I mean, I think that you *are* entitled to not have the transplants. Oh, bah. You're entitled to get what you want. Bad wording as a result of a sentence revision.:-)
I refuse anonymous donations of anything going into my body. This also includes bio-engineered body parts like pig and mouse freakshow parts. No animal parts, no thanks.
Why not? I mean, I can understand, say, if you didn't like immunosuppressants. But as for disgusting...I mean, it's just flesh. When the industry grows a turkey-in-a-box with legs that can't support itself and you eat it, your body converts that into your new flesh.
I don't think that you're entitled to not have the transplants if you don't want them, but it just seems kind of weird. I can't imagine choosing death over having a body that couldn't have been created a hundred years ago.
There's always demand for low-pay human labor, if for nothing else, as a luxury.
Now, some people may not find it *appealing* to be a servant, but if the prices fall low enough, it's a safe bet that the rich will find some way to buy said luxuries, and the econonmy will continue to function.
This is a particularly vicious slur, given the history of antisemitic blood libels [CC] against the Jews.
[shrug] Most of the griping I hear about Jewish nastiness is claims of power-brokering, which certainly is the case WRT our support of Israel.
That being said, I have a couple of not-insanely-wealthy Jewish friends, and none of *them* have ever set up illegal arms deals or anything.:-)
I think the griping is less to do with Jews as a religion or culture, and more as shorthand for "rich and powerful", since you have a strong Jewish banking industry and a group of people that are wealthy and powerful and also happen to be Jewish. I'm sure that xenophobia ties into it in some parts of the world.
In the US, the kind of unhappiness with people like Cheney would probably translate to unhappiness with Jews in some other parts of the world. [shrug]
It makes you wonder what would happen to George Washington if he was attempting to break the colonies from Britain today.
He'd probably be imprisoned for life rather than hung (as he would have been then).
The problem is not legalities once society reaches a breaking point and is in revolution. At that point, things have already gone to hell. The problem is ensuring that the way is kept open and smooth to *reach* that point, so that the threat keeps a few powerful people from influencing the government over mass unhappyiness with what is going on. Protecting free speech to allow political criticism and rallying cries, as well as gun ownership is what is important. The idea is that if enough people are upset, the transition from legal protest to illegal revolution is essentially not stoppable. Thus, unrest poses a significant threat.
Of course, the Alien and Sedition Acts ignored this, so the mechanism can be defeated. However, it means that an administration that wants to impose a dictatorship has only four years to do so; the next election, they will be smacked down.
Now is it right for me to say that my linux computers are more secure just because they are running linux? No, that's stupid.
It's not that Linux is secure. It's that Windows is *insecure*.
Microsoft had a long period (perhaps over?) where they introduced *horribly* insecure designs -- making decisions that completely ignored security in the name of any shred of functionality that they might gain. (And those designs still affect us today.) Double-click execution of executables in email, using their full-blown web browser to view emails (which escallated any security hole in a web browser into a worm-class bug), default of no Administrator password on NT, default share all drives (but make them "invisible" to other Windows machines), design a windowing API that essentially makes local security on a computer impossible, have a system where each file has many names (which makes it damned difficult to write a secure server), encourage people to use threads (because their OS lacked copy-on-write), omit the ability to create chroot jails from their OS, run all kinds of servers by default (remember Messenger Service and the spam that you *knew* was going to happen?) allowing IP-baed access and then proceed to blame sysadmins for not firewalling Windows boxes because Win machines weren't usable out of box on the Internet, bundle telnet but not ssh, and so forth.
Hmm...other goodies. POSIX places hard bounds on what calls do. Microsoft provides MSDN, which provides some examples and no guarantees. It's a tutorial, not a spec. Writing secure software when you don't have guarantees on *exactly* what a call can do or will do in future revisions of the OS is damned impossible. Because Windows isn't a very usable multi-user machine, software authors essentially ignored local security for years -- most Windows software can be attacked every way to Sunday locally (though I'll grant that this wasn't directly MS's fault). There are local security vulnerabilities in Unix software as well, but people actually *care* about them and fix them if they can find them, and don't just introduce them without a care in the world.
