NO IT ISN'T. Auto insurance is a voluntary deal, where you can choose not to drive. I know several people who don't pay a dime for auto insurance since they prefer to walk, or bike, or ride the bus.
Hospitalization insurance is not. You can't simply decide to not be alive.
You can opt out of paying for health insurance, just as realistically as you can opt out of paying for auto insurance.
For instance, you can lower your income to the point where you're exempt from the health insurance mandate. That's about as reasonable as lowering your mobility to the point where you're exempt from the auto insurance mandate.
Or you can move to a better job that provides health insurance for you. That's about as reasonable as moving to a better location where you don't need a car to get around.
the Law that was passed is clear: funding goes for abortions.
However, I absolutely demand that others respect the licensing terms I distribute my materials under, and I respect the licenses chosen by others. Violating that is absolutely inexcusable. It irritates me to no end that the open source community will frequently scream bloody murder over a GPL violation, then turn around and say stuff like this "isn't evil."
If they believe in sharing information, wouldn't you expect them to support licenses like the GPL that promote sharing and oppose proprietary licenses that don't?
Personally, I only care about the GPL as a means to an end: promoting the free exchange and improvement of software. Copyright law takes away the ability to do that, and the GPL gives it back. But it's only necessary, and deserving of respect, to the extent that copyright law is taking that ability away in the first place.
They understood that without a way to protect the intellectual creations, such as books, music, architectural designs, inventions, et al, there would be less motivation for people to spend the time, and energy, to create them.
They thought there would be insufficient motivation. But like many other 18th century beliefs, they were mistaken: don't forget that many of the founders owned slaves, too.
We in the 21st century now know that copyright is not required to motivate people to spend time and energy to produce such content: millions of people do it every day, for free, just because they like to share their creations.
If you could be sued for 5 times your annual salary for every program you send out that had a bug, or COULD HAVE BEEN DONE BETTER code-wise, and you are expected to write 4-8 programs a day (each taking 30 minutes to 3 hours to write) would you start charging more for your services?
Sure - specifically, I'd purchase insurance to cover those payouts, and I'd charge just enough extra to cover the cost of that insurance.
BTW, capitalizing "COULD HAVE BEEN DONE BETTER" doesn't make it true. Do you have a citation for that claim?
Also... if a doctor could amputate the wrong limb or remove the wrong organ, and the compensation you could receive were legally capped to an inadequate amount, wouldn't that make you less likely to seek medical care? Do you have a proposal for reducing doctors' malpractice risk while still ensuring that the victims of malpractice are compensated fairly?
If you RTFA, you would see that they're trying to license for 3% of the wholesale value of the saws. Hardly half.
He said "half of the gross profit", not half the price of the saws.
That might be true too...but hey, if you invented something, you'd want to make money off it too.
Of course. But I wouldn't want to make money off it in this way, by effectively threatening to sue anyone who arranges saw parts in a certain way unless they pay me royalties. I prefer to get paid for doing work, rather than charging rent on work I did 20 years earlier.
I've successfully installed Windows Virtual PC on Windows 7 Home Premium. You have to tell the web site you're using Professional or Ultimate in order to download it, but once you set it up, you can install your own copy of XP and run it just fine. In fact, once you install the Virtual PC integration features in the guest OS, it works just like the "real" XP Mode - floating windows, start menu integration, etc.
That's awfully glib. How do you propose people save up the money to buy a car with cash, if they can't get to work because they don't have transportation? This is America, after all, where public transit is between nonexistent and useless in most cities.
A lot of people considered that to be all sorts of bullshit because Intel uses their VT feature to differentiate product lines; I.E., moderately priced business desktops don't support XP mode.
Moral: if you're looking for something modestly priced, go with AMD processors. Not only are they cheaper, but nearly all the ones you can find today support virtualization.
then with windows vista why didn't MSFT include an XP mode, than ran in it's own self contained section while using the higher security of a modern OS?
Windows 7 Professional/Ultimate includes exactly that. But it's implemented using Virtual PC, which is where this flaw was discovered.
It's a matter of priorities. Do I want to a) fight Windows security and have the apps I want, b) ignore security and have the apps I want, or c) have security, but have to learn some other app, or maybe do without that app.
The whole point of having a computer is to run the programs you want to run. If you're going to have to "do without", you might as well unplug the damn thing (thereby achieving perfect security).
Or maybe they discovered that there is value in having your product/brand visible to people
In some cases, I'm sure that's true. But is there really value in having your product/brand visible to people on the internet?
Think about it. Have spammers made you more likely to buy Viagra, or less likely? Do sexy banner ads make you feel better or worse about the idea of paying for online porn? If you remember X10's massive ad campaign, did it make you more or less likely to buy one of their cameras?
