Hopefully not buying the spyware is enough. It might not. If they pass a law that you have to just sit there and take it, when they come to your house, point a gun at you, go to your computer, type "sudo apt-get install spyware", and then say "type your password or else I will kill you" then you will have an important decision to make.
The decision: whether or not to tell them they're typing in the VM sandbox that you set up for just that sort of eventuality.
I say you shouldn't. But talk is cheap when I don't have a gun to my head.
Actually, the key here, is that it's not missing from their website. It's missing from Wordpress' website. They don't have a website of their own. If they did, then they (not Wordpress) would have been the one who received the DMCA notice, and the decision to pull or keep the "infringing" article would have been in the hands of someone with actual knowledge of the situation, rather than a frightened fold-by-default middleman.
Everyone see the two radically conflicting views here? I don't know if the above post appeared in a thread about NNTP coincidentally or not, but it definitely is deeply related.
I have seen some references to articles and links that have interested me, and even though I've bookmarked lots of them, the bookmarks have sometimes disappeared due to computer crashes, software changes or updates or other reasons, and then I can't find the original article again
Call this the anti-NNTP position. Or in modern hipster speak, it's the "cloud" position. Summary: "Your computer is no good, and their computer is awesome."
When you bookmark or otherwise save the data on your machine, your imagination is the limit to what you can do with it. Well, your imagination if you're typing or pasting them into some text editor, or it's the browser authors' imagination if you're using the browser to do your bookmarking.
Many people are happy with that, but not completely. I've heard of third-party bookmarking sites (e.g., delic.io.us), "syncing" plugins, etc though I've never used any of them. And in the above example, the person is having unrelated problems (broken browser or OS?) and so their computer is completely unreliable. No matter how well a browser handles bookmarks, it's not going to work for this guy, because his computer just isn't capable of reliably storing information for years. So of course he'd rather sites themselves provide features, such as say, bookmarking, since that's his only hope of things ever working.
And that has potential, but then the user's imagination, or the imaginations of those he delegate to make his tools, is no longer the upper limit as to what can be done ; the site owners' imaginations is the upper bound now. And possibly other factors too (maybe they'll get more ad impressions if they don't make it easy for you to quickly find things). And every site the users, needs to be persuaded to do whatever you want. And since sites are shared by many users, there is One Global Right Way to do things (for that site).
We know from experience, that "One Global Right Way" is always wrong.
Some of us see the problem from the other end, where we trust ourselves, or the software we use, to do things right, or at least to do things best, and the software is interchangeable and can be replaced if we don't like it, each competing to implement some particular protocol. That's why you have bookmarks at all: because someone at Netscape or Microsoft or whereever, saw that people were pasting URLs into some file. So they added it to the browser. And then the others browsers had to have it, and then a few browsers branched off and started doing it in slightly different ways.
And that would be ideal, if only the parent poster's computer fucking worked and could store things long-term. He could have reliable bookmarks and they could work however he wanted them to. But nooo.. people have to buy crap, or keep the Windows preload, or whatever is going on with this guy (maybe it's just bad luck that an alligator ate all his backups). So he wants the sites to do his bookmarking, since the sites are reliable. And there are lots of people who are just like him, so the pressure on the sites gets unbearable.
And everyone suffers as a consequence, as we drift into retarded "progress," and a weird mix of homogenity (every site does things for all its users, but in one way) and heterogeneity (each site does the aforementioned thing, in a different site-varying way), rather than simply letting everyone get everything they want, which people like me assume, has to be the truly best way to do anything. What part of "everyone wins" don't you like?! I don't want to tell you how to bookmark; I just want your computer or browser to be able to do it, somehow, so
Of course. That's how it became a DVD player. Until I installed the OS and the DVD app, it was just a computer and an optical drive. It's the installation of software (which definitely does include the OS) which breathes life into the otherwise useless hardware.
> l Gimli the Dwarf (Necromancer) Strider the Human (Greater Necromancer) Legolas the Elf (Necromancer) >'hey guys, are you all ready? You say, "hey guys, are you all ready?" Gimli says, "y" Legolas says, "wait, I think Frodo is coming" > s Pirate Cave You are in a pirate cave. There are various pirate props here. The only exit is to the north. Sauron the Maiar (Greater Necromancer). Saruman the Istari (Necromancer) (blocking the north exit). Grishnakh the Orc (Lesser Sorcerer). Magic helmet. Balrog the Balrog (Greater Necromancer). Ugluk the Orc (Lesser Sorcerer). Balrog says, "I see them on who, so there's a chance they might attack today" >ooc oh shit, meant to type 'lead s' You say (ooc), "oh shit, meant to type 'lead s'" > n The exit is blocked. Strider shouts, "aren't we coming with you?" Ugluk takes Magic helmet. Legolas shouts, "wait" Sauron grapples you! Sauron says "what do we have here?" > n The exit is blocked. You can't move while grappled. > kill sauron You attack Sauron! Sauron attacks you! > shout help! You shout, "help!" Saruman laughs. Balrog blocks the north exit. Gimli shouts "Are you coming back or should we wait?" Ugluk wears Magic helmet. Grishnahk attacks you! Legolas arrives. Legolas says "come back north, we're not ready" You hit Sauron hard! Ugluk attacks you! Legolas tries to move north but is blocked by Saruman. Azog arrives. Strider arrives. Bilbo arrives. Strider says, "did you mean to lead us?" Shagrat arrives. Frodo arrives. Sauron shouts "lag!"
So there's a MUD which has PK. Someone accidentally separated from the party he was leading, and found himself in a room with a different party, which consisted of enemies. Instead of running away, he decided to fight, and he shouted for help. The whole MUD heard the shout. Then instead of just his party coming, nearly every player on the MUD ran to that one room, picked a side, and attacked someone. Does that about sum it up?
I remember reading something about this in a book titled "Undocumented DOS" a couple decades or so ago. I don't know if I'm paraphrasing or verbatim quoting, but it was essentially: "Your product may be a DLL in the next version of Windows."
*I* think the point is that Congress (and presidents) created this problem.
We have a law that people walking on the grass will be killed. Someone walks on the grass. They are killed. You complain about the cop?!
This isn't DoJ's fault. They're supposed to be ruthless scumbags in the service of the evil policies that we demand. We want people to be hurt, and they do this for us.
If you don't like it, change your instructions. Maybe people ought to start voting instead of signing petitions. Every election day, 99% of us say we want an authoritarian central government. And so that's what we have. Scientists should investigate the possibility that there's a relationship between who we vote for, and the laws we have.
I really like this explanation. For all the amazingly stupid bullshit I've been hearing the last month about America having a "gun culture," we are actually far below average in our exposure to this stuff. I'm pretty sure most Americans get a little freaked out whenever they see machine guns outside of movie screens.
There are many possible agendas which would benefit from changing that (let's create the "gun culture" the media keeps telling us we already have), and you have suggested one very plausible one. I can think of some others, too, though yours is better.
Followup question: did you throw up in your mouth a little, at using the word "popular" to describe that OS' marketshare? That's not really an honest way of describe a default "choice," or a "choice" that people are railroaded into thanks to network effects, kicking and screaming, and yet it is technically accurate.
I really need my high-end desktop computer to do my job. How long until something will happen to this market segment will disappear as well?
Nobody is saying that it will disappear. What they're predicting is that this segment will get smaller. And because of that, some manufacturers will pull out.
We have been lucky over the last two or three decades (especially the last two) in that everyone (Joe Schmoe) needs a computer much like yours and mine. The resulting economy-of-scale allowed many manufacturers to participate, and caused prices to plummet, so that where as a "good" computer used to cost $3000, today it costs around $800 (give or take, depending on how you define "good").
In the future, though, they're saying Joe Schmoe isn't going to buy a computer like yours and mine. He's going to buy something totally different. When someone makes a new low-power ARM-based board which serves Joe's market, you and I get little or nothing in scale-coattail-riding. The manufacturers that we buy from, aren't getting a piece of Joe's action.
So your future "good" computer might cost $1600 instead of $800, your "kick-ass" computer will cost $4000 instead of the $2000 that it costs today, and your "super-kickass" computer will cost.. well, actually that one won't change much because we already don't get much economy-of-scale from Joe since he never buys SMP boxes anyway. It'll be back-to-the-80s, in that your machine will identify you as being a niche user. Someone will see your bedroom or desk and immediately think "nerd." Just like they did in 1983, but didn't in 1993 or 2003, years when your computer was like everyone else's, if I may overgeneralize a little.