Secure software is correct software, and because Windows tries to guarantee binary compatibility and there is only one Windows, developers don't often look up the spec (when I code serious software under Linux, I have the C99 spec in one window and the POSIX spec in the other). It's just a matter of "well, I've passed in this invalid value and it seems to work, and it'll probably keep going". That drives me nuts. Try saying that on comp.unix.programmer, and you'll discover a higher standard.
And MS is still doing it. Okay,.NET does solve buffer overruns (unless you make any calls into Win32 or other C code, which Microsoft makes unnecessarily difficult to do correctly), but it pushes threads even harder. Secure software has to be correct, and threaded correct software is an oxymoron. Now you've got race conditions. The only race condition I usually have to worry about in a typical Unix software package is use of tmpnam() (and every time anyone compiles a piece of software, they get warned about it).
Now, Microsoft provides lots of security *administration* tools. They provide a sophisticated (I'd even argue overcomplicated -- in the vein of VMS, the problem is not a lack of controls, but in users not understanding the system fully) ACL system. The rules for what exactly happens with permissions when copying files around are bonkers. Sure, most users don't care, but if you're trying to write a system that doesn't have security holes, it's a royal pain in the ass. If it takes a ton of work to figure out and write something properly, developers will just stuff a maximally-permissive ACL on something -- under Unix, you have exactly 12 bits and an owner and group to worry about, and there's the extent of your permission system.
But the problem isn't a lack of frontends and tools. It's the coding and design practices, and that's just ha
You know, I always thought that 1984 and similar books would be sufficient to discourage ubiquitious government monitoring.
I guess I was wrong.
I remember the police chief in Houston just a couple days ago putting monitoring cameras up all over and saying "If you don't have anything to hide, then you don't have anything to worry about." Quote from 1984, but simply used in the opposite direction.
Of course, Britain already *has* cameras all over, so I guess tracking is just the next logical extension. They're just starting on their own post-September 11th style reduction in civil liberties.
I guess that the problem is that it's hard to stuff complex ideas into a pop movie, so today's media lacks much beyond very simple political criticism.
Or *maybe* it's because Chinese law and social norms state that the Chinese government gets to censor. US law and social norms state that the current administration doesn't get to demand data of random companies (without criminal investigation or other justification) to push their partisian issues.
1) Much of Google's assets are their search data.
2) Google has a reputation to protect. If they don't draw a line in handing over data, people cannot trust that their searches are private. If I can go use a search engine based on Sealand instead of Google because that one is private because it doesn't fall under US law, then obviously I'm going to use that. Google is protecting their customer.
Man, you Google-haters *love* to try to use the "but teh chinks is evil!" argument.
I'm reminded by Ashcroft (Bush's last Attorney General -- remember him?) covering up the statue "The Spirit of Justice" with curtains so that its one bare breast would be hidden.
I thought that that was rather nicely symbolic.
I rather figured at that point that things were probably going to keep going downhill.
I like to consider the implications of that.
It means that the British (who have *toplessness* on their television) are all hopeless perverts. Cultured? Certainly not. At least, they certainly don't give a damn about their children. In the eyes of the Bush Administration, that is.
The British *invented* Victorianism and decided that it was a bad idea long ago, and moved on. We still haven't figured it out. I'm reminded of the Imperial unit system.
We invaded Afghanistan, and encouraged women to throw off their burkas afterwards. We freed them from their social norms and gave them ours, because ours are clearly best.
One of my current co-workers used to work there and told me they sell the excess or unsuitable blood to comsetic companies for use in protein shampoos and such.
I'm guessing, but I very strongly doubt it, for two reasons:
(a) Anything extracted from a human is a potential biohazard. It would be really dumb to deal with all the extra red tape and limited supply of human blood (because there won't be a consistent oversupply) to your shampoos when you could just use something like pig blood.
