Or maybe the obese rates are those that had no self-control to start out with. If that's the case, the severe obesity might simply be a visible indicator of a very real character flaw. (Although I have serious questions about the meaning of "moral failure", if brain chemistry determines a person's actions.)
Unless you're going to invoke some mythological explanation like a soul, brain structure and chemistry determine all of a person's actions. We may be extremely complex and chaotic (in the formal mathematical sense), but we're still automata, just like everything else in a deterministic universe.
He even had to do a quick google to find some old buzzwords to throw in, I almost want to give him points for throwing in CICS, almost.
What are you, twelve? I've developed COBOL and CICS applications, though thankfully, I work mostly in C++ and Java now.
You should have picked up on this when he starts naming books that he's read. The more name/buzzword dropping you see the more you know the person doesn't really have a clue.
No, but thirty-five years of software engineering has taught me that treading on the sacred turf of DBAs gets you one of two possible responses. If you don't make it clear at the outset that you do know what you're talking about, you're immediately dismissed as a clueless outsider. If you do make it clear that you know what you're talking about, you get responses like yours, which just descend into nonsensical nastiness. You can't have a meaningful discussion with people who aren't interested in dealing in good faith.
All of which serves to underscore my original point, which is that there is a deeply entrenched RDBMS faction that can only see problems in terms of the one tool that they have, and react to problems that don't fit the tool well (or at all) by simply denying their existence. The irony is that there is hardly anyone who denies the broad utility of the relational model. The hysterical reaction to the suggestion that not everything fits the model equally well and a few things don't fit it at all only highlights the blind dogma involved.
Use the right tool for the job, except databases, eh?
The simple fact of the matter is that not every app is aiming for Google's scale. (Not every app is web-based or even going to be web-based, though people seem to forget that.) And even some large-scale apps don't fit the relational model very well, medical records being one of the more outstanding examples.
And yes, I have read Codd and Date and understand the relational model and its benefits very well, and it annoys me to no end when people break the relational model without realizing or understanding what it costs them. That said, sometimes those costs are acceptable, and sometimes an application requires features that the relational model does not (and in fact cannot) bring to the table.
It may be, as with every other silver bullet fad, that what's at work here is the basic human tendency to become familiar with something, begin to see everything in terms of it, and then try to persuade anyone who'll listen that they are in possession of the all-singing, all-dancing solution to all problems. Today, it's Ruby, multi-touch interfaces, and functional programming. But not very long ago it was COBOL and CICS. And while one must acknowledge that progress has been made, it is equally obvious that progress will continue to be made and that "one size fits all" is always BS, even in clothing.
I do my best not to be irritated by this line of questioning, not least because it is almost always a rhetorical question with an implied "No", or else just a stalling tactic. But the most irritating thing is that it's the wrong question.
The question we should be asking is NOT whether we want to alter human genes. The real question here is whether *I* want to alter my own genes, and what the hell business that is of anyone's but mine and my doctor's. If the alteration extends to my reproductive cells, then there's a broader question, but I'd be perfectly willing to be sterilized as a precondition of curing any number of potential genetic disorders. As it happens, I had a vasectomy years ago, so I have long since ceased to be a concern for the human gene pool.
Should we be curing [insert condition here]? No. Should we allow people to voluntarily seek out whatever medical treatment they need (or want, if they can afford it)? Yes.
It's bad enough that we have religion interfering with people's medical choices. We don't need to open the door for idle philosophical speculation to deny people medical treatment.
What's missing here is the fact that TJX didn't take reasonable precautions to protect the data.
Fully agreed. Until there's some serious liability for mis- and non-feasance when it comes to customer data, there's no incentive for these bozos to clean up their act.
All in all, I still bet this guy has about $10m buried someplace but still 20 years of your life is a very stiff sentence considering a plea bargain as well.
Here I'd disagree. This is being treated as a single offense, but it's actually an offense against millions of victims. If the sentence was proportionate to the offense, this guy would never see daylight again.
Would we want a Chinese company to come into our country and tell our government what to do? While I've seen a great deal of discussion about human rights surrounding these stories, I've seen precious little about sovereignty.
If our government was as oppressive as the Chinese government, then hell yes, I'd like foreign powers to pressure our government to improve its human rights record. And if foreign powers weren't willing to step up to the plate, foreign companies would be welcome. I value my freedom a lot more than a bunch of primitive tribalism. And the last thing I'd want is a company like Microsoft to come in and collaborate with my oppressive government.
As far as sovereignty goes, my view is that the legitimacy of a government, and hence its sovereignty, arises from the democratic will of a free people. There are no legitimate non-democratic states, so the question of mainland Chinese sovereignty is moot. The PRC is no more a legitimate state than the USSR was.
Whenever a capitalist talks about "adding value" or "creating wealth", they're really talking about creating scarcity. "Intellectual property" is the purest form of artificial scarcity, restricting the use of ideas, which otherwise can travel freely from mind to mind with negligible actual cost. A more mundane example is the way building houses drives up the cost of property by reducing the pool of available (or at least desirable) undeveloped property. (The housing bubble pushed this past the point of viability by building more houses than there were buyers for, but between inevitable population growth and the physical decline of abandoned houses, the situation will eventually return to normal.)
We end up with deceptive terms like "creating wealth" because few people would be enthusiastic about creating scarcity except, of course, for the people who already own the commodity being made scarce. Everyone else just ends up paying more for less. Intellectual property is particularly egregious in this sense because the scarcity is completely artificial, as opposed to real estate, where there really is a limited supply of raw material. Ideas, even good ones, are cheap and plentiful and very seldom actually unique; "ownership" is rather arbitrarily awarded to the company that has the resources to afford the patent process and gets it through the door first, with a strong incentive to do so as vaguely and broadly as possible so as to throttle as much actual creativity as possible.
The Indian Wars were not great slaughters and its insulting to the memory of the soldiers and warriors who fought on both sides to call it that.
Please accept my apologies for impugning the memory of the racist thugs who stole an entire continent from its rightful owners. I occasionally slip up and forget that criminals cease to be criminals once they put on a government-issued uniform. My bad.
What the hell has happend to us as a country? Has it always been this fucked and we just have the means to know about it now? Or were things truly better back int he day?
There is no explicit Constitutional right to privacy; it's one of the rights that the courts have found to be implied, and that fairly recently. Conversely, the census was placed in the Constitution by the founding fathers.
They were much, much worse back in the day, actually. The FBI originated to suppress peaceful political activity. Women used to be chattel, we had slaves, corporations had private armies that could kill striking union members with impunity, young children were forced to work twelve-hour shifts in factories and mines, American Indians were slaughtered by roving army units and bands of vigilantes, mob lynchings were commonplace, college was available only to the very rich, antibiotics and blood transfusion hadn't been invented yet, and so on. Heck, at the outset, only white male landowners could vote.
The idea that things are getting worse seems to be promulgated by people whose knowledge of history stretches back no more than a week or two. Aside from the current recession, things are better now in almost every respect than they have ever been.
Which is worse? Something not supposed to be classified NOT being leaked, or something SUPPOSED to be classified being leaked? I, and most people, would say the latter.
That's frighteningly naive. If you create a system in which people can use the pretense of national security to commit heinous crimes, then they will as a matter of statistical certainty use it to commit heinous crimes. If it works, they will be emboldened to commit more numerous and more heinous crimes. If there is no internal regulatory mechanism to stop the cycle -- and generally, there is not, for "national security" reasons -- then you either helplessly watch as your country is imperiled by increasingly corrupt and inhuman national security agencies, or you thank your lucky stars that there are still some people inside the system with the courage and the moral character to leak evidence of wrongdoing to reporters and groups like WikiLeaks.
As it is today, any PI or other motivated individual can pull up a buttload of personal information on you for a couple of hundred dollars.
For considerably less than that, I can already pull up a "buttload of personal information" on you or anyone else, quite likely including your SSN, and you can do the same to me. If you're willing to physically go down to the county courthouse where I was born or where I currently reside, you can get a lot more. That boat has already sailed.
The idea that hiding ID information will somehow protect us is, in any case, an appeal to security through obscurity. Just as it takes more than your account number to log in to your account at your bank's website, the answer is to separate security from any single identifier. That you can harm me, or that I can harm you, with just an identifier says nothing about the identifier, but it speaks volumes about the shoddy security of systems that use the identifiers. You could have separate identifiers in each place without significantly increasing the security of any of them or all of them, as it's usually trivial to connect ID x to ID y.
