I think the main reason that most privacy infringements get compared to 1984 is that pretty much all of the non-1984 privacy infringements have already been implemented and accepted by the public. 1984 was a sci-fi/horror novel. We are now entering the technological stage that 1984's sci-fi is becoming sci-fact. It is a little like finding out that somebody figured out how to make a real life "Jason" and "Freddy". The part that suprises me is how you can describe many of the horror elements from 1984 to people today, and get a response of "That's a good idea, they should do that!".
"then they should have said something when we bought them."
They do say something before you buy. They say "BUY" your copy of Spiderman. They say "OWN" it today. You go into the store, and right their on the shelf there is a sign that says "SALE". You then take the item to the cashier, and pay for this item. They then give you as "SALES" reciept.
Then after all this, what do we hear? "You didn't buy the item, you licensed the item!"
The Media Barons are simply being allowed to commit fraud. Anyone that thinks for a second that the Media Barons are not intentionally using the word "Buy" and "Own" instead of "Rent" and "License" for the express purpose of tricking customers is simply being nieve. How long do you think it would take for sales to REALLY plummet if the Media Barons started using the term "license" in all of their advertising?
The one that gets me is how many stores now require you basically go through the payment system twice. Someone had this nifty idea a while ago that the customer can scan their own card, while the cashier is still ringing things up. Since the cashier rarely checks the card or signiture anyways, this should speed the whole process. The problem is that checking signitures and cards is a cyclical thing. Fraud becomes high, signitures/cards start getting checked. This reduces fraud to to point that signitures/cards are no longer checked, and the cycle begins anew. Now that we are in a check the card phase, or if you do any shopping in a higher risk area, the process goes like this:
1) swipe card
2) put card back in wallet
3) wait for cashier to finish scanning
4) have cashier ask for card
5) get out wallet
6) give card to cashier
7) get card back
8) put card away
9) have cashier as for ID
10) get ID out of wallet and hand to cashier
11) get ID back from cashier
The process should be
1) give card to cashier
2) get card back
I don't include the initial getting out of the first card or putting away because these can be done while the cashier is doing something else. It makes absolutly no sense to slow down the entire process in some strange attempt to push more of the work off of the cashier and on to the customer.
Worse yet is finding out that that very post was the straw that broke the camels back, and it is the single identifiable reason that Allah curses you with an eternity of pain and torment. Now that would be some funny irony.
Given that MS has been cought with 'pirate' code in their OS before, and it didn't hurt them at all, I don't think they are worried. Heck, when they outright copied Stacker into DOS 6, they didn't even bother to remove Stackers copyright notice from the files.
I don't think that word means what you think it means. Installing monitorying software on your computer, and forcing you to ask permission to use something you already bought is certainly not treating you with dignity and respect.
The term "Western Culture" does not mean Western Hemisphere. It means the general culture of the west half of the Asian/European land mass. That is why the UK is considered "Western Culture". The US got most of it's origianl culture from England, and that is how we ended up a "Western Culture". Of course South America got much of it's culture from spain, which is also a "Western Culture", so that doesn't really change your argument. Just clarify item (1).
Although, there is a case to be made that the gun is what kept the mugger from just bashing his victim over the head right off. With a gun you carry a very big threat, where as with a knife or club, the unarmed victim is more likely to fight back. This means that the proper approach to mugging without a gun is to incapacitate your victim before they know they are getting mugged.
That being said, I am regularly amazed that more muggings don't happen with stun guns. One jolt behind the neck, and there is very little chance of resistance by the victim. I guess if they had any brains they wouldn't be risking life, limb, and liberty over some pocket money and mp3 players.
You would of course know far better what the sword was made of, the density of the metals, and the strenghts and weaknesses of it's INTERNALS. That is what we are talking about right? A guy who is supposed to be an expert on the internals. Not the best Windows USER.
"No, I work in retail, programming is just a hobby I happen to thoroughly enjoy. "
Fair enough.
