If not, this it completely and utterly wrong and amounts to socialism.
Of course, this relies on the acceptance of the premise that 'socialism' is 'wrong'... and judging by your ending statement of 'The French have lost a lot of battles, my guess is they'll lose their fight with Apple too.', I can only assume this is more American France-bashing.
How will France lose their battle with Apple? Are Apple going to go to war with France? Of course not - they'll both lose, as Apple will lose revenue and the French government will lose taxes on that revenue. Whatever you think about France's decision here, equating 'socialism' with 'wrongness' is subjective, and cheap shots about French military victories (PML PUT IT IN GOOGLE LOL!) simply cheapen your post further.
You know, it would be nice, just once, for those we entrust with ensuring the country is run for the good of it's people actually worked for the people who vote for them, rather than constantly trying to sneak pieces of legislation into any bill they can in a bid to force it through because it is clearly so unpalatable to everyone else that every time anyone spots it in the wild they beat it to death and chuck it to the kerb?
What must happen before the people we elect realise that when a piece of legislation is slapped down as often as this one has been, that the people don't want it, and that if the people don't want it, it shouldn't be a "tough shit, we'll just try again when you look the other way" thing? (and before you answer, I already know the answer - campaign 'donations' matching those the media companies chuck at them - when did democracy turning into 'the rule of those who can buy the elected rulers the biggest, most expensive lunch'?
Worthless piece of scum? Dude, you realise this is the mother of the 14-year-old suing, and not the 14-year-old?
The 14-year-old in all reality probably consented to whatever went on - maybe it's different across the pond but here in the UK pretty much ever girl, from thirteen and up, wants a 18+ boyfriend with a car and fat wallet - yeah, the guys are wrong for going along with it, but it's hardly 'worthless piece of scum' time - girls of that age are more likely to want a boyfriend of 19 than one of their own age (for the record, my girlfriend is 18, as am I).
If you let someone take you out on a date, and then go back to their place, you are obviously not being forced against your will to do those things - the girl spent many hours talking to this boy, via emails, phone calls, etc, and I'd bet you any money you like 'cybering' of some sort was involved, from both sides - I really doubt this guy sprang this on her after pretending to innocently take her out to dinner and a movie... but hey, one overzealous soccer mom finds out her underage daughter made out with a guy of 19 and it becomes 'sexual assault'. The article mentions a 27-year-old assaulting a 13-year-old, yeah, that guy's a 'worthless piece of scum' as I'm betting he lied about a lot more than one year and it was a lot less consentual, but this? This is just a teenage girl wanting an older boyfriend, her mom finding out and going apeshit, with the nice added bonus that if she keeps going apeshit she might get $30m in her back pocket.
Parents of teen girls: Girls of that age are sexually aware. Most girls that age want a dude with a car. This means that given the oppertunity they will jump their bones. Don't like it? Watch your damn children! If I'd spent hours on the phone to strangers every day my parents would sure as hell know about it, and if I arranged to meet anyone I met on the internet, alone, my mum'd still kick my ass for being so stupid even now.
Hey man, just stay on Slashdot - given the standard of bickering here recently, I'd hazard a guess that around half the UIDs in the 9* range are virgins that just turned 18 - you're spoilt for choice!
Maybe this is the generation gap, but at 28 and having read hundreds of paper novels, I've never once felt the need for any of those while reading.
It's not a generation gap - I'm 18 now and I'm still in love with reading paper novels, for precisely the reasons mentioned elsewhere in this discussion; I enjoy being able to curl up somewhere comfortable, lie how I want, and enjoy a good book. You just can't do that with a 'tablet PC' or a notebook - the former may be easier than the latter, but it's still not a comfortable experience, least of all for the eyes. There is simply something very satisfying of holding a good-sized book in your hand, flipping the pages and letting your eyes relaxedly pass over the print that just cannot be replaced by a brightly-glowing screen, regardless of how great the resolution is - it just feels so abstracted.
