Or are we accepting, blindly, that people should always follow actions that are claimed to be for the benefit of the larger social group?
No, at least I'm not. First of all, I wouldn't say we should simply accept others' claims without critical thinking. Second, I wouldn't claim that a person should always give up his own personal good for the sake of a public good. However, I tend to favor the idea that individuals should be prepared to make some sacrifices in order to benefit the society which in turn benefits us all. Many political philosophers (including those influential in the founding of the USA) believed that this was the foundation of civil organizations: everyone contributes, and everyone benefits. In return for our contributions, we get more back than we contribute. It's not a zero-sum game.
Of course, that's not to say that paying more in taxes will always provide greater benefits. It's quite a bit more complicated than that. In non-zero-sum games, it's possible to gain, but it's also possible to lose. History and great thinkers provide a lot of resources to think about these problems.
Anyway, bringing this back to the topic at hand, my view is that the free education crowd is behaving extremely selfishly.
I agree with you that there are problems caused by free education. However, I also think people make a mistake by talking about education as a person financial investment, i.e. "our society should make no effort to foster education, because why should I pay for someone else's financial gain?" Again some level of non-zero-sumness should come into play. You do not benefit from hurting others' educational prospective, but when people in our society are well educated, our society improves, and we in turn reap the rewards. It's probably in our best interest (even financial best interest) to pay some taxes if it means improving the education of our fellow citizens.
The larger question is where the balance lies, how much each of us should be willing to pay to support education, and whether that money is being well spent. Should society's role in fostering education be primarily governmental/financial and lie in continually paying for people to spend more and more years in responsibility-free academic situations. I'd say no. It seems to have devalued the education and foster the expansion of adolescence all the way up to age 30. However, that doesn't mean that public education itself is an evil idea which only steals from your pocketbook. It doesn't mean that the benefits of public education are incapable of outweighing the cost that we all contribute to it.
In fact, I believe the attitude which treats public institutions as evil is partially responsible for the poor performance of public institutions. There's no motivation to contribute earnest efforts to contribute a thing when you believe it's evil and should be abolished outright. On the contrary, you're happy to watch it fail over and over again, because it lends support to your beliefs, and so your beliefs become a self-fulfilling prophesy.
First, she isn't throwing down thousands of years of social theory, but the far more recent idea of charity at other peoples' expense.
It's not a new idea. There's an ongoing tension throughout history, going back as far as we have any record or ability to say, between individual benefit and the benefit of the larger social group. I don't really see any way we could reasonable posit that it's anything other than a result of nature, and probably existed even before our records. In Plato, Socrates even claims (though we might doubt the truth of this claim) that he's choosing to accept a death sentence for the good of his city.
But watch out, we're throwing away thousands of years of thought on the subject and just accepting, blindly, that people should always do whatever will be most profitable for themselves without consideration of the harm to those around them. That's not a new idea either, but I don't believe it's had the sort of grip on people that it has on the American public today.
Second, social theory like related subjects, especially economics, is traditionally wrong.
Well I don't know about that. If you want to say that any given social theory is wrong, misguided, or at least incomplete, I might agree with you. I don't believe, however, that all social thought over the last couple thousands of years should be ignored. If anything, I'd say that ignoring the whole body of social thought that came before is the problem with the -isms you cited. Marxism, nihilism, post-modernism, and objectivism are all quasi-utopian ideals that claim (more or less) that everything else that came before is rubbish, and if we could only throw away all old thoughts and traditions, and start over with the professor's preferred set of logical ideas, everything in the world would work out in a lovely way.
Maybe you don't agree with that characterization, but I think it's the ignorance of past social thought that leads to these naive and misguided ideas.
Yeah, I've heard (only recently) that all of this nonsense traces back to Rand. Surprising that thousands of years of social theory can be torn down so thoroughly by one woman.
I suppose there's something notable and admirable in being so persuasive and influential. On the other hand, it's horribly damaging.
The problem is one of treating education as a business like any other.
