All Google has to do to make Verizon's incessant whining disappear for a long time is redirect every hit from a Verizon customer to Google's servers to a page explaining that Verizon is trying to extort money from them for a 24 hour period. Verizon will get so many customers leaving their service that within 24 hours, they will be BEGGING Google to unblock their network. If Google wants Verizon's internet service to go away forever, all they have to do is refuse to remove the block, and enough customers will tell Verizon to cram it that they will diminish into irrelevance in a matter of days or weeks. Verizon is banking on Google not having the guts to do it. I'm betting that if they push Google too far, they will.
If Google did that, I suspect Verizon would have them so tied up in extortion lawsuits... that I can't think of a good metaphor. Just because you're a benevolent 900-pound gorilla doesn't mean you're any less a bully pushing your weight around.
And if you doubt that the definition of extortion could stretch that far, just look at the cases where abortion clincs tried to sue pro-life groups under the RICO act. If you're a business threat and you display any sign of obstructing the other person's business, you'd best be wary of RICO.
Um... that was exactly the point of his post, I think. The great-grandparent post talked about high Internet speeds in India and "proved" it by citing an Internet cafe in Delhi. The grandparent post satirized it by saying that living cost is high in the US and cited New York City. In both cases, it's a generalized assumption based on a specific case.
You see 20 year olds voting for those politicians who CLAIM to care really care about the environment and the world's state. In other words those 20 year olds were young enough to be had.
More frightening, I know some girls in high school who voted for Clinton because he looked cuter. Then again, I've found more older people who vote straight party lines which I personally see as about the most idiotic voting practice you can do. Anyone else think it's a disservice to encourage people to vote when they're disinclined to it? You get people voting who don't know the issues, don't know the candidates. Everyone should have the right to vote. Only those willing to intelligently vote ought to.
-White roof shingle.
This is a no-brainer. They are already being produced. They reduce cooling requirements during the summer. All the lasy-ass politicians need to do is tax the black (and dark colour) shingles and joe consumer will instinctively buy the cheaper white shingles.
Sounds like a clear-cut case of color discrimination to me. Are you saying that you think blacks in this country should be taxed at a higher rate? That's the sort of thing that causes riots, you know...
Openness and accuracy are not mutually exclusive. Often times when we have increased openness and a greater availability of information, we end up having more accurate information.
The key to Wikipedia's policy is assuming that, with enough input, the correct information will come out on top. Unfortunately, a determined vandal or large amounts of misinformed people can easily reverse this trend.
Yes, cream floats to the top of the milk, but shit floats to the top of the toilet water.
Personally, I'm in the process of job-seeking and am resigned to taking a pay cut when I go. On one hand, I'm not a big consumer, so I'm not worried about a drop in pay. On the other hand, I do worry a bit about the shift in job stability. My current job, I could probably hold until I retire. If I sign up for more exciting work with a start-up or small company, I could very well be short a job a year later, and with even less saving built up then before.
Really, the decision depends on a number of factors. Maybe the current job's extra pay allows you to enjoy yourself more outside of work. If your job is merely tedious, not soul-sucking, you might consider staying and pumping up your style outside of work. Or save up enough for an early retirement. But, given what you said about how braindead your taskings are, if you do stay, make sure you keep up on your education outside of work. You don't want to be 10 years out of school, 15 left for retirement, and trying to peddle your ability to create Excel Macros.
When this happens, the oldest child can't seem to let go of this parental sense of responsability for the younger kids. It's almost like part of their childhood has been lost. So I agree. I think it has to do with the presence of responsability. Nothing makes you grow up faster than having to care for a child of your own.
You can see the same thing in the children of alcoholics and the like. Forced to become the responsible adults in the family, they often have to give up on their childhood in the process. Major psychological pitfalls often lie ahead for them.
Personally, I feel every child should have the opportunity to be a child, without major care or responsibility. It's not always been the historical precedent (adolescence, and especially the teenage period are relatively recent inventions within the last century or two), but I think it's been established as something necessary in today's society. Not to say that you shouldn't instill a sense of maturity and responsibility within your kids, but it's more along the lines of keeping their rooms clean and budgeting their allowance, not having to keep up the house finances and ensure that mummy and daddy get tucked into bed after they drink themselves into an alcoholic stupor.
