It works by detecting hidden patterns that don't exist in a random file.
I should first say that I'm rather ignorant about encryption but I hope someone will be able to explain this. I was under the impression that any sort of good-quality encrypted data is indistinguishable from completely random data. That seems to directly contradict the ability to determine whether a volume contains encrypted data by means of locating patterns. Is this really a contradiction?
The FCC created this problem when it bowed to the wishes of the telcos and created an entirely new regime ("enhanced services") not governed by common carriage.
Yeah, when I see a corporation or a governmental agency use a term like "enhanced services" it immediately raises a glaring red flag in my mind. It raises the question "enhanced for whom?" Of course, they themselves don't answer that question because it's clearly not an enhancement for the customers or for anyone else who loves freedom and does not celebrate another excuse to exert control. "Enhanced services" indeed: they call it marketing, I call it Newspeak.
What if I want to pay less for a lower demand service? I bring this up because a regulator probably needs to have some sort of answer to that question.
I think the best long term solution is to require ISPs to completely separate themselves from media companies, and then separate the physical plant off from any operations that provide bits (VOIP, VoD, Cable, etc.). The company in each of those segments is then going to be more interested in serving customer interests than in serving the interests of the conglomerate.
I think total bandwidth is a good way to address that concern. These are made-up numbers but I hope they illustrate the point. Let's say my ISP offers 756k downstream and 256k upstream speeds at $25/month. That same ISP can also offer 3mbit downstream and 756k upstream at $40/month. Of course there are many different ways that this could be arranged. The important thing is that neither plan has to be metered or micromanaged in any way for this to work quite well. I think the only problem is that it's almost too simple. I don't mean this to sound so much like a condemnation but human beings in general sometimes have a hard time leaving well enough alone.
Oh come on. He's not letting in illegal aliens to steal our bandwidth. He's letting them in to steal our social services because he and pretty much every other politician feels guilty about not paying their nannies and gardeners a livable wage. The liberal mind functions entirely in guilt-mode, and so they're perpetually trying to make everything "fair" (for everyone except themselves, of course) in order to compensate for the fact that they are always trying to screw people. This allows them to sleep at night after a hard day's work of disenfranchising Mexicans, squashing individual liberties and personal accountability, and deliberately using Fannie and Freddie to crush the economy as cover for an unprecedented power grab. It's a quid-pro-quo: You wipe my kid's bottom and cut my lawn, and I don't make you pay for social services via taxes like everyone else.
This actually is the truth, and if I must be modded down to -1 for saying so then I accept that willingly. The only mistake this AC has made is succumbing to the same worthy opponent that challenges anyone who is willing to call things what they are. The worthy opponent is the temptation to be angry and upset at the injustice of it, be it real injustice or perceived, as though that negative energy had the power to effect change and bring about a world in which these power struggles are obsolete.
Even more important than what you do is where you're coming from when you do it. Do you act out of courage and love because you can extend equanimity and grace to the worthy and the unworthy alike, or do you act out of spite and resentment because you cannot see these things in their undiluted ugly glory without losing whatever virtue you have? It's the Universe's way of asking you what sort of a man you are. So long as you are re-acting, everything you say and do is the effect of someone else's cause. That someone else is himself a mere effect of another cause in a long unbroken chain that has been handed down throughout the generations. There is no freedom in this and the fetters of slavery are made up of your angry resentful re-actions. There is a saying, "no one is more hopelessly imprisoned than he who falsely believes himself to be free."
That capacity for anger is the you that isn't you because someone else's ignorance put it there. Only free beings can truly love because only in freedom can you know the difference between need that cries out to be satisfied and real unconditional love for all beings. Most human beings think that mutual need is love and thus they make a mockery of it without intending to do so. So they grasp for a man or a woman to meet those needs and they think the relief they feel when the needs are met is love, except that when relationships have this basis (most do) the "love" you have is enslaving, not liberating. Thus they give in order to get, be it comfort or affection or sex or anything else and so their giving is not pure; it is tainted.
You can see this and you can see how it taints everything, from the fact that nearly all families are at least a little dysfunctional all the way up to the manipulation and control and dehumanization that is the basis of all modern politics. You can see this and rail against it and experience the suffering that comes from trying to force your will on anything. Usually the suffering is in the form of a sense of a crushing powerlessness, of wrestling with personal and political and spiritual forces that are far more powerful than "you" (that is, your will) are. When confronted with this, many people either respond with an apathy that is not genuine or they turn it inward and experience the myriad mental disturbances that psychologists with their "symptom" model cannot hope to understand, such as depression. The evidence that they do not truly understand it is that their models become increasingly complicated instead of increasingly simple. In fact, many people who suffer this way believe that they're not trying hard enough be
If they were degrading Hulu streams, you'd have more of a point. Bittorent is just any old high-bandwidth file transfer as far as they're concerned though, and therefore low priority.
I mean no offense but I think you yourself may be missing the point. I can't speak for everyone but I'll explain to you what I want and I hope that will elucidate the viewpoint. I want a completely neutral, disinterested carrier. This carrier merely delivers my IP packets on a best-effort basis with absolutely no regard for the content of those packets. They don't decide that one type of transmission needs higher priority and they don't decide that another type of transmission needs lower priority. They don't analyze my data for the purpose of serving advertisements, nor do they do this for any other reason. In short, they are merely the pipe. If I need VoIP traffic to have priority over BitTorrent traffic, then I will perform my own prioritization and traffic shaping. If that's not quite as effective as what an ISP can do, I will accept that as a fair trade-off.
It bothers me that so many things are heading down the path of "we know what's good for you." That's not specific to ISPs at all. The idea of "we (the centralized entity of some sort) know what's good for you" has been put to the test throughout history, in many different forms, again and again. It has failed each time it has tried, unless your definition of success includes conditioned helplessness and a rejection of free will. Each new form of this idea is presented as though it were truly new and it isn't. How many iterations do we need to experience before we realize that there are only a few important principles that govern many thousands of things, and that this path is the wrong way to go?
This has the pungent aroma of legal douchebaggery all over it. A cynic might suspect that all the business-friendly appointments to the bench Bush made are starting to pay off.
In truth, the two major parties are quite comfortable with their duopoly. There is but one and only one significant difference between the two major politcal parties of the USA: the justifications given for things that they're going to do anyway. All of the rest is designed to make you believe that all problems and all instances of corruption are due to the other party or the other candidate(s). It's always some kind of "other". Some people think the entire problem is the Republicans. Some people think the entire problem is the Democrats. Who is correct? Both. Do you know why Congress has such a high incumbency rate? Because my Congressman is great; it's all the rest who need to go!
I'll phrase the same idea in a different way. These are in no particular order.
I want a federal government that is far less powerful, including the recognition that it has no jurisdiction over any domestic event that does not cross state lines.
I want the legal definition of "treason" expanded to include any politician who ever infringes on any civil right (as defined in the Bill of Rights) for any reason and I want this to be legally and vigorously enforced.
