which is why i'm still a misogynist.. and not out of ignorance, but out of knowledge.. full knowledge of exactly how much society reverse-discriminates against men today.
I'm a "reactionary misogynist".. in reaction against things like: *mandatory asset forfeiture laws *sexual harassment laws which make hitting on someone a risk of lifetime wage garnishment *the continued whining about 25% less pay for women, but not about 25% higher insurance and other costs for men. *a cultural insistence that women should be working, but men should still be "bread winners" *a cultural insistence that women should have all the rights, but none of the responsibilities.. "we want equal rights, equal pay, etc. etc... but we still want YOU footing the bill for the dates, and forfeiting half your assets in a divorce"
The wealthy do use social services, or do you think:
the military and police are there to keep the nasty rotten hordes from sacking the ghettos?
the national highway services are maintained so joe average can drive his SUV? or maybe it has something to do with how vast swaths of major businesses depend on trucks which require a well maintained interstate system.
Then there's that whole "internet" thing, which was born of a very long gestation period in the womb of public funding/public grants
the list goes on and on.
and no, they don't do it themselves, at least not the way the government does it. For instance, a recent documentary on new orleans talks about how, before the government stepped in, the city's sea walls were built by the local plantation owners, whose designs were still in place when the government took over. Guess how well those worked out in katrina.
No, credit reports exist to help lenders decide how much of a risk you are. By the time a debt ends up in the hands of the debt collection industry, your credit report is already fucked.
I've had an instance where some stupid hospital screwed up my address, omitting a number. I never received a single bill from them and get a debt collection call 2 years later. I ask for a written bill (otherwise this "claimed" collection agency could just be a fraudster) and guess which non-existant address it gets sent to. Finally, 5 years later, the thing gets sorted out.
I'm sorry, but "guilty until proven innocent" is not an adequate system. Credit bureaus should be shut down by federal order and replaced with a system which gives truly equal arbitration, perhaps under the oversight of the judicial branch.
That's certainly not true; there is recourse for erroneous information on your credit report. You can argue that it isn't good enough, or it is too cumbersome, but it isn't "no recourse".
I forgot where I heard it, but it was a reputable news source.
Some woman had her name mistaken for someone else's. She got sacked with the crappiest credit rating on planet earth out of nowhere, and eventually had to fully litigate it for 5+ years before they finally capitulated and restored her proper score.
And the loss of community has really pushed the anonymity movement. In days of old, you had to have a "relationship" with the people who bought and sold. Somewhere along the way, that was lost in favor of cheaper prices. We have, collectively, started to see the repercussions of this throughout society.
Now, to buy big ticket items, all you need is a fake ID, a Good SS#, and be gone, and nobody seems to care that we've lost the humanity in the process.
The reprocussions are broader than that.
The lack of interpersonal connection has resulted in a cold and much more rigid society.
In the old days (i mean pre-1970), most people didn't need small loans or welfare because people knew each other. When someone was on hard times they "cut them a break", same when they were late or having a bad day.
Now as an employee you have to suppress every hint of emotion and act like an automaton. So much as a a small imperfection can get you terminated. If you dare to add flexibility to the policies you will be terminated as well, which makes it hard for everyday people to conduct their day to day transactions.
In my family it's quite common to send out a relative with a charge card (my grandmother does it to my mother, my mother does to me, etc), and despite affidavits and id provided you cannot use a family member's card.
Great!, now my poor bed ridden grandmother has to be rolled out to some store across town because they refuse to allow for familial proxy?
Isn't that the bigger problem? Instead of spending more and more money to hide this number (or blame companies who lose such data), intelligent people should be asking why this number should be private.
Exactly. I wish the govt would just announce that on January 1, 2009 they will put up a website that publicly reveals everyone's SSN. Banks and other institutions have until then to work out some other means of authentication.
Brilliant Idea..
It occurred to me as i was filling out some employment forms just how many people I find questionable have my SSN as open record, and how many people now have me by the gonads.
