Yes, I was awarded moderator points 3 times in the past week. I hadn't gotten any moderator points for several weeks before that.
I also know this happened to a lot of people too because I suddenly saw a vast profusion of +5 posts on threads: Everyone suddenly had a lot more moderator points than they knew what to do with. Just the previous week an article would be posted and the highest rated post was a +4 while an article on the same subject the week after had 15 posts rated +5.
Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Singapore were just as poor as India or Pakistan after WW2. One set of countries opened up their markets and the other didn't. Do I need to remind you how the individual sets of countries are doing right now?
Economics is not a zero-sum game and wealth can be created but you communists are too stupid to understand that.
Socialism is the short-sighted pursuit of equality among people (in terms of wealth, not rights) at the expense of a better standard of living for everyone. It's a classic socialist attitude to think "We should not let the rich countries get richer so we should ban imports from them" resulting in crappy results for everyone.
It's also a classically stupid socialist attitude to fail to realize that IP is created by people in order so they can benefit from it and that people do not work and innovate in order to "benefit humanity". How many Soviet Unions will it take for you idiots to realize that people won't work without incentives?
Very insightful. Congratulations on discovering what socialist countries suffered through for the last 50 years.
In India, for example, the government decided that in order to encourage local industry, etc. they would ban or at least make it very expensive by imposing duties, the importing of foreign goods. Great idea, in principle - except if you lived there during the time. Indian cars sucked. There was no incentive to improve, of course, because there was no competition. Until the early 90s, most cars sold in India were essentially the same as a 1950's Fiat. Small, boxy, made-of-cast-iron tank-like pieces of crap that had no air-conditioning or even fans in them! This is just an example - it was common to expect to wait in line for more than an hour to deposit a check - there were no ATMs etc. Banks were nationalized and had no reason to improve.
There's a lesson there that the wise will learn. Others are condemned to have it happen to them.
California may do an excellent job of conservation of electricity, but where they are failing is in the production. California is a net importer of electricity.
Anyhow, my rant was not about how much electricity is consumed but about who has to pay for it. The current crisis is because California doesn't produce as much electricity as it uses. It's ridiculous that consumers in the Pacific Northwest should pay much more for electricity than Californians do!
The federal energy commission actually forced Northwest energy producers to ship electricity to California at prices much lower than current market value leaving the local utilities forced to buy power on the open market at much higher prices. And the whole time our rates sky-rocket while Californians pay the same amount they always used to.
My electricity bill is, in effect, the cost of my electricity plus the cost of some Californians electricity. I at least hope they send me a picture of the Californian I'm supporting so I can feel proud to bring light into the life of some rich soul.
PS: I used to live in California before I moved here - I don't hate Californians - I just resent having to pay for them screwing up while they don't.
PPS: I posted the previous comment at 1. Three people moderated it up and one moderated it back down as offtopic but due to the wonders of the Slashdot karma system, my karma went down one point as a result.
No, Californians don't pay high energy costs. Their laws shield the utilities from passing on the costs to the consumers. So guess who gets to pay for California's dumb laws? We in the Pacific NorthWest do! We've had our power rates go up more than 100% (that's DOUBLE) in the past few months and just the other day they had an article about Californians whining that a new bill would allow their power rates to grow by up to (from memory) 45% over the next 5 years!
Washington actually produces power. And this year we're being forced to pump more water under drought conditions (which means we'll hurt our Salmon runs and have water shortage in the summer) and being forced to send that power to California at a low price while we have to buy our power on the open market.
</rant>
The situations aren't even REMOTELY related! I know you kiddies feel the need to involve the RIAA or Microsoft in every article but there are some situations out there where the comparisons are irrelevant.
Scientists don't directly make any money off their publications. There is no market for pirated or bootlegged versions of publications because they are not sold for revenues. Scientists publish for the reputation, research grants, acknowledgement, etc. that it brings. The more people read their articles, the better it is for them. Period.
Musicians, on the other hand, tend to work for profit. Musicians benefit from the SALES of their music. If all music was free, it would be the musicians who'd suffer from it. Musicians have little or no interest in seeing the big bad RIAA give their music away for free. Yes, there are a few musicians who'd like the free publicity in the hopes that it will boost sales of their records and concert tickets but by and large the ones that are the most successful don't want it to happen (regardless of what they say in public because they don't want to piss off their fan-base).