Maybe it's because I spend the rest of my day staring at screens be it at work, at college or wherever else I seem to be - I'm a nerd, I spend a lot of time the internet, it simply comes with the territory - and so it's a nice break for my eyes to sit down with a book and spend an hour or two each day, if I can, not straining my eyes staring intently into a screen of some description, but that doesn't explain why my less geeky friends still prefer to indulge in their reading material on paper rather than pixel. I have a bookcase at home with what must be around 400+ books, fact and fiction, from technical manuals and programming guides to Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams right through to Stephen King and James Herbert, and there is not one I would rather read on a screen, tablet PC or not.
I think books are going to be around for a long time to come, simply because of people like me. When I get around to having children at some point in the future, I hope those books I've enjoyed over the years are going to still be there for me to pass my passion for reading onto them; I'm already helping my girlfriend's baby sister learn to read by passing on all the children's books I had and have kept all these years out of nostalgia, as I remember just how fulfilling it is to cultivate a precocious understanding of English and just how much it helps acquire knowledge in other areas, and the relaxed, enjoyable nature of reading just cannot be fully grasped staring into a screen - as I said above, there's something about turning the pages of a good book that is strangely fulfilling in a way that scrolling up and down a.pdf isn't. Of course, another reason I'm passing them on is that I don't like the idea of the generation after me seeing a 'book' as just another file format, but I think that's a view shared by all but the most rabid of technology entheusiasts. The day I can only buy the latest novel by my favourite author (slightly difficult, I know, what with Mr. Adams being very, very dead) on a plastic DRMed tablet is the day I'll truly learn to appreciate my massive back-catalogue of paper books I havent got round to reading yet.
Don't get me wrong, fellow nerds, I love computers, but I love books too.
No, this is like a guy who loans his van out his friends in exchange for a few beers suddenly realising that there's money to be made in setting up a self-drive hire business; they only supply you with the means of distribution, not what you deliver with it.
Please do not assume bittorrent == illegal. Much as the RIAA don't want you to know it, it's the content that counts.
You work for cell phones? Cell phones are your immediate superiors? Wow, that must make the daily grind of productivity meetings a lot more interesting!
Can I get a job with your company? After all, I, for one, welcome our new cell phone overlords...
I'm a straight male of 19 years of age and I can safely say I have never uncontrollably stared at a woman's breasts, in conversation or any other time - unless they're amusingly large or have smiley faces painted on them, really, your breasts aren't that interesting.
The stereotype that all men do nothing but stare at breasts all day is interesting - am I the only one that doesn't?
No-one needs an iPod now. It's wanting one. It's the fashion.
There's MP3-player phones now and the iPod still sells like cold beer on a hot day - why? Marketing. Hype. Fashion.
If Apple can keep that up, they can keep up the iPod sales for years provided they keep coming out with new ideas to put on them so people will keep buying the latest and greatest - for every person who's happy with their Gen-1 original iPod there'll be 2 more who are going to be shelling out £100-£250 every 18 months or less to get the new, updated video-holo-iPod.
Frankly, unless Apple redesign iPods to be three feet wide, only availible puke-green and bundled with a free kick to the face, I can't see Apple's sales dropping off dramatically anytime soon, regardless of what Motorola, Microsoft or anyone else does.
'In the seven-day stretch between Christmas and the new year, millions of consumers armed with new MP3 players (primarily iPods) and stacks of gift cards gobbled up almost 20 million tracks from iTunes and other download retailers' (Emphasis mine)
Bad Nielsen Soundscan! Your fanboyism is showing! Precisely what was the point of mentioning that the MP3 player most bought was the iPod? The one I bought myself certainly wasn't; the one I bought my girlfriend certainly wasnt; who cares? Not everyone is painfully in love with the iPod and it's line of bastard cousins.
I'm used to this sort of Apple/iPod namedropping from the/. hordes, but I don't expect it from so-called professional companies (yeah, yeah, Slashdot is a professional company, OSTG and all that, but this is a news aggregator, it's not supposed to be their speciality to do the sort of reporting Nielsen has done here).