"betamax" under your definition is also "judicial activism".
rulings like that are a common function of the judicial system, and if congress finds it objectionable they can specifically address it with legislation.
that would be better than band-aiding a broken system.
credit reports exist to put you at the mercy of the debt collection industry.
The system is perverse, requiring you to go into debt in order to qualify for a mortgage, but providing no recourse when they make mistakes.. even though those mistakes can be as horrific for the victims as false accusations of pedophilia
If you think the current destruction of the middle class is not the result of pure corporate greed you have blinders on. The truth is at least half if not a good 60% of economic hardship is a result of corruption somewhere, from discriminatory disadvantage to high profile corporate intrigue to everyday office politics. I have met very few people who are truly as lazy as the preachy arch-conservatives claim.
As far as welfare is concerned, the current welfare system is well below the poverty line. It doesn't help that bankruptcy protections for everday citizens, especially people who gambled on college, have been gutted, and that major companies don't reward loyalty, and only marginally reward education at this point. (for example: see hardcore engineering vs climbing the ladder straight out of high school, also see: "train your indian replacement or no severance pay")
Part of the failures of the social programs we have today is conservatives, out of personal bias against the poor for the reasons outlined above, in addition to a personal desire to see such programs fail, sabotage them rather than contribute substantive but productive checks to their unnecessary use.
For example: refusing to make good on initial or continued funding by, for example sneakily making sure the initial legislation does not track with inflation.
A good example of a responsible republican input would be to insist that, following proper funding for initial launch, social services be non profits whenever possible (universal healthcare as a self-sustaining, tax-exempt,non-profit,government founded organization rather than a tax-based "social security" organization)
So far as "penalizing" the rich: see the journal article in my sig. The wealthy gain a lot more from most government provided services than the poor, and they can also afford to pay more than the poor without noticeable change in lifestyle. It's possible to tax the rich without imposing outright wealth caps.
And the fundamental difference between a liberal and a conservative is that liberals acknowledge the presence of moral hazard in an economic and social environment.
Thus, they demand government regulation to help check private interests, but also want to keep well short of communism so the private sector can check government interests.
Republicans tend to adopt a much more black and white world view, in which nobody abuses their power, hard work pays off, and therefore anyone who does not have the good things in life or is dissatisfied in any way has done or is doing something wrong.
Because thinking employees add more to a company than human automatons.
Yes they do. But practically no one is interested in actually thinking, so we have to expect them to turn out as automatons until proven otherwise.
Then the message is inconsistent.
Every class and school policy, all the way through college (and my school was top 20) penalized me for independent thought.
The sad thing is this isn't the school's problem. If businesses made it clear through their hiring practices that they don't care about numbers or a cookie-cutter mentality this wouldn't be an issue..
Yet every interview in the professional sector i've attended has had a masked message of "we want a cookie-cutter attitude", and 60-70% of posted jobs to the campus career page set minimum GPA's or demand transcripts.
Keep tying employment to numbers which depend heavily on how well you suck up to an administration and faculty who demand rigidly automated behavior, and don't be surprised when you get... rigidly automated behavior.
...This keeps the money in the local economy, which is good for the government since they then get a cut of it back when the workers are paid, another cut when they spend it, and so on.
You realize of course that this statement can be applied almost universally to undermine the value of any kind of trade. For example, wouldn't it be better if my town harvested its own trees for building the new police station rather than importing lumber from some far away place like Canada? After all, it keeps the jobs and the money local. No, the reason trade is beneficial is it fosters competition, and it allows for specialization, which in turn drives efficiency. Software is no different from any other industry in this regard. Just because it's *possible* for local people to write/modify office software doesn't mean it's a wise course of action. In fact, I shudder to think about every local government hiring/contracting with local software engineers to add this-that-or-the-other feature to a fork of Open Office. The last thing I would want is my local government getting into software development. They struggle to fill potholes for goodness sake.
what a crock!
First off, you don't get much more efficient than ready-made software that's free out of the box, and which-- on this scale where the govt is spending 25 million on MS licenses-- provides a cheaper and more convenient means of implementing any missing or needed features.