We don't need a "gargantuan mess of privacy laws" to avoid the problem. What we do need is a legal framework wherein the entities that handle our personal information are legally liable for breaches of their security. If we continue with the current situation, where -- for example -- a major bank can announce the compromise of millions of customers' information without being held legally responsible, there will be no significant incentive for them to improve their security. Which identifiers are used or not used has no real effect on the current artificial corporate impunity.
Why? Because we've already gone through this with the social security number, which was promised to be only used to administer social security benefits, and is now used for everything.
True enough. As far as I can tell, though, I have yet to be seriously harmed by my SSN. The data security provisions of my bank might be another matter, but my SSN is no more harmful to me than my name, my phone number, my dedicated IP address, or the primary keys assigned to me in any of hundreds of databases. I'm certainly not going to wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat thinking, "Oh shit! I've been assigned another number!"
We don't want any more stinking ID!!!
Meh. Doesn't even rank in the top hundred things that worry me about the government. Any number of both free and unfree countries have such things, and like gun ownership, to which the same applies, there's not much correlation between that and the local degree of personal freedom. And frankly, I'd rather not have my tax dollars going to paying for the errors and duplication of effort that come from not having a single, reliable personal ID.
Price is only the first hurdle for SSDs. There's also the issue of reliability, and reports from the field suggest that SSD reliability is highly variable, and in no case as good over the long term as hard drives. That will probably change in time, but they're not there yet.
It doesnt sound safe to me, especially in a post 911 world.
Well, of course not. If you're one of those people who uses the phrase "post-9/11 world" without (conscious) irony, you're never going to feel safe. Just be thankful you have the specter of terrorism to focus your fear on, instead of the countless vague fears that preyed on your mind in the long and dreadful period between the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of al Qaeda.
Three things will happen here. First, because Switzerland is a relatively small, landlocked country, many Swiss gamers will simply take the relatively short drive to a neighboring country to purchase the games they want. Second, many games are available for purchase online, so the drive will in many cases be unnecessary. And third, anyone who was still waiting for an excuse to pirate games in Switzerland now has it, and quite frankly, more power to them.
The only way this could be more of an empty gesture is if the Swiss legislature banned wicked thoughts. Good luck with that.
The idea that imaginary or virtual products are new is really only true in the US Patent Office sense, that is, they are new... on a computer. The truth is that we've been buying virtual products all along. When someone buys an article of clothing from a manufacturer whose products are fashionable, yes, they are buying something real -- shoes, a shirt, a jacket, whatever -- but they are also buying the associated fashionability, which is purely imaginary. People buy all kinds of things for reasons that make the physical object itself a secondary concern. The only thing that has changed is that computers and the Internet have made it possible to dispense with the inessential -- the object -- and directly purchase the intangible benefit.
Looked at another way, buying game-related virtual products is not really any different from a lot of entertainment purchases. When you buy tickets to a concert, what tangible thing are you purchasing? Absolutely nothing. You're paying for an experience. The difference between a musician and a stored value in a game server is, from the point of view of the customer, quite irrelevant: in both cases, the customer is paying to be entertained.
If anything is new here, it's just the introduction of a new medium for entertainment and -- as Apple's recent success amply demonstrates -- brand-based social status contests. That may very well be interesting in its own right, but it doesn't represent anything novel as far as market economics are concerned.
That was my first thought, having given up on BIND years ago in favor of the vastly more efficient, user-friendly, and -- most importantly -- bug free djbdns.
After all this time, the best they can do is something they themselves admit is crap, and they plan to take years to make it less crappy? That's really stunning, and not in a good way. We are, after all, talking about a key/value store. Thank goodness they didn't try something that wasn't appallingly well-understood already.
Okay, it's like parking your car in your neighbor's driveway and then accusing them of stealing it.
There's actually nothing complicated here. Viacom planted evidence of a crime, and then tried to hijack the court system to finish off the fraud. If I was a Viacom attorney right now, I'd be telling my employer to look for a new attorney and quite possibly threatening to sue them.
The real danger is that if work ever became fun, our employers would start charging us to do it.
Re:Internet on TV? Really?
on
I Want My GTV
·
· Score: 1
We're seriously doing this again? Aside from video services like YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, etc, haven't we learned that Internet on our TV is kind of...lame?