Am I the only one left who can't bear to go one story without some reference to how superior I am to everyone else for having the sense to buy a particular brand of pocket MP3 player? -1, Flamebait, sure, but this is really getting rediculous.
(For the record, I am a happy Mac user on the desktop)
I love the way they have 'Designed by ElipseNetworks' at the bottom of the page, like we're supposed to bow in wonder at those 1337 designers who came up with a centred table filled with text on a white background - oooh, they have red paragraph titles, gotta employ them for our next great website design!
This post designed by One Childish n00b! For all your circa-1990's bog-standard net fare!
This is the male equivalent of camel-toe. I don't think that'd be allowed throughout a 2-hour movie either.
Breasts aren't quite as far down the Religious Right's 'Unacceptability Scale', for some reason - Janetgate notwithstanding.
It's probably to stop the 40,000 anti-Google trolls screaming "in your FACE! Google! Yahoo has feature X and feature Y!", to save us sensible (though not neccessarily Google-loving) people from having to reply to each one pointing out that, in fact, Google does this too. And those with mod points from having to mod them both down to -1, Troll or -1, Offtopic.
Not really a huge victory, because the polluted files are still out there - you'd be surprised how many dumbasses don't delete fake files from their directories, and that means all their pollutants out there for the time they've been operating are still floating around, being downloaded and annoying more people - Kazaa and it's network are likely to remain entirely unusable for a long time thanks to this, and what better division to shut down than one that has done it's job, and creating an almost self-perpetuating state of pollution?
I guess the good thing is that now the jackasses that worked for these people are now unemployed - while I largely disagree with illegal P2P filesharing, I can see that it's a symptom of overpriced and 'evil' cartels and hate the fact that they employ shitheads like this, who's sole buisness is rooted firmly into the 'annoy as many people as we can for fun and profit' business model, rather than realising they'd get far more sales (and thus more profit) if they lowered their damn profit margin on every disc
(then again, they'd also save money if they signed good, existing, unsigned bands instead of manufacturing cookie-cutter Britney pop and having to pay songwriters, etc hundreds of thousands of dollars rather than getting the whole thing in one package by signing up real bands, but I can't see that happening any time soon...)
Ermmm... correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Windows' success based on Window 95/98, which were both buggy POS's (except for 98SE)? The GP poster has a point when you consider Microsoft built up an monopoly on the basis of a bug-ridden often-unstable OS.
(Posted from a Win2000 system with an uptime in the months - I accept you have a point, but Windows' success came *before* the stability of the 2000/XP editions).
Said boy has unlimited access to pictures of men demeaning women, and learns at age 11 to treat women as sexual objects, there for his gratification.
Unless this kid has been watching sado-masochist master-slave bondage hardcore, he hasnt seen anyone degraded - how is a woman degraded by having sex? how is the man less degraded than the woman? You're just going back to the rather medieval belief that women lie back and think about knitting and kittens while men ravish them - *women enjoy sex too*, and if getting paid for sex is exploitation, then the men are being just as exploited as the women - there are no passive performers in porn, the women are there by choice as well; If a girl watched porn (and trust me on this, a lot of them do), are they learning to 'treat men as sexual objects, there for their gratification'?
Please don't start on the 'pornography exploits women' bullshit, it's not true, and if you don't believe me, here's a BBC article about a (female) performer who agrees that if anyone's exploited in porn, it's the buyers.
Whatever your opinion on whether porn degrades or not, claiming one sex is more exploited than the other (unless you were talking about the nasty S&M stuff, but then even that has a *huge* niche of women dominating men) is an entirely unfounded suggestion rooted in the belief that women do not have sexuality or sex drive - if women want to get paid to have sex, and are paid handsomely for doing so on camera, precisely where is the exploitation occurring?
