Now, 733 MHz was top of the line back in 2001.... Hardly... by the time the Xbox was released, the P4 architecture was off of stop-gap mode and running at the better-performing 2.0 GHz level that clearly outperformed the old PIII cores. The Athlon Thunderbird processors had beat out the old PIII cores months before that.
The 733 MHz was probably closer to top of the line back when the final design decisions were being made, not when the XBox was released. From the perspective of Xbox-as-PC, the Xbox was pretty badly obsoleted the day it hit store shelves.
That's sort of an odd position. The original Xbox is just a wimpy little PC that doesn't do much of anything out of the box except play games and DVDs. It's really no more ironic than wiping out the pre-installed copy of Windows XP on a Dell and installing Linux, when you think about it.
Except you can buy an Xbox for $140 new now because the prices on the hardware have to naturally fall to stay competetive as well.
All game machines start out at several hundreds of dollars until the sucker market is exhausted and you have to start targetting people who are only willing to pay $200, then the ones who will only pay $150, then the ones who will only pay $100.
The machine's price will fall at a faster rate than the cost will.
When non-lawyers point out that they aren't lawyers, it's for the benefit of the reader so the reader doesn't mistake a layperson's opinion on a legal matter with expert legal advice. In other words, I'm saying above "I'm not an expert on this matter, so don't take what I say here and try to apply it in a court of law or you could be in serious trouble".
Lawyers have to be careful online about giving out legal advice because of ethical standards, so they frequently disclaim their statements (whether it means anything or not) with "this does not constitute legal advice". Providing certain advice could be construed as creating an attorney-client relationship. At that point, you could also be automatically in breach of attorney-client privilege because you would be posting your new client's advice on a public forum.
There's actually a significant amount of debate on the matter. By simply pointing out that you're not providing legal advice, does your advice become any less legal?
Disclaiming is sort of like those statements at the bottom of corporate emails that say if you receive a message by mistake you're obligated to destroy it immediately. Well, of course you're not unless you have a contract with the company that says otherwise. If I get a private email from somebody with damaging corporate details, I'm in no way, shape, or form obligated to destroy it, and I'm entirely free to share it with other people so long as I'm not breaking other laws by doing so (e.g. - committing fraud, espionage, etc.).
IANAL, but I worked for one for more than seven years. I haven't the training or the interest to provide legal advice, but here we go:
Exculpatory/Hold Harmless/Indemnity agreement is/are the correct term(s).
Exculpatory agreements are those contracts that attempt to create a pretext of blamelessness when a party might otherwise be typically held liable for damages in the event of some sort of failing on their part.
They're generally challenged at a state level and taken before the state supreme court. Generally speaking, the track record of such agreements is dismal. Wisconsin, for example, has recently heard some six or so cases involving exculpatory agreements, including the one provided along with Atkins. In each case, the court ruled that the agreements were unenforcable. Here's the Supreme Court's overturn of the trial court's finding of indemnity:
They're not always ruled unenforceable, but because they tend to be so overbroad, they're highly subject to being ruled that way. Generally speaking, this type of agreement is used mainly to frighten people away from lawsuits. The handful of people who will actually challenge them and the cost they create for a company is usually much smaller than if the company actually had to pay out when they did some harm.
... and as I pointed out to yet another slashdotter who's off on some anti-Microsoft rampage and not bothering to partake in the actual discussion at hand, it doesn't matter because he didn't make any attempt to defend his claim over the name.
... and as I pointed out, he made no attempt to defend his claim over the name. It really doesn't matter what Microsoft could have or couldn't have proven in court, because he didn't take them there.
But since glass panes can't testify in court, I guess it doesn't really matter what they think.
Microsoft Windows is a trademark, this guy infringed on it, he signed away his rights to his name, and now he's shocked that Microsoft decided to use it? Why? He's shocked that Microsoft would leverage a resource they legally obtained from him?