That was my first thought, too -- I remembered the bad old days of having to design web pages to accommodate WebTV. But the vital difference between now and then is HDTV. The newer televisions actually have the resolution to do a decent job of displaying web pages. Add a Wii-style controller for positioning the pointer, and it might actually be usable.
Mind you, *I* won't be one of their customers -- I don't even have a TV. But I suspect that there might actually be a market for this.
It's not like John Smith was sitting on his Sofa in Madison Wisconsin and a hellfire missle dropped in on his house.
Maybe if that did happen more often, Americans might not be so sanguine about the sloppy work being done by the military overseas, where our targets have included wedding parties, schools, and clearly marked tanks commanded by members of allied forces. Perhaps then, they'd get off their capitalized sofas and learn how to spell "missile" correctly.
Being at war is not an excuse for incompetence, violations of the laws of war, or the indiscriminate killing of civilians. Or so we once argued at Nuremburg. On a purely practical, self-interested level, the wars in which apologists spend the most time defending the indefensible in the name of "doing what's necessary" tend to be the wars we lose. And considering that we've effectively lost most of the wars we've fought in recent years and are in the middle of two more conflicts that have boiled down to desperate searches for a dignified exit strategy, maybe it's time we reevaluated what's necessary.
If US Citizens are employed in the service of enemies of this Republic on foreign soil, then what the hell does the ACLU want?
I don't think the question here is whether it is permissible to attack military enemies, so much as whether it is permissible to engage in the assassination of specific individuals, to say nothing of the accuracy of the intelligence that leads to such assassination missions and the extensive collateral damage that may end up creating more enemies than it destroys. We are, after all, talking about an intelligence community whose failures over the last fifty years would be comical if the consequences weren't so grave.
The failure of the "let's just trust our leaders" model is what spurred us to form a republic in the first place. To have it come up again in the context of the two biggest military disasters of our nation's history suggests that someone isn't paying attention to the reality on the ground, and it's not the ACLU.
Slashdot Mirror
Or maybe the obese rates are those that had no self-control to start out with. If that's the case, the severe obesity might simply be a visible indicator of a very real character flaw. (Although I have serious questions about the meaning of "moral failure", if brain chemistry determines a person's actions.)
Unless you're going to invoke some mythological explanation like a soul, brain structure and chemistry determine all of a person's actions. We may be extremely complex and chaotic (in the formal mathematical sense), but we're still automata, just like everything else in a deterministic universe.
He even had to do a quick google to find some old buzzwords to throw in, I almost want to give him points for throwing in CICS, almost.
What are you, twelve? I've developed COBOL and CICS applications, though thankfully, I work mostly in C++ and Java now.
You should have picked up on this when he starts naming books that he's read. The more name/buzzword dropping you see the more you know the person doesn't really have a clue.
No, but thirty-five years of software engineering has taught me that treading on the sacred turf of DBAs gets you one of two possible responses. If you don't make it clear at the outset that you do know what you're talking about, you're immediately dismissed as a clueless outsider. If you do make it clear that you know what you're talking about, you get responses like yours, which just descend into nonsensical nastiness. You can't have a meaningful discussion with people who aren't interested in dealing in good faith.
All of which serves to underscore my original point, which is that there is a deeply entrenched RDBMS faction that can only see problems in terms of the one tool that they have, and react to problems that don't fit the tool well (or at all) by simply denying their existence. The irony is that there is hardly anyone who denies the broad utility of the relational model. The hysterical reaction to the suggestion that not everything fits the model equally well and a few things don't fit it at all only highlights the blind dogma involved.
Use the right tool for the job, except databases, eh?
The simple fact of the matter is that not every app is aiming for Google's scale. (Not every app is web-based or even going to be web-based, though people seem to forget that.) And even some large-scale apps don't fit the relational model very well, medical records being one of the more outstanding examples.
And yes, I have read Codd and Date and understand the relational model and its benefits very well, and it annoys me to no end when people break the relational model without realizing or understanding what it costs them. That said, sometimes those costs are acceptable, and sometimes an application requires features that the relational model does not (and in fact cannot) bring to the table.
It may be, as with every other silver bullet fad, that what's at work here is the basic human tendency to become familiar with something, begin to see everything in terms of it, and then try to persuade anyone who'll listen that they are in possession of the all-singing, all-dancing solution to all problems. Today, it's Ruby, multi-touch interfaces, and functional programming. But not very long ago it was COBOL and CICS. And while one must acknowledge that progress has been made, it is equally obvious that progress will continue to be made and that "one size fits all" is always BS, even in clothing.
