You need to rethink the concept of means tests for voting. Just because it was applied as thinly veiled racism decades ago doesn't mean we can't get it right this time around.
But there is no way to be sure we're getting it right. And just like its better to let the guilty go free than to lock up the innocent, it is better to let the incompetent vote than to prevent the competent from voting.
Did I say voter fraud? No, I don't believe I did. I guess this kind of fraud is okay with you though, as long as it serves your purposes.
Its not that the fraud is ok, but that it doesn't serve Obamama or anyone elses purposes. All it accomplished was to siphon money from Obama into the pockets of dishonest acorn employees. The voters aren't affected. The election isn't affected. Who exactly is the victim of this fraud?
I'd say it was, of all people, Obama, and that's even if it wasn't splattered all over the news.
The same person always has the same IP? The same IP always belongs the same person?
The same IP has registered every word in the dictionary starting with F?
Seriously, its bloody obvious there isn't a 1:1:1 mapping from IP to user to twitter account, and its true there is no way to separate a little bit of squatting from 'a family of twitter users', but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that that batch of 150,000 twitter accounts created from a particular ID, all linked to single gmail address, aren't a "family"... and if you wanted to be really sure, you dig a little deeper and find out that hey, that IP is assigned to Verizon's pool of 'dynamically allocated residential ip addresses'... hmmmm?
LOL, my sister-in-law is a teachers assistance. Every single year she gets back more money than she put into taxes. I guess this is the benefit of having two kids without a father in the picture. Why should she get my tax dollars if she did not pay them in?
She probably did pay them in. You just aren't looking in the right places.
Would you be happier if they gave her a card that said she didn't have to pay sales taxes, fuel taxes, etc, so that she could KEEP a few more of HER dollars? Of course then the state etc would need some assistance funding its programs so they'd ask for your dollars for that. Would that make you happier? Since now your dollars were going towards police stations instead of HER paying for those and you paying into a fund that returns money to HER?
I realize that state, local, and federal taxation systems are all theoretically separate but its smoke and mirrors; its all intertwined through various federal assistance and transfer programs. I'm sure if we looked hard enough we could find a way to allocate more of your dollars to a federally assisted education program and thus reduce the dollars she pays in local taxes by the same amount.
Ultimately the net result could be the same.
The real point is, we have a lot of people at the poverty line who pay a lot more tax than you give them credit for.
The ideal solution would be to scrap the ENTIRE tax system and rebuild it from scratch, but that's not going to happen anytime soon.
Saying the software is no better or worse because the package as a whole is no better or worse is a pointless argument. The weakest link in that set is the infrastructure (depending on how the SLA defines it) followed by the hardware.
Which is why you have redundant infrastructure and redundant hardware. Pretty much by definition you can't achieve 5 9's on a single box, because the box itself can't achieve 5 9's. (A mainframe doesn't count as a single box here, because its got all the redundancy built in.)
So at the end of the day, your OS should be a negligible factor in your SLA. In terms of availability, it shouldn't even come up in the discussion.
Your OS is what enables you to effectively use that redundancy, it's what allows clustering, replication, load balancing, automatic failover, etc. This is -how- the average shop achieves 5 9's.
When an OS vendor wants to talk about how its being used in a 5 9's shop, this is what they are talking about.
I have had personal BSD and Linux boxes that have run endlessly for more than a year, multiple times, and only rebooted due to 4+ hour power outages.
Stopping a service, updating, and starting it again isn't really that much better than rebooting. Its a bit faster, sure, and that's a good thing, but bragging about the uptime of the OS is irrelevant if the service is still down.
*nix definitely has an edge and I'm not making excuses for windows, but at the same time I know of lots of *nix admins who had a problem after an apache update that took hours to sort out, who still brag about their 'uptime' numbers, as if the fact that they didn't have to 'reboot' is somehow relevant to people trying to use the web site.
No, I've managed to have a single Linux box reach 99.999%
"Managed to have"? You are talking about 5 9's as something that you can reach. People who demand 5 9's consider that the minimum they will accept. They don't want systems that can reach 5 9's they want systems guaranteed not to be less than 5 9's. That's a HUGE difference.
So if we sign an SLA, how certain should I be that you can deliver 5 9's?... From one box? Not very.
That fact that you might 'manage it' simply isn't good enough. What happens when a piece of hardware fails? or if an update doesn't go smoothly? With a single box you have no contingency and 5 minutes to resolve any problems and perform any updates that might be needed for the entire year.
My point stands: anyone serious about delivering 5 9's simply isn't using a single box, because you simply can't depend on it. MAYBE you'll get 5 9's out of it, but getting 5 9's from a single box is like winning a prize from a scratch and win. Its not exactly a miracle, but its hardly something you can rely on.
