Ebay would like to be very much like Kazaa and Napster in their arguments of "they're using the software we provide, but we can't be responsible for what they do with it."
However unlike Kazaa and the service formerly known as Napster, they charge money for every transaction going on under their noses, thus rather ruining their argument.
To break out the metaphors;
If i own a nightclub, and charge people for admittance, and some of those people sell drugs and stolen goods, I have the defence that i didn't know they were doing that sort of thing on my property, they were supposed just to be coming to dance.
If however I'm taking a payback on every drug deal and dodgy sale, my defence of ignorance is shot to hell!
Over here in the UK the mobile phone company orange runs movie ads in cinemas.
The basic plot of which is a bunch of marketing types from orange proceed to ruin a movie, with product placement, ringtone tie-ins and general marketing bollocks.
The punch line being "don't let a mobile ruin your movie"; A public service announcement to turn off mobile phones in the cinemas.
Although these are satirical ads, you just know that the writers are basing the marketing droids on real people/events.
Most people who when they see great art get a touch of enlightenment, a few weasles however want to use it as a method of selling you stuff!
Is it just me that hears this to the tune of "the old gray mare" as sung by the old man in the simpsons
poohneat the land of the free, aint wat it used to be aint wat it used be. aint wat it used to be. announcer and now, the poohneat dancers! poohneat the land of the free, aint wat it used to be aint wat it used be. aint wat it used to be.
The format is actually used as one of the games (Cheddar Gorge) on Radio 4 's I'm sorry I haven't a clue, although to make it a bit more challenging the team get alternate words not paragraphs.
Players must provide one word each in turn which added to the previous submissions makes up a coherent sentence - challenging enough, you might think, but the aim of the game is never to utter a word which might be construed as actually finishing the sentence. They usually produce perfectly plausible constructs, the funniest bits occuring when one side attempts to back the other over a stretched metaphorical cliff.
For more information on I haven't a clue i would recommend the h2g2 guide's entry. Radio 4 is of course one of the last places that great english game mornington crescent is still played.
...and who exactly would it be deciding what is absolute WRONG and absolute RIGHT ? would that be you or me? and who exactly will be enforcing good behaviour?
moral relativism is the only logical choice unless you feel comfortable enforcing your moral code on the rest of the world. ( oh and if you do feel comfortable enforcing your moral code on everyone else... go look up hubris in the dictionary!)
no not that goblin, i've been a goblin of one form or the other on the net for 15yrs now, and am glad i took the safety in numbers approach to online identity. there are just too many needles in the goblin haystack, to identify which ones are me now.
edinburgh... you think a city that is the most radioactive in europe is somehow greatest? this a measure of culture and history you know... not how quickly it can mutate the local inhabitants into mekons!
I take your ethical point, and i agree that if the "corruption" is of the level of the big bad corporates, enron et al, then yes its not a thing to aspire too.
however, (and i admit this is purely my preconceptions based on other information regarding hooke, so may well be bollocks) i see hooke's actions more as recognising a business opportunity and making cash from it. I am not aware he made any out and out fraudulant claims, or unfairly penalised non-bribing honest claimants (he may well have done, i don't know) i see it more as being there to get the gravy that greases the wheels.
I think the distinction I am trying to make is the one between a rogue and an out an out villian. rogues might be a bit dodgy, but love them for their cleverness, villians we dislike because they are bad, and cruel.
another way of putting it is that rogues think out of the legal box, villians just break the law.
you may want to check out things like this blue angel, it's currently only running windows pocketPC, but i have one from t-mobile (they call it an MDA) and its the best phone i've ever had. has wif-fi capabilities, terminal services etc... now i would rather some command line tools, but to be honest i haven't bothered digging around that much, so they may be available on the web.
like you i really hated having to lug two things around all the time, this is a pretty good fusion of the two, and presumably it can only get better...
thanks, i have read a couple of Stephenson's book, he has a nice range to him, and i like his style... i shall add barock cycle to my booklist.
to return the favour, i can recommend the biography of london, by peter ackroyd... his novels are usually very atmospheric and rich in historical flotsam, but he often loses the plot for the sake of cleverness. The Biography on the other hand, is him playing to his strength, it is just a wealth of information about london, from a whole host of historical perspectives. From secret histories of stones and buildings, to the sounds of the city. A excellent lexicon of slang too; what was "a punchable nun" for example?.... it was slang for prostitute. facinating details on all the stuff that you were never taught in school by a bloke who's passionate about the greatest city in the world.