I do my best not to be irritated by this line of questioning, not least because it is almost always a rhetorical question with an implied "No", or else just a stalling tactic. But the most irritating thing is that it's the wrong question.
The question we should be asking is NOT whether we want to alter human genes. The real question here is whether *I* want to alter my own genes, and what the hell business that is of anyone's but mine and my doctor's. If the alteration extends to my reproductive cells, then there's a broader question, but I'd be perfectly willing to be sterilized as a precondition of curing any number of potential genetic disorders. As it happens, I had a vasectomy years ago, so I have long since ceased to be a concern for the human gene pool.
Should we be curing [insert condition here]? No. Should we allow people to voluntarily seek out whatever medical treatment they need (or want, if they can afford it)? Yes.
It's bad enough that we have religion interfering with people's medical choices. We don't need to open the door for idle philosophical speculation to deny people medical treatment.
What's missing here is the fact that TJX didn't take reasonable precautions to protect the data.
Fully agreed. Until there's some serious liability for mis- and non-feasance when it comes to customer data, there's no incentive for these bozos to clean up their act.
All in all, I still bet this guy has about $10m buried someplace but still 20 years of your life is a very stiff sentence considering a plea bargain as well.
Here I'd disagree. This is being treated as a single offense, but it's actually an offense against millions of victims. If the sentence was proportionate to the offense, this guy would never see daylight again.
Would we want a Chinese company to come into our country and tell our government what to do? While I've seen a great deal of discussion about human rights surrounding these stories, I've seen precious little about sovereignty.
If our government was as oppressive as the Chinese government, then hell yes, I'd like foreign powers to pressure our government to improve its human rights record. And if foreign powers weren't willing to step up to the plate, foreign companies would be welcome. I value my freedom a lot more than a bunch of primitive tribalism. And the last thing I'd want is a company like Microsoft to come in and collaborate with my oppressive government.
As far as sovereignty goes, my view is that the legitimacy of a government, and hence its sovereignty, arises from the democratic will of a free people. There are no legitimate non-democratic states, so the question of mainland Chinese sovereignty is moot. The PRC is no more a legitimate state than the USSR was.
Whenever a capitalist talks about "adding value" or "creating wealth", they're really talking about creating scarcity. "Intellectual property" is the purest form of artificial scarcity, restricting the use of ideas, which otherwise can travel freely from mind to mind with negligible actual cost. A more mundane example is the way building houses drives up the cost of property by reducing the pool of available (or at least desirable) undeveloped property. (The housing bubble pushed this past the point of viability by building more houses than there were buyers for, but between inevitable population growth and the physical decline of abandoned houses, the situation will eventually return to normal.)
We end up with deceptive terms like "creating wealth" because few people would be enthusiastic about creating scarcity except, of course, for the people who already own the commodity being made scarce. Everyone else just ends up paying more for less. Intellectual property is particularly egregious in this sense because the scarcity is completely artificial, as opposed to real estate, where there really is a limited supply of raw material. Ideas, even good ones, are cheap and plentiful and very seldom actually unique; "ownership" is rather arbitrarily awarded to the company that has the resources to afford the patent process and gets it through the door first, with a strong incentive to do so as vaguely and broadly as possible so as to throttle as much actual creativity as possible.
The Indian Wars were not great slaughters and its insulting to the memory of the soldiers and warriors who fought on both sides to call it that.
Please accept my apologies for impugning the memory of the racist thugs who stole an entire continent from its rightful owners. I occasionally slip up and forget that criminals cease to be criminals once they put on a government-issued uniform. My bad.
What the hell has happend to us as a country? Has it always been this fucked and we just have the means to know about it now? Or were things truly better back int he day?
There is no explicit Constitutional right to privacy; it's one of the rights that the courts have found to be implied, and that fairly recently. Conversely, the census was placed in the Constitution by the founding fathers.
They were much, much worse back in the day, actually. The FBI originated to suppress peaceful political activity. Women used to be chattel, we had slaves, corporations had private armies that could kill striking union members with impunity, young children were forced to work twelve-hour shifts in factories and mines, American Indians were slaughtered by roving army units and bands of vigilantes, mob lynchings were commonplace, college was available only to the very rich, antibiotics and blood transfusion hadn't been invented yet, and so on. Heck, at the outset, only white male landowners could vote.
