Everything of this nature is legal, until it's brought before a court of law. Are you willing to put in years of stress and potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars to file a suit against a Telecom giant that might reward you the cost of the phone? I don't think I would be, and companies like Motorola count on the fact that most people aren't.
And of course, since the government owns the roads they'd be liable for any loss of property through theft where the thief used a public road to escape the scene of the crime. Maybe the manufacturer of the getaway car the thief used could also chip in, it's only fair after all.
I've noticed that if you throw something into a water body, like a lake or an ocean, that the next day you come back and it's gone. So somehow it takes it away and filters it through and it just cleans it up like a garbage compactor or whatever, so it's not really littering if you ask me.
- Ricky, Trailer Park Boys
And as a sweet bonus Blizzard gets to save some money on forum moderators. It's much more cost effective to let people police themselves if you give them the power to.
But no, it was a stupid idea and even though I don't play WoW I'm glad it didn't make it through. Hopefully this serves as a warning to other companies that people are still concerned about their privacy. At the end of the day privacy is nothing more than having a choice, you choose what personal information you want to make public and where. This idea took that choice away, and obviously that crossed a line with people. If Blizzard really is serious about improving order on the forums, then I'd suggest they take some of the ridiculous sums of money WoW pumps out for them and hire some more moderators.
So now in addition to the pressure of needing to write a good exam I also have the pressure of not accidentally tripping their high tech anti-cheating measures with some thoughtless action? I never found it necessary to cheat on an exam, but had these measures been in place at my university I'm sure I'd have done worse on them.
It's the same logic that "behavior recognition" systems use at airports. Hey, that guy looks nervous, he must be hiding something. No, I'm nervous because I know if I make one wrong move I could end up missing my flight, having my bags searched and being grilled by some power tripping TSA lackey for the next 3 hours.
But that's not really a fine then, is it? If I steal $100 out of someone's wallet and then get "fined" $100 then I really wasn't fined anything, I just gave back the money I stole. If that's the only punishment I receive then why not steal money all the time? If I get caught I'm out something I shouldn't have had in the first place, if I don't get caught I get free money.
They should have to give back the extra profit that they made illegally and then be fined an extra amount for doing something illegal in the first place.
Not that it really matters, either way the expense will just be factored into pricing and the consumer ends up paying for it.
One of the most disgusting things about this situation is that assholes like Harper can just keep introducing DMCA-style laws over and over again. Didn't make it through the legislature? Too much public opposition? No problem! We'll give it 6 months then we'll just start all over again. Eventually they will succeed in sneaking it through, and once it's through it's pretty much there for good.
I wish I could have just gotten 4 years of that newbie experience under my belt instead of spending it on a degree who's only real worth today is to get you that newbie job to begin with. Sure I learned some things doing my CS degree, but most of it could have been learned just as well through on the job experience in less than half the time. A lot of it was completely useless to my chosen career. But hey, that's the way the world works I guess. Shame I didn't know anyone who could score me a job in the field back then.
Oddly I had the opposite problem. Although I hadn't done a lot of programming before starting my CS degree it just seemed to come naturally to me. I wrote a lot of terrible code I'm sure, but I always knew what I was doing with the practical assignments. And most of all I enjoyed working on them.
What almost killed me was the theoretical side of things. Mathematical proofs, runtime classifications for algorithms, number theory, I just had no patience for it. I was overjoyed when I actually got to write some code for a change. A good friend of mine was more into the theoretical side, so we worked together a lot of the time. I'd help him with the practical coding, he'd help me crawl my way through pages of induction proofs.
Point being for some people the theoretical side of a CS degree is just as hard, if not harder, than the practical coding part.
Isn't this a case of "better safe than sorry"? Even if 99% of flights could resume with no problems at all, who's responsible for the 1% that run into serious trouble? Given that we're talking about tens of thousands of flights per day, even a 1/10,000 chance of disaster translates to a handful of planes per day that could simply fall out of the sky.