I'm not sure which is more telling about his lack of business savvy: the fact that he just handed over the name without any kind of meaningful resistance (did he even haggle?), or the fact that he's shocked that Microsoft used it for themselves once it was clearly under their control.
Maybe they "dont get that" because you're not making a coherent argument. Attacking a person is not the same as slandering or libeling them if that's where you're getting confused. You can attack a person to undermine their credibility without insulting them, and it's a perfectly valid tactic.
In the legal field, you can partially discredit a witness by showing that they are not qualified to be speaking on the subject on which they are speaking. For example, if they were drunk at the time they witnessed something, you can point it out to the jury. It rightly debilitates the message without ever once actually attempting to discredit the message itself by calling into question the legitimacy of the speaker.
In a debate, you can call into question the credentials of the other speaker to help your case. If you're arguing over deep sky anamolies, and you are an astrophysicist and the other person is a gym teacher, it's perfectly legitimate to inform the audience of this fact so that they don't have a propensity to accept speculation and unproven statements on the mistaken assumption that the speaker is an expert who knows what he/she is talking about.
There is nothing new about any of this. The problem is the people who continue to push their agenda, so the important thing is not to waste time on something that isn't even academically worth considering. If the people are being dishonest, you point it out. If the people are poorly or not at all qualified to be speaking on the subject, you point it out. If you didn't do this, the only threshold for making a valid statement would be that you made it and nobody else had yet "disproved" it, which is certainly a ridiculous way to go about things.
There is absolute nothing invalid about this, there never was, and there never should be. Not everyone's opinion on every subject is equally valid, so pointing out that some people are speaking non-authoritatively for the purpose of adjusting the impact of their message appropriately is, was, and always shall be perfectly legitimate.
Sarcasm does not travel well on the Internet and your comment was no exception to that rule. While you may not care, that was still your mistake in conveying the message, not mine in receiving it.
Anyway, the point was that you are attacking his opinion. He did not actually slander anybody in his statement, if I recall correctly.
Also, note that the simple fact is that I.D. is not worthy of academic discourse within the field of science. It simply is not science, so there's no value in discussing I.D. anymore than there is in arguing over whether or not aliens built the pyramids.
Since I.D. is nothing more than a popular story, the problem is not the idea of I.D., but the proponents who are arguing for it as something more than a story. There is nothing to attack in I.D. because it simply isn't science, but there are plenty of things to attack about the proponents ranging from the fact that practically none of them are subject matter experts (or even scientifically trained) to the rampant dishonesty used to push the philosophy.
The proponents are what pose a threat to science, not the idea. The idea is nothing to science. It is not science and can simply be ignored as a result. The proponents, however, are actively engaging in a smear campaign to try and discredit science in the minds of the public, so they are the problem and, far from it being invalid, attacking them is the correct way to handle the situation.
So first you attack Dvorkin's personal opinion on the matter, then you have the absolute gall to suggest - devoid of any suggestive or material evidence whatever (hell, you probably don't even KNOW him) - that he's going to naturally progress from being mean-spirited to being violent to being a murderer?
And you top it all off by calling him unevolved as if he was the one that had said all of that?
How is it insightful? The comment attacks a personal opinion as if the original poster is not allowed to have it, then goes on to suggest that not only will his position naturally progress to one of violence, but one in which he becomes an ouright murderer.
THEN he has the absolute gall to hold the entire thing against Dvorkin as if HE had said it.
I'd say this is a rare example of where it DID work, except it's only going to REALLY work if he winds up at -1, Flamebait.
What are you, from the stone age? WIFI my man! They can hunch over their screens and be within arms length of decent coffee.
No more will they be subject to the horrors of vending machine java while they pound out the code of the same name. Real coffee instead of something that looks, smells, and tastes like it was pooled under a car that was built in East Germany the same day I was born.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, 733 MHz was top of the line back in 2001....