(Before I get started, a side question: Are we sure the "costs" we're talking about here, aren't negative? CDNs increase efficiency. If I were an ISP, maybe I would be happy that a hundred of my customers all accessing the same stream, only hit my upstream connections once instead of a hundred times.)
The key words in TFA are "must-have content." The premise is that many people must be Netflix customers and this is unavoidable. It's assumed, out of the gate, that Netflix can't lose. Nothing bad can possibly happen to Netflix and customers cannot say no to them.
Given that, of couse they can abuse their absolutely unassailable position. If nobody can say no to Netflix, then raising the price of ISPs is really just the tip of the iceberg; we're all going to have to name our first born childen "Netflix" too, and buy Netflix-branded cars and let Netflix VPs have special privileges with our brides. After all, we can't say no to Netflix's demands, right?
Just as a pointless exercise, though, let's imagine the unimaginable. What if customers can say no, and do? What if people see the "your ISP doesn't work with Netflix" message and decide "oh well, time to cancel Netflix." What happens then?
That aside, yes, I actually do know Netflix has muscle. I know many people who subscribe to Netflix, though I'm not one of them. Whether people can say no to Netflix or not, I admit that many won't, just like they don't say no to Microsoft and Apple. It's a world of shit out there, and I won't say it's not.
I am very interested in exactly how the Net Neutrality rules prohibit ISPs from charging customers extra for access to a particular server on their own internal network (the Netflix CDN), since AFAIK the neutrality rules only prohibit discrimination against people who access the outside. Normally it is allowed for ISPs to charge extra, for extra services. That's why I save money by not subscribing to my ISP's TV and telephone service. They're prohibited from charging me less? They're prohibited from charging other customers more, for access to the TV and VoIP servers? Are you sure about that?
I think the CDN node makes the ISPs more than a "gatekeeper" or network provider; they're file server providers. If there really is a bug in the rules that keeps them from charging the machine's users (and only that machine's users) for its costs (just like how my ISP currently charges its TV-over-IP users for their TV-over-IP servers' costs (plus an amazing shitload of markup)), then the FCC can change the rules again. Bugs are fixable.
That's the conundrum of all "IP." You sometimes get occasional exceptions (some old people have bought Sgt Pepper on multiple mediums) but they really are exceptions. How many times have you listened to your favorite album, which you only paid once for? A thousand so far, until later this week when it becomes a thousand and one.
On the bright side, even though people only pay once, you only had to spend the time to create it, once. Don't feel bad for John Lennon if you only paid him once for Sgt Pepper. Over all those decades when you weren't paying him, he wasn't working on making the recording again, either. He was banging Jodie Foster, instead. (No wait, I think I got my entertainer history up. Which was the Beatle who shot Reagan? Huh? Who is Mike Muir?)
Anyway. The WotC guys can take pride in the great job they did on 3.5. Surely they have been up to something else since all those years ago, hopefully not involving yet another superfluous set of core rules for a FRPG.
Quit thinking about law when you ought to be thinking about power. In this situation, you have a government so bullshit that it can make a law against insulting someone. In that context, it is ridiculous, whenever they decide to act against someone, to get bogged down in technicalities about whether their chosen victim obeyed or violated the law. What they wrote doesn't matter; the ACTUAL LAW is: "stay on my good side." Their chosen victim violated that law.
The real problem isn't the stupid law; it's that they would, and can and did, have such a stupid law. Once you say "stupid laws are ok" then it doesn't make sense to complain about stupid laws; "stupid laws are ok" is what you ought to be complaining about.
That aside, back in rules-lawyer mode... I can insult someone by not saying anything against them, whether by backhanded complement or conspicuous omission. I can communicate a word without speaking that word. I can point at a person without saying their name or aiming my finger.
Whenever you say "he who must not be named," it can cause Voldemort or Demogorgon to be summoned (depending on context. That's the power of magic.;-)
If you lay off enough teachers, then school will cease to be an attractive place for childen to congregate (no reason to go there, since there are no teachers to provide education service), and the targets will distribute differently. This could create a serious logistic problems for people who are trying to plan a massacre.
