Don't forget that there's more value than just possible cash winnings in buying a lottery ticket: some people find entertainment value in the very act of the gamble. To many people, even if your expected ROI is less than 100%, the difference is made up for by the excitement of the gambling. Now, I don't personally find any entertainment value in that, if there's no element of skill; pure-chance gambling holds virtually no interest to me (very occasionally I do participate, though; when my office puts together a lottery pool, I *do* participate, for exactly one reason: if they DID hit it big, and I was the only one not chipping in, I'd feel like an idiot for the rest of my life, and $1 is quite worth it to eliminate that risk).
The Nigerian scam is just a variation on the Spanish Prisoner scam: help me out with a little bit of money in order to make available a large amount of money which I will give you some fraction of (although the fraction still dwarfs the amount you'll potentially spend). In the Spanish Prisoner, the money is to secure the release of some noble who will reward you; in the Nigerian scam, the money is to secure access to a large bank account from which you will be rewarded.
More to the point, the Spanish Prisoner scam dates back several centuries.:)
User-printed ebooks as you describe would not be close to the overall quality of a bound book. Keep in mind you'd have to bind the book too, and that takes time and energy and money and supplies and space and specific knowledge, much of which most students don't really care to spend.
Plus, most students can't even afford to buy a high-quality color printer right off the bat; books for a quarter at UCLA (when I was there, anyway) weren't anywhere near the $840 initial cost you'd need for your own printer.
And then there's the issue that the whole idea of self-printing is predicated on the existence of textbook-equivalent ebooks (that you can acquire legally, for free) to use as source material for the printing. Which currently don't exist in bulk. So you have to include the cost to the student of writing dozens of ebooks.;)
Don't forget to account for the time investment in setting up and maintaining the printer, buying supplies, the use of all that space, electrical costs, etc.
See, and I've never had a problem with any Maxtor drive I've owned[1]. It seems that one person's experience is not enough to draw statistical conclusions from.
Or, as someone on Slashdot's sig says: "Data" is not the plural of "anecdote".
[1] Actually I've never had trouble with a substantial portion of any manufacturer's hard drives. I've had IBM, Seagate, WD, and Maxtor drives (and maybe some others), and to the best of my knowledge, none of them ever went bad in less than a year, and I didn't have any manufacturer's drives go back more than once.
I've got Ubuntu Dapper Drake on my work machine, still running FF 2 (haven't gotten around to upgrading to 3 yet), and the Flash plugin works fine. I think it causes the browser to crash maybe once every few months, and then it's always 1) when I've had the browser open a long time without restarting, and 2) some complicated, overstuffed SWF gets opened and it just tips things over the edge.
Aside from that (and the wmode thing), I don't really have any trouble with Flash. And lest you think I don't use it enough, I work for a website that has Flash embedded on nearly every page, sometimes multiple times, and we host hundreds of Flash games. So it's not like I'm not loading a lot of Flash.
And it probably will be; but what gets my goat is people acting like this injunction is some sign of How Bad Things Are Getting, or something like that. It's not; it's run-of-the-mill.
No, but Google shouldn't be conducting itself in a manner which local custom and culture say is unacceptable. If Google doesn't like it then they can go elsewhere.
But unless the law forces them to do so, they won't. That's the reason we have laws: because "custom" and "culture" cannot force anyone to do anything. It'd sure be nice if everyone was polite all the time and never did anything wrong or rude or inconsiderate, but it ain't gonna happen (or even get close) without the force of law.
Why not concentrate on their home ground and then, if other nation's decide that it is a good idea - and perhaps there is money to be made - they can invite Google to do the same in their country.
Ah, so any commerce should only be engaged in at the specific request of a government. Why don't you run a country for a few decades with that economic standard and tell me how it works out.
By the way, has Google tried doing this in some parts of Russia yet? There are areas occupied by the 'nouveau riche' where they will be lucky to leave alive.
Do you think Google is stupid enough to send their drivers to places where they're likely to get injured or killed? Having people think you're rude is one thing; having them shoot at you is another.
If you're in the public, you're expected to suck it up. If you don't want your picture taken, you have to stay at home.
I'm reasonably certain there isn't a country on Earth where the common expectation is that anyone taking a picture in public will ask every single person who might end up in the shot if it's okay with them. Go find a picture taken by German, Japanese, whatever country's tourists in Times Square. You think any of them has ever once asked the hundreds of people milling about if it was okay to take a picture?
I agree with you in general, but let's not go overboard.
From what I can tell by looking up prior restraint, it refers to when organs of the government besides courts restrict the publication or distribution of written materials. The courts only do it based on laws created by the legislative branch, and if they decide such laws are unconstitutional, they don't do it. But it's the courts who decide whether it's a constitutional action or not, on a case-by-case basis. If this court was wrong and doesn't reverse itself, a higher court will probably do so.