Hardly... by the time the Xbox was released, the P4 architecture was off of stop-gap mode and running at the better-performing 2.0 GHz level that clearly outperformed the old PIII cores. The Athlon Thunderbird processors had beat out the old PIII cores months before that.
The 733 MHz was probably closer to top of the line back when the final design decisions were being made, not when the XBox was released. From the perspective of Xbox-as-PC, the Xbox was pretty badly obsoleted the day it hit store shelves.
That's sort of an odd position. The original Xbox is just a wimpy little PC that doesn't do much of anything out of the box except play games and DVDs. It's really no more ironic than wiping out the pre-installed copy of Windows XP on a Dell and installing Linux, when you think about it.
Except you can buy an Xbox for $140 new now because the prices on the hardware have to naturally fall to stay competetive as well.
All game machines start out at several hundreds of dollars until the sucker market is exhausted and you have to start targetting people who are only willing to pay $200, then the ones who will only pay $150, then the ones who will only pay $100.
The machine's price will fall at a faster rate than the cost will.
Well, as a pretty much unabashed liberal, I'd like to point out that you're batting zero for eight so far.
When non-lawyers point out that they aren't lawyers, it's for the benefit of the reader so the reader doesn't mistake a layperson's opinion on a legal matter with expert legal advice. In other words, I'm saying above "I'm not an expert on this matter, so don't take what I say here and try to apply it in a court of law or you could be in serious trouble".
Lawyers have to be careful online about giving out legal advice because of ethical standards, so they frequently disclaim their statements (whether it means anything or not) with "this does not constitute legal advice". Providing certain advice could be construed as creating an attorney-client relationship. At that point, you could also be automatically in breach of attorney-client privilege because you would be posting your new client's advice on a public forum.
There's actually a significant amount of debate on the matter. By simply pointing out that you're not providing legal advice, does your advice become any less legal?
Disclaiming is sort of like those statements at the bottom of corporate emails that say if you receive a message by mistake you're obligated to destroy it immediately. Well, of course you're not unless you have a contract with the company that says otherwise. If I get a private email from somebody with damaging corporate details, I'm in no way, shape, or form obligated to destroy it, and I'm entirely free to share it with other people so long as I'm not breaking other laws by doing so (e.g. - committing fraud, espionage, etc.).
IANAL, but I worked for one for more than seven years. I haven't the training or the interest to provide legal advice, but here we go:
i d=360
Exculpatory/Hold Harmless/Indemnity agreement is/are the correct term(s).
Exculpatory agreements are those contracts that attempt to create a pretext of blamelessness when a party might otherwise be typically held liable for damages in the event of some sort of failing on their part.
They're generally challenged at a state level and taken before the state supreme court. Generally speaking, the track record of such agreements is dismal. Wisconsin, for example, has recently heard some six or so cases involving exculpatory agreements, including the one provided along with Atkins. In each case, the court ruled that the agreements were unenforcable. Here's the Supreme Court's overturn of the trial court's finding of indemnity:
http://www.gklaw.com/publication.cfm?publication_
They're not always ruled unenforceable, but because they tend to be so overbroad, they're highly subject to being ruled that way. Generally speaking, this type of agreement is used mainly to frighten people away from lawsuits. The handful of people who will actually challenge them and the cost they create for a company is usually much smaller than if the company actually had to pay out when they did some harm.
... and as I pointed out to yet another slashdotter who's off on some anti-Microsoft rampage and not bothering to partake in the actual discussion at hand, it doesn't matter because he didn't make any attempt to defend his claim over the name.
Try paying attention.
... and as I pointed out, he made no attempt to defend his claim over the name. It really doesn't matter what Microsoft could have or couldn't have proven in court, because he didn't take them there.
But since glass panes can't testify in court, I guess it doesn't really matter what they think.
Microsoft Windows is a trademark, this guy infringed on it, he signed away his rights to his name, and now he's shocked that Microsoft decided to use it? Why? He's shocked that Microsoft would leverage a resource they legally obtained from him?
