About 5 years back I was in for a regular checkup and asked the doc to write me a prescription for a drug I didn't need because it was sold in two versions - one brand name for an 8mg dose for one symptom and a different brand name for 2mg dose for another symptom. The kick was that the 8mg dose and the 2mg dose cost the same, so I wanted a script for the 8mg version and a pill cutter to cut them into quarters, for 75% savings on a per dose basis.
He was very happy to do it because he was sick of the drug marketing bullshit that is aimed at him and his fellow doctors. The kind of marketing that convinces the docs to prescribe the expensive but only equal or somtimes even less effective drugs rather than the tried and true and cheap ones. He was of the opinion that doctors are just as much a victim of misleading marketing as patients, it just came to them in a different form (office visits from drug marketers and ads in various journals).
Airline dereg was the best thing for consumers, which is the way it is supposed to go. Tickets that used to cost $2000 in inflation-corrected dollars regularly go for $200-$300 now. Even then, the industry isn't fully deregulated, look at the FAA's twin priorities of promoting the industry and overseeing it as well as thing the multi-billion dollar 'bailouts' they got over the last few years.
The people at gitmo are so unlikely to be innocent it's not even a question.
If the that is true, that the evidence is so overwhelmingly powerful that their guilt is "not even a question" - then what do we have to lose by giving them a trial? Surely, something so obvious to someone like you who only knows what the news tells them would cause any jury of American citizens to unanimously find those terrorists guilty. Right?
One of the articles I read said: 'Officials said it contained an electronic circuit board with some components that were "consistent with an improvised explosive device,"'
Okay, now, come on. These are really large circuit boards with a whole lot of LEDs soldered on to them. Nothing more, unless there are some other really messed up packages out there that haven't been reported on.
Now you know.
That's the way they justify all their bullshit.
"Behavior consistent with terrorist actions." "Associations with well-known terrorists." etc
When those vague phrases are the best they can do it means they don't have a shred of meaningful evidence but they want to scare people into thinking they do, so their authority won't be questioned.
This is what happened in Australia and we have a thriving broadband market.
Since when? Last I heard, a year or two ago, the partially-state-owned telco had a near monopoly and was farting around with xfer caps for any international traffic. Apparently you live there and all and thus should know more about it than someone who is too lazy to google it, but if what you say is true, it's gotta be a recent phenomenon.
Abolishing copyright law would shift the financial rewards to those who are good at copying or facilitating copying (TPB is already making some pretty good money), and shift them away from Adobe and other innovators who follow the "invest a lot of money in R&D" model.
I completely disagree. If TPB is actually making money it is for the same reason cocaine is so profitable - supply is restricted by the law. If copying was fully legal, then the margins would fall out of it just like they would for Adobe who, right now, is just selling copies too.
If copyright were abolished, I believe that would happen is that Adobe would have to face the choice of being marginalized, or adopting a new business model that capitalizes on their expertise - something similar to pay per performance where software creation is the performance. There would be a need for a financial instrument like an escrow fund in which everyone who wants the next release of Photoshop could pay into until the balance reaches Adobe's asking price - the equivalent of buying tickets to a grateful dead concert.
Under such a model, TPB would also face the choice of being marginalized or capitalizing on their expertise - providing a better user interface, higher quality and more comprehensive indexing, hosting the trackers themselves to improve performance, etc. Similarly physical media distributors would have to compete on the quality of the media, packaging, timeliness, etc.
The issue is that the cost of copying is nearly zero, but the cost of production - be it software, easy-to-use websites or physical products, is not. So selling a product that can't be easily replicated is the obvious way to make money in such an environment.
Lots of Slashdot armchair economics experts don't get this; they parrot the "supply is infinite thus value should be driven to zero" nonsense.
It's not nonsense at all. Supply of proprietary software is not infinite - the copyright monopoly creates artificial scarcity. It weren't for that artificial scarcity, selling price per copy would approach zero, just as it has for Firefox, Linux and a whole host of other best of breed products. Just because the gimp has not attained best of breed status doesn't disprove basic economic theory, it just proves that the gimp is not best of breed, yet.
Not bashing her just beacuse, but her history does not support her intent to protect privacy. This is just poliical rhetoric to get elected. ( typical of *all* candidates as they ramp up towards an election)
The one good thing about it is that as rhetoric, more people are going to hear about it. It's now "on the table" when last election nobody with a chance of getting elected to office would ever pro-actively bring up the subject.
I have found it to be a bit annoying as I use features around the airport for identification for my work, and it was always nice to have an outside 'reference' which might or might not agree with the GPS solution.
For every "terrorist use" there are thousands or more productive uses like yours. Blurring it out only serves to make people's jobs harder and is thus a drag on the economy.
That's terrorism. Miminal threats that cause out of proportion reactions that themselves cause more damage than than any direct terrorist action.
Don't know about you, but I use the dictoinary to find the meaning of a word, not the meaning of life.
Well, either you are arguing about words or you are arguing about ideas. If you want to redefine your ideas so that they don't mean what you were initially arguing about, then go ahead. We'll all ignore you for being out of touch with reality.
I'm not asking for morality.
And according to a narrowly defined dictionary definition of "ask" that's true, but again irrelevant to the point of the flaming you started out with.
Good luck with your own personal form of relativism there.
So I guess the established definition of words is irrelevant. Next time I'll quote the much more authoritative Dr. Seuss.
Because a book says so, huh? There is another book besides the dictionary that a lot of people think perfectly and completely defines life.
Yes, advertising IS fraud
Hey, at least you are consistent. Foolishly consistent, but consistent. You sure must hate living, being up to your neck in all of other people's immorality. Too bad you don't do anything about all these terrible people you have to put up with.
Sorry to break it to you but you are never going to watch tv 24/7 even with added help, it just aint possible.
It is if you have multiple people living in the same house. A typical family with 2 parents and 2 kids only needs to spend 8 hours/day each watching tv to get the same coverage as one person going 24x7.
If some of them watch the recorded shows sped up at 1.1x or 1.2x real-time, they can watch even more in less actual time. Speeding-up playback is great for shows like the the news or soaps.
deceit, trickery, sharp practice, or breach of confidence, perpetrated for profit or to gain some unfair or dishonest advantage.
Just about all advertising must be fraud since it all consists of sharp practice and often deceit such as claims of "the best," "number one," "ichi-ban" or words to that effect.
Oh, what say you, that's not fraudulent? That some base level of competence and critical ability is assumed? Then what moral relativism do you use to draw the line for how much competence and critical ability? Perhaps that line might be somewhere in the neighborhood of what the law defines it to do be? Ooops.
Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University fixed the bacteria to the micro-capsules and then used chemicals to turn on and off their motion-producing flagella.
And despite the billion or so tiny bacteria voices, no one at CMU noticed when they said: We as one welcome our new bacteria-enslaving scientist overlords!
What happens when I sue you for posting my copyrighted material on slashdot? How do you prove that you originally wrote it in the first place, and that you didn't copy it from me? (I put it on my web site and modified the datestamps to make it look like it predated yours by a few days).
How is that any different from the current system?
Your whole argument about establishing authorship applies just as much today as it would under a registration scheme. At least with a registration scheme, there is the date of filing to use as a reference. With the current system it could easily devolve into he-said/she-said.
Yes, they're under CC, but I'd like to be sure the author put them there himself, and someone wasn't "getting back" at him or something similar and I'd want to make sure he's not vacillating about it.
If someone is faking the CC license, chances are they are impersonating the author. Fat lot of good checking with that guy will do you.
The problem that you are trying to address is the copyright-induced belief that an artist should retain control over his creation once it has been published. The useful Creative Commons licenses are all about breaking that mindset - realizing that an artist should not have any more control over their published creations than a woodcrafter has over the furniture he sells.
Sure, the law is not anywhere near catching up with that yet, but the useful CC licenses are an attempt to recognize what statute still hasn't.
Separating functionality is not necessary to determine that the expressive nature of source code overrides the importance of the functionality. However compiled code, in and of itself, has no expressiveness, it is purely functional. Thus, as I said, a lot better protected from claims. IP law is such bullshit that there are no absolutes, but from the following it is clear that source is better protected than binaries.
Particularly, a musical score cannot be read by the majority of the public but can be used as a means of communication among musicians. Likewise, computer source code, though unintelligible to many, is the preferred method of communication among computer programers.
Because computer source code is an expressive means for the exchange of information and ideas about computer programming, we hold that it is protected by the First Amendment. -- Junger v Daley
"If a threat to national security was insufficient to warrant a prior restraint in New York Times Co. v. United States, the threat to plaintiff's copyrights and trade secrets is woefully inadequate." -- DVDCA v Brunner
I seem to recall that some existing OSS MPEG-4 related projects distribute source code only for that sort of reason.
They distribute source code because the courts (in the USA at least) have ruled that source code is speech, as in "freedom of" and binaries are not. Thus they are a lot better protected from claims of patent infringment if they stay away from the binaries.
International Business Machines the you realize that they in their inventory (of past products) have servers that have been proven By Actual Troops to be bullet proof (with actual bullets!!)
Hollywood needs Canada's money more than Canada needs Hollywood's film releaes in theaters.
That applies not just to Canada, but everywhere. If the world ended tomorrow, Hollywood would be SOL. If Hollywood ended tomorrow, there would be a dozen more mini-hollywoods around the globe ready to step in. In fact, there already are - Hong Kong, Vancouver, Seoul and Mumbai to start with.
It could just as easily be that Sony's timeout is shorter than the maximum required by the HDMI spec. You really can't tell one way or the other from the information given.
Ev'rywhere I hear the sound of spinning, charging wheels, robo 'Cause summer's here and the time is right for fighting in the street, robo Well then what can a poor robo do Except to aibo-dance for a rock 'n' roll band 'Cause in sleepy Singapore town There's just no place for a street fighting robo No!
Hey! Think the time is right for a city-state revolution 'Cauce where I live the game to play is mechanized solution Well then what can a poor robo do Except to aibo-dance for a rock 'n' roll band 'Cause in sleepy Singapore town There's no place for a street fighting robo No! Get down
Hey! Said my name is called magnetic disturbance I'll beep and squeel, I'll kill the king, I'll rail at all his servants Well, what can a poor robo do Except to aibo-dance for a rock 'n' roll band 'Cause in sleepy Singapore town There's no place for a street fighting robo No Get down
Slashdot Mirror
About 5 years back I was in for a regular checkup and asked the doc to write me a prescription for a drug I didn't need because it was sold in two versions - one brand name for an 8mg dose for one symptom and a different brand name for 2mg dose for another symptom. The kick was that the 8mg dose and the 2mg dose cost the same, so I wanted a script for the 8mg version and a pill cutter to cut them into quarters, for 75% savings on a per dose basis.
He was very happy to do it because he was sick of the drug marketing bullshit that is aimed at him and his fellow doctors. The kind of marketing that convinces the docs to prescribe the expensive but only equal or somtimes even less effective drugs rather than the tried and true and cheap ones. He was of the opinion that doctors are just as much a victim of misleading marketing as patients, it just came to them in a different form (office visits from drug marketers and ads in various journals).
Airline dereg was the best thing for consumers, which is the way it is supposed to go.
Tickets that used to cost $2000 in inflation-corrected dollars regularly go for $200-$300 now.
Even then, the industry isn't fully deregulated, look at the FAA's twin priorities of promoting the industry and overseeing it as well as thing the multi-billion dollar 'bailouts' they got over the last few years.
The people at gitmo are so unlikely to be innocent it's not even a question.
If the that is true, that the evidence is so overwhelmingly powerful that their guilt is "not even a question" - then what do we have to lose by giving them a trial? Surely, something so obvious to someone like you who only knows what the news tells them would cause any jury of American citizens to unanimously find those terrorists guilty. Right?
That's the way they justify all their bullshit.
"Behavior consistent with terrorist actions."
"Associations with well-known terrorists."
etc
When those vague phrases are the best they can do it means they don't have a shred of meaningful evidence but they want to scare people into thinking they do, so their authority won't be questioned.
This is what happened in Australia and we have a thriving broadband market.
Since when? Last I heard, a year or two ago, the partially-state-owned telco had a near monopoly and was farting around with xfer caps for any international traffic. Apparently you live there and all and thus should know more about it than someone who is too lazy to google it, but if what you say is true, it's gotta be a recent phenomenon.
Abolishing copyright law would shift the financial rewards to those who are good at copying or facilitating copying (TPB is already making some pretty good money), and shift them away from Adobe and other innovators who follow the "invest a lot of money in R&D" model.
I completely disagree. If TPB is actually making money it is for the same reason cocaine is so profitable - supply is restricted by the law. If copying was fully legal, then the margins would fall out of it just like they would for Adobe who, right now, is just selling copies too.
If copyright were abolished, I believe that would happen is that Adobe would have to face the choice of being marginalized, or adopting a new business model that capitalizes on their expertise - something similar to pay per performance where software creation is the performance. There would be a need for a financial instrument like an escrow fund in which everyone who wants the next release of Photoshop could pay into until the balance reaches Adobe's asking price - the equivalent of buying tickets to a grateful dead concert.
Under such a model, TPB would also face the choice of being marginalized or capitalizing on their expertise - providing a better user interface, higher quality and more comprehensive indexing, hosting the trackers themselves to improve performance, etc. Similarly physical media distributors would have to compete on the quality of the media, packaging, timeliness, etc.
The issue is that the cost of copying is nearly zero, but the cost of production - be it software, easy-to-use websites or physical products, is not. So selling a product that can't be easily replicated is the obvious way to make money in such an environment.
Lots of Slashdot armchair economics experts don't get this; they parrot the "supply is infinite thus value should be driven to zero" nonsense.
It's not nonsense at all. Supply of proprietary software is not infinite - the copyright monopoly creates artificial scarcity. It weren't for that artificial scarcity, selling price per copy would approach zero, just as it has for Firefox, Linux and a whole host of other best of breed products. Just because the gimp has not attained best of breed status doesn't disprove basic economic theory, it just proves that the gimp is not best of breed, yet.
Not bashing her just beacuse, but her history does not support her intent to protect privacy. This is just poliical rhetoric to get elected. ( typical of *all* candidates as they ramp up towards an election)
The one good thing about it is that as rhetoric, more people are going to hear about it. It's now "on the table" when last election nobody with a chance of getting elected to office would ever pro-actively bring up the subject.
I have found it to be a bit annoying as I use features around the airport for identification for my work, and it was always nice to have an outside 'reference' which might or might not agree with the GPS solution.
For every "terrorist use" there are thousands or more productive uses like yours. Blurring it out only serves to make people's jobs harder and is thus a drag on the economy.
That's terrorism. Miminal threats that cause out of proportion reactions that themselves cause more damage than than any direct terrorist action.
Don't know about you, but I use the dictoinary to find the meaning of a word, not the meaning of life.
Well, either you are arguing about words or you are arguing about ideas. If you want to redefine your ideas so that they don't mean what you were initially arguing about, then go ahead. We'll all ignore you for being out of touch with reality.
I'm not asking for morality.
And according to a narrowly defined dictionary definition of "ask" that's true, but again irrelevant to the point of the flaming you started out with.
Good luck with your own personal form of relativism there.
So I guess the established definition of words is irrelevant. Next time I'll quote the much more authoritative Dr. Seuss.
Because a book says so, huh? There is another book besides the dictionary that a lot of people think perfectly and completely defines life.
Yes, advertising IS fraud
Hey, at least you are consistent. Foolishly consistent, but consistent. You sure must hate living, being up to your neck in all of other people's immorality. Too bad you don't do anything about all these terrible people you have to put up with.
Sorry to break it to you but you are never going to watch tv 24/7 even with added help, it just aint possible.
It is if you have multiple people living in the same house. A typical family with 2 parents and 2 kids only needs to spend 8 hours/day each watching tv to get the same coverage as one person going 24x7.
