Read the thread again. I agree that Sony's marketing/PR did a crappy job of prepping people's expectations on the LCD quality vs. price issue. That doesn't change the fact that the product is at the price it's at because of Sony's choices on manufacturing quality. I suggest they do away with the chance of flaws, and just raise the price on the product. Simple. But then, all we'd hear about is "gauging" on the price. It's a toy! Sheesh.
You have some statistics saying that it's the same group of people?
Why does it matter? The point is that many bright, articulate, thoughtful people show up on slashdot, start reading, and immediately form a distinct impression that it's hip deep in hypocrisy in exactly the way that you're saying it's not. It doesn't even matter if it's not true: I'm talking about how readily a casual reader can form that opinion. That you're being so defensive about it indicates that you know I'm right.
So, that being said, the real question is: why is it that way? To use a somewhat clumsy analogy, it's sort of like how easy it is for a lot of people to assume that all Muslims are terrorists, or that all white guys with dogs (hey! that's me!) are biggoted rednecks. Why? Because not enough white guys with dogs say non-Rednecky things in front of the people drawing the wrong conclusions. No, we're too busy. Or, not enough live-and-let-live Muslims make it loudly (enough) plain that they're appalled at Taliban-Al-Queda-like thinking. At least, not in front of the people that would benefit from hearing it.
Meaning: would someone deeply making notes about which slashdotters do and don't think what about IP issues come to a different conclusion than someone briefly hopping in and out of IP-related threads? Probably. But the fastest way to make your point (which is also mine, however indirectly) is to step into the Infringement-For-Entertainment fray, and light those people up. Given the dull roar of witless defenses of song stealing, it's tempting just to leave it all alone and concentrate on, say, obscure GPL conflicts over operating system emulators... but that's not where the population's hearts and minds will be won on these issues. Make this subject easier for everyone by helping to deflate the notion that there are only, say, 6 slashdot users who think that music pirating is a bad thing. As long as that myth persists, other IP discussions are a perfectly good place to raise the issue, again and again.
Now, if the people like you, who are thinking rationally about this, weren't completely, thoroughly drowned out by posters (and more importantly, moderators) that DO leap awkwardly to the defense of anyone "caught" with IP they shouldn't have (or, shouldn't use in the way they do, anyway) to soothe their guilty downloading consciences, then I'd feel less like taking the occasional jab. But the prevailing noisemakers on slashdot actually do seem bent on propping up the whole "information wants to be free" (but only when it suits them) world view. Making a not very subtle joke about it seems the least I can do in the face of the unrelenting hypocrisy on that subject. If not hypocrisy in deed, then hypocrisy in silence. I know you know what I mean.
Incidentally, what makes you think that I'm picking on "advocates" of P2P systems? I'm not. I'm picking on people who are too cheap to pay for their entertainment, and who too often do stumble their way into only semi-related IP discussions and flail about, philosophically.
I'm happy for you to violate the terms of my GPL licensed code, PROVIDED you waive all right now and in future to enforce your own copyrights. Seems fair to me
Which works fine if you're a person making a living through creativity. Having to give up claim to their own work in order to claim someone else's is a viable disincentive. But the great unwashed masses have nothing to lose (as they make pet, unpaid-for copies of films and recordings, etc), because even as they knowingly infringe, they'd know they'll never produce anything copyrightable in their lives. Not going to work for the I-don't-want-to-pay-for-my-entertainment crowd.
Unless they put this type of condition on the box, on the outside where I can see it, they are not telling me.
It's a delicate situation, no doubt, and sort of a new problem as these things enter the low-priced/high-expectation consumer market place. Certainly we all buy shirts with imperfect cotton weaves (though the size is right), or furniture with imperfect wood grain (though the chairs are all the same height), or brick houses with some masonry irregularities (even though the house is strong). Some of this sort of stuff is just sort of understood. No question, you're right that most people don't give LCD flaws any thought at all until one is sitting right in the middle of some Sim's forehead. The only thing to do is for Sony to raise the price and reduce the flaw rate.
Can someone please explain to me how having an LCD with dead pixels (even one) is considered "normal"?
Because the manufacturing of LCD displays produces a lot of devices with dead pixels. It is normal. The only thing that alters that is whether or not the company distributing the end product is willing to charge enough for that product (and whether the consumers are willing to pay enough) to cover their having to throw out any sub-perfect displays.
I've paid good money for a good display
Actually, you've paid the price the manufacturer and their dealers have asked, for what it is they say they're selling. If they say they're selling a unit with an LCD display that may have a dead pixel or two, then that's what your money buys. If they say they're selling you a unit with a flawless display (something Sony is expressly saying that they are not providing at that price), then that's another matter.
So is this a classic case of manufacturers trying to get us to accept mediocrity
But we accept mediocrity all the time. That's the only thing that makes life affordable. If everything we made and purchased was "the best," then that would be the new average, or middle-ground (or mediocrity), and we'd just complain because, gee, at that price, shouldn't it be gold-plated and read my mind, too? This isn't about excellence, it's about price. No doubt Sony weighed very carefully the price they expected to get, the distribution costs, the manufacturing costs, and came to this decision. It was probably tone-deaf from a marketing/PR point of view, but it was no doubt a very deliberate decision made to keep the retail price down a notch or two.
Why does everyone even care about this? Because they want the product, and consider it to be within reach, money-wise. If the thing cost $1000, no one would be talking about it. If the thing cost $49, we'd all shrug at dead pixel or two. It's finding that sweet spot, for Sony and for us, that's hard - and Sony probably gambled a little unwisely with this, and didn't have the PR engine in place as well as they should have. They're not idiots, and it's not like they don't want you for a customer. And if you're absolutely sure that this is an evil plot by a mediocrity-driven company, then surely you don't want their entertainment product anyway, right? I'm being rhetorical, but you get my drift. It's price point, price point, price point.
If you knew the vulnerability that was being discussed, then why did you attack the strawman of e-mail reception being the vulnerability
Because I was anticipating that someone, like you, would fall for the poster's own straw man, which is the relaying issue. So I wasn't putting up a straw man, I was eliminating one from the discussoin. Yes, 0wned boxes are part of the problem, but it is more a symptom of the problem. The real problem is the viability of spam as a faux-business model, and that causes the scammers to seek out fraudulant/anonymous ways to relay their mail, regardless of what platform it's on, and regardless of whether it was an OS hole, a social hack, or a poor implementation that allows the illegal activity when they don't have their own un-blacklisted box to send from.
The thread's about the spammer himself and his activity, and about getting punished for doing what he was doing. Plenty more where that came from, and the incentive for cracking people's machines is impacted. If every PC in the US was impervious to relay attempts, we'd still be getting choked with spam from Asia and Eastern Europe, sent by machines specifically set up to do that. Suits and prosecutions overseas are going to take a lot longer to have an impact, but that has to happen, too. Even that, though, is still treating the symptom. The fix is in getting more people to understand the fraudulant nature of so much of that spam, and to simply take the incentive out of sending it.
The poster's complaint about "intimidation" not being a useful tactic is simply wrong. Wrong because that's not what the suit and its consequences were. The spammer wasn't being intimidated out of legitimate or MS-competitive business, he was engaged in abusive, fraudulant activities, knew he was, and was simply gambling that he wouldn't get caught or called on it. So, someone with deep pockets and a lot of upset mailbox users stepped up. If the top 25 people like the spammer in question were similarly shut down, enourmous amounts of spam would disappear from the scene. And just as important, the prevailing sense that these guys are immune from some retribution for what they do would be altered.
Intimidation is not the way to get rid of spam. Fixing broken Windows security is. Microsoft is just taking the option that's easier for them to implement.
Why is this modded interesting or insightful? Whatever vulnerabilities Windows may have, "able to receive e-mail" is not one of them. The real battle over spam will continue to be server-side, as well as in the courtroom. This "insightful" comment (troll, really) is not only a gratutitous MS bash, it exposes a complete mental disconnect on the actual problem. Whether or not someone 0wns a machine through which they're sending spam, the fraudulant or basically slimy messages, and people's mysterious willingness to read and occasionally act on them is the real issue.
Microsoft is just taking the option that's easier for them to implement.