"Come again?? How on Earth do you equate enjoying music with a drug addiction?! Mind you, having some good background music makes the time go faster for me while coding, but I certainly won't go into anything resembling a crippling withdrawel. Good God, that's worse than a failed car analogy. Try to make some sense here, will ya? "
Well, you said: "But music? Gotta have it. No, not the redundent bubble-gum pop, but I am a hard rock junkie. Corrosion of Confirmity, Union Underground, Godsmack, Mushroomhead, Saliva, Stabbing Westward, White Zombie, Tool... gotta have 'em."
Seems to be pretty straight forward how I: "equate enjoying music with a drug addiction"
"Riiiight, it's MY fault the *AA are a bunch of greedy bastards. Good to know."
It's not your fault that they are greedy. You just let them put their greed into action.
"you presumptuous ass."
Name calling doesn't make you right.
"Um, NO. They can't. Not even close. Just because I have a strong interest in a particular genre of music does NOT mean that I will bend over and take it from the RIAA to listen to said music. There are many more avenues for listening to music besides buying CDs. Conventional radio and (my personal favorite) internet radio, are my most oft-used sources of music enjoyment. Also, there are used CD stores in my area which, for the time being, are still 100% legal. I buy occasionally, when I can find what I want at a decent price. I won't pay US$25+ for a CD, and I'd hope the same applies to the majority of reasonably intelligent people as well."
You pay for radio. Just not directly, and you can be sure that the RIAA is working hard at plugging up any 'free' ways for you to use their 'Intellectual Property' without paying them. It doesn't matter anyway. You have publicly stated that you "gotta have" their product, and that you hope they know it. This is at best encourging them to act more diligently on their greed.
"Oh look, here come the mods ready to flame me just for defending myself... "
No, they would more likely mod you down for swearing, throwing unrelated personal insults, completely backtracking on your original post, and most importantly trying to insult them into not modding you down for the other reasons.
That has to be the dumbest thing I've ever heard. If you recognize racism, you must be a racist? The GP has a problem with labeling 'black' stereo types as "Urban" because not even most things in Urban areas fit the 'black' stereo type. And from this you get that he just assumes that everyone in an Urban setting is a minority? Absolutly the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
The problem is in the definition of the term "Free Energy". If you have to build it, it isn't free. The one that always strikes me is the experiments with magnet powered devices. I can't count the number of times that I have heard "It's impossible because of the laws of thermodynamics". They are constantly called perpetual motion machines, and "Free Energy". As far as I can tell a magnet powered device has a power source. It's called a magnet. Calling a magnet powered device a perpetual motion machine is no different than calling a flashlight a perpetual motion machine. Magnatism is energy right? You do have to put the magnet into the device for it to work, right? So you have added energy, and thus it is neigther free energy, nor a perpetual motion machine.
The point is, that while there are many kooks out there trying to develope 'free energy', there are also a lot of people that don't know as much as they think they do, and spout of arguments they don't understand (like the thermodynamics one) to dismiss people that have little (not zero) chance of success.
Except that given two individuals who have commited the same crime, a male is dramatically more likely to recieve a harsher sentence. So, no, it would not eliminate crime, it would just eliminate sentencing.
Lets hope they are not paying attention. You just told them that you cannot function without buying their product. That means they can do anything they want, and you will still buy it. Given your statment about coding, I assume that you do this for a living? If so, you just told the RIAA that you cannot earn a living without their product. Why in the world would they sell their product for a fair price, and treat you with any respect if you cannot do without it?
You've put yourself in the position of a haroin addict, and told the only dealer in town, just how bad your addiction is. Don't take this as an insult, because you certainly have a right to buy what products you want, but it is people like you that makes sure consumers have absolutly no leverage in negotiating a fair deal. The RIAA will take 1 of you over 5 of me, because they can charge you 6 times as much as me.
The Notes/Domino vs. Outlook/Exchange wars happened almost 10 years ago. MS was really gung-ho about how Outlook/Exhchange was going to kill Notes/Domino. I was watching it closely as we expected we would start offering development services under Exchange to complement our Domino work. After about a year of heavy hype, MS decided it was better to ignore Domino than to point out to people that they were unsuccessfully playing catch up.