Unfortuanately, this production comes at a cost to those who consume it, as the cows are also often pumped full of steroids and other crap that a free-ranging cow would have no contact with. There are some remarkable similarities here, since RIAA artists tend to exhibit the same sense of "artificiality".
Before the chemicals and supplements, there were tremendous gains made through simple animal husbandry, breeding and managing the cows as dedicated producers, not as animals who you just harvested every once in a while.
But on the other side, though he succeded, he "only" requested every defendant to pay the 30-40 Euros the game was initially sold for.
Unless there's some degree of "cost of court" added to that, I'd think that's a nice way to win yourself out of business. Even if he only did this with people who admitted their guilt, the costs are likely to add up to more than the margin on his game. Then again, that does mean that he's got some publicity both from his altruistic bent and from several thousands copies of his game as running advertisement for other people to buy it.
RIAA really had/has no reason to fear individuals filesharing and should have jumped at this gratis opportunity for broad artist exposure and recognize the market for high-quality reasonably priced unobstructive digital formats. Instead of their centralized campaigns for a handful of artists they could have taken advantage of everyone promoting everyone for free and let the naturally popular artists rise instead of trying to manufacture them.
While I want to agree with you, I'm going to have to call you on that. I suspect they make a lot more money by grooming particular artists and therefore knowing where their money will be coming from. To use an analogy, look at the state of animal husbandry. In medieval times, it was not uncommon to let your pig or cow free range for food. It was considered cheaper than providing for feed. Nowadays, I'm sure people would argue that it provides for a survival of the fittest, much as you state your idea regarding music. However, what typically happened was that there was little control over your animal and its productiveness. Your cow might be stolen by bandits. It might be shot by an errant poacher (or an earnest one). Even when it survived, you had no idea what it had been eating and who it was breeding with. And average production for those cows was small. With modern animal husbandry techniques, we now keep the naimals penned and well fed, control their breeding, and we wind up with cows who have easily 50 times the milk production of medieval cows. Right now, the RIAA has those penned and bred cows. They know they can milk those cows and be assured of a rich bounty because they bred them that way. And you're asking them to free range their artists? It's just not a smart move for them.
I'm eagerly avaiting the day a senators or congressmembers child/familymember is hauled in to court by the RIAA or MPAA, they share too. Hell, I'm pro-Bush but I'm sure there's at least one track on his beloved iPod that's "pirated" lol:)
Feh! Do you think their lawyers would let them get that far? I would not be surprised if they have a database of names which they automatically remove from consideration. At that, they probably do make a non-token effort to ascertain who's actually pirating out of the people they prosecute. It's only due to volume that we're getting these "never touched the Internet" people. If the RIAA were at all smart, they'd come out publically and state that this person was all a mistake and award her $500 worth of music from RIAA artists. It would be good publicity, the "we made a mistake and are making up for it" kind, plus it will cost them all of $5 plus shipping to do so, since they own the CDs.
Anyway, Junior went bankrupt due to some bad business decisions, and suddenly John Senior found himself not being able to use his credit cards anymore. He only managed to get them back after several heated phone calls...
You think that's bad... just wait until the companies have an even more shared databasing system. It's hard enough getting your name out of one database, but when it's ditributed over 50 of them and they all cite the others when asked for the authenticity of the source of their data, things can get pretty ugly.
the biggest difference is you can 'turn off' unsolicited bulk mailings from the Post Office. So other than being completely different...yep it's the same;-)
Please, tell me more about your methods...
Only thing is, the "unsolicited" part is probably as tenuous as it is for Email or phone spam. So long as you've had any interaction with the company or any of their subsidiaries...
Did you know that most retailers don't make hardly a dollar on the new video games, because of the cost of them shipped? (My wife and I are opening a store to sell games, and toys and such) This is a good compelling argument for stores to take back some profit by selling used games. Most of that money for new games goes directly back to the publisher. There is really not much incentive for a store to sell new games.
