This is the same behavior exhibited by the Massachusetts legislature in 2000 when the tax payers voted on a binding referendum to lower the state income tax rate from 5.3% to 5.0%. This time period was during a $1B annual surplus but the legislators stated that it was not finacially wise for the state to lower the tax rate and that the resulting decrease would not significantly benefit the tax payers in terms of cold hard cash. As it was a binding referendum the legislators simply passed a bill the next day to raise the tax rate back to 5.3%
Why do people always pick on the federal agents for asking for documents, video, etc... without documentation. They should be free to request anything be turned over that they wish, just as you or I can. The people you should be angry with are the corporate folks who comply they're the ones who should ask for a warrant, subpoena, etc...
Why can't distraction be an agravating offense for various traffic infractions. Sure most people suck at driving while on cell phones, while changing CDs, while drinking from the coffee cup, and oh yes while talking to their passenger but those actions shouldn't in and of themselves be illegal. They should simply contribute to a larger penalty when something bad happens. Please stop penalizing me for your inabilities.
While piracy is bad, I think most people would agree, this study shows an interesting phenomenon of our shrinking world. With the increased availability of digital content the barriers to acquiring a product available in a region of the world that is not your own are almost non-existent. In the past you would have to fly to the region that had the product you sought out, buy it and fly back or have it imported via some other means. Now there is no technological reason you shouldn't be able to do the same, just some legal hurdles imposed by countries out to make a buck anywhere they can and media companies out to do the same. I don't know what the solution to the former is but in regards to the latter I would think this would be enough to show that there is a demand for the content and for them to find a way to distribute it.
I've never gotten a satisfactory answer to the question of why God could not have created man to evolve. He clearly created bacteria and virii to evolve. That we can witness on a daily basis as illnesses adapt to the drugs we use to treat them and become resistant. There is evidence that species have come and gone from this world, and that some have morphed into others (trying to use evolve here as much as possible). Why is it so inconceivable that man would have been made to adapt to his surroundings in similar ways?
Yes dual core chips are > $100 in price but there are a lot of AMD AM2 chips out there that are significantly less than $100. If you want cutting edge stuff you have to pay for it. Back when the latest and greatest AMDs were $75 was back when AMD was eating Intel's dust and had to buy market share through cost. Now they have products which can compete on performance and features as a result they charge accordingly. This is capitalism if you don't like the price don't buy it. Charging what the market will bare is the fundamental of the system we live in.
While Amazon.com did make a mistake, the advertised price was buy one get one free. Even though the checkout stated $0.00, it can be argued that the customer agreed to pay for one of those boxed sets.
Does this mean that when I go to the grocery store and the teenager rings up my organic tomatoes as regular ones, i pay and exit the store that the manager can come to my home demanding payment or the return of the tomates?
It seems that there is an assumption here that there were nothing but orders for $0.00 here. At Christmas time I did all my shopping from Amazon in one shot, bought ~ $300 across probably 12 items. At that point I didn't bother to scrutinize my shopping cart and make sure that the price shown on the site was attached to each item in the cart and that every discount was provided once. I probably wouldn't have noticed if a discount had been applied twice. It seems that once they took payment and shipped the order their opportunity for consideration, which is the final stage of any contract, had passed.
I honestly don't see the benefit of this. Why is it better to drag your files over manually using a filesystem view and then have the device be required to either:
1. Create the DB itself (on a CPU and disk that are slower than your desktop / laptop) or
2. Use the filesystem directly, costing more disk seeks/reads (and hence a battery life hit)
The benefit is 3rd party platforms with nonDRM'ed music. I am a Linux user and ever music player that requires some special client to upload music to it requires some special hacked community app to access it. I really want to be able to mount it copy songs and be done, not pray to god that the latest kernel won't break the app or some new firmware on the device won't make it incompatable. Why is it so damned hard to just make it play files????
It does not enable survelance that is not possible through other (also legal) means.
It most certainly does enable surveilance that is not possible otherwise, if the cops get bored, tired, cranky and stop tailing me I'm free and clear, with this device they can tag me and check in from their desks any time they want without anyone being any wiser. Had they observed me acting in a criminal manner it should be trivial for them to get a warrant for a GPS tag while another team continues to follow. What this does is it trivializes the cost of following people from place to place to place. Don't get me wrong I am all in favor of this for tracking people who the judiciary has decided have probably committed a crime by signing a warrant to allow such behavior. This looks like it could be headed down the slippery slope of tagging people because they are likely to commit a crime which is not what the framers of the constitution intended when they decided that defendants were to be presumed innocent until such time as a jurry of their peers finds them guilty of a crime.