(b) I remember seeing a "Pantene Pro-V" commercial which showed 3d-rendered pills flowing into someone's hair as the narrator talked about healthy hair. Your hair is dead. I assure you, vitamins and minerals and protein and whatnot are not going to improve its health any more than spreading a little lemon juice over the corpse of your Uncle Edward is going to bring him back to life. If you were taking vitamin *pills* to try to help out the hair follicules, that might be a different story. If some shampoo company wants to laud the imaginary wonders of dumping nutrients on your hair, they probably aren't going to go to any more effort than they absolutely have to -- they're going to get some sort of industrial byproduct that contains protein (like plant husks or seeds or something).
It must be quite a liberating feeling living as you do, unencumbered by actual facts or knowledge.
You *do* realize that we're talking about *porn thumnails* here? Is society so fragile that it will crumble if someone displays a tiny preview of the porn on your site?
And you don't think that the benefits of having a vast index of all the image content on the Web makes that tradeoff worthwhile? I'm amazed, I really am.
To those of us who live in the real world and know a bit about basic economics, we can show you unequivocally and without question, and beyond any reasonable doubt whatsoever, that history has shown us time and time and time and time and time again (so much so that you are basically arguing the intellectual property version of creationism while I'm duly reciting the basic tenets of evolution here)
Oh, nice. Slip creationism in. How about you also call him a Nazi?...that countries with relatively stronger IP systems, including the US and Western Europe, have historically created more intellectual property and have made more progress advancing the "useful arts" than those that don't. Does this apply to Christina Aguilera and Mickey Mouse?
Except up until recently, our IP systems were a lot weaker than they are today. You couldn't patent algorithms, and copyright was far shorter.
Or maybe you refer to the last few decades, when the *rest* of the wealthy world had been clobbered by (a) worldwide war and (b) revolution? Your example comes down to "The United States is rich, and recently they extended the reach of IP, so IP must be good."
Sure. But it also applies to pharmeceutical development, industrial production methods, and other things that adults concern themselves with while you're off in your bouts of postmodernist "deep thought" in between counterstrike sessions.
Well, I've never played a game of CounterStrike in my life, I'm certainly an adult, and I would strongly favor a returning of IP to its original status -- no software patents, and 14+14 year copyrights.
I'd argue that you may just not be comfortable with such an idea, because it's different, opposes a lot of things that you've gotten comfortable with and been taught.
Big deal. Media costs are not where your money is going.
Plus having a much higher chance of all your data being destroyed suddenly.
That's ridiculous. I remember everyone trumpeting CD-RW as the optical media that would outlast all the hard drives and be great for backing up. I've seen a whole lot more CD-RW discs go belly-up than hard drives, and do so a lot quicker.
Netflix isn't going to ship you hard drives.
But companies can stream me data.
How fast does it take Netflix to send me a physical movie? (I don't use them, so I don't know.) I'm going to assume a day.
How long does it take for them to transfer a movie? Well, my home connection can pull down a megabyte every two or three seconds. Dunno how large the stuff you're talking about is, but that's about a GB an hour.
You can't loan/sell individual movies to friends
There isn't actually anything stopping you from doing so.
Trivially easy to destroy via heat, electricity, magnets, G-forces, etc.
When was the last time you destroyed a hard drive from a magnet? And exactly the same thing affects optical media, plus it's easy to scratch.
Basically, the only benefit of optical media is that it's easier for a retailer to treat it as a traditional product -- you can shove it in a box and put it on a shelf.
Sony also tried locking people into a proprietary format with MiniDisc (not a total failure, but didn't do too well) and UMD (the thing on the PSP -- crashing and burning as we speak).
Sony spends huge amounts of effort trying to control the dominant media distribution format at any one time.
That's what the MebiByte fuckers did with hard drive space, and we all know how much I hate them.