Really, is this guy going for the 'Jerk of the Year' award? Darl McBride must be shaking in his boots.
Personally, I think Amazon have got their arse covered on this one, especially given the legal might they could probably rustle up - from the site (emphasis mine):
"Customers tagged this item with
First tag: lies (6mullet on Nov 17, 2005)
Last tag: Propaganda
The key word, there, Jack, is 'Customers' - not Amazon. That's the opinion of people being posted by people to advise other people what to buy - if it's slander, sue those people, subpoena Amazon.com for the IPs of the people that posted them, but don't sue Amazon, it just makes you look like a dingbat.
Jeez, I've never seen something so childish from someone with the supposed intelligence to become a lawyer - maybe it's different in the UK, but every person in the legal profession I've come across has been intelligent, respectable and level-headed - not someone likely to go off on a sue-fest if someone calls them names, and even if they did, they'd sure aim it at the right target.
As it's customers tagging it, and Amazon point this out, they should be OK - sure, an 'Amazon.com is not responsible for' blah-blah would help matters, but I'm sure that disclaimer that customers did it alone will get them out of any trouble, especially with the army of lawyers far more qualified than Thompson that Amazon's millions could muster - perhaps this could be a chance for Amazon to recoup some good feeling after their recent patent-grabbings; I mean regardless of how you feel about patents and Amazon's behaviour in that field, who wouldn't like to see Thompson get laughed out of court for suing over something that stopped bothering me when I left kiddy school?
I love this site, I love the discussions that the comments generate and I enjoy this community being one of the places (other than IRC) where technically-minded people can come together - hell, even some of the trolls are pretty damn funny, and I'm not usually one to join in the crowd of people screaming 'Dupe!' every time you repost an article from the previous week or day - I don't always get a chance to check/. everyday and so if something gets reposted I often haven't noticed the original and still enjoy reading it, and I don't see why dupes attract so much of the screaming masses to deride you.
However, two on the front page, with only one article seperating them, no less, is utterly rediculous - that'd be like the TV news reporting on the same thing, with the same content, but with a different correspondant - it's not professional, and it'd be pretty poor even for an amateur setup - an analogy would be it's OK for the same announcement to be on two days in a row, but two in the same bulletin is sloppy and unprofessional. It's even below the standard of your average LiveJournal blogger, and it's certainly put a doubt in my mind over my decision to treat myself to a/. subscription for Christmas - while this isn't quite 'you lost yourself a customer', those few beers I'd buy instead of a subscription are now looking that much more tempting...
I'm surprised someone as knowledgeable (or as crazy, depending on your point of view) about these things as Stallman would mix up using aluminium foil - which is almost useless when it comes to these sort of signals - and tin foil, which is somewhat more effective.
Kudos to him for doing this, though, as regardless of what you think about the man, there are still a lot of problems and risks to be ironed out with RFID, not just the privacy concerns that Stallman has, and personally I'd be in two minds about carrying anything that relied on such technology until those issues are resolved - admittedly, though, I'd probably be OK with it for something like this, I'm more concerned about RFID passports and credit cards, given the recent issues (I'm too lazy to look them up on the/. search myself, but they're there if you want to hunt them down, just search for 'RFID')
A Mac speed bump is important as it's something I can get hold of if I want - I can charge off to my local Apple store and splash the cash on the latest shiny speed-demon Apple have released; take the last round of Mac updates mentioned on Slashdot - a lot of designers and photographers had been waiting for those machines to arrive so they could buy them to tide them over until the second or third generation of MacTel machines have been released and all the bugs ironed out, with all their apps ported.
Even the Mini-Mac speed boost and Ubuntu release updates are a story about something tangible to the average person, whereas this is a story about a barely-interesting update to a closed beta which even if I did care about it I couldnt do anything about - unless you're a shareholder, why do you care? This story was posted solely so/. could get in it's daily dose of MS-bashing, and nothing else.
I agree with the grandparent poster - call me back when Vista's released, or at least MS start taking applications for an open beta.