I want all income taxes outlawed and replaced by sales taxes in a revenue-neutral way, at all levels of government, no matter what disadvantages (real or perceived) there may be to the practice of sales taxation.
I want to end the War on (some) Drugs and replace it with the legal recognition that it is the government's responsibility to prevent you from harming other people or depriving other people of their civil rights but it is not the government's role to prevent you from harming yourself.
I want all laws concerning victimless crimes to be abolished, for that matter.
I want the law to require that all states must raise their own revenue via their own taxes and the federal government may not give money to any of them.
I want all forms of fiat currency outlawed, particularly those which are combined with fractional reserve banking, and replaced with a representative currency.
I want the Constitution amended to state that no government or government-funded entity may run any sort of educational institution, no matter what the disadvantages of this (real or perceived) may be, with one exception: critical thinking, argumentation, and propaganda techniques should comprise the only compulsory education and, due to their compulsory nature, should be state-funded.
If you read that and are inclined to tell me that some of those ideas have disadvantages, particularly those that would abolish government's involvement in drugs and in public education, I may already agree with you. My argument is not based on the idea that this is some flawless solution. My argument is simply that the advantages of removing government's entanglement with these things far outweigh any disadvantages of doing so. Research it earnestly and you will come to the same conclusion, without fail, so long as you can go wherever the facts may lead you. Beware, because the number of people who think they can do that is far higher than the number of people who can actually do that. A good topic for researching drugs is the asset forfeiture laws and the fact that they are carried out without any sort of due process. An excellent reference for researching education is John Taylor Gatto.
If you read that and believe that I must mean "the private sector" when I call for the abolition of public schooling, you need to know the danger of allowing the media to frame debates for you. I imagine that for-profit private schools, parochial schools and homeschooli
One thing you can be sure of, and happened in the tobacco suits, if the companies lose and are fined, the amount they pay out will be made up by price increases. All buyers will end up paying the fine. And once they've covered the cost of the fines, they'll leave the price where it was moved up to, and rake in even more.
Supply and demand? Prices up, units sold down?
In the specific case of the tobacco companies, there's this little thing called nicotine addiction that tends to prevent the "units sold down" part of that. If you don't know what nicotine addiction is all about because you have never personally experienced it, I urge you to be grateful for that.
So far as the RIAA is concerned, it's my personal opinion that they're quite evil but they are not stupid. They aren't going to destroy their own market by means of some absurdly high price increase.
I think this country seriously fucked up the moment it was decided that corporations should have all of the same rights as real people. How about this for an idea: your artificial construct can have full rights, or it can provide you with a liability shield; it may not do both.
one probably has to assume that the proceedings touch 'national security'.
But this is exactly the point the RIAA has been driving at all the time. You've just now grasped their entire motivation!
Now, can a judge seal anything he/she wants? Or does something have to meet certain conditions? What sort of allegations in the plaintiff's motion might possibly result in this? Did the RIAA ask for it to be sealed?
I'm ignorant of such matters and I hope someone here, like maybe a lawyer, could explain this. Why are they ever allowed to seal anything? What useful purpose does it serve that outweighs the potential for abuse? I also would like to know whether there is ever any way to challenge a judge's decision to seal a document, especially when the lack of disclosure is so entirely one-sided. It really seems to me that the dangers of anything approaching secret courts (which have been tools of oppression by various dictators) are more severe than anything good that could possibly be accomplished by withholding information in what is otherwise a public process.
I apologize for the bad form of replying to myself, but I meant to add something.
"People have a desire to perpetuate not only for themselves, but for their loved ones, the story of their lives, and technology has all these new great ways of doing that,"
Sounds to me like they want to perpetuate the mourning process in order to assuage their own fear of death. I've seen people do some rather odd things because they, on some level, could not come to terms with their own mortality; this is tame compared to some. However, this may not be a gift to the loved ones at all; it very well may be a selfish burden. It's selfish because there is an (unstated) assumption in it that everyone's mourning process is the same and is compatible with this idea. Making assumptions like that about such personal matters seems to me like very poor taste. If that compatibility doesn't describe the bereaved then they may be placed in the unenviable position of disliking this service while at the same time feeling guilty about rejecting it. Besides, calling them "loved ones" implies that you and what you stood for are not so easily forgotten in their hearts and minds.
I'm not saying this is necessarily a terrible idea, but I think it's rather unnecessary. Certainly it should be done with a great deal of forethought and an awareness of these potential problems.
WMP11. Add files to your Media Library. Go to your Library Settings, then Configure Sharing. Settings button again, then Allow new devices and computers automatically. Reboot for good measure (we're using Windows here), reboot your Xbox 360, and try and play the media you added to your Library in WMP. If it works, go back to the Library settings and untick the automagic box. What I want to know, is it says I need to download codecs... But how?!
You can download free codec packs that you can install on WIndows much like any application, except that they're basically DLLs that programs like WMP can use. Just be very careful about where you get the codec pack. Make sure it's from a well-known, trustworthy site because I've heard that many unscrupulous sites offer codec packs that also include malware.
Obviously your boss isn't good at making cables. While if you lack the skill to do something like make cables with care you're going to have problems, there's no reason that you can't make your own cables and have them perform just as well as the ones made by a machine in a factory.
They can put it under the "Tech" section if they like, but this is really another disappointing Ask Slashdot. It's disappointing because too many of these have this format: "my boss at work wants me to do X, but I'd really rather do Y; what are the merits of X versus Y?" All of them need to be summarily rejected, with a polite e-mail sent to the submitter which says "within the bounds of the law, you need to do what your boss asks you to do whether or not you necessarily agree with it. If you cannot convince your boss to do otherwise, and this is a problem for you, perhaps you should consider working elsewhere."
The other disappointing category of Ask Slashdot-type submissions are those questions that are factual in nature and have only one correct (and rather well-known, easily researched) answer. Asking a large group with varying levels of expertise makes a lot of sense when there are multiple possible solutions to a problem and there is room to be creative. It makes no sense when it's more of a yes/no question -- remember the recent Ask Slashdot that asked whether spam is increased by trying to opt-out of spam e-mails? That's an excellent case in point, and not atypical either. That should have been an "Ask Google", not an "Ask Slashdot".
I think it's a shame that the quality of these particular submissions are on the decline. There's nothing inherently wrong with the "Ask Slashdot" format and there are a lot of very knowledgable people who browse this site. I'd love to see how creative they can be. It's just never going to be as good as it easily could be when it's handled this way.
It's a shame that uShare is the only one that can stream to the xbox. I used it for a long while because it's pretty lightweight, but it turns out mediatomb is as well and can stream to the ps3 perfectly. You can set up all sorts of custom transcoding operations in mediatomb, though of course if it's for the 360 then this is no use to you.