Unfortunately, we do a lot of that here. We treat education like a business. We treat health like a business. We treat city planning like a business. We treat infrastructure construction like a business. We treat government like a business.
For some reason, if you suggest that anything ought to be done for the common good, even if it's not directly profitable, you're labelled an anit-American communist. I was born in the US and have lived here my entire life. I've studied US history and I've studied some of the same political philosophers the "founding fathers" did. Still, I don't know where this idea came from, that benefitting the public good was morally evil. I feel like something must have happened to make everyone so angry and frightened.
Yeah, on the one hand, it makes sense: loaning money to someone unlikely to pay it back is a risky investment, and risky investments demand higher returns. If presented with a risky investment or a risk-free investment, both offering the same return, you'd never make a risky investment.
On the other hand, you're taking the very people who are least likely to be able to pay their loans off, and you're making it even harder. That makes no sense. It's just another example of it being more expensive to be poor.
And it's worth mentioning, I think, that there is a connection between the difficulty of creating an iPod killer and creating an iPhone killer. If you want to kill the iPhone, you have to build an iPod killer into your phone.
You aren't going to beat the iPhone at its own game by putting in faster processors, having flashier interfaces, creating some half-assed app store. You certainly aren't going to beat the iPhone by relying on the superiority of the Verizon Network. What people have to remember is that when the iPhone first came out, it didn't have the App store, it didn't have any 3G capabilities at all, and it still flew off the shelves. Why was that?
People miss the obvious. First, the carrier had virtually no influence on the phone, so the phone was built to service the customer and not to steer customers toward carrier services. That's not insignificant. But much more importantly, people were already committed time and money to using the iTunes/iPod combination, and the iPhone let them have an iPod in their smartphone.
I know, people are going to say, "But I can play MP3's on my phone!" Yeah, but what's the experience like? Is the GUI as clear, sensible, and responsive as the iPhone? What's the experience of getting that music onto your phone? Does it sync new songs automatically? Does it sync the metadata, including things like play-count and ratings? Can you make smart playlists on your computer and sync those to your phone? What online music stores are supported on your phone? Does the carrier try to make you buy music from them for prices higher than iTunes or Amazon? Is your phone an iPod killer?
If people want to beat the iPhone, they shouldn't disregard the importance of the iPod in the iPhone, nor the relative ease of using iTunes. Not only does iTunes provide a method for managing media, but it links directly into the #1 music retailer in the US. The purchasing process couldn't be easier, and you can even buy directly from the iPod, iPhone, or AppleTV. If you want to beat Apple, you have to beat that level of integration.
So what you need is an online store and software that allows you to manage all your media in one place, and you need to hook that into the phone. Then the phone itself needs to be as capable an MP3 player as the iPhone. Only when you have all that squared away does it make sense to worry about your own app store. Don't try to run before you can walk.
I went another way with that quote: Oh, it could have been a challenger except that it wasn't on a good network and the hardware wasn't great? Really? Well, my old Nokia could have been a challenger, except for that part about not being a smartphone and having no data capabilities. I also made a phone out of cardboard, and it could have been a challenger except for the fact that it didn't work at all.
Well I suppose the questions are whether there's a legal distinction between licensing the right to copy the book and refusing to sue for infringement, and whether in his exclusive license he retains the right to refuse to sue.
It sounds like he's not distributing the book himself and not technically licensing anyone else to do so, but claiming that insofar as he has the right to sue someone or not-sue them for infringement, he won't sue. It's a minor distinction, but IANAL and I have no idea whether there's anything to that distinction.
Naw, they had to do something to earn that $31mil. Most likely it's IPv6 with the 6 crossed out, a 7 in its place, and enough useless proprietary and patented changes so that it's interoperable with anything except approved MS software and LM hardware.
Prior art doesn't necessarily stop them from patenting, and if they get the patent it won't necessarily stop them from suing. Sure, unless there's a travesty of justice (not out of the question) you'll win the lawsuit, but that won't necessarily keep it from being expensive.