I don't know about you, but when I see an ad online, I almost always associate the advertiser with desperation and sleaze. That doesn't make me want to spend money, now or later. When I see their brand in a store somewhere, I don't think "hey, that brand's familiar, must be good" -- I think "oh god, it's that company from the banner ads, time to leave".
I disagree, while a lot of the claims are absurd, those of us that are hypersensitive still have real issues. I couldn't go to a large electronics store to buy a TV since even the smaller shops with a mere half dozen TVs on display had too many of me to stand. It's a relatively common problem for a subset of people with tinnitus.
Um... you're not describing a hypersensitivity to electronics. You're describing sensitive hearing.
Because they are paid per viewed ad as well as per clicked ad.
In other words, some advertisers have not yet realized that they can pay per click instead of per view? Shouldn't we be encouraging them to get with the times, instead of changing our behavior to suit their inefficient advertising model?
So just by viewing the ads, you are providing Ars with revenue. Alternative; subscribe.
Another alternative: set your ad blocker to load the ads without displaying them.
But [TV advertisers] really have no true idea who sees what ad, and that's why it's a medium based on potential and not provable results. On the Internet everything is 100% trackable and is billed and sold as such.
Yes, now take that one step further - on the internet, you can track clicks, not just views. I don't click on ads, period, so why should Ars or their advertisers care whether or not my browser displays them?
This is usually the same thing on discussions about piracy too - there's always someone pointing out that "duplicating" that content to sell it to you doesn't cost anything. Really? Are we really that dumb?
No, we aren't. You seem to have a selective memory about how these discussions tend to go, though...
That may not cost much, but it's creating it that does and those costs are got back from selling it to people. A lot of times a lot later, with some forms of entertainment even years later.
Yes, someone always makes that point. And then someone else points out that selling copies is not the only way to get paid for creating content -- in fact, it's a pretty poor way, considering that the fundamental nature of the medium makes it impossible to prevent others from distributing their own copies.
Likewise, selling ads isn't the only way to get paid for running a web site. It might even be a pretty poor way, considering that Ars is now having to beg their readers to pay more attention to the ads.
If people don't want to look at advertisements, that's something sites like Ars will have to deal with. Maybe they should sell subscriptions instead.
"Hello voice subscriber what. Hey if you few questions for you. They can feel me 6 like a year like 2 years ago to like forever. Go you came over and I was locked out of the password didnt know the password so much and we wanted. Anybody passed it. I don't know how you guys have a good i just took it out for the first time in years and it says your class is expired. I must be changed and I go to that the windows X P professional you went and dollar dishing whatever it is really old addition, windows 85,001 yet and it's give me a change. Faster screen and says, administrative, which is still around. Funny has got hold us for new password. I confirm you got through. I've any idea what the password again, 30, or if you're more than the who knows no idea what it would've been so if you tell me but sister for you know the next week, otherwise, I was gonna go out to confirm for some a long time, so if you should come pick the and a case."
Funny I would have thought that [California is bankrupt] because California and Californians basically pay the federal government a shitload more money than they get back in benefits.
I thought it was because the law in California requires a super-majority vote to increase taxes, and the Republicans control enough votes to prevent any tax increases from passing, but at the same time they don't want to cut popular spending programs.
There's no accident that all the states that have similar problems to California (e.g. pay more in federal taxes than they get back) are all states where the per capita income is in the top 10 of the 50 states.
You make it sound so sinister! The states that pay the most in federal taxes are, obviously, the ones with the most economic activity. That's not a Robin Hood plot, it's just how taxes work.
The only real way around this is to either run a local authentication server (difficult if you use asymmetric keys)
It's not that difficult: if you patch the game to disable the encryption, you don't need to crack the key, you can write an authentication/saved-game server that speaks plaintext. The patched game wouldn't be compatible with the official server, but that's not much of a problem.
By now it's clear that you have no interest or understanding of any application of digital text other than what you've encountered in your own limited experience, and that you lack the technical knowledge to evaluate or discuss the workings of any font rendering algorithm.
Between your ignorance, your accusations, your nonsensical demands (don't use a bitmap image to demonstrate the renderer's output), and your elitist insistence that you are the sole arbiter of what a font renderer is supposed to aim for as well as how a person is supposed to edit documents (always zooming in rather than reading text at small sizes; choosing a print font based on what looks good on screen, rather than using software that makes their preferred print font legible on screen), I see no reason to continue this discussion. Have a nice day.
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NO IT ISN'T. Auto insurance is a voluntary deal, where you can choose not to drive. I know several people who don't pay a dime for auto insurance since they prefer to walk, or bike, or ride the bus.
Hospitalization insurance is not. You can't simply decide to not be alive.
You can opt out of paying for health insurance, just as realistically as you can opt out of paying for auto insurance.
