Yes, and you also get to complain to everyone that Ferraris should cost the same as Hyundais, that Ferrari should be put out of business because some people can afford Ferraris but you can't, that Ferrari drivers are immoral and stupid just because they have a higher income than you, and that you're entitled to a free Ferrari anyway (preferably forcibly taken from someone else who bought the Ferrari with their own money).
You DO realize that "American" corporate practices are pretty much identical to Australian, Canadian, European, etc. corporate practices, as they all come from English practices? That there is just as much (if not more) corruption in other nations... government, business, individual... as America? That you and your nation are in no way superior to America?
Don't like it? Defend yourself without American help or American military equipment. Hope you like being Indonesian, because they're crowded, resource-hungry, have ten times your population and a military much larger than your own, and not a whole lot of love for you.
Illegal? Not sure. Nmap's licence specifically forbids this kind of crap.
Music, movies and commercial software all are subject to license, but those are ignored at the whim of anyone with a "download" button. Why should a corporate entity obey copyright law and licenses when their customers don't? Funny how the same people who completely ignore copyright when they want something try to enforce it when it's their own.
Copyright laws and licenses apply equally to music and software. Suck it up.
The computer in question with the monitoring software is property of the company
The employer lays out the terms, you accept the job or you don't, and once accepted then you and the employer do what you said you would do. If you bill per hour instead of per project, then every hour you bill has to be productive; that time belongs to the employer. They have a right to know whether they are being told the truth about how those hours they bought are being used, whether the contractor is doing illegal or likely-to-get-the-employer-sued things, and whether the contractor is telling the truth. In case any haven't noticed, there are a lot of people on the Internet who have a serious problem with telling the truth.
What I find amazing is that some commenters seem to think it's okay to surf porn on company time, or claim 8 hours' billing for 5 hours' work. Yeah, yeah, Slashdot on company time etc., but nobody is going to file a harassment suit for seeing yet another poorly-researched article summary painting tech workers as moral perfection on the screen, and once in a great while Slashdot is (vaguely) relevant to tech work. If I were told to stop reading Slashdot at work, I would. But as for people advocating that it's okay to claim more hours than you actually worked... that's fraud. No sympathy at all.
All the QA in the world won't help if the findings of the QA engineers do not result in defects being acknowledged or fixed. QA in those cases is not a testing group; it's a rubber stamp for which the question "do we ship it" is required to be "yes". This arises either because QA reports to a development manager (i.e. someone whose performance review is based what is released how close to schedule under budget, therefore someone who simultaneously has the motivation and the power to ignore QA findings), or because it exists only because the company's executives require that they be able to tell customers that they have a QA department (regardless of its effectiveness or lack thereof). Either situation means that there is little incentive to invest in more QA engineers, to listen to those engineers, or for QA to expend any effort above minimum. Why try if it doesn't matter?
Even if QA's findings are acknowledged, if the release schedule is cast in stone then those findings are not acted upon (I'm looking at YOU, Bethesda). "Patch in production" is considered acceptable, so there is little urgency to act upon QA's findings for anything less serious than "causes cancer in rats, children, lawyers and other vermin". Again, does quality matter?
The reason this situation exists is because lack of quality so often is irrelevant. If a customer complains but buys anyway, the complaint is guaranteed to be ignored. Using the aforementioned Bethesda as an example: Bethesda's reputation for releasing bug-ridden unstable games that would be fantastic if it wasn't for the hourly crashes (Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout Vegas, Skyrim) is irrelevant in the face of their huge sales figures. Quality, in fact, does NOT matter; people buy anyway. They bitch, but they buy. Which do you think speaks more loudly to the product managers and execs: bitching or buying?
No. Sales actually dropped. That may or may not be because of the natural falling off of a book's sales over time; there's no way to know. The vast majority of the sales of this book (about 5,000 copies) took place in the first six months after publication. There certainly was no increase. The point, however, is that I never gave Google permission to reproduce or distribute my work. Even if there had been an increase directly due to click-throughs, I would be all over Google's case. Those rights and the ability to transfer those rights are exclusively my own, and I granted those rights to a specific publisher, NOT to Google.
Google's actions communicated their thoughts clearly: authors have no rights, and any jackass with a scanner and OCR software can give away anything.