Hell, even promising 4 9's from a single box is taking on some heavy risk. It's not hard to envision an unexpected hour of downtime on a box over the course of a year.
If you were MS, and wanted to brag about 5 Nines uptime, wouldn't you design the patch so you didn't have to reboot production servers once a month?
5 nines is ~5.3 minutes downtime per year
You don't acheive that with a single Linux box either, unless you simply aren't keeping it up to date, even if you manage to avoid 'rebooting it' you are still going to have serious trouble reliably preventing 'unavailability of services' from reaching 5.3 minutes over a year.
It takes either a mainframe or a cluster to reach 5 9's with any reliability. Windows doesn't run on a mainframe, and if you have cluster, a few scheduled reboots now and then don't result in any downtime, since you don't have to bring the entire cluster down.
The imbalance exists because the RIAA has loads of money and the people they've decided to sue don't. Did the judge establish that situation? No. To imply that she's at fault for even hearing the case is silly (it's her job), unless you think the case shouldn't be heard simply because one litigant has loads of money and the other doesn't. It would be an interesting precedent.
She's not at fault for 'hearing the case'.
But she had a great deal of discretion in terms of what she allowed the RIAA to do, including letting the RIAA join multiple cases together to realize economies of scale for themselves.
Remember she chastized the RIAA for not being 'mindful' that the defendants had no representation, and that this legislation was bankrupting them and/or forcing unfair settlements.
Yet, when the RIAA filed motion after motion was she herself 'mindful' that the defendants had no representation and were not objecting and/or filing appropriate counter motions of their own? Or did she simply grant the RIAA whatever they asked for without that consideration?
Is she not, as judge, ultimately responsible for seeing justice served in her courtroom? Surely she bears some responsibility, at least morally if not legally for what happens in her court. I think that's what is being suggested here.
but Marie Antoinette didn't create the situation that made the statement "let them eat cake" ridiculous either
Marie Antoinette didn't make that statement either, according to most historians. Some convincing evidence of that fact would be:
Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 12-volume autobiographical work Confessions was completed in 1769. In Book 6, which was reputedly written around 1767, he recalls:..."At length I recollected the thoughtless saying of a great princess, who, on being informed that the country people had no bread, replied, "Then let them eat pastry!"
Marie-Antoinette arrived at Versailles from her native Austria in 1770, after Rousseau had written the above passage, and long before she could possibly have credibly made that statement.
Historians believe it was in fact most likely Marie Thérèse of Spain, Queen Consort of France as wife of Louis XIV, King of France. (Marie Antoinette as an aside was married to Louis XVI.)
Additionally, it is believed that the statement is actually in DEFENSE of the poor. Relating to the fact that the price of plain bread and fancy bread (cake/pastry) were by law regulated to be sold at same price in times of shortage, to ensure bakers could not benefit from diverting supplies like butter, eggs, etc to making more expensive 'luxury items' while not offering plain bread.
So, if bakers were to mis-allocate, and run out of plain bread, the poor were entitled to buy 'cake' at the same price. And it is believed, that the 'let them eat cake' statement was a suggestion that this law should be actually be enforced, as bakers were abusing the system.
Punitive damages shouldn't even be given to the plaintiff. Their intent is to punish, not compensate, so the money should just go to help fix that fourteen digit debt we've been racking up.
I agree with this in principle. But at the same time, if the plaintiff is only allowed to recover the $4 in actual damages, what is his incentive in pursuing the case in the first place?
Now perhaps this is precisely what you intend in the case of copyright infringement but this effectively legalizes petty crime in general, because its impossible to even break even. Everything from small scale Ebay fraud to the dry cleaners lose your pants leaves you with no recourse.
It would be far better to simply limit punitive damages to a single instance. After all if infringing copyright has a $500 punitive damage, making 22 songs available shouldn't expose you to 22x that amount ($11,000) After all, it doesn't cost 22x as much to ligitate the case.
I don't dispute that for a second. And I'll go further: even those who -can- afford an attorney are still massively disadvantaged when facing a top corporate legal team. Its long been the case that the legal system too often provides the 'justice you can afford'.
However, my original point still stands: An inadequate defense attorney is still better than none at all.
There is a damage component and a punishment component. Its reasonable for damages to scale up as actual damages go up... there is no reason to do the same for punishment.
The problem with the penalties for copyright is that they are punitively applied 'per infringement'. Getting nailed for $500 for violating copyright is actually a reasonable punishment, call it $2 damages, and $498 for punishment; that's a relatively fair outcome.
The problem is that sharing 22 songs SHOULDN'T be counted as 22 separate acts of infringement; the damages might be at most $2 x 22 = $44, plus the SAME $498 for punishment. So the final award for 22 songs ought to be around $542, not $11,000, and certainly not $222,000.