A software contract to "tweak" an oss project that comes close would be a one-time fixed expenditure for less money than they spend annually, and maintaining a core team to "maintain" the resulting code would entail minimal cost, assuming the community doesn't pick that up after.
Finally, there's the fundamental assumption at the general level here which is fully out of place. Trade promotes efficiency and specialization in an ideal environment.
In the real world(tm), what free trade does is destroy the middle class of developed nations which have human, labor, and consumer rights laws by severely diminishing the capacity for labor to organize and compelling governments to "compete" for the attention of multinationals.
In the long term it has other deleterious effects, creating a fundamentally unequal playing field in which new startups will never be able to compete on a local level because of economies of scale, save for whichever nation is "lowest" on the wage and labor/human rights totem poles at the time.
I love all the "starry-eyed" conservatives/libertarians who claim FTA's are beneficial in any long-term sense.
and what does modern pop culture teach young women?
That the really desirable men are rich, vapid people toward whom no respect need be conveyed because they "have no emotions". It's perfectly cool of course to prey upon them, cheat on them, and leverage horribly one-sided laws to relieve them of their assets, whether married to them or not (sexual harassment, mandatory asset forfeiture) because, one day millions of years in the past, there were paleoconservatives who went extinct.
If this kind of message is allowed in the mainstream media piped into "apple pie" america 24/7, we have the same problem.
The women's movement has reversed rather than balanced the discrimination issue.
Porn, and the reaction to it among young men teaches young girls and women that if they want that guy to like them that they have to be sexually flirtatious. To the point where there have been studies showing more girls willing to make out with other girls (for attention) as it becomes more likely in our cultural references. Girls are left with the social impression that they are a vagina and giving it up will get them the attention and assurance they seek from male counterparts.
The problem is other studies have shown men are incredibly thick regarding "signals". Additionally, the afore mentioned sexual harassment laws mean women must make the initial advance, because for a man to do so today is risking severe social and financial penalties, potentially for generations.
Think it wouldn't happen, I know of at least 3 guys for whom it has happened. An errant comment about someone's hair and BAM your wages are garnished for the rest of your life!
if you adjust a plaintext file with a different url you can connect to a free server and play it completely free of charge, with minor bugs in the server side code.
with their code wheels and the occasional prompting for "word 4 of paragraph 3 of page 8 of the manual." and whatnot. They were the cheap equivalent of a hardware dongle and while slightly more difficult to duplicate than the 3.5 disks (or CDs) the games came on, in my opinion they gave a great "value added" feel to the experience.
yeah, just like drm provides "value added" to music and movies right?
For the same reasons that Sony took the staple-article doctrine of patent law as a model for its copyright safe-harbor rule, the inducement rule, too, is a sensible one for copyright. We adopt it here, holding that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties
They can claim a difference all they want, but scotus has overturned betamax. There is no clarity anymore, and it has noticeably chilled technical innovation since then.
sorry to say this, but you are a statistical outlier.
I know very few people who ever had that many cd's, even when napster had a majority dialup userbase and cd burners were more expensive than a heart transplant.
However, saying that games should be for free or almost for free is stupid.
people will always pay for convenience, so there will always be a market for software sales.. but..
I believe blizzard is a very stupid company then. No no no.. don't look at those profit sheets! they're in horrible danger and their stockholders should abandon them in droves!
Slashdot Mirror
Because they've outgrown misogyny but not racism?
which is why i'm still a misogynist.. and not out of ignorance, but out of knowledge.. full knowledge of exactly how much society reverse-discriminates against men today.
I'm a "reactionary misogynist".. in reaction against things like: *mandatory asset forfeiture laws
*sexual harassment laws which make hitting on someone a risk of lifetime wage garnishment
*the continued whining about 25% less pay for women, but not about 25% higher insurance and other costs for men.
*a cultural insistence that women should be working, but men should still be "bread winners"
*a cultural insistence that women should have all the rights, but none of the responsibilities.. "we want equal rights, equal pay, etc. etc... but we still want YOU footing the bill for the dates, and forfeiting half your assets in a divorce"
a quote with no link.. I now expect someone on fox news to magically "dig up" this "quote from the million-strong slashdot blog"
maybe ad-hominem, but still true.. at least the two-faced part.
her name showed up as co-sponsor of the induce act.
female + induce act = bitch (at least for anyone technical : P)
The wealthy do use social services, or do you think:
the military and police are there to keep the nasty rotten hordes from sacking the ghettos?
the national highway services are maintained so joe average can drive his SUV? or maybe it has something to do with how vast swaths of major businesses depend on trucks which require a well maintained interstate system.
Then there's that whole "internet" thing, which was born of a very long gestation period in the womb of public funding/public grants
the list goes on and on.
and no, they don't do it themselves, at least not the way the government does it. For instance, a recent documentary on new orleans talks about how, before the government stepped in, the city's sea walls were built by the local plantation owners, whose designs were still in place when the government took over. Guess how well those worked out in katrina.
this is bull. you get sacked with the interest anyway.
it wasn't off topic though.
No, credit reports exist to help lenders decide how much of a risk you are. By the time a debt ends up in the hands of the debt collection industry, your credit report is already fucked.
I've had an instance where some stupid hospital screwed up my address, omitting a number. I never received a single bill from them and get a debt collection call 2 years later. I ask for a written bill (otherwise this "claimed" collection agency could just be a fraudster) and guess which non-existant address it gets sent to. Finally, 5 years later, the thing gets sorted out.
I'm sorry, but "guilty until proven innocent" is not an adequate system. Credit bureaus should be shut down by federal order and replaced with a system which gives truly equal arbitration, perhaps under the oversight of the judicial branch.
That's certainly not true; there is recourse for erroneous information on your credit report. You can argue that it isn't good enough, or it is too cumbersome, but it isn't "no recourse".
I forgot where I heard it, but it was a reputable news source.
Some woman had her name mistaken for someone else's. She got sacked with the crappiest credit rating on planet earth out of nowhere, and eventually had to fully litigate it for 5+ years before they finally capitulated and restored her proper score.
And the loss of community has really pushed the anonymity movement. In days of old, you had to have a "relationship" with the people who bought and sold. Somewhere along the way, that was lost in favor of cheaper prices. We have, collectively, started to see the repercussions of this throughout society.
Now, to buy big ticket items, all you need is a fake ID, a Good SS#, and be gone, and nobody seems to care that we've lost the humanity in the process.
The reprocussions are broader than that.
The lack of interpersonal connection has resulted in a cold and much more rigid society.
In the old days (i mean pre-1970), most people didn't need small loans or welfare because people knew each other. When someone was on hard times they "cut them a break", same when they were late or having a bad day.
Now as an employee you have to suppress every hint of emotion and act like an automaton. So much as a a small imperfection can get you terminated.
If you dare to add flexibility to the policies you will be terminated as well, which makes it hard for everyday people to conduct their day to day transactions.
In my family it's quite common to send out a relative with a charge card (my grandmother does it to my mother, my mother does to me, etc), and despite affidavits and id provided you cannot use a family member's card.
Great!, now my poor bed ridden grandmother has to be rolled out to some store across town because they refuse to allow for familial proxy?
Isn't that the bigger problem? Instead of spending more and more money to hide this number (or blame companies who lose such data), intelligent people should be asking why this number should be private.
Exactly. I wish the govt would just announce that on January 1, 2009 they will put up a website that publicly reveals everyone's SSN. Banks and other institutions have until then to work out some other means of authentication.
Brilliant Idea..
It occurred to me as i was filling out some employment forms just how many people I find questionable have my SSN as open record, and how many people now have me by the gonads.
"betamax" under your definition is also "judicial activism".
rulings like that are a common function of the judicial system, and if congress finds it objectionable they can specifically address it with legislation.
can the states make credit reports illegal?
that would be better than band-aiding a broken system.
credit reports exist to put you at the mercy of the debt collection industry.