Slashdot Mirror
How will France lose their battle with Apple? Are Apple going to go to war with France? Of course not - they'll both lose, as Apple will lose revenue and the French government will lose taxes on that revenue. Whatever you think about France's decision here, equating 'socialism' with 'wrongness' is subjective, and cheap shots about French military victories (PML PUT IT IN GOOGLE LOL!) simply cheapen your post further.
Other than that, good try, thanks for playing.
The sad thing is that is a far more apt metaphor than you probably realised...
You know, it would be nice, just once, for those we entrust with ensuring the country is run for the good of it's people actually worked for the people who vote for them, rather than constantly trying to sneak pieces of legislation into any bill they can in a bid to force it through because it is clearly so unpalatable to everyone else that every time anyone spots it in the wild they beat it to death and chuck it to the kerb?
What must happen before the people we elect realise that when a piece of legislation is slapped down as often as this one has been, that the people don't want it, and that if the people don't want it, it shouldn't be a "tough shit, we'll just try again when you look the other way" thing? (and before you answer, I already know the answer - campaign 'donations' matching those the media companies chuck at them - when did democracy turning into 'the rule of those who can buy the elected rulers the biggest, most expensive lunch'?
Worthless piece of scum? Dude, you realise this is the mother of the 14-year-old suing, and not the 14-year-old?
The 14-year-old in all reality probably consented to whatever went on - maybe it's different across the pond but here in the UK pretty much ever girl, from thirteen and up, wants a 18+ boyfriend with a car and fat wallet - yeah, the guys are wrong for going along with it, but it's hardly 'worthless piece of scum' time - girls of that age are more likely to want a boyfriend of 19 than one of their own age (for the record, my girlfriend is 18, as am I).
If you let someone take you out on a date, and then go back to their place, you are obviously not being forced against your will to do those things - the girl spent many hours talking to this boy, via emails, phone calls, etc, and I'd bet you any money you like 'cybering' of some sort was involved, from both sides - I really doubt this guy sprang this on her after pretending to innocently take her out to dinner and a movie... but hey, one overzealous soccer mom finds out her underage daughter made out with a guy of 19 and it becomes 'sexual assault'. The article mentions a 27-year-old assaulting a 13-year-old, yeah, that guy's a 'worthless piece of scum' as I'm betting he lied about a lot more than one year and it was a lot less consentual, but this? This is just a teenage girl wanting an older boyfriend, her mom finding out and going apeshit, with the nice added bonus that if she keeps going apeshit she might get $30m in her back pocket.
Parents of teen girls: Girls of that age are sexually aware. Most girls that age want a dude with a car. This means that given the oppertunity they will jump their bones. Don't like it? Watch your damn children! If I'd spent hours on the phone to strangers every day my parents would sure as hell know about it, and if I arranged to meet anyone I met on the internet, alone, my mum'd still kick my ass for being so stupid even now.
Hey man, just stay on Slashdot - given the standard of bickering here recently, I'd hazard a guess that around half the UIDs in the 9* range are virgins that just turned 18 - you're spoilt for choice!
Maybe this is the generation gap, but at 28 and having read hundreds of paper novels, I've never once felt the need for any of those while reading.
.pdf isn't. Of course, another reason I'm passing them on is that I don't like the idea of the generation after me seeing a 'book' as just another file format, but I think that's a view shared by all but the most rabid of technology entheusiasts. The day I can only buy the latest novel by my favourite author (slightly difficult, I know, what with Mr. Adams being very, very dead) on a plastic DRMed tablet is the day I'll truly learn to appreciate my massive back-catalogue of paper books I havent got round to reading yet.
It's not a generation gap - I'm 18 now and I'm still in love with reading paper novels, for precisely the reasons mentioned elsewhere in this discussion; I enjoy being able to curl up somewhere comfortable, lie how I want, and enjoy a good book. You just can't do that with a 'tablet PC' or a notebook - the former may be easier than the latter, but it's still not a comfortable experience, least of all for the eyes. There is simply something very satisfying of holding a good-sized book in your hand, flipping the pages and letting your eyes relaxedly pass over the print that just cannot be replaced by a brightly-glowing screen, regardless of how great the resolution is - it just feels so abstracted.
Maybe it's because I spend the rest of my day staring at screens be it at work, at college or wherever else I seem to be - I'm a nerd, I spend a lot of time the internet, it simply comes with the territory - and so it's a nice break for my eyes to sit down with a book and spend an hour or two each day, if I can, not straining my eyes staring intently into a screen of some description, but that doesn't explain why my less geeky friends still prefer to indulge in their reading material on paper rather than pixel. I have a bookcase at home with what must be around 400+ books, fact and fiction, from technical manuals and programming guides to Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams right through to Stephen King and James Herbert, and there is not one I would rather read on a screen, tablet PC or not.
I think books are going to be around for a long time to come, simply because of people like me. When I get around to having children at some point in the future, I hope those books I've enjoyed over the years are going to still be there for me to pass my passion for reading onto them; I'm already helping my girlfriend's baby sister learn to read by passing on all the children's books I had and have kept all these years out of nostalgia, as I remember just how fulfilling it is to cultivate a precocious understanding of English and just how much it helps acquire knowledge in other areas, and the relaxed, enjoyable nature of reading just cannot be fully grasped staring into a screen - as I said above, there's something about turning the pages of a good book that is strangely fulfilling in a way that scrolling up and down a
Don't get me wrong, fellow nerds, I love computers, but I love books too.
No, this is like a guy who loans his van out his friends in exchange for a few beers suddenly realising that there's money to be made in setting up a self-drive hire business; they only supply you with the means of distribution, not what you deliver with it.
Please do not assume bittorrent == illegal. Much as the RIAA don't want you to know it, it's the content that counts.
I work for cell phones
You work for cell phones? Cell phones are your immediate superiors? Wow, that must make the daily grind of productivity meetings a lot more interesting! Can I get a job with your company? After all, I, for one, welcome our new cell phone overlords...
I'm a straight male of 19 years of age and I can safely say I have never uncontrollably stared at a woman's breasts, in conversation or any other time - unless they're amusingly large or have smiley faces painted on them, really, your breasts aren't that interesting.
The stereotype that all men do nothing but stare at breasts all day is interesting - am I the only one that doesn't?
Ermm... Escstasy == MDMA.
No-one needs an iPod now. It's wanting one. It's the fashion.
There's MP3-player phones now and the iPod still sells like cold beer on a hot day - why? Marketing. Hype. Fashion.
If Apple can keep that up, they can keep up the iPod sales for years provided they keep coming out with new ideas to put on them so people will keep buying the latest and greatest - for every person who's happy with their Gen-1 original iPod there'll be 2 more who are going to be shelling out £100-£250 every 18 months or less to get the new, updated video-holo-iPod.
Frankly, unless Apple redesign iPods to be three feet wide, only availible puke-green and bundled with a free kick to the face, I can't see Apple's sales dropping off dramatically anytime soon, regardless of what Motorola, Microsoft or anyone else does.
Cydoor?
NoooooooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooo!!!
'In the seven-day stretch between Christmas and the new year, millions of consumers armed with new MP3 players (primarily iPods) and stacks of gift cards gobbled up almost 20 million tracks from iTunes and other download retailers' (Emphasis mine)
/. hordes, but I don't expect it from so-called professional companies (yeah, yeah, Slashdot is a professional company, OSTG and all that, but this is a news aggregator, it's not supposed to be their speciality to do the sort of reporting Nielsen has done here).
Bad Nielsen Soundscan! Your fanboyism is showing! Precisely what was the point of mentioning that the MP3 player most bought was the iPod? The one I bought myself certainly wasn't; the one I bought my girlfriend certainly wasnt; who cares? Not everyone is painfully in love with the iPod and it's line of bastard cousins.
