their annual UK TURNOVER in 2005 was only £21.7m. This judgement effectively means that the high court wants them to hand over at least 5 years UK profits. It would be a damn-sight cheaper for CD-Wow to just pull out of the British market. Also, it's clear that the BPI's plan here was to get such unreasonably large damages that CD-Wow has to hike its prices right up around the world to cover the cost of paying them, thus destroying their business of selling CDs cheap. UK customers already pay a £2 surcharge at CD-Wow to cover the cost of sourcing CD's in the EU, now the high court has deigned to make consumers the world over pay a surcharge to give pure profit to a few already wealthy corporations. So, either the company goes under, or they stop trading in the UK, or they massively hike the prices. Either way it's bad for many UK consumers. Well done the high court, always looking out for the majority of people in society!
Hopefully the EU will strike this effective tariff-imposing down - people may lambast them, but the EU seems to be the only thing protecting us from the jokers in Westminster who make laws to benefit corporate interests over those of consumers.
I'm going to pop back up with this link again. The first 6-12 months of this case had nothing to do with the truth and mostly revolved around the plaintiff trying to bamboozle the defendant into slipping up with some paperwork so they could apply for summary judgement on a technicality (even going as far as to apply for summary judgement because, although the defendant had replied to and opposed various plaintiff motions, had not replied to the original complaint within 6 weeks or whatever) and getting injunctions, without the defendant knowing about them, (which had no relation to the actual case other than to try and strangle the defendant's trying to get support from the world at large) and which came into force so soon that the defendant (living a few 1000 miles away) hadn't actually received the documents by the day that the injunction was to come into force.
You want to try and fight a case against those kinds of tactics?
Courts have as much to do with the truth as pheasant hunting has with protecting worms from pheasants.
OO.o? The GIMP? I'm currently sitting on my Windows installation and I have zero pieces of software (other than games) that I've had to pay for. If you have to use MS Office for whatever reason then you can't make the saving on the OS in the first place! But a computer with Windows can, from a productivity perspective, do everything a linux computer can do for the same price. Hello Cygwin! Heck, the Windows computer can do more - it can crash too!
Here is a more extensive list of free software that will allow you to do most of the stuff you can do on linux (and which linux software it replaces if applicable):
OO.o
The GIMP
7-zip - ark
notepad++ - kate
Filezilla
VLC - Xine
thunderbird - Kmail
trillian/gaim - kopete
AVG free edition
Zonealarm
Ad-aware
Blender
Azureus - ktorrent
Firefox - konq/firefox
MikTeX
Now, I'm no MS fanboy, but to try and claim that you can't do Foo on Windows for free that you can do on Linux is laughable. Yes, not all the software is exactly equivalent and some of it is clunkier on one OS or the other, but the only piece of software that I can think of off the top of my head that isn't available for windows is my periodic table software - why can be substituted with using wikipedia. Yes, that's more clunky, but what do you get in return? Drivers that work and the option to buy other, more specialised, software.
who's not seeing these products for sale at dell.com ? Also, as someone else has mentioned, a measly $50 saving is pretty worthless unless you're trying to cram the price right down. I which case you'll be buying the cheapest computer. Which they're not offering Ubuntu on; clever.
with MS equation editor becoming passable, journals that will mark your work up for you and quasi-wysiwyg TeX editors, people who 'do' LaTeX are hard to come by. (Afaik, I was the only person out of ~60 in my year (of physicists) who typed their project report up in LaTeX as plain LaTeX markup. About 4 other people used an editor. Everyone else used word.) Or maybe it's just that the students in my department are lazy and take little pride in the presentation of their work.
We have private companies that do that here (often running up bills of up to £500). The scottish courts smacked them down as extortion. Hopefully the same will happen soon in England/Wales.
Want to solve the graffitti problem? It is very very easy, graffitti should have a heavy punishment, not a measly £80.
Here in Emerald City if do graffitti, they execute you on the spot. Add on the cost of execution and the embarrasment of it all and things become very harsh.