Uh, no. The *hard drive* manufacturers started using decimal units (which, while obviously unintuitive and irritating and profitable for them, does at least make SI sense).
Other people who wanted some degree of consistency (and not two different types of "MB"), pushed for the use of "MiB".
You want to blame someone, blame Seagate, not the IEEE.
OSS excels at providing "core systems" that many people want to use to build their own systems on top of. Everyone contributes a little to the core system (so everyone wins there) and then puts the rest of their work into application-specific stuff.
Some of law isn't that bad -- it's common sense. I can't rattle off the exact set of laws delineating what constitutes murder, but I know that if I don't kill anyone, I'm probably going to be okay.
This doesn't apply to some large (and important) chunks of law, like tax law. However, it does help.
Sometimes, however, there are things that are counterintitive, and in civil law, things are less clear (which affects trademarks, copyright, employment contracts, etc).
For example, "Suppose V is drowning. D, an Olympic swimmer (and, coincidently, trained in lifeguard techniques), is standing on the side of the pool, and could easily rescue V. However, D hates V and chooses not to do so. Instead, he stands and points, laughing at V, as V dies. Is V legally liable?" And, if V is just an ordinary bystander, he may be an asshole, but he's not a criminal -- what he did is perfectly legal.
On the other hand, if D yells "I'll get him", then hops in the pool, decides that he doesn't actually want to do so, and then jumps back out, he probably *is* liable.
This sort of situation will come up where there's no time to refer to a lawbook, so you don't have the excuse of being able to look up anything.
The worst is when we have laws that are the result of politics. These usually are worthless and add complexity without benefit.
For example, US criminal code can be found under Title 18.
Now, some of these are probably necessary. Arson, okay. Assault, okay. Why do we need a "Biological Weapons" section and a "Chemical Weapons" section? Why can't we just have a "Weapons" section? Why do we need a "Criminal Street Gangs" section? Why do we need a "Genocide" section? How about "Partial Birth Abortions"? Why does "Sexual Exploitation and Other Abuse of Children" have a completely unrelated "Misleading domain names on the Internet" section beneath it? Why is there a "Terrorism" section -- surely, bombing people is already illegal?
All of these things pop up because some group decided to lobby for it, it became a hot topic in the media, and we decided to add a "fix".
Oh, and why do half these laws exploit the Interstate Commerce clause that was never, ever intended to let Congress do anything other than ensure free trade between the states? It's a federal crime to transport someone between states for illegal prostitution (Ch 117, S2421). How about we just let the *state* in which the prostitution is illegal do the charging, mmmkay? To do otherwise is nothing other than a power grab.
Of course, it can't be as simple as just simplying the tax laws -- every industry has their own favorite exemption or quirk that they've been lobbying for -- but boy, would it be nice if the tax laws were uber-simple. Something like "plug in total assets and total change in assets since last year, and find tax".
A friend pointed out today that if the typical American worker wastes a single day on taxes, that's hundreds of thousands of man-years wasted every year.
Just once, just *once*, just for the *sheer novelty*, I'd like to see an actual streaming video website that's nice and usable in Firefox in Linux.
Inexplicably, websites with streaming video also seem to be the ones that are badly-tested IE-specific "applications" with masses of Javascript and everything else you can think of, instead of just websites with a "video" link. They're making money off ads here. What possible benefit can it be to them to make it miserable for everyone else?
The only think I can think of is that the people who get hired to do streaming video must be the same crowd that is convinced that websites need to be "media-rich" and either be a single big Flash applet or pop up four windows running various clever scripts that they didn't bother to test anywhere but IE and playing sounds.
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I mean, I think that you *are* entitled to not have the transplants. Oh, bah. You're entitled to get what you want. Bad wording as a result of a sentence revision. :-)
I refuse anonymous donations of anything going into my body. This also includes bio-engineered body parts like pig and mouse freakshow parts. No animal parts, no thanks.