I'm used to this sort of Apple/iPod namedropping from the
Am I the only one left who can't bear to go one story without some reference to how superior I am to everyone else for having the sense to buy a particular brand of pocket MP3 player?
-1, Flamebait, sure, but this is really getting rediculous.
(For the record, I am a happy Mac user on the desktop)
I love the way they have 'Designed by ElipseNetworks' at the bottom of the page, like we're supposed to bow in wonder at those 1337 designers who came up with a centred table filled with text on a white background - oooh, they have red paragraph titles, gotta employ them for our next great website design!
This post designed by One Childish n00b! For all your circa-1990's bog-standard net fare!
This is the male equivalent of camel-toe. I don't think that'd be allowed throughout a 2-hour movie either.
Breasts aren't quite as far down the Religious Right's 'Unacceptability Scale', for some reason - Janetgate notwithstanding.
It's probably to stop the 40,000 anti-Google trolls screaming "in your FACE! Google! Yahoo has feature X and feature Y!", to save us sensible (though not neccessarily Google-loving) people from having to reply to each one pointing out that, in fact, Google does this too. And those with mod points from having to mod them both down to -1, Troll or -1, Offtopic.
Not really a huge victory, because the polluted files are still out there - you'd be surprised how many dumbasses don't delete fake files from their directories, and that means all their pollutants out there for the time they've been operating are still floating around, being downloaded and annoying more people - Kazaa and it's network are likely to remain entirely unusable for a long time thanks to this, and what better division to shut down than one that has done it's job, and creating an almost self-perpetuating state of pollution?
I guess the good thing is that now the jackasses that worked for these people are now unemployed - while I largely disagree with illegal P2P filesharing, I can see that it's a symptom of overpriced and 'evil' cartels and hate the fact that they employ shitheads like this, who's sole buisness is rooted firmly into the 'annoy as many people as we can for fun and profit' business model, rather than realising they'd get far more sales (and thus more profit) if they lowered their damn profit margin on every disc
(then again, they'd also save money if they signed good, existing, unsigned bands instead of manufacturing cookie-cutter Britney pop and having to pay songwriters, etc hundreds of thousands of dollars rather than getting the whole thing in one package by signing up real bands, but I can't see that happening any time soon...)
Maybe because it's not so buggy?
Ermmm... correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Windows' success based on Window 95/98, which were both buggy POS's (except for 98SE)? The GP poster has a point when you consider Microsoft built up an monopoly on the basis of a bug-ridden often-unstable OS.
(Posted from a Win2000 system with an uptime in the months - I accept you have a point, but Windows' success came *before* the stability of the 2000/XP editions).
Gazza, is that you?*
*may not be understood by non-Brits
Said boy has unlimited access to pictures of men demeaning women, and learns at age 11 to treat women as sexual objects, there for his gratification.
/feminist_rant
Unless this kid has been watching sado-masochist master-slave bondage hardcore, he hasnt seen anyone degraded - how is a woman degraded by having sex? how is the man less degraded than the woman? You're just going back to the rather medieval belief that women lie back and think about knitting and kittens while men ravish them - *women enjoy sex too*, and if getting paid for sex is exploitation, then the men are being just as exploited as the women - there are no passive performers in porn, the women are there by choice as well; If a girl watched porn (and trust me on this, a lot of them do), are they learning to 'treat men as sexual objects, there for their gratification'?
Please don't start on the 'pornography exploits women' bullshit, it's not true, and if you don't believe me, here's a BBC article about a (female) performer who agrees that if anyone's exploited in porn, it's the buyers.
Whatever your opinion on whether porn degrades or not, claiming one sex is more exploited than the other (unless you were talking about the nasty S&M stuff, but then even that has a *huge* niche of women dominating men) is an entirely unfounded suggestion rooted in the belief that women do not have sexuality or sex drive - if women want to get paid to have sex, and are paid handsomely for doing so on camera, precisely where is the exploitation occurring?