True. Most get-rich-quick schemes won't get you rich.
Just think about the economics of the thing. When there's some get-rich-quick bandwagon that everyone is jumping on, it's going to quickly turn into a highly competitive situation due to everyone jumping on the bandwagon, and opportunities will become limited. Or if it doesn't becomes competitive and opportunities don't become limited, that means your in the middle of an economic bubble. Sell what you can while the bubble is big, and you might not lose your shirt when it bursts.
I see this as stratifying feature... the have's and have not, the able and the un-able.
I think you're right in a lot of what you're saying, except for this. The problem is that if most people don't feel comfortable, then it won't become a ubiquitous control scheme. Most computers won't come with the appropriate hardware and software support, so it won't be available for most computers you sit down at. That means most people won't get the opportunity to practice it and become comfortable with it.
So there may be some occasional people who have it set up on their own computer and use it themselves, but it'll probably be quite a rarity. Because of this, it probably won't be well supported even on systems where it's supported. Whenever you have some niche thing in computers, you always end up with bugs. The hardware drivers will conflict with some other drivers, or some particular piece of software will render something in a whacky way breaking your nice little unified UI. Part of the reason things like this don't catch on is that, if you want your computer to work well, it's best to stick to well-worn roads.
I like the idea and I'm always interested in new UI ideas, but they always seem to be too complicated and subtle. There's something nice about having a button that you push, and having that button do a clear and expected thing. I always turn off the multitouch stuff on my trackpad, or else it gets activated accidentally at random times, and my browser fonts change size because it interpreted something I did as a "pinch" move.
Here's what I could see as a new mouse alternative: put a small touchpad next to your keyboard with an LCD screen behind it. Most of the time it can work as a normal touchpad like we have in laptops today, even allowing for configurable multi-touch controls. However, you could have it change its display under certain contexts to allow for specialty-functions. Like let's say you press a certain key combination to control your computer's volume, and the pad turns into a graphic equalizer. It could be cool, useful, and not-too-confusing to your grandma.
I'm probably just missing the point. Still, it could have easily been http:com.example.www and http:com.example/www. At least then people might understand the structure of those names better.
You make a good point, but I don't think the problem is just that it's made up, how how unclever the problems and solutions sometimes were. Surely not every problem in the future can be solved by screwing around with the deflector array or realigning dilithium crystals.
Sure, but my point about DNS is, imagine if you could get your SSL up and running with a self-signed cert, you dump that cert into your DNS record for that domain name, and you're your own certificate authority. That's not a huge expense of your time and could be done free. What's the downside?
I don't know, I think it makes sense if you can essentially get both for the cost of one. I think the problem is that you have to pay some arbitrary company relatively large amounts of money to authenticate your identity, and then they often do a bad job at it anyway.
This has been one of the reasons that I've kept an eye on the signing of DNS records. If you could sign your DNS records and verify that they're authentic, then it seems to me that you could also drop in an SSL cert for each DNS record and get CAs out of the loop (unless you really want some kind of EV-like service).
The problem was that marketdroids severely understated Vista's hardware requirements, tried to segment the market too finely with too many editions, and outright lied about the user experience at some levels of hardware capability.
I don't think that was the whole problem. Yes, that was a problem: Vista did not perform well on all the machines that were advertised as being supported by Vista. However, that also indicates that there was another problem: Vista's hardware requirements were too high for the time when it was released.
There's also the too-many-editions problem. Home vs. Business vs. Server is about as much of a breakdown as I'm willing to entertain. Also, I won't put up with having to activate my OS under any circumstances. But those are just my views, admittedly, and those weren't really the problem either.
I'd like to claim (and have been claiming since Vista came out) that the big problem is that there wasn't a big enough problem with Windows XP. Or to be more direct, of any of the problems people actually had with Windows XP, Vista didn't solve enough of them to make it worth the trouble of upgrading, let alone the cost of buying new licenses.