Domino already does this. R7 allows you to tell the server to use DB2 as a back end instead of the traditional Notes file store. Of course this is a corporate solution, not a home solution. I have this feeling it won't be popular to store email in DB2 though. As was stated by another poster, relational databases are great for making relations between different groups of data. For something like email, it really looses its edge.
The "your stealing from the artist" argument is a red herring. Unless your a mega-star, you don't get crap from record sales anyway, and from recent articles, we can conclude that they get even less from legal downloads. Often the artist does not even own the recording. So in that case it is a little like asking how much of that cheeseburger sold down at the dinner goes to the guy flipping burgers at McDonalds.
Just wait until the school decides that your child playing video games in your home is a disruption at school. What happens when they decide that your child reading certain books at home will create a disruption at home. This is exactly the kind of garbage that makes not only children, but parents hostile towards the schools. If what the kid did was illegal, call the cops. If it wasn't, then the school has no say.
And those numbers show that driving with a.08 has the same likelyhood of an accident as being completely sober. What's that? Too small of a sample? That right? Just looking at the numbers shows that this is a BS "Study".
Ahh, but that would mean that less than 420 cars drove that road within, say an hour of when you drove it. I would guess that the number of cars on those highways would be counted in the thousands.
Of course you are right. Most drivers really really suck at driving.
"You're looking at results from a study with a relatively small sample size and trying to draw absolute conclusions about every driver in the world."
Uhh...did you read my post? My point was that the classroom experiment is total BS. It is really unfair to call an experiment with 40 test cases to be a "study". I then proceeded to point out that IF one were nieve enough to take the experiment as having any validity, then one would have to conclude that drunk driveing was safe.
So, what say you? Is it a valid study or not? I say not.
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I think the main reason that most privacy infringements get compared to 1984 is that pretty much all of the non-1984 privacy infringements have already been implemented and accepted by the public. 1984 was a sci-fi/horror novel. We are now entering the technological stage that 1984's sci-fi is becoming sci-fact. It is a little like finding out that somebody figured out how to make a real life "Jason" and "Freddy". The part that suprises me is how you can describe many of the horror elements from 1984 to people today, and get a response of "That's a good idea, they should do that!".
"then they should have said something when we bought them."
They do say something before you buy. They say "BUY" your copy of Spiderman. They say "OWN" it today. You go into the store, and right their on the shelf there is a sign that says "SALE". You then take the item to the cashier, and pay for this item. They then give you as "SALES" reciept.
Then after all this, what do we hear? "You didn't buy the item, you licensed the item!"
The Media Barons are simply being allowed to commit fraud. Anyone that thinks for a second that the Media Barons are not intentionally using the word "Buy" and "Own" instead of "Rent" and "License" for the express purpose of tricking customers is simply being nieve. How long do you think it would take for sales to REALLY plummet if the Media Barons started using the term "license" in all of their advertising?
The one that gets me is how many stores now require you basically go through the payment system twice. Someone had this nifty idea a while ago that the customer can scan their own card, while the cashier is still ringing things up. Since the cashier rarely checks the card or signiture anyways, this should speed the whole process. The problem is that checking signitures and cards is a cyclical thing. Fraud becomes high, signitures/cards start getting checked. This reduces fraud to to point that signitures/cards are no longer checked, and the cycle begins anew. Now that we are in a check the card phase, or if you do any shopping in a higher risk area, the process goes like this:
1) swipe card
2) put card back in wallet
3) wait for cashier to finish scanning
4) have cashier ask for card
5) get out wallet
6) give card to cashier
7) get card back
8) put card away
9) have cashier as for ID
10) get ID out of wallet and hand to cashier
11) get ID back from cashier
The process should be
1) give card to cashier
2) get card back
I don't include the initial getting out of the first card or putting away because these can be done while the cashier is doing something else. It makes absolutly no sense to slow down the entire process in some strange attempt to push more of the work off of the cashier and on to the customer.