Google doesn't have the right to make that decision, or appoint itself as publisher. A book already has a publisher; Google is saying "we are going to steal that role, and to hell with what the author and publisher say. We have more lawyers." There is no difference between what Google is doing and walking into a bookstore and copying what you find, without asking the publisher, author, or bookstore. The amount of material copied is irrelevant; this isn't "fair use".
It's identical. Google is just using a scanner instead of a photocopier.
This is all about Google forcing its projects down everyone's throats, just like Google publishing data about your WiFi network or Facebook selling everything they know about you to anyone with enough money. People scream about "evil corporations" ignoring the law to lock themselves into the top of a market or take what they have no legal or moral claim to; how is this different? Oh yeah, you don't have to pay for books that you otherwise would have had to pay for. YOU benefit, so it's okay. I guess.
The law very clearly states that unless you have a "yes" in writing, the answer is "no". All rights not specifically granted remain with the creator of the material. And as for "unknown"... says who? Just about every book out there has this little line saying "written by". There's your "unknown" right there. If Google can't contact the author, tough. If Google CLAIMS they can't contact the author (meaning, they never tried), tough. No signature, no permission.
They did this to me with a book I wrote in 2004. One day I was checking on how it was doing and SURPRISE there it was in Google Books. They had not contacted me or my publisher.
In any event, neither you nor Google have the right to decide what to do with someone else's property. I find it amazing that people like you are very happy to take others' works and information without compensation yet get all bent out of shape when Facebook and CarrierIQ do the same to you.
%/s/Information wants to be free/I don't want to pay for others information/g
Wrong. The entire book is scanned. The filtration is done at presentation time; the entire work is digitized. I know this because Google tried to do this with my book. They also lied about trying to contact me for permission; I received no such contact even though my contact information had not changed in years, and the publisher is still in business at the same contact points listed in the book itself. Needless to say, when I found out about this I cease-and-desisted Google. My work is not theirs to give away.
The lawsuit notes they they are scanning the entire work, without permission, with intent to provide the entire work to libraries in addition to presenting excerpts to anyone. The lawsuit also asserts that the usage is NOT "fair use". Kinko's Copies used to photocopy portions of textbooks selected by professors, assemble those chapters into custom textbooks per the professor's specifications, and sell them; they too claimed "fair use". Kinko's had their heads handed to them in court, which forced them to greatly diminish their campus income and started a slide into non-profitability that led to the FedEx buyout. (I managed a campus-facing Kinko's in the late 80's; I saw it all firsthand) The only differences are that with Kinko's, the copied material was presented in physical form, and that the financial benefit for the infringement was immediate (a retail sale) as opposed to diffuse (advertising data collection and presentation). The Kinko's case is being cited by the plaintiffs as precedent.
The lawsuit also states that Google is exposing the authors to the risk of having all of their works compromised at once. If someone breaks into Google's storage system, they can get every book Google has ever come into contact with. The pirates won't have to do the scanning and OCR work; Google will have already removed that hurdle. This is a risk which Google has imposed upon authors without consent; it's another example of Google not giving a damn about what authors want, and assuming rights and powers which they have no legal or ethical claim to.
The evil is that they are scanning commercial literary works subject to copyright with the intent of giving the scans away, and doing so against the wishes of the copyright holders. Though copyright law states the duration of copyright, and that the copyright holders retain all rights unless explicitly granted, Google is claiming "silence gives consent" for items which are still under copyright. Essentially, Google is accused of directly engaging in piracy of literary works.
Nevermind, the table I was looking at had a typo (dunno if it's corrected yet). Listed density elsewhere is 1.46g/cc. Much more reasonable (and Neptune-like)
The density estimate on the official Kepler page is estimated to be 14.7g/cc. That's somewhere between lead and gold. To sustain a density like that, assuming there is a fair amount of iron present (a very common metal readily created in large stars), the planet would have to be near half gold, uranium, or something equally unlikely.
Also, if the mass and radius (and therefore density) given are anywhere near correct, that's 20 gravities.