I had some free upgrades to Vista available, and never used them. I tested it, but there were compatibility issues with hardware and 3rd party software, and there was nothing Windows Vista did that Windows XP didn't that I needed to do. Vista itself was fine, but upgrading would have meant a whole lot of trouble for me, and the only benefit I could see from upgrading was a cooler-looking interface.
This is one of the few areas where my instinct says that a guilty mind should not be necessary at all to punish someone.
I wouldn't agree that a bad claim should in all cases be punishable. I would think, however, that there could be some level of due diligence required on the part of someone filing a DMCA claim. If they file an unsupported claim and it's later found that they didn't do anything to make sure they actually had standing to make the complaint (or whatever the correct legal terminology would be) that perhaps there should be some kind of punishment or liability.
There are cases where the law punishes negligence or recklessness, but it shouldn't punish understandable mistakes.
An essay is a shitty way to select engineering students and doesn't gauge anything other than their ability to make up 500 words of bullshit.
Doesn't that depend on whether the person reading the application is capable of recognizing bullshit? Or are we assuming that any 500 word essay can only possibly be bullshit?
And anyway, when an istitution that big uses only Microsoft inhouse, is like having another stakeholder on your back, with an agenda of its own, like having you switch soon to the latest and greatest of its Server suite...
There are advantages to their routers, but you practically need to be an all-Apple shop to appreciate them. For example, if you run OSX server, you can set it to automatically reconfigure the router based on which services the server is offering. You can also set them up to share drives for Time Machine and advertise services via Bonjour and stuff like that.
They're pretty nice, actually, but not if you're running Linux and just want to be able to configure the damned thing.
the incredibly mediocre Dollhouse managed to get a second season
I've wondered if the reason Dollhouse is getting more of a fair shake is because of Firefly. Maybe someone realized that they might have blown something good in not giving Firefly a chance to catch on, and so they're not being too quick to drop Wheadon's new show?
Slashdot Mirror
Or are we accepting, blindly, that people should always follow actions that are claimed to be for the benefit of the larger social group?
No, at least I'm not. First of all, I wouldn't say we should simply accept others' claims without critical thinking. Second, I wouldn't claim that a person should always give up his own personal good for the sake of a public good. However, I tend to favor the idea that individuals should be prepared to make some sacrifices in order to benefit the society which in turn benefits us all. Many political philosophers (including those influential in the founding of the USA) believed that this was the foundation of civil organizations: everyone contributes, and everyone benefits. In return for our contributions, we get more back than we contribute. It's not a zero-sum game.
Of course, that's not to say that paying more in taxes will always provide greater benefits. It's quite a bit more complicated than that. In non-zero-sum games, it's possible to gain, but it's also possible to lose. History and great thinkers provide a lot of resources to think about these problems.
Anyway, bringing this back to the topic at hand, my view is that the free education crowd is behaving extremely selfishly.
I agree with you that there are problems caused by free education. However, I also think people make a mistake by talking about education as a person financial investment, i.e. "our society should make no effort to foster education, because why should I pay for someone else's financial gain?" Again some level of non-zero-sumness should come into play. You do not benefit from hurting others' educational prospective, but when people in our society are well educated, our society improves, and we in turn reap the rewards. It's probably in our best interest (even financial best interest) to pay some taxes if it means improving the education of our fellow citizens.
The larger question is where the balance lies, how much each of us should be willing to pay to support education, and whether that money is being well spent. Should society's role in fostering education be primarily governmental/financial and lie in continually paying for people to spend more and more years in responsibility-free academic situations. I'd say no. It seems to have devalued the education and foster the expansion of adolescence all the way up to age 30. However, that doesn't mean that public education itself is an evil idea which only steals from your pocketbook. It doesn't mean that the benefits of public education are incapable of outweighing the cost that we all contribute to it.
In fact, I believe the attitude which treats public institutions as evil is partially responsible for the poor performance of public institutions. There's no motivation to contribute earnest efforts to contribute a thing when you believe it's evil and should be abolished outright. On the contrary, you're happy to watch it fail over and over again, because it lends support to your beliefs, and so your beliefs become a self-fulfilling prophesy.