For instance, you can lower your income to the point where you're exempt from the health insurance mandate. That's about as reasonable as lowering your mobility to the point where you're exempt from the auto insurance mandate.
Or you can move to a better job that provides health insurance for you. That's about as reasonable as moving to a better location where you don't need a car to get around.
the Law that was passed is clear: funding goes for abortions.
Citation needed.
However, I absolutely demand that others respect the licensing terms I distribute my materials under, and I respect the licenses chosen by others. Violating that is absolutely inexcusable. It irritates me to no end that the open source community will frequently scream bloody murder over a GPL violation, then turn around and say stuff like this "isn't evil."
If they believe in sharing information, wouldn't you expect them to support licenses like the GPL that promote sharing and oppose proprietary licenses that don't?
Personally, I only care about the GPL as a means to an end: promoting the free exchange and improvement of software. Copyright law takes away the ability to do that, and the GPL gives it back. But it's only necessary, and deserving of respect, to the extent that copyright law is taking that ability away in the first place.
What free speech [rights] of yours are being abridged?
Copyright makes it illegal to say certain things without a third party's permission. That's a restriction on speech.
Am I abridging your right to free speech if I take you to court for incorporating my software into a commercial product without following the license?
Yes. If the government stops him from sharing information that you don't want him to share, then of course his freedom of speech is abridged.
They understood that without a way to protect the intellectual creations, such as books, music, architectural designs, inventions, et al, there would be less motivation for people to spend the time, and energy, to create them.
They thought there would be insufficient motivation. But like many other 18th century beliefs, they were mistaken: don't forget that many of the founders owned slaves, too.
We in the 21st century now know that copyright is not required to motivate people to spend time and energy to produce such content: millions of people do it every day, for free, just because they like to share their creations.
If you could be sued for 5 times your annual salary for every program you send out that had a bug, or COULD HAVE BEEN DONE BETTER code-wise, and you are expected to write 4-8 programs a day (each taking 30 minutes to 3 hours to write) would you start charging more for your services?
Sure - specifically, I'd purchase insurance to cover those payouts, and I'd charge just enough extra to cover the cost of that insurance.
BTW, capitalizing "COULD HAVE BEEN DONE BETTER" doesn't make it true. Do you have a citation for that claim?
Also... if a doctor could amputate the wrong limb or remove the wrong organ, and the compensation you could receive were legally capped to an inadequate amount, wouldn't that make you less likely to seek medical care? Do you have a proposal for reducing doctors' malpractice risk while still ensuring that the victims of malpractice are compensated fairly?
Malpractice is one enormous CAUSE of the high price of healthcare in the US.
That's a myth.
If you RTFA, you would see that they're trying to license for 3% of the wholesale value of the saws. Hardly half.
He said "half of the gross profit", not half the price of the saws.
That might be true too...but hey, if you invented something, you'd want to make money off it too.
Of course. But I wouldn't want to make money off it in this way, by effectively threatening to sue anyone who arranges saw parts in a certain way unless they pay me royalties. I prefer to get paid for doing work, rather than charging rent on work I did 20 years earlier.
I've successfully installed Windows Virtual PC on Windows 7 Home Premium. You have to tell the web site you're using Professional or Ultimate in order to download it, but once you set it up, you can install your own copy of XP and run it just fine. In fact, once you install the Virtual PC integration features in the guest OS, it works just like the "real" XP Mode - floating windows, start menu integration, etc.
Here's a laptop with 2 GB and 2.2 GHz for $329.
That's awfully glib. How do you propose people save up the money to buy a car with cash, if they can't get to work because they don't have transportation? This is America, after all, where public transit is between nonexistent and useless in most cities.
A lot of people considered that to be all sorts of bullshit because Intel uses their VT feature to differentiate product lines; I.E., moderately priced business desktops don't support XP mode.
Moral: if you're looking for something modestly priced, go with AMD processors. Not only are they cheaper, but nearly all the ones you can find today support virtualization.
then with windows vista why didn't MSFT include an XP mode, than ran in it's own self contained section while using the higher security of a modern OS?
Windows 7 Professional/Ultimate includes exactly that. But it's implemented using Virtual PC, which is where this flaw was discovered.
It's a matter of priorities. Do I want to a) fight Windows security and have the apps I want, b) ignore security and have the apps I want, or c) have security, but have to learn some other app, or maybe do without that app.
The whole point of having a computer is to run the programs you want to run. If you're going to have to "do without", you might as well unplug the damn thing (thereby achieving perfect security).
Or maybe they discovered that there is value in having your product/brand visible to people
In some cases, I'm sure that's true. But is there really value in having your product/brand visible to people on the internet?