The system is perverse, requiring you to go into debt in order to qualify for a mortgage, but providing no recourse when they make mistakes.. even though those mistakes can be as horrific for the victims as false accusations of pedophilia
Please read my entire post before posting.
a lovely misquote to rival "al gore invented the internet" policy.
btw.. way to go in removing the emphasis which indicated i was presenting persuasion to the contrary
If you think the current destruction of the middle class is not the result of pure corporate greed you have blinders on. The truth is at least half if not a good 60% of economic hardship is a result of corruption somewhere, from discriminatory disadvantage to high profile corporate intrigue to everyday office politics. I have met very few people who are truly as lazy as the preachy arch-conservatives claim.
As far as welfare is concerned, the current welfare system is well below the poverty line. It doesn't help that bankruptcy protections for everday citizens, especially people who gambled on college, have been gutted, and that major companies don't reward loyalty, and only marginally reward education at this point. (for example: see hardcore engineering vs climbing the ladder straight out of high school, also see: "train your indian replacement or no severance pay")
Part of the failures of the social programs we have today is conservatives, out of personal bias against the poor for the reasons outlined above, in addition to a personal desire to see such programs fail, sabotage them rather than contribute substantive but productive checks to their unnecessary use.
For example: refusing to make good on initial or continued funding by, for example sneakily making sure the initial legislation does not track with inflation.
A good example of a responsible republican input would be to insist that, following proper funding for initial launch, social services be non profits whenever possible (universal healthcare as a self-sustaining, tax-exempt,non-profit,government founded organization rather than a tax-based "social security" organization)
So far as "penalizing" the rich: see the journal article in my sig. The wealthy gain a lot more from most government provided services than the poor, and they can also afford to pay more than the poor without noticeable change in lifestyle. It's possible to tax the rich without imposing outright wealth caps.
potholes?
And the fundamental difference between a liberal and a conservative is that liberals acknowledge the presence of moral hazard in an economic and social environment.
Thus, they demand government regulation to help check private interests, but also want to keep well short of communism so the private sector can check government interests.
Republicans tend to adopt a much more black and white world view, in which nobody abuses their power, hard work pays off, and therefore anyone who does not have the good things in life or is dissatisfied in any way has done or is doing something wrong.
Because thinking employees add more to a company than human automatons.
Yes they do. But practically no one is interested in actually thinking, so we have to expect them to turn out as automatons until proven otherwise.
Then the message is inconsistent.
Every class and school policy, all the way through college (and my school was top 20) penalized me for independent thought.
The sad thing is this isn't the school's problem. If businesses made it clear through their hiring practices that they don't care about numbers or a cookie-cutter mentality this wouldn't be an issue..
Yet every interview in the professional sector i've attended has had a masked message of "we want a cookie-cutter attitude", and 60-70% of posted jobs to the campus career page set minimum GPA's or demand transcripts.
Keep tying employment to numbers which depend heavily on how well you suck up to an administration and faculty who demand rigidly automated behavior, and don't be surprised when you get... rigidly automated behavior.
You realize of course that this statement can be applied almost universally to undermine the value of any kind of trade. For example, wouldn't it be better if my town harvested its own trees for building the new police station rather than importing lumber from some far away place like Canada? After all, it keeps the jobs and the money local. No, the reason trade is beneficial is it fosters competition, and it allows for specialization, which in turn drives efficiency. Software is no different from any other industry in this regard. Just because it's *possible* for local people to write/modify office software doesn't mean it's a wise course of action. In fact, I shudder to think about every local government hiring/contracting with local software engineers to add this-that-or-the-other feature to a fork of Open Office. The last thing I would want is my local government getting into software development. They struggle to fill potholes for goodness sake.
what a crock!
First off, you don't get much more efficient than ready-made software that's free out of the box, and which-- on this scale where the govt is spending 25 million on MS licenses-- provides a cheaper and more convenient means of implementing any missing or needed features.