Nonsense. These legal pursuits are, just like writing software, expensive and complex. To suggest that MS (or the rest of us, for that matter) should (or can) only do one thing or the other suggests a very shortsighted view of the problem. Meanwhile, the mortgage abusers, Russian mobsters, identity thieves, and phony diet pill scammers continue, themselves, to be able to do more than one thing at a time. Let's hear it for MS for doing the same.
I live in Maryland. Just across the Potomac River is the DC-area regional office for my employer, in northern Virginia. The reason I telecommute, rather than drive 20 miles to the office, is that driving means about 3 hours of commuting per day. This would be because Virginia can't raise the tax money to build enough roads to make the commute livable for all of the employees that do business in the Dulles corridor. So, my company is more than happy to get that extra couple of hours of productivity out of my not sitting in the car - but Maryland is more than happy to tax my income. If Virginia joins in these NY shenanigans, I'll need a gigantic raise to tolerate the VA taxes, Maryland's very high rate, plus the 60% rider that my local county tacks on. Oh, and city taxes, of course. I'm avoiding a drive into Virginia, and not using their infrastructure (um, except the onsite office resources, and the company's paying plenty of corporate taxes in VA already). But you can bet that any offer to do the same for a company in NY would have to come with a real premium, now. Wow.
Don't raise someone else's kid for them. Let them live in a closet. They have the right to limit all forms of media from their child.
But ban books and other media from kids until they're 18 years old?! That's crazy. Kids are intellectually curious, and capable of rational thought and self-education long, long before that age. Banning media from them, personally, until 18 is sending entirely the wrong idea. If their parents think it's important to shelter them that much, but can't make a rational, pursuasive case to an 18 year old as to why they shouldn't, say, participate in a moderated message board disucussing evolution - then the parent's position would have to be pretty damn week. Which is, I think, typical of a lot of home-schoolers.
I would like to see all media being banned (with the exception of Libraries) for purchase by those under the age of 18
Libraries, of course, are notoriously out of date, in terms of compelling, up-to-date material that kids in the 10-18 range seek to soak up. But more to the point... "banned?" Do you even hear yourself? I'm not a liberal, nor a right-winger. But I sure don't want to "empower" parents in Kansas, for example, to keep their kids from even hearing the word "evolution" until they're 18 (and it's way, way too late for them to form any useful critical thinking skills whatsoever).
Perhaps all of the responses about the lesser of two evils still being evil are missing the point. There's nothing evil about shutting this clown down. It's a blow for our ability to constructively use the 'net when (rich!) loser scammers hawking V1@gra see it all come down in a stinking pile around them. Good riddance, and thanks, Bill, for using that army of retainer lawyers in this way.
There's a difference between getting sued and losing a lawsuit.
Yes, there is, and you're right that being sued is not at all the same as being "guilty" of something. But a determined bunch of activists can still drive a manufacturer out of business by forcing them to pony up for literally unbearable legal fees. Of course, this could happen in any industry, but it plays OK in the news when it's those "evil gun makers" that are getting creamed by litigation costs. A lot of people completely overestimate the size of a typical firearms manufacturer. These guys are not General Motors (the mis-use of whose products cause a LOT more damage than, say Colt's or Ruger's).
That the occasional jury has decided to direct a manufacturer's cash towards the family of a shooting victim (essentially, because they see court much as they see government - a consequenceless source of free money, and because the jerk who actually pulled the trigger doesn't usually have any assets to sieze) doesn't mean that the litigation has demonstrated any real culpability on the gunmaker's part. One could argue otherwise with, say, tobacco or even P2P outfits, where there's evidence of deliberate attempts to support or profit from mal-behavior.
criminals (and everybody else for that matter) today need to start using better passwords
Well, OK, so you're talking about this in more or less academic terms... but, I'd say that what criminals really need to do (um, espcially the ones that are smart enough read up on this sort of thing) is to use their brains for, say, something other than crime.
Why does evolution always catch more attention when it is played out in the real world?
Because we've pretty much squashed whatever native talent most people have for abstract thought (or for appreciating the fruits of thought experiments). Never mind that people bank on the the output of weather sims every time they pack up to go skiiing - but anything that requires some extrapolation to the physical world is just too much for too many people these days. I truly, truly lay that at the feet of the "it takes a village" educators, who happily displace critical thinking and logic work with warmer and fuzzier aspects of Socialization. That being said, of course, this is entirely up to parents to counter, and that would work if so many of them weren't also handicapped by the same lack of work in that area. Ironically, it's possible that kids playing decent quality sim games may actually wind up better at getting this stuff when they grow up!
Apparently they've got more important things to worry about than some dubious report about some idiots stealing money from Denny's. I don't blame them.
You obviously didn't RTFA, or this thread. The Denny's piece of the action was only one part of how the trail let to the jerks who were burning up thousands and thousands of dollars of other people's money. And don't think that even if you don't carry a balance on your credit cards - hell, even if you only pay cash for things - that the prices you may for merchandise and services everywhere you go are no impacted by theft (of all sorts, including this kind). If you shrug your shoulders at bad guys, you deserve what you get. But I don't deserve what you get, so straighten up.
Actully, Visa and Mastercard cover the expenses lost to fraud to both customer AND the business that got frauded
Er... only if the merchant did every last little thing correctly. Otherwise, it's the merchant that eats it. Besides, there is no such thing as Visa/MC eating anything. They reflect the cost of doing that in the substantial fees they charge the merchants and other middlemen. They take no risks, financially, when you look at the big picture.
That some kid stole a couple thousand dollars from Discover Card and some Visa merchant - so what? This guy acts like they were stealing the money from him.
Don't you get it? This isn't play money. It's real money that the merchants, banks, and card processors have to cough up. Where do you think it comes from? Higher merchandise prices (or, eroded retail margins, and fewer mom-and-pop retailers as a result), higher bank fees, and higher transaction fees. All of that, all of it, trickles down to the paying consumer in one way or the other.
Thieves like this are taking it from all of us, however indirectly. They're parasites. I completely tip my hat to someone who busted a couple of these punks while their greasy (stolen) Denny's breakfast was still impacting their short-term blood pressure. Truly delightful.
I do a lot of network infrastructure work, so I'm the exactly the sort of nerd that would hang out and watch the cable guys to their work. I should have elaborated more. The cable to the pod is one big fat piece of coax, which does phantom power the drop there. Then, there's a run to my house, which is a dual-molded thing with two physical pieces of coax. They are interchangeable, but one is used for the RF, and the other provides talk battery and whatnot to power the side-of-the-house box and to light up old-fashioned analog phones.
They prohibit another cable company from laying cable. So no one can compete, even if they wanted to lay their own cable.
I'm looking out my back window right now, at the two olive-drab cable pods/mushrooms that are within five feet of each other out behind the row of houses. One belongs to Comcast, the other belongs to Starpower/RCN. They've each pulled cable into our neighborhood, and they each provide high speed data. Starpower's signal also gets converted (on the wall of my house) into two analog phone lines. The crazy thing, though, is that Starpower has to pull a dual-line cable. The second one is only there to provide power to the conversion equipment. All of the signals are RF on the other hunk of cable. Analog cable, digital cable, HD stuff, "voice," and really, really fast data.
Near as I can tell, I'm the only guy in my class C. Everyone else in the 'hood is on Comcast, so so far RCN spent three days and a ton of money pulling cable half a mile off of their main line outside our development for: little old me. Even at the high rates both of these companies charge, it's going to be a long, long time before they recoup what they spent to run their cable right next to Comcast's. But: it's competition!
You're using the definition in a somewhat correct way, but the context makes the tone of your comments a little off. "Coerced," as in "compelled," true. But if Apple just threw a dart at the phone book and decided to "coerce" someone into giving them $10k, it wouldn't hold up in court. This settlement stuck because it's the tail end of a process that the twaddle-headed developer started through his own (uncoerced) actions. What happened was the playing-out of his own, freely chosen behavior within a framework that he understood and within which he chose to act.
There's no coercing there, but rather simple justice. Otherwise, you might argue that when you choose to jump off a building, you are then coerced into hitting the ground. Apple said, "You're going to hit the ground either way, buddy, so say you're sorry, and we'll put out something of a mattress for you."
Slashdot Mirror
Man, way to totally spin this issue.