Prior restraint is pretty much only allowed where national security (not mere "public safety" -- think launch codes, not Pentagon Papers) concerns come into play.
Not according to this. If there's a more authoritative citation, please provide it.
And again, the whole point of the temporary injunction is that it's asked for and granted in a hurry, without taking time to fully consider the case. Mass. probably argued that terrorists or criminals could make use of this information to disrupt Mass. transit (heh) on a large scale.
Exactly which part of the Consitution does this injunction violate? It may not be prima facie clear that this info is protected by the First Amendment, and if it is, only Congress and the Several States are limited by the First Amendment. Courts are not. Now, it's the court's job to interpret the laws written by Congress (and the states), and if the court has made this temporary injunction in accordance with an unconstitutional law, then the court will (in theory) get overturned by a higher court, or may simply rescind the order itself later.
The point of a temporary injunction like this is that the claimant, er, claims that not getting the injunction will cause some kind of irreperable harm, and actions must be taken quickly. Courts are not always in a position to tell whether this is true or not, so they have to make a quick decision based on what the claimaints tell them. It may be obvious to us techies that this information is protected by the First Amendment, but not necessarily to the judge, especially when he's got High-Powered Government Attorneys (tm) telling him it's a matter of public safety that it be restrained.
It's almost certainly an unnecessary injunction, and Massachusetts is seriously in the wrong here, but it's unlikely the judge is doing anything particularly heinous here.
Why? There's a practical problem here -- what's the difference between asking someone to provide an eyewitness account of what happened, and asking (e.g.) a business to provide surveillance tapes of an event? If it would be illegal for them to ask for the second without a warrant, it would also need to be illegal to ask for the first, and so law enforcement would need warrants for every single step of an investigation. I'm the last person on Earth who would ever say that we need to do such-and-such to make law enforcement's life easier, but making it infeasible for them to even perform their most basic investigative functions without a warrant is severe overkill.
Obviously if they request something and the person says no, they have no right to compel that person without a warrant, and that's exactly as it should be. But if cops are investigating a convenience store robbery, and find out there's a tape of the event, why exactly would it be useful to require them to get a warrant just to get the tape, if the store owner is happily willing to give it to them?
You've bought into the new-age feel-good philosophy that's taken America like cancer. All opinions are not equal
"All opinions are not equal" only when discussing situations that have a factual basis. Whether or not SUVs are good for the environment, for example, is not a domain where all opinions are equal (or more precisely, equally valid).
But humor is such a domain, because the only qualification for whether something is humor is if someone finds it funny. Humor is 100% subjective, defined as that which someone finds amusing. I suppose you could say that if there's no one who finds something amusing, then it's objectively not funny, but just because there's no one who currently finds it amusing, does not preclude that someone could find it amusing. (And the inverse is true, of course; even if every person who ever lived found something funny, it does not follow that there cannot be someone who does not find it funny.)
and you must realize that humor itself can be objectively defined to some limited degree.
The limit is this: If someone finds it funny, it's humor to that person. There is no such thing as objective humor, any more than there is any such thing as objective beauty. Even if every person living finds something funny or beautiful, it is still a subjective characteristic.
1. The idea that the platform will be unbreakable depends on the assumption that nobody implementing it ever makes a mistake. Think about how likely that is, when there are literally tens of thousands of people involved.
2. New computer hardware comes out all the time; TCI components will have to be constantly rewritten/re-engineered along with the new motherboards and CPUs and suchlike, thus increasing the chance that there's an exploitable mistake somewhere along the way.
3. There are criminal organizations out there dedicated to breaking DRM and distributing copyrighted material for money; they have a gigantic profit motive. You think they'll just go away because the hardware gets more difficult to crack?
4. We've been hearing for years that TCI is going to destroy us all; I remember reading articles in 2002 or 2003 that Palladium was going to bring chaos and destruction. Are we any closer to this stuff actually happening? I'm not saying we shouldn't fight it anywhere it appears, but assuming it's a done deal because they've proposed an "unbreakable" architecture is silly.
You're like the teenager who's interested in cryptography and learns about one-time pads, and goes around telling everyone how awesome they are and how unbreakable they are, without considering that you have to distribute the pad in the first place, and all it takes is a thug with a gun to break your "unbreakable" encryption. No offense.:)
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Don't forget that there's more value than just possible cash winnings in buying a lottery ticket: some people find entertainment value in the very act of the gamble. To many people, even if your expected ROI is less than 100%, the difference is made up for by the excitement of the gambling. Now, I don't personally find any entertainment value in that, if there's no element of skill; pure-chance gambling holds virtually no interest to me (very occasionally I do participate, though; when my office puts together a lottery pool, I *do* participate, for exactly one reason: if they DID hit it big, and I was the only one not chipping in, I'd feel like an idiot for the rest of my life, and $1 is quite worth it to eliminate that risk).