First, she isn't throwing down thousands of years of social theory, but the far more recent idea of charity at other peoples' expense.
It's not a new idea. There's an ongoing tension throughout history, going back as far as we have any record or ability to say, between individual benefit and the benefit of the larger social group. I don't really see any way we could reasonable posit that it's anything other than a result of nature, and probably existed even before our records. In Plato, Socrates even claims (though we might doubt the truth of this claim) that he's choosing to accept a death sentence for the good of his city.
But watch out, we're throwing away thousands of years of thought on the subject and just accepting, blindly, that people should always do whatever will be most profitable for themselves without consideration of the harm to those around them. That's not a new idea either, but I don't believe it's had the sort of grip on people that it has on the American public today.
Second, social theory like related subjects, especially economics, is traditionally wrong.
Well I don't know about that. If you want to say that any given social theory is wrong, misguided, or at least incomplete, I might agree with you. I don't believe, however, that all social thought over the last couple thousands of years should be ignored. If anything, I'd say that ignoring the whole body of social thought that came before is the problem with the -isms you cited. Marxism, nihilism, post-modernism, and objectivism are all quasi-utopian ideals that claim (more or less) that everything else that came before is rubbish, and if we could only throw away all old thoughts and traditions, and start over with the professor's preferred set of logical ideas, everything in the world would work out in a lovely way.
Maybe you don't agree with that characterization, but I think it's the ignorance of past social thought that leads to these naive and misguided ideas.
Yeah, I've heard (only recently) that all of this nonsense traces back to Rand. Surprising that thousands of years of social theory can be torn down so thoroughly by one woman.
I suppose there's something notable and admirable in being so persuasive and influential. On the other hand, it's horribly damaging.
The problem is one of treating education as a business like any other.
Unfortunately, we do a lot of that here. We treat education like a business. We treat health like a business. We treat city planning like a business. We treat infrastructure construction like a business. We treat government like a business.
For some reason, if you suggest that anything ought to be done for the common good, even if it's not directly profitable, you're labelled an anit-American communist. I was born in the US and have lived here my entire life. I've studied US history and I've studied some of the same political philosophers the "founding fathers" did. Still, I don't know where this idea came from, that benefitting the public good was morally evil. I feel like something must have happened to make everyone so angry and frightened.
Yeah, on the one hand, it makes sense: loaning money to someone unlikely to pay it back is a risky investment, and risky investments demand higher returns. If presented with a risky investment or a risk-free investment, both offering the same return, you'd never make a risky investment.
On the other hand, you're taking the very people who are least likely to be able to pay their loans off, and you're making it even harder. That makes no sense. It's just another example of it being more expensive to be poor.
And it's worth mentioning, I think, that there is a connection between the difficulty of creating an iPod killer and creating an iPhone killer. If you want to kill the iPhone, you have to build an iPod killer into your phone.
You aren't going to beat the iPhone at its own game by putting in faster processors, having flashier interfaces, creating some half-assed app store. You certainly aren't going to beat the iPhone by relying on the superiority of the Verizon Network. What people have to remember is that when the iPhone first came out, it didn't have the App store, it didn't have any 3G capabilities at all, and it still flew off the shelves. Why was that?
People miss the obvious. First, the carrier had virtually no influence on the phone, so the phone was built to service the customer and not to steer customers toward carrier services. That's not insignificant. But much more importantly, people were already committed time and money to using the iTunes/iPod combination, and the iPhone let them have an iPod in their smartphone.
I know, people are going to say, "But I can play MP3's on my phone!" Yeah, but what's the experience like? Is the GUI as clear, sensible, and responsive as the iPhone? What's the experience of getting that music onto your phone? Does it sync new songs automatically? Does it sync the metadata, including things like play-count and ratings? Can you make smart playlists on your computer and sync those to your phone? What online music stores are supported on your phone? Does the carrier try to make you buy music from them for prices higher than iTunes or Amazon? Is your phone an iPod killer?
