Other than it being obscure, I'm good with what finally resolved the problem - he (sort of) paid for premium support.
I think that if a person or business becomes dependent on a 'free' service then charging for premium support is reasonable. But the quality of service had better be top notch where the first level support is trained to be real good at escalating problems instead of simply sending canned responses that don't really address the issue. If managed well, it can also be a revenue stream in that the people who want somebody to hold their hands for the otherwise trivial stuff can also pay for the privilege and thus its a win-win situation. However, if managed poorly it creates an incentive for bad documentation and obtuse user-interfaces intended to funnel people who would otherwise be self-service into the pay-for-service channel. Its a pick-your-poison situation.
The only part of any religion that can not be simultaneously right with any other religion is the part that says, "this is the only true religion." Plenty of religions do not say that. Even of the religions that do say that, there are widespread sects that do not. For example Sufism and Kabala. The christians have at least one mystic sect too, I just can't remember its name off hand.
BP *WILL NOT* come out of this unscathed, if they come out at all.
But the people responsible will do just fine. That's what a corporation is for - a liability shield to enable management to take risks where the only consequences of a bad decision are shouldered by the shareholders (and the rest of the world) but the benefits of a good decision (or even a bad decision) go to management as well in the form of bonuses.
If BP gets hit hard enough in the courts they will go bankrupt and the assets will be acquired by another petrocorp for pennies on the dollar. Many in management will just find new jobs within the industry, in many cases with the acquiring company itself ('continuity of operations' and all that).
The problem is that whole liability shield thing, in some rare cases it can be pierced but not when the defense has hundreds of millions to spend on lawyers.
Yeah! Lets punish a group of people, 95% of which had absolutely nothing to do with the safty of oil rigs just to satisfy the screaming mob! They're rich, who cares about how innocent they are!
Really? You don't think the top 10% of the company has both the means to do something about shoddy business practices and has not directly benefited from them?
Here's an idea for how to really motivate BP - and any other company with the potential to cause such massive havoc...
For every day that the oil continues to gush, the top 10% of their employees, by total compensation, should be required to work for a day on the clean-up crews. Not simply going to meetings and coming up with plans - they are to get down and dirty scraping oil off rocks and washing birds. The kind of work that gets oil under your fingernails and in your hair, with the smell soaked so deeply into your skin that it takes weeks to get it out.
After all, these guys have so much money in the bank that firing them won't hurt, and fining the company will just translate into higher oil prices. If they had some real skin in the game, I think we would have seen them take the problem a whole lot more seriously from day one.
More "one bad apple" logic. Does this sound right?
Nope it doesn't sound right. Read what I wrote, here I'll quote it for you - "When the actions they [people] take because of those conclusions are destructive then they do need to be opposed." Do you see me opposing religion or opposing actions justified by religion?
Why focus on opposing religion since you can't prove it wrong? The whole topic is a waste of time.
While the existence of an all-powerful deity or deities is not falsifiable - a hell of a lot of conclusions that people come to based on that premise are. When the actions they take because of those conclusions are destructive then they do need to be opposed.
One ~40 minute TV show on itunes is 1.5GB - at only 720p and that's on the edge of acceptable quality with macro-blocking and loss of detail in scenes that are 'hard' to encode.
You may not give a crap about the cap, but you are an old and boring fuddite who apparently has no interest beyond the status quo.
Yeah, its not illegal - that's why they spent all that money getting the laws written in their favor. But, you can't see it very easily because he wasn't modded up, but the guy was I responding to was one of those types who insist that violating copyright is stealing based on his own moral evaluation rather than what the laws say. My response was intended to show that if morality is what matters, then by his own criteria, the copyright cartel is so massively in the wrong that everything else is just in the noise.
Gee that's odd you decided that was your point since, just a few posts above, I wrote the following:
What is the purpose of the stock markets? Are they meant to be a video game played by A.I.'s for big cash prizes, or a way of facilitating investment and trade?
False dichotomy. It is quite possible, and I would say almost certain, that they can be both.
One must keep in mind though, that not every distributor/production company is part of the Hollywood cartel, or necessarily agrees with their views on copyright.
Yes, there are some publishers who do not own the copyright on any works old enough to be affected by the most recent copyright extension, they at least can't be held responsible for that grand theft. But it is pretty rare that you hear of one of them actively disclaiming copyright extensions either.
That may be true but it's irrelevant in this case.
Oh it is true, no maybe about it. And it is just as relevant as insisting that the legal definition of theft should be discarded because of your moral beliefs.
but what's their alternative? The most common solution offered on slashdot for the people who make these movies is basically to just allow piracy.
Work om commission. We already pay for cable tv through what is essentially a commission basis - you subscribe to certain channels which guarantees a revenue stream for the producers working with that channel. Publish on the channel AFTER enough subscription fees have been collected to pay for the labor of creating the movie or show. That way you can 'just allow piracy' because its already been paid for, the piracy even acts as free advertising for the channel, possibly generating even more subscriptions if people like the shows enough that they are willing to pay for the production of more of them.
Then hollywood and all the other publishers are the biggest thieves in the world. Why? Because of retroactive copyright extensions. Because of those extensions the publishers have stolen millions of works from the public domain. Works that were created and released under very specific copyright terms that guaranteed their release into the public domain. If they didn't agree to those terms, they should never have published in the first place. But instead, they hired lobbyists to steal all of those works from every single citizen. That is theft on a scale hundreds of thousands of times greater than 'internet piracy' could ever achieve, even if every single citizen pirated everything they ever watched.
So if you want to talk about stealing you should be focusing on the biggest thieves in the world bar none not these piddly little downloaders.
It would be kind of hard to claim a robbery was a crime of opportunity (e.g. not premeditated) if the robber was found to have a map to the house, a picture of the front door, a satellite view of the surrounding neighborhood, and pictures of the inside (from Zillow, Redfin, etc.).
Then why a special law for those circumstances? Premeditation is already something that boosts sentencing - if it is so easy to show premeditation then this new law is wasteful.
There's always someone with more information than you out there.
That doesn't mean the system should deliberately include such loopholes.
It used to be that a powerful investor could get a bigger "story" out of a CEO than today. One could watch the larger investors and know they "knew something". Today, it's so "fair" you can't tell much of anything from a wealthy trader's trades.
Fine by me. Since 99% of the american population will never be a "powerful investor" the fact that such trades do not reflect any insider knowledge is AOK - the less people able to act on insider knowledge the better for the rest of us. On the other hand, I say you are making that shit up. Seriously - you can't watch the trading activity of a "powerful investor" - the best you can do is look at the reports from public mutual funds 3+ months after the trades were executed, long after any insider knowledge has lost its value. The only thing you can do, and have always been able to do, is watch the anonymous trades on the exchange and draw inferences from that info.
As long as there is no intent to defraud, lying about anything, including your identity, is perfectly legal with only a few rare exceptions involving the government itself and even many of those exceptions the penalties are trivial. For example, you may end up in jail for lying on a concealed carry license application, but in most states lying about your name and address for your driver's license carries a penalty of, at worst, getting your license revoked if you get caught.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes it did, the pychess google group continued to operate, he just didn't have administrative control over it.
Sounds a bit like Stockholm Syndrome.
Other than it being obscure, I'm good with what finally resolved the problem - he (sort of) paid for premium support.
I think that if a person or business becomes dependent on a 'free' service then charging for premium support is reasonable. But the quality of service had better be top notch where the first level support is trained to be real good at escalating problems instead of simply sending canned responses that don't really address the issue. If managed well, it can also be a revenue stream in that the people who want somebody to hold their hands for the otherwise trivial stuff can also pay for the privilege and thus its a win-win situation. However, if managed poorly it creates an incentive for bad documentation and obtuse user-interfaces intended to funnel people who would otherwise be self-service into the pay-for-service channel. Its a pick-your-poison situation.
Why not create another account to let your users know what's going on, and to contact Google support staff?
Why not read the fine article and discover the he did just that and it didn't help?
The only part of any religion that can not be simultaneously right with any other religion is the part that says, "this is the only true religion."
Plenty of religions do not say that. Even of the religions that do say that, there are widespread sects that do not. For example Sufism and Kabala. The christians have at least one mystic sect too, I just can't remember its name off hand.
I'm not an atheist, since that would require a non believe in a god which sort of gives him some credence.
No more than not collecting stamps is a hobby.
I don't give a rat's ass about what college kids feel!
BP *WILL NOT* come out of this unscathed, if they come out at all.
But the people responsible will do just fine. That's what a corporation is for - a liability shield to enable management to take risks where the only consequences of a bad decision are shouldered by the shareholders (and the rest of the world) but the benefits of a good decision (or even a bad decision) go to management as well in the form of bonuses.
If BP gets hit hard enough in the courts they will go bankrupt and the assets will be acquired by another petrocorp for pennies on the dollar. Many in management will just find new jobs within the industry, in many cases with the acquiring company itself ('continuity of operations' and all that).
The problem is that whole liability shield thing, in some rare cases it can be pierced but not when the defense has hundreds of millions to spend on lawyers.
Yeah! Lets punish a group of people, 95% of which had absolutely nothing to do with the safty of oil rigs just to satisfy the screaming mob! They're rich, who cares about how innocent they are!
Really? You don't think the top 10% of the company has both the means to do something about shoddy business practices and has not directly benefited from them?
Here's an idea for how to really motivate BP - and any other company with the potential to cause such massive havoc...
For every day that the oil continues to gush, the top 10% of their employees, by total compensation, should be required to work for a day on the clean-up crews. Not simply going to meetings and coming up with plans - they are to get down and dirty scraping oil off rocks and washing birds. The kind of work that gets oil under your fingernails and in your hair, with the smell soaked so deeply into your skin that it takes weeks to get it out.
After all, these guys have so much money in the bank that firing them won't hurt, and fining the company will just translate into higher oil prices. If they had some real skin in the game, I think we would have seen them take the problem a whole lot more seriously from day one.
More "one bad apple" logic. Does this sound right?
Nope it doesn't sound right.
Read what I wrote, here I'll quote it for you - "When the actions they [people] take because of those conclusions are destructive then they do need to be opposed."
Do you see me opposing religion or opposing actions justified by religion?
Why focus on opposing religion since you can't prove it wrong? The whole topic is a waste of time.
While the existence of an all-powerful deity or deities is not falsifiable - a hell of a lot of conclusions that people come to based on that premise are. When the actions they take because of those conclusions are destructive then they do need to be opposed.
And that is EXACTLY what the GP pointed out the copyright cartels were doing too.
Thanks dude, I totally didn't know what I wrote.
One ~40 minute TV show on itunes is 1.5GB - at only 720p and that's on the edge of acceptable quality with macro-blocking and loss of detail in scenes that are 'hard' to encode.
You may not give a crap about the cap, but you are an old and boring fuddite who apparently has no interest beyond the status quo.
Yeah, its not illegal - that's why they spent all that money getting the laws written in their favor. But, you can't see it very easily because he wasn't modded up, but the guy was I responding to was one of those types who insist that violating copyright is stealing based on his own moral evaluation rather than what the laws say. My response was intended to show that if morality is what matters, then by his own criteria, the copyright cartel is so massively in the wrong that everything else is just in the noise.
Gee that's odd you decided that was your point since, just a few posts above, I wrote the following:
What is the purpose of the stock markets? Are they meant to be a video game played by A.I.'s for big cash prizes, or a way of facilitating investment and trade?
False dichotomy. It is quite possible, and I would say almost certain, that they can be both.
One must keep in mind though, that not every distributor/production company is part of the Hollywood cartel, or necessarily agrees with their views on copyright.
Yes, there are some publishers who do not own the copyright on any works old enough to be affected by the most recent copyright extension, they at least can't be held responsible for that grand theft. But it is pretty rare that you hear of one of them actively disclaiming copyright extensions either.
15 years? Sounds like Stix has too much time on their hands.
But they finally got it made, like a renegade.
That may be true but it's irrelevant in this case.
Oh it is true, no maybe about it.
And it is just as relevant as insisting that the legal definition of theft should be discarded because of your moral beliefs.
but what's their alternative? The most common solution offered on slashdot for the people who make these movies is basically to just allow piracy.
Work om commission. We already pay for cable tv through what is essentially a commission basis - you subscribe to certain channels which guarantees a revenue stream for the producers working with that channel. Publish on the channel AFTER enough subscription fees have been collected to pay for the labor of creating the movie or show. That way you can 'just allow piracy' because its already been paid for, the piracy even acts as free advertising for the channel, possibly generating even more subscriptions if people like the shows enough that they are willing to pay for the production of more of them.
Taking something without paying is stealing.
Then hollywood and all the other publishers are the biggest thieves in the world.
Why? Because of retroactive copyright extensions.
Because of those extensions the publishers have stolen millions of works from the public domain.
Works that were created and released under very specific copyright terms that guaranteed their release into the public domain.
If they didn't agree to those terms, they should never have published in the first place.
But instead, they hired lobbyists to steal all of those works from every single citizen.
That is theft on a scale hundreds of thousands of times greater than 'internet piracy' could ever achieve, even if every single citizen pirated everything they ever watched.
So if you want to talk about stealing you should be focusing on the biggest thieves in the world bar none not these piddly little downloaders.
It would be kind of hard to claim a robbery was a crime of opportunity (e.g. not premeditated) if the robber was found to have a map to the house, a picture of the front door, a satellite view of the surrounding neighborhood, and pictures of the inside (from Zillow, Redfin, etc.).
Then why a special law for those circumstances? Premeditation is already something that boosts sentencing - if it is so easy to show premeditation then this new law is wasteful.
If you have a point, you didn't make it with that post.
There's always someone with more information than you out there.
That doesn't mean the system should deliberately include such loopholes.
It used to be that a powerful investor could get a bigger "story" out of a CEO than today. One could watch the larger investors and know they "knew something". Today, it's so "fair" you can't tell much of anything from a wealthy trader's trades.
Fine by me. Since 99% of the american population will never be a "powerful investor" the fact that such trades do not reflect any insider knowledge is AOK - the less people able to act on insider knowledge the better for the rest of us. On the other hand, I say you are making that shit up. Seriously - you can't watch the trading activity of a "powerful investor" - the best you can do is look at the reports from public mutual funds 3+ months after the trades were executed, long after any insider knowledge has lost its value. The only thing you can do, and have always been able to do, is watch the anonymous trades on the exchange and draw inferences from that info.
Was giving a fake name legal?
As long as there is no intent to defraud, lying about anything, including your identity, is perfectly legal with only a few rare exceptions involving the government itself and even many of those exceptions the penalties are trivial. For example, you may end up in jail for lying on a concealed carry license application, but in most states lying about your name and address for your driver's license carries a penalty of, at worst, getting your license revoked if you get caught.