They took obvious technology (gee... how long have we been able to timeshift programs? Beta, anyone?), went jury shopping and whored themselved out to the beast that is Patent Land. Goodbye, TiVO - I can only hope that you are put out of my misery quickly. I'm quite content with the Dish DVR for which I pay no additional monthly fee (grandfathered in, you see - sometimes it pays to be an early adopter) and have no use for technology that guesses one's sexual orientation incorrectly.
That and the patent thing. The patent lawsuit really annoyed me.
From TFA:
This week, the company that has amassed such powerful brand equity that it has become a verb ("Did you TiVo The Sopranos finale?") announced that it is working hard to convince the cable industry that it's a friend, not a foe.
When you go jury shopping in your meritless lawsuit, who wants you as a friend?
Gerbils singing Streisand would you anti-Bush parrots give it a rest and start caring about actual government abuses for a change?
Spying on Americans is NOT a Bush innovation no matter how much you wish it to be. Yes, Bush is a major screwup who probably represents the greatest threat to the Constitution this nation has ever seen, but from the way you portray things Clinton never pushed for the clipper chip and MS never got caught with an NSA hook in Windows (also under Clinton).
The FBI has been abused by dems and republicans alike, yet you people only whine about Bush and hint that this time the dems will be the bastions of civil liberties who won't keep people locked up indefinitely without being charged (which Clinton did), won't be greedy, corrupt troglodytes (no more cash in the freezer?), and won't spy except on those who REALLY deserve it (Echelon spying for Boeing, anybody? Also under Clinton's watch.)
I call BS on that. However, the TFA DOES state that the state sets up checkpoints to search one's vehicle (without a warrant, I am guessing) for evidence of alternate fuels. This is highly illegal, but hey - who cares about the constitution these days?
Teixeira's story began near Lowe's Motor Speedway on May 14. As recreational vehicles streamed in for race week, revenue investigators were checking fuel tanks of diesel RVs for illegal fuel.
I this case the previous article was regarding the guys blog and this was regarding the registers coverage of the same article.
How about a tag indicating what kind of link it is? I'd love to know before clicking a link if I was headed towards a blog, legitimate media, fox (I'm JOKING! All of the big media suck equally), video, or what have you.
They are concerned with Google having too much information on users but don't say a word about ChoicePoint? Anybody else feel a need to reach for the wtf tag?
Jeria has done almost nothing in her academic career besides push the notion that women need to take over the IT industry. Without any respect to concepts of dedication or aptitude (one of her subjects stated "I like the solution piece of IT, but keeping up with the nuts and bolts and all that, I really do not enjoy that") she pushes papers such as:
"Understanding the Under Representation of Women in the IT Workforce."
"Exploring the Importance of Social Networks in the IT Workforce: Experiences with the 'Boy's
Club.'"
"Problematizing the Problem of Gender Under Representation in IT."
Plus, three the four professional organizations she claims on her CV are sexist, discriminatory and exclusionary - yet if anybody ever suggested to her that there should be an organization for "Men in the Sciences and Engineering" what do you suppose her reaction would be?
This is nothing more than yet another sexist, feminist ivory tower denizen who believes that advancement at the expense of others is a noble pursuit. Some of the best IT workers I've ever known were women and some of the worst were men - and I, like just about everybody else, really don't care who does the work so long as the work gets done. Sex should have absolutely ~zero~ consideration in IT hiring practices. Hire the best person for the job and get rid of that person if their work-life balance is always tipped towards life at the expense of work.
If you have an audience. On your own two feet. The audience in question belongs to XM, not to O&A. Are you really claiming that all comedians have unlimited and perfect rights to be on stage in a particular club, or that the club owners have no rights to pull somebody if they are being inappropriate? What is the difference between what you are claiming here and asserting that Disney can't pull a Mickey Mouse from the streets of Disneyland when he launches an impromptu rendition of the seven words you can't say on TV?
There is absolute zero natural right to an audience. None. Zip. Zilch. Don't believe me? Then try to get on stage at the Apollo claiming that you have a "natural right" to be there.