As tech-heads, we look at the distribution problem and try to solve it. The most efficient way to handle distributed targets is with distributed attack, so this results in a fleet of killbots, each of which needs only one or two bullets. The nut still gets his massacre, the government gets their limited magazine powertrip without significant public resistance, the taxpayers get freed of the monocle-wearing Porche-driving teachers getting fat on their paychecks, the children get to die in their homes surrounded by their loving homeschooling families instead of alone-in-a-crowd in a terrorized schoolroom stampede, and we get the killbot spinoff tech (as well as the initial enjoyment of designing them). Everybody wins!
By seeing the "s" in "perpetrators." A person sees that a different criminal (not themself) went to jail, predicts that if they take similar actions they will experience a similar outcome, weighs jail negatively, and places negative number in crime column of payoff table.
[pedantism on!] It's free market, not necessarily capitalism. Regardless of whoever owns the means of production (even if the government owned the magazine-making factories] you would expect them, if they are acting with fiduciary prudence, to charge whatever the market will bear. I know: you don't ever actually hear about "free market communism" but it's a theoretical possibility.
As someone who is aware of my surroundings and generally conscientious, I simply turn my phone to "vibrate" or even - God forbid - OFF... It works very well indeed.
I agree with you, in this particular case. But there will be situations where I find something trivial and obvious that you find to be a pain in the ass, and vice-versa. Once person might say "I'm aware of what I'm watching and it's trivial and foolproof to press fast-forward on my Tivo remote when there's a commercial" and the other person might say "I shouldn't have to do that or think about that, when I'm trying to concentrate on the actresses' boobies, so mythfrontend should automatically commercial-skip for me." One person might say "I want a padlock icon when it is a totally sure thing (except for a glossed-over list of exceptions, all of which I want to always be un-acknowledged) there is no MitM attack, and I want lack of an icon when the certainty is less than 100.00%; I don't want to think about grey areas and degrees of certainty" and another person might prefer a realistic UI which says "MiTM is probably not happening" or "MitM is very very likely not happening" or "The level of conspiracy required for a MitM right now, has precedent." or "You only have one stranger's assurance that nothing shady is going on, and betrayal would require no conspiracy at all."
We say just a little awareness and common sense solves the problem, maybe because our phones happen to be something we sometimes think about, for whatever reasons that have emerged from our personal quirks. Someone else says "I shouldn't have to be aware of something as unimportant as the current sleep/wake state of one of my pocket computers, among the dozen items I happen to be carrying." If eyeglasses or shoes or hats sometimes spontaneously started screaming in response to external activity, that same person might want the behavior automatically suppressed at some times, whereas you and I would probably raise an eyebrow at the thought of ever buying a screaming hat in the first place, because we already have enough to worry about (our phones) without having to worry about screaming hats.
Unless there are genuine state secrets lurking about the company..
Interesting that you are willing to make an exception. From here on, the strumpet and the john are just haggling over the price.
Why draw the line at "state" secrets, not some other level of secrets? Who are you to say that the exception is reasonable in that one instance and not reasonable in others?
i really REALLY don't get this obsession with linking violent video games to violent behavior.
Suppose there is a person you wish to murder, because, oh say, you're an evil piece of shit. Suppose, furthermore, that you live in a society that generally disapproves of murder (you would probably be punished if you just walked up to your victim and shot them in the head) but society does make an exception: it is ok to murder a witch.
Doesn't it make sense that you would claim that your intended victim is a witch? That's not obsession; that's strategy.
If you suck at video games and resent that other people enjoy them, or if you sell media that competes for peoples' time with video games, or if you're just plain nutty and have some weird (but irrelevant to this discussion) reason for wanting video games to go away, then you should try to convince everyone that video games are responsible for crop failures, volcanos, plagues, and of course, incidents of people going apeshit.
That's just one way it makes sense. Another: suppose someone (not you) has decided to target someone by claiming that person is a witch. You can rebut them (boring) or sit it out (even more boring) or join in the hunt. Killing witches is fun and exciting, and if you can take one down, everyone will see you as a Very Important Person. C'mon, don't you want to be the person who utters the perfect nonsense, the one thing that finally brings the mob over to the witchfinder's side?