strangely enough i just had a sucessful job interview where they asked me how i would solve the problam of not knowing a dynamic ip address for connecting to a remote machine.
i speced down a couple of approaches.
after the interview, i asked how they had solved the problem, and they showed me dynDNS, essentially the same method i had come up with. which was reassuring, because at the time i was thinking this is such an ugly kludge, this is such an ugly kludge...it was nice to know that yes it may be ugly, but its the best we can come up with.
not personal finance-wise, but that's because I'm just starting out.
sadly though mate you are going to spend the rest of your life trying to pay for the debts incurred by those poor baby boomers, they are all getting older and older, and living much longer than any other generation... and guess who has to foot the bill? enjoy your i-pod, but don't plan on ever being able to retire!
off topic, but i'm now thinking of the Golgafrincham B Ark, who have all become fabulously wealthy thanks to the adoption of the leaf as currency... obviously a major project of deforestation may be necessary in order to control inflation!
Like the old saying goes... "If I've seen farther than others, it's because I've stood on the shoulders of giants."
It's actually a quote from Issac Newton...
now if you know anything about the real Issac Newton this quote seems remarkably out of character, the rest of his career he was an insufferable arrogant bastard (probably made even worse by being right a lot of the time) but he was never one to thank others for their contributions to his work... just look at calculus...
but if Newton disliked Leibniz he hated Robert Hooke (you remember hooke's law for springs?) with a passion. (Hooke had demonstrated flaws in newtons theory of light)... hooke also had ideas about and inverse square law for gravity nearly 10 yrs before newton, but lacked the maths to prove it.
Hooke was also very very short, so newtons reference to standing on the shoulder's of giants was not some magnanimous gesture on his part, but rather an act of sarcastic bile directed at hooke.
after hookes death, when newton was president of the royal society, newton systematically removed as much of hookes work as he could from the records, which is why now most people can only remember the thing about springs if he's lucky.
Its a great shame really, because by all accounts Hooke was the much more interesting person.
his book micrographia was the first "best seller" the coffe table book of its day, everyone had to have one, the first time the microscopic world was made available to the masses.
He was very fond of attractive young women, having scandalous affairs and 3 in bed sex romps with his house keepers until late in his life.
he made a small fortune after the fire of london, being good mates with wren, as he was london surveyor. Basically he was the one that went round to assess peoples compensation claims regarding the amount of land they lost, and obviously the more money you gave the surveyor the more likely he was to agree with your definitions of your land boundry.
oh yeah did i mention he and wren designed the royal observatory at greenwich?
ultimately hooke was the cool scientist a lot of us would like to be, and newton was the insufferable wanker a lot of us wind up being...
Why would a casual movie watcher pay $8.50 to see one movie a month in the theater?
$8.50 for just two hours of entertainment makes no sense at all.
which is why i tend to wait a while and buy the dvd for only twice the price of a movie ticket (which i'd have to pay anyway, as i'd be going to the movies with my wife)
I suggest you find out a little bit more about your hero Newton and what a closed minded arrogant wanker he actually was.
For reference you may want to look at his contempories Leibniz and Hook, and you may also want to repeat his prism experiment and see how many colours you can count (the answer is 5, he rejected it in favour of 7 because 7 was a more mystical number). Oh and don't get me started about Newton and the impossibility of meteorites!
As for finding QM interesting, he would have found it an abhorent blasphemy and done everything in his not inconsiderable power as president of the Royal Society to discredit anyone who esposed such ideas
Slashdot Mirror
However unlike Kazaa and the service formerly known as Napster, they charge money for every transaction going on under their noses, thus rather ruining their argument.
To break out the metaphors;
If i own a nightclub, and charge people for admittance, and some of those people sell drugs and stolen goods, I have the defence that i didn't know they were doing that sort of thing on my property, they were supposed just to be coming to dance.
If however I'm taking a payback on every drug deal and dodgy sale, my defence of ignorance is shot to hell!
You keep using that word... i do not think it means what you think it means...
Over here in the UK the mobile phone company orange runs movie ads in cinemas.