Your argument that people surrender their natural rights just because they are making money is offensive. Go ahead and claim that XM radio is a non-person and has no rights of any kind, but how do you get off saying that if somebody owns a radio station they themselves must surrender any and all rights to control how it is used? If I say that your car is not a person therefore you have no rights to dictate how it is used you'd probably disagree - because it is your car. But if somebody else owns something you suddenly have the compelling need to tell them how they can or can't use what they own? What's up with that?
Opie and Anthony have the natural right to say whatever it is that they want. But despite your claims to the contrary, they can't say it in my living room or using the Mr Microphone that I could buy tomorrow. If it is *MY* mic and I don't want them to use it then they can't. Even if I *DO* control 100% of the local broadcasting capacity in my basement.
You want a moral argument? Please explain why it is moral to compel somebody to allow people unlimited access to their property and their equipment? If I wanted to spray "I lust for Hillary" on your roof would you object? Should I care if you do? Your roof has no rights, and by your arguments above just because you own the house doesn't mean you have any right to limit free expression by third parties on your property, right? Or are you saying that -this- case is different because it involves capital?
By the way, how is XM in any way, shape or form a monopoly?
If those who own the printing presses censor what the rest of us write, we do not have freedom of the press.
If those who own the medium of communication censor what we say, we do not have freedom of speech.
You could not possibly be further off the mark.
First, the only people to whom the guarantee of freedom of the press apply are those who own or otherwise control a press. You are guaranteed the right to say whatever you wish, but you are not guaranteed a medium nor an audience. This is where the spammers get hung up when they whine that spam is protected - they think they have a right to an audience, a notion shot down in the early 70s in Rowan v US Postal Service.
In Rowan the direct mailers in America were complaining that the Postal Service had a mechanism designed to prevent people from receiving unwanted prawn. In the lower courts the marketers were told to get bent because, among other things, "A vendor does not have a constitutional right to send unwanted material into someone's home, and a mailer's right to communicate must stop at the mailbox of an unreceptive addressee." This policy was enforce by the USPS, which flies in the face of your 2nd assertion above. This probably isn't your intent, but you aren't following the train of thought past the first station.
There are two rights at issue here: freedom of speech and rights of property ownership. You are focusing on the first and giving no consideration to the second, a dangerous mindset. The owners of XM have the absolute right inviolate of deciding what they air and do not air on their network. If you own a printer you have the right to print whatever you want - or refrain from printing what you don't want - in your own home. You are challenging this notion by saying that O&A's right to free speech guarantee them the right to use somebody else's property according to their own whims. Would you mind if somebody used your backyard to stage a KKK or a Black Panthers rally? If you object, aren't you obstructing their freedom of speech?
Freedom of speech is not at issue here - property rights are. You have a right to subscribe to XM or not as you desire. If you think the XM execs are incredibly stupid for their decisions then by all means cancel your subscription or smash your radio. But if you tell them that they ~have~ to accept certain speech on their property and their network then you are seeking to exert state control over the private sector, thereby eliminating the private sector and the very freedom you claim to support. You are advocating one tiny little seed of socialism - and if you start to use the government to control who can and can't say what, how long do you think it will take for your one tiny little seed to grow into something much larger?
Heart disease is heart disease is heart disease - when you research heart disease you are researching equally for both men and women. When you research breast cancer you are focusing on something that almost exclusively strikes women (there is the occasional man who develops breast cancer but few people talk or care about that).
In 2005 the US government spent about $700 million on a disease that affects one women out of eight. That same year the government spent only $390 million on a disease that affects one man out of six.
Indeed. Come to think of it, the number of people who have salaries over $1,000,000 probably number far fewer than a million... shall we stop chasing income of that subset?
*Disclaimer* - I've never played WoW and am pulling this idea out of some orifice or another.
If this is indeed what the Chinese farmers are doing - repeatedly logging on with the free accounts to quickly bot-mine/farm then are either of these viable solutions?
Ban multiple free trials from the same IP address within number of days
Prohibit free trial accounts from transferring gold/equipment to any other player (if you can't sell the veggies, why farm?)
How does browsing through tmp block an account? He had verified that the computer was the same one that had been previously blocked but decided to give the hacker an additional 15 minutes of time which could have been used to cause additional damage on the university's network. Since the sysadmin was taking the time to snoop it should be clear that he was going beyond what was necessary in the emergency situation. A cop kicks in a door because he hears a scream and finds a woman bleeding to death on the floor. Instead of calling an ambulance or otherwise rendering aid he takes 15 minutes to wander through the house to search for drugs. Proper action?
None of these, however, belongs in an actual scientific discussion since there is no way presently of actually *testing* and *verifying* any of these ideas to any reasonable level of accuracy.
Actually, there is. It is a perfectly rational and scientifically valid exercise to ask students "if you wanted to create a planet populated with various plants, birds and reptiles, what knowledge, tools, and skills would you need?". Unfortunately, the vast majority of evolutionists decry such a question being asked in school - even though it is probably the BEST question to ask to get young minds thinking about biology, planetary physics, genetic engineering and the like - because to them it is impossible for anything to have ever happened unless it was purely random or done by humans.
Like all men, I could think of little else when I was 13, but I knew that going all the way at that age was likely to cause all sorts of trouble that I didn't want to be in.
Then you were to be commended as one of the extreme few (perhaps one in 100,000?) who thought that way. Most kids don't.
Most kids consider themselves first, foremost and in the immediate here and now without respect or concern for possible consequences. Most kids have been either explicitly conditioned to think this way (parents who swoop in and demand passing grades for failing work, sue because the genetic drift didn't make the cut for football or cheerleading and demand an apology from the school when their kid was caught cheating) or have been allowed to passively develop their own views through latchkey neglect of either single-parent or dual-income parent homes who not only refuse to raise their own children but refuse to allow anybody else to do so either.
Compound this with the absolute anal hysteria of the radical right and run of the mill fruitcakes who demand that breasts be objectified (people thrown off of aircraft, kicked out of malls and restaurants and/or threatened with arrest for breast feeding and girls being conditioned with bikinis from age five to believe that any skin showing is non-sexual except for those two specific square inches) and you have conditions ripe for chaos.
To the people on the right, stop forcing the message that sex is wrong. To the people on the left, stop forcing the message that sex needs to be anything goes. To people on both sides, start forcing the message that parents need to be responsible for and to their kids.
When equal numbers of people are as concerned about equal male representation in teaching and nursing as they are about equal female representation in engineering and science then I'll believe that equality is the actual goal.
Until that time, there is no issue.
I say bring it on. Air America stands to lose ~much~ more than, say, Rush Limbaugh.
(And when discussing the two, if you haven't actually sat down and ~listened~ to them both for at least a 30 minute stretch then you don't know what you're talking about and I don't care what you have to say. This includes about 90% of all people who say they hate Rush, even though they've never actually tuned to his program, but have formed opinions from snippets on Air America.)
But I do remember DDT, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, and thin eggshells. Bird populations have rebounded after removing DDT from the US market.
After many years of carefully controlled feeding experiments, Dr. M. L. Scott and associates of the Department of Poultry Science at Cornell University "found no tremors, no mortality, no thinning of eggshells and no interference with reproduction caused by levels of DDT which were as high as those reported to be present in most of the wild birds where 'catastrophic' decreases in shell quality and reproduction have been claimed."
In Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) DDT spraying had reduced malaria cases from 2.8 million in 1948 to 17 in 1963. After spraying was stopped in 1964, malaria cases began to rise again and reached 2.5 million in 1969. The same pattern was repeated in many other tropical-- and usually impoverished--regions of the world. In Zanzibar the prevalence of malaria among the populace dropped from 70 percent in 1958 to 5 percent in 1964. By 1984 it was back up to between 50 and 60 percent. The chief malaria expert for the U.S. Agency for International Development said that malaria would have been 98 percent eradicated had DDT continued to be used.
The resistance is another issue - it, like many other really nasty things, are caused by non-judicious usage by commercial entities. If DDT had been applied only to the walls of sleeping quarters all would have been well. Instead we had cotton farmers pouring the stuff on their crops like water - in much the same fashion that most (every?) cow is fed a regular diet of antibiotics even when they aren't sick.