Slashdot Mirror
Hopefully not buying the spyware is enough. It might not. If they pass a law that you have to just sit there and take it, when they come to your house, point a gun at you, go to your computer, type "sudo apt-get install spyware", and then say "type your password or else I will kill you" then you will have an important decision to make.
The decision: whether or not to tell them they're typing in the VM sandbox that you set up for just that sort of eventuality.
I say you shouldn't. But talk is cheap when I don't have a gun to my head.
Actually, the key here, is that it's not missing from their website. It's missing from Wordpress' website. They don't have a website of their own. If they did, then they (not Wordpress) would have been the one who received the DMCA notice, and the decision to pull or keep the "infringing" article would have been in the hands of someone with actual knowledge of the situation, rather than a frightened fold-by-default middleman.
Everyone see the two radically conflicting views here? I don't know if the above post appeared in a thread about NNTP coincidentally or not, but it definitely is deeply related.
Call this the anti-NNTP position. Or in modern hipster speak, it's the "cloud" position. Summary: "Your computer is no good, and their computer is awesome."
When you bookmark or otherwise save the data on your machine, your imagination is the limit to what you can do with it. Well, your imagination if you're typing or pasting them into some text editor, or it's the browser authors' imagination if you're using the browser to do your bookmarking.
Many people are happy with that, but not completely. I've heard of third-party bookmarking sites (e.g., delic.io.us), "syncing" plugins, etc though I've never used any of them. And in the above example, the person is having unrelated problems (broken browser or OS?) and so their computer is completely unreliable. No matter how well a browser handles bookmarks, it's not going to work for this guy, because his computer just isn't capable of reliably storing information for years. So of course he'd rather sites themselves provide features, such as say, bookmarking, since that's his only hope of things ever working.
And that has potential, but then the user's imagination, or the imaginations of those he delegate to make his tools, is no longer the upper limit as to what can be done ; the site owners' imaginations is the upper bound now. And possibly other factors too (maybe they'll get more ad impressions if they don't make it easy for you to quickly find things). And every site the users, needs to be persuaded to do whatever you want. And since sites are shared by many users, there is One Global Right Way to do things (for that site).
We know from experience, that "One Global Right Way" is always wrong.
Some of us see the problem from the other end, where we trust ourselves, or the software we use, to do things right, or at least to do things best, and the software is interchangeable and can be replaced if we don't like it, each competing to implement some particular protocol. That's why you have bookmarks at all: because someone at Netscape or Microsoft or whereever, saw that people were pasting URLs into some file. So they added it to the browser. And then the others browsers had to have it, and then a few browsers branched off and started doing it in slightly different ways.
And that would be ideal, if only the parent poster's computer fucking worked and could store things long-term. He could have reliable bookmarks and they could work however he wanted them to. But nooo.. people have to buy crap, or keep the Windows preload, or whatever is going on with this guy (maybe it's just bad luck that an alligator ate all his backups). So he wants the sites to do his bookmarking, since the sites are reliable. And there are lots of people who are just like him, so the pressure on the sites gets unbearable.
And everyone suffers as a consequence, as we drift into retarded "progress," and a weird mix of homogenity (every site does things for all its users, but in one way) and heterogeneity (each site does the aforementioned thing, in a different site-varying way), rather than simply letting everyone get everything they want, which people like me assume, has to be the truly best way to do anything. What part of "everyone wins" don't you like?! I don't want to tell you how to bookmark; I just want your computer or browser to be able to do it, somehow, so
Of course. That's how it became a DVD player. Until I installed the OS and the DVD app, it was just a computer and an optical drive. It's the installation of software (which definitely does include the OS) which breathes life into the otherwise useless hardware.
You are thinking this is not a PC. It is, no matter how much you think it's not.
> l
Gimli the Dwarf (Necromancer)
Strider the Human (Greater Necromancer)
Legolas the Elf (Necromancer)
>'hey guys, are you all ready?
You say, "hey guys, are you all ready?"
Gimli says, "y"
Legolas says, "wait, I think Frodo is coming"
> s
Pirate Cave
You are in a pirate cave. There are various pirate props here. The only exit is to the north.
Sauron the Maiar (Greater Necromancer).
Saruman the Istari (Necromancer) (blocking the north exit).
Grishnakh the Orc (Lesser Sorcerer).
Magic helmet.