Why not? I mean, I can understand, say, if you didn't like immunosuppressants. But as for disgusting...I mean, it's just flesh. When the industry grows a turkey-in-a-box with legs that can't support itself and you eat it, your body converts that into your new flesh.
I don't think that you're entitled to not have the transplants if you don't want them, but it just seems kind of weird. I can't imagine choosing death over having a body that couldn't have been created a hundred years ago.
There's always demand for low-pay human labor, if for nothing else, as a luxury.
Now, some people may not find it *appealing* to be a servant, but if the prices fall low enough, it's a safe bet that the rich will find some way to buy said luxuries, and the econonmy will continue to function.
This is a particularly vicious slur, given the history of antisemitic blood libels [CC] against the Jews.
:-)
[shrug] Most of the griping I hear about Jewish nastiness is claims of power-brokering, which certainly is the case WRT our support of Israel.
That being said, I have a couple of not-insanely-wealthy Jewish friends, and none of *them* have ever set up illegal arms deals or anything.
I think the griping is less to do with Jews as a religion or culture, and more as shorthand for "rich and powerful", since you have a strong Jewish banking industry and a group of people that are wealthy and powerful and also happen to be Jewish. I'm sure that xenophobia ties into it in some parts of the world.
In the US, the kind of unhappiness with people like Cheney would probably translate to unhappiness with Jews in some other parts of the world. [shrug]
It makes you wonder what would happen to George Washington if he was attempting to break the colonies from Britain today.
He'd probably be imprisoned for life rather than hung (as he would have been then).
The problem is not legalities once society reaches a breaking point and is in revolution. At that point, things have already gone to hell. The problem is ensuring that the way is kept open and smooth to *reach* that point, so that the threat keeps a few powerful people from influencing the government over mass unhappyiness with what is going on. Protecting free speech to allow political criticism and rallying cries, as well as gun ownership is what is important. The idea is that if enough people are upset, the transition from legal protest to illegal revolution is essentially not stoppable. Thus, unrest poses a significant threat.
Of course, the Alien and Sedition Acts ignored this, so the mechanism can be defeated. However, it means that an administration that wants to impose a dictatorship has only four years to do so; the next election, they will be smacked down.
at worst, it could be considered felony vote tampering.
I don't think that you can be convicted of misdemeanor vote tampering.
How long do you think that will last?
Once the technology is in place, what exactly prevents policy change? Policy is such a fragile thing...
When everyone is afraid to speak, there will be no dissenting voices.
Now is it right for me to say that my linux computers are more secure just because they are running linux? No, that's stupid.
.NET does solve buffer overruns (unless you make any calls into Win32 or other C code, which Microsoft makes unnecessarily difficult to do correctly), but it pushes threads even harder. Secure software has to be correct, and threaded correct software is an oxymoron. Now you've got race conditions. The only race condition I usually have to worry about in a typical Unix software package is use of tmpnam() (and every time anyone compiles a piece of software, they get warned about it).
It's not that Linux is secure. It's that Windows is *insecure*.
Microsoft had a long period (perhaps over?) where they introduced *horribly* insecure designs -- making decisions that completely ignored security in the name of any shred of functionality that they might gain. (And those designs still affect us today.) Double-click execution of executables in email, using their full-blown web browser to view emails (which escallated any security hole in a web browser into a worm-class bug), default of no Administrator password on NT, default share all drives (but make them "invisible" to other Windows machines), design a windowing API that essentially makes local security on a computer impossible, have a system where each file has many names (which makes it damned difficult to write a secure server), encourage people to use threads (because their OS lacked copy-on-write), omit the ability to create chroot jails from their OS, run all kinds of servers by default (remember Messenger Service and the spam that you *knew* was going to happen?) allowing IP-baed access and then proceed to blame sysadmins for not firewalling Windows boxes because Win machines weren't usable out of box on the Internet, bundle telnet but not ssh, and so forth.