Indeed. I helped a friend set up streaming media from a Linux machine to his XBOX 360, which was a tremendous pain in the ass. That's when you find out the hard way what embrace-and-extend is all about, because apparently Microsoft chose to slightly alter the uPNP standard for the 360 (is anyone surprised at that?). What I found was that a Java program called x360mediaserver can correctly stream music (mp3s) while uShare can correctly stream videos (mostly AVIs). uShare claims to be able to stream both video and music, and in a way it does, except that the music shows up as a flat unsorted list with no categories whatsoever, such as artist or album, which is not very useful at all when you have thousands of mp3s (yes, that's with its XBOX360 compatibility option, because without that option, nothing shows up at all). To get things working in a reasonable way, we run the two servers, one for music and one for video. That provides the closest approximation of how the media shows up when it's served by a Windows machine using Windows Media Player.
Really, Microsoft's apparent hatred of simply following an open standard in order to be compatible gets old, and what really gets old are the extra measures needed to accommodate it. Most of the time it's just selfish of them, but sometimes it really seems like a religious thing because in this particular case I can't see how it helps them sell products at all. It doesn't make anyone want to run Windows for the sole purpose of streaming media to a gaming console; what it does do is make their customers feel like they are being "punished" with an extra burden for not having done so. If it accomplished anything that simply could not possibly be done via the uPNP standard I wouldn't complain, but this isn't the case. It's just needless complication.
If it's anything like Youtube, you would still have the original copy.
Also if your local authority is that corrupt, then you probably need to consider building a case against them and bringing it to the attention of a higher authority such as the county or state.
That might work. Not because the higher authority hates corruption, but rather, because they don't like competition. Besides, it'd be good PR.
It's really not, you can film the police in public like anyone else. The thing is, the police generally don't actually realise this, or they simply lie, and will tell you that it's illegal.
Any police officer who tells a citizen that something is illegal, when it is in fact clearly legal, is actually trying to intimidate that person. It's an attempt to coerce that citizen to get them to stop doing something merely because the officer personally does not like it. The cop knows it's not illegal, and if not, the cop is incompetent. We don't need cops who are either malicious or incompetent. This is wrong and should never be tolerated. Any officer who does this should be fired and barred from ever holding any law enforcement position. I would feel this way even if there were a severe shortage of police officers. I am not very fond of cops, but sometimes I feel like I respect the importance of their job more than they do.
Ultimately, getting the citizenry involved in self-policing is the key to eliminating most of the police. Making sure that the people police the police is the hard part. If you really want to see the negative effects of this decision mitigated, make sure that you take part in copwatch or similar. Sure, there will be some overactive reporting, but eventually there will be a backlash. Or, maybe it won't be that eventual.
I appreciate what you're saying and I agree that it is very important. The citizenry is not supposed to take a backseat but rather should be actively involved in their own communities. I think that understanding is another something that we are slowly losing.
I think all of these things are symptoms. Proactive policing and the rise of the "law and order" mentality, which dictates that if we can just catch enough people and be harsh enough with them then somehow all of our problems will go away, are the wrong responses to a problem. People see that crime is worse than it was a couple of generations ago and they feel afraid and they don't know what else to do. The measures we are taking currently are the wrong response. Crime, especially malicious violent crime, is the end result of a series of failures. What we are actually dealing with here is the decline of virtue. Before you can harm another human being with an unprovoked attack, or steal from them, you first have to view them as something other than a human being who is worthy of love and respect. That is the actual ultimate problem. We don't seem to know how to handle that so we concentrate on its effects. I submit that this is a dead end. I think it's no coincidence that treating other people as mere resources, which is how corporations view us, goes along with this more general dehumanization quite neatly.
It makes it too easy. Let's say that your neighbor likes to smoke pot from time to time, and that bothers you.
I'm not saying that the behavior should be any more illegal than smoking tobacco (Arguably it should be far less so) but if you smoke weed where it's illegal and you do it in plain sight of someone you don't know you can trust then you're a bozo.
Making small amounts of red tape (i.e. you actually have to call a phone number and talk to somone) limits the number of frivilous complaints.
You'll probably have to fill out a form when you upload the video, too.
It's problematic because the police, in fact the entire government, are supposed to be servants of the people and this did not arise due to overwhelming demand from the people. I don't know if I have ever seen anything fitting that description that was actually a good or desirable thing. That alone should be a giant red flag.
I think this is connected to what may go by various names, but the term I have heard for it is "proactive policing". At least in the USA, it arose during the 80s. It's what has filled jails with minor non-violent drug offenders and others who are involved in victimless crimes. The basis of it is that if their idea of how many arrests should be made is unmet, they go looking for something, anything, even the most minor violations, to compensate. It should be common public knowledge, and it's shameful that it isn't, but the job performance of police officers is evaluated entirely in terms of how many arrests they make, with more weight given to severe crimes like felonies. They receive no encouragement whatsoever to find other ways to handle the more minor victimless offenses. They don't score points with their boss by being more community-friendly, like at more often issuing warnings instead of tickets or confiscating marijuana and saying "look, I better not catch you doing this again" instead of outright arrests. The result is that people don't respect authority anymore because it's no longer respectable, it has lost its human side and has become a set of mechanical rules.
It's a shame and it's part of how things are getting worse. Talk to your parents or grandparents and you'll hear about a time when the police were your neighbors, people you knew. Teenagers who were caught drinking etc. used to be taken home with a lecture or a stern warning and the matter was left to their parents to handle, and you know what, if prevention of a reoccurance is the goal, this was more effective. Now, someone who gets caught doing that has a criminal record for the rest of their life and stands to lose their driver's license etc. There is no longer any understanding that "they're young and dumb and have their entire lives ahead of them; it should not be harmed or ruined because of an indiscretion that they are likely to outgrow."
I'm not saying that all crime isn't serious or that all crime should be dealt with softly. I'm talking specifically about cases where the "criminal" wasn't harming anyone except maybe himself. There's a world of difference between that, and actually intentionally hurting another human being. The former is merely poor judgment that is better corrected by education and loving family and good role models, whereas the other is truly wrong and must be fought. That difference used to be recognized, then along came proactive policing and other political movements that always have the effect of increasing both state power and state involvement in daily life. I really believe this is heading down the wrong path and has been for some time now. There is no better evidence for this than the fact that it seems impossible to change.
Lordy. This is some pretty fundamental biochemistry - frankly, it's the sort of thing I would really expect most/.ers to have heard of at some point in their life. Even if you hadn't, it should be fairly obvious with a few moment's thought that certain molecules are going to exist in various transformed versions of themselves, and that selective pressures would inevitably lead to the dominance of one particular type.
However, I'm surprised to learn we collect enough light from a planet to be able to authoritatively assess chirality.
While I appreciate your snide pontification and hope that it provided the feeling of correctness that you seemed to be after, you have missed my point entirely. I wasn't speaking about whether I personally have heard of this or not; you just felt free to assume that with no positive unmistakable reason for thinking so (baseless assumptions - what could possibly go wrong?). A *good* article would not have left the sort of questions open that the GP was asking. That the article doesn't begin to explain how we can detect this across interstellar distances only further reinforces my point, for that too would need to be addressed in some way before this technique could begin to be useful. It's just a poor-quality article. When someone makes a general comment about what he perceives to be the decline of journalism, do you really believe that this automatically indicates he needs your assistance with the subject matter of the article? Some people need to be needed. I don't know if that's you (see, no assumption!), but if it is, know that you won't find much joy down that path.