The basic plot of which is a bunch of marketing types from orange proceed to ruin a movie, with product placement, ringtone tie-ins and general marketing bollocks.
The punch line being "don't let a mobile ruin your movie"; A public service announcement to turn off mobile phones in the cinemas.
Although these are satirical ads, you just know that the writers are basing the marketing droids on real people/events.
Most people who when they see great art get a touch of enlightenment, a few weasles however want to use it as a method of selling you stuff!
pearls before swine.. pearls before swine.
Is it just me that hears this to the tune of "the old gray mare" as sung by the old man in the simpsons
poohneat the land of the free, aint wat it used to be aint wat it used be. aint wat it used to be.
announcer and now, the poohneat dancers!
poohneat the land of the free, aint wat it used to be aint wat it used be. aint wat it used to be.
The format is actually used as one of the games (Cheddar Gorge) on Radio 4 's I'm sorry I haven't a clue, although to make it a bit more challenging the team get alternate words not paragraphs.
Players must provide one word each in turn which added to the previous submissions makes up a coherent sentence - challenging enough, you might think, but the aim of the game is never to utter a word which might be construed as actually finishing the sentence. They usually produce perfectly plausible constructs, the funniest bits occuring when one side attempts to back the other over a stretched metaphorical cliff.
For more information on I haven't a clue i would recommend the h2g2 guide's entry. Radio 4 is of course one of the last places that great english game mornington crescent is still played.
am i the only one that gets a mental image of a giant mousetrap with porn in place of cheese?
...and who exactly would it be deciding what is absolute WRONG and absolute RIGHT ? would that be you or me? and who exactly will be enforcing good behaviour?
moral relativism is the only logical choice unless you feel comfortable enforcing your moral code on the rest of the world. ( oh and if you do feel comfortable enforcing your moral code on everyone else... go look up hubris in the dictionary!)
yeah... basically we are stuffed unless we can get the generation under us to start footing the bill for granny and grandad.
bring back child labor that what i say... i'm sure we can find some chimneys to stuff em up!
no not that goblin, i've been a goblin of one form or the other on the net for 15yrs now, and am glad i took the safety in numbers approach to online identity. there are just too many needles in the goblin haystack, to identify which ones are me now.
edinburgh... you think a city that is the most radioactive in europe is somehow greatest? this a measure of culture and history you know... not how quickly it can mutate the local inhabitants into mekons!
I take your ethical point, and i agree that if the "corruption" is of the level of the big bad corporates, enron et al, then yes its not a thing to aspire too.
however, (and i admit this is purely my preconceptions based on other information regarding hooke, so may well be bollocks) i see hooke's actions more as recognising a business opportunity and making cash from it. I am not aware he made any out and out fraudulant claims, or unfairly penalised non-bribing honest claimants (he may well have done, i don't know) i see it more as being there to get the gravy that greases the wheels.
I think the distinction I am trying to make is the one between a rogue and an out an out villian. rogues might be a bit dodgy, but love them for their cleverness, villians we dislike because they are bad, and cruel.
another way of putting it is that rogues think out of the legal box, villians just break the law.
just saw your comment as i was meta moddding.
you may want to check out things like this blue angel, it's currently only running windows pocketPC, but i have one from t-mobile (they call it an MDA) and its the best phone i've ever had. has wif-fi capabilities, terminal services etc... now i would rather some command line tools, but to be honest i haven't bothered digging around that much, so they may be available on the web.
like you i really hated having to lug two things around all the time, this is a pretty good fusion of the two, and presumably it can only get better...
thanks, i have read a couple of Stephenson's book, he has a nice range to him, and i like his style... i shall add barock cycle to my booklist.
to return the favour, i can recommend the biography of london, by peter ackroyd... his novels are usually very atmospheric and rich in historical flotsam, but he often loses the plot for the sake of cleverness. The Biography on the other hand, is him playing to his strength, it is just a wealth of information about london, from a whole host of historical perspectives. From secret histories of stones and buildings, to the sounds of the city. A excellent lexicon of slang too; what was "a punchable nun" for example?.... it was slang for prostitute. facinating details on all the stuff that you were never taught in school by a bloke who's passionate about the greatest city in the world.