The idea that things are getting worse seems to be promulgated by people whose knowledge of history stretches back no more than a week or two. Aside from the current recession, things are better now in almost every respect than they have ever been.
Which is worse? Something not supposed to be classified NOT being leaked, or something SUPPOSED to be classified being leaked? I, and most people, would say the latter.
That's frighteningly naive. If you create a system in which people can use the pretense of national security to commit heinous crimes, then they will as a matter of statistical certainty use it to commit heinous crimes. If it works, they will be emboldened to commit more numerous and more heinous crimes. If there is no internal regulatory mechanism to stop the cycle -- and generally, there is not, for "national security" reasons -- then you either helplessly watch as your country is imperiled by increasingly corrupt and inhuman national security agencies, or you thank your lucky stars that there are still some people inside the system with the courage and the moral character to leak evidence of wrongdoing to reporters and groups like WikiLeaks.
As it is today, any PI or other motivated individual can pull up a buttload of personal information on you for a couple of hundred dollars.
For considerably less than that, I can already pull up a "buttload of personal information" on you or anyone else, quite likely including your SSN, and you can do the same to me. If you're willing to physically go down to the county courthouse where I was born or where I currently reside, you can get a lot more. That boat has already sailed.
The idea that hiding ID information will somehow protect us is, in any case, an appeal to security through obscurity. Just as it takes more than your account number to log in to your account at your bank's website, the answer is to separate security from any single identifier. That you can harm me, or that I can harm you, with just an identifier says nothing about the identifier, but it speaks volumes about the shoddy security of systems that use the identifiers. You could have separate identifiers in each place without significantly increasing the security of any of them or all of them, as it's usually trivial to connect ID x to ID y.
We don't need a "gargantuan mess of privacy laws" to avoid the problem. What we do need is a legal framework wherein the entities that handle our personal information are legally liable for breaches of their security. If we continue with the current situation, where -- for example -- a major bank can announce the compromise of millions of customers' information without being held legally responsible, there will be no significant incentive for them to improve their security. Which identifiers are used or not used has no real effect on the current artificial corporate impunity.
Why? Because we've already gone through this with the social security number, which was promised to be only used to administer social security benefits, and is now used for everything.
True enough. As far as I can tell, though, I have yet to be seriously harmed by my SSN. The data security provisions of my bank might be another matter, but my SSN is no more harmful to me than my name, my phone number, my dedicated IP address, or the primary keys assigned to me in any of hundreds of databases. I'm certainly not going to wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat thinking, "Oh shit! I've been assigned another number!"
We don't want any more stinking ID!!!
Meh. Doesn't even rank in the top hundred things that worry me about the government. Any number of both free and unfree countries have such things, and like gun ownership, to which the same applies, there's not much correlation between that and the local degree of personal freedom. And frankly, I'd rather not have my tax dollars going to paying for the errors and duplication of effort that come from not having a single, reliable personal ID.
Price is only the first hurdle for SSDs. There's also the issue of reliability, and reports from the field suggest that SSD reliability is highly variable, and in no case as good over the long term as hard drives. That will probably change in time, but they're not there yet.
If one of Bill Gates' projects leads to clean and plentiful energy and saves the world from global warming, it still won't make up for IE6.
It doesnt sound safe to me, especially in a post 911 world.
Well, of course not. If you're one of those people who uses the phrase "post-9/11 world" without (conscious) irony, you're never going to feel safe. Just be thankful you have the specter of terrorism to focus your fear on, instead of the countless vague fears that preyed on your mind in the long and dreadful period between the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of al Qaeda.
Bah. Wake me up when they have a maneuverable superluminal cruise missile.
They already have. The problem is that it hits its targets about five thousand years before it is launched.
Three things will happen here. First, because Switzerland is a relatively small, landlocked country, many Swiss gamers will simply take the relatively short drive to a neighboring country to purchase the games they want. Second, many games are available for purchase online, so the drive will in many cases be unnecessary. And third, anyone who was still waiting for an excuse to pirate games in Switzerland now has it, and quite frankly, more power to them.
