Cancer might resemble the kind of cells that eventually made the transition of prokaryotes to eukaryotes. But it is simplistic to say it is governed by just a few genes, so we should be able to handle it. Think about it, if these genes have escaped natural selection for 1 billion years, how hard it is going to be to fight them.
Up until very recently the vast majority of humans did not live long enough to see the onset of cancer, so natural selection didn't have a chance to play the part you're suggesting that it should/would have. Furthermore, most cancers occur later in life than when most humans reproduce (this was especially so prior to modern times). This prevents cancer from having the usual fitness detriment in relation to reproduction, providing an alternative explanation for why it hasn't been selected out.
Indeed, the hysteria surrounding intoxicated driving seems to outweigh the threat. As you mentioned, the number of yearly deaths attributable to intoxicated driving is a drop in the preventable death bucket. However, several (but not all) of the other types of preventable death are brought upon oneself, such as death from prolonged tobacco smoking. With intoxicated driving the victim is not necessarily the intoxicated individual, it can be a passenger or another driver/pedestrian. Those individuals often have families, which introduces a very emotional and tragic aspect to preventable death by an intoxicated driver. That's why you have such powerful lobbying groups like MADD, which leads to (in my opinion) overzealous pursuit of intoxicated drivers and the prevention of intoxicated driving.
It would be refreshing if some of the more substantial causes of preventable death received the same attention and lobbying.
The continental US was under a real threat of attack, I would argue, during the Cuban missile crisis. This was post WW2, by the way. I'm not sure what you'd classify as a "threat of attack," but I'm pretty sure if you'd have been alive at the time this would qualify. For more info:
It's also important to note that trial courts don't set precedent, appellate courts do that (and this case was at the trial court level). The other lawsuits that are popping up elsewhere aren't the result of any new precedent set by this case, they are the result of other lawyers being shown a winning argument. CajunArson is right about Slashdot and the law -- I see a couple posts at +5 alleging that there is now legal precedent requiring the use of patented technology -- supposedly by a court that cannot even set precedent.
Furthermore, even if this case is reviewed at the appellate level and affirmed, it still will not set any legal precedent requiring companies to use patented technology. The precedent already was/is a question of reasonableness. As CajunArson mentioned, suggested use of a patented technology to improve safety is but one step down the road to establishing (or refuting) reasonableness in legal terms.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a Mac Pro with two 2.26GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon "Nehalem" processors and 6GB of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Warcraft will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Safari is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 2x 2.26Ghz 8-core machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
The share price is only down a small amount, which can be attributed to normal market noise. This is actually an indicator that the iPhone is performing (over 500,000 sold) just about where financial analysts expected it to. If it had outperformed expectations you'd see huge abnormal gains, and if it had underperformed you'd see enormous capital losses. These two scenarios can still occur as more information comes out about the iPhone's sales, but for the moment it appears that analysts predicted sales fairly accurately and began pricing their estimates into Apple stock from when the product was first announced.
Personally, I short sold (bet against) a large amount of Apple stock last Friday. I feel like the iPhone has been over-hyped and the Apple loyalists are influencing the share price more than they should be in a relatively efficient market.
For those who are more risk averse than I am, it's potentially a bad security to be holding at the moment. Large fluctuations in share price are certainly possible in the coming weeks if analysts turn out to be wrong in either direction.
A real investor puts their money into something productive, which could be anything from a movie studio to a car company, that produces wealth. It's not a zero sum game, since the process results in wealth creation.
The futures markets will be excited to hear about this (since they are, literally, a zero sum game)! The participants are not "real investors". Seriously, though, if you invest in anything but the "market" portfolio, what are you saying when you do so? If you buy a share of IBM stock at X price, you are saying that you think that share will become more valuable in the future (assuming risk aversion). But, if it does, the person who sold it to you has effectively "lost" that appreciation.
People have vastly different beliefs about the efficiency of our markets, but I believe that any sort of "wealth creation" would have already been price into the asset that you are purchasing. Thus, if you invest in a movie studio or a car company, the only way you create wealth is if the person who sold you the investment (even the IPO, if necessary) "loses" out by missing the appreciation.
If you buy iTunes music today and switch platforms later, you now have to buy a different format of that same music. How is this different?
+4 Insightful? I can tell you how it's different. Understand, first, that I don't have a personal stance on whether Apple "uses" DRM to lock-in customers or not.