If people want to beat the iPhone, they shouldn't disregard the importance of the iPod in the iPhone, nor the relative ease of using iTunes. Not only does iTunes provide a method for managing media, but it links directly into the #1 music retailer in the US. The purchasing process couldn't be easier, and you can even buy directly from the iPod, iPhone, or AppleTV. If you want to beat Apple, you have to beat that level of integration.
So what you need is an online store and software that allows you to manage all your media in one place, and you need to hook that into the phone. Then the phone itself needs to be as capable an MP3 player as the iPhone. Only when you have all that squared away does it make sense to worry about your own app store. Don't try to run before you can walk.
I went another way with that quote: Oh, it could have been a challenger except that it wasn't on a good network and the hardware wasn't great? Really? Well, my old Nokia could have been a challenger, except for that part about not being a smartphone and having no data capabilities. I also made a phone out of cardboard, and it could have been a challenger except for the fact that it didn't work at all.
Well I suppose the questions are whether there's a legal distinction between licensing the right to copy the book and refusing to sue for infringement, and whether in his exclusive license he retains the right to refuse to sue.
It sounds like he's not distributing the book himself and not technically licensing anyone else to do so, but claiming that insofar as he has the right to sue someone or not-sue them for infringement, he won't sue. It's a minor distinction, but IANAL and I have no idea whether there's anything to that distinction.
Naw, they had to do something to earn that $31mil. Most likely it's IPv6 with the 6 crossed out, a 7 in its place, and enough useless proprietary and patented changes so that it's interoperable with anything except approved MS software and LM hardware.
Prior art doesn't necessarily stop them from patenting, and if they get the patent it won't necessarily stop them from suing. Sure, unless there's a travesty of justice (not out of the question) you'll win the lawsuit, but that won't necessarily keep it from being expensive.
True. Most get-rich-quick schemes won't get you rich.
Just think about the economics of the thing. When there's some get-rich-quick bandwagon that everyone is jumping on, it's going to quickly turn into a highly competitive situation due to everyone jumping on the bandwagon, and opportunities will become limited. Or if it doesn't becomes competitive and opportunities don't become limited, that means your in the middle of an economic bubble. Sell what you can while the bubble is big, and you might not lose your shirt when it bursts.
I see this as stratifying feature... the have's and have not, the able and the un-able.
I think you're right in a lot of what you're saying, except for this. The problem is that if most people don't feel comfortable, then it won't become a ubiquitous control scheme. Most computers won't come with the appropriate hardware and software support, so it won't be available for most computers you sit down at. That means most people won't get the opportunity to practice it and become comfortable with it.
So there may be some occasional people who have it set up on their own computer and use it themselves, but it'll probably be quite a rarity. Because of this, it probably won't be well supported even on systems where it's supported. Whenever you have some niche thing in computers, you always end up with bugs. The hardware drivers will conflict with some other drivers, or some particular piece of software will render something in a whacky way breaking your nice little unified UI. Part of the reason things like this don't catch on is that, if you want your computer to work well, it's best to stick to well-worn roads.
I like the idea and I'm always interested in new UI ideas, but they always seem to be too complicated and subtle. There's something nice about having a button that you push, and having that button do a clear and expected thing. I always turn off the multitouch stuff on my trackpad, or else it gets activated accidentally at random times, and my browser fonts change size because it interpreted something I did as a "pinch" move.
Here's what I could see as a new mouse alternative: put a small touchpad next to your keyboard with an LCD screen behind it. Most of the time it can work as a normal touchpad like we have in laptops today, even allowing for configurable multi-touch controls. However, you could have it change its display under certain contexts to allow for specialty-functions. Like let's say you press a certain key combination to control your computer's volume, and the pad turns into a graphic equalizer. It could be cool, useful, and not-too-confusing to your grandma.
If the syntax was that way, how would we tell the difference between http://www.example.com/ and http://example.com/www/?