Why should someone accused of copyright infringement have it any easier (cheaper), than someone accused of running a red light, or breaking a contract, or committing a felony (tort, civil, and criminal examples mixed here deliberately)?
With respect to commiting a felony, this might sound familiar:
"You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford one, an attorney will be appointed to you."
So if copyright infringement were actually criminal, we'd be providing her with an attorney.
The real question is "why should someone accused of 'copyright infringement' have it so much HARDER, than someone accused of a felony"? Given that the legislated MINIMUM penalties for casual non-commericial infringement make the penalties for 'wire fraud' seem like a slap on the wrist by comparison.
A normal analog TV channel uses 6 MHz of bandwidth, in that same space DOCSIS 2 can send 28 Mbps up and 38 Mbps down. That's more than enough to feed all of the televisions in your house with with its own HD signal (which is about 6 Mbps). DOCSIS 3 can bond up to 10 channels, offering about 500 Mbps. If analog is completely turned off, 1 Gbps are a very real possibility.
So the problem here is bandwidth allocation, not theoretical performance. If the cable carriers would be willing -- and they aren't -- you could have multi-Gbps feeds into your house right now.
er... critical logic error in progress...
That would only be true if you were the cable companies only customer in the area.
Right now, you and everyone else all receive that analog channel. If they switched it to internet data, only one person at a time (on any given loop to to the head end) could use it. They absolutely cannot turn off a single analog channel and then offer everyone full utilisation of 38down/28up Mbps connections.
Turning off analog completely would free up multi-gbps of bandwidth, but it will still be divided up amongst everyone on the loop.
Nope. You're just making them work without pay for their creations.
I didn't 'make' them do anything.
How would you like to spend time creating a beautiful piece of programming & your employer just says "thanks" and takes it w/o paying you?
Your right that would suck. Fortunately I neatly avoid this by requiring that I be paid in regular chunks throughout development, and if the payments were to cease I would cease handing over code. It works quite nicely.
Your statistical analysis doesn't hold-up, because the PS2 sold its first 100 million in just four years time.
If by "four years time" you mean "5 years 9 months".
The Wii has sold "only" 30 million in two years; which would be 60 million in four years.... far short of what the PS2 did.
These things happen on a curve. A linear approximation is pretty weak. And the Wii curve is still on an upswing. And Nintendo is still ramping production -up-.
by which point its SD-quality graphics will start looking rather aged
And by then DVDs will dead too? What with that awful 'SD-quality' image? I doubt it. Hell, world wide penetration of HD ready sets is at 11%. Its going to be a long time before SD is dead.
I predict the Wii will...
I think I can safely write off most of your predictions as being more what you 'wish to see' than what any sort of real analysis supports.
Given you were off by how long it took sony to reach 100M by almost 2 years, you have fantasy level faith in HD penetration, and you make ridiculous linear approximations.
Granted North America is well ahead of the WW 11% HD penetration rate, up around the 50% mark, but Western Europe is down around 10% as is most of asia. Even Japan isn't expected to crack 50% until 2012.
Plus, with the recent economic turmoil, if anything, it wouldn't surprise me to see sales slow down and hd adoption take longer than previously estimated. SD is going to be with us for a while yet.
Yeah, but you are talking about Nintendo after the Gamecube (LEAST successful previous gen console, by far)
"by far"? Are you serious? Xbox sold 24 million. Gamecube sold 22 million. I'd hardly call that 'least successful by far'. I'd call that pretty much tied for 2nd place. Especially as the Cube made Nintendo decent money while the Xbox lost Microsoft money hand over fist.
Saying the cube was least successful 'by far' is clearly overstating things 'by far'.
I imagine there would be some trepidation about building factories to handle 2.4M units/month. Sure, its selling that well now, but hindsight is always 20/20.
Sorry buddy, parent poster is needlessly blunt but essentially right.
There is nothing really wrong with them; they aren't really "crap". Its just that they aren't particularly special. Yet they are marketed (and usually priced) as if they were. The simple reality is that many other brands of speaker perform equally well at a considerably reduced price.
To put it into slashdot terms, Bose speakers are like Dell's line of gaming PCs. Nothing wrong with them per se; they are certainly functional enough, but they aren't particularly special, and nobody who is serious about gaming and knows hardware is going to be remotely impressed. Meanwhile, compared to a custom rig ordered at newegg or ncix etc the Dell gaming unit cost more and does less.
Wow... guess he doesn't realize that console games can be pirated too. Especially since GoW2 was leaked to the tubes more than two weeks early.
Not at all, he clearly realizes that.
He's saying, essentially, there are pirates on both platforