with KDE on this.
Slavery in the US was rather efficient for the cotton industry, or so it seemed to them at the time. They had zero market incentive to give that up, and it require extra-market forces to ensure that they did.
Yes, that is how slavery ended in America, is that the only way slavery could have ended?
Or if we didn't go to war, and the distastefulness of slavery continued to foment in the North, could the North have said, we're no longer buying cotton-based goods from the South, if they're made with cotton from slave-worked plantations? There goes the demand for those that deal in slavery, and their competitors who don't use slaves suddenly see demand increase.
The slaveowners can either stop buying/using slaves, or have their markets overtaken by non-slave plantations.
That is how the free market can solve things that most of society finds distasteful.
But like I said, in most cases the people in charge don't have the stomach for short term market problems.
Am I saying Lincoln shouldn't have freed the slaves? No, I'm saying eventually markets can solve all problems. I'm not assuming some moral position here.