What 'handedness' is earth? I think that because of the vast amount of life on our planet, the handedness would be (statistically speaking) about the same in both directions. According to the article, the handedness gets inherited from parents but it doesn't make clear whether or not it is the same for all life forms.
The last several articles that interested me also did a terrible job of actually explaining anything. It's surprising that some of the information omitted consists of very basic details that are directly related to the headline. I hope this isn't the beginning of a trend; infotainment and the average press release have done enough damage to journalism already.
It's true that our current income tax system is complex... but it's hardly true that this is an essential feature of income tax systems.
Really? Because I don't have to file a tax return when I buy items from a store and pay the sales tax. H&R Block doesn't offer consultation services for the tax attached to a gallon of gasoline. The government will never audit my individual personal records to make sure I didn't cheat the sales tax when I bought groceries.
Income taxes have one more weakness as well. Many foreigners who visit this country, such as tourists, are not employed in this country. That means that they do not pay any sort of income tax. If we replaced the income tax with a national sales tax, any goods those foreigners purchase would be taxed just like when a citizen purchases an item. Also, illegal aliens could no longer work "under the table" to dodge a sales tax.
This is utterly ridiculous. The reason for having an income tax is that it can be made progressive (in other words, you can make rich people pay proportionally more), in ways you can't with sales/excise taxes. That's the benefit of an income tax system... and yes, it is in fact a benefit.
A percentage is already inherently proportional. If there is a uniform 10% income tax that applies equally to everyone, the guy who makes $30,000 a year pays $3000. The guy who makes $500,000 a year pays $50,000. I am satisfied with that. Of course the real figure would probably be higher than 10% but this makes the point I intended to make. Yes, I do know what a progressive tax is; I just happen to feel that it is unnecessary.
What I am about to say next is difficult to explain because it will be very easy to demagogue. That's because there are many pundits and talk show hosts who say things that sound very similar to what I am about to say but I do not feel the way that they do. So, if you want to show me that you are insecure and very desperate to make a cheap shot, you can try a pigeonhole tactic by lumping me together with them and attributing their flaws to me. That won't make your position any more correct, of course, but it will show a weakness in your position.
I've never heard an argument for progressive taxation that made sense. The argument that wealthy people and their businesses benefit more from government services (such as police protection of that wealth) doesn't hold water, because a flat percentage applied to everyone already guarantees that they pay more money to support these things.
There is a side-effect of progressive taxation that I suspect is the real reason why certain political forces like it so much. We currently have a situation where about 40% of the population has no federal income tax liability. Many of those are still eligible for various tax credits. Those people can be expected to continue to vote for and support those politicians who make this possible.
Then there's the fact that the wealthiest one percent of income earners pay about one-third of all federal income tax. Because they are only one percent, their votes are negligible; meanwhile, the other 99% has an interest in supporting any politician who maintains this status quo. It's effectively a way to disenfranchise a segment of the population. I believe this is wrong no matter how much you may think they deserve it or how noble-sounding your justification is. I just don't buy into the situational ethics which permit a person to believe that doing something wrong is okay as long as you really want to. If you have a system that permits a segment of the population to be marginalized like this, and it's considered acceptable, then logically any other segment of the population could be next.
Then there's also the idea that each person should be equal in the eyes of the law. If you single out a segment of the population and treat them differently, you are harming this concept. Again, I am sure tha
Excuse me? Have you not heard about the Bermuda Triangle, UFO abductions, or Income Tax? All the work of ninjas.
I was with you right up until "income tax." The income tax is proof that there is a Satan. An income tax is much more complex and labor-intensive than all other forms of taxation. It's also much more prone to cheating compared to excise or sales taxes. The only reason for having one is so that you can use carrot-and-stick methods to manipulate the population ("do something we like, get a tax credit; do something we don't like, pay more"). That's the only "benefit"; otherwise it is inferior in every way to all other forms of taxation.
If the pirates support a national sales tax to replace the income tax, then I have to say they are better than the ninjas! That's too bad, because the Bermuda Triangle and UFO abductions were pretty good. Maybe the ninjas were framed and manipulative social engineering isn't really their fault!
This is about netbooks, not notebooks with 4 GB RAM, a dual core 2.8 GHz CPU, and two fast SSD drives. Try to read before getting your panties in a twist. Or maybe you were just karma whoring to get on the MS bashing bandwagon.
Just curious, can that be construed to mean that you agree with artificial limitations like this and can see no reason why anyone would ever oppose ("bash") them or MS for creating them?
A three-application maximum sounds reasonable for a modest netbook until you realize that some applications have a lightweight footprint and that running significantly more than three at a time is well within the hardware capabilities of most netbooks. An objection on grounds other than practicality is that this is yet another instance of a Microsoft operating system determining what the user may or may not do instead of the user determining what the operating system may or may not do. Considering that the operating system is a tool, that seems inappropriate to me. Your hammer doesn't tell you which nails you may drive with it.
I appreciate Microsoft's business reasons for wanting to target different price points by creating lower-cost versions of their OS. Many companies do this. I think they had the right idea with Vista in that the more expensive versions included more "luxury" features that the most basic one lacked, such as the Aero interface. I disagree with the method they're using for Windows 7 because all versions of it have multitasking capability, it's just artificially crippled in the Starter Edition. They didn't innovate or create any new feature, they just crippled an existing and very basic feature.
What follows is my personal opinion. I think this would be a business failure if every member of the general public were thoroughly educated on all matters concerning IT. I can't in any good conscience support something that, in all likelihood, only exists because of widespread ignorance.
What exactly are the "pirates" pirating? Does mere communications count as "piracy" now?
Never heard the term "pirate radio" before?
I'll explain this in terms of the USA. To broadcast on many frequencies (such as those picked up by a standard AM/FM radio) with any appreciable transmission power (i.e. more than about 300 feet) you are supposed to have an FCC license for that frequency. Pirate radio is what they call it when someone makes a powerful unlicensed transmission on such a frequency. Usually this is done in order to get a message out, particularly a message that "the Establishment" (if you will) or the mainstream would find counter to its interests. Remember that arge media conglomerates such as Clearchannel tend to own most or all of the radio stations in a given area.
So, this deal with the US military satellites involves a "pirate signal" in the sense of an unauthorized transmission.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
-- Carl Sagan, 1987 CSICOP keynote address
Actually, this happens often in religion, once you reach a certain level, just like it happens in science once you reach a certain level. Like science, which has those to claim to follow it yet know little, and defend that knowledge incorrectly, you also get people raised with a religion who claim to follow it, defend it illogically because it's all they know, yet fail to understand what real religion is all about.