But your example isn't valid for the following reason: CD players and tape players are different hardware. You either purchased a tape, or a CD. You could try to stick your tapes in the CD player, but it will never work. Apple's songs are restricted from working on other players by software. You can put iTunes music files on another Mp3 player, they just won't play because of a software incompatibility. So you can't make the comparison between differences in hardware and an issue of software restrictions. Switching between two CD players that both will only play their own copy-protected music CDs would be a much better comparison.
Whether or not Apple should or should not allow iTunes music to play on other players is a much more complicated issue.
I would be interested to hear anyone's argument about why people should be allowed to die for the sake of someone else's property.
It would be very hard to make this argument, but you've forgotten that there are other ways to feed yourself besides stealing from "the rich". Life is not lived in a vacuum where it's you and a rich guy in a room together for a month and he has a loaf of bread and you don't. In real life there are other factors and options. You could raise your own food or grow crops. I used to raise small groups of chickens (about 30 at a time) for the eggs. And once they were plump enough, I slaughted them myself, plucked them, cleaned them, and cooked them. I don't know about the availability of chickens in Nigeria, but here in Texas a baby chick costs less than a dollar. And all of this was done on a half an acre of land (not a farm). Another option would be hunting. I've killed many different types of edible animals with both a bow and a gun. And again, slaughtered, cleaned, and cooked on my own. You could also fish, or any number of other things.
If stealing is the first option that you try, then you're a criminal. Plain and simple.
Does someone use it to drive to the market every day, run errands, etc? That's where it starts to bother people.
I don't care if it bothers other people. They have no right to be in my busines, and neither does the government which you probably wish would regulate SUVs. Let me drive what I want and I wil let you drive what you want. I'm not complaining, why are you?
I am so damn tired of hearing this new liberal slashdot rhetoric. What happened to all the libertarians that used to congregate here?
Reminds me of the old Texas saying (I realize Bush doesn't adhere to this so piss off): Leave me the hell alone and I'll leave you the hell alone.
Many of the titles that EA creates are sports titles, and so it is not exactly accurate to say that they just keep releasing sequels because sequels are absolutely necessary in many sports games. I'm an avid sports watcher and an avid sport video game player and I *want* the updated rosters and draft picks and whatnot. To be honest I could care less about new features. The game could stay EXACTLY the same from year to year and I'd still buy it just for the updated season info.
Now I realize this is not the same for a lot of people, so from the point of view of a consumer I can see that it gets boring and old for a company to keep releasing the same game with minor updates, but please keep in mind that developing and selling a Madden '06 is not exactly the same as developing and selling a Metal Gear Solid 12 would be.
but I haven't run into any sites lately that require IE
While casually browsing the web I have noticed the same thing. But a dependence on IE is still very much alive in a corporate setting. Take the company I work for, I've wanted to deploy firefox ever since I've been around, but I can't because a lot of the websites the brokers and agents use are IE only. Like the MLS... and several other sites. One of the sites they use (I believe it's SABOR) actually requires a 'patch' to be installed that runs at every startup which un-does one of the microsoft security patches that broke compatability with the site. Unfortunately, this means it would probably be tough to convince such websites to create non-IE dependent sites, because they can barely keep their sites compatible with IE itself!
I don't know what needs to be done or what could be done, but I do know that having such a high dependency on IE in the corporate setting is going to hold firefox back in such arenas. Which is a shame, because a lot of firefox's features would probably prove useful to the brokers and agents where i work.
The answer is absolutely no he would have not posted it if the tax was proposed by a Republican. You see, Democrats don't like being (usually accurately) stereotyped as big taxers and the like.
Many Republicans, on the other hand, don't mind being stereotyped negatively. I remember back in my days as a "College Republican", people thought of us as the rich elite snobby people on campus. So what did we do? We walked around smoking cigars and holding our chins up to people.
This distinction, in my opinion (and I am DEFINATELY not a political expert) is a major problem for the Democrats. They don't embrace what they really are. They try to deny it and start crying out when they get stereotyped for it. Take Kerry, for example. I don't think he was a "flip-flopper" like most Republicans claim, it was just that he tried to deny his liberal roots and move to the center, which ended up with him looking like everything at once. Why not just cast away your fear of being tax & spend liberals and just embrace it? About 50% of the American people obviously supports taxing and spending (because they vote Dem), so what's the freaking problem? Just be what you are and stop bitching about people calling you down on it.