I'm probably just missing the point. Still, it could have easily been http:com.example.www and http:com.example/www. At least then people might understand the structure of those names better.
You make a good point, but I don't think the problem is just that it's made up, how how unclever the problems and solutions sometimes were. Surely not every problem in the future can be solved by screwing around with the deflector array or realigning dilithium crystals.
Sure, but my point about DNS is, imagine if you could get your SSL up and running with a self-signed cert, you dump that cert into your DNS record for that domain name, and you're your own certificate authority. That's not a huge expense of your time and could be done free. What's the downside?
Please explain?
I don't know, I think it makes sense if you can essentially get both for the cost of one. I think the problem is that you have to pay some arbitrary company relatively large amounts of money to authenticate your identity, and then they often do a bad job at it anyway.
This has been one of the reasons that I've kept an eye on the signing of DNS records. If you could sign your DNS records and verify that they're authentic, then it seems to me that you could also drop in an SSL cert for each DNS record and get CAs out of the loop (unless you really want some kind of EV-like service).
The problem was that marketdroids severely understated Vista's hardware requirements, tried to segment the market too finely with too many editions, and outright lied about the user experience at some levels of hardware capability.
I don't think that was the whole problem. Yes, that was a problem: Vista did not perform well on all the machines that were advertised as being supported by Vista. However, that also indicates that there was another problem: Vista's hardware requirements were too high for the time when it was released.
There's also the too-many-editions problem. Home vs. Business vs. Server is about as much of a breakdown as I'm willing to entertain. Also, I won't put up with having to activate my OS under any circumstances. But those are just my views, admittedly, and those weren't really the problem either.
I'd like to claim (and have been claiming since Vista came out) that the big problem is that there wasn't a big enough problem with Windows XP. Or to be more direct, of any of the problems people actually had with Windows XP, Vista didn't solve enough of them to make it worth the trouble of upgrading, let alone the cost of buying new licenses.
I had some free upgrades to Vista available, and never used them. I tested it, but there were compatibility issues with hardware and 3rd party software, and there was nothing Windows Vista did that Windows XP didn't that I needed to do. Vista itself was fine, but upgrading would have meant a whole lot of trouble for me, and the only benefit I could see from upgrading was a cooler-looking interface.
you've taken away 100% of their compensation, and added 1/10 of one percent of the towers needed to blanket the nation
Cool. I'm fully willing to make that trade.
This is one of the few areas where my instinct says that a guilty mind should not be necessary at all to punish someone.
I wouldn't agree that a bad claim should in all cases be punishable. I would think, however, that there could be some level of due diligence required on the part of someone filing a DMCA claim. If they file an unsupported claim and it's later found that they didn't do anything to make sure they actually had standing to make the complaint (or whatever the correct legal terminology would be) that perhaps there should be some kind of punishment or liability.
There are cases where the law punishes negligence or recklessness, but it shouldn't punish understandable mistakes.
It does, however, allow for free SMS messages.
An essay is a shitty way to select engineering students and doesn't gauge anything other than their ability to make up 500 words of bullshit.
Doesn't that depend on whether the person reading the application is capable of recognizing bullshit? Or are we assuming that any 500 word essay can only possibly be bullshit?
And anyway, when an istitution that big uses only Microsoft inhouse, is like having another stakeholder on your back, with an agenda of its own, like having you switch soon to the latest and greatest of its Server suite...
That's not only true of huge companies.
There are advantages to their routers, but you practically need to be an all-Apple shop to appreciate them. For example, if you run OSX server, you can set it to automatically reconfigure the router based on which services the server is offering. You can also set them up to share drives for Time Machine and advertise services via Bonjour and stuff like that.
They're pretty nice, actually, but not if you're running Linux and just want to be able to configure the damned thing.
the incredibly mediocre Dollhouse managed to get a second season
I've wondered if the reason Dollhouse is getting more of a fair shake is because of Firefly. Maybe someone realized that they might have blown something good in not giving Firefly a chance to catch on, and so they're not being too quick to drop Wheadon's new show?