Balrog the Balrog (Greater Necromancer).
Ugluk the Orc (Lesser Sorcerer).
Balrog says, "I see them on who, so there's a chance they might attack today"
>ooc oh shit, meant to type 'lead s'
You say (ooc), "oh shit, meant to type 'lead s'"
> n
The exit is blocked.
Strider shouts, "aren't we coming with you?"
Ugluk takes Magic helmet.
Legolas shouts, "wait"
Sauron grapples you!
Sauron says "what do we have here?"
> n
The exit is blocked.
You can't move while grappled.
> kill sauron
You attack Sauron!
Sauron attacks you!
> shout help!
You shout, "help!"
Saruman laughs.
Balrog blocks the north exit.
Gimli shouts "Are you coming back or should we wait?"
Ugluk wears Magic helmet.
Grishnahk attacks you!
Legolas arrives.
Legolas says "come back north, we're not ready"
You hit Sauron hard!
Ugluk attacks you!
Legolas tries to move north but is blocked by Saruman.
Azog arrives.
Strider arrives.
Bilbo arrives.
Strider says, "did you mean to lead us?"
Shagrat arrives.
Frodo arrives.
Sauron shouts "lag!"
So there's a MUD which has PK. Someone accidentally separated from the party he was leading, and found himself in a room with a different party, which consisted of enemies. Instead of running away, he decided to fight, and he shouted for help. The whole MUD heard the shout. Then instead of just his party coming, nearly every player on the MUD ran to that one room, picked a side, and attacked someone. Does that about sum it up?
What a story!
I remember reading something about this in a book titled "Undocumented DOS" a couple decades or so ago. I don't know if I'm paraphrasing or verbatim quoting, but it was essentially: "Your product may be a DLL in the next version of Windows."
Some peoples' "broken" sites are other peoples' "fixed" sites.
*I* think the point is that Congress (and presidents) created this problem.
We have a law that people walking on the grass will be killed. Someone walks on the grass. They are killed. You complain about the cop?!
This isn't DoJ's fault. They're supposed to be ruthless scumbags in the service of the evil policies that we demand. We want people to be hurt, and they do this for us.
If you don't like it, change your instructions. Maybe people ought to start voting instead of signing petitions. Every election day, 99% of us say we want an authoritarian central government. And so that's what we have. Scientists should investigate the possibility that there's a relationship between who we vote for, and the laws we have.
I really like this explanation. For all the amazingly stupid bullshit I've been hearing the last month about America having a "gun culture," we are actually far below average in our exposure to this stuff. I'm pretty sure most Americans get a little freaked out whenever they see machine guns outside of movie screens.
There are many possible agendas which would benefit from changing that (let's create the "gun culture" the media keeps telling us we already have), and you have suggested one very plausible one. I can think of some others, too, though yours is better.
Pop quiz: what's the most popular desktop OS?
Followup question: did you throw up in your mouth a little, at using the word "popular" to describe that OS' marketshare? That's not really an honest way of describe a default "choice," or a "choice" that people are railroaded into thanks to network effects, kicking and screaming, and yet it is technically accurate.
No matter how Google+ got its users, it has them.
Nobody is saying that it will disappear. What they're predicting is that this segment will get smaller. And because of that, some manufacturers will pull out.
We have been lucky over the last two or three decades (especially the last two) in that everyone (Joe Schmoe) needs a computer much like yours and mine. The resulting economy-of-scale allowed many manufacturers to participate, and caused prices to plummet, so that where as a "good" computer used to cost $3000, today it costs around $800 (give or take, depending on how you define "good").
In the future, though, they're saying Joe Schmoe isn't going to buy a computer like yours and mine. He's going to buy something totally different. When someone makes a new low-power ARM-based board which serves Joe's market, you and I get little or nothing in scale-coattail-riding. The manufacturers that we buy from, aren't getting a piece of Joe's action.
So your future "good" computer might cost $1600 instead of $800, your "kick-ass" computer will cost $4000 instead of the $2000 that it costs today, and your "super-kickass" computer will cost .. well, actually that one won't change much because we already don't get much economy-of-scale from Joe since he never buys SMP boxes anyway. It'll be back-to-the-80s, in that your machine will identify you as being a niche user. Someone will see your bedroom or desk and immediately think "nerd." Just like they did in 1983, but didn't in 1993 or 2003, years when your computer was like everyone else's, if I may overgeneralize a little.