Worse yet is finding out that that very post was the straw that broke the camels back, and it is the single identifiable reason that Allah curses you with an eternity of pain and torment. Now that would be some funny irony.
Given that MS has been cought with 'pirate' code in their OS before, and it didn't hurt them at all, I don't think they are worried. Heck, when they outright copied Stacker into DOS 6, they didn't even bother to remove Stackers copyright notice from the files.
You mean like implying to tens of thousands of customers that their PC vender is a pirate?
I don't think that word means what you think it means. Installing monitorying software on your computer, and forcing you to ask permission to use something you already bought is certainly not treating you with dignity and respect.
The term "Western Culture" does not mean Western Hemisphere. It means the general culture of the west half of the Asian/European land mass. That is why the UK is considered "Western Culture". The US got most of it's origianl culture from England, and that is how we ended up a "Western Culture". Of course South America got much of it's culture from spain, which is also a "Western Culture", so that doesn't really change your argument. Just clarify item (1).
Although, there is a case to be made that the gun is what kept the mugger from just bashing his victim over the head right off. With a gun you carry a very big threat, where as with a knife or club, the unarmed victim is more likely to fight back. This means that the proper approach to mugging without a gun is to incapacitate your victim before they know they are getting mugged.
That being said, I am regularly amazed that more muggings don't happen with stun guns. One jolt behind the neck, and there is very little chance of resistance by the victim. I guess if they had any brains they wouldn't be risking life, limb, and liberty over some pocket money and mp3 players.
You would of course know far better what the sword was made of, the density of the metals, and the strenghts and weaknesses of it's INTERNALS. That is what we are talking about right? A guy who is supposed to be an expert on the internals. Not the best Windows USER.
"No, I work in retail, programming is just a hobby I happen to thoroughly enjoy. "
Fair enough.
"Come again?? How on Earth do you equate enjoying music with a drug addiction?! Mind you, having some good background music makes the time go faster for me while coding, but I certainly won't go into anything resembling a crippling withdrawel. Good God, that's worse than a failed car analogy. Try to make some sense here, will ya? "
Well, you said:
"But music? Gotta have it. No, not the redundent bubble-gum pop, but I am a hard rock junkie. Corrosion of Confirmity, Union Underground, Godsmack, Mushroomhead, Saliva, Stabbing Westward, White Zombie, Tool... gotta have 'em."
Seems to be pretty straight forward how I: "equate enjoying music with a drug addiction"
"Riiiight, it's MY fault the *AA are a bunch of greedy bastards. Good to know."
It's not your fault that they are greedy. You just let them put their greed into action.
"you presumptuous ass."
Name calling doesn't make you right.
"Um, NO. They can't. Not even close. Just because I have a strong interest in a particular genre of music does NOT mean that I will bend over and take it from the RIAA to listen to said music. There are many more avenues for listening to music besides buying CDs. Conventional radio and (my personal favorite) internet radio, are my most oft-used sources of music enjoyment. Also, there are used CD stores in my area which, for the time being, are still 100% legal. I buy occasionally, when I can find what I want at a decent price. I won't pay US$25+ for a CD, and I'd hope the same applies to the majority of reasonably intelligent people as well."
You pay for radio. Just not directly, and you can be sure that the RIAA is working hard at plugging up any 'free' ways for you to use their 'Intellectual Property' without paying them. It doesn't matter anyway. You have publicly stated that you "gotta have" their product, and that you hope they know it. This is at best encourging them to act more diligently on their greed.
"Oh look, here come the mods ready to flame me just for defending myself... "
No, they would more likely mod you down for swearing, throwing unrelated personal insults, completely backtracking on your original post, and most importantly trying to insult them into not modding you down for the other reasons.
That has to be the dumbest thing I've ever heard. If you recognize racism, you must be a racist? The GP has a problem with labeling 'black' stereo types as "Urban" because not even most things in Urban areas fit the 'black' stereo type. And from this you get that he just assumes that everyone in an Urban setting is a minority? Absolutly the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
The problem is in the definition of the term "Free Energy". If you have to build it, it isn't free. The one that always strikes me is the experiments with magnet powered devices. I can't count the number of times that I have heard "It's impossible because of the laws of thermodynamics". They are constantly called perpetual motion machines, and "Free Energy". As far as I can tell a magnet powered device has a power source. It's called a magnet. Calling a magnet powered device a perpetual motion machine is no different than calling a flashlight a perpetual motion machine. Magnatism is energy right? You do have to put the magnet into the device for it to work, right? So you have added energy, and thus it is neigther free energy, nor a perpetual motion machine.
The point is, that while there are many kooks out there trying to develope 'free energy', there are also a lot of people that don't know as much as they think they do, and spout of arguments they don't understand (like the thermodynamics one) to dismiss people that have little (not zero) chance of success.
Power tools? Eh...Your kidding right? Ohhhh... You meant like drills and saws. Never mind.
Except that given two individuals who have commited the same crime, a male is dramatically more likely to recieve a harsher sentence. So, no, it would not eliminate crime, it would just eliminate sentencing.
It's just that having a violent and agressive guy is MORE important than a 10 a huge unit.
Lets hope they are not paying attention. You just told them that you cannot function without buying their product. That means they can do anything they want, and you will still buy it. Given your statment about coding, I assume that you do this for a living? If so, you just told the RIAA that you cannot earn a living without their product. Why in the world would they sell their product for a fair price, and treat you with any respect if you cannot do without it?
You've put yourself in the position of a haroin addict, and told the only dealer in town, just how bad your addiction is. Don't take this as an insult, because you certainly have a right to buy what products you want, but it is people like you that makes sure consumers have absolutly no leverage in negotiating a fair deal. The RIAA will take 1 of you over 5 of me, because they can charge you 6 times as much as me.
The Notes/Domino vs. Outlook/Exchange wars happened almost 10 years ago. MS was really gung-ho about how Outlook/Exhchange was going to kill Notes/Domino. I was watching it closely as we expected we would start offering development services under Exchange to complement our Domino work. After about a year of heavy hype, MS decided it was better to ignore Domino than to point out to people that they were unsuccessfully playing catch up.
Domino already does this. R7 allows you to tell the server to use DB2 as a back end instead of the traditional Notes file store. Of course this is a corporate solution, not a home solution. I have this feeling it won't be popular to store email in DB2 though. As was stated by another poster, relational databases are great for making relations between different groups of data. For something like email, it really looses its edge.
The smurfs seemed to smurf their smurf just smurfy, and they smurfed their smurfy smurfed smurfs without to much smurf.
The "your stealing from the artist" argument is a red herring. Unless your a mega-star, you don't get crap from record sales anyway, and from recent articles, we can conclude that they get even less from legal downloads. Often the artist does not even own the recording. So in that case it is a little like asking how much of that cheeseburger sold down at the dinner goes to the guy flipping burgers at McDonalds.
Just wait until the school decides that your child playing video games in your home is a disruption at school. What happens when they decide that your child reading certain books at home will create a disruption at home. This is exactly the kind of garbage that makes not only children, but parents hostile towards the schools. If what the kid did was illegal, call the cops. If it wasn't, then the school has no say.
And those numbers show that driving with a .08 has the same likelyhood of an accident as being completely sober. What's that? Too small of a sample? That right? Just looking at the numbers shows that this is a BS "Study".
Ahh, but that would mean that less than 420 cars drove that road within, say an hour of when you drove it. I would guess that the number of cars on those highways would be counted in the thousands.
Of course you are right. Most drivers really really suck at driving.
"You're looking at results from a study with a relatively small sample size and trying to draw absolute conclusions about every driver in the world."
Uhh...did you read my post? My point was that the classroom experiment is total BS. It is really unfair to call an experiment with 40 test cases to be a "study". I then proceeded to point out that IF one were nieve enough to take the experiment as having any validity, then one would have to conclude that drunk driveing was safe.
So, what say you? Is it a valid study or not? I say not.