so much that I bet few of you even know who their candidates are.
Oooh, I know: Mr. Unelectable#1, Mr. Unelectable#2, and Mr. Unelectable#3!
Has it ever occurred to anyone else, that the "third" parties are a ploy by the two big parties to siphon-off people who demand change, into irrelevancy, so that the big-two aren't forced to change at all to accommodate these 'extremists'?
Having to have a CJ degree will greatly increase the cost
Actually, this is great for geeks. When my neighbor asks me to swap-out the hard-drive in his PC, I can say, "Sorry, that's illegal. But I will stand over your shoulder and walk you through it." That way, some people will learn (with help) how to do these things for themselves, and others will stop asking. The second type of person will contribute to great dumpster-diving days ahead. That is a win-win.
This is America, no one's responsible for themselves anymore.
We have made the world a whole lot more complicated, without somehow making people a whole lot smarter. Realistically, the only way for the majority of the population* to be able to handle that complexity** is to delegate the handling of that complexity to others. These others are either experts, or at least people who spend a lot more time than you are able to, following a topic (such as how much violence, gore, nudity, sex, 'foul' language there is in each of hundreds of video games).
To whom are you going to delegate these tasks? One approach is for "the people" to turn to an organization that they have already create of/by/for themselves, which is supposed to hold their interests paramount. Another approach is to hire a team of individual experts who are motivated to hold your personal interests paramount, by the cash that you throw at them (very costly option, out of the reach of most of us).
A third way (similar to the second way) is to delegate these decisions to corporations that are motivated by their own profits, and hope that the pittance that you throw at them for this service are enough make them consider your interests when they make decisions for you. For example, if you subscribe, for $19.99 per month, to a service that designs healthy meals for you, you have to hope that the high-fructose corn syrup industry isn't willing to pay them $2M to 'reconsider' their analysis of HFCS; ditto for a bunch of other interests that have a lot more money than you do. You can threaten to change companies, in an attempt to keep them honest, but on what basis do you make that decision? Many of these issues are complex enough that people can scarcely understand that they are being ill-served.
* I think that most/.ers are 'above average' when it comes to intelligence, awareness, and the ability to handle complexity. OTOH, how many/.-lawyers fail to understand the complexity of the legal system, and fail to understand that they fail to understand the complexity of the legal system?
** The consequences of 'not handling' this complexity are various, but depending on the topic, include: severe injury, death, poverty/bankruptcy, imprisonment, twisted kids (that's the theory, anyway), etc.
I'd like to at least be getting something out of all that sun other than dehydration and sunburn.
Well, if you can find some way to grant a monopoly to the oil companies on the harnessing of solar power, I'm sure we can clear-up these bureaucratic hurdles PDQ.
But honestly, most of the people who use Linux use Debian or a derivative (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Mint, etc) or a more "unstable" distro then CentOS (Fedora, openSUSE, PCLinuxOS, etc).
There, I fixed it for you.
Maybe Firefox is a boon to the employees on the IE team, by forcing MS to pay people to improve their browser. Firefox is a burden to Microsoft (the company), because it forces the company to pay people to improve their browser. You'll notice that it was the team, not the CEO, who sent the cake.
Try this: send exactly one unsolicited, 'promotional' email for your business to a friend of yours that your boss doesn't know about. Have that friend file a lawsuit against your business for spamming him. Your boss will certainly notice that one lawsuit, assume that a non-negligible portion of all people spammed do this, and ask himself if he really wants to deal with 10,000 lawsuits.
More to the point DRM doesn't need to lock out fair use.
Yeah, it pretty much does. Unless your DRM system is a full-blown AI (with all the knowledge of a competent lawyer (for your jurisdiction)), how is it going to judge whether the mashup video that you want to create, using someone's DRM-encumbered audio stream, is a copyright violation or fair use? Does it depend on whether you are going to view your mashup in your own home, or send it to friends? Does it matter if you intend a commercial use for your mashup? Even an IP lawyer can't necessarily tell you how a judge is going to rule on a license violation issue (or whether the license is valid, meaningful, unconcionable, etc)
With DRM, the answer to your request to access encumbered content can never be "maybe" or "sometimes"; it pretty much has to be "yes" or "no".