(Before I get started, a side question: Are we sure the "costs" we're talking about here, aren't negative? CDNs increase efficiency. If I were an ISP, maybe I would be happy that a hundred of my customers all accessing the same stream, only hit my upstream connections once instead of a hundred times.)
The key words in TFA are "must-have content." The premise is that many people must be Netflix customers and this is unavoidable. It's assumed, out of the gate, that Netflix can't lose. Nothing bad can possibly happen to Netflix and customers cannot say no to them.
Given that, of couse they can abuse their absolutely unassailable position. If nobody can say no to Netflix, then raising the price of ISPs is really just the tip of the iceberg; we're all going to have to name our first born childen "Netflix" too, and buy Netflix-branded cars and let Netflix VPs have special privileges with our brides. After all, we can't say no to Netflix's demands, right?
Just as a pointless exercise, though, let's imagine the unimaginable. What if customers can say no, and do? What if people see the "your ISP doesn't work with Netflix" message and decide "oh well, time to cancel Netflix." What happens then?
That aside, yes, I actually do know Netflix has muscle. I know many people who subscribe to Netflix, though I'm not one of them. Whether people can say no to Netflix or not, I admit that many won't, just like they don't say no to Microsoft and Apple. It's a world of shit out there, and I won't say it's not.
I am very interested in exactly how the Net Neutrality rules prohibit ISPs from charging customers extra for access to a particular server on their own internal network (the Netflix CDN), since AFAIK the neutrality rules only prohibit discrimination against people who access the outside. Normally it is allowed for ISPs to charge extra, for extra services. That's why I save money by not subscribing to my ISP's TV and telephone service. They're prohibited from charging me less? They're prohibited from charging other customers more, for access to the TV and VoIP servers? Are you sure about that?
I think the CDN node makes the ISPs more than a "gatekeeper" or network provider; they're file server providers. If there really is a bug in the rules that keeps them from charging the machine's users (and only that machine's users) for its costs (just like how my ISP currently charges its TV-over-IP users for their TV-over-IP servers' costs (plus an amazing shitload of markup)), then the FCC can change the rules again. Bugs are fixable.
That's the conundrum of all "IP." You sometimes get occasional exceptions (some old people have bought Sgt Pepper on multiple mediums) but they really are exceptions. How many times have you listened to your favorite album, which you only paid once for? A thousand so far, until later this week when it becomes a thousand and one.
On the bright side, even though people only pay once, you only had to spend the time to create it, once. Don't feel bad for John Lennon if you only paid him once for Sgt Pepper. Over all those decades when you weren't paying him, he wasn't working on making the recording again, either. He was banging Jodie Foster, instead. (No wait, I think I got my entertainer history up. Which was the Beatle who shot Reagan? Huh? Who is Mike Muir?)
Anyway. The WotC guys can take pride in the great job they did on 3.5. Surely they have been up to something else since all those years ago, hopefully not involving yet another superfluous set of core rules for a FRPG.
It's a horrible unfair law, yadda yadda.
Quit thinking about law when you ought to be thinking about power. In this situation, you have a government so bullshit that it can make a law against insulting someone. In that context, it is ridiculous, whenever they decide to act against someone, to get bogged down in technicalities about whether their chosen victim obeyed or violated the law. What they wrote doesn't matter; the ACTUAL LAW is: "stay on my good side." Their chosen victim violated that law.
The real problem isn't the stupid law; it's that they would, and can and did, have such a stupid law. Once you say "stupid laws are ok" then it doesn't make sense to complain about stupid laws; "stupid laws are ok" is what you ought to be complaining about.
That aside, back in rules-lawyer mode... I can insult someone by not saying anything against them, whether by backhanded complement or conspicuous omission. I can communicate a word without speaking that word. I can point at a person without saying their name or aiming my finger.
Whenever you say "he who must not be named," it can cause Voldemort or Demogorgon to be summoned (depending on context. That's the power of magic. ;-)
If there's anyone who knows how to find a competent-but-also-cheap accountant, it's this guy.
Wait a minute, you're onto something.