strangely enough i just had a sucessful job interview where they asked me how i would solve the problam of not knowing a dynamic ip address for connecting to a remote machine.
i speced down a couple of approaches.
after the interview, i asked how they had solved the problem, and they showed me dynDNS, essentially the same method i had come up with. which was reassuring, because at the time i was thinking this is such an ugly kludge, this is such an ugly kludge...it was nice to know that yes it may be ugly, but its the best we can come up with.
dumbshit, it was uncyclopedia.org not wikipedia
you see this just demonstrates the futility of wiki when random people can just change log in and change the domain name as and when they feel like!
not personal finance-wise, but that's because I'm just starting out.
sadly though mate you are going to spend the rest of your life trying to pay for the debts incurred by those poor baby boomers, they are all getting older and older, and living much longer than any other generation... and guess who has to foot the bill? enjoy your i-pod, but don't plan on ever being able to retire!
off topic, but i'm now thinking of the Golgafrincham B Ark, who have all become fabulously wealthy thanks to the adoption of the leaf as currency... obviously a major project of deforestation may be necessary in order to control inflation!
Like the old saying goes... "If I've seen farther than others, it's because I've stood on the shoulders of giants."
It's actually a quote from Issac Newton...
now if you know anything about the real Issac Newton this quote seems remarkably out of character, the rest of his career he was an insufferable arrogant bastard (probably made even worse by being right a lot of the time) but he was never one to thank others for their contributions to his work... just look at calculus...
but if Newton disliked Leibniz he hated Robert Hooke (you remember hooke's law for springs?) with a passion. (Hooke had demonstrated flaws in newtons theory of light)... hooke also had ideas about and inverse square law for gravity nearly 10 yrs before newton, but lacked the maths to prove it.
Hooke was also very very short, so newtons reference to standing on the shoulder's of giants was not some magnanimous gesture on his part, but rather an act of sarcastic bile directed at hooke.
after hookes death, when newton was president of the royal society, newton systematically removed as much of hookes work as he could from the records, which is why now most people can only remember the thing about springs if he's lucky.
Its a great shame really, because by all accounts Hooke was the much more interesting person.
his book micrographia was the first "best seller" the coffe table book of its day, everyone had to have one, the first time the microscopic world was made available to the masses.
He was very fond of attractive young women, having scandalous affairs and 3 in bed sex romps with his house keepers until late in his life.
he made a small fortune after the fire of london, being good mates with wren, as he was london surveyor. Basically he was the one that went round to assess peoples compensation claims regarding the amount of land they lost, and obviously the more money you gave the surveyor the more likely he was to agree with your definitions of your land boundry.
oh yeah did i mention he and wren designed the royal observatory at greenwich?
ultimately hooke was the cool scientist a lot of us would like to be, and newton was the insufferable wanker a lot of us wind up being...
I don't want a dog to admin my server :)
are you sure? he's cheap and very very loyal... and he only peed on the UPS that once!
I use "Unreliable Linux" all the time it may not be the best but it's free... how many other distros can say that eh, mr clever clogs?
don't be ridiculous...
"the chances of anything coming from mars are a miliion to one", he said
Hey, Slashdot! Check out zombie_goat_bukkake_porn.avi.torrent!
is that with brown goats or grey goats? I hate the ones with grey goats!
Bomb THEM? THEM who? If you knew who THEM was, you could arrest THEM ahead of time.
ah that would be everyone who isn't US, you know those funny looking people not from our tribe, we should hit them with big rock!
Why would a casual movie watcher pay $8.50 to see one movie a month in the theater? $8.50 for just two hours of entertainment makes no sense at all.
which is why i tend to wait a while and buy the dvd for only twice the price of a movie ticket (which i'd have to pay anyway, as i'd be going to the movies with my wife)
I suggest you find out a little bit more about your hero Newton and what a closed minded arrogant wanker he actually was.
For reference you may want to look at his contempories Leibniz and Hook, and you may also want to repeat his prism experiment and see how many colours you can count (the answer is 5, he rejected it in favour of 7 because 7 was a more mystical number). Oh and don't get me started about Newton and the impossibility of meteorites!
As for finding QM interesting, he would have found it an abhorent blasphemy and done everything in his not inconsiderable power as president of the Royal Society to discredit anyone who esposed such ideas