The Nigerian scam is just a variation on the Spanish Prisoner scam: help me out with a little bit of money in order to make available a large amount of money which I will give you some fraction of (although the fraction still dwarfs the amount you'll potentially spend). In the Spanish Prisoner, the money is to secure the release of some noble who will reward you; in the Nigerian scam, the money is to secure access to a large bank account from which you will be rewarded.
More to the point, the Spanish Prisoner scam dates back several centuries. :)
There hasn't been a live-action comedy that can compete since the show left the air in my opinion, although Scrubs comes close.
Two words: Arrested Development.
User-printed ebooks as you describe would not be close to the overall quality of a bound book. Keep in mind you'd have to bind the book too, and that takes time and energy and money and supplies and space and specific knowledge, much of which most students don't really care to spend.
Plus, most students can't even afford to buy a high-quality color printer right off the bat; books for a quarter at UCLA (when I was there, anyway) weren't anywhere near the $840 initial cost you'd need for your own printer.
And then there's the issue that the whole idea of self-printing is predicated on the existence of textbook-equivalent ebooks (that you can acquire legally, for free) to use as source material for the printing. Which currently don't exist in bulk. So you have to include the cost to the student of writing dozens of ebooks. ;)
Don't forget to account for the time investment in setting up and maintaining the printer, buying supplies, the use of all that space, electrical costs, etc.
'less than one hundredth of 1% of Internet traffic is IPv6... equivalent to the allowed parts of contaminants in drinking water.'
Like that means anything to me. Can they compare that percentage in terms of the number of pages per Library of Congress?
No, it's the metric standard unit for measuring adoption of a new technology: Multiples of the allowed parts of contaminants of drinking water.
Besides, what do you mean a "percentage" of a Library of Congress? It's an indivisible unit! Geez. :)
See, and I've never had a problem with any Maxtor drive I've owned[1]. It seems that one person's experience is not enough to draw statistical conclusions from.
Or, as someone on Slashdot's sig says: "Data" is not the plural of "anecdote".
[1] Actually I've never had trouble with a substantial portion of any manufacturer's hard drives. I've had IBM, Seagate, WD, and Maxtor drives (and maybe some others), and to the best of my knowledge, none of them ever went bad in less than a year, and I didn't have any manufacturer's drives go back more than once.
I've got Ubuntu Dapper Drake on my work machine, still running FF 2 (haven't gotten around to upgrading to 3 yet), and the Flash plugin works fine. I think it causes the browser to crash maybe once every few months, and then it's always 1) when I've had the browser open a long time without restarting, and 2) some complicated, overstuffed SWF gets opened and it just tips things over the edge.
Aside from that (and the wmode thing), I don't really have any trouble with Flash. And lest you think I don't use it enough, I work for a website that has Flash embedded on nearly every page, sometimes multiple times, and we host hundreds of Flash games. So it's not like I'm not loading a lot of Flash.
I imagine that if all the people who care about a piece of data are destroyed, then whether or not there are any existing copies is irrelevant :)
And it probably will be; but what gets my goat is people acting like this injunction is some sign of How Bad Things Are Getting, or something like that. It's not; it's run-of-the-mill.
No, but Google shouldn't be conducting itself in a manner which local custom and culture say is unacceptable. If Google doesn't like it then they can go elsewhere.
But unless the law forces them to do so, they won't. That's the reason we have laws: because "custom" and "culture" cannot force anyone to do anything. It'd sure be nice if everyone was polite all the time and never did anything wrong or rude or inconsiderate, but it ain't gonna happen (or even get close) without the force of law.
Why not concentrate on their home ground and then, if other nation's decide that it is a good idea - and perhaps there is money to be made - they can invite Google to do the same in their country.
Ah, so any commerce should only be engaged in at the specific request of a government. Why don't you run a country for a few decades with that economic standard and tell me how it works out.
By the way, has Google tried doing this in some parts of Russia yet? There are areas occupied by the 'nouveau riche' where they will be lucky to leave alive.
Do you think Google is stupid enough to send their drivers to places where they're likely to get injured or killed? Having people think you're rude is one thing; having them shoot at you is another.
I'm reasonably certain there isn't a country on Earth where the common expectation is that anyone taking a picture in public will ask every single person who might end up in the shot if it's okay with them. Go find a picture taken by German, Japanese, whatever country's tourists in Times Square. You think any of them has ever once asked the hundreds of people milling about if it was okay to take a picture?
I agree with you in general, but let's not go overboard.
From what I can tell by looking up prior restraint, it refers to when organs of the government besides courts restrict the publication or distribution of written materials. The courts only do it based on laws created by the legislative branch, and if they decide such laws are unconstitutional, they don't do it. But it's the courts who decide whether it's a constitutional action or not, on a case-by-case basis. If this court was wrong and doesn't reverse itself, a higher court will probably do so.