It should be mentioned that most of the manufacturers of e-cig liquid offer nicotine-free versions. Getting through the physical dependency of nicotine could be a lot easier if you don't have to fight through the psychological habit of the whole act of smoking at the same time.
"There's no doubt that the music distribution industry has declined significantly over the last 10 years,"
Fixed that for you, Mr. Lamy. But seriously, did I miss the memo that states certain business models are simply not allowed to fail? I assume it was sent out some time before the bailout of Wallstreet, but maybe my copy was lost in the mail...
The problem with hard sci-fi is that it appeals to a niche audience only. This used to be ok, but nowadays studios want films to appeal to as broad an audience as possible. Which, incidentally, is also why so many films that could have been amazing end up being pretty terrible. It doesn't help that sci-fi is generally expensive to produce, why spend all that money when the much cheaper standard-relationship-comedy-sequel ends up earning more?
Not to say I wouldn't love to see more sci-fi or cyberpunk films. I'm not sure how you'd compress the Xeelee Sequence into a 2 hour movie (even if it's just a part of it), but I'd kill to see Takeshi Kovacs on the big screen.
"Start by reducing the price of Blu-Ray movies to the same price as their DVD counterparts."
And why stop there? Here's a few other things that need to go:
Why are there anti-piracy warnings displayed at the beginning of the movie I just bought? Why can't I skip them?
Why are there commercials and trailers in this DVD that I just bought? If I want to see a trailer I'll go look it up online.
Region locking? We've had region-free players for a while now, it's pointless and it needs to go.
An "extended Directors Cut" version of the same DVD I just bought released a couple months later? Great, thanks, I love wasting money.
Yes, I see your flashy menu. It's nice. Now can we get on with the playing of the movie please? No? Oh good, now you're showing me all the funny parts of the movie in the menu before I've even seen the movie. Can I turn subtitles off now? More animation? All I did was press a button, I don't need a damn light show congratulating me on it.
I think it's more along the lines of "It's happened before, there's no reason to expect it won't happen again". Whether it's meteor strikes, supervolcano eruptions, earthquakes, or more subtle catastrophes like temperature changes, the world is a dangerous place. It doesn't hurt to keep that in mind. Though it also doesn't hurt to lessen our impact on the environment, people don't need to agree on what's causing the latest change in climate to agree that pollution is probably not the best thing we can contribute to the planet.
I think this is an important distinction that's sometimes overlooked. Of course a solid mathematical foundation is a great help in programming, especially anything to do with graphics, but that doesn't mean a programmer should be expected to come up with formulas for complicated problems from scratch. We have people who do this for a living, they're called mathematicians. The programmer's job is to take that formula and translate it into an algorithm a computer can use.
I would call this one of the problems with the IT field today. Many employers seem to think that just because a program is meant to run on a computer a programmer should be able to build it all up from scratch, they overlook the fact that often other fields are involved in the theoretical side of things. Fields that really have nothing to do with what my job is as a programmer. Off the top of my head I don't know how to find a formula for marginal revenue, but if you give me that formula I'll be happy to write you an algorithm to compute the answer because that's my job.
Isn't that one of the main problems with ACTA? The MAFIAA is just riding on the coat tails of a legitimate piece of legislation, to combat commercial IP theft and counterfeiting. Seems to me Obama supports that part of the bill, but didn't say anything specific about the piracy side of it. Just the way they like it. They'll quietly slip through on the heels of a piece of legislation that probably is needed, and probably will do some good.
SOP in politics these days. Just quietly stitch the unappealing laws into legislation that really does need to be passed.
For voting to work you need politicians who aren't playing by the rules of the status quo. People who don't play by the rules don't get to play the game anymore, they're pushed aside and forgotten before they get anywhere near a position of power. That's reality.
But I can see this is going nowhere. Enjoy your romanticism while it lasts, one day you'll realize the world isn't as cut and dry as you make it out to be.