But with that restriction, are you proposing that the government has to get an actual fraud conviction before the load conversion can be imposed? That prosecution will be very expensive (you, Mr. Taxpayer, might be less out-of-pocket to satisfy the loan with tax dollars (as unsatisfying as that may be)). That solution will also require a whole lot of time, like a 10-year backlog of cases. That process won't stop the problems of neighborhoods turning into ghost towns of empty houses (which are often vandalized and/or 'occupied' by drug dealers) and homeless families. A less-than-ideal solution now is probably better for all concerned that an ideal solution later.
Oh, and if a fraud conviction is secured, the penalty shouldn't be converting the loan, but landing somebodies butt in the klink (which we taxpayers also have to pay for) and a large damage award (say five-times the loan amount) to the defrauded party.
Sure the fraudsters, if there are any, are at fault. BUT I'M NOT AND NEITHER ARE MOST OF US SO WHY SHOULD WE PAY TO FIX IT?!
I agree that those who created the problem (in hopes of profiting from it) should pay for it (if possible). We can start with the financial services companies that created instruments such as NINA and CDOs, and should have known better. Those companies have been hurt by their own stupidity, but that doesn't mean that they can't be punished again. They had the wherewithal to know what was going on, the means to prevent it, and they had the most to gain (in raw dollars) from the arrangement. Why shouldn't they pay for it?
How's this for a simple solution (and penalty) that doesn't involve a tax or the government getting to decide how money gets distributed (to cronies, etc.): any homeowner with a "bad" (subprime, fraudulent, or sufficiently suspicious) mortgage gets the option of converting it to a 30-year fixed 6% mortgage. Bang, done. And those who issued or bought the bad loans are the ones who pay. And BTW, they won't be paying too badly, since they will receive the income from a 30-year fixed mortgage, at a reasonable rate, instead of having to foreclose on a house that they then have to try and sell in a terrible market.
Gah, as long as you expect others to manage you, some day someone will screw you--period.
Your statement could be applied to just about any case of fraud. Does that mean that the savvy operators who were deliberately defrauding people are not at fault. Do you want to call fraud a victimless crime, since the victim could have prevented it if only they had a little bit more knowledge? Any other crimes you want to blame the victim for, since they could have been prevented if the victim was always on-guard?
My post never claimed that you took out an adjustable mortgage, so why are you acting like I did?
Because that's what the word "you" means in English: "Oh, but since you were too lazy to do any due diligence on your part, I need to 'bail' you out? With my money?" Why didn't you say, "But since they were too lazy to do any due diligence on their part, I need to 'bail' them out? With my money?"
If the lender puts documents in front of you, and you sign them without knowing what they mean, you weren't 'defrauded'. You were lazy and irresponsible.
Uh, no. Just because you were lazy (irresponsible is highly debatable), that doesn't mean that you weren't defrauded. If someone tells you the terms of a contract and hands it to you to sign, and you sign it, and the terms are materially different than was presented to you have been defrauded (IANAL). BTW, do you hire a lawyer to review every shrink-wrap EULA when you 'buy' a piece of software (or hardware that comes with pre-installed software and/or driver disks)? Is it lazy and irresponsible of you to not do so?
If you treat your house as a place to live, and buy something that you can afford, you will be fine.
There were many people living in houses that they could afford. They were called by a mortgage broker who said, "I can save you $200/month on your current mortgage." Responding to such an offer is not speculation or an attempt to 'get over' (interest rates do go down sometimes). The brokers screwed them with high-fee, higher-interest, and/or adjustable rate loans with high resets, purely for the profit of the broker. Sure there were speculators who got burned, but there were also a lot of honest homeowners who were defrauded.
Slashdot Mirror
Oooh, I know: Mr. Unelectable#1, Mr. Unelectable#2, and Mr. Unelectable#3!
Has it ever occurred to anyone else, that the "third" parties are a ploy by the two big parties to siphon-off people who demand change, into irrelevancy, so that the big-two aren't forced to change at all to accommodate these 'extremists'?