This is yet another case that begs the question, why does law enforcement feel warrants are such an impediment? Is this an issue of courts not being open 24x7 like drive through chapels in Las Vegas or is it that judges are foolishly trying to connect the dots and not let cops play out hunches? While I agree this one isn't that big of a deal if you get enough not a big deal warrantless things going on it becomes a big deal and suddenly the big deal things aren't such a big deal anymore.
Basically they've been bared from approving new machines until they add a step to their test cycle called "fabricate documents". Unless officials are overseeing (actively watching) the testing process there is no way to determine which tests were run and passed and which tests simply were documented as passing.
Its not that companies feel the need to conquer every aspect of the market. They attempt to conquer every aspect of the market because their investors demand 5% year over year growth which is difficult with mature products like Windows but branching out into a new area allows you to bring in new revenue while not competing with yourself.
I never understood why CS students couldn't be given a project that could grow as they furthered their education. For example it might begin as something little in the intro class then blossom into something that encompased large data structures, and move on to threading with OS, network connectivity with networks, a database based backing store and DOCUMENTATION along the way with a good SW engineering. In college I wrote a lot of crap code because I'd never see it again. If I had to learn about some of the evilness I wrote and why not to do it again it would have made me a much better programmer out of the box.
If the parents buy the game or not they should be aware of what their kids are playing. When I was in elementary school I used to trade Nintendo cartridges with my friends all the time, play the game for a week and move on. I assume the same thing happens today so even if a parent has to buy a game for their kid it doesn't mean that my kid (who I won't buy the game for) can't simply borrow it from a friend who has more permissive parents. So while I can see some benefit to parents having to make the initial purchase I think its negledgable compared to parents being aware of what their kids are playing and finding enough diversion for them so that they can separate video games from reality.
See if they could actually catch me red handed that would be one thing but finding the IP and then weeks later coming and knocking on my door doesn't make me guilty. Any of my 5 roomates can use the internet access and while Comcast gets common carrier status for some reason that's unavailable to me as a private citizen. Unless I can offer up a better suspect I am the one who has to go to court and even then I have to go to court and produce lots of evidence of who it actually was to get the suit against me dropped. If someone was paintballing people on the sidewalk from my house the cops would come and investigate and the person who had most recently handled the paintball gun would likely be halled off to jail not the person who happened to have the misfortune of having their name printed on the deed. What ever happened to innocent until proven guilty?
There's a difference between welcoming competition and giving someone the recipe, blue prints, engineering drawings, etc... to your flagship product. Oracle welcomes competition from IBM and MS but their don't give away their query optimizer to them.
This person is completely right as much as Ed Norton's speak in Fight Club about automotive recalls only happening if the cost of the recall were less than the cost of settling all the lawsuits may be frightening and seem outrageous this is the same situation. It doesn't currently cost enough to lose the data. Only once losing the data becomes outrageously expensive and unlitigatable will corporations protect it.
and that percentage of any profit derrived from the patent should be given back to the grant giving agency to fund future research,
Ok, suppose some compound was discovered which showed some promise as a lead for a cure for cancer. It was 100% government funded. Are you suggesting that 100% of any profits made from the compound be surrendered to the government? Nobody would manufacture it even if every single step of the drug R&D process was completely paid for - even if the pills cost 5 cents to make and sold for $500 dollars you couldn't make a cent from it.
This is not what I'm saying, what I'm saying is any profit the patent holder derives should be contributed back at the percentage it was funded. The better case would be a university develops some cancer curing drug and the research is 100% federally funded. Then Merc comes along and licenses the patent from the university and makes the drug. Only the profit that the university derives from the patent would be given back to the grant giving entity not the patent that Merc derives. The result being that if the research cost 10M to perform and it generates 100M in profit for the university 100M goes into the research grant system which the university can then apply to again and the cycle continues
Personally I feel that universities should be free to patent at will but they should be required to disclose the percentage of the research that was funded form public grants and that percentage of any profit derrived from the patent should be given back to the grant giving agency to fund future research. This way the cycle becomes self feeding. This way there is no conflict of ownership between research that is funded both publicly and privately the university gets to continue to recieve grants and do more research and increase their fame while attracting more distinguished faculty.