Something ain't right. What elements of that density are that common in a star of that population, age and metallicity? How would a planet of such density form, and in the process rid itself of pesky, feather-light extremely common materials like iron? The mass can be estimated fairly accurately with Dopper measurements. If the transit is reporting a size of 2.4 Earth radii, either the mass estimate is wrong, the transit data is wrong, or this is the most exotic, highly-radioactive metalball you're ever likely to find. What am I missing here?
There may be liquid water, but that planet's going to be as radioactive as it gets, with a hell of a lot of heat coming from the inside out.
Ah yes. The extortion machine. The reason RICO exists. Let me tell you about my family experience with unions.
I had a cousin who crossed a picket line in a logging strike in the 70's in California. He was killed in an "accident' in which the chains bundling the logs were cut almost entirely through in workplace sabotage and gave way during loading. It was a closed-casket funeral.
I have two uncles who worked for Ford in the 60s through the 80s. They tell stories of leaving beer bottles in the bottoms of car doors, or of tying nuts on strings between body panels to drive people crazy figuring out where the rattling and banging was coming from, of showing up drunk. (one uncle would tell the stories with sadness because he disapproved of what he saw happening, the other would laugh because he was the type of person to actually do it).
Don't go comparing yourself to Chavez. You're not being soaked in pesticides or beaten by foremen in near-slavery conditions. Unions have a place in coal mining and agricultural labor. IT? Laughable. While you're at it, why not "sympathy strike" to support the filthy greed, er, proletariat struggle of those poor, underpaid NBA players? And when you don't get your way, you rootkit all the desktops in your company, change server admin passwords, and poison (or release) all the mission critical and customer data, right?
Fuck unions. Fuck them with laws, Pinkertons and bullets. I know them for what they are; I've seen firsthand exactly how unions go about their business. They bankrupt companies, states and nations, they leave hospital patients suffering in their beds while picketing, they think that whatever their industry is must never be allowed to shrink regardless of changes in technology or economy (just like your philosophical brothers the RIAA, yes?), and they do everything they can to ensure that the incompetent cannot be fired. They trade in political bribery, influence-peddling and kingmaking. They hurt innocents to get their way, they commit criminal acts when they don't get their way. Go ahead, tell me that what I've said isn't true and that unions do no harm. I and anybody who ever pays attention to the news and to history and to personal experience will look you in the eye and call you a liar.
Exactly. They never should have been allowed to create the drug or sell it in the first place. The whole idea of "whoever does the work is the one who should get the reward" is evil. Pharma companies should not be allowed to engage in research, earn profit, or do anything except bleed money into the pockets of lawyers and socialists. Anyone should be able to simultaneously cash in on another company's research and sue that company. Drugs happen by magic, and don't tell me otherwise; effort has nothing to do with it. Screw people with high cholesterol, they're old while entitlement-driven people are young, it doesn't affect the young so to hell with anyone except the young. I'm ENTITLED.
May you die of a heart attack for want of an effective drug.
If Pfizer is offering Lipitor cheaply, what's the problem? Seriously, unless the goal is to actively punish companies that create drugs and bear the cost of research and the risk of scum-sucking tort lawyers, let Pfizer compete, and if their pricing is competitive, more power (and market share) to them.
If the goal is to say "once patents expire, the originating company is never again permitted to sell their invention", just say so and try to justify it.
And just how many hours a day do you think average users have available to become "You Lite"? Do you even practice what you preach on any subject other than software?
Next time you seek health care or travel, be glad that doctors, plumbers and pilots don't have the same attitude toward you which you have toward them. Discover your own antibiotics and do your own labwork. Do your own surgery; if you're too lazy to learn, screw you and your tumor. Muck out your own septic tank so you can smell like you act. Fly your own damned plane, and while you're at it, BUILD your own damned plane. And house. And car.
I'm building my own plane, so yeah, that does in fact make me better than you, Linux-boy. Like the attitude? Got it from you.
--pilot, mechanic, ham "extra", and... oh yeah, software engineer.
If Hypercard and the concept behind it is so great, why aren't you superior basement-dwellers writing your own? If you've been "bemoaning" its loss for over a decade, why aren't there a hundred open source versions?