Think about it. Have spammers made you more likely to buy Viagra, or less likely? Do sexy banner ads make you feel better or worse about the idea of paying for online porn? If you remember X10's massive ad campaign, did it make you more or less likely to buy one of their cameras?
I don't know about you, but when I see an ad online, I almost always associate the advertiser with desperation and sleaze. That doesn't make me want to spend money, now or later. When I see their brand in a store somewhere, I don't think "hey, that brand's familiar, must be good" -- I think "oh god, it's that company from the banner ads, time to leave".
I disagree, while a lot of the claims are absurd, those of us that are hypersensitive still have real issues. I couldn't go to a large electronics store to buy a TV since even the smaller shops with a mere half dozen TVs on display had too many of me to stand. It's a relatively common problem for a subset of people with tinnitus.
Um... you're not describing a hypersensitivity to electronics. You're describing sensitive hearing.
Because they are paid per viewed ad as well as per clicked ad.
In other words, some advertisers have not yet realized that they can pay per click instead of per view? Shouldn't we be encouraging them to get with the times, instead of changing our behavior to suit their inefficient advertising model?
So just by viewing the ads, you are providing Ars with revenue. Alternative; subscribe.
Another alternative: set your ad blocker to load the ads without displaying them.
But [TV advertisers] really have no true idea who sees what ad, and that's why it's a medium based on potential and not provable results. On the Internet everything is 100% trackable and is billed and sold as such.
Yes, now take that one step further - on the internet, you can track clicks, not just views. I don't click on ads, period, so why should Ars or their advertisers care whether or not my browser displays them?
This is usually the same thing on discussions about piracy too - there's always someone pointing out that "duplicating" that content to sell it to you doesn't cost anything. Really? Are we really that dumb?
No, we aren't. You seem to have a selective memory about how these discussions tend to go, though...
That may not cost much, but it's creating it that does and those costs are got back from selling it to people. A lot of times a lot later, with some forms of entertainment even years later.
Yes, someone always makes that point. And then someone else points out that selling copies is not the only way to get paid for creating content -- in fact, it's a pretty poor way, considering that the fundamental nature of the medium makes it impossible to prevent others from distributing their own copies.
Likewise, selling ads isn't the only way to get paid for running a web site. It might even be a pretty poor way, considering that Ars is now having to beg their readers to pay more attention to the ads.
If people don't want to look at advertisements, that's something sites like Ars will have to deal with. Maybe they should sell subscriptions instead.
My funniest one:
"Hello voice subscriber what. Hey if you few questions for you. They can feel me 6 like a year like 2 years ago to like forever. Go you came over and I was locked out of the password didnt know the password so much and we wanted. Anybody passed it. I don't know how you guys have a good i just took it out for the first time in years and it says your class is expired. I must be changed and I go to that the windows X P professional you went and dollar dishing whatever it is really old addition, windows 85,001 yet and it's give me a change. Faster screen and says, administrative, which is still around. Funny has got hold us for new password. I confirm you got through. I've any idea what the password again, 30, or if you're more than the who knows no idea what it would've been so if you tell me but sister for you know the next week, otherwise, I was gonna go out to confirm for some a long time, so if you should come pick the and a case."
Talk about advanced! Back in my day, we had to pay engineers to generate technology for us!
Funny I would have thought that [California is bankrupt] because California and Californians basically pay the federal government a shitload more money than they get back in benefits.
I thought it was because the law in California requires a super-majority vote to increase taxes, and the Republicans control enough votes to prevent any tax increases from passing, but at the same time they don't want to cut popular spending programs.
There's no accident that all the states that have similar problems to California (e.g. pay more in federal taxes than they get back) are all states where the per capita income is in the top 10 of the 50 states.
You make it sound so sinister! The states that pay the most in federal taxes are, obviously, the ones with the most economic activity. That's not a Robin Hood plot, it's just how taxes work.
The only real way around this is to either run a local authentication server (difficult if you use asymmetric keys)
It's not that difficult: if you patch the game to disable the encryption, you don't need to crack the key, you can write an authentication/saved-game server that speaks plaintext. The patched game wouldn't be compatible with the official server, but that's not much of a problem.
At least Flash is multiplatform and works on my Android phone.
That's nice for you, but it still doesn't work on most Android phones.
By now it's clear that you have no interest or understanding of any application of digital text other than what you've encountered in your own limited experience, and that you lack the technical knowledge to evaluate or discuss the workings of any font rendering algorithm.
Between your ignorance, your accusations, your nonsensical demands (don't use a bitmap image to demonstrate the renderer's output), and your elitist insistence that you are the sole arbiter of what a font renderer is supposed to aim for as well as how a person is supposed to edit documents (always zooming in rather than reading text at small sizes; choosing a print font based on what looks good on screen, rather than using software that makes their preferred print font legible on screen), I see no reason to continue this discussion. Have a nice day.