The only way this could be more of an empty gesture is if the Swiss legislature banned wicked thoughts. Good luck with that.
The idea that imaginary or virtual products are new is really only true in the US Patent Office sense, that is, they are new... on a computer. The truth is that we've been buying virtual products all along. When someone buys an article of clothing from a manufacturer whose products are fashionable, yes, they are buying something real -- shoes, a shirt, a jacket, whatever -- but they are also buying the associated fashionability, which is purely imaginary. People buy all kinds of things for reasons that make the physical object itself a secondary concern. The only thing that has changed is that computers and the Internet have made it possible to dispense with the inessential -- the object -- and directly purchase the intangible benefit.
Looked at another way, buying game-related virtual products is not really any different from a lot of entertainment purchases. When you buy tickets to a concert, what tangible thing are you purchasing? Absolutely nothing. You're paying for an experience. The difference between a musician and a stored value in a game server is, from the point of view of the customer, quite irrelevant: in both cases, the customer is paying to be entertained.
If anything is new here, it's just the introduction of a new medium for entertainment and -- as Apple's recent success amply demonstrates -- brand-based social status contests. That may very well be interesting in its own right, but it doesn't represent anything novel as far as market economics are concerned.
Could apply to any version of BIND.
That was my first thought, having given up on BIND years ago in favor of the vastly more efficient, user-friendly, and -- most importantly -- bug free djbdns.
After all this time, the best they can do is something they themselves admit is crap, and they plan to take years to make it less crappy? That's really stunning, and not in a good way. We are, after all, talking about a key/value store. Thank goodness they didn't try something that wasn't appallingly well-understood already.
I doubt in the extreme that the DOD has gone to war with the CIA, or that they are this blatantly making like the Keystone Kops.
Why not? Outside of the fantasy world Tom Clancy novels, both agencies are notoriously corrupt and incompetent.
Maybe I need a car analogy.
Okay, it's like parking your car in your neighbor's driveway and then accusing them of stealing it.
There's actually nothing complicated here. Viacom planted evidence of a crime, and then tried to hijack the court system to finish off the fraud. If I was a Viacom attorney right now, I'd be telling my employer to look for a new attorney and quite possibly threatening to sue them.
The real danger is that if work ever became fun, our employers would start charging us to do it.
We're seriously doing this again? Aside from video services like YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, etc, haven't we learned that Internet on our TV is kind of...lame?
That was my first thought, too -- I remembered the bad old days of having to design web pages to accommodate WebTV. But the vital difference between now and then is HDTV. The newer televisions actually have the resolution to do a decent job of displaying web pages. Add a Wii-style controller for positioning the pointer, and it might actually be usable.
Mind you, *I* won't be one of their customers -- I don't even have a TV. But I suspect that there might actually be a market for this.
It's not like John Smith was sitting on his Sofa in Madison Wisconsin and a hellfire missle dropped in on his house.
Maybe if that did happen more often, Americans might not be so sanguine about the sloppy work being done by the military overseas, where our targets have included wedding parties, schools, and clearly marked tanks commanded by members of allied forces. Perhaps then, they'd get off their capitalized sofas and learn how to spell "missile" correctly.
Being at war is not an excuse for incompetence, violations of the laws of war, or the indiscriminate killing of civilians. Or so we once argued at Nuremburg. On a purely practical, self-interested level, the wars in which apologists spend the most time defending the indefensible in the name of "doing what's necessary" tend to be the wars we lose. And considering that we've effectively lost most of the wars we've fought in recent years and are in the middle of two more conflicts that have boiled down to desperate searches for a dignified exit strategy, maybe it's time we reevaluated what's necessary.
If US Citizens are employed in the service of enemies of this Republic on foreign soil, then what the hell does the ACLU want?
I don't think the question here is whether it is permissible to attack military enemies, so much as whether it is permissible to engage in the assassination of specific individuals, to say nothing of the accuracy of the intelligence that leads to such assassination missions and the extensive collateral damage that may end up creating more enemies than it destroys. We are, after all, talking about an intelligence community whose failures over the last fifty years would be comical if the consequences weren't so grave.
The failure of the "let's just trust our leaders" model is what spurred us to form a republic in the first place. To have it come up again in the context of the two biggest military disasters of our nation's history suggests that someone isn't paying attention to the reality on the ground, and it's not the ACLU.