Oh yeah. You want Apple to do it for you, at their expense, so you can take it for free while at the same time claiming you invented it and bashing Apple for doing all your research and hard work for you. You want to keep yourselves on pedestals so that nobody can send an email without consulting a Birkenstock-clad neckbeard. Too bad Apple is making all the toys that previously were your domains to "idiots" and "sheep" and anybody else who doesn't think that you should need to devote your life to computing to be "worthy" of using a computer.
No wonder nobody important pays attention to what the "Slashdot community" wants.
>How much of this was due to the slashdot publicity and EFF involvement?
EFF involvement: almost all of it. They've been doing some incredibly stupid stuff lately, but once in a while they still have the capability to do something right.
Slashdot PR: don't kid yourself. Slashdot is irrelevant to just about anything other than DDoS'ing self-hosted websites. Face it, we're not that important.
Facebook will never hold to privacy agreements OR to FTC/court rulings, because it is far too profitable to break those agreements or rulings. After all, there are no real consequences for doing so. Given that Zuckerberg holds all of Facebook's users in open,. sneering contempt (in the same way that many./ commenters do), what possible motive would he have to comply? It's not like the FTC is ever going to touch him.
Or, to restate: there is a word for law enforcement without teeth. That word is "bitch". The FTC is Zuckerberg's bitch; they've conclusively proved it.
Assholes remain assholes until there is a credible threat of physical violence; nothing else motivates them. Robber barons remain robber barons unless there is a credible threat of having everything they own seized and sold; nothing else motivates them. Right now, there is no credibility to anything that the FTC says, so nothing's changed.
Would you accept the same pricing structure for an Android phone, given that the per-unit cost to produce the phones is similar? Or are the rules different for iPhones?
Do you know what "hyperbole" is? Do you know that "deal with" is not equivalent to "speak with"? Do you know that the Congress is the primary internal-facing Federal body in the US? Do you know that the President is the primary external-facing power in the US? Do you realize that foreign policy IS an affair of the US? Do you believe everything you read in a Slashdot summary, or for that matter, on the Internet at all?
I don't think you really understand how the presidency operates at all. Or journalists, or politics, or...
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, and you also get to complain to everyone that Ferraris should cost the same as Hyundais, that Ferrari should be put out of business because some people can afford Ferraris but you can't, that Ferrari drivers are immoral and stupid just because they have a higher income than you, and that you're entitled to a free Ferrari anyway (preferably forcibly taken from someone else who bought the Ferrari with their own money).
Keep your hands to yourself, sneak-thief.
You DO realize that "American" corporate practices are pretty much identical to Australian, Canadian, European, etc. corporate practices, as they all come from English practices? That there is just as much (if not more) corruption in other nations... government, business, individual... as America? That you and your nation are in no way superior to America?
Don't like it? Defend yourself without American help or American military equipment. Hope you like being Indonesian, because they're crowded, resource-hungry, have ten times your population and a military much larger than your own, and not a whole lot of love for you.
Illegal? Not sure. Nmap's licence specifically forbids this kind of crap.
Music, movies and commercial software all are subject to license, but those are ignored at the whim of anyone with a "download" button. Why should a corporate entity obey copyright law and licenses when their customers don't? Funny how the same people who completely ignore copyright when they want something try to enforce it when it's their own.
Copyright laws and licenses apply equally to music and software. Suck it up.
It's fine and fair if:
The employer lays out the terms, you accept the job or you don't, and once accepted then you and the employer do what you said you would do. If you bill per hour instead of per project, then every hour you bill has to be productive; that time belongs to the employer. They have a right to know whether they are being told the truth about how those hours they bought are being used, whether the contractor is doing illegal or likely-to-get-the-employer-sued things, and whether the contractor is telling the truth. In case any haven't noticed, there are a lot of people on the Internet who have a serious problem with telling the truth.
What I find amazing is that some commenters seem to think it's okay to surf porn on company time, or claim 8 hours' billing for 5 hours' work. Yeah, yeah, Slashdot on company time etc., but nobody is going to file a harassment suit for seeing yet another poorly-researched article summary painting tech workers as moral perfection on the screen, and once in a great while Slashdot is (vaguely) relevant to tech work. If I were told to stop reading Slashdot at work, I would. But as for people advocating that it's okay to claim more hours than you actually worked... that's fraud. No sympathy at all.