The fact that it works doesn't justify it being disproportionate.
Trying to force people to get along by fining them if they do things that other people don't like is the very worst kind of antisocial behaviour.
You don't honestly think that giving someone total costs of around £1000 for parking illegally is a good thing (between the actual fine, towing, storage, release fee and whatever lost earnings as a result of not having their car). Tell me, in Switzerland's low gun crime rate, what percentage is your equivalent of traffic wardens finding themselves on the sharp end of some 'citizen justice' with an assault rifle?
I thought I was going to be running out of steam, and was even beginning to realise that 1) we agreed on quite a lot and 2) I was beginning to come around to your position. But... "Hitler technically never physically did anything. He just spoke....very very well." Godwin! hooray! I win!
So thinking about an ideal situation is bad if we don't already find ourselves in that ideal situation?
I never said that it didn't harm 'society' nor did I say that it should be done, I just said that trying to make direct and immediate consequences for someone who is not directly doing actual harm to another is a bad idea. (Ok, that's not what I said, it's what I implied, or at least hope that I implied.)
Back to your professors example - the ability to ask of a professor their reasons for giving a particular grade is necessary. If pushy parents are abusing this to get fair grades changed by bullying administrators then the problem is spineless administrators. The bad thing is the grade actually getting changed and the responsibility for that lies with the person who changed the grade. Do you still want to bang on about the policy of allowing grades to be questioned having consequences, or even the pushy parents on the 'phone having consequences? Did either of those things actually change the grade? No. Therefore, the changing of the grade is not a consequence of those things. It may be a reaction, but it's not a consequence.
"Words count, things cascade and snowball, an ignored kid can be pushed over the edge" And when the kid goes over the edge. Is that an action by the kid of a consequence of whatever pushed them over the edge. Is whatever the kid does effectively the same as if the person who pushed them over the edge did it themselves? If it's a consequence, we shouldn't hold the kid responsible for their actions. If a kid is bullied and eventually goes on a killing spree, should we hold the kid or the bully responsible to the tune of a murder charge?
"Things have consequence you look at someone wrong and they may kill you later" And that's ok is it? my point was that a 'consequence' for an action that doesn't physically do anything is a made up consequence. In this case the made up consequence is death. Why should one person's made up consequence be any better than another's?
"punish the first offender harshly and the rest will fall in line" Enjoy your selective enforcement. There'll be 100 jaywalking tickets at your door in the morning. Your neighbours will be getting 1 each. Hope that scares the people in the next street into using crossings. Hey, the law allows it. Enjoy your justice.
I said questioned, not changed for flimsy reasons related to the fact that the students parent is a very generous member of the college alumni. Firstly, professors should be willing to justify the grades they give. Secondly, they shouldn't object to having to do so. Thirdly, is there is a valid reason and the academic office is changing the grade anyway, then your problem is the academic office, not being able to hold the professor accountable.
Accountability. Giving an account. Explaining your actions. To that definition, I have no problem with college professors being held acountable. That doesn't mean that they have to change the grades if someone asks and they can actually give a valid reason why the grade is so low.
The point with your going on about consequences is that mocking the teacher DOESN'T have consequences in the same way that firing a gun into a corwd has consequences. The only consequences of mocking the teacher are ones MADE UP BY THE TEACHER.
you have pretty much absolute power over subbordinates. Do you have absolute power over students?
Here's an example. Should teachers have the tools to make kids shut up and sit down and stop throwing paper so they can learn? Yes. Should teachers have the power to arbitrarilly make students swap desks (say) at the teachers whim without there being some good reason (such as seperating disruptive pupils)? No.
Todays lesson is not relevant. If I sit on a sled on some ice and throw a weight off, I move; Newtons third law and all that. What you're talking about is an attempt to replicate that in the world of abstract actions and it comes across as being arbitrary. Which it is.
Free speech with consequences isn't free speech. Ref: shouting 'fire' in a theatre. (person shouting 'fire' gets consequences, we accept that in this situation person did not have free speech)
You assume in calling something insubbordinate that a school pupil is subbordinate to a teacher. I'm not sure how you come to this conclusion, but it's wrong. Teachers teach and maintain enough control as necessary to enable the former. This does not make the children their subbordinates. Do teachers issue orders or instructions in your world?
Perhaps your college professor friends might like to have a look at their own attitude to accountability if they don't like having their grades questioned.
Incorrect. Play again. The same circumstances warrant the same punishment. 'making an example' out of the first person to do it and then lightening off all the subsequent offenders (or hitting the 10th person particularly hard to show that 'enough is enough', or whatever) is the definition of arbitrary punishment and it's bad bad bad. Punishing one person harshly and everyone else lightly is no better than selective enforcement and I'd be interested to see someone argue in favour of deliberate selective enforcement.
so it ceases to be disproportionate punishment if he THEN exercises his first ammendment right to post it on youtube? How can you compound an 'illegal' act by commiting a further 'legal' act?
Isn't dancing for the purposes of humiliating the teacher free expression anyway?
the school district is desperately backpeddling to find a good reason why they should be able to sue over a youtube clip. Even IF their given reason for the suspension is legitimate (which it isn't) 40 days is utterly disproportionate. 40 days is 8 school weeks which is over half a term. Even a ONE DAY suspension for getting up and dancing behind the teacher's back is disproportionate.
erm, well, yeah, if you can't earn money, you don't pay tax. If, when you do earn money, your employer can't record it properly because you exist illegally, you don't pay tax. This leaves two options: illegal immigrants not allowed to earn or illegal immigrants need to be unillegalised if they're earning. Seeing as, in order to eat, they need to work, the ONLY available (humane) option (if you want to collect taxes, which governments do) is to let them work.
If someone is earning and contributing to society, why would you NOT want them to work and continue to do so?
The United States is NOT short of space - there's no good reason why people who will contribute to society should not be allowed to immigrate and do so.
Re:How many people have the computing power ...
on
A Mighty Number Falls
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
governments. Who, incidentally, are the prime targets for using encryption against.
"Pardo also suggested that Warcraft III might have been a more forgiving game for beginners--differences in skill levels seemed less pronounced in that game. The VP said that in Starcraft II, there will be many more nuances that will separate highly skilled players from beginners, and good players from great ones"
So it's going to be crap online then? People don't like getting beaten. They partcicularly don't like getting beaten outright by players who, in the grand scheme of things, are only slightly better than themselves. Trying to make that happen more will just make multiplayer starcraft rubbish. Here's hoping they do a map editor to rival War3's, we can then have enjoyable custom maps at least.
What kind of library has £9000 to spend on a single piece of computer hardware? It'd be substantially cheaper to buy a computer and four of those 1 TB hardisks that were mentioned yesterday, and they'd be rewritable!
Or they could spent the £9000 on, y'know, say... books.
a compromise is where you both agree and both go away happy (or at least satisfied that you've got the best possible outcome for you), an arbitrary decision is when someone else tries to make a compromise and both sides go away unhappy - that's why it's often called arbitration.
The courts are a bad case for any conflict - they're expensive, unpredictable, arbitrary and usually produce an outcome not satisfactory to either side.
it'll never be secure by default - so long as every computer (or 90%+) is set up in the same way then nefarious types *will* find a way around whatever security you put in (for instance, if you leave every port closed; then as soon as something gets in through a new website script, an email, a floppy disk or whatever, it can open the ports or trick the user into doing it for them).
The only way to beat malware is to keep on top of it with regular updates and constant vigilance. I think we've already accepted the fact that getting the majority of end users to do constant vigilance is probably a lost cause. The best bet is going to be ISP install disks which install AVG, spybot, ad-aware & zonealarm (for instance) by default with seamless auto-updates on by default. BUT that will eventually suffer the same problems as trying to make it secure out of the box. The only real defence is to ensure substantial variety in the protective methods used throughout the web-using population - thus splitting up attack development effort amongst different systems and ensuring reduced numbers of users vulnerable to any one attack.