If you lay off enough teachers, then school will cease to be an attractive place for childen to congregate (no reason to go there, since there are no teachers to provide education service), and the targets will distribute differently. This could create a serious logistic problems for people who are trying to plan a massacre.
As tech-heads, we look at the distribution problem and try to solve it. The most efficient way to handle distributed targets is with distributed attack, so this results in a fleet of killbots, each of which needs only one or two bullets. The nut still gets his massacre, the government gets their limited magazine powertrip without significant public resistance, the taxpayers get freed of the monocle-wearing Porche-driving teachers getting fat on their paychecks, the children get to die in their homes surrounded by their loving homeschooling families instead of alone-in-a-crowd in a terrorized schoolroom stampede, and we get the killbot spinoff tech (as well as the initial enjoyment of designing them). Everybody wins!
By seeing the "s" in "perpetrators." A person sees that a different criminal (not themself) went to jail, predicts that if they take similar actions they will experience a similar outcome, weighs jail negatively, and places negative number in crime column of payoff table.
[pedantism on!] It's free market, not necessarily capitalism. Regardless of whoever owns the means of production (even if the government owned the magazine-making factories] you would expect them, if they are acting with fiduciary prudence, to charge whatever the market will bear. I know: you don't ever actually hear about "free market communism" but it's a theoretical possibility.
That reminds me: is it safe to go see The Hobbit yet?
I agree with you, in this particular case. But there will be situations where I find something trivial and obvious that you find to be a pain in the ass, and vice-versa. Once person might say "I'm aware of what I'm watching and it's trivial and foolproof to press fast-forward on my Tivo remote when there's a commercial" and the other person might say "I shouldn't have to do that or think about that, when I'm trying to concentrate on the actresses' boobies, so mythfrontend should automatically commercial-skip for me." One person might say "I want a padlock icon when it is a totally sure thing (except for a glossed-over list of exceptions, all of which I want to always be un-acknowledged) there is no MitM attack, and I want lack of an icon when the certainty is less than 100.00%; I don't want to think about grey areas and degrees of certainty" and another person might prefer a realistic UI which says "MiTM is probably not happening" or "MitM is very very likely not happening" or "The level of conspiracy required for a MitM right now, has precedent." or "You only have one stranger's assurance that nothing shady is going on, and betrayal would require no conspiracy at all."
We say just a little awareness and common sense solves the problem, maybe because our phones happen to be something we sometimes think about, for whatever reasons that have emerged from our personal quirks. Someone else says "I shouldn't have to be aware of something as unimportant as the current sleep/wake state of one of my pocket computers, among the dozen items I happen to be carrying." If eyeglasses or shoes or hats sometimes spontaneously started screaming in response to external activity, that same person might want the behavior automatically suppressed at some times, whereas you and I would probably raise an eyebrow at the thought of ever buying a screaming hat in the first place, because we already have enough to worry about (our phones) without having to worry about screaming hats.
Different strokes for different folks.
Interesting that you are willing to make an exception. From here on, the strumpet and the john are just haggling over the price.
Why draw the line at "state" secrets, not some other level of secrets? Who are you to say that the exception is reasonable in that one instance and not reasonable in others?
I don't long for it. It's called the space bar. mplayer pauses exactly as long as I need, whenever I need it.
Suppose there is a person you wish to murder, because, oh say, you're an evil piece of shit. Suppose, furthermore, that you live in a society that generally disapproves of murder (you would probably be punished if you just walked up to your victim and shot them in the head) but society does make an exception: it is ok to murder a witch.
Doesn't it make sense that you would claim that your intended victim is a witch? That's not obsession; that's strategy.
If you suck at video games and resent that other people enjoy them, or if you sell media that competes for peoples' time with video games, or if you're just plain nutty and have some weird (but irrelevant to this discussion) reason for wanting video games to go away, then you should try to convince everyone that video games are responsible for crop failures, volcanos, plagues, and of course, incidents of people going apeshit.
That's just one way it makes sense. Another: suppose someone (not you) has decided to target someone by claiming that person is a witch. You can rebut them (boring) or sit it out (even more boring) or join in the hunt. Killing witches is fun and exciting, and if you can take one down, everyone will see you as a Very Important Person. C'mon, don't you want to be the person who utters the perfect nonsense, the one thing that finally brings the mob over to the witchfinder's side?