Oh yeah. That's what I'd like to see. We should make laws that tell people what they should or should not play on their radio stations beyond what is obscene or defamatory.
Are you being facetious or are you just naturally stupid?
Ah - the classic way to karma whore on Slashdot. Find a problem and find a way to blame a corporation for it. Never mind that it doesn't make any sense, the children that frequent this site will mod it up anyway.
For a radio station, broadcasting on the internet means they reach a wider audience. It's no different, conceptually, than if they got a more powerful transmitter and reached more people (admittedly with a different geographic distribution). It is perfectly fair for the artists to want more money - assuming their contracts are structured so that they get paid more for their ads going to a wider audience. Blame the ad agencies if they are not doing that because it's their fault, not the radio stations. Radio stations get paid for the advertising - they don't pay for it.
The article you pointed to on Salon is egregiously naive. Radio stations have two sources of revenue: Advertising and record companies paying to broadcast their music. Advertising is constrained by the kind of listener audience they are able to command. The better stuff they play, the more listeners and hence more advertising revenue. Obviously, not everyone shares your opinion that radio sucks or there wouldn't be people listening to it and therefore no advertising.
Those specs are for the "Easy PC" - a version of PCs sold to people who don't want to deal with a lot of the stuff a lot of PCs make you deal with today - you know, those same people who like buying fruit-colored cars and computers? There was an article about this on Slashdot a few days ago too. I won't go into the details of why anyone would want to buy a computer like that - this crowd is obviously too narrow-minded to get it - but rest assured that that won't be the only kind of XP Box sold.
<whine>
Great. My karma was 50 when I posted the above comment - without the +1 bonus. I got moderated up twice and then moderated down once as overrated and my karma ends up at 49.
</whine>
</offtopic>
I know you were only joking, but this can't happen.
The sonic boom is only produced at the precise moment where the speed of travel for the plane is equal to the speed of sound. At that speed, the sound waves emitted over a period of time "bunch up" and hit together, causing a sonic boom. However, this doesn't apply once the speed gets above the speed of sound - in fact, the faster above the speed of sound that the plane gets, the less of a sonic boom effect it will produce. After Mach 2, the sonic boom effect will be less than if it were standing still.
So, regardless of how fast the plane travels, there will be exactly two moments when there is a "sonic boom" - When it's accelerating and when it's decelerating.
Ok, call me clueless but how the hell does having passwords allow you to get your email quicker? Either Randal is a complete idiot, or he thought the policeman was a complete idiot and was bullshitting him or the policeman was a complete idiot and is bullshitting us.
You use words like illegal and fraudulent without basis. None of the practices you described are illegal. There's a whiny section of the population that would like to think that they are on account of Microsoft being the mythical monopoly.
Yes, certain manufacturers only sold PCs with Windows pre-installed. This was a business decision they made in order to be able to provide the best product at the lowest price. However, there always were other manufacturers that didn't sell with Windows pre-installed.
Is that air or vacuum? It's been a while since I've taken Physics so I don't remember whether refractive index is defined with respect to air or vacuum - i'd be surprised if it was the former.
What it seems to me is that they have discovered a material where the waves travel faster than the speed of light in vacuum (hence they refract the other way). That would be a quite interesting discovery if that was the case.
That said, the idea that my copyrights should last for decades after i die is just asinine. I would hope my kids have jobs and won't be depending on work I did 50 years ealier to feed themselves.
No, dude, having the length of the copyright be longer helps YOU. NOW. It makes the copyright worth more. So, assuming someone wanted to reproduce your painting, they'd pay you more for the copyright if it lasted 50 years than if it lasted 5 years.
Why would anyone trust their company secrets to Hotmail?
Where I work, sometimes when our mail servers are down, we use an external free email provider to exchange important messages with colleagues. When doing this, it is a very clear policy to state in the first line of the email that it is being sent via hotmail and no confidential information should be contained in any reply. Also, of course, the sender makes sure that no confidential information is disclosed in the original message.
Messages are simply of the form "The build is ready" or "I have checked in the fix for Bug #12345".
This is not because we don't trust the email provider but because we don't trust the security of messages transmitted as clear text over the internet. It would be foolish to do otherwise.