When I see "religion" in that context, I take it to mean organized, institutionalized religion. That's especially true when it's mentioned together with politics in that fashion. It is my belief that the true seeking is always an individual, personal thing. Another person can show you the way if they are advanced enough to combine a good explanation with the good example of who they are and how they live their life, so it can be shared, but words alone are empty and cause much confusion. Only a mere facsimile of it, that is, a description about it rather than the real thing, can be transmitted in the form of large organizations and chapters and verses.
In that sense, I believe that organized religion actually holds back the spiritual progress of many people because it provides them with a map and never explicitly explains to them that the map is not the territory. That's why you can walk into almost any church and find people who don't truly love one another, who judge you by your outward appearance, who have their little cliques and circles instead of true unity, and who can be just as petty and superficial as the general population. This is possible because those folks have an intellectual description that allows them to believe that they have understanding when they really don't. The evidence of the real Oneness is compassion, loving-kindness, and grace towards all beings combined with a patience that does not permit you to become angry or upset even when doing so is easily justified.
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I should first say that I'm rather ignorant about encryption but I hope someone will be able to explain this. I was under the impression that any sort of good-quality encrypted data is indistinguishable from completely random data. That seems to directly contradict the ability to determine whether a volume contains encrypted data by means of locating patterns. Is this really a contradiction?
Yeah, when I see a corporation or a governmental agency use a term like "enhanced services" it immediately raises a glaring red flag in my mind. It raises the question "enhanced for whom?" Of course, they themselves don't answer that question because it's clearly not an enhancement for the customers or for anyone else who loves freedom and does not celebrate another excuse to exert control. "Enhanced services" indeed: they call it marketing, I call it Newspeak.
What if I want to pay less for a lower demand service? I bring this up because a regulator probably needs to have some sort of answer to that question.
I think the best long term solution is to require ISPs to completely separate themselves from media companies, and then separate the physical plant off from any operations that provide bits (VOIP, VoD, Cable, etc.). The company in each of those segments is then going to be more interested in serving customer interests than in serving the interests of the conglomerate.
I think total bandwidth is a good way to address that concern. These are made-up numbers but I hope they illustrate the point. Let's say my ISP offers 756k downstream and 256k upstream speeds at $25/month. That same ISP can also offer 3mbit downstream and 756k upstream at $40/month. Of course there are many different ways that this could be arranged. The important thing is that neither plan has to be metered or micromanaged in any way for this to work quite well. I think the only problem is that it's almost too simple. I don't mean this to sound so much like a condemnation but human beings in general sometimes have a hard time leaving well enough alone.
Oh come on. He's not letting in illegal aliens to steal our bandwidth. He's letting them in to steal our social services because he and pretty much every other politician feels guilty about not paying their nannies and gardeners a livable wage. The liberal mind functions entirely in guilt-mode, and so they're perpetually trying to make everything "fair" (for everyone except themselves, of course) in order to compensate for the fact that they are always trying to screw people. This allows them to sleep at night after a hard day's work of disenfranchising Mexicans, squashing individual liberties and personal accountability, and deliberately using Fannie and Freddie to crush the economy as cover for an unprecedented power grab. It's a quid-pro-quo: You wipe my kid's bottom and cut my lawn, and I don't make you pay for social services via taxes like everyone else.
This actually is the truth, and if I must be modded down to -1 for saying so then I accept that willingly. The only mistake this AC has made is succumbing to the same worthy opponent that challenges anyone who is willing to call things what they are. The worthy opponent is the temptation to be angry and upset at the injustice of it, be it real injustice or perceived, as though that negative energy had the power to effect change and bring about a world in which these power struggles are obsolete.
Even more important than what you do is where you're coming from when you do it. Do you act out of courage and love because you can extend equanimity and grace to the worthy and the unworthy alike, or do you act out of spite and resentment because you cannot see these things in their undiluted ugly glory without losing whatever virtue you have? It's the Universe's way of asking you what sort of a man you are. So long as you are re-acting, everything you say and do is the effect of someone else's cause. That someone else is himself a mere effect of another cause in a long unbroken chain that has been handed down throughout the generations. There is no freedom in this and the fetters of slavery are made up of your angry resentful re-actions. There is a saying, "no one is more hopelessly imprisoned than he who falsely believes himself to be free."
That capacity for anger is the you that isn't you because someone else's ignorance put it there. Only free beings can truly love because only in freedom can you know the difference between need that cries out to be satisfied and real unconditional love for all beings. Most human beings think that mutual need is love and thus they make a mockery of it without intending to do so. So they grasp for a man or a woman to meet those needs and they think the relief they feel when the needs are met is love, except that when relationships have this basis (most do) the "love" you have is enslaving, not liberating. Thus they give in order to get, be it comfort or affection or sex or anything else and so their giving is not pure; it is tainted.
You can see this and you can see how it taints everything, from the fact that nearly all families are at least a little dysfunctional all the way up to the manipulation and control and dehumanization that is the basis of all modern politics. You can see this and rail against it and experience the suffering that comes from trying to force your will on anything. Usually the suffering is in the form of a sense of a crushing powerlessness, of wrestling with personal and political and spiritual forces that are far more powerful than "you" (that is, your will) are. When confronted with this, many people either respond with an apathy that is not genuine or they turn it inward and experience the myriad mental disturbances that psychologists with their "symptom" model cannot hope to understand, such as depression. The evidence that they do not truly understand it is that their models become increasingly complicated instead of increasingly simple. In fact, many people who suffer this way believe that they're not trying hard enough be
If they were degrading Hulu streams, you'd have more of a point. Bittorent is just any old high-bandwidth file transfer as far as they're concerned though, and therefore low priority.
I mean no offense but I think you yourself may be missing the point. I can't speak for everyone but I'll explain to you what I want and I hope that will elucidate the viewpoint. I want a completely neutral, disinterested carrier. This carrier merely delivers my IP packets on a best-effort basis with absolutely no regard for the content of those packets. They don't decide that one type of transmission needs higher priority and they don't decide that another type of transmission needs lower priority. They don't analyze my data for the purpose of serving advertisements, nor do they do this for any other reason. In short, they are merely the pipe. If I need VoIP traffic to have priority over BitTorrent traffic, then I will perform my own prioritization and traffic shaping. If that's not quite as effective as what an ISP can do, I will accept that as a fair trade-off.
It bothers me that so many things are heading down the path of "we know what's good for you." That's not specific to ISPs at all. The idea of "we (the centralized entity of some sort) know what's good for you" has been put to the test throughout history, in many different forms, again and again. It has failed each time it has tried, unless your definition of success includes conditioned helplessness and a rejection of free will. Each new form of this idea is presented as though it were truly new and it isn't. How many iterations do we need to experience before we realize that there are only a few important principles that govern many thousands of things, and that this path is the wrong way to go?
This has the pungent aroma of legal douchebaggery all over it. A cynic might suspect that all the business-friendly appointments to the bench Bush made are starting to pay off.
In truth, the two major parties are quite comfortable with their duopoly. There is but one and only one significant difference between the two major politcal parties of the USA: the justifications given for things that they're going to do anyway. All of the rest is designed to make you believe that all problems and all instances of corruption are due to the other party or the other candidate(s). It's always some kind of "other". Some people think the entire problem is the Republicans. Some people think the entire problem is the Democrats. Who is correct? Both. Do you know why Congress has such a high incumbency rate? Because my Congressman is great; it's all the rest who need to go!
I'll phrase the same idea in a different way. These are in no particular order.
If you read that and are inclined to tell me that some of those ideas have disadvantages, particularly those that would abolish government's involvement in drugs and in public education, I may already agree with you. My argument is not based on the idea that this is some flawless solution. My argument is simply that the advantages of removing government's entanglement with these things far outweigh any disadvantages of doing so. Research it earnestly and you will come to the same conclusion, without fail, so long as you can go wherever the facts may lead you. Beware, because the number of people who think they can do that is far higher than the number of people who can actually do that. A good topic for researching drugs is the asset forfeiture laws and the fact that they are carried out without any sort of due process. An excellent reference for researching education is John Taylor Gatto.
If you read that and believe that I must mean "the private sector" when I call for the abolition of public schooling, you need to know the danger of allowing the media to frame debates for you. I imagine that for-profit private schools, parochial schools and homeschooli
One thing you can be sure of, and happened in the tobacco suits, if the companies lose and are fined, the amount they pay out will be made up by price increases. All buyers will end up paying the fine. And once they've covered the cost of the fines, they'll leave the price where it was moved up to, and rake in even more.
Supply and demand? Prices up, units sold down?
In the specific case of the tobacco companies, there's this little thing called nicotine addiction that tends to prevent the "units sold down" part of that. If you don't know what nicotine addiction is all about because you have never personally experienced it, I urge you to be grateful for that.
So far as the RIAA is concerned, it's my personal opinion that they're quite evil but they are not stupid. They aren't going to destroy their own market by means of some absurdly high price increase.
I think this country seriously fucked up the moment it was decided that corporations should have all of the same rights as real people. How about this for an idea: your artificial construct can have full rights, or it can provide you with a liability shield; it may not do both.
one probably has to assume that the proceedings touch 'national security'.
But this is exactly the point the RIAA has been driving at all the time. You've just now grasped their entire motivation! Now, can a judge seal anything he/she wants? Or does something have to meet certain conditions? What sort of allegations in the plaintiff's motion might possibly result in this? Did the RIAA ask for it to be sealed?
I'm ignorant of such matters and I hope someone here, like maybe a lawyer, could explain this. Why are they ever allowed to seal anything? What useful purpose does it serve that outweighs the potential for abuse? I also would like to know whether there is ever any way to challenge a judge's decision to seal a document, especially when the lack of disclosure is so entirely one-sided. It really seems to me that the dangers of anything approaching secret courts (which have been tools of oppression by various dictators) are more severe than anything good that could possibly be accomplished by withholding information in what is otherwise a public process.
Sounds to me like they want to perpetuate the mourning process in order to assuage their own fear of death. I've seen people do some rather odd things because they, on some level, could not come to terms with their own mortality; this is tame compared to some. However, this may not be a gift to the loved ones at all; it very well may be a selfish burden. It's selfish because there is an (unstated) assumption in it that everyone's mourning process is the same and is compatible with this idea. Making assumptions like that about such personal matters seems to me like very poor taste. If that compatibility doesn't describe the bereaved then they may be placed in the unenviable position of disliking this service while at the same time feeling guilty about rejecting it. Besides, calling them "loved ones" implies that you and what you stood for are not so easily forgotten in their hearts and minds.
I'm not saying this is necessarily a terrible idea, but I think it's rather unnecessary. Certainly it should be done with a great deal of forethought and an awareness of these potential problems.
Maybe the U.S. Constitution can have a social life now.
WMP11. Add files to your Media Library. Go to your Library Settings, then Configure Sharing. Settings button again, then Allow new devices and computers automatically. Reboot for good measure (we're using Windows here), reboot your Xbox 360, and try and play the media you added to your Library in WMP. If it works, go back to the Library settings and untick the automagic box. What I want to know, is it says I need to download codecs... But how?!
You can download free codec packs that you can install on WIndows much like any application, except that they're basically DLLs that programs like WMP can use. Just be very careful about where you get the codec pack. Make sure it's from a well-known, trustworthy site because I've heard that many unscrupulous sites offer codec packs that also include malware.
Obviously your boss isn't good at making cables. While if you lack the skill to do something like make cables with care you're going to have problems, there's no reason that you can't make your own cables and have them perform just as well as the ones made by a machine in a factory.
They can put it under the "Tech" section if they like, but this is really another disappointing Ask Slashdot. It's disappointing because too many of these have this format: "my boss at work wants me to do X, but I'd really rather do Y; what are the merits of X versus Y?" All of them need to be summarily rejected, with a polite e-mail sent to the submitter which says "within the bounds of the law, you need to do what your boss asks you to do whether or not you necessarily agree with it. If you cannot convince your boss to do otherwise, and this is a problem for you, perhaps you should consider working elsewhere."
The other disappointing category of Ask Slashdot-type submissions are those questions that are factual in nature and have only one correct (and rather well-known, easily researched) answer. Asking a large group with varying levels of expertise makes a lot of sense when there are multiple possible solutions to a problem and there is room to be creative. It makes no sense when it's more of a yes/no question -- remember the recent Ask Slashdot that asked whether spam is increased by trying to opt-out of spam e-mails? That's an excellent case in point, and not atypical either. That should have been an "Ask Google", not an "Ask Slashdot".
I think it's a shame that the quality of these particular submissions are on the decline. There's nothing inherently wrong with the "Ask Slashdot" format and there are a lot of very knowledgable people who browse this site. I'd love to see how creative they can be. It's just never going to be as good as it easily could be when it's handled this way.
It's a shame that uShare is the only one that can stream to the xbox. I used it for a long while because it's pretty lightweight, but it turns out mediatomb is as well and can stream to the ps3 perfectly. You can set up all sorts of custom transcoding operations in mediatomb, though of course if it's for the 360 then this is no use to you.
Indeed. I helped a friend set up streaming media from a Linux machine to his XBOX 360, which was a tremendous pain in the ass. That's when you find out the hard way what embrace-and-extend is all about, because apparently Microsoft chose to slightly alter the uPNP standard for the 360 (is anyone surprised at that?). What I found was that a Java program called x360mediaserver can correctly stream music (mp3s) while uShare can correctly stream videos (mostly AVIs). uShare claims to be able to stream both video and music, and in a way it does, except that the music shows up as a flat unsorted list with no categories whatsoever, such as artist or album, which is not very useful at all when you have thousands of mp3s (yes, that's with its XBOX360 compatibility option, because without that option, nothing shows up at all). To get things working in a reasonable way, we run the two servers, one for music and one for video. That provides the closest approximation of how the media shows up when it's served by a Windows machine using Windows Media Player.
Really, Microsoft's apparent hatred of simply following an open standard in order to be compatible gets old, and what really gets old are the extra measures needed to accommodate it. Most of the time it's just selfish of them, but sometimes it really seems like a religious thing because in this particular case I can't see how it helps them sell products at all. It doesn't make anyone want to run Windows for the sole purpose of streaming media to a gaming console; what it does do is make their customers feel like they are being "punished" with an extra burden for not having done so. If it accomplished anything that simply could not possibly be done via the uPNP standard I wouldn't complain, but this isn't the case. It's just needless complication.
If it's anything like Youtube, you would still have the original copy.
Also if your local authority is that corrupt, then you probably need to consider building a case against them and bringing it to the attention of a higher authority such as the county or state.
That might work. Not because the higher authority hates corruption, but rather, because they don't like competition. Besides, it'd be good PR.
It's really not, you can film the police in public like anyone else. The thing is, the police generally don't actually realise this, or they simply lie, and will tell you that it's illegal.
Any police officer who tells a citizen that something is illegal, when it is in fact clearly legal, is actually trying to intimidate that person. It's an attempt to coerce that citizen to get them to stop doing something merely because the officer personally does not like it. The cop knows it's not illegal, and if not, the cop is incompetent. We don't need cops who are either malicious or incompetent. This is wrong and should never be tolerated. Any officer who does this should be fired and barred from ever holding any law enforcement position. I would feel this way even if there were a severe shortage of police officers. I am not very fond of cops, but sometimes I feel like I respect the importance of their job more than they do.
Ultimately, getting the citizenry involved in self-policing is the key to eliminating most of the police. Making sure that the people police the police is the hard part. If you really want to see the negative effects of this decision mitigated, make sure that you take part in copwatch or similar. Sure, there will be some overactive reporting, but eventually there will be a backlash. Or, maybe it won't be that eventual.
I appreciate what you're saying and I agree that it is very important. The citizenry is not supposed to take a backseat but rather should be actively involved in their own communities. I think that understanding is another something that we are slowly losing.
I think all of these things are symptoms. Proactive policing and the rise of the "law and order" mentality, which dictates that if we can just catch enough people and be harsh enough with them then somehow all of our problems will go away, are the wrong responses to a problem. People see that crime is worse than it was a couple of generations ago and they feel afraid and they don't know what else to do. The measures we are taking currently are the wrong response. Crime, especially malicious violent crime, is the end result of a series of failures. What we are actually dealing with here is the decline of virtue. Before you can harm another human being with an unprovoked attack, or steal from them, you first have to view them as something other than a human being who is worthy of love and respect. That is the actual ultimate problem. We don't seem to know how to handle that so we concentrate on its effects. I submit that this is a dead end. I think it's no coincidence that treating other people as mere resources, which is how corporations view us, goes along with this more general dehumanization quite neatly.
It makes it too easy. Let's say that your neighbor likes to smoke pot from time to time, and that bothers you.
I'm not saying that the behavior should be any more illegal than smoking tobacco (Arguably it should be far less so) but if you smoke weed where it's illegal and you do it in plain sight of someone you don't know you can trust then you're a bozo.
Making small amounts of red tape (i.e. you actually have to call a phone number and talk to somone) limits the number of frivilous complaints.
You'll probably have to fill out a form when you upload the video, too.
It's problematic because the police, in fact the entire government, are supposed to be servants of the people and this did not arise due to overwhelming demand from the people. I don't know if I have ever seen anything fitting that description that was actually a good or desirable thing. That alone should be a giant red flag.
I think this is connected to what may go by various names, but the term I have heard for it is "proactive policing". At least in the USA, it arose during the 80s. It's what has filled jails with minor non-violent drug offenders and others who are involved in victimless crimes. The basis of it is that if their idea of how many arrests should be made is unmet, they go looking for something, anything, even the most minor violations, to compensate. It should be common public knowledge, and it's shameful that it isn't, but the job performance of police officers is evaluated entirely in terms of how many arrests they make, with more weight given to severe crimes like felonies. They receive no encouragement whatsoever to find other ways to handle the more minor victimless offenses. They don't score points with their boss by being more community-friendly, like at more often issuing warnings instead of tickets or confiscating marijuana and saying "look, I better not catch you doing this again" instead of outright arrests. The result is that people don't respect authority anymore because it's no longer respectable, it has lost its human side and has become a set of mechanical rules.
It's a shame and it's part of how things are getting worse. Talk to your parents or grandparents and you'll hear about a time when the police were your neighbors, people you knew. Teenagers who were caught drinking etc. used to be taken home with a lecture or a stern warning and the matter was left to their parents to handle, and you know what, if prevention of a reoccurance is the goal, this was more effective. Now, someone who gets caught doing that has a criminal record for the rest of their life and stands to lose their driver's license etc. There is no longer any understanding that "they're young and dumb and have their entire lives ahead of them; it should not be harmed or ruined because of an indiscretion that they are likely to outgrow."
I'm not saying that all crime isn't serious or that all crime should be dealt with softly. I'm talking specifically about cases where the "criminal" wasn't harming anyone except maybe himself. There's a world of difference between that, and actually intentionally hurting another human being. The former is merely poor judgment that is better corrected by education and loving family and good role models, whereas the other is truly wrong and must be fought. That difference used to be recognized, then along came proactive policing and other political movements that always have the effect of increasing both state power and state involvement in daily life. I really believe this is heading down the wrong path and has been for some time now. There is no better evidence for this than the fact that it seems impossible to change.
Lordy. This is some pretty fundamental biochemistry - frankly, it's the sort of thing I would really expect most /.ers to have heard of at some point in their life. Even if you hadn't, it should be fairly obvious with a few moment's thought that certain molecules are going to exist in various transformed versions of themselves, and that selective pressures would inevitably lead to the dominance of one particular type.
However, I'm surprised to learn we collect enough light from a planet to be able to authoritatively assess chirality.
While I appreciate your snide pontification and hope that it provided the feeling of correctness that you seemed to be after, you have missed my point entirely. I wasn't speaking about whether I personally have heard of this or not; you just felt free to assume that with no positive unmistakable reason for thinking so (baseless assumptions - what could possibly go wrong?). A *good* article would not have left the sort of questions open that the GP was asking. That the article doesn't begin to explain how we can detect this across interstellar distances only further reinforces my point, for that too would need to be addressed in some way before this technique could begin to be useful. It's just a poor-quality article. When someone makes a general comment about what he perceives to be the decline of journalism, do you really believe that this automatically indicates he needs your assistance with the subject matter of the article? Some people need to be needed. I don't know if that's you (see, no assumption!), but if it is, know that you won't find much joy down that path.
What 'handedness' is earth? I think that because of the vast amount of life on our planet, the handedness would be (statistically speaking) about the same in both directions. According to the article, the handedness gets inherited from parents but it doesn't make clear whether or not it is the same for all life forms.
The last several articles that interested me also did a terrible job of actually explaining anything. It's surprising that some of the information omitted consists of very basic details that are directly related to the headline. I hope this isn't the beginning of a trend; infotainment and the average press release have done enough damage to journalism already.
whoah! I think someone needs a nap.
You fed the troll. Why would you do that?
Really? Because I don't have to file a tax return when I buy items from a store and pay the sales tax. H&R Block doesn't offer consultation services for the tax attached to a gallon of gasoline. The government will never audit my individual personal records to make sure I didn't cheat the sales tax when I bought groceries.
Income taxes have one more weakness as well. Many foreigners who visit this country, such as tourists, are not employed in this country. That means that they do not pay any sort of income tax. If we replaced the income tax with a national sales tax, any goods those foreigners purchase would be taxed just like when a citizen purchases an item. Also, illegal aliens could no longer work "under the table" to dodge a sales tax.
A percentage is already inherently proportional. If there is a uniform 10% income tax that applies equally to everyone, the guy who makes $30,000 a year pays $3000. The guy who makes $500,000 a year pays $50,000. I am satisfied with that. Of course the real figure would probably be higher than 10% but this makes the point I intended to make. Yes, I do know what a progressive tax is; I just happen to feel that it is unnecessary.
What I am about to say next is difficult to explain because it will be very easy to demagogue. That's because there are many pundits and talk show hosts who say things that sound very similar to what I am about to say but I do not feel the way that they do. So, if you want to show me that you are insecure and very desperate to make a cheap shot, you can try a pigeonhole tactic by lumping me together with them and attributing their flaws to me. That won't make your position any more correct, of course, but it will show a weakness in your position.
I've never heard an argument for progressive taxation that made sense. The argument that wealthy people and their businesses benefit more from government services (such as police protection of that wealth) doesn't hold water, because a flat percentage applied to everyone already guarantees that they pay more money to support these things.
There is a side-effect of progressive taxation that I suspect is the real reason why certain political forces like it so much. We currently have a situation where about 40% of the population has no federal income tax liability. Many of those are still eligible for various tax credits. Those people can be expected to continue to vote for and support those politicians who make this possible.
Then there's the fact that the wealthiest one percent of income earners pay about one-third of all federal income tax. Because they are only one percent, their votes are negligible; meanwhile, the other 99% has an interest in supporting any politician who maintains this status quo. It's effectively a way to disenfranchise a segment of the population. I believe this is wrong no matter how much you may think they deserve it or how noble-sounding your justification is. I just don't buy into the situational ethics which permit a person to believe that doing something wrong is okay as long as you really want to. If you have a system that permits a segment of the population to be marginalized like this, and it's considered acceptable, then logically any other segment of the population could be next.
Then there's also the idea that each person should be equal in the eyes of the law. If you single out a segment of the population and treat them differently, you are harming this concept. Again, I am sure tha
Excuse me? Have you not heard about the Bermuda Triangle, UFO abductions, or Income Tax? All the work of ninjas.
I was with you right up until "income tax." The income tax is proof that there is a Satan. An income tax is much more complex and labor-intensive than all other forms of taxation. It's also much more prone to cheating compared to excise or sales taxes. The only reason for having one is so that you can use carrot-and-stick methods to manipulate the population ("do something we like, get a tax credit; do something we don't like, pay more"). That's the only "benefit"; otherwise it is inferior in every way to all other forms of taxation.
If the pirates support a national sales tax to replace the income tax, then I have to say they are better than the ninjas! That's too bad, because the Bermuda Triangle and UFO abductions were pretty good. Maybe the ninjas were framed and manipulative social engineering isn't really their fault!
This is about netbooks, not notebooks with 4 GB RAM, a dual core 2.8 GHz CPU, and two fast SSD drives. Try to read before getting your panties in a twist. Or maybe you were just karma whoring to get on the MS bashing bandwagon.
Just curious, can that be construed to mean that you agree with artificial limitations like this and can see no reason why anyone would ever oppose ("bash") them or MS for creating them?
A three-application maximum sounds reasonable for a modest netbook until you realize that some applications have a lightweight footprint and that running significantly more than three at a time is well within the hardware capabilities of most netbooks. An objection on grounds other than practicality is that this is yet another instance of a Microsoft operating system determining what the user may or may not do instead of the user determining what the operating system may or may not do. Considering that the operating system is a tool, that seems inappropriate to me. Your hammer doesn't tell you which nails you may drive with it.
I appreciate Microsoft's business reasons for wanting to target different price points by creating lower-cost versions of their OS. Many companies do this. I think they had the right idea with Vista in that the more expensive versions included more "luxury" features that the most basic one lacked, such as the Aero interface. I disagree with the method they're using for Windows 7 because all versions of it have multitasking capability, it's just artificially crippled in the Starter Edition. They didn't innovate or create any new feature, they just crippled an existing and very basic feature.
What follows is my personal opinion. I think this would be a business failure if every member of the general public were thoroughly educated on all matters concerning IT. I can't in any good conscience support something that, in all likelihood, only exists because of widespread ignorance.
What exactly are the "pirates" pirating? Does mere communications count as "piracy" now?
Never heard the term "pirate radio" before?
I'll explain this in terms of the USA. To broadcast on many frequencies (such as those picked up by a standard AM/FM radio) with any appreciable transmission power (i.e. more than about 300 feet) you are supposed to have an FCC license for that frequency. Pirate radio is what they call it when someone makes a powerful unlicensed transmission on such a frequency. Usually this is done in order to get a message out, particularly a message that "the Establishment" (if you will) or the mainstream would find counter to its interests. Remember that arge media conglomerates such as Clearchannel tend to own most or all of the radio stations in a given area.
So, this deal with the US military satellites involves a "pirate signal" in the sense of an unauthorized transmission.
Actually, this happens often in religion, once you reach a certain level, just like it happens in science once you reach a certain level. Like science, which has those to claim to follow it yet know little, and defend that knowledge incorrectly, you also get people raised with a religion who claim to follow it, defend it illogically because it's all they know, yet fail to understand what real religion is all about.
When I see "religion" in that context, I take it to mean organized, institutionalized religion. That's especially true when it's mentioned together with politics in that fashion. It is my belief that the true seeking is always an individual, personal thing. Another person can show you the way if they are advanced enough to combine a good explanation with the good example of who they are and how they live their life, so it can be shared, but words alone are empty and cause much confusion. Only a mere facsimile of it, that is, a description about it rather than the real thing, can be transmitted in the form of large organizations and chapters and verses.
In that sense, I believe that organized religion actually holds back the spiritual progress of many people because it provides them with a map and never explicitly explains to them that the map is not the territory. That's why you can walk into almost any church and find people who don't truly love one another, who judge you by your outward appearance, who have their little cliques and circles instead of true unity, and who can be just as petty and superficial as the general population. This is possible because those folks have an intellectual description that allows them to believe that they have understanding when they really don't. The evidence of the real Oneness is compassion, loving-kindness, and grace towards all beings combined with a patience that does not permit you to become angry or upset even when doing so is easily justified.