I seem to recall that movies are like that too. The theaters don't make money on movie-tickets. The fees they have to pay to show the film eat away at almost the entire ticket price. They make money on concessions. That's why they're so dragonian about people bringing food into the theater. I wish I had a cite on that, though... it was in a discussion where someone in the movie industry was commenting on it. That and apparently the soda syrup is so cheap that it's actually less expensive to the theater to fill your soda cup to the brim without ice than it is to do the same thing with ice in the cup.
On the other hand, you're probably paying $20 for a game someone else bought new and then decided it sucks.
To some degree, I see your point. A lot of games wind up on the used shelf simply because they were so bad that the other person didn't want to play them. And some games, like Katamari Damacy, were so good that they were practically impossible to get as used games. Then again, one could argue that the average game has Y hours of gameplay (with Y being higher, usually about double, than the X hours of gameplay that you'd expend just beating the game) and after that, there's so many games that you simply won't ever get back to playing that older game. Me, I horde, because I think the prices paid for used games are criminal. I'll only sell my used games to people, and even then, I'd prefer to trade.
Half-Life 2 and World of Warcraft have pretty much proved that with a good game, the companies can and will restrict second sales. Half-Life 2, you have to pay an additional fee ($10 IIRC) to Valve to re-key the copy of the game to a new Steam account. World of Warcraft was even more restrictive, at least in the early copies (I haven't read anything retracting the policy, at least) in that gamers were buying used copies and finding there wasn't even a way to re-key the account.
It's just one more way to make more money on the game.
From Article: "So while you might think it is coming from cousin Alice, most likely cousin Alice is not going to send you something that says 'Hey look at these pictures with naked people.' So that should be your first clue that a virus is propagating and you'd be well served to call cousin Alice to let her know that she is [unknowingly] sending out this type of e-mail," Sergile said.
But cousin Alice sends me pictures like that all the time. Don't believe me? Go ask Alice.
But seriously though, incidents like this make me wonder whether we're doing the human race a disfavor by trying to protect all of these stupid people. If someone is going to click on random porn links, especially ones sent by unusual sources, maybe they deserve to have their computer ruined? I mean, we're not exactly talking about your grandma. Ok, well maybe your grandma, but somehow I don't suspect either of mine would click on such a link.
Most non-linguists are pretty convinced of the same. After enough education to get over common sense, most linguists change their mind. Just like physicists and the idea that if you hit a large 50 lbs block with a 1 lb block that the 50 lbs block won't move. Common sense says it won't, but physics tells us that's BS.
Except that, outside of locating the blocks in areas of very low friction, the 50 lb block won't move. It's like the old joke about the mathematician located on a desert island with canned food and no way to open them, "Ok, now assume we have a can-opener..."
On the other hand "everyone knows" (except people who watch Mythbusters) that if you shoot a 150-lb person with a 10-gram bullet, that the velocity of the bullet will cause the person to fly back several feet.
Kind of makes me wonder, are you using an alternative input device? In your posts, most all of the letters are there, but jumbled or with odd letters switched. It doesn't seem like phonetic spelling errors, more like what would happen if you had an imprecise control on the keyboard, reminiscint of a friend of mine who had to point things out a letter at a time due to a motor control problem.
The world is flat... It's being carried on the back of four elephants who are themself carried on the back of a giant space turtle... Every sane person knows that...
And what does the turtle stand on? Another turtle. It's turtles all the way down.
So, what's so evil about Disney again? I mean, other than the whole no-pants thing corrupting minds of youngsters, and the various "Donald Duck"-parties that have been inspired by this...
Have you seen The Hunchback of Notre Dame? Cinderella? The Little Mermaid? Disney takes public domain stories and utterly perverts them. Yes, they're in their rights to do so, but it's still evil in my eyes.
Every little bit of extra money I get ends up going to pay for something I don't need but am forced to have (car insurance) or something that I need that breaks (stove, microwave, car parts)... and I've overdrafted my bank account in the past to buy a loaf of bread.