Users have been hungering for digital rights management for some time. It's about time an upstanding company like Napster provided users what they want - restrictions on the media they purchase.
(This message brought to you by the RIAA)
Napster is jumping in a little bit late... Apple has already graciously been giving users DRM for a while now. And the irony of your joke that users would actually rally around a company for giving them DRM is that Apple users actually do just that. Just read ANY old slashdot story about iTunes DRM and you will find 100's of +5 insightful comments about how great DRM is as long as it's from Apple and how happy Apple users are that Apple serves them up DRM.
Actually, Apple is doing a horrible thing, in my opinion. Follow along:
You see, the record companies / tv stations / movie producers want full DRM to where they can control EXACTLY what you watch, how you watch it, where you watch it, how many times you watch it, etc.
Many people, myself included, want to be able to do what we want with the movies and music we purchase. This is where Apple comes in.
You feel that Apple is doing a wonderful thing by coming to a compromise with the music industry to give us mild DRM. It seems fair to everyone, right? For the moment......
You see, the music industry has been battling piracy for years. They finally found an opportunity to win a small battle, courtesy of Apple. They now have DRM's foot in the door of many homes, with people like you defending it the whole way! What would stop the record companies from later on demanding more restrictive DRM? Apple would have to play along to keep them on board so that they could keep iTunes up and sell more iPods. You are probably saying to yourself that I need my tinfoil hat right about now, but think about how guns have been eliminated in many societies. They start out by 'regulating' who can buy them. Then they move on to 'regulating' who can carry them and when (this would be the equivalent to Apple's DRM). And finally they just outright ban them. Why do they take such baby steps? Think about what would happen if you banned guns outright in America. People would go nuts. But if you do it slowly, people get used to the idea slowly, and you can eventually make your final move. The Apple DRM situation is the same thing. The final move will be made some day. And people like you will have defended and praised Apple for doing such a wonderful thing the whole way through.
I'd just like to throw in my 2 cents on the article that is link to at the end of the slashdot story. I decided to browse it but then got pulled in and read the whole thing. Some of the comments made by the author were down right scary and heavy handed.
She's right--it wasn't the intent. But that's because these weight limits generally predate the 1990s SUV craze that lured suburbanites out of their lighter sedans and minivans. It's the vehicles that have changed, not the law. These ordinances remain on the books and they're not obscure. They're clearly marked on signs in many California cities. In fact, three of L.A.'s affluent neighborhoods have the signs almost everywhere you look.
The author is certainly correct that it is the SUVs that have changed, not the law. But what about slavery? Slavery used to be legal, and it was the people in America who changed and started believing slavery was wrong, not the law. So would the author be in favor of slavery back then because 'It's the people that have changed, not the law'. In my opinion laws in a democracy should change, to benefit the people living in the country. Just because a law is already a law does not make it sacred.
I suspect the biggest impediment to enforcing these bans is political will--SUVs are wildly popular, and it will take brave city and state officials to challenge the right of residents to use their own streets.
The author seems almost indignant that we have a democracy where popular things are allowed to exist. If America were a dictatorship, the author could show all those stupid SUV driving pricks a thing or two without fear of losing the next election! Stupid democracy! How elitist.
Six-thousand pounds does the same damage to roads (not to mention pedestrians) that it did before the SUV craze. I don't know about your state, but California's ongoing budget crisis doesn't exactly leave cash to burn for road repair.
Maybe California wouldn't be in a budget crisis if it didn't spend so much money on big government regulating everything? But sure, spend more money on regulating SUVs out of existence, which may end up costing more than letting them 'ruin' the roads and just fixing them.
For vehicles over 6K, classify them as trucks, pure and simple. Let their drivers use more gas, roll over more often if they want, and take tax breaks. And ban them from residential streets. Make them stick to the truck routes, including truck lanes on highways. (Heck, maybe even require a truck driver's license to pilot one.)
This comment is totally elitist, totalitarianistic, and harsh. How about rather than regulating everything you don't like out of existence, just leave me alone? If I want to drive a vehicle that has a higher risk of rolling over, then LET ME. Why do you care if I kill myself? I know what is best for me better than you know what is best for me.
I think the Golden State has stumbled on a way to end this hypocrisy, and the rest of the country should take notice.