Hmm...other goodies. POSIX places hard bounds on what calls do. Microsoft provides MSDN, which provides some examples and no guarantees. It's a tutorial, not a spec. Writing secure software when you don't have guarantees on *exactly* what a call can do or will do in future revisions of the OS is damned impossible. Because Windows isn't a very usable multi-user machine, software authors essentially ignored local security for years -- most Windows software can be attacked every way to Sunday locally (though I'll grant that this wasn't directly MS's fault). There are local security vulnerabilities in Unix software as well, but people actually *care* about them and fix them if they can find them, and don't just introduce them without a care in the world.
Secure software is correct software, and because Windows tries to guarantee binary compatibility and there is only one Windows, developers don't often look up the spec (when I code serious software under Linux, I have the C99 spec in one window and the POSIX spec in the other). It's just a matter of "well, I've passed in this invalid value and it seems to work, and it'll probably keep going". That drives me nuts. Try saying that on comp.unix.programmer, and you'll discover a higher standard.
And MS is still doing it. Okay,
Now, Microsoft provides lots of security *administration* tools. They provide a sophisticated (I'd even argue overcomplicated -- in the vein of VMS, the problem is not a lack of controls, but in users not understanding the system fully) ACL system. The rules for what exactly happens with permissions when copying files around are bonkers. Sure, most users don't care, but if you're trying to write a system that doesn't have security holes, it's a royal pain in the ass. If it takes a ton of work to figure out and write something properly, developers will just stuff a maximally-permissive ACL on something -- under Unix, you have exactly 12 bits and an owner and group to worry about, and there's the extent of your permission system.
But the problem isn't a lack of frontends and tools. It's the coding and design practices, and that's just ha
The only capability that needs to provide is the ability of a cell user to obtain such information.
I'm pretty sure that both the phone and the SIM transmit their own unique ID, though I hate cells and don't own one.
You know, I always thought that 1984 and similar books would be sufficient to discourage ubiquitious government monitoring.
I guess I was wrong.
I remember the police chief in Houston just a couple days ago putting monitoring cameras up all over and saying "If you don't have anything to hide, then you don't have anything to worry about." Quote from 1984, but simply used in the opposite direction.
Of course, Britain already *has* cameras all over, so I guess tracking is just the next logical extension. They're just starting on their own post-September 11th style reduction in civil liberties.
I guess that the problem is that it's hard to stuff complex ideas into a pop movie, so today's media lacks much beyond very simple political criticism.
Or *maybe* it's because Chinese law and social norms state that the Chinese government gets to censor. US law and social norms state that the current administration doesn't get to demand data of random companies (without criminal investigation or other justification) to push their partisian issues.
1) Much of Google's assets are their search data.
2) Google has a reputation to protect. If they don't draw a line in handing over data, people cannot trust that their searches are private. If I can go use a search engine based on Sealand instead of Google because that one is private because it doesn't fall under US law, then obviously I'm going to use that. Google is protecting their customer.
Man, you Google-haters *love* to try to use the "but teh chinks is evil!" argument.
I'm reminded by Ashcroft (Bush's last Attorney General -- remember him?) covering up the statue "The Spirit of Justice" with curtains so that its one bare breast would be hidden.
I thought that that was rather nicely symbolic.
I rather figured at that point that things were probably going to keep going downhill.
I like to consider the implications of that.
It means that the British (who have *toplessness* on their television) are all hopeless perverts. Cultured? Certainly not. At least, they certainly don't give a damn about their children. In the eyes of the Bush Administration, that is.
The British *invented* Victorianism and decided that it was a bad idea long ago, and moved on. We still haven't figured it out. I'm reminded of the Imperial unit system.
We invaded Afghanistan, and encouraged women to throw off their burkas afterwards. We freed them from their social norms and gave them ours, because ours are clearly best.
One of my current co-workers used to work there and told me they sell the excess or unsuitable blood to comsetic companies for use in protein shampoos and such.