The way these things work is that whoever discovers the bug, if they are a white hats, sends a message to the software manufacturer. Usually it is of the form "Here's the bug, here's what it can do. You have XX days to issue a fix. After XX days I will post this to a security discussion alias with/without also posting the exploit".
The fact that the bug was reported today does not mean that that is when Microsoft found out about it.
I had a funny experience. I went to the website and downloaded and ran the patch but it gave me a message saying I did not need to install this update and exited. Anyone else have this happen?
This is just annoying. No, I'm not suggesting what they are doing is unethical or illegal. MLB definitely has the right to license its broadcasts to whoever it chooses.
I work in an office building and radio reception on my walkman is pretty shitty. I remember last year when the Mariners were making a playoff run, we'd tune in to 710kiro.com which had all the Mariners game broadcasts online and follow the game that way. This was great for the radio station because they just got more listeners than they could cover otherwise - all listening to the same commercials, etc.
I'm guessing I won't be able to do that anymore. My interest in MLB is guaranteed to suffer as a result. I'm really not sure what MLB is getting out of this deal - they are offering $10 in gift certificates to make up for the cost of buying the broadcast. I might even have considered this if Realaudio wasn't such a piece of crap software.
This article is pure flamebait. I am just shocked by the statement dubbing parents who want to use a V-chip to control the content that their children see as "lazy".
The writer of the comment is probably a 19-year-old living in mommys basement resentful at his parents having to work fulltime to support him. People have to have jobs in order to put food on the table. Television is not necessarily bad. Growing up I watched a fair bit of it. There were some great shows on TV that I learned a lot from. Luckily for me, and my parents, I grew up in a country where the content on TV was fairly limited and almost entirely non-violent and non-sexual.
However, a lot of popular programming on TV projects a vision of reality which is far from the truth. Shooting people dead and blowing buildings up are made to seem like routine everyday incidents in several of those shows. If I were a parent, I'd like to screen this crap from my children until they are old enough to realize it for what it's worth.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I was awarded moderator points 3 times in the past week. I hadn't gotten any moderator points for several weeks before that.
I also know this happened to a lot of people too because I suddenly saw a vast profusion of +5 posts on threads: Everyone suddenly had a lot more moderator points than they knew what to do with. Just the previous week an article would be posted and the highest rated post was a +4 while an article on the same subject the week after had 15 posts rated +5.
As a comment to the original article on the subject. It was even modded up to a +5 so I'll assume it was read too.
Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Singapore were just as poor as India or Pakistan after WW2. One set of countries opened up their markets and the other didn't. Do I need to remind you how the individual sets of countries are doing right now?
Economics is not a zero-sum game and wealth can be created but you communists are too stupid to understand that.
Socialism is the short-sighted pursuit of equality among people (in terms of wealth, not rights) at the expense of a better standard of living for everyone. It's a classic socialist attitude to think "We should not let the rich countries get richer so we should ban imports from them" resulting in crappy results for everyone.
It's also a classically stupid socialist attitude to fail to realize that IP is created by people in order so they can benefit from it and that people do not work and innovate in order to "benefit humanity". How many Soviet Unions will it take for you idiots to realize that people won't work without incentives?
Very insightful. Congratulations on discovering what socialist countries suffered through for the last 50 years.
In India, for example, the government decided that in order to encourage local industry, etc. they would ban or at least make it very expensive by imposing duties, the importing of foreign goods. Great idea, in principle - except if you lived there during the time. Indian cars sucked. There was no incentive to improve, of course, because there was no competition. Until the early 90s, most cars sold in India were essentially the same as a 1950's Fiat. Small, boxy, made-of-cast-iron tank-like pieces of crap that had no air-conditioning or even fans in them! This is just an example - it was common to expect to wait in line for more than an hour to deposit a check - there were no ATMs etc. Banks were nationalized and had no reason to improve.
There's a lesson there that the wise will learn. Others are condemned to have it happen to them.
California may do an excellent job of conservation of electricity, but where they are failing is in the production. California is a net importer of electricity.
Anyhow, my rant was not about how much electricity is consumed but about who has to pay for it. The current crisis is because California doesn't produce as much electricity as it uses. It's ridiculous that consumers in the Pacific Northwest should pay much more for electricity than Californians do!
The federal energy commission actually forced Northwest energy producers to ship electricity to California at prices much lower than current market value leaving the local utilities forced to buy power on the open market at much higher prices. And the whole time our rates sky-rocket while Californians pay the same amount they always used to.