And no, I'm not saying that pesticides will fix the problem of tropical diseases associated with global warming. Personally, I suspect that we'll see more deserts rather than mosquito habitat being created.
As for the coal bit, that was more in reference to another comment from earlier on (I don't think it was yours) about how all climate change is bad "period" and what seemed to be a complaint that our fairly temperate clime came at the expense of the woolies. Slashdot doesn't handle tongue in cheek very well, I'm afraid.
Ummm.. west nile and malaria are prevented in exactly the same fashion: kill the muskytoes. Dengue fever? Same bug. Lymphatic filariasis? According to various sources the primary method of prevention is controlling the population of little biting insects that love to go eeeEEEEEEEeeeeEeeeee around your ear. Sleeping sickness? This is the first on the list that isn't spread by mosquitoes, but DDT works just as well against the tsetse fly as it does against Mr Bitey.
Ebola is a bit different - it is suspected (but not proven) to be a zoonotic - who knows how to prevent it? So few people have ever come down with it and the outbreaks quickly vanish rendering it somewhat difficult to study.
But the point is that by using DDT (the reference to thin eggshells is from the original ban on DDT which is probably before your time, young whippersnapper) many - if not most - of these tropical diseases can be brought under control.
But just think... if we burn lots of coal we can bring about another ice age and eliminate tropical diseases once and for all. Good idea, no?
Climate change is bad, period? Are you sure you wish to make such an unqualified statement? Shall we return to the little ice age? Or is the warming from that time frame also bad? Was the thaw from the last great ice age (10,000ish years ago) a bad thing? That, too, was climate change, which you have declared to be "bad, period". How long did that thaw take? Are you sure that it was "on a geological time scale"?
Slashdot Mirror
That and the patent thing. The patent lawsuit really annoyed me.
From TFA:
When you go jury shopping in your meritless lawsuit, who wants you as a friend?
Spying on Americans is NOT a Bush innovation no matter how much you wish it to be. Yes, Bush is a major screwup who probably represents the greatest threat to the Constitution this nation has ever seen, but from the way you portray things Clinton never pushed for the clipper chip and MS never got caught with an NSA hook in Windows (also under Clinton).
The FBI has been abused by dems and republicans alike, yet you people only whine about Bush and hint that this time the dems will be the bastions of civil liberties who won't keep people locked up indefinitely without being charged (which Clinton did), won't be greedy, corrupt troglodytes (no more cash in the freezer?), and won't spy except on those who REALLY deserve it (Echelon spying for Boeing, anybody? Also under Clinton's watch.)
How about a tag indicating what kind of link it is? I'd love to know before clicking a link if I was headed towards a blog, legitimate media, fox (I'm JOKING! All of the big media suck equally), video, or what have you.
They are concerned with Google having too much information on users but don't say a word about ChoicePoint? Anybody else feel a need to reach for the wtf tag?
Plus, three the four professional organizations she claims on her CV are sexist, discriminatory and exclusionary - yet if anybody ever suggested to her that there should be an organization for "Men in the Sciences and Engineering" what do you suppose her reaction would be?
This is nothing more than yet another sexist, feminist ivory tower denizen who believes that advancement at the expense of others is a noble pursuit. Some of the best IT workers I've ever known were women and some of the worst were men - and I, like just about everybody else, really don't care who does the work so long as the work gets done. Sex should have absolutely ~zero~ consideration in IT hiring practices. Hire the best person for the job and get rid of that person if their work-life balance is always tipped towards life at the expense of work.
There is absolute zero natural right to an audience. None. Zip. Zilch. Don't believe me? Then try to get on stage at the Apollo claiming that you have a "natural right" to be there.
Your argument that people surrender their natural rights just because they are making money is offensive. Go ahead and claim that XM radio is a non-person and has no rights of any kind, but how do you get off saying that if somebody owns a radio station they themselves must surrender any and all rights to control how it is used? If I say that your car is not a person therefore you have no rights to dictate how it is used you'd probably disagree - because it is your car. But if somebody else owns something you suddenly have the compelling need to tell them how they can or can't use what they own? What's up with that?