Read the thread again. I agree that Sony's marketing/PR did a crappy job of prepping people's expectations on the LCD quality vs. price issue. That doesn't change the fact that the product is at the price it's at because of Sony's choices on manufacturing quality. I suggest they do away with the chance of flaws, and just raise the price on the product. Simple. But then, all we'd hear about is "gauging" on the price. It's a toy! Sheesh.
You have some statistics saying that it's the same group of people?
Why does it matter? The point is that many bright, articulate, thoughtful people show up on slashdot, start reading, and immediately form a distinct impression that it's hip deep in hypocrisy in exactly the way that you're saying it's not. It doesn't even matter if it's not true: I'm talking about how readily a casual reader can form that opinion. That you're being so defensive about it indicates that you know I'm right.
So, that being said, the real question is: why is it that way? To use a somewhat clumsy analogy, it's sort of like how easy it is for a lot of people to assume that all Muslims are terrorists, or that all white guys with dogs (hey! that's me!) are biggoted rednecks. Why? Because not enough white guys with dogs say non-Rednecky things in front of the people drawing the wrong conclusions. No, we're too busy. Or, not enough live-and-let-live Muslims make it loudly (enough) plain that they're appalled at Taliban-Al-Queda-like thinking. At least, not in front of the people that would benefit from hearing it.
Meaning: would someone deeply making notes about which slashdotters do and don't think what about IP issues come to a different conclusion than someone briefly hopping in and out of IP-related threads? Probably. But the fastest way to make your point (which is also mine, however indirectly) is to step into the Infringement-For-Entertainment fray, and light those people up. Given the dull roar of witless defenses of song stealing, it's tempting just to leave it all alone and concentrate on, say, obscure GPL conflicts over operating system emulators... but that's not where the population's hearts and minds will be won on these issues. Make this subject easier for everyone by helping to deflate the notion that there are only, say, 6 slashdot users who think that music pirating is a bad thing. As long as that myth persists, other IP discussions are a perfectly good place to raise the issue, again and again.
Now, if the people like you, who are thinking rationally about this, weren't completely, thoroughly drowned out by posters (and more importantly, moderators) that DO leap awkwardly to the defense of anyone "caught" with IP they shouldn't have (or, shouldn't use in the way they do, anyway) to soothe their guilty downloading consciences, then I'd feel less like taking the occasional jab. But the prevailing noisemakers on slashdot actually do seem bent on propping up the whole "information wants to be free" (but only when it suits them) world view. Making a not very subtle joke about it seems the least I can do in the face of the unrelenting hypocrisy on that subject. If not hypocrisy in deed, then hypocrisy in silence. I know you know what I mean.
Incidentally, what makes you think that I'm picking on "advocates" of P2P systems? I'm not. I'm picking on people who are too cheap to pay for their entertainment, and who too often do stumble their way into only semi-related IP discussions and flail about, philosophically.
I'm happy for you to violate the terms of my GPL licensed code, PROVIDED you waive all right now and in future to enforce your own copyrights. Seems fair to me
Which works fine if you're a person making a living through creativity. Having to give up claim to their own work in order to claim someone else's is a viable disincentive. But the great unwashed masses have nothing to lose (as they make pet, unpaid-for copies of films and recordings, etc), because even as they knowingly infringe, they'd know they'll never produce anything copyrightable in their lives. Not going to work for the I-don't-want-to-pay-for-my-entertainment crowd.
Because, that would be different.
Unless they put this type of condition on the box, on the outside where I can see it, they are not telling me.
It's a delicate situation, no doubt, and sort of a new problem as these things enter the low-priced/high-expectation consumer market place. Certainly we all buy shirts with imperfect cotton weaves (though the size is right), or furniture with imperfect wood grain (though the chairs are all the same height), or brick houses with some masonry irregularities (even though the house is strong). Some of this sort of stuff is just sort of understood. No question, you're right that most people don't give LCD flaws any thought at all until one is sitting right in the middle of some Sim's forehead. The only thing to do is for Sony to raise the price and reduce the flaw rate.
"Why, my shark-mounted laser robots would have won this competition if it hadn't been for you meddling kids!"
Can someone please explain to me how having an LCD with dead pixels (even one) is considered "normal"?
Because the manufacturing of LCD displays produces a lot of devices with dead pixels. It is normal. The only thing that alters that is whether or not the company distributing the end product is willing to charge enough for that product (and whether the consumers are willing to pay enough) to cover their having to throw out any sub-perfect displays.
I've paid good money for a good display
Actually, you've paid the price the manufacturer and their dealers have asked, for what it is they say they're selling. If they say they're selling a unit with an LCD display that may have a dead pixel or two, then that's what your money buys. If they say they're selling you a unit with a flawless display (something Sony is expressly saying that they are not providing at that price), then that's another matter.
So is this a classic case of manufacturers trying to get us to accept mediocrity
But we accept mediocrity all the time. That's the only thing that makes life affordable. If everything we made and purchased was "the best," then that would be the new average, or middle-ground (or mediocrity), and we'd just complain because, gee, at that price, shouldn't it be gold-plated and read my mind, too? This isn't about excellence, it's about price. No doubt Sony weighed very carefully the price they expected to get, the distribution costs, the manufacturing costs, and came to this decision. It was probably tone-deaf from a marketing/PR point of view, but it was no doubt a very deliberate decision made to keep the retail price down a notch or two.
Why does everyone even care about this? Because they want the product, and consider it to be within reach, money-wise. If the thing cost $1000, no one would be talking about it. If the thing cost $49, we'd all shrug at dead pixel or two. It's finding that sweet spot, for Sony and for us, that's hard - and Sony probably gambled a little unwisely with this, and didn't have the PR engine in place as well as they should have. They're not idiots, and it's not like they don't want you for a customer. And if you're absolutely sure that this is an evil plot by a mediocrity-driven company, then surely you don't want their entertainment product anyway, right? I'm being rhetorical, but you get my drift. It's price point, price point, price point.
If you knew the vulnerability that was being discussed, then why did you attack the strawman of e-mail reception being the vulnerability
Because I was anticipating that someone, like you, would fall for the poster's own straw man, which is the relaying issue. So I wasn't putting up a straw man, I was eliminating one from the discussoin. Yes, 0wned boxes are part of the problem, but it is more a symptom of the problem. The real problem is the viability of spam as a faux-business model, and that causes the scammers to seek out fraudulant/anonymous ways to relay their mail, regardless of what platform it's on, and regardless of whether it was an OS hole, a social hack, or a poor implementation that allows the illegal activity when they don't have their own un-blacklisted box to send from.
The thread's about the spammer himself and his activity, and about getting punished for doing what he was doing. Plenty more where that came from, and the incentive for cracking people's machines is impacted. If every PC in the US was impervious to relay attempts, we'd still be getting choked with spam from Asia and Eastern Europe, sent by machines specifically set up to do that. Suits and prosecutions overseas are going to take a lot longer to have an impact, but that has to happen, too. Even that, though, is still treating the symptom. The fix is in getting more people to understand the fraudulant nature of so much of that spam, and to simply take the incentive out of sending it.
The poster's complaint about "intimidation" not being a useful tactic is simply wrong. Wrong because that's not what the suit and its consequences were. The spammer wasn't being intimidated out of legitimate or MS-competitive business, he was engaged in abusive, fraudulant activities, knew he was, and was simply gambling that he wouldn't get caught or called on it. So, someone with deep pockets and a lot of upset mailbox users stepped up. If the top 25 people like the spammer in question were similarly shut down, enourmous amounts of spam would disappear from the scene. And just as important, the prevailing sense that these guys are immune from some retribution for what they do would be altered.
Intimidation is not the way to get rid of spam. Fixing broken Windows security is. Microsoft is just taking the option that's easier for them to implement.
Why is this modded interesting or insightful? Whatever vulnerabilities Windows may have, "able to receive e-mail" is not one of them. The real battle over spam will continue to be server-side, as well as in the courtroom. This "insightful" comment (troll, really) is not only a gratutitous MS bash, it exposes a complete mental disconnect on the actual problem. Whether or not someone 0wns a machine through which they're sending spam, the fraudulant or basically slimy messages, and people's mysterious willingness to read and occasionally act on them is the real issue.
Microsoft is just taking the option that's easier for them to implement.
Nonsense. These legal pursuits are, just like writing software, expensive and complex. To suggest that MS (or the rest of us, for that matter) should (or can) only do one thing or the other suggests a very shortsighted view of the problem. Meanwhile, the mortgage abusers, Russian mobsters, identity thieves, and phony diet pill scammers continue, themselves, to be able to do more than one thing at a time. Let's hear it for MS for doing the same.
I live in Maryland. Just across the Potomac River is the DC-area regional office for my employer, in northern Virginia. The reason I telecommute, rather than drive 20 miles to the office, is that driving means about 3 hours of commuting per day. This would be because Virginia can't raise the tax money to build enough roads to make the commute livable for all of the employees that do business in the Dulles corridor. So, my company is more than happy to get that extra couple of hours of productivity out of my not sitting in the car - but Maryland is more than happy to tax my income. If Virginia joins in these NY shenanigans, I'll need a gigantic raise to tolerate the VA taxes, Maryland's very high rate, plus the 60% rider that my local county tacks on. Oh, and city taxes, of course. I'm avoiding a drive into Virginia, and not using their infrastructure (um, except the onsite office resources, and the company's paying plenty of corporate taxes in VA already). But you can bet that any offer to do the same for a company in NY would have to come with a real premium, now. Wow.
Don't raise someone else's kid for them. Let them live in a closet. They have the right to limit all forms of media from their child.
But ban books and other media from kids until they're 18 years old?! That's crazy. Kids are intellectually curious, and capable of rational thought and self-education long, long before that age. Banning media from them, personally, until 18 is sending entirely the wrong idea. If their parents think it's important to shelter them that much, but can't make a rational, pursuasive case to an 18 year old as to why they shouldn't, say, participate in a moderated message board disucussing evolution - then the parent's position would have to be pretty damn week. Which is, I think, typical of a lot of home-schoolers.
I would like to see all media being banned (with the exception of Libraries) for purchase by those under the age of 18
Libraries, of course, are notoriously out of date, in terms of compelling, up-to-date material that kids in the 10-18 range seek to soak up. But more to the point... "banned?" Do you even hear yourself? I'm not a liberal, nor a right-winger. But I sure don't want to "empower" parents in Kansas, for example, to keep their kids from even hearing the word "evolution" until they're 18 (and it's way, way too late for them to form any useful critical thinking skills whatsoever).
of course it takes a village to properly raise a child
No, it takes a good parent to raise a child that won't be a plague on the village.
Perhaps all of the responses about the lesser of two evils still being evil are missing the point. There's nothing evil about shutting this clown down. It's a blow for our ability to constructively use the 'net when (rich!) loser scammers hawking V1@gra see it all come down in a stinking pile around them. Good riddance, and thanks, Bill, for using that army of retainer lawyers in this way.
There's a difference between getting sued and losing a lawsuit.
Yes, there is, and you're right that being sued is not at all the same as being "guilty" of something. But a determined bunch of activists can still drive a manufacturer out of business by forcing them to pony up for literally unbearable legal fees. Of course, this could happen in any industry, but it plays OK in the news when it's those "evil gun makers" that are getting creamed by litigation costs. A lot of people completely overestimate the size of a typical firearms manufacturer. These guys are not General Motors (the mis-use of whose products cause a LOT more damage than, say Colt's or Ruger's).
That the occasional jury has decided to direct a manufacturer's cash towards the family of a shooting victim (essentially, because they see court much as they see government - a consequenceless source of free money, and because the jerk who actually pulled the trigger doesn't usually have any assets to sieze) doesn't mean that the litigation has demonstrated any real culpability on the gunmaker's part. One could argue otherwise with, say, tobacco or even P2P outfits, where there's evidence of deliberate attempts to support or profit from mal-behavior.
Nah, they just need to steal more so they become revolutionaries or businessmen
Right, right. Of course, I forgot. Anybody that starts up a business is a criminal. I keep forgetting I'm on slashdot.
criminals (and everybody else for that matter) today need to start using better passwords
Well, OK, so you're talking about this in more or less academic terms... but, I'd say that what criminals really need to do (um, espcially the ones that are smart enough read up on this sort of thing) is to use their brains for, say, something other than crime.
Why does evolution always catch more attention when it is played out in the real world?
Because we've pretty much squashed whatever native talent most people have for abstract thought (or for appreciating the fruits of thought experiments). Never mind that people bank on the the output of weather sims every time they pack up to go skiiing - but anything that requires some extrapolation to the physical world is just too much for too many people these days. I truly, truly lay that at the feet of the "it takes a village" educators, who happily displace critical thinking and logic work with warmer and fuzzier aspects of Socialization. That being said, of course, this is entirely up to parents to counter, and that would work if so many of them weren't also handicapped by the same lack of work in that area. Ironically, it's possible that kids playing decent quality sim games may actually wind up better at getting this stuff when they grow up!
Apparently they've got more important things to worry about than some dubious report about some idiots stealing money from Denny's. I don't blame them.
You obviously didn't RTFA, or this thread. The Denny's piece of the action was only one part of how the trail let to the jerks who were burning up thousands and thousands of dollars of other people's money. And don't think that even if you don't carry a balance on your credit cards - hell, even if you only pay cash for things - that the prices you may for merchandise and services everywhere you go are no impacted by theft (of all sorts, including this kind). If you shrug your shoulders at bad guys, you deserve what you get. But I don't deserve what you get, so straighten up.
Actully, Visa and Mastercard cover the expenses lost to fraud to both customer AND the business that got frauded
Er... only if the merchant did every last little thing correctly. Otherwise, it's the merchant that eats it. Besides, there is no such thing as Visa/MC eating anything. They reflect the cost of doing that in the substantial fees they charge the merchants and other middlemen. They take no risks, financially, when you look at the big picture.
That some kid stole a couple thousand dollars from Discover Card and some Visa merchant - so what? This guy acts like they were stealing the money from him.
Don't you get it? This isn't play money. It's real money that the merchants, banks, and card processors have to cough up. Where do you think it comes from? Higher merchandise prices (or, eroded retail margins, and fewer mom-and-pop retailers as a result), higher bank fees, and higher transaction fees. All of that, all of it, trickles down to the paying consumer in one way or the other.
Thieves like this are taking it from all of us, however indirectly. They're parasites. I completely tip my hat to someone who busted a couple of these punks while their greasy (stolen) Denny's breakfast was still impacting their short-term blood pressure. Truly delightful.
I do a lot of network infrastructure work, so I'm the exactly the sort of nerd that would hang out and watch the cable guys to their work. I should have elaborated more. The cable to the pod is one big fat piece of coax, which does phantom power the drop there. Then, there's a run to my house, which is a dual-molded thing with two physical pieces of coax. They are interchangeable, but one is used for the RF, and the other provides talk battery and whatnot to power the side-of-the-house box and to light up old-fashioned analog phones.
They prohibit another cable company from laying cable. So no one can compete, even if they wanted to lay their own cable.
I'm looking out my back window right now, at the two olive-drab cable pods/mushrooms that are within five feet of each other out behind the row of houses. One belongs to Comcast, the other belongs to Starpower/RCN. They've each pulled cable into our neighborhood, and they each provide high speed data. Starpower's signal also gets converted (on the wall of my house) into two analog phone lines. The crazy thing, though, is that Starpower has to pull a dual-line cable. The second one is only there to provide power to the conversion equipment. All of the signals are RF on the other hunk of cable. Analog cable, digital cable, HD stuff, "voice," and really, really fast data.
Near as I can tell, I'm the only guy in my class C. Everyone else in the 'hood is on Comcast, so so far RCN spent three days and a ton of money pulling cable half a mile off of their main line outside our development for: little old me. Even at the high rates both of these companies charge, it's going to be a long, long time before they recoup what they spent to run their cable right next to Comcast's. But: it's competition!
You're using the definition in a somewhat correct way, but the context makes the tone of your comments a little off. "Coerced," as in "compelled," true. But if Apple just threw a dart at the phone book and decided to "coerce" someone into giving them $10k, it wouldn't hold up in court. This settlement stuck because it's the tail end of a process that the twaddle-headed developer started through his own (uncoerced) actions. What happened was the playing-out of his own, freely chosen behavior within a framework that he understood and within which he chose to act.
There's no coercing there, but rather simple justice. Otherwise, you might argue that when you choose to jump off a building, you are then coerced into hitting the ground. Apple said, "You're going to hit the ground either way, buddy, so say you're sorry, and we'll put out something of a mattress for you."