Iraqi insurgents don't have nuclear weapons and I'd say they're doing relatively well against us. They cost us billions of dollars every day, and thousands of lives each year.
Really? So you think that our government is in danger of being overthrown by Iraqui insurgents? Funny, I don't see many of them on our soil taking up arms against our government, and we have yet to bring the full might of our military and domestic armed services to bear against them. If there's an armed domestic uprising, it would be quite a different story. Not that there's even a remote chance of an armed domestic uprising, because our government would snuff out anyone and anything that got bigger than a few malcontents here and there.
Sure it seems impossible for full scale chaos in America, but say there's a shortage on oil, and subsequently food, in the near future. How impossible is it then?
Very impossible. Who the hell do you think would control the oil and food distribution? The government, you idiot, that's one of the first things they would do is take control of the supply line of crucial resources like that. And who the hell do you think would get the oil and food? I'll give you a hint: NOT you, and NOT the people who are fighting the government.
This has nothing to do with gun rights, by the way.
Maybe you didn't read the grandparent post:
in 1998, Obama stated that he would Ban the sale or transfer of all forms of semi-automatic weapons. that includes about half the shotguns, more than half of the pistols, and a fairly good chunk of the rifles in the U.S.
I'm not the one that made this about gun control, he did, and it was done (as it is most of the time) for the purpose of distracting and easily-distractable audience from the real issue at hand: privacy rights.
My point is just, no one needs guns to kill people (see: IEDs a la Iraq) and it's quite naive to think our government can't be fought simply because of the tools they built in an arms race with Russians for over 40 years.
Your point is completely irrelevant. It doesn't matter what arms you use against the government, if you use them, they will arrest or kill you.Any argument that is based on the premise that some person or domestic group might take up arms against the U.S. government is simply invalid, because the U.S. government is capable to the point of impossibility of making sure that will never happen. Congratulations, in your quest to make the U.S. government armed services the most powerful in the world, you've also them invincible against its own citizens. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that no one will ever successfully win an armed conflict against the U.S. government. And by "win," I'm referring to the rationale that your idiot argument refers to, overthrowing the U.S. government by force or even successfully defending yourself on domestic soil. When Iraq comes to the shores of the U.S. and starts winning the war, THEN come and tell me how powerful and effective they are. Meanwhile, there won't be any grand insurgency here, no guerrilla warfare, and you'll never get past the possibility of going at it alone (or maybe with a few of your mentally unstable buddies) and getting yourself killed, and probably some innocent civilians and a few cops in the process.
So if you want to be against gun control, be against gun (or whatever your arms of choice are) control, I don't care. But at least be honest about the reason you're against it and stop with this "we need them to defend ourselves against the government!" crap, because like I said, when you say that, you come off sounding like an idiot.
I keep seeing this ludicrous "we can take up arms!" justification for having no control of guns in the United States. You do realize that for any practical purposes, unless they allow private citizens to own nuclear weapons, no amount of firepower you amass will do you a damned bit of good, right?
If you don't believe me, ask some of the guys who had a hell of a lot more guns that you probably do and decided to take up arms against the government. Ask David Koresh. Oh, that's right, you can't, because he's dead. Ask Timothy McVeigh. Whoops, he's dead, too. Ask Eric Rudolph. Whoa, you actually can, because he's not dead yet, he's rotting in a jail cell in Colorado!
Anyone who threatens to take up arms against the government is either playing on irrational emotions or an idiot, and they're more dangerous to society than helpful to it. You would have thought that people would have learned more from Dr. Martin Luther King, but I guess he was just some kind of weird ineffectual idealist, right?
When it comes to guns, I'm infinitely more concerned about well-meaning stupid people who think they're responsible gun owners than our government, because in the U.S., the government already own us, lock, stock, and barrel. (Pun slightly intended.) No, it's not a good thing, and I don't particularly like the situation, but it's the way it is, and gun control didn't have a damn thing to do with it. Stupid voters constantly giving the government too much power and taking away our civil liberties is what got us in this situation.
If you really want to make a change for the better, then quitcherbitchin' with all this gun talk, get off your ass, and either run for office or support someone running for office who will do a better job of protecting our privacy and civil liberties. Because when you rationalize wanting to own dangerous weapons with the excuse that you might want or need to take up arms against the government someday, you're not coming off as a patriot, you're coming off as a bloodthirsty idiot.
This is not the same as "crazy pants guy". Let's count a few ways quickly:
The dry cleaners that he was suing found his pants. This lady's laptop is still lost.
The dry cleaners offered to reimburse him $12,000, which is orders of magnitude more than what his pants cost. Best Buy is lowballing this lady.
The dry cleaners were a small business, and the money he was asking for would have closed their shop down and permanently saddled them with debt. Best Buy is a major corporation that can afford this payout. It will sting them, but not completely bankrupt them.
Crazy Pants Guy probably didn't have his social security and bank account numbers in his pants when he dropped them off. This lady probably did have such information on her laptop.
Crazy Pants Guy didn't pay $300 to guarantee that should something happen to his pants, he should be treated particularly well. This lady did.
To my knowledge, Crazy Pants Guy didn't approach the dry cleaners and try to make nice with a good-faith offer to make things right. This lady did.
...And so on. Like I said, this is a completely different situation.
She's not the loon that the submitter tries to make her out to be. There are a bunch of mitigating factors here, and I highly suggest anyone who complains about her actiosn dig a little deeper.
The thing that really ticks me off more than anything is that the lady paid $300 for one of those ripoff store warranties. This kind of money is normally pure profit for companies, since very few people actually collect on it. However, when someone does have a problem, I expect them to fulfill their obligations on it, not lie and jerk around the customer who bought it for THREE MONTHS. To fix a friggin' POWER BUTTON.
Also, please keep in mind that she admits that she does not expect to actually win $54 million. The reason she chose that amount is because, as stated, they've been lying to her and jerking her around for three months, and this was the only way she felt that it could get any attention.
Normally, I frown upon these cases myself for being a drain on the system and a waste of time. But seriously, read what she's gone through before deciding that she's out of line for trying to punish them for how stupid they've been. She may not be 100% right here, but I don't think that she's 100% wrong, and I have to admit that I hope she gets a pretty high payout to strike a punitive blow against the company for its practices.
Once you have your first child, suddenly, UNCLE TELEVISION will become your best friend.
Actually, we could all do with a lot less of UNCLE TELEVISION, especially kids.
It's too often today that people use the television (and video games and the computer) as a surrogate babysitter instead of actually taking the time to do stuff with them. There is no reason anyone's child needs dozens or hundreds of channels of entertainment. All it does is contribute to our short attention span 24-hour entertainment culture.
I took the plunge and canceled my satellite service a little over a year ago. Since then, I have kept up with exactly two shows: Mythbusters and Lost. I have so much more time now to do things that are infinitely more interesting, and I'd never go back to watching television from the time I got home until the time I go to bed. The sad thing is that until I got rid of the satellite service, I thought I would just die without it, precisely because I was raised with the television on almost every waking hour I was at home.
I know a few people like me who don't have cable or satellite service, and their kids are consistently smarter than their average couch potato peers. They don't call it the "idiot box" for nothing.
I don't think that television is inherently evil. But I do think that people who plop their kids down in front of it and give them instant access to everything they want for hours at a time are doing them a grave disservice.
Thanks, and I'm not saying that facetiously. That's exactly the kind of due diligence that I expect someone to do before this thing hits the front page. If the submitter wouldn't, then the editors should have, or if they're too busy to do that level of double-checking, the article should have been rejected for lack of substance.
I don't expect Slashdot to be a fully-outfitted news outfit with multiple sources and all, but I do hold them to a standard a little higher than publishing "guess what happened to me" stories.
I'd still like to know who these people are that are complaining and where they complained, but again, thanks for at leave providing some evidence that the whole thing isn't just fabricated out of thin air.
A caveat: there is no external confirmation that Amazon did what is claimed here.
External confirmation? I don't even see any internal confirmation. The one link in the submission goes to the item on Amazon.com's site, at which there is one glowing five-star rated customer review. As far as I can tell, this submitter simply wrote up something that may or may not be a complete fabrication with absolutely zero backing evidence, without even so much as a "here's my blog article about the experience," and somehow it make the front page.
Where's the screenshot of the item being offered for $31? Where's the printout of the placed order? Who were those customers that Amazon strung along for over a month, and where are they complaining? Was there even more than one? Was there even one? What "highly publicized price guarantee policy?" Are you talking about? This one, which Slate describes as "not something Amazon publicizes?" You are aware that companies don't have to honor prices that are obvious misprints, right? (And that a 75-CD limited edition import CD set being sold for $31 is an obivous misprint, right?)
Man, next time I have a beef with some company, remind me to completely make some shit up about them and post it as an article here on Slashdot. I'm usually not one to gripe about the job the editorial staff does here, but you guys really drop the ball in a major way on this one. Whether you like Amazon.com or not, with nothing to back it up, this borders on outright libel.
Re:NOT the same old entrenched politics
on
Has Ron Paul Quit?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
There must be some prisoner surveys or similar which show the effects of violence on adults. I'm inclined to believe that violence breeds violent behavior, in adults as well as children.
Yeah, I'd like to know on what basis you say that, too.
I mean, if you're the victim of fraud, does that make you more inclined to commit fraud on others, or more willing to fight against it? If you are the victim of rape, does that make you more inclined to rape others, or to stand up against rape? I can't speak for everyone, and I know there are odd exceptions, but I would think that most adults are like me, that when someone commits some horrible wrong against them, it pisses them off and makes them want to fight against that wrong, not commit that wrong upon others. The fact that John McCain is a Vietnam prisoner of war is relevant because he has FIRSTHAND knowledge of what it's like and why we can't go down that road. Also, as pointed out, he WAS tortured extensively during his captivity.
John McCain is on the record about how he feels about torture. In fact, it's one of the reasons that, even though I don't like Republicans in general, I do respect him. When all other Republicans literally were saying that torture is okay—when even the Vice President was saying that a "dunk in the water," as he euphemistically referred to it, was a no-brainer—John McCain went against the grain of his own party at a time when there was a significant political risk for doing so to do the right thing and speak out against it. It's an issue that I'm convinced he is passionate about, and if he's elected, I trust him to do the right thing about it.
And by the way, I'm also convinced that John McCain's vocal opposition to torture is the only reason why the U.S. government hasn't gone further than it has. Did we torture prisoners? Yes. But once this was discovered, John McCain did a great job working to stop it, and had he not, I believe the situation would be much, much worse. Was it a 100% win? Probably not, since Bush & Co. have demonstrated a blatant disregard, even contempt, for any limits on their power. But it was a hell of a try, it DID make a difference, and if he's elected, he won't have to deal with an egomaniac who thinks these practices are perfectly okay.
And again, this isn't a wholehearted endorsement of John McCain. I plan on voting for Obama or Clinton when the time comes. I'm merely pointing out that unlike Bush, McCain is a moderate, and an honorable one at that. No matter what happens this November (barring a fluke upset by Huckabee), we as a country will be much better off than we are today.
Re:NOT the same old entrenched politics
on
Has Ron Paul Quit?
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· Score: 1
At one time, he vehemently opposed the US's torture of prisoners abroad. Then he had a meeting with Bush, and suddenly he's got no problem with it.
Let me restate this: He was a Vietnam prisoner of war. Given that, I defy you to show me the quote where John McCain said that he's got no problem with torture of prisoners.
I certainly wouldn't be surprised if a conversation like this happened at some point:
McCain: George, we need to not torture people. It weakens our position internationally. Bush: I don't give a damn what you think, John. I'm going to do what I want, and if you don't keep your mouth shut, I will use all of my position and power to make sure that your political career is dead. I am the decider, not you, and you'd do well to remember your place in this party, because I've got political capital. McCain (privately): You know, fighting this battle right now is pointless and unwinnable. I will bide my time, wait until I am the guy in charge, and then we'll do things differently.
Unfortunately, such is the nature of politics. Don't think these conversations haven't happened with people in both parties, both between the parties and within them.
Whoever gets elected, I'm pretty sure the days of the U.S. torturing prisoners is over. At least, for the next four years.
NOT the same old entrenched politics
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Has Ron Paul Quit?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
No matter who wins this race, it is NOT the same old entrenched politics.
My personal preference, in order of who I think would be best for the country, is Obama, Clinton, and McCain to win. Now, having said that, I have to admit, I don't see McCain winning as all that bad.
Yes, he will continue the war in Iraq. But you know what? Unlike George Bush, I think he has the competence to continue it in a manner in which we don't alienate the entire world and look like idiots to those who want us all dead. Don't get me wrong, I don't have anything against our troops fighting the war. In fact, I have an immense respect that I could never convey adequately. But when I think of how Bush has misused them... Well, being a Vietnam War prisoner, I don't think McCain will take our soldiers' lives so capriciously for the sake of building "political capital."
You know what I think is most exciting about John McCain? He hasn't kowtowed to the Jesus Crispies, and he's cleaning the clocks of people who do. If he can successfully show Republicans with brains (yes, contrary to popular belief, there are some) that you can be a conservative without being a sycophant to the religious nuts out there, that would represent anything BUT entrenched politics.
So yeah, I hope Obama wins. And barring that, I hope Clinton wins. But if neither of them do, unlike I've ever felt about George Bush, if John McCain wins, he'll have my support as President and Commander-in-Chief. Unlike the last two elections, I don't see this country as being a miserable failure at everything in the next four years no matter who wins.
I'm sorry, but until Apple gets out of their exclusive contract with AT&T, the iPhone is a no-go for me. That's a show-stopper. I absolutely, positively, detest AT&T. In the past, they've screwed up my cable service, and they've screwed up my Internet access service twice. I simply do not have any faith that the company can do anything right. Plus, having been on Verizon for several years now, I'm happy to say that I'm not under one of those oppressive contracts, and they treat me rather well.
Why Apple would deliberately lock themselves out of a HUGE customer base of other carriers is beyond me. Surely they had to realize that the short-term perks they got from AT&T aren't worth it. (At least, I hope that if they didn't, they do now.)
So there you go, that's my excuse. It will be a cold day in hell before I buy an iPhone and get on AT&T's network, and I'm not willing to risk getting a $500 phone to tinker around with using those unlocking schemes. If they want my business, they're going to have to work with my preferred carrier.
As for the iTouch, whatever. I have an 80GB iPod already, I don't see the need to get a much more expensive 30GB model.
For what it's worth, I've paid for several albums off of Magnatune. It's a great site, and I've recommended it to others. (And I didn't pay the $5 cheap-o price, either.:-)
OK, here's the REALITY.. a perfectly everyday sequence of events:
1) Someone buys band XXX's CD
2) They rip it and put it on PirateBay
Frankly, you almost lost me right there. Normal people do not rip CDs and put them on the Pirate Bay.
Now are you really going to suggest that a DRM free version on iTunes will CHANGE the dynamics of this very real scenario?
...But I did get one more sentence in before deciding this was a waste of my time.
Yeah, as a matter of fact, I do. How long do you think it will be before we start seeing a glut of applications that will sync up your DRMless iTunes music library with any iPod, whether it's yours or someone else's? Hell, there's probably already something out there. Or an application that will allow you to copy the DRMless files off of your iPod to anyone else's computer and play them?
Hell, with DRMless music, I don't have to go to the Pirate Bay any more. I can just go over to a couple of my buddies' houses, and I'm good to go.
But like I said, I think the net result is that we'll all be buying more music, not less, even if we copy songs from each other.
As for the rest of your message, try to be shorter and more on point next time. I just glanced up and your last sentence—something about DRM being responsible for manufacturing jobs going overseas?—and I don't have time for this foolishness.
The question waiting to be answered is whether or not DRM free music will encourage/facilitate more "illegal" file sharing.
No, there's no question about that, it most certainly will.
The real question isn't whether there will be more illegal file sharing, it's whether there will be more legal purchases.
For a long, long time, I've asked a simple thought experiment. If you had your choice of having $500 million in sales with rampant piracy, or $1 billion in sales with twice as much piracy, which would you choose? The music industry has a history of choosing the lesser amount because of the risk of the increase in music piracy. I've contended all along that this is stupidity, that even if music piracy increases, it would be well worth it to increase their bottom line in legal music purchases. To date, they've been operating out of spite instead of common financial sense.
I hope, and I honestly believe, that as DRM-free music becomes the de facto standard in the marketplace, sales will increase as hardware manufacturers gear up to take advantage of it and people are able to listen to what they want, how they want, where they want. It's just a no-brainer to me. And I hope the MPAA is taking note, because the same principle will apply to television shows and movies also.
The question has never been about whether or not there will be piracy. The only way to prevent it is to close your company's doors and declare bankruptcy, never to earn another penny again. The only question is how willing the industry is to cut off its nose to spite its face, to forgo profits to stop something that will never be stopped.
and annoyingly lowercase (lowercase tags suck because they are harder to tell from normal text).
...which is why I used one of the many open source and/or freeware text editors out there that support syntax highlighting. I can honestly say that I've never had a problem telling my tags and attributes from my content, and even when I'm not using case-sensitive markup, I never use asinine CAPITAL LETTERS to denote such things. I let my computer do that for me.
Sometimes choice is a good thing, such as when you decide which editor to use or which markup language you support. Sometimes though, it is a badge thing, such as when it leads to inconsistent and even ambiguous coding standards. Count me squarely in the lower-case tags camp.
I always think it's a little funny how so many people complain about the Wikipedia, yet so many people—including the complainers—continue to use it with excellent results.
Which part of Alpha did these guys not understand? It is, by definition, "Not Ready Yet"!
Jimmy has pointed out that they're not even running against a real index yet, just a placeholder index. He even went so far as to say, "the search sucks today." The idea wasn't to launch a finished product that's ready for primetime. It wasn't even to launch a particularly working application. The point was to put something out there to demonstrate some rudimentary functionality while they continue to work towards something that does work.
You know, like a Beta.
I think it's kind of sad that Jimmy put something out and said, "Here's what it kinda will look like, and sorta how it will work," and people's first reaction is, "It's not a fully-functional working product? What a piece of crap."
I think I'll wait a little longer before judging. If you don't like the concept, fine, don't like the concept. But to bust its chops because it's not fully functional is a bit premature and silly at this point.
I hope this becomes such a public relations nightmare that DRM dissapears so thoroughly that it becomes nothing more than a footnote in books on the histories of bad ideas.
Amen! I've been saying for years that I wish they could come up with a DRM scheme that truly is uncrackable. Not only for audio and video media, but for software as well. And I hope that Microsoft, Apple, the MAFIAA, and everyone else uses the hell out of it to lock everything down so tight that no one can get access to anything. Most people look at me like I'm crazy.
The reason, of course, is because right now, DRM is still viewed by a lot of people—even technical people who ought to know better—as a problem limited to software and media "pirates". They've grown accustomed to buying and re-buying the same videos and songs in multiple formats, or being locked into one device to play their stuff for so long, they have no idea that there should be alternatives.
If DRM were locked down so tightly that it affected every aspect of your entertainment as much as those who implement it want it to, everyone from the most technical of gurus down to your average schmoe on the street would finally understand why this issue is so important. They wouldn't be able to ignore it any more. Maybe, just maybe, people would start fighting back for their rights to use the software, watch the video, and listen to the music they rightfully own. Until it's a problem that affects average, normal people in a tangible, impossible-to-ignore way, it will continue to be out there on the fringes of what people get upset about.
I'm headed out of town and don't have time to read all the posts to see if this has been pointed out already, but it doesn't say or suggest that anyone actually be in the car when it goes from 300 to 0 in 12 feet.
Assuming for a second that KITT can drive itself, it might come in handy for it to be able to jump off to starts and screech to stops faster than the human body can tolerate.
Your solution was not the "obvious" one unless the majority of that 150 student course came up with the same one and failed the lab for the same reason.
A majority of the students were still learning C++. It was obvious to anyone who has studied it to a degree of proficiency and had professional work experience using the language.
When people ask you to do work, they want results that make their lives as easy as possible.
When university faculty asks you to do work, it is presumably because they want you to learn the subject they are teaching, or if you already know it, demonstrate proficiency with it. Funny enough, the professors and TAs I encountered who wanted to make their lives as easy as possible tended to be the absolute worst of the lot. They weren't paying me to write this program. If they had been, I would have done it in whatever manner they wished. I was paying them to teach me a subject that, in this case, I clearly knew more about than they did.
I clearly demonstrated that I knew what I was doing and understood the topic, and I wrote code that met the specifications of the requirements they gave me and then some. I was not only penalized for it, my code—which worked perfectly well according to their specifications, I must reiterate—was completely rejected.
I'd also be willing to bet that if asked "Would you like to let the movie studio control what you watch on your legally purchased DVD, or would YOU like to choose?" darn near 100% of the users would indicate the latter.
I'd be willing to bet that if asked "Would you rather go work and earn $100, or would you like to have it for free from UncleTogie's personal bank account?" darn near 100% of the people would indicate the latter. Majority rule is completely irrelevant in some cases, such as what the DVD specifications say.
If you check the linked article above, pay close attention to the last sentence in the first paragraph. Wonton abuse of a published spec is one of the first steps to render said spec obsolete.
I read it, and I saw the last sentence. Here it is for reference: "Some publishers run protected commercials on their DVDs, which is widely seen as an abuse of the feature." I don't disagree, and I also see it as an abuse of the feature. Maybe the spec is obsolete. That still doesn't change the fact that according to the specification, players that ignore PUOs are not working correctly. They may be broken in a way that is convenient to you, and you might like the way in which they're broken a lot, and I would never argue that you shouldn't use a player that works how you want it to.
But acting like DVD players that work according to the specification are broken only masks the real problems: companies that force you to watch stuff you don't want to because of greed, and maybe a specification that has parts in it that allows such companies to engage in such abuse, although there ARE valid uses of PUOs (some of which are also outlined in the Wikipedia article). Whining and complaining about the DVD players is pointless.
Wonton abuse of a published spec is one of the first steps to render said spec obsolete.
Actually, not buying DVDs that abuse the practice is the first step to make the situation better. If you get a DVD home and are forced to watch a crapfest of commercials, return it to the store and explain why. If companies start seeing an impact in their bottom line because of their abuse, they'll stop. If you keep buying DVDs from them and working around the PUOs, their profits will continue to go up, their abuse will appear to be profitable, and it will encourage even more abuse.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? So you think that our government is in danger of being overthrown by Iraqui insurgents? Funny, I don't see many of them on our soil taking up arms against our government, and we have yet to bring the full might of our military and domestic armed services to bear against them. If there's an armed domestic uprising, it would be quite a different story. Not that there's even a remote chance of an armed domestic uprising, because our government would snuff out anyone and anything that got bigger than a few malcontents here and there.
Very impossible. Who the hell do you think would control the oil and food distribution? The government, you idiot, that's one of the first things they would do is take control of the supply line of crucial resources like that. And who the hell do you think would get the oil and food? I'll give you a hint: NOT you, and NOT the people who are fighting the government.
Maybe you didn't read the grandparent post:
I'm not the one that made this about gun control, he did, and it was done (as it is most of the time) for the purpose of distracting and easily-distractable audience from the real issue at hand: privacy rights.
Your point is completely irrelevant. It doesn't matter what arms you use against the government, if you use them, they will arrest or kill you. Any argument that is based on the premise that some person or domestic group might take up arms against the U.S. government is simply invalid, because the U.S. government is capable to the point of impossibility of making sure that will never happen. Congratulations, in your quest to make the U.S. government armed services the most powerful in the world, you've also them invincible against its own citizens. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that no one will ever successfully win an armed conflict against the U.S. government. And by "win," I'm referring to the rationale that your idiot argument refers to, overthrowing the U.S. government by force or even successfully defending yourself on domestic soil. When Iraq comes to the shores of the U.S. and starts winning the war, THEN come and tell me how powerful and effective they are. Meanwhile, there won't be any grand insurgency here, no guerrilla warfare, and you'll never get past the possibility of going at it alone (or maybe with a few of your mentally unstable buddies) and getting yourself killed, and probably some innocent civilians and a few cops in the process.
So if you want to be against gun control, be against gun (or whatever your arms of choice are) control, I don't care. But at least be honest about the reason you're against it and stop with this "we need them to defend ourselves against the government!" crap, because like I said, when you say that, you come off sounding like an idiot.
I keep seeing this ludicrous "we can take up arms!" justification for having no control of guns in the United States. You do realize that for any practical purposes, unless they allow private citizens to own nuclear weapons, no amount of firepower you amass will do you a damned bit of good, right?
If you don't believe me, ask some of the guys who had a hell of a lot more guns that you probably do and decided to take up arms against the government. Ask David Koresh. Oh, that's right, you can't, because he's dead. Ask Timothy McVeigh. Whoops, he's dead, too. Ask Eric Rudolph. Whoa, you actually can, because he's not dead yet, he's rotting in a jail cell in Colorado!
Anyone who threatens to take up arms against the government is either playing on irrational emotions or an idiot, and they're more dangerous to society than helpful to it. You would have thought that people would have learned more from Dr. Martin Luther King, but I guess he was just some kind of weird ineffectual idealist, right?
When it comes to guns, I'm infinitely more concerned about well-meaning stupid people who think they're responsible gun owners than our government, because in the U.S., the government already own us, lock, stock, and barrel. (Pun slightly intended.) No, it's not a good thing, and I don't particularly like the situation, but it's the way it is, and gun control didn't have a damn thing to do with it. Stupid voters constantly giving the government too much power and taking away our civil liberties is what got us in this situation.
If you really want to make a change for the better, then quitcherbitchin' with all this gun talk, get off your ass, and either run for office or support someone running for office who will do a better job of protecting our privacy and civil liberties. Because when you rationalize wanting to own dangerous weapons with the excuse that you might want or need to take up arms against the government someday, you're not coming off as a patriot, you're coming off as a bloodthirsty idiot.
This is not the same as "crazy pants guy". Let's count a few ways quickly:
...And so on. Like I said, this is a completely different situation.
She's not the loon that the submitter tries to make her out to be. There are a bunch of mitigating factors here, and I highly suggest anyone who complains about her actiosn dig a little deeper.
The thing that really ticks me off more than anything is that the lady paid $300 for one of those ripoff store warranties. This kind of money is normally pure profit for companies, since very few people actually collect on it. However, when someone does have a problem, I expect them to fulfill their obligations on it, not lie and jerk around the customer who bought it for THREE MONTHS. To fix a friggin' POWER BUTTON.
Also, please keep in mind that she admits that she does not expect to actually win $54 million. The reason she chose that amount is because, as stated, they've been lying to her and jerking her around for three months, and this was the only way she felt that it could get any attention.
Normally, I frown upon these cases myself for being a drain on the system and a waste of time. But seriously, read what she's gone through before deciding that she's out of line for trying to punish them for how stupid they've been. She may not be 100% right here, but I don't think that she's 100% wrong, and I have to admit that I hope she gets a pretty high payout to strike a punitive blow against the company for its practices.
Actually, we could all do with a lot less of UNCLE TELEVISION, especially kids.
It's too often today that people use the television (and video games and the computer) as a surrogate babysitter instead of actually taking the time to do stuff with them. There is no reason anyone's child needs dozens or hundreds of channels of entertainment. All it does is contribute to our short attention span 24-hour entertainment culture.
I took the plunge and canceled my satellite service a little over a year ago. Since then, I have kept up with exactly two shows: Mythbusters and Lost. I have so much more time now to do things that are infinitely more interesting, and I'd never go back to watching television from the time I got home until the time I go to bed. The sad thing is that until I got rid of the satellite service, I thought I would just die without it, precisely because I was raised with the television on almost every waking hour I was at home.
I know a few people like me who don't have cable or satellite service, and their kids are consistently smarter than their average couch potato peers. They don't call it the "idiot box" for nothing.
I don't think that television is inherently evil. But I do think that people who plop their kids down in front of it and give them instant access to everything they want for hours at a time are doing them a grave disservice.
Thanks, and I'm not saying that facetiously. That's exactly the kind of due diligence that I expect someone to do before this thing hits the front page. If the submitter wouldn't, then the editors should have, or if they're too busy to do that level of double-checking, the article should have been rejected for lack of substance.
I don't expect Slashdot to be a fully-outfitted news outfit with multiple sources and all, but I do hold them to a standard a little higher than publishing "guess what happened to me" stories.
I'd still like to know who these people are that are complaining and where they complained, but again, thanks for at leave providing some evidence that the whole thing isn't just fabricated out of thin air.
External confirmation? I don't even see any internal confirmation. The one link in the submission goes to the item on Amazon.com's site, at which there is one glowing five-star rated customer review. As far as I can tell, this submitter simply wrote up something that may or may not be a complete fabrication with absolutely zero backing evidence, without even so much as a "here's my blog article about the experience," and somehow it make the front page.
Where's the screenshot of the item being offered for $31? Where's the printout of the placed order? Who were those customers that Amazon strung along for over a month, and where are they complaining? Was there even more than one? Was there even one? What "highly publicized price guarantee policy?" Are you talking about? This one, which Slate describes as "not something Amazon publicizes?" You are aware that companies don't have to honor prices that are obvious misprints, right? (And that a 75-CD limited edition import CD set being sold for $31 is an obivous misprint, right?)
Man, next time I have a beef with some company, remind me to completely make some shit up about them and post it as an article here on Slashdot. I'm usually not one to gripe about the job the editorial staff does here, but you guys really drop the ball in a major way on this one. Whether you like Amazon.com or not, with nothing to back it up, this borders on outright libel.
Yeah, I'd like to know on what basis you say that, too.
I mean, if you're the victim of fraud, does that make you more inclined to commit fraud on others, or more willing to fight against it? If you are the victim of rape, does that make you more inclined to rape others, or to stand up against rape? I can't speak for everyone, and I know there are odd exceptions, but I would think that most adults are like me, that when someone commits some horrible wrong against them, it pisses them off and makes them want to fight against that wrong, not commit that wrong upon others. The fact that John McCain is a Vietnam prisoner of war is relevant because he has FIRSTHAND knowledge of what it's like and why we can't go down that road. Also, as pointed out, he WAS tortured extensively during his captivity.
John McCain is on the record about how he feels about torture. In fact, it's one of the reasons that, even though I don't like Republicans in general, I do respect him. When all other Republicans literally were saying that torture is okay—when even the Vice President was saying that a "dunk in the water," as he euphemistically referred to it, was a no-brainer—John McCain went against the grain of his own party at a time when there was a significant political risk for doing so to do the right thing and speak out against it. It's an issue that I'm convinced he is passionate about, and if he's elected, I trust him to do the right thing about it.
And by the way, I'm also convinced that John McCain's vocal opposition to torture is the only reason why the U.S. government hasn't gone further than it has. Did we torture prisoners? Yes. But once this was discovered, John McCain did a great job working to stop it, and had he not, I believe the situation would be much, much worse. Was it a 100% win? Probably not, since Bush & Co. have demonstrated a blatant disregard, even contempt, for any limits on their power. But it was a hell of a try, it DID make a difference, and if he's elected, he won't have to deal with an egomaniac who thinks these practices are perfectly okay.
And again, this isn't a wholehearted endorsement of John McCain. I plan on voting for Obama or Clinton when the time comes. I'm merely pointing out that unlike Bush, McCain is a moderate, and an honorable one at that. No matter what happens this November (barring a fluke upset by Huckabee), we as a country will be much better off than we are today.
Let me restate this: He was a Vietnam prisoner of war. Given that, I defy you to show me the quote where John McCain said that he's got no problem with torture of prisoners.
I certainly wouldn't be surprised if a conversation like this happened at some point:
McCain: George, we need to not torture people. It weakens our position internationally.
Bush: I don't give a damn what you think, John. I'm going to do what I want, and if you don't keep your mouth shut, I will use all of my position and power to make sure that your political career is dead. I am the decider, not you, and you'd do well to remember your place in this party, because I've got political capital.
McCain (privately): You know, fighting this battle right now is pointless and unwinnable. I will bide my time, wait until I am the guy in charge, and then we'll do things differently.
Unfortunately, such is the nature of politics. Don't think these conversations haven't happened with people in both parties, both between the parties and within them.
Whoever gets elected, I'm pretty sure the days of the U.S. torturing prisoners is over. At least, for the next four years.
No matter who wins this race, it is NOT the same old entrenched politics.
My personal preference, in order of who I think would be best for the country, is Obama, Clinton, and McCain to win. Now, having said that, I have to admit, I don't see McCain winning as all that bad.
Yes, he will continue the war in Iraq. But you know what? Unlike George Bush, I think he has the competence to continue it in a manner in which we don't alienate the entire world and look like idiots to those who want us all dead. Don't get me wrong, I don't have anything against our troops fighting the war. In fact, I have an immense respect that I could never convey adequately. But when I think of how Bush has misused them... Well, being a Vietnam War prisoner, I don't think McCain will take our soldiers' lives so capriciously for the sake of building "political capital."
You know what I think is most exciting about John McCain? He hasn't kowtowed to the Jesus Crispies, and he's cleaning the clocks of people who do. If he can successfully show Republicans with brains (yes, contrary to popular belief, there are some) that you can be a conservative without being a sycophant to the religious nuts out there, that would represent anything BUT entrenched politics.
So yeah, I hope Obama wins. And barring that, I hope Clinton wins. But if neither of them do, unlike I've ever felt about George Bush, if John McCain wins, he'll have my support as President and Commander-in-Chief. Unlike the last two elections, I don't see this country as being a miserable failure at everything in the next four years no matter who wins.
I'm sorry, but until Apple gets out of their exclusive contract with AT&T, the iPhone is a no-go for me. That's a show-stopper. I absolutely, positively, detest AT&T. In the past, they've screwed up my cable service, and they've screwed up my Internet access service twice. I simply do not have any faith that the company can do anything right. Plus, having been on Verizon for several years now, I'm happy to say that I'm not under one of those oppressive contracts, and they treat me rather well.
Why Apple would deliberately lock themselves out of a HUGE customer base of other carriers is beyond me. Surely they had to realize that the short-term perks they got from AT&T aren't worth it. (At least, I hope that if they didn't, they do now.)
So there you go, that's my excuse. It will be a cold day in hell before I buy an iPhone and get on AT&T's network, and I'm not willing to risk getting a $500 phone to tinker around with using those unlocking schemes. If they want my business, they're going to have to work with my preferred carrier.
As for the iTouch, whatever. I have an 80GB iPod already, I don't see the need to get a much more expensive 30GB model.
For what it's worth, I've paid for several albums off of Magnatune. It's a great site, and I've recommended it to others. (And I didn't pay the $5 cheap-o price, either. :-)
Frankly, you almost lost me right there. Normal people do not rip CDs and put them on the Pirate Bay.
...But I did get one more sentence in before deciding this was a waste of my time.
Yeah, as a matter of fact, I do. How long do you think it will be before we start seeing a glut of applications that will sync up your DRMless iTunes music library with any iPod, whether it's yours or someone else's? Hell, there's probably already something out there. Or an application that will allow you to copy the DRMless files off of your iPod to anyone else's computer and play them?
Hell, with DRMless music, I don't have to go to the Pirate Bay any more. I can just go over to a couple of my buddies' houses, and I'm good to go.
But like I said, I think the net result is that we'll all be buying more music, not less, even if we copy songs from each other.
As for the rest of your message, try to be shorter and more on point next time. I just glanced up and your last sentence—something about DRM being responsible for manufacturing jobs going overseas?—and I don't have time for this foolishness.
Right now, Notepad++ is my editor of choice, but I've also used UltraEdit and PSPad. All of them are really good and solid.
When you pair it up with NetDrive (an FTP filesystem mounter for Windows), you're pretty much set.
No, there's no question about that, it most certainly will.
The real question isn't whether there will be more illegal file sharing, it's whether there will be more legal purchases.
For a long, long time, I've asked a simple thought experiment. If you had your choice of having $500 million in sales with rampant piracy, or $1 billion in sales with twice as much piracy, which would you choose? The music industry has a history of choosing the lesser amount because of the risk of the increase in music piracy. I've contended all along that this is stupidity, that even if music piracy increases, it would be well worth it to increase their bottom line in legal music purchases. To date, they've been operating out of spite instead of common financial sense.
I hope, and I honestly believe, that as DRM-free music becomes the de facto standard in the marketplace, sales will increase as hardware manufacturers gear up to take advantage of it and people are able to listen to what they want, how they want, where they want. It's just a no-brainer to me. And I hope the MPAA is taking note, because the same principle will apply to television shows and movies also.
The question has never been about whether or not there will be piracy. The only way to prevent it is to close your company's doors and declare bankruptcy, never to earn another penny again. The only question is how willing the industry is to cut off its nose to spite its face, to forgo profits to stop something that will never be stopped.
...and delightfully extensible and powerful...
...which is why I used one of the many open source and/or freeware text editors out there that support syntax highlighting. I can honestly say that I've never had a problem telling my tags and attributes from my content, and even when I'm not using case-sensitive markup, I never use asinine CAPITAL LETTERS to denote such things. I let my computer do that for me.
Sometimes choice is a good thing, such as when you decide which editor to use or which markup language you support. Sometimes though, it is a badge thing, such as when it leads to inconsistent and even ambiguous coding standards. Count me squarely in the lower-case tags camp.
I could be wrong, but I think that was sarcasm.
I always think it's a little funny how so many people complain about the Wikipedia, yet so many people—including the complainers—continue to use it with excellent results.
Does that make v.3 the one where the NSA also gets to watch what you're watching in real-time?
Which part of Alpha did these guys not understand? It is, by definition, "Not Ready Yet"!
Jimmy has pointed out that they're not even running against a real index yet, just a placeholder index. He even went so far as to say, "the search sucks today." The idea wasn't to launch a finished product that's ready for primetime. It wasn't even to launch a particularly working application. The point was to put something out there to demonstrate some rudimentary functionality while they continue to work towards something that does work.
You know, like a Beta.
I think it's kind of sad that Jimmy put something out and said, "Here's what it kinda will look like, and sorta how it will work," and people's first reaction is, "It's not a fully-functional working product? What a piece of crap."
I think I'll wait a little longer before judging. If you don't like the concept, fine, don't like the concept. But to bust its chops because it's not fully functional is a bit premature and silly at this point.
Amen! I've been saying for years that I wish they could come up with a DRM scheme that truly is uncrackable. Not only for audio and video media, but for software as well. And I hope that Microsoft, Apple, the MAFIAA, and everyone else uses the hell out of it to lock everything down so tight that no one can get access to anything. Most people look at me like I'm crazy.
The reason, of course, is because right now, DRM is still viewed by a lot of people—even technical people who ought to know better—as a problem limited to software and media "pirates". They've grown accustomed to buying and re-buying the same videos and songs in multiple formats, or being locked into one device to play their stuff for so long, they have no idea that there should be alternatives.
If DRM were locked down so tightly that it affected every aspect of your entertainment as much as those who implement it want it to, everyone from the most technical of gurus down to your average schmoe on the street would finally understand why this issue is so important. They wouldn't be able to ignore it any more. Maybe, just maybe, people would start fighting back for their rights to use the software, watch the video, and listen to the music they rightfully own. Until it's a problem that affects average, normal people in a tangible, impossible-to-ignore way, it will continue to be out there on the fringes of what people get upset about.
I really wish I had eaten pizza last night instead of ordering takeout Chinese.
Other than that, I can't think of anything.
Score for Maxo-Texas!
I love you, man.
I'm headed out of town and don't have time to read all the posts to see if this has been pointed out already, but it doesn't say or suggest that anyone actually be in the car when it goes from 300 to 0 in 12 feet.
Assuming for a second that KITT can drive itself, it might come in handy for it to be able to jump off to starts and screech to stops faster than the human body can tolerate.
A majority of the students were still learning C++. It was obvious to anyone who has studied it to a degree of proficiency and had professional work experience using the language.
When university faculty asks you to do work, it is presumably because they want you to learn the subject they are teaching, or if you already know it, demonstrate proficiency with it. Funny enough, the professors and TAs I encountered who wanted to make their lives as easy as possible tended to be the absolute worst of the lot. They weren't paying me to write this program. If they had been, I would have done it in whatever manner they wished. I was paying them to teach me a subject that, in this case, I clearly knew more about than they did.
I clearly demonstrated that I knew what I was doing and understood the topic, and I wrote code that met the specifications of the requirements they gave me and then some. I was not only penalized for it, my code—which worked perfectly well according to their specifications, I must reiterate—was completely rejected.
According to the people who came up with the DVD format.
I'd be willing to bet that if asked "Would you rather go work and earn $100, or would you like to have it for free from UncleTogie's personal bank account?" darn near 100% of the people would indicate the latter. Majority rule is completely irrelevant in some cases, such as what the DVD specifications say.
I read it, and I saw the last sentence. Here it is for reference: "Some publishers run protected commercials on their DVDs, which is widely seen as an abuse of the feature." I don't disagree, and I also see it as an abuse of the feature. Maybe the spec is obsolete. That still doesn't change the fact that according to the specification, players that ignore PUOs are not working correctly. They may be broken in a way that is convenient to you, and you might like the way in which they're broken a lot, and I would never argue that you shouldn't use a player that works how you want it to.
But acting like DVD players that work according to the specification are broken only masks the real problems: companies that force you to watch stuff you don't want to because of greed, and maybe a specification that has parts in it that allows such companies to engage in such abuse, although there ARE valid uses of PUOs (some of which are also outlined in the Wikipedia article). Whining and complaining about the DVD players is pointless.
Actually, not buying DVDs that abuse the practice is the first step to make the situation better. If you get a DVD home and are forced to watch a crapfest of commercials, return it to the store and explain why. If companies start seeing an impact in their bottom line because of their abuse, they'll stop. If you keep buying DVDs from them and working around the PUOs, their profits will continue to go up, their abuse will appear to be profitable, and it will encourage even more abuse.