All the QA in the world won't help if the findings of the QA engineers do not result in defects being acknowledged or fixed. QA in those cases is not a testing group; it's a rubber stamp for which the question "do we ship it" is required to be "yes". This arises either because QA reports to a development manager (i.e. someone whose performance review is based what is released how close to schedule under budget, therefore someone who simultaneously has the motivation and the power to ignore QA findings), or because it exists only because the company's executives require that they be able to tell customers that they have a QA department (regardless of its effectiveness or lack thereof). Either situation means that there is little incentive to invest in more QA engineers, to listen to those engineers, or for QA to expend any effort above minimum. Why try if it doesn't matter?
Even if QA's findings are acknowledged, if the release schedule is cast in stone then those findings are not acted upon (I'm looking at YOU, Bethesda). "Patch in production" is considered acceptable, so there is little urgency to act upon QA's findings for anything less serious than "causes cancer in rats, children, lawyers and other vermin". Again, does quality matter?
The reason this situation exists is because lack of quality so often is irrelevant. If a customer complains but buys anyway, the complaint is guaranteed to be ignored. Using the aforementioned Bethesda as an example: Bethesda's reputation for releasing bug-ridden unstable games that would be fantastic if it wasn't for the hourly crashes (Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout Vegas, Skyrim) is irrelevant in the face of their huge sales figures. Quality, in fact, does NOT matter; people buy anyway. They bitch, but they buy. Which do you think speaks more loudly to the product managers and execs: bitching or buying?
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
No. Sales actually dropped. That may or may not be because of the natural falling off of a book's sales over time; there's no way to know. The vast majority of the sales of this book (about 5,000 copies) took place in the first six months after publication. There certainly was no increase. The point, however, is that I never gave Google permission to reproduce or distribute my work. Even if there had been an increase directly due to click-throughs, I would be all over Google's case. Those rights and the ability to transfer those rights are exclusively my own, and I granted those rights to a specific publisher, NOT to Google.
Google's actions communicated their thoughts clearly: authors have no rights, and any jackass with a scanner and OCR software can give away anything.
Google doesn't have the right to make that decision, or appoint itself as publisher. A book already has a publisher; Google is saying "we are going to steal that role, and to hell with what the author and publisher say. We have more lawyers." There is no difference between what Google is doing and walking into a bookstore and copying what you find, without asking the publisher, author, or bookstore. The amount of material copied is irrelevant; this isn't "fair use".
It's identical. Google is just using a scanner instead of a photocopier.
This is all about Google forcing its projects down everyone's throats, just like Google publishing data about your WiFi network or Facebook selling everything they know about you to anyone with enough money. People scream about "evil corporations" ignoring the law to lock themselves into the top of a market or take what they have no legal or moral claim to; how is this different? Oh yeah, you don't have to pay for books that you otherwise would have had to pay for. YOU benefit, so it's okay. I guess.
The law very clearly states that unless you have a "yes" in writing, the answer is "no". All rights not specifically granted remain with the creator of the material. And as for "unknown"... says who? Just about every book out there has this little line saying "written by". There's your "unknown" right there. If Google can't contact the author, tough. If Google CLAIMS they can't contact the author (meaning, they never tried), tough. No signature, no permission.
They did this to me with a book I wrote in 2004. One day I was checking on how it was doing and SURPRISE there it was in Google Books. They had not contacted me or my publisher.
In any event, neither you nor Google have the right to decide what to do with someone else's property. I find it amazing that people like you are very happy to take others' works and information without compensation yet get all bent out of shape when Facebook and CarrierIQ do the same to you.
%/s/Information wants to be free/I don't want to pay for others information/g
That's what Kinko's Copies said when they were sued. They lost.
Wrong. The entire book is scanned. The filtration is done at presentation time; the entire work is digitized. I know this because Google tried to do this with my book. They also lied about trying to contact me for permission; I received no such contact even though my contact information had not changed in years, and the publisher is still in business at the same contact points listed in the book itself. Needless to say, when I found out about this I cease-and-desisted Google. My work is not theirs to give away.
The lawsuit notes they they are scanning the entire work, without permission, with intent to provide the entire work to libraries in addition to presenting excerpts to anyone. The lawsuit also asserts that the usage is NOT "fair use". Kinko's Copies used to photocopy portions of textbooks selected by professors, assemble those chapters into custom textbooks per the professor's specifications, and sell them; they too claimed "fair use". Kinko's had their heads handed to them in court, which forced them to greatly diminish their campus income and started a slide into non-profitability that led to the FedEx buyout. (I managed a campus-facing Kinko's in the late 80's; I saw it all firsthand) The only differences are that with Kinko's, the copied material was presented in physical form, and that the financial benefit for the infringement was immediate (a retail sale) as opposed to diffuse (advertising data collection and presentation). The Kinko's case is being cited by the plaintiffs as precedent.
The lawsuit also states that Google is exposing the authors to the risk of having all of their works compromised at once. If someone breaks into Google's storage system, they can get every book Google has ever come into contact with. The pirates won't have to do the scanning and OCR work; Google will have already removed that hurdle. This is a risk which Google has imposed upon authors without consent; it's another example of Google not giving a damn about what authors want, and assuming rights and powers which they have no legal or ethical claim to.
Check your own facts.
The evil is that they are scanning commercial literary works subject to copyright with the intent of giving the scans away, and doing so against the wishes of the copyright holders. Though copyright law states the duration of copyright, and that the copyright holders retain all rights unless explicitly granted, Google is claiming "silence gives consent" for items which are still under copyright. Essentially, Google is accused of directly engaging in piracy of literary works.
Nevermind, the table I was looking at had a typo (dunno if it's corrected yet). Listed density elsewhere is 1.46g/cc. Much more reasonable (and Neptune-like)
The density estimate on the official Kepler page is estimated to be 14.7g/cc. That's somewhere between lead and gold. To sustain a density like that, assuming there is a fair amount of iron present (a very common metal readily created in large stars), the planet would have to be near half gold, uranium, or something equally unlikely.
Also, if the mass and radius (and therefore density) given are anywhere near correct, that's 20 gravities.
Something ain't right. What elements of that density are that common in a star of that population, age and metallicity? How would a planet of such density form, and in the process rid itself of pesky, feather-light extremely common materials like iron? The mass can be estimated fairly accurately with Dopper measurements. If the transit is reporting a size of 2.4 Earth radii, either the mass estimate is wrong, the transit data is wrong, or this is the most exotic, highly-radioactive metalball you're ever likely to find. What am I missing here?
There may be liquid water, but that planet's going to be as radioactive as it gets, with a hell of a lot of heat coming from the inside out.
Granted.
Ah yes. The extortion machine. The reason RICO exists. Let me tell you about my family experience with unions.
I had a cousin who crossed a picket line in a logging strike in the 70's in California. He was killed in an "accident' in which the chains bundling the logs were cut almost entirely through in workplace sabotage and gave way during loading. It was a closed-casket funeral.
I have two uncles who worked for Ford in the 60s through the 80s. They tell stories of leaving beer bottles in the bottoms of car doors, or of tying nuts on strings between body panels to drive people crazy figuring out where the rattling and banging was coming from, of showing up drunk. (one uncle would tell the stories with sadness because he disapproved of what he saw happening, the other would laugh because he was the type of person to actually do it).
Don't go comparing yourself to Chavez. You're not being soaked in pesticides or beaten by foremen in near-slavery conditions. Unions have a place in coal mining and agricultural labor. IT? Laughable. While you're at it, why not "sympathy strike" to support the filthy greed, er, proletariat struggle of those poor, underpaid NBA players? And when you don't get your way, you rootkit all the desktops in your company, change server admin passwords, and poison (or release) all the mission critical and customer data, right?
Fuck unions. Fuck them with laws, Pinkertons and bullets. I know them for what they are; I've seen firsthand exactly how unions go about their business. They bankrupt companies, states and nations, they leave hospital patients suffering in their beds while picketing, they think that whatever their industry is must never be allowed to shrink regardless of changes in technology or economy (just like your philosophical brothers the RIAA, yes?), and they do everything they can to ensure that the incompetent cannot be fired. They trade in political bribery, influence-peddling and kingmaking. They hurt innocents to get their way, they commit criminal acts when they don't get their way. Go ahead, tell me that what I've said isn't true and that unions do no harm. I and anybody who ever pays attention to the news and to history and to personal experience will look you in the eye and call you a liar.