Slashdot Mirror
their annual UK TURNOVER in 2005 was only £21.7m. This judgement effectively means that the high court wants them to hand over at least 5 years UK profits. It would be a damn-sight cheaper for CD-Wow to just pull out of the British market. Also, it's clear that the BPI's plan here was to get such unreasonably large damages that CD-Wow has to hike its prices right up around the world to cover the cost of paying them, thus destroying their business of selling CDs cheap. UK customers already pay a £2 surcharge at CD-Wow to cover the cost of sourcing CD's in the EU, now the high court has deigned to make consumers the world over pay a surcharge to give pure profit to a few already wealthy corporations. So, either the company goes under, or they stop trading in the UK, or they massively hike the prices. Either way it's bad for many UK consumers. Well done the high court, always looking out for the majority of people in society!
Hopefully the EU will strike this effective tariff-imposing down - people may lambast them, but the EU seems to be the only thing protecting us from the jokers in Westminster who make laws to benefit corporate interests over those of consumers.
I'm going to pop back up with this link again. The first 6-12 months of this case had nothing to do with the truth and mostly revolved around the plaintiff trying to bamboozle the defendant into slipping up with some paperwork so they could apply for summary judgement on a technicality (even going as far as to apply for summary judgement because, although the defendant had replied to and opposed various plaintiff motions, had not replied to the original complaint within 6 weeks or whatever) and getting injunctions, without the defendant knowing about them, (which had no relation to the actual case other than to try and strangle the defendant's trying to get support from the world at large) and which came into force so soon that the defendant (living a few 1000 miles away) hadn't actually received the documents by the day that the injunction was to come into force.
You want to try and fight a case against those kinds of tactics?
Courts have as much to do with the truth as pheasant hunting has with protecting worms from pheasants.
Here is a more extensive list of free software that will allow you to do most of the stuff you can do on linux (and which linux software it replaces if applicable):
Now, I'm no MS fanboy, but to try and claim that you can't do Foo on Windows for free that you can do on Linux is laughable. Yes, not all the software is exactly equivalent and some of it is clunkier on one OS or the other, but the only piece of software that I can think of off the top of my head that isn't available for windows is my periodic table software - why can be substituted with using wikipedia. Yes, that's more clunky, but what do you get in return? Drivers that work and the option to buy other, more specialised, software.
who's not seeing these products for sale at dell.com ? Also, as someone else has mentioned, a measly $50 saving is pretty worthless unless you're trying to cram the price right down. I which case you'll be buying the cheapest computer. Which they're not offering Ubuntu on; clever.
with MS equation editor becoming passable, journals that will mark your work up for you and quasi-wysiwyg TeX editors, people who 'do' LaTeX are hard to come by. (Afaik, I was the only person out of ~60 in my year (of physicists) who typed their project report up in LaTeX as plain LaTeX markup. About 4 other people used an editor. Everyone else used word.) Or maybe it's just that the students in my department are lazy and take little pride in the presentation of their work.
The content of the sentence isn't important. You said 'Hitler' first, so I win by default.
We have private companies that do that here (often running up bills of up to £500). The scottish courts smacked them down as extortion. Hopefully the same will happen soon in England/Wales.
Want to solve the graffitti problem? It is very very easy, graffitti should have a heavy punishment, not a measly £80. Here in Emerald City if do graffitti, they execute you on the spot. Add on the cost of execution and the embarrasment of it all and things become very harsh.
The fact that it works doesn't justify it being disproportionate.
Trying to force people to get along by fining them if they do things that other people don't like is the very worst kind of antisocial behaviour.
You don't honestly think that giving someone total costs of around £1000 for parking illegally is a good thing (between the actual fine, towing, storage, release fee and whatever lost earnings as a result of not having their car). Tell me, in Switzerland's low gun crime rate, what percentage is your equivalent of traffic wardens finding themselves on the sharp end of some 'citizen justice' with an assault rifle?
I thought I was going to be running out of steam, and was even beginning to realise that 1) we agreed on quite a lot and 2) I was beginning to come around to your position. But... "Hitler technically never physically did anything. He just spoke....very very well." Godwin! hooray! I win!
Having the technology. Now. And no major competition with an already mature product.
So thinking about an ideal situation is bad if we don't already find ourselves in that ideal situation?
I never said that it didn't harm 'society' nor did I say that it should be done, I just said that trying to make direct and immediate consequences for someone who is not directly doing actual harm to another is a bad idea. (Ok, that's not what I said, it's what I implied, or at least hope that I implied.)
Back to your professors example - the ability to ask of a professor their reasons for giving a particular grade is necessary. If pushy parents are abusing this to get fair grades changed by bullying administrators then the problem is spineless administrators. The bad thing is the grade actually getting changed and the responsibility for that lies with the person who changed the grade. Do you still want to bang on about the policy of allowing grades to be questioned having consequences, or even the pushy parents on the 'phone having consequences? Did either of those things actually change the grade? No. Therefore, the changing of the grade is not a consequence of those things. It may be a reaction, but it's not a consequence.
"Words count, things cascade and snowball, an ignored kid can be pushed over the edge"
And when the kid goes over the edge. Is that an action by the kid of a consequence of whatever pushed them over the edge. Is whatever the kid does effectively the same as if the person who pushed them over the edge did it themselves? If it's a consequence, we shouldn't hold the kid responsible for their actions. If a kid is bullied and eventually goes on a killing spree, should we hold the kid or the bully responsible to the tune of a murder charge?
"Things have consequence you look at someone wrong and they may kill you later"
And that's ok is it? my point was that a 'consequence' for an action that doesn't physically do anything is a made up consequence. In this case the made up consequence is death. Why should one person's made up consequence be any better than another's?
"punish the first offender harshly and the rest will fall in line"
Enjoy your selective enforcement. There'll be 100 jaywalking tickets at your door in the morning. Your neighbours will be getting 1 each. Hope that scares the people in the next street into using crossings. Hey, the law allows it. Enjoy your justice.
I said questioned, not changed for flimsy reasons related to the fact that the students parent is a very generous member of the college alumni. Firstly, professors should be willing to justify the grades they give. Secondly, they shouldn't object to having to do so. Thirdly, is there is a valid reason and the academic office is changing the grade anyway, then your problem is the academic office, not being able to hold the professor accountable.
Accountability. Giving an account. Explaining your actions. To that definition, I have no problem with college professors being held acountable. That doesn't mean that they have to change the grades if someone asks and they can actually give a valid reason why the grade is so low.
The point with your going on about consequences is that mocking the teacher DOESN'T have consequences in the same way that firing a gun into a corwd has consequences. The only consequences of mocking the teacher are ones MADE UP BY THE TEACHER.
you have pretty much absolute power over subbordinates. Do you have absolute power over students?
Here's an example. Should teachers have the tools to make kids shut up and sit down and stop throwing paper so they can learn? Yes. Should teachers have the power to arbitrarilly make students swap desks (say) at the teachers whim without there being some good reason (such as seperating disruptive pupils)? No.
Todays lesson is not relevant. If I sit on a sled on some ice and throw a weight off, I move; Newtons third law and all that. What you're talking about is an attempt to replicate that in the world of abstract actions and it comes across as being arbitrary. Which it is.
and if driving down the road whilst being persued having committed a crime were a constitutionally protected right like free speech is?
Free speech with consequences isn't free speech. Ref: shouting 'fire' in a theatre. (person shouting 'fire' gets consequences, we accept that in this situation person did not have free speech)
You assume in calling something insubbordinate that a school pupil is subbordinate to a teacher. I'm not sure how you come to this conclusion, but it's wrong. Teachers teach and maintain enough control as necessary to enable the former. This does not make the children their subbordinates. Do teachers issue orders or instructions in your world?