A real ISP.
Are those metric WTFs, Imperial WTFs, or Troy WTFs?
Parse error: I'm sorry, but your comment should have begun with "Crikey", not "Hush".
Or both. Pity her for being messed-up; jail her as a lesson to her future self, and to others, to think before setting-out to cause harm.
I'm not saying that her speech in this case is not protected by the first amendment, only that in general pity/punishment should not be exclusive.
From the spammer's point of view, yes it is.
Actually, this is great for geeks. When my neighbor asks me to swap-out the hard-drive in his PC, I can say, "Sorry, that's illegal. But I will stand over your shoulder and walk you through it." That way, some people will learn (with help) how to do these things for themselves, and others will stop asking. The second type of person will contribute to great dumpster-diving days ahead. That is a win-win.
We have made the world a whole lot more complicated, without somehow making people a whole lot smarter. Realistically, the only way for the majority of the population* to be able to handle that complexity** is to delegate the handling of that complexity to others. These others are either experts, or at least people who spend a lot more time than you are able to, following a topic (such as how much violence, gore, nudity, sex, 'foul' language there is in each of hundreds of video games).
To whom are you going to delegate these tasks? One approach is for "the people" to turn to an organization that they have already create of/by/for themselves, which is supposed to hold their interests paramount. Another approach is to hire a team of individual experts who are motivated to hold your personal interests paramount, by the cash that you throw at them (very costly option, out of the reach of most of us).
A third way (similar to the second way) is to delegate these decisions to corporations that are motivated by their own profits, and hope that the pittance that you throw at them for this service are enough make them consider your interests when they make decisions for you. For example, if you subscribe, for $19.99 per month, to a service that designs healthy meals for you, you have to hope that the high-fructose corn syrup industry isn't willing to pay them $2M to 'reconsider' their analysis of HFCS; ditto for a bunch of other interests that have a lot more money than you do. You can threaten to change companies, in an attempt to keep them honest, but on what basis do you make that decision? Many of these issues are complex enough that people can scarcely understand that they are being ill-served.
* I think that most /.ers are 'above average' when it comes to intelligence, awareness, and the ability to handle complexity. OTOH, how many /.-lawyers fail to understand the complexity of the legal system, and fail to understand that they fail to understand the complexity of the legal system?
** The consequences of 'not handling' this complexity are various, but depending on the topic, include: severe injury, death, poverty/bankruptcy, imprisonment, twisted kids (that's the theory, anyway), etc.
Well, if you can find some way to grant a monopoly to the oil companies on the harnessing of solar power, I'm sure we can clear-up these bureaucratic hurdles PDQ.
That is a very geocentric attitude. Perhaps Mars has its own Standard Temperature and Pressure.
But honestly, most of the people who use Linux use Debian or a derivative (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Mint, etc) or a more "unstable" distro then CentOS (Fedora, openSUSE, PCLinuxOS, etc). There, I fixed it for you.
Then they should have put an iceweasel on the cake.
Maybe Firefox is a boon to the employees on the IE team, by forcing MS to pay people to improve their browser. Firefox is a burden to Microsoft (the company), because it forces the company to pay people to improve their browser. You'll notice that it was the team, not the CEO, who sent the cake.
XP is smaller, faster, less buggy, and doesn't come encumbered with a ton of DRM crap. How is that a "downgrade"?
Try this: send exactly one unsolicited, 'promotional' email for your business to a friend of yours that your boss doesn't know about. Have that friend file a lawsuit against your business for spamming him. Your boss will certainly notice that one lawsuit, assume that a non-negligible portion of all people spammed do this, and ask himself if he really wants to deal with 10,000 lawsuits.
So what? If our Constitution is not worth dying for, then why do we have a military?
"The Nation will live to regret what the Court has done today."
I subscribe to The Nation, and somehow I don't their writers are going to side with Scalia on this one.
Four Supreme Court Justices disagree with you. I don't.
Good answer. Now, what do we call people who have faith in the existence of dragons? What would an expert witnesses call them at a competency hearing?
Nope, tool of the devil.