Lead deficiency.
Exactly. They never should have been allowed to create the drug or sell it in the first place. The whole idea of "whoever does the work is the one who should get the reward" is evil. Pharma companies should not be allowed to engage in research, earn profit, or do anything except bleed money into the pockets of lawyers and socialists. Anyone should be able to simultaneously cash in on another company's research and sue that company. Drugs happen by magic, and don't tell me otherwise; effort has nothing to do with it. Screw people with high cholesterol, they're old while entitlement-driven people are young, it doesn't affect the young so to hell with anyone except the young. I'm ENTITLED.
May you die of a heart attack for want of an effective drug.
If Pfizer is offering Lipitor cheaply, what's the problem? Seriously, unless the goal is to actively punish companies that create drugs and bear the cost of research and the risk of scum-sucking tort lawyers, let Pfizer compete, and if their pricing is competitive, more power (and market share) to them.
If the goal is to say "once patents expire, the originating company is never again permitted to sell their invention", just say so and try to justify it.
And just how many hours a day do you think average users have available to become "You Lite"? Do you even practice what you preach on any subject other than software?
Next time you seek health care or travel, be glad that doctors, plumbers and pilots don't have the same attitude toward you which you have toward them. Discover your own antibiotics and do your own labwork. Do your own surgery; if you're too lazy to learn, screw you and your tumor. Muck out your own septic tank so you can smell like you act. Fly your own damned plane, and while you're at it, BUILD your own damned plane. And house. And car.
I'm building my own plane, so yeah, that does in fact make me better than you, Linux-boy. Like the attitude? Got it from you.
--pilot, mechanic, ham "extra", and... oh yeah, software engineer.
If Hypercard and the concept behind it is so great, why aren't you superior basement-dwellers writing your own? If you've been "bemoaning" its loss for over a decade, why aren't there a hundred open source versions?
Oh yeah. You want Apple to do it for you, at their expense, so you can take it for free while at the same time claiming you invented it and bashing Apple for doing all your research and hard work for you. You want to keep yourselves on pedestals so that nobody can send an email without consulting a Birkenstock-clad neckbeard. Too bad Apple is making all the toys that previously were your domains to "idiots" and "sheep" and anybody else who doesn't think that you should need to devote your life to computing to be "worthy" of using a computer.
No wonder nobody important pays attention to what the "Slashdot community" wants.
>How much of this was due to the slashdot publicity and EFF involvement?
EFF involvement: almost all of it. They've been doing some incredibly stupid stuff lately, but once in a while they still have the capability to do something right.
Slashdot PR: don't kid yourself. Slashdot is irrelevant to just about anything other than DDoS'ing self-hosted websites. Face it, we're not that important.
Facebook will never hold to privacy agreements OR to FTC/court rulings, because it is far too profitable to break those agreements or rulings. After all, there are no real consequences for doing so. Given that Zuckerberg holds all of Facebook's users in open,. sneering contempt (in the same way that many ./ commenters do), what possible motive would he have to comply? It's not like the FTC is ever going to touch him.
Or, to restate: there is a word for law enforcement without teeth. That word is "bitch". The FTC is Zuckerberg's bitch; they've conclusively proved it.
Assholes remain assholes until there is a credible threat of physical violence; nothing else motivates them. Robber barons remain robber barons unless there is a credible threat of having everything they own seized and sold; nothing else motivates them. Right now, there is no credibility to anything that the FTC says, so nothing's changed.
Would you accept the same pricing structure for an Android phone, given that the per-unit cost to produce the phones is similar? Or are the rules different for iPhones?
No, Obama does not speak to him every day.
Do you know what "hyperbole" is? Do you know that "deal with" is not equivalent to "speak with"? Do you know that the Congress is the primary internal-facing Federal body in the US? Do you know that the President is the primary external-facing power in the US? Do you realize that foreign policy IS an affair of the US? Do you believe everything you read in a Slashdot summary, or for that matter, on the Internet at all?
I don't think you really understand how the presidency operates at all. Or journalists, or politics, or...