Perhaps your college professor friends might like to have a look at their own attitude to accountability if they don't like having their grades questioned.
Incorrect. Play again. The same circumstances warrant the same punishment. 'making an example' out of the first person to do it and then lightening off all the subsequent offenders (or hitting the 10th person particularly hard to show that 'enough is enough', or whatever) is the definition of arbitrary punishment and it's bad bad bad. Punishing one person harshly and everyone else lightly is no better than selective enforcement and I'd be interested to see someone argue in favour of deliberate selective enforcement.
so it ceases to be disproportionate punishment if he THEN exercises his first ammendment right to post it on youtube? How can you compound an 'illegal' act by commiting a further 'legal' act?
Isn't dancing for the purposes of humiliating the teacher free expression anyway?
the school district is desperately backpeddling to find a good reason why they should be able to sue over a youtube clip. Even IF their given reason for the suspension is legitimate (which it isn't) 40 days is utterly disproportionate. 40 days is 8 school weeks which is over half a term. Even a ONE DAY suspension for getting up and dancing behind the teacher's back is disproportionate.
erm, well, yeah, if you can't earn money, you don't pay tax. If, when you do earn money, your employer can't record it properly because you exist illegally, you don't pay tax. This leaves two options: illegal immigrants not allowed to earn or illegal immigrants need to be unillegalised if they're earning. Seeing as, in order to eat, they need to work, the ONLY available (humane) option (if you want to collect taxes, which governments do) is to let them work.
If someone is earning and contributing to society, why would you NOT want them to work and continue to do so?
The United States is NOT short of space - there's no good reason why people who will contribute to society should not be allowed to immigrate and do so.
governments. Who, incidentally, are the prime targets for using encryption against.
"Pardo also suggested that Warcraft III might have been a more forgiving game for beginners--differences in skill levels seemed less pronounced in that game. The VP said that in Starcraft II, there will be many more nuances that will separate highly skilled players from beginners, and good players from great ones"
So it's going to be crap online then? People don't like getting beaten. They partcicularly don't like getting beaten outright by players who, in the grand scheme of things, are only slightly better than themselves. Trying to make that happen more will just make multiplayer starcraft rubbish. Here's hoping they do a map editor to rival War3's, we can then have enjoyable custom maps at least.
What kind of library has £9000 to spend on a single piece of computer hardware? It'd be substantially cheaper to buy a computer and four of those 1 TB hardisks that were mentioned yesterday, and they'd be rewritable!
Or they could spent the £9000 on, y'know, say... books.
10, actually. [/smartass]
a compromise is where you both agree and both go away happy (or at least satisfied that you've got the best possible outcome for you), an arbitrary decision is when someone else tries to make a compromise and both sides go away unhappy - that's why it's often called arbitration.
The courts are a bad case for any conflict - they're expensive, unpredictable, arbitrary and usually produce an outcome not satisfactory to either side.
it'll never be secure by default - so long as every computer (or 90%+) is set up in the same way then nefarious types *will* find a way around whatever security you put in (for instance, if you leave every port closed; then as soon as something gets in through a new website script, an email, a floppy disk or whatever, it can open the ports or trick the user into doing it for them).
The only way to beat malware is to keep on top of it with regular updates and constant vigilance. I think we've already accepted the fact that getting the majority of end users to do constant vigilance is probably a lost cause. The best bet is going to be ISP install disks which install AVG, spybot, ad-aware & zonealarm (for instance) by default with seamless auto-updates on by default. BUT that will eventually suffer the same problems as trying to make it secure out of the box. The only real defence is to ensure substantial variety in the protective methods used throughout the web-using population - thus splitting up attack development effort amongst different systems and ensuring reduced numbers of users vulnerable to any one attack.