If some of them watch the recorded shows sped up at 1.1x or 1.2x real-time, they can watch even more in less actual time. Speeding-up playback is great for shows like the the news or soaps.
First entry: Just about all advertising must be fraud since it all consists of sharp practice and often deceit such as claims of "the best," "number one," "ichi-ban" or words to that effect.
Oh, what say you, that's not fraudulent? That some base level of competence and critical ability is assumed? Then what moral relativism do you use to draw the line for how much competence and critical ability? Perhaps that line might be somewhere in the neighborhood of what the law defines it to do be? Ooops.
Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University fixed the bacteria to the micro-capsules and then used chemicals to turn on and off their motion-producing flagella.
And despite the billion or so tiny bacteria voices, no one at CMU noticed when they said:
We as one welcome our new bacteria-enslaving scientist overlords!
What happens when I sue you for posting my copyrighted material on slashdot? How do you prove that you originally wrote it in the first place, and that you didn't copy it from me? (I put it on my web site and modified the datestamps to make it look like it predated yours by a few days).
How is that any different from the current system?
Your whole argument about establishing authorship applies just as much today as it would under a registration scheme. At least with a registration scheme, there is the date of filing to use as a reference. With the current system it could easily devolve into he-said/she-said.
Yes, they're under CC, but I'd like to be sure the author put them there himself, and someone wasn't "getting back" at him or something similar and I'd want to make sure he's not vacillating about it.
If someone is faking the CC license, chances are they are impersonating the author. Fat lot of good checking with that guy will do you.
The problem that you are trying to address is the copyright-induced belief that an artist should retain control over his creation once it has been published. The useful Creative Commons licenses are all about breaking that mindset - realizing that an artist should not have any more control over their published creations than a woodcrafter has over the furniture he sells.
Sure, the law is not anywhere near catching up with that yet, but the useful CC licenses are an attempt to recognize what statute still hasn't.
I'm not discussing breaking the law.
Lol. There is no fraud without law to define it as so. You are just as morally relative as those you rail against.
I better not EVER catch you exceeding the speed limit.
Not even by 0.5mph, because that's just as bad as going 50mph over.
I seem to recall that some existing OSS MPEG-4 related projects distribute source code only for that sort of reason.
They distribute source code because the courts (in the USA at least) have ruled that source code is speech, as in "freedom of" and binaries are not. Thus they are a lot better protected from claims of patent infringment if they stay away from the binaries.
The future doesn't look so good for the frogs.
International Business Machines the you realize that they in their inventory (of past products) have servers that have been proven By Actual Troops
to be bullet proof (with actual bullets!!)
I don't know about that. But HP has some systems that are bullet proof, with actual videos of the shooting.
Hollywood needs Canada's money more than Canada needs Hollywood's film releaes in theaters.
That applies not just to Canada, but everywhere. If the world ended tomorrow, Hollywood would be SOL. If Hollywood ended tomorrow, there would be a dozen more mini-hollywoods around the globe ready to step in. In fact, there already are - Hong Kong, Vancouver, Seoul and Mumbai to start with.
It could just as easily be that Sony's timeout is shorter than the maximum required by the HDMI spec. You really can't tell one way or the other from the information given.
Ev'rywhere I hear the sound of spinning, charging wheels, robo
'Cause summer's here and the time is right for fighting in the street, robo
Well then what can a poor robo do
Except to aibo-dance for a rock 'n' roll band
'Cause in sleepy Singapore town
There's just no place for a street fighting robo
No!
Hey! Think the time is right for a city-state revolution
'Cauce where I live the game to play is mechanized solution
Well then what can a poor robo do
Except to aibo-dance for a rock 'n' roll band
'Cause in sleepy Singapore town
There's no place for a street fighting robo
No!
Get down
Hey! Said my name is called magnetic disturbance
I'll beep and squeel, I'll kill the king, I'll rail at all his servants
Well, what can a poor robo do
Except to aibo-dance for a rock 'n' roll band
'Cause in sleepy Singapore town
There's no place for a street fighting robo
No
Get down