Prior restraint is pretty much only allowed where national security (not mere "public safety" -- think launch codes, not Pentagon Papers) concerns come into play.
Not according to this. If there's a more authoritative citation, please provide it.
And again, the whole point of the temporary injunction is that it's asked for and granted in a hurry, without taking time to fully consider the case. Mass. probably argued that terrorists or criminals could make use of this information to disrupt Mass. transit (heh) on a large scale.
or bullshit unconstitutional court injunctions
Exactly which part of the Consitution does this injunction violate? It may not be prima facie clear that this info is protected by the First Amendment, and if it is, only Congress and the Several States are limited by the First Amendment. Courts are not. Now, it's the court's job to interpret the laws written by Congress (and the states), and if the court has made this temporary injunction in accordance with an unconstitutional law, then the court will (in theory) get overturned by a higher court, or may simply rescind the order itself later.
The point of a temporary injunction like this is that the claimant, er, claims that not getting the injunction will cause some kind of irreperable harm, and actions must be taken quickly. Courts are not always in a position to tell whether this is true or not, so they have to make a quick decision based on what the claimaints tell them. It may be obvious to us techies that this information is protected by the First Amendment, but not necessarily to the judge, especially when he's got High-Powered Government Attorneys (tm) telling him it's a matter of public safety that it be restrained.
It's almost certainly an unnecessary injunction, and Massachusetts is seriously in the wrong here, but it's unlikely the judge is doing anything particularly heinous here.
Don't you mean, get off my 127.0.0.1?
Harsh language?
Because in ice skating, you don't have another skater trying to knock you over or prevent you from doing a triple axel.
(It probably should be but it isn't.)
Why? There's a practical problem here -- what's the difference between asking someone to provide an eyewitness account of what happened, and asking (e.g.) a business to provide surveillance tapes of an event? If it would be illegal for them to ask for the second without a warrant, it would also need to be illegal to ask for the first, and so law enforcement would need warrants for every single step of an investigation. I'm the last person on Earth who would ever say that we need to do such-and-such to make law enforcement's life easier, but making it infeasible for them to even perform their most basic investigative functions without a warrant is severe overkill.
Obviously if they request something and the person says no, they have no right to compel that person without a warrant, and that's exactly as it should be. But if cops are investigating a convenience store robbery, and find out there's a tape of the event, why exactly would it be useful to require them to get a warrant just to get the tape, if the store owner is happily willing to give it to them?
Let's just hope they don't work in the Italian energy industry.
...depictions of creating human life are horrible and perverted, but depictions of destroying human life are A-OK!
I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out which socio-religious traditions have brought us to this point.
"All opinions are not equal" only when discussing situations that have a factual basis. Whether or not SUVs are good for the environment, for example, is not a domain where all opinions are equal (or more precisely, equally valid).
But humor is such a domain, because the only qualification for whether something is humor is if someone finds it funny. Humor is 100% subjective, defined as that which someone finds amusing. I suppose you could say that if there's no one who finds something amusing, then it's objectively not funny, but just because there's no one who currently finds it amusing, does not preclude that someone could find it amusing. (And the inverse is true, of course; even if every person who ever lived found something funny, it does not follow that there cannot be someone who does not find it funny.)
The limit is this: If someone finds it funny, it's humor to that person. There is no such thing as objective humor, any more than there is any such thing as objective beauty. Even if every person living finds something funny or beautiful, it is still a subjective characteristic.
Wow, goatse links are getting really desperate these days. ;)
1. The idea that the platform will be unbreakable depends on the assumption that nobody implementing it ever makes a mistake. Think about how likely that is, when there are literally tens of thousands of people involved.
2. New computer hardware comes out all the time; TCI components will have to be constantly rewritten/re-engineered along with the new motherboards and CPUs and suchlike, thus increasing the chance that there's an exploitable mistake somewhere along the way.
3. There are criminal organizations out there dedicated to breaking DRM and distributing copyrighted material for money; they have a gigantic profit motive. You think they'll just go away because the hardware gets more difficult to crack?
4. We've been hearing for years that TCI is going to destroy us all; I remember reading articles in 2002 or 2003 that Palladium was going to bring chaos and destruction. Are we any closer to this stuff actually happening? I'm not saying we shouldn't fight it anywhere it appears, but assuming it's a done deal because they've proposed an "unbreakable" architecture is silly.
You're like the teenager who's interested in cryptography and learns about one-time pads, and goes around telling everyone how awesome they are and how unbreakable they are, without considering that you have to distribute the pad in the first place, and all it takes is a thug with a gun to break your "unbreakable" encryption. No offense. :)
God dammit, Slashdot!
As an atheist, I prefer to blaspheme dead religions. "By Odin's beard!"
As an atheist, I prefer to blasph