Slashdot Mirror
Lots of things can be used for torture, but the list of things that leave no evidence of torture behind is much shorter.
Everything of this nature is legal, until it's brought before a court of law. Are you willing to put in years of stress and potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars to file a suit against a Telecom giant that might reward you the cost of the phone? I don't think I would be, and companies like Motorola count on the fact that most people aren't.
And of course, since the government owns the roads they'd be liable for any loss of property through theft where the thief used a public road to escape the scene of the crime. Maybe the manufacturer of the getaway car the thief used could also chip in, it's only fair after all.
I've noticed that if you throw something into a water body, like a lake or an ocean, that the next day you come back and it's gone. So somehow it takes it away and filters it through and it just cleans it up like a garbage compactor or whatever, so it's not really littering if you ask me.
- Ricky, Trailer Park Boys
And as a sweet bonus Blizzard gets to save some money on forum moderators. It's much more cost effective to let people police themselves if you give them the power to.
But no, it was a stupid idea and even though I don't play WoW I'm glad it didn't make it through. Hopefully this serves as a warning to other companies that people are still concerned about their privacy. At the end of the day privacy is nothing more than having a choice, you choose what personal information you want to make public and where. This idea took that choice away, and obviously that crossed a line with people. If Blizzard really is serious about improving order on the forums, then I'd suggest they take some of the ridiculous sums of money WoW pumps out for them and hire some more moderators.
So now in addition to the pressure of needing to write a good exam I also have the pressure of not accidentally tripping their high tech anti-cheating measures with some thoughtless action? I never found it necessary to cheat on an exam, but had these measures been in place at my university I'm sure I'd have done worse on them.
It's the same logic that "behavior recognition" systems use at airports. Hey, that guy looks nervous, he must be hiding something. No, I'm nervous because I know if I make one wrong move I could end up missing my flight, having my bags searched and being grilled by some power tripping TSA lackey for the next 3 hours.
Don't have much to add other than Halting State by Charles Stross is a great read if you're interested in this sort of thing.
But that's not really a fine then, is it? If I steal $100 out of someone's wallet and then get "fined" $100 then I really wasn't fined anything, I just gave back the money I stole. If that's the only punishment I receive then why not steal money all the time? If I get caught I'm out something I shouldn't have had in the first place, if I don't get caught I get free money.
They should have to give back the extra profit that they made illegally and then be fined an extra amount for doing something illegal in the first place.
Not that it really matters, either way the expense will just be factored into pricing and the consumer ends up paying for it.
TPB v3.0, now with 6000 and one hulls!
The lawyers are celebrating another full pocket book, as they're the only ones in this whole equation who actually "won" anything.
One of the most disgusting things about this situation is that assholes like Harper can just keep introducing DMCA-style laws over and over again. Didn't make it through the legislature? Too much public opposition? No problem! We'll give it 6 months then we'll just start all over again. Eventually they will succeed in sneaking it through, and once it's through it's pretty much there for good.
Sometimes I just hate the world we live in.
I wish I could have just gotten 4 years of that newbie experience under my belt instead of spending it on a degree who's only real worth today is to get you that newbie job to begin with. Sure I learned some things doing my CS degree, but most of it could have been learned just as well through on the job experience in less than half the time. A lot of it was completely useless to my chosen career. But hey, that's the way the world works I guess. Shame I didn't know anyone who could score me a job in the field back then.
Oddly I had the opposite problem. Although I hadn't done a lot of programming before starting my CS degree it just seemed to come naturally to me. I wrote a lot of terrible code I'm sure, but I always knew what I was doing with the practical assignments. And most of all I enjoyed working on them.
What almost killed me was the theoretical side of things. Mathematical proofs, runtime classifications for algorithms, number theory, I just had no patience for it. I was overjoyed when I actually got to write some code for a change. A good friend of mine was more into the theoretical side, so we worked together a lot of the time. I'd help him with the practical coding, he'd help me crawl my way through pages of induction proofs.