I'm not sure which is more telling about his lack of business savvy: the fact that he just handed over the name without any kind of meaningful resistance (did he even haggle?), or the fact that he's shocked that Microsoft used it for themselves once it was clearly under their control.
Maybe they "dont get that" because you're not making a coherent argument. Attacking a person is not the same as slandering or libeling them if that's where you're getting confused. You can attack a person to undermine their credibility without insulting them, and it's a perfectly valid tactic.
In the legal field, you can partially discredit a witness by showing that they are not qualified to be speaking on the subject on which they are speaking. For example, if they were drunk at the time they witnessed something, you can point it out to the jury. It rightly debilitates the message without ever once actually attempting to discredit the message itself by calling into question the legitimacy of the speaker.
In a debate, you can call into question the credentials of the other speaker to help your case. If you're arguing over deep sky anamolies, and you are an astrophysicist and the other person is a gym teacher, it's perfectly legitimate to inform the audience of this fact so that they don't have a propensity to accept speculation and unproven statements on the mistaken assumption that the speaker is an expert who knows what he/she is talking about.
There is nothing new about any of this. The problem is the people who continue to push their agenda, so the important thing is not to waste time on something that isn't even academically worth considering. If the people are being dishonest, you point it out. If the people are poorly or not at all qualified to be speaking on the subject, you point it out. If you didn't do this, the only threshold for making a valid statement would be that you made it and nobody else had yet "disproved" it, which is certainly a ridiculous way to go about things.
There is absolute nothing invalid about this, there never was, and there never should be. Not everyone's opinion on every subject is equally valid, so pointing out that some people are speaking non-authoritatively for the purpose of adjusting the impact of their message appropriately is, was, and always shall be perfectly legitimate.
Sarcasm does not travel well on the Internet and your comment was no exception to that rule. While you may not care, that was still your mistake in conveying the message, not mine in receiving it.
Anyway, the point was that you are attacking his opinion. He did not actually slander anybody in his statement, if I recall correctly.
Also, note that the simple fact is that I.D. is not worthy of academic discourse within the field of science. It simply is not science, so there's no value in discussing I.D. anymore than there is in arguing over whether or not aliens built the pyramids.
Since I.D. is nothing more than a popular story, the problem is not the idea of I.D., but the proponents who are arguing for it as something more than a story. There is nothing to attack in I.D. because it simply isn't science, but there are plenty of things to attack about the proponents ranging from the fact that practically none of them are subject matter experts (or even scientifically trained) to the rampant dishonesty used to push the philosophy.
The proponents are what pose a threat to science, not the idea. The idea is nothing to science. It is not science and can simply be ignored as a result. The proponents, however, are actively engaging in a smear campaign to try and discredit science in the minds of the public, so they are the problem and, far from it being invalid, attacking them is the correct way to handle the situation.
So first you attack Dvorkin's personal opinion on the matter, then you have the absolute gall to suggest - devoid of any suggestive or material evidence whatever (hell, you probably don't even KNOW him) - that he's going to naturally progress from being mean-spirited to being violent to being a murderer?
And you top it all off by calling him unevolved as if he was the one that had said all of that?
I smell a dirty stinkin' troll.
How is it insightful? The comment attacks a personal opinion as if the original poster is not allowed to have it, then goes on to suggest that not only will his position naturally progress to one of violence, but one in which he becomes an ouright murderer.
THEN he has the absolute gall to hold the entire thing against Dvorkin as if HE had said it.
I'd say this is a rare example of where it DID work, except it's only going to REALLY work if he winds up at -1, Flamebait.
What are you, from the stone age? WIFI my man! They can hunch over their screens and be within arms length of decent coffee.
No more will they be subject to the horrors of vending machine java while they pound out the code of the same name. Real coffee instead of something that looks, smells, and tastes like it was pooled under a car that was built in East Germany the same day I was born.