I can't believe I forgot car expenses... that's what led to the lady next door nearly starving. Her car broke down. She didn't have enough money to get it fixed (her spare money in that area was spent buying that car, which turned out to have more problems than she thought) and without decent transportation (there's no real public transportation here in Newark, OH), she couldn't hold a job. Sadly, she didn't think to mention this to me in our nearly-daily conversations and she stopped eating for about two weeks.
But you're right... I glossed over a lot of expenses in everyday life. *wrinkles nose* It's going to come back to bite me in the butt one of these days, but I never really got the hang of budgeting. I lower my expenses as much as I can and as long as my bank balance keeps staying at least level, I don't worry about it. I was fortunate enough to get hired at an IT job upon graduating with a bonus large enough to cover the part of student loans that I didn't cover with work while in school. It's government work, so the pay isn't spectacular, but it's a 40 hour work week and it's steady work.
I know the experience
on
Chess for Kids?
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· Score: 4, Funny
The last time I went on a trip with the chess club, they had a hotel manager throw them out of the lobby because they were trash-talking too loudly. He said that there was one thing he couldn't stand and that was chess nuts boasting in an open foyer.
Thank you. I'm here all week and Joe's grocery down the road has a special on rotten tomatos, so stock up.
Or for that matter, being able to eat and have a roof over your head.
And even that isn't all that expensive... I live in a furnished studio apartment for a little over $300 a month. I've heard larger apartment are even cheaper if you have roommates. Your food budget can easily be under $5 a day if you don't buy alcohol and you don't eat out. Yes, there are people who can't afford to eat or have a roof over their head, but they generally have no job at all.
Slashdot Mirror
If Google did that, I suspect Verizon would have them so tied up in extortion lawsuits... that I can't think of a good metaphor. Just because you're a benevolent 900-pound gorilla doesn't mean you're any less a bully pushing your weight around.
And if you doubt that the definition of extortion could stretch that far, just look at the cases where abortion clincs tried to sue pro-life groups under the RICO act. If you're a business threat and you display any sign of obstructing the other person's business, you'd best be wary of RICO.
Do you get it now?
You see 20 year olds voting for those politicians who CLAIM to care really care about the environment and the world's state. In other words those 20 year olds were young enough to be had.
More frightening, I know some girls in high school who voted for Clinton because he looked cuter. Then again, I've found more older people who vote straight party lines which I personally see as about the most idiotic voting practice you can do. Anyone else think it's a disservice to encourage people to vote when they're disinclined to it? You get people voting who don't know the issues, don't know the candidates. Everyone should have the right to vote. Only those willing to intelligently vote ought to.
Money can't buy you happiness, but it can rent it for you.
Similarly, money can't buy you love, but again, it's available for rent.
This is a no-brainer. They are already being produced. They reduce cooling requirements during the summer. All the lasy-ass politicians need to do is tax the black (and dark colour) shingles and joe consumer will instinctively buy the cheaper white shingles.
Sounds like a clear-cut case of color discrimination to me. Are you saying that you think blacks in this country should be taxed at a higher rate? That's the sort of thing that causes riots, you know...
The key to Wikipedia's policy is assuming that, with enough input, the correct information will come out on top. Unfortunately, a determined vandal or large amounts of misinformed people can easily reverse this trend.
Yes, cream floats to the top of the milk, but shit floats to the top of the toilet water.
Really, the decision depends on a number of factors. Maybe the current job's extra pay allows you to enjoy yourself more outside of work. If your job is merely tedious, not soul-sucking, you might consider staying and pumping up your style outside of work. Or save up enough for an early retirement. But, given what you said about how braindead your taskings are, if you do stay, make sure you keep up on your education outside of work. You don't want to be 10 years out of school, 15 left for retirement, and trying to peddle your ability to create Excel Macros.
You can see the same thing in the children of alcoholics and the like. Forced to become the responsible adults in the family, they often have to give up on their childhood in the process. Major psychological pitfalls often lie ahead for them.
Personally, I feel every child should have the opportunity to be a child, without major care or responsibility. It's not always been the historical precedent (adolescence, and especially the teenage period are relatively recent inventions within the last century or two), but I think it's been established as something necessary in today's society. Not to say that you shouldn't instill a sense of maturity and responsibility within your kids, but it's more along the lines of keeping their rooms clean and budgeting their allowance, not having to keep up the house finances and ensure that mummy and daddy get tucked into bed after they drink themselves into an alcoholic stupor.
Unfortuanately, this production comes at a cost to those who consume it, as the cows are also often pumped full of steroids and other crap that a free-ranging cow would have no contact with. There are some remarkable similarities here, since RIAA artists tend to exhibit the same sense of "artificiality".
Before the chemicals and supplements, there were tremendous gains made through simple animal husbandry, breeding and managing the cows as dedicated producers, not as animals who you just harvested every once in a while.
But on the other side, though he succeded, he "only" requested every defendant to pay the 30-40 Euros the game was initially sold for.
Unless there's some degree of "cost of court" added to that, I'd think that's a nice way to win yourself out of business. Even if he only did this with people who admitted their guilt, the costs are likely to add up to more than the margin on his game. Then again, that does mean that he's got some publicity both from his altruistic bent and from several thousands copies of his game as running advertisement for other people to buy it.
While I want to agree with you, I'm going to have to call you on that. I suspect they make a lot more money by grooming particular artists and therefore knowing where their money will be coming from. To use an analogy, look at the state of animal husbandry. In medieval times, it was not uncommon to let your pig or cow free range for food. It was considered cheaper than providing for feed. Nowadays, I'm sure people would argue that it provides for a survival of the fittest, much as you state your idea regarding music. However, what typically happened was that there was little control over your animal and its productiveness. Your cow might be stolen by bandits. It might be shot by an errant poacher (or an earnest one). Even when it survived, you had no idea what it had been eating and who it was breeding with. And average production for those cows was small. With modern animal husbandry techniques, we now keep the naimals penned and well fed, control their breeding, and we wind up with cows who have easily 50 times the milk production of medieval cows. Right now, the RIAA has those penned and bred cows. They know they can milk those cows and be assured of a rich bounty because they bred them that way. And you're asking them to free range their artists? It's just not a smart move for them.
I'm eagerly avaiting the day a senators or congressmembers child/familymember is hauled in to court by the RIAA or MPAA, they share too. Hell, I'm pro-Bush but I'm sure there's at least one track on his beloved iPod that's "pirated" lol :)
Feh! Do you think their lawyers would let them get that far? I would not be surprised if they have a database of names which they automatically remove from consideration. At that, they probably do make a non-token effort to ascertain who's actually pirating out of the people they prosecute. It's only due to volume that we're getting these "never touched the Internet" people. If the RIAA were at all smart, they'd come out publically and state that this person was all a mistake and award her $500 worth of music from RIAA artists. It would be good publicity, the "we made a mistake and are making up for it" kind, plus it will cost them all of $5 plus shipping to do so, since they own the CDs.
Anyway, Junior went bankrupt due to some bad business decisions, and suddenly John Senior found himself not being able to use his credit cards anymore. He only managed to get them back after several heated phone calls...
You think that's bad... just wait until the companies have an even more shared databasing system. It's hard enough getting your name out of one database, but when it's ditributed over 50 of them and they all cite the others when asked for the authenticity of the source of their data, things can get pretty ugly.
Please, tell me more about your methods...
Only thing is, the "unsolicited" part is probably as tenuous as it is for Email or phone spam. So long as you've had any interaction with the company or any of their subsidiaries...
Did you know that most retailers don't make hardly a dollar on the new video games, because of the cost of them shipped? (My wife and I are opening a store to sell games, and toys and such) This is a good compelling argument for stores to take back some profit by selling used games. Most of that money for new games goes directly back to the publisher. There is really not much incentive for a store to sell new games.