Opie and Anthony have the natural right to say whatever it is that they want. But despite your claims to the contrary, they can't say it in my living room or using the Mr Microphone that I could buy tomorrow. If it is *MY* mic and I don't want them to use it then they can't. Even if I *DO* control 100% of the local broadcasting capacity in my basement.
You want a moral argument? Please explain why it is moral to compel somebody to allow people unlimited access to their property and their equipment? If I wanted to spray "I lust for Hillary" on your roof would you object? Should I care if you do? Your roof has no rights, and by your arguments above just because you own the house doesn't mean you have any right to limit free expression by third parties on your property, right? Or are you saying that -this- case is different because it involves capital?
By the way, how is XM in any way, shape or form a monopoly?
First, the only people to whom the guarantee of freedom of the press apply are those who own or otherwise control a press. You are guaranteed the right to say whatever you wish, but you are not guaranteed a medium nor an audience. This is where the spammers get hung up when they whine that spam is protected - they think they have a right to an audience, a notion shot down in the early 70s in Rowan v US Postal Service.
In Rowan the direct mailers in America were complaining that the Postal Service had a mechanism designed to prevent people from receiving unwanted prawn. In the lower courts the marketers were told to get bent because, among other things, "A vendor does not have a constitutional right to send unwanted material into someone's home, and a mailer's right to communicate must stop at the mailbox of an unreceptive addressee." This policy was enforce by the USPS, which flies in the face of your 2nd assertion above. This probably isn't your intent, but you aren't following the train of thought past the first station.
There are two rights at issue here: freedom of speech and rights of property ownership. You are focusing on the first and giving no consideration to the second, a dangerous mindset. The owners of XM have the absolute right inviolate of deciding what they air and do not air on their network. If you own a printer you have the right to print whatever you want - or refrain from printing what you don't want - in your own home. You are challenging this notion by saying that O&A's right to free speech guarantee them the right to use somebody else's property according to their own whims. Would you mind if somebody used your backyard to stage a KKK or a Black Panthers rally? If you object, aren't you obstructing their freedom of speech?
Freedom of speech is not at issue here - property rights are. You have a right to subscribe to XM or not as you desire. If you think the XM execs are incredibly stupid for their decisions then by all means cancel your subscription or smash your radio. But if you tell them that they ~have~ to accept certain speech on their property and their network then you are seeking to exert state control over the private sector, thereby eliminating the private sector and the very freedom you claim to support. You are advocating one tiny little seed of socialism - and if you start to use the government to control who can and can't say what, how long do you think it will take for your one tiny little seed to grow into something much larger?
Heart disease is heart disease is heart disease - when you research heart disease you are researching equally for both men and women. When you research breast cancer you are focusing on something that almost exclusively strikes women (there is the occasional man who develops breast cancer but few people talk or care about that).
In 2005 the US government spent about $700 million on a disease that affects one women out of eight. That same year the government spent only $390 million on a disease that affects one man out of six.
Special treatment for women IS equal treatment... after all, men always get special treatment, no?
Indeed. Come to think of it, the number of people who have salaries over $1,000,000 probably number far fewer than a million... shall we stop chasing income of that subset?
If this is indeed what the Chinese farmers are doing - repeatedly logging on with the free accounts to quickly bot-mine/farm then are either of these viable solutions?
How does browsing through tmp block an account? He had verified that the computer was the same one that had been previously blocked but decided to give the hacker an additional 15 minutes of time which could have been used to cause additional damage on the university's network. Since the sysadmin was taking the time to snoop it should be clear that he was going beyond what was necessary in the emergency situation. A cop kicks in a door because he hears a scream and finds a woman bleeding to death on the floor. Instead of calling an ambulance or otherwise rendering aid he takes 15 minutes to wander through the house to search for drugs. Proper action?