My electricity bill is, in effect, the cost of my electricity plus the cost of some Californians electricity. I at least hope they send me a picture of the Californian I'm supporting so I can feel proud to bring light into the life of some rich soul.
PS: I used to live in California before I moved here - I don't hate Californians - I just resent having to pay for them screwing up while they don't.
PPS: I posted the previous comment at 1. Three people moderated it up and one moderated it back down as offtopic but due to the wonders of the Slashdot karma system, my karma went down one point as a result.
No, Californians don't pay high energy costs. Their laws shield the utilities from passing on the costs to the consumers. So guess who gets to pay for California's dumb laws? We in the Pacific NorthWest do! We've had our power rates go up more than 100% (that's DOUBLE) in the past few months and just the other day they had an article about Californians whining that a new bill would allow their power rates to grow by up to (from memory) 45% over the next 5 years!
Washington actually produces power. And this year we're being forced to pump more water under drought conditions (which means we'll hurt our Salmon runs and have water shortage in the summer) and being forced to send that power to California at a low price while we have to buy our power on the open market.
</rant>
> always behind schedual!
The Russians (the Soviets, actually) were the first to put a man in space.
The situations aren't even REMOTELY related! I know you kiddies feel the need to involve the RIAA or Microsoft in every article but there are some situations out there where the comparisons are irrelevant.
Scientists don't directly make any money off their publications. There is no market for pirated or bootlegged versions of publications because they are not sold for revenues. Scientists publish for the reputation, research grants, acknowledgement, etc. that it brings. The more people read their articles, the better it is for them. Period.
Musicians, on the other hand, tend to work for profit. Musicians benefit from the SALES of their music. If all music was free, it would be the musicians who'd suffer from it. Musicians have little or no interest in seeing the big bad RIAA give their music away for free. Yes, there are a few musicians who'd like the free publicity in the hopes that it will boost sales of their records and concert tickets but by and large the ones that are the most successful don't want it to happen (regardless of what they say in public because they don't want to piss off their fan-base).
Oh yeah. That's what I'd like to see. We should make laws that tell people what they should or should not play on their radio stations beyond what is obscene or defamatory.
Are you being facetious or are you just naturally stupid?
Ah - the classic way to karma whore on Slashdot. Find a problem and find a way to blame a corporation for it. Never mind that it doesn't make any sense, the children that frequent this site will mod it up anyway.
For a radio station, broadcasting on the internet means they reach a wider audience. It's no different, conceptually, than if they got a more powerful transmitter and reached more people (admittedly with a different geographic distribution). It is perfectly fair for the artists to want more money - assuming their contracts are structured so that they get paid more for their ads going to a wider audience. Blame the ad agencies if they are not doing that because it's their fault, not the radio stations. Radio stations get paid for the advertising - they don't pay for it.
The article you pointed to on Salon is egregiously naive. Radio stations have two sources of revenue: Advertising and record companies paying to broadcast their music. Advertising is constrained by the kind of listener audience they are able to command. The better stuff they play, the more listeners and hence more advertising revenue. Obviously, not everyone shares your opinion that radio sucks or there wouldn't be people listening to it and therefore no advertising.
How does this crap get moderated up?
Those specs are for the "Easy PC" - a version of PCs sold to people who don't want to deal with a lot of the stuff a lot of PCs make you deal with today - you know, those same people who like buying fruit-colored cars and computers? There was an article about this on Slashdot a few days ago too. I won't go into the details of why anyone would want to buy a computer like that - this crowd is obviously too narrow-minded to get it - but rest assured that that won't be the only kind of XP Box sold.
Moderation Totals:Flamebait=1, Troll=14, Insightful=4, Interesting=7, Funny=8, Overrated=1, Total=35.
What's the record?
<whine>
Great. My karma was 50 when I posted the above comment - without the +1 bonus. I got moderated up twice and then moderated down once as overrated and my karma ends up at 49.
</whine>
</offtopic>
Comes with being the 51st State, eh.
I know you were only joking, but this can't happen.
The sonic boom is only produced at the precise moment where the speed of travel for the plane is equal to the speed of sound. At that speed, the sound waves emitted over a period of time "bunch up" and hit together, causing a sonic boom. However, this doesn't apply once the speed gets above the speed of sound - in fact, the faster above the speed of sound that the plane gets, the less of a sonic boom effect it will produce. After Mach 2, the sonic boom effect will be less than if it were standing still.