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This is the same behavior exhibited by the Massachusetts legislature in 2000 when the tax payers voted on a binding referendum to lower the state income tax rate from 5.3% to 5.0%. This time period was during a $1B annual surplus but the legislators stated that it was not finacially wise for the state to lower the tax rate and that the resulting decrease would not significantly benefit the tax payers in terms of cold hard cash. As it was a binding referendum the legislators simply passed a bill the next day to raise the tax rate back to 5.3%
Why do people always pick on the federal agents for asking for documents, video, etc... without documentation. They should be free to request anything be turned over that they wish, just as you or I can. The people you should be angry with are the corporate folks who comply they're the ones who should ask for a warrant, subpoena, etc...
So the difference between you and a Boston driver is????
Why can't distraction be an agravating offense for various traffic infractions. Sure most people suck at driving while on cell phones, while changing CDs, while drinking from the coffee cup, and oh yes while talking to their passenger but those actions shouldn't in and of themselves be illegal. They should simply contribute to a larger penalty when something bad happens. Please stop penalizing me for your inabilities.
While piracy is bad, I think most people would agree, this study shows an interesting phenomenon of our shrinking world. With the increased availability of digital content the barriers to acquiring a product available in a region of the world that is not your own are almost non-existent. In the past you would have to fly to the region that had the product you sought out, buy it and fly back or have it imported via some other means. Now there is no technological reason you shouldn't be able to do the same, just some legal hurdles imposed by countries out to make a buck anywhere they can and media companies out to do the same. I don't know what the solution to the former is but in regards to the latter I would think this would be enough to show that there is a demand for the content and for them to find a way to distribute it.
I've never gotten a satisfactory answer to the question of why God could not have created man to evolve. He clearly created bacteria and virii to evolve. That we can witness on a daily basis as illnesses adapt to the drugs we use to treat them and become resistant. There is evidence that species have come and gone from this world, and that some have morphed into others (trying to use evolve here as much as possible). Why is it so inconceivable that man would have been made to adapt to his surroundings in similar ways?
Yes dual core chips are > $100 in price but there are a lot of AMD AM2 chips out there that are significantly less than $100. If you want cutting edge stuff you have to pay for it. Back when the latest and greatest AMDs were $75 was back when AMD was eating Intel's dust and had to buy market share through cost. Now they have products which can compete on performance and features as a result they charge accordingly. This is capitalism if you don't like the price don't buy it. Charging what the market will bare is the fundamental of the system we live in.
It seems that there is an assumption here that there were nothing but orders for $0.00 here. At Christmas time I did all my shopping from Amazon in one shot, bought ~ $300 across probably 12 items. At that point I didn't bother to scrutinize my shopping cart and make sure that the price shown on the site was attached to each item in the cart and that every discount was provided once. I probably wouldn't have noticed if a discount had been applied twice. It seems that once they took payment and shipped the order their opportunity for consideration, which is the final stage of any contract, had passed.
It most certainly does enable surveilance that is not possible otherwise, if the cops get bored, tired, cranky and stop tailing me I'm free and clear, with this device they can tag me and check in from their desks any time they want without anyone being any wiser. Had they observed me acting in a criminal manner it should be trivial for them to get a warrant for a GPS tag while another team continues to follow. What this does is it trivializes the cost of following people from place to place to place. Don't get me wrong I am all in favor of this for tracking people who the judiciary has decided have probably committed a crime by signing a warrant to allow such behavior. This looks like it could be headed down the slippery slope of tagging people because they are likely to commit a crime which is not what the framers of the constitution intended when they decided that defendants were to be presumed innocent until such time as a jurry of their peers finds them guilty of a crime.
This is yet another case that begs the question, why does law enforcement feel warrants are such an impediment? Is this an issue of courts not being open 24x7 like drive through chapels in Las Vegas or is it that judges are foolishly trying to connect the dots and not let cops play out hunches? While I agree this one isn't that big of a deal if you get enough not a big deal warrantless things going on it becomes a big deal and suddenly the big deal things aren't such a big deal anymore.