Actually, there is. It is a perfectly rational and scientifically valid exercise to ask students "if you wanted to create a planet populated with various plants, birds and reptiles, what knowledge, tools, and skills would you need?". Unfortunately, the vast majority of evolutionists decry such a question being asked in school - even though it is probably the BEST question to ask to get young minds thinking about biology, planetary physics, genetic engineering and the like - because to them it is impossible for anything to have ever happened unless it was purely random or done by humans.
Most people who believe in intelligent design do NOT believe that the world is only 6,000 years old. ID is *NOT* the same thing as creationism.
What about it? Are you one of those idjets who object to people taking photos of the Empire State Building or the US Capitol?
Somebody taking a photo of your house - without setting foot in your yard - even once a year is nothing to get upset over.
Then you were to be commended as one of the extreme few (perhaps one in 100,000?) who thought that way. Most kids don't.
Most kids consider themselves first, foremost and in the immediate here and now without respect or concern for possible consequences. Most kids have been either explicitly conditioned to think this way (parents who swoop in and demand passing grades for failing work, sue because the genetic drift didn't make the cut for football or cheerleading and demand an apology from the school when their kid was caught cheating) or have been allowed to passively develop their own views through latchkey neglect of either single-parent or dual-income parent homes who not only refuse to raise their own children but refuse to allow anybody else to do so either.
Compound this with the absolute anal hysteria of the radical right and run of the mill fruitcakes who demand that breasts be objectified (people thrown off of aircraft, kicked out of malls and restaurants and/or threatened with arrest for breast feeding and girls being conditioned with bikinis from age five to believe that any skin showing is non-sexual except for those two specific square inches) and you have conditions ripe for chaos.
To the people on the right, stop forcing the message that sex is wrong. To the people on the left, stop forcing the message that sex needs to be anything goes. To people on both sides, start forcing the message that parents need to be responsible for and to their kids.
When equal numbers of people are as concerned about equal male representation in teaching and nursing as they are about equal female representation in engineering and science then I'll believe that equality is the actual goal. Until that time, there is no issue.
(And when discussing the two, if you haven't actually sat down and ~listened~ to them both for at least a 30 minute stretch then you don't know what you're talking about and I don't care what you have to say. This includes about 90% of all people who say they hate Rush, even though they've never actually tuned to his program, but have formed opinions from snippets on Air America.)
I doubt it:
"Yes, we'd love to sell you some ad space. We have 20,000,000 users."
"Yes, we'd love to sell you some ad space. We have 20,000,000 users, and only 5,000,000 block ads."
Which do you suppose is the sales pitch closer to reality?
The resistance is another issue - it, like many other really nasty things, are caused by non-judicious usage by commercial entities. If DDT had been applied only to the walls of sleeping quarters all would have been well. Instead we had cotton farmers pouring the stuff on their crops like water - in much the same fashion that most (every?) cow is fed a regular diet of antibiotics even when they aren't sick.
And no, I'm not saying that pesticides will fix the problem of tropical diseases associated with global warming. Personally, I suspect that we'll see more deserts rather than mosquito habitat being created.
As for the coal bit, that was more in reference to another comment from earlier on (I don't think it was yours) about how all climate change is bad "period" and what seemed to be a complaint that our fairly temperate clime came at the expense of the woolies. Slashdot doesn't handle tongue in cheek very well, I'm afraid.
Ebola is a bit different - it is suspected (but not proven) to be a zoonotic - who knows how to prevent it? So few people have ever come down with it and the outbreaks quickly vanish rendering it somewhat difficult to study.
But the point is that by using DDT (the reference to thin eggshells is from the original ban on DDT which is probably before your time, young whippersnapper) many - if not most - of these tropical diseases can be brought under control.
But just think... if we burn lots of coal we can bring about another ice age and eliminate tropical diseases once and for all. Good idea, no?
(Worried about thin egg shells? Don't put the birds on restricted-calcium diets.)
Climate change is bad, period? Are you sure you wish to make such an unqualified statement? Shall we return to the little ice age? Or is the warming from that time frame also bad? Was the thaw from the last great ice age (10,000ish years ago) a bad thing? That, too, was climate change, which you have declared to be "bad, period". How long did that thaw take? Are you sure that it was "on a geological time scale"?