A software contract to "tweak" an oss project that comes close would be a one-time fixed expenditure for less money than they spend annually, and maintaining a core team to "maintain" the resulting code would entail minimal cost, assuming the community doesn't pick that up after.
Finally, there's the fundamental assumption at the general level here which is fully out of place. Trade promotes efficiency and specialization in an ideal environment.
In the real world(tm), what free trade does is destroy the middle class of developed nations which have human, labor, and consumer rights laws by severely diminishing the capacity for labor to organize and compelling governments to "compete" for the attention of multinationals.
In the long term it has other deleterious effects, creating a fundamentally unequal playing field in which new startups will never be able to compete on a local level because of economies of scale, save for whichever nation is "lowest" on the wage and labor/human rights totem poles at the time.
I love all the "starry-eyed" conservatives/libertarians who claim FTA's are beneficial in any long-term sense.
"ancient" is a much more severe term in the mac community.
My computer was bought in mid 05, and it still plays HD h.264 streams, and runs wow very well while also playing divx.
Typically macs will provide lightning responsiveness and very good performance all around for upwards of 4 years before starting to show their age.
I don't see how it can be considered "ancient".
I'm a power user, and have not noticed any compelling reason to upgrade from my twin 2.7.
and what does modern pop culture teach young women?
That the really desirable men are rich, vapid people toward whom no respect need be conveyed because they "have no emotions". It's perfectly cool of course to prey upon them, cheat on them, and leverage horribly one-sided laws to relieve them of their assets, whether married to them or not (sexual harassment, mandatory asset forfeiture) because, one day millions of years in the past, there were paleoconservatives who went extinct.
If this kind of message is allowed in the mainstream media piped into "apple pie" america 24/7, we have the same problem.
The women's movement has reversed rather than balanced the discrimination issue.
Porn, and the reaction to it among young men teaches young girls and women that if they want that guy to like them that they have to be sexually flirtatious. To the point where there have been studies showing more girls willing to make out with other girls (for attention) as it becomes more likely in our cultural references. Girls are left with the social impression that they are a vagina and giving it up will get them the attention and assurance they seek from male counterparts.
The problem is other studies have shown men are incredibly thick regarding "signals". Additionally, the afore mentioned sexual harassment laws mean women must make the initial advance, because for a man to do so today is risking severe social and financial penalties, potentially for generations.
Think it wouldn't happen, I know of at least 3 guys for whom it has happened. An errant comment about someone's hair and BAM your wages are garnished for the rest of your life!
i'm sorry but you're wrong.
Go download it, and use the simple instructions wowscape gives to connect to their servers.
the actual software does not "expire", only the account on blizzard's servers.
it's not a demo, it's a fully functional program.
if you adjust a plaintext file with a different url you can connect to a free server and play it completely free of charge, with minor bugs in the server side code.
with their code wheels and the occasional prompting for "word 4 of paragraph 3 of page 8 of the manual." and whatnot. They were the cheap equivalent of a hardware dongle and while slightly more difficult to duplicate than the 3.5 disks (or CDs) the games came on, in my opinion they gave a great "value added" feel to the experience.
yeah, just like drm provides "value added" to music and movies right?
I think your idea of value is rather perverted.
They have apparently overturned it
They can claim a difference all they want, but scotus has overturned betamax. There is no clarity anymore, and it has noticeably chilled technical innovation since then.
sorry to say this, but you are a statistical outlier.
I know very few people who ever had that many cd's, even when napster had a majority dialup userbase and cd burners were more expensive than a heart transplant.
You have to balance that with the owner of the software having some control over their software.
yeah, I do have to balance that, which is why I should have 100% control over my computer.
However, saying that games should be for free or almost for free is stupid.
people will always pay for convenience, so there will always be a market for software sales.. but..
I believe blizzard is a very stupid company then. No no no.. don't look at those profit sheets! they're in horrible danger and their stockholders should abandon them in droves!
how do they stay in business then?