I seem to recall that movies are like that too. The theaters don't make money on movie-tickets. The fees they have to pay to show the film eat away at almost the entire ticket price. They make money on concessions. That's why they're so dragonian about people bringing food into the theater. I wish I had a cite on that, though... it was in a discussion where someone in the movie industry was commenting on it. That and apparently the soda syrup is so cheap that it's actually less expensive to the theater to fill your soda cup to the brim without ice than it is to do the same thing with ice in the cup.
On the other hand, you're probably paying $20 for a game someone else bought new and then decided it sucks.
To some degree, I see your point. A lot of games wind up on the used shelf simply because they were so bad that the other person didn't want to play them. And some games, like Katamari Damacy, were so good that they were practically impossible to get as used games. Then again, one could argue that the average game has Y hours of gameplay (with Y being higher, usually about double, than the X hours of gameplay that you'd expend just beating the game) and after that, there's so many games that you simply won't ever get back to playing that older game. Me, I horde, because I think the prices paid for used games are criminal. I'll only sell my used games to people, and even then, I'd prefer to trade.
It's just one more way to make more money on the game.
But cousin Alice sends me pictures like that all the time. Don't believe me? Go ask Alice.
But seriously though, incidents like this make me wonder whether we're doing the human race a disfavor by trying to protect all of these stupid people. If someone is going to click on random porn links, especially ones sent by unusual sources, maybe they deserve to have their computer ruined? I mean, we're not exactly talking about your grandma. Ok, well maybe your grandma, but somehow I don't suspect either of mine would click on such a link.
Except that, outside of locating the blocks in areas of very low friction, the 50 lb block won't move. It's like the old joke about the mathematician located on a desert island with canned food and no way to open them, "Ok, now assume we have a can-opener..."
On the other hand "everyone knows" (except people who watch Mythbusters) that if you shoot a 150-lb person with a 10-gram bullet, that the velocity of the bullet will cause the person to fly back several feet.
Kind of makes me wonder, are you using an alternative input device? In your posts, most all of the letters are there, but jumbled or with odd letters switched. It doesn't seem like phonetic spelling errors, more like what would happen if you had an imprecise control on the keyboard, reminiscint of a friend of mine who had to point things out a letter at a time due to a motor control problem.
A philosopher says, "I think, therefore I am." A Quantum Physicist says, "I am, I think..."
The world is flat... It's being carried on the back of four elephants who are themself carried on the back of a giant space turtle... Every sane person knows that...
And what does the turtle stand on? Another turtle. It's turtles all the way down.
So, what's so evil about Disney again? I mean, other than the whole no-pants thing corrupting minds of youngsters, and the various "Donald Duck"-parties that have been inspired by this...
Have you seen The Hunchback of Notre Dame? Cinderella? The Little Mermaid? Disney takes public domain stories and utterly perverts them. Yes, they're in their rights to do so, but it's still evil in my eyes.
I can't believe I forgot car expenses... that's what led to the lady next door nearly starving. Her car broke down. She didn't have enough money to get it fixed (her spare money in that area was spent buying that car, which turned out to have more problems than she thought) and without decent transportation (there's no real public transportation here in Newark, OH), she couldn't hold a job. Sadly, she didn't think to mention this to me in our nearly-daily conversations and she stopped eating for about two weeks.
But you're right... I glossed over a lot of expenses in everyday life. *wrinkles nose* It's going to come back to bite me in the butt one of these days, but I never really got the hang of budgeting. I lower my expenses as much as I can and as long as my bank balance keeps staying at least level, I don't worry about it. I was fortunate enough to get hired at an IT job upon graduating with a bonus large enough to cover the part of student loans that I didn't cover with work while in school. It's government work, so the pay isn't spectacular, but it's a 40 hour work week and it's steady work.
Thank you. I'm here all week and Joe's grocery down the road has a special on rotten tomatos, so stock up.
Or for that matter, being able to eat and have a roof over your head.
And even that isn't all that expensive... I live in a furnished studio apartment for a little over $300 a month. I've heard larger apartment are even cheaper if you have roommates. Your food budget can easily be under $5 a day if you don't buy alcohol and you don't eat out. Yes, there are people who can't afford to eat or have a roof over their head, but they generally have no job at all.