No but if you buy something at 1.98 you'll have to pay 2.00. Australia's been doing this for years.
Of course I agree I'm posting on /. where M$FT is bad and AAPL is always way ahead except in the security vulnerabilities department.
Basically they've been bared from approving new machines until they add a step to their test cycle called "fabricate documents". Unless officials are overseeing (actively watching) the testing process there is no way to determine which tests were run and passed and which tests simply were documented as passing.
Its not that companies feel the need to conquer every aspect of the market. They attempt to conquer every aspect of the market because their investors demand 5% year over year growth which is difficult with mature products like Windows but branching out into a new area allows you to bring in new revenue while not competing with yourself.
I can see your point about transferring in but if you're really able to skip the first year class then banging out first year code should be trivial.
I say you give anyone who makes it through the semester without throwing away every line of useful code from their first project.
I never understood why CS students couldn't be given a project that could grow as they furthered their education. For example it might begin as something little in the intro class then blossom into something that encompased large data structures, and move on to threading with OS, network connectivity with networks, a database based backing store and DOCUMENTATION along the way with a good SW engineering. In college I wrote a lot of crap code because I'd never see it again. If I had to learn about some of the evilness I wrote and why not to do it again it would have made me a much better programmer out of the box.
If the parents buy the game or not they should be aware of what their kids are playing. When I was in elementary school I used to trade Nintendo cartridges with my friends all the time, play the game for a week and move on. I assume the same thing happens today so even if a parent has to buy a game for their kid it doesn't mean that my kid (who I won't buy the game for) can't simply borrow it from a friend who has more permissive parents. So while I can see some benefit to parents having to make the initial purchase I think its negledgable compared to parents being aware of what their kids are playing and finding enough diversion for them so that they can separate video games from reality.
See if they could actually catch me red handed that would be one thing but finding the IP and then weeks later coming and knocking on my door doesn't make me guilty. Any of my 5 roomates can use the internet access and while Comcast gets common carrier status for some reason that's unavailable to me as a private citizen. Unless I can offer up a better suspect I am the one who has to go to court and even then I have to go to court and produce lots of evidence of who it actually was to get the suit against me dropped. If someone was paintballing people on the sidewalk from my house the cops would come and investigate and the person who had most recently handled the paintball gun would likely be halled off to jail not the person who happened to have the misfortune of having their name printed on the deed. What ever happened to innocent until proven guilty?
There's a difference between welcoming competition and giving someone the recipe, blue prints, engineering drawings, etc... to your flagship product. Oracle welcomes competition from IBM and MS but their don't give away their query optimizer to them.
This person is completely right as much as Ed Norton's speak in Fight Club about automotive recalls only happening if the cost of the recall were less than the cost of settling all the lawsuits may be frightening and seem outrageous this is the same situation. It doesn't currently cost enough to lose the data. Only once losing the data becomes outrageously expensive and unlitigatable will corporations protect it.
and that percentage of any profit derrived from the patent should be given back to the grant giving agency to fund future research,
Ok, suppose some compound was discovered which showed some promise as a lead for a cure for cancer. It was 100% government funded. Are you suggesting that 100% of any profits made from the compound be surrendered to the government? Nobody would manufacture it even if every single step of the drug R&D process was completely paid for - even if the pills cost 5 cents to make and sold for $500 dollars you couldn't make a cent from it.
This is not what I'm saying, what I'm saying is any profit the patent holder derives should be contributed back at the percentage it was funded. The better case would be a university develops some cancer curing drug and the research is 100% federally funded. Then Merc comes along and licenses the patent from the university and makes the drug. Only the profit that the university derives from the patent would be given back to the grant giving entity not the patent that Merc derives. The result being that if the research cost 10M to perform and it generates 100M in profit for the university 100M goes into the research grant system which the university can then apply to again and the cycle continues
Personally I feel that universities should be free to patent at will but they should be required to disclose the percentage of the research that was funded form public grants and that percentage of any profit derrived from the patent should be given back to the grant giving agency to fund future research. This way the cycle becomes self feeding. This way there is no conflict of ownership between research that is funded both publicly and privately the university gets to continue to recieve grants and do more research and increase their fame while attracting more distinguished faculty.