I'm guessing, but I very strongly doubt it, for two reasons:
(a) Anything extracted from a human is a potential biohazard. It would be really dumb to deal with all the extra red tape and limited supply of human blood (because there won't be a consistent oversupply) to your shampoos when you could just use something like pig blood.
(b) I remember seeing a "Pantene Pro-V" commercial which showed 3d-rendered pills flowing into someone's hair as the narrator talked about healthy hair. Your hair is dead. I assure you, vitamins and minerals and protein and whatnot are not going to improve its health any more than spreading a little lemon juice over the corpse of your Uncle Edward is going to bring him back to life. If you were taking vitamin *pills* to try to help out the hair follicules, that might be a different story. If some shampoo company wants to laud the imaginary wonders of dumping nutrients on your hair, they probably aren't going to go to any more effort than they absolutely have to -- they're going to get some sort of industrial byproduct that contains protein (like plant husks or seeds or something).
It must be quite a liberating feeling living as you do, unencumbered by actual facts or knowledge.
...that countries with relatively stronger IP systems, including the US and Western Europe, have historically created more intellectual property and have made more progress advancing the "useful arts" than those that don't. Does this apply to Christina Aguilera and Mickey Mouse?
You *do* realize that we're talking about *porn thumnails* here? Is society so fragile that it will crumble if someone displays a tiny preview of the porn on your site?
And you don't think that the benefits of having a vast index of all the image content on the Web makes that tradeoff worthwhile? I'm amazed, I really am.
To those of us who live in the real world and know a bit about basic economics, we can show you unequivocally and without question, and beyond any reasonable doubt whatsoever, that history has shown us time and time and time and time and time again (so much so that you are basically arguing the intellectual property version of creationism while I'm duly reciting the basic tenets of evolution here)
Oh, nice. Slip creationism in. How about you also call him a Nazi?
Except up until recently, our IP systems were a lot weaker than they are today. You couldn't patent algorithms, and copyright was far shorter.
Or maybe you refer to the last few decades, when the *rest* of the wealthy world had been clobbered by (a) worldwide war and (b) revolution? Your example comes down to "The United States is rich, and recently they extended the reach of IP, so IP must be good."
Sure. But it also applies to pharmeceutical development, industrial production methods, and other things that adults concern themselves with while you're off in your bouts of postmodernist "deep thought" in between counterstrike sessions.
Well, I've never played a game of CounterStrike in my life, I'm certainly an adult, and I would strongly favor a returning of IP to its original status -- no software patents, and 14+14 year copyrights.
I'd argue that you may just not be comfortable with such an idea, because it's different, opposes a lot of things that you've gotten comfortable with and been taught.
Plus about 2X more expensive per GB.
Big deal. Media costs are not where your money is going.
Plus having a much higher chance of all your data being destroyed suddenly.
That's ridiculous. I remember everyone trumpeting CD-RW as the optical media that would outlast all the hard drives and be great for backing up. I've seen a whole lot more CD-RW discs go belly-up than hard drives, and do so a lot quicker.
Netflix isn't going to ship you hard drives.
But companies can stream me data.
How fast does it take Netflix to send me a physical movie? (I don't use them, so I don't know.) I'm going to assume a day.
How long does it take for them to transfer a movie? Well, my home connection can pull down a megabyte every two or three seconds. Dunno how large the stuff you're talking about is, but that's about a GB an hour.
You can't loan/sell individual movies to friends
There isn't actually anything stopping you from doing so.
Trivially easy to destroy via heat, electricity, magnets, G-forces, etc.
When was the last time you destroyed a hard drive from a magnet? And exactly the same thing affects optical media, plus it's easy to scratch.
Basically, the only benefit of optical media is that it's easier for a retailer to treat it as a traditional product -- you can shove it in a box and put it on a shelf.
You consider using the number "386" *pilfering*?
Oh, yes, and don't forget about Memory Stick.