Yeah, it pretty much does. Unless your DRM system is a full-blown AI (with all the knowledge of a competent lawyer (for your jurisdiction)), how is it going to judge whether the mashup video that you want to create, using someone's DRM-encumbered audio stream, is a copyright violation or fair use? Does it depend on whether you are going to view your mashup in your own home, or send it to friends? Does it matter if you intend a commercial use for your mashup? Even an IP lawyer can't necessarily tell you how a judge is going to rule on a license violation issue (or whether the license is valid, meaningful, unconcionable, etc)
With DRM, the answer to your request to access encumbered content can never be "maybe" or "sometimes"; it pretty much has to be "yes" or "no".
But with that restriction, are you proposing that the government has to get an actual fraud conviction before the load conversion can be imposed? That prosecution will be very expensive (you, Mr. Taxpayer, might be less out-of-pocket to satisfy the loan with tax dollars (as unsatisfying as that may be)). That solution will also require a whole lot of time, like a 10-year backlog of cases. That process won't stop the problems of neighborhoods turning into ghost towns of empty houses (which are often vandalized and/or 'occupied' by drug dealers) and homeless families. A less-than-ideal solution now is probably better for all concerned that an ideal solution later.
Oh, and if a fraud conviction is secured, the penalty shouldn't be converting the loan, but landing somebodies butt in the klink (which we taxpayers also have to pay for) and a large damage award (say five-times the loan amount) to the defrauded party.
I agree that those who created the problem (in hopes of profiting from it) should pay for it (if possible). We can start with the financial services companies that created instruments such as NINA and CDOs, and should have known better. Those companies have been hurt by their own stupidity, but that doesn't mean that they can't be punished again. They had the wherewithal to know what was going on, the means to prevent it, and they had the most to gain (in raw dollars) from the arrangement. Why shouldn't they pay for it?
How's this for a simple solution (and penalty) that doesn't involve a tax or the government getting to decide how money gets distributed (to cronies, etc.): any homeowner with a "bad" (subprime, fraudulent, or sufficiently suspicious) mortgage gets the option of converting it to a 30-year fixed 6% mortgage. Bang, done. And those who issued or bought the bad loans are the ones who pay. And BTW, they won't be paying too badly, since they will receive the income from a 30-year fixed mortgage, at a reasonable rate, instead of having to foreclose on a house that they then have to try and sell in a terrible market.
Straight-talking McCain lost to a swiftboating liar. Now do you know where the new, improved, 2008-model McCain came from?
Your statement could be applied to just about any case of fraud. Does that mean that the savvy operators who were deliberately defrauding people are not at fault. Do you want to call fraud a victimless crime, since the victim could have prevented it if only they had a little bit more knowledge? Any other crimes you want to blame the victim for, since they could have been prevented if the victim was always on-guard?
Because that's what the word "you" means in English: "Oh, but since you were too lazy to do any due diligence on your part, I need to 'bail' you out? With my money?" Why didn't you say, "But since they were too lazy to do any due diligence on their part, I need to 'bail' them out? With my money?"
If the lender puts documents in front of you, and you sign them without knowing what they mean, you weren't 'defrauded'. You were lazy and irresponsible.
Uh, no. Just because you were lazy (irresponsible is highly debatable), that doesn't mean that you weren't defrauded. If someone tells you the terms of a contract and hands it to you to sign, and you sign it, and the terms are materially different than was presented to you have been defrauded (IANAL). BTW, do you hire a lawyer to review every shrink-wrap EULA when you 'buy' a piece of software (or hardware that comes with pre-installed software and/or driver disks)? Is it lazy and irresponsible of you to not do so?
If you treat your house as a place to live, and buy something that you can afford, you will be fine.
There were many people living in houses that they could afford. They were called by a mortgage broker who said, "I can save you $200/month on your current mortgage." Responding to such an offer is not speculation or an attempt to 'get over' (interest rates do go down sometimes). The brokers screwed them with high-fee, higher-interest, and/or adjustable rate loans with high resets, purely for the profit of the broker. Sure there were speculators who got burned, but there were also a lot of honest homeowners who were defrauded.