Geeks don't procreate...
they fork.
Personally, I think Amazon have got their arse covered on this one, especially given the legal might they could probably rustle up - from the site (emphasis mine):
The key word, there, Jack, is 'Customers' - not Amazon. That's the opinion of people being posted by people to advise other people what to buy - if it's slander, sue those people, subpoena Amazon.com for the IPs of the people that posted them, but don't sue Amazon, it just makes you look like a dingbat.
Jeez, I've never seen something so childish from someone with the supposed intelligence to become a lawyer - maybe it's different in the UK, but every person in the legal profession I've come across has been intelligent, respectable and level-headed - not someone likely to go off on a sue-fest if someone calls them names, and even if they did, they'd sure aim it at the right target.
As it's customers tagging it, and Amazon point this out, they should be OK - sure, an 'Amazon.com is not responsible for' blah-blah would help matters, but I'm sure that disclaimer that customers did it alone will get them out of any trouble, especially with the army of lawyers far more qualified than Thompson that Amazon's millions could muster - perhaps this could be a chance for Amazon to recoup some good feeling after their recent patent-grabbings; I mean regardless of how you feel about patents and Amazon's behaviour in that field, who wouldn't like to see Thompson get laughed out of court for suing over something that stopped bothering me when I left kiddy school?
Hey, Editors!
/. everyday and so if something gets reposted I often haven't noticed the original and still enjoy reading it, and I don't see why dupes attract so much of the screaming masses to deride you.
/. subscription for Christmas - while this isn't quite 'you lost yourself a customer', those few beers I'd buy instead of a subscription are now looking that much more tempting...
I love this site, I love the discussions that the comments generate and I enjoy this community being one of the places (other than IRC) where technically-minded people can come together - hell, even some of the trolls are pretty damn funny, and I'm not usually one to join in the crowd of people screaming 'Dupe!' every time you repost an article from the previous week or day - I don't always get a chance to check
However, two on the front page, with only one article seperating them, no less, is utterly rediculous - that'd be like the TV news reporting on the same thing, with the same content, but with a different correspondant - it's not professional, and it'd be pretty poor even for an amateur setup - an analogy would be it's OK for the same announcement to be on two days in a row, but two in the same bulletin is sloppy and unprofessional. It's even below the standard of your average LiveJournal blogger, and it's certainly put a doubt in my mind over my decision to treat myself to a
I'm surprised someone as knowledgeable (or as crazy, depending on your point of view) about these things as Stallman would mix up using aluminium foil - which is almost useless when it comes to these sort of signals - and tin foil, which is somewhat more effective.
/. search myself, but they're there if you want to hunt them down, just search for 'RFID')
Kudos to him for doing this, though, as regardless of what you think about the man, there are still a lot of problems and risks to be ironed out with RFID, not just the privacy concerns that Stallman has, and personally I'd be in two minds about carrying anything that relied on such technology until those issues are resolved - admittedly, though, I'd probably be OK with it for something like this, I'm more concerned about RFID passports and credit cards, given the recent issues (I'm too lazy to look them up on the
A Mac speed bump is important as it's something I can get hold of if I want - I can charge off to my local Apple store and splash the cash on the latest shiny speed-demon Apple have released; take the last round of Mac updates mentioned on Slashdot - a lot of designers and photographers had been waiting for those machines to arrive so they could buy them to tide them over until the second or third generation of MacTel machines have been released and all the bugs ironed out, with all their apps ported.
/. could get in it's daily dose of MS-bashing, and nothing else.
Even the Mini-Mac speed boost and Ubuntu release updates are a story about something tangible to the average person, whereas this is a story about a barely-interesting update to a closed beta which even if I did care about it I couldnt do anything about - unless you're a shareholder, why do you care? This story was posted solely so
I agree with the grandparent poster - call me back when Vista's released, or at least MS start taking applications for an open beta.