Point being for some people the theoretical side of a CS degree is just as hard, if not harder, than the practical coding part.
Isn't this a case of "better safe than sorry"? Even if 99% of flights could resume with no problems at all, who's responsible for the 1% that run into serious trouble? Given that we're talking about tens of thousands of flights per day, even a 1/10,000 chance of disaster translates to a handful of planes per day that could simply fall out of the sky.
It should be mentioned that most of the manufacturers of e-cig liquid offer nicotine-free versions. Getting through the physical dependency of nicotine could be a lot easier if you don't have to fight through the psychological habit of the whole act of smoking at the same time.
"There's no doubt that the music distribution industry has declined significantly over the last 10 years,"
Fixed that for you, Mr. Lamy. But seriously, did I miss the memo that states certain business models are simply not allowed to fail? I assume it was sent out some time before the bailout of Wallstreet, but maybe my copy was lost in the mail...
The problem with hard sci-fi is that it appeals to a niche audience only. This used to be ok, but nowadays studios want films to appeal to as broad an audience as possible. Which, incidentally, is also why so many films that could have been amazing end up being pretty terrible. It doesn't help that sci-fi is generally expensive to produce, why spend all that money when the much cheaper standard-relationship-comedy-sequel ends up earning more?
Not to say I wouldn't love to see more sci-fi or cyberpunk films. I'm not sure how you'd compress the Xeelee Sequence into a 2 hour movie (even if it's just a part of it), but I'd kill to see Takeshi Kovacs on the big screen.
And why stop there? Here's a few other things that need to go:
Sigh. You're very bad people.
I think it's more along the lines of "It's happened before, there's no reason to expect it won't happen again". Whether it's meteor strikes, supervolcano eruptions, earthquakes, or more subtle catastrophes like temperature changes, the world is a dangerous place. It doesn't hurt to keep that in mind. Though it also doesn't hurt to lessen our impact on the environment, people don't need to agree on what's causing the latest change in climate to agree that pollution is probably not the best thing we can contribute to the planet.
"By no means do I know what I am talking about."
"Score:3, Informative"
Never change Slashdot.
And after that, the Biggest Large Telescope. Free BLT's at the grand opening, I hear.
Wikipedia was also down for a couple hours earlier, why wasn't I informed of this Slashdot??
I think this is an important distinction that's sometimes overlooked. Of course a solid mathematical foundation is a great help in programming, especially anything to do with graphics, but that doesn't mean a programmer should be expected to come up with formulas for complicated problems from scratch. We have people who do this for a living, they're called mathematicians. The programmer's job is to take that formula and translate it into an algorithm a computer can use.
I would call this one of the problems with the IT field today. Many employers seem to think that just because a program is meant to run on a computer a programmer should be able to build it all up from scratch, they overlook the fact that often other fields are involved in the theoretical side of things. Fields that really have nothing to do with what my job is as a programmer. Off the top of my head I don't know how to find a formula for marginal revenue, but if you give me that formula I'll be happy to write you an algorithm to compute the answer because that's my job.
Isn't that one of the main problems with ACTA? The MAFIAA is just riding on the coat tails of a legitimate piece of legislation, to combat commercial IP theft and counterfeiting. Seems to me Obama supports that part of the bill, but didn't say anything specific about the piracy side of it. Just the way they like it. They'll quietly slip through on the heels of a piece of legislation that probably is needed, and probably will do some good.
SOP in politics these days. Just quietly stitch the unappealing laws into legislation that really does need to be passed.
For voting to work you need politicians who aren't playing by the rules of the status quo. People who don't play by the rules don't get to play the game anymore, they're pushed aside and forgotten before they get anywhere near a position of power. That's reality.
But I can see this is going nowhere. Enjoy your romanticism while it lasts, one day you'll realize the world isn't as cut and dry as you make it out to be.