Sony also tried locking people into a proprietary format with MiniDisc (not a total failure, but didn't do too well) and UMD (the thing on the PSP -- crashing and burning as we speak).
Sony spends huge amounts of effort trying to control the dominant media distribution format at any one time.
That's what the MebiByte fuckers did with hard drive space, and we all know how much I hate them.
Uh, no. The *hard drive* manufacturers started using decimal units (which, while obviously unintuitive and irritating and profitable for them, does at least make SI sense).
Other people who wanted some degree of consistency (and not two different types of "MB"), pushed for the use of "MiB".
You want to blame someone, blame Seagate, not the IEEE.
Good point.
OSS excels at providing "core systems" that many people want to use to build their own systems on top of. Everyone contributes a little to the core system (so everyone wins there) and then puts the rest of their work into application-specific stuff.
Some of law isn't that bad -- it's common sense. I can't rattle off the exact set of laws delineating what constitutes murder, but I know that if I don't kill anyone, I'm probably going to be okay.
This doesn't apply to some large (and important) chunks of law, like tax law. However, it does help.
Sometimes, however, there are things that are counterintitive, and in civil law, things are less clear (which affects trademarks, copyright, employment contracts, etc).
For example, "Suppose V is drowning. D, an Olympic swimmer (and, coincidently, trained in lifeguard techniques), is standing on the side of the pool, and could easily rescue V. However, D hates V and chooses not to do so. Instead, he stands and points, laughing at V, as V dies. Is V legally liable?" And, if V is just an ordinary bystander, he may be an asshole, but he's not a criminal -- what he did is perfectly legal.
On the other hand, if D yells "I'll get him", then hops in the pool, decides that he doesn't actually want to do so, and then jumps back out, he probably *is* liable.
This sort of situation will come up where there's no time to refer to a lawbook, so you don't have the excuse of being able to look up anything.
The worst is when we have laws that are the result of politics. These usually are worthless and add complexity without benefit.
For example, US criminal code can be found under Title 18.
Now, some of these are probably necessary. Arson, okay. Assault, okay. Why do we need a "Biological Weapons" section and a "Chemical Weapons" section? Why can't we just have a "Weapons" section? Why do we need a "Criminal Street Gangs" section? Why do we need a "Genocide" section? How about "Partial Birth Abortions"? Why does "Sexual Exploitation and Other Abuse of Children" have a completely unrelated "Misleading domain names on the Internet" section beneath it? Why is there a "Terrorism" section -- surely, bombing people is already illegal?
All of these things pop up because some group decided to lobby for it, it became a hot topic in the media, and we decided to add a "fix".
Oh, and why do half these laws exploit the Interstate Commerce clause that was never, ever intended to let Congress do anything other than ensure free trade between the states? It's a federal crime to transport someone between states for illegal prostitution (Ch 117, S2421). How about we just let the *state* in which the prostitution is illegal do the charging, mmmkay? To do otherwise is nothing other than a power grab.
Of course, it can't be as simple as just simplying the tax laws -- every industry has their own favorite exemption or quirk that they've been lobbying for -- but boy, would it be nice if the tax laws were uber-simple. Something like "plug in total assets and total change in assets since last year, and find tax".
A friend pointed out today that if the typical American worker wastes a single day on taxes, that's hundreds of thousands of man-years wasted every year.
Just once, just *once*, just for the *sheer novelty*, I'd like to see an actual streaming video website that's nice and usable in Firefox in Linux.
Inexplicably, websites with streaming video also seem to be the ones that are badly-tested IE-specific "applications" with masses of Javascript and everything else you can think of, instead of just websites with a "video" link. They're making money off ads here. What possible benefit can it be to them to make it miserable for everyone else?
The only think I can think of is that the people who get hired to do streaming video must be the same crowd that is convinced that websites need to be "media-rich" and either be a single big Flash applet or pop up four windows running various clever scripts that they didn't bother to test anywhere but IE and playing sounds.