So, regardless of how fast the plane travels, there will be exactly two moments when there is a "sonic boom" - When it's accelerating and when it's decelerating.
Ok, call me clueless but how the hell does having passwords allow you to get your email quicker? Either Randal is a complete idiot, or he thought the policeman was a complete idiot and was bullshitting him or the policeman was a complete idiot and is bullshitting us.
You use words like illegal and fraudulent without basis. None of the practices you described are illegal. There's a whiny section of the population that would like to think that they are on account of Microsoft being the mythical monopoly.
Yes, certain manufacturers only sold PCs with Windows pre-installed. This was a business decision they made in order to be able to provide the best product at the lowest price. However, there always were other manufacturers that didn't sell with Windows pre-installed.
Is that air or vacuum? It's been a while since I've taken Physics so I don't remember whether refractive index is defined with respect to air or vacuum - i'd be surprised if it was the former.
What it seems to me is that they have discovered a material where the waves travel faster than the speed of light in vacuum (hence they refract the other way). That would be a quite interesting discovery if that was the case.
That said, the idea that my copyrights should last for decades after i die is just asinine. I would hope my kids have jobs and won't be depending on work I did 50 years ealier to feed themselves.
No, dude, having the length of the copyright be longer helps YOU. NOW. It makes the copyright worth more. So, assuming someone wanted to reproduce your painting, they'd pay you more for the copyright if it lasted 50 years than if it lasted 5 years.
I wish more people took economics classes.
Why would anyone trust their company secrets to Hotmail?
Where I work, sometimes when our mail servers are down, we use an external free email provider to exchange important messages with colleagues. When doing this, it is a very clear policy to state in the first line of the email that it is being sent via hotmail and no confidential information should be contained in any reply. Also, of course, the sender makes sure that no confidential information is disclosed in the original message.
Messages are simply of the form "The build is ready" or "I have checked in the fix for Bug #12345".
This is not because we don't trust the email provider but because we don't trust the security of messages transmitted as clear text over the internet. It would be foolish to do otherwise.
The way these things work is that whoever discovers the bug, if they are a white hats, sends a message to the software manufacturer. Usually it is of the form "Here's the bug, here's what it can do. You have XX days to issue a fix. After XX days I will post this to a security discussion alias with/without also posting the exploit".
The fact that the bug was reported today does not mean that that is when Microsoft found out about it.
I had a funny experience. I went to the website and downloaded and ran the patch but it gave me a message saying I did not need to install this update and exited. Anyone else have this happen?
Wow! A slashdot editor researching an anti-Microsoft article before posting it!
Sarcasm aside, thanks for the research and the information. Someone please mod parent post up.
This is just annoying. No, I'm not suggesting what they are doing is unethical or illegal. MLB definitely has the right to license its broadcasts to whoever it chooses.
I work in an office building and radio reception on my walkman is pretty shitty. I remember last year when the Mariners were making a playoff run, we'd tune in to 710kiro.com which had all the Mariners game broadcasts online and follow the game that way. This was great for the radio station because they just got more listeners than they could cover otherwise - all listening to the same commercials, etc.
I'm guessing I won't be able to do that anymore. My interest in MLB is guaranteed to suffer as a result. I'm really not sure what MLB is getting out of this deal - they are offering $10 in gift certificates to make up for the cost of buying the broadcast. I might even have considered this if Realaudio wasn't such a piece of crap software.
This article is pure flamebait. I am just shocked by the statement dubbing parents who want to use a V-chip to control the content that their children see as "lazy".
The writer of the comment is probably a 19-year-old living in mommys basement resentful at his parents having to work fulltime to support him. People have to have jobs in order to put food on the table. Television is not necessarily bad. Growing up I watched a fair bit of it. There were some great shows on TV that I learned a lot from. Luckily for me, and my parents, I grew up in a country where the content on TV was fairly limited and almost entirely non-violent and non-sexual.
However, a lot of popular programming on TV projects a vision of reality which is far from the truth. Shooting people dead and blowing buildings up are made to seem like routine everyday incidents in several of those shows. If I were a parent, I'd like to screen this crap from my children until they are old enough to realize it for what it's worth.