I think this is a good comment to end my own comment on. Go ahead, golden state, end your hipocrisy all you want, but I doubt the rest of the nation is going to take notice. Most of us still live in common-sense-ville, thank goodness.
I've been watching this whole thing unfold for some time now and paid attention to the overtures Real was making to Apple some time ago. Basically issue here is that the folks who designed the iPod and the iTunes music store really cared about the music, whereas Real is concerned with making money by delivering media rather than caring anything about the media per se. Let me repeat that for the folks at Real........It's about the music.
How this got modded up is beyond me... I guess it's just apple fanboyism, which really scares me in this case. First of all, you didn't stay on topic. The topic is not "Is Apple supportive of musicians?" or "Let's list all the things we love about Apple". Second, rather than focusing on the fact that Apple is going after Real for doing the same things that many slashdotters do on a daily basis, you try to make Apple look better by pointing out how bad you think Real is.
Anyway, let us focus on the real issue here, which is Apple accusing Real of using hacker tactics and going ape over the whole thing. Now, many of the Apple fanboys are going to say "Ohhh noooo, but Apple is not in the wrong because they should be able to determine what files can play on their products and what files can't!!!11!" I absolutely agree. When the iPod leaves the factory, Apple should (and does) have complete control over what music files it can play. When the iPod gets from the store into my house, however, it is my turn to have control. If Real offers me a way to put music on my iPod that I couldn't put otherwise, then it is my *right* as the full owner of the product to do with it as I please. I could throw it in the garbage if I want to, piss on it, or simply load some music from Real's network. It's mine.
And lastly, Apple does not really care about the music. I'm sorry to crush your dreams that Apple is a loving, caring corporation. It is in the business to make money. It does the things it does in order to get people like you to cheer it on and praise it and buy its products. So no, apple never really cared about the music, it just looked like it cared so that you (and others) would support it financially by buying Apple products.
Obviously, "Froogles" was an attempt to make people think of "Google", otherwise why would you misspell "frugal" in that fashion?
I would mispell "frugal" in that fashion because frugal.com was registered in 1995 and frugals.com was registered in 1999. Also, fru sounds just like froo. And if you really think he did this to make people think of "Google", why did he not just register froogle.com, rather than froogles.com? froogle.com was still available when he registered froogles.com.
The search-engine company's loss has no immediate impact on its use of the name Froogle. But it means that the Froogles.com name will remain with Richard Wolfe, a disabled Holtsville, N.Y., carpenter who started the Web shopping site in March 2001, before Google introduced Froogle in December 2002.
So Richard Wolfe started a web shopping site more than a year before Google ever started using the name Froogle, but Google thinks HE is infringing on THEIR rights? I don't see how that is possible. I mean seriously, I think Google is a great search engine too, but to support them trampling someone who started a service over a year before they did is just impossible for me to do. I am not very familiar with the circumstances surrounding the other domain names that the article mentions (like google.biz), but I am assuming they were created after Google existed, which I totally agree is clearly wrong. Taking advantage of the fame and success of a certain company to the detriment of consumers is horrible. But this is not an instance of taking advantage of a famous name, since Wolfe came up the domain name and website first.
Wolfe is using a confusingly similar name in a bad-faith attempt to compete with Google's business, the judge concluded.
I really don't see how Wolfe could be purposefully confusing consumers in bad-faith since he started his business first. Wouldn't it be the other way around? The only instance I can think of where this would be true is if Wolfe was a former employee of Google and knew about their Froogle plans ahead of time, but the article mentions nothing about this.
``It still amazes me that I should have to go through this at all,'' Wolfe said. ``I started my shopping service called Froogles almost two years before Google started a shopping service called Froogle. What more does anyone need to know?''
This is exactly how I feel. How is this even an issue? And what in the world is Google thinking going after this guy? I'm sure some slashdotter and huge fan of Google is going to figure out some warped logic to show how it is ok, but it is going to take some good investigative work (at least to convince me).
In fact, if Google (correctly) thought it was wrong of other people to use their name, or derivatives of it, such as google.biz or googlesex.com, how come they don't think it is wrong for themselves to use some other guy's name?
I must admit that I am afraid to roll the karma dice on this one, but I really can't stand when large businesses start pushing people around. It's especially bad when said business is well liked and supported, because people might ignore such things or even find ways to justify them.
Slashdot Mirror
hi
Cancer might resemble the kind of cells that eventually made the transition of prokaryotes to eukaryotes. But it is simplistic to say it is governed by just a few genes, so we should be able to handle it. Think about it, if these genes have escaped natural selection for 1 billion years, how hard it is going to be to fight them.
Up until very recently the vast majority of humans did not live long enough to see the onset of cancer, so natural selection didn't have a chance to play the part you're suggesting that it should/would have. Furthermore, most cancers occur later in life than when most humans reproduce (this was especially so prior to modern times). This prevents cancer from having the usual fitness detriment in relation to reproduction, providing an alternative explanation for why it hasn't been selected out.
Indeed, the hysteria surrounding intoxicated driving seems to outweigh the threat. As you mentioned, the number of yearly deaths attributable to intoxicated driving is a drop in the preventable death bucket. However, several (but not all) of the other types of preventable death are brought upon oneself, such as death from prolonged tobacco smoking. With intoxicated driving the victim is not necessarily the intoxicated individual, it can be a passenger or another driver/pedestrian. Those individuals often have families, which introduces a very emotional and tragic aspect to preventable death by an intoxicated driver. That's why you have such powerful lobbying groups like MADD, which leads to (in my opinion) overzealous pursuit of intoxicated drivers and the prevention of intoxicated driving.
It would be refreshing if some of the more substantial causes of preventable death received the same attention and lobbying.
This is the dumbest post I've ever seen.
The continental US was under a real threat of attack, I would argue, during the Cuban missile crisis. This was post WW2, by the way. I'm not sure what you'd classify as a "threat of attack," but I'm pretty sure if you'd have been alive at the time this would qualify. For more info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis
Don't forget to pay your $699 licensing fee, you cock-smoking teabaggers!
It's also important to note that trial courts don't set precedent, appellate courts do that (and this case was at the trial court level). The other lawsuits that are popping up elsewhere aren't the result of any new precedent set by this case, they are the result of other lawyers being shown a winning argument. CajunArson is right about Slashdot and the law -- I see a couple posts at +5 alleging that there is now legal precedent requiring the use of patented technology -- supposedly by a court that cannot even set precedent.
Furthermore, even if this case is reviewed at the appellate level and affirmed, it still will not set any legal precedent requiring companies to use patented technology. The precedent already was/is a question of reasonableness. As CajunArson mentioned, suggested use of a patented technology to improve safety is but one step down the road to establishing (or refuting) reasonableness in legal terms.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a Mac Pro with two 2.26GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon "Nehalem" processors and 6GB of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Warcraft will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Safari is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 2x 2.26Ghz 8-core machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
The share price is only down a small amount, which can be attributed to normal market noise. This is actually an indicator that the iPhone is performing (over 500,000 sold) just about where financial analysts expected it to. If it had outperformed expectations you'd see huge abnormal gains, and if it had underperformed you'd see enormous capital losses. These two scenarios can still occur as more information comes out about the iPhone's sales, but for the moment it appears that analysts predicted sales fairly accurately and began pricing their estimates into Apple stock from when the product was first announced.
Personally, I short sold (bet against) a large amount of Apple stock last Friday. I feel like the iPhone has been over-hyped and the Apple loyalists are influencing the share price more than they should be in a relatively efficient market.
For those who are more risk averse than I am, it's potentially a bad security to be holding at the moment. Large fluctuations in share price are certainly possible in the coming weeks if analysts turn out to be wrong in either direction.
A real investor puts their money into something productive, which could be anything from a movie studio to a car company, that produces wealth. It's not a zero sum game, since the process results in wealth creation.
The futures markets will be excited to hear about this (since they are, literally, a zero sum game)! The participants are not "real investors". Seriously, though, if you invest in anything but the "market" portfolio, what are you saying when you do so? If you buy a share of IBM stock at X price, you are saying that you think that share will become more valuable in the future (assuming risk aversion). But, if it does, the person who sold it to you has effectively "lost" that appreciation.
People have vastly different beliefs about the efficiency of our markets, but I believe that any sort of "wealth creation" would have already been price into the asset that you are purchasing. Thus, if you invest in a movie studio or a car company, the only way you create wealth is if the person who sold you the investment (even the IPO, if necessary) "loses" out by missing the appreciation.
LOL
I lol'd
If you buy iTunes music today and switch platforms later, you now have to buy a different format of that same music. How is this different?
+4 Insightful? I can tell you how it's different. Understand, first, that I don't have a personal stance on whether Apple "uses" DRM to lock-in customers or not.
But your example isn't valid for the following reason: CD players and tape players are different hardware. You either purchased a tape, or a CD. You could try to stick your tapes in the CD player, but it will never work. Apple's songs are restricted from working on other players by software. You can put iTunes music files on another Mp3 player, they just won't play because of a software incompatibility. So you can't make the comparison between differences in hardware and an issue of software restrictions. Switching between two CD players that both will only play their own copy-protected music CDs would be a much better comparison.
Whether or not Apple should or should not allow iTunes music to play on other players is a much more complicated issue.
I would be interested to hear anyone's argument about why people should be allowed to die for the sake of someone else's property.
It would be very hard to make this argument, but you've forgotten that there are other ways to feed yourself besides stealing from "the rich". Life is not lived in a vacuum where it's you and a rich guy in a room together for a month and he has a loaf of bread and you don't. In real life there are other factors and options. You could raise your own food or grow crops. I used to raise small groups of chickens (about 30 at a time) for the eggs. And once they were plump enough, I slaughted them myself, plucked them, cleaned them, and cooked them. I don't know about the availability of chickens in Nigeria, but here in Texas a baby chick costs less than a dollar. And all of this was done on a half an acre of land (not a farm). Another option would be hunting. I've killed many different types of edible animals with both a bow and a gun. And again, slaughtered, cleaned, and cooked on my own. You could also fish, or any number of other things.
If stealing is the first option that you try, then you're a criminal. Plain and simple.
Does someone use it to drive to the market every day, run errands, etc? That's where it starts to bother people.
I don't care if it bothers other people. They have no right to be in my busines, and neither does the government which you probably wish would regulate SUVs. Let me drive what I want and I wil let you drive what you want. I'm not complaining, why are you?
I am so damn tired of hearing this new liberal slashdot rhetoric. What happened to all the libertarians that used to congregate here?
Reminds me of the old Texas saying (I realize Bush doesn't adhere to this so piss off): Leave me the hell alone and I'll leave you the hell alone.
Many of the titles that EA creates are sports titles, and so it is not exactly accurate to say that they just keep releasing sequels because sequels are absolutely necessary in many sports games. I'm an avid sports watcher and an avid sport video game player and I *want* the updated rosters and draft picks and whatnot. To be honest I could care less about new features. The game could stay EXACTLY the same from year to year and I'd still buy it just for the updated season info.
Now I realize this is not the same for a lot of people, so from the point of view of a consumer I can see that it gets boring and old for a company to keep releasing the same game with minor updates, but please keep in mind that developing and selling a Madden '06 is not exactly the same as developing and selling a Metal Gear Solid 12 would be.
but I haven't run into any sites lately that require IE
While casually browsing the web I have noticed the same thing. But a dependence on IE is still very much alive in a corporate setting. Take the company I work for, I've wanted to deploy firefox ever since I've been around, but I can't because a lot of the websites the brokers and agents use are IE only. Like the MLS... and several other sites. One of the sites they use (I believe it's SABOR) actually requires a 'patch' to be installed that runs at every startup which un-does one of the microsoft security patches that broke compatability with the site. Unfortunately, this means it would probably be tough to convince such websites to create non-IE dependent sites, because they can barely keep their sites compatible with IE itself!
I don't know what needs to be done or what could be done, but I do know that having such a high dependency on IE in the corporate setting is going to hold firefox back in such arenas. Which is a shame, because a lot of firefox's features would probably prove useful to the brokers and agents where i work.
I haven't read a post this funny in a while... bravo!
The answer is absolutely no he would have not posted it if the tax was proposed by a Republican. You see, Democrats don't like being (usually accurately) stereotyped as big taxers and the like.
Many Republicans, on the other hand, don't mind being stereotyped negatively. I remember back in my days as a "College Republican", people thought of us as the rich elite snobby people on campus. So what did we do? We walked around smoking cigars and holding our chins up to people.
This distinction, in my opinion (and I am DEFINATELY not a political expert) is a major problem for the Democrats. They don't embrace what they really are. They try to deny it and start crying out when they get stereotyped for it. Take Kerry, for example. I don't think he was a "flip-flopper" like most Republicans claim, it was just that he tried to deny his liberal roots and move to the center, which ended up with him looking like everything at once. Why not just cast away your fear of being tax & spend liberals and just embrace it? About 50% of the American people obviously supports taxing and spending (because they vote Dem), so what's the freaking problem? Just be what you are and stop bitching about people calling you down on it.
Users have been hungering for digital rights management for some time. It's about time an upstanding company like Napster provided users what they want - restrictions on the media they purchase.
(This message brought to you by the RIAA)
Napster is jumping in a little bit late... Apple has already graciously been giving users DRM for a while now. And the irony of your joke that users would actually rally around a company for giving them DRM is that Apple users actually do just that. Just read ANY old slashdot story about iTunes DRM and you will find 100's of +5 insightful comments about how great DRM is as long as it's from Apple and how happy Apple users are that Apple serves them up DRM.
Apple is doing a great thing
Actually, Apple is doing a horrible thing, in my opinion. Follow along:
You see, the record companies / tv stations / movie producers want full DRM to where they can control EXACTLY what you watch, how you watch it, where you watch it, how many times you watch it, etc.
Many people, myself included, want to be able to do what we want with the movies and music we purchase. This is where Apple comes in.
You feel that Apple is doing a wonderful thing by coming to a compromise with the music industry to give us mild DRM. It seems fair to everyone, right? For the moment......
You see, the music industry has been battling piracy for years. They finally found an opportunity to win a small battle, courtesy of Apple. They now have DRM's foot in the door of many homes, with people like you defending it the whole way! What would stop the record companies from later on demanding more restrictive DRM? Apple would have to play along to keep them on board so that they could keep iTunes up and sell more iPods. You are probably saying to yourself that I need my tinfoil hat right about now, but think about how guns have been eliminated in many societies. They start out by 'regulating' who can buy them. Then they move on to 'regulating' who can carry them and when (this would be the equivalent to Apple's DRM). And finally they just outright ban them. Why do they take such baby steps? Think about what would happen if you banned guns outright in America. People would go nuts. But if you do it slowly, people get used to the idea slowly, and you can eventually make your final move. The Apple DRM situation is the same thing. The final move will be made some day. And people like you will have defended and praised Apple for doing such a wonderful thing the whole way through.
I'd just like to throw in my 2 cents on the article that is link to at the end of the slashdot story. I decided to browse it but then got pulled in and read the whole thing. Some of the comments made by the author were down right scary and heavy handed.
She's right--it wasn't the intent. But that's because these weight limits generally predate the 1990s SUV craze that lured suburbanites out of their lighter sedans and minivans. It's the vehicles that have changed, not the law. These ordinances remain on the books and they're not obscure. They're clearly marked on signs in many California cities. In fact, three of L.A.'s affluent neighborhoods have the signs almost everywhere you look.
The author is certainly correct that it is the SUVs that have changed, not the law. But what about slavery? Slavery used to be legal, and it was the people in America who changed and started believing slavery was wrong, not the law. So would the author be in favor of slavery back then because 'It's the people that have changed, not the law'. In my opinion laws in a democracy should change, to benefit the people living in the country. Just because a law is already a law does not make it sacred.
I suspect the biggest impediment to enforcing these bans is political will--SUVs are wildly popular, and it will take brave city and state officials to challenge the right of residents to use their own streets.
The author seems almost indignant that we have a democracy where popular things are allowed to exist. If America were a dictatorship, the author could show all those stupid SUV driving pricks a thing or two without fear of losing the next election! Stupid democracy! How elitist.
Six-thousand pounds does the same damage to roads (not to mention pedestrians) that it did before the SUV craze. I don't know about your state, but California's ongoing budget crisis doesn't exactly leave cash to burn for road repair.
Maybe California wouldn't be in a budget crisis if it didn't spend so much money on big government regulating everything? But sure, spend more money on regulating SUVs out of existence, which may end up costing more than letting them 'ruin' the roads and just fixing them.
For vehicles over 6K, classify them as trucks, pure and simple. Let their drivers use more gas, roll over more often if they want, and take tax breaks. And ban them from residential streets. Make them stick to the truck routes, including truck lanes on highways. (Heck, maybe even require a truck driver's license to pilot one.)
This comment is totally elitist, totalitarianistic, and harsh. How about rather than regulating everything you don't like out of existence, just leave me alone? If I want to drive a vehicle that has a higher risk of rolling over, then LET ME. Why do you care if I kill myself? I know what is best for me better than you know what is best for me.
I think the Golden State has stumbled on a way to end this hypocrisy, and the rest of the country should take notice.
I think this is a good comment to end my own comment on. Go ahead, golden state, end your hipocrisy all you want, but I doubt the rest of the nation is going to take notice. Most of us still live in common-sense-ville, thank goodness.
I've been watching this whole thing unfold for some time now and paid attention to the overtures Real was making to Apple some time ago. Basically issue here is that the folks who designed the iPod and the iTunes music store really cared about the music, whereas Real is concerned with making money by delivering media rather than caring anything about the media per se. Let me repeat that for the folks at Real........It's about the music.
How this got modded up is beyond me... I guess it's just apple fanboyism, which really scares me in this case. First of all, you didn't stay on topic. The topic is not "Is Apple supportive of musicians?" or "Let's list all the things we love about Apple". Second, rather than focusing on the fact that Apple is going after Real for doing the same things that many slashdotters do on a daily basis, you try to make Apple look better by pointing out how bad you think Real is.
Anyway, let us focus on the real issue here, which is Apple accusing Real of using hacker tactics and going ape over the whole thing. Now, many of the Apple fanboys are going to say "Ohhh noooo, but Apple is not in the wrong because they should be able to determine what files can play on their products and what files can't!!!11!" I absolutely agree. When the iPod leaves the factory, Apple should (and does) have complete control over what music files it can play. When the iPod gets from the store into my house, however, it is my turn to have control. If Real offers me a way to put music on my iPod that I couldn't put otherwise, then it is my *right* as the full owner of the product to do with it as I please. I could throw it in the garbage if I want to, piss on it, or simply load some music from Real's network. It's mine.
And lastly, Apple does not really care about the music. I'm sorry to crush your dreams that Apple is a loving, caring corporation. It is in the business to make money. It does the things it does in order to get people like you to cheer it on and praise it and buy its products. So no, apple never really cared about the music, it just looked like it cared so that you (and others) would support it financially by buying Apple products.
Obviously, "Froogles" was an attempt to make people think of "Google", otherwise why would you misspell "frugal" in that fashion?
I would mispell "frugal" in that fashion because frugal.com was registered in 1995 and frugals.com was registered in 1999. Also, fru sounds just like froo. And if you really think he did this to make people think of "Google", why did he not just register froogle.com, rather than froogles.com? froogle.com was still available when he registered froogles.com.
The search-engine company's loss has no immediate impact on its use of the name Froogle. But it means that the Froogles.com name will remain with Richard Wolfe, a disabled Holtsville, N.Y., carpenter who started the Web shopping site in March 2001, before Google introduced Froogle in December 2002.
So Richard Wolfe started a web shopping site more than a year before Google ever started using the name Froogle, but Google thinks HE is infringing on THEIR rights? I don't see how that is possible. I mean seriously, I think Google is a great search engine too, but to support them trampling someone who started a service over a year before they did is just impossible for me to do. I am not very familiar with the circumstances surrounding the other domain names that the article mentions (like google.biz), but I am assuming they were created after Google existed, which I totally agree is clearly wrong. Taking advantage of the fame and success of a certain company to the detriment of consumers is horrible. But this is not an instance of taking advantage of a famous name, since Wolfe came up the domain name and website first.
Wolfe is using a confusingly similar name in a bad-faith attempt to compete with Google's business, the judge concluded.
I really don't see how Wolfe could be purposefully confusing consumers in bad-faith since he started his business first. Wouldn't it be the other way around? The only instance I can think of where this would be true is if Wolfe was a former employee of Google and knew about their Froogle plans ahead of time, but the article mentions nothing about this.
``It still amazes me that I should have to go through this at all,'' Wolfe said. ``I started my shopping service called Froogles almost two years before Google started a shopping service called Froogle. What more does anyone need to know?''
This is exactly how I feel. How is this even an issue? And what in the world is Google thinking going after this guy? I'm sure some slashdotter and huge fan of Google is going to figure out some warped logic to show how it is ok, but it is going to take some good investigative work (at least to convince me).
In fact, if Google (correctly) thought it was wrong of other people to use their name, or derivatives of it, such as google.biz or googlesex.com, how come they don't think it is wrong for themselves to use some other guy's name?
I must admit that I am afraid to roll the karma dice on this one, but I really can't stand when large businesses start pushing people around. It's especially bad when said business is well liked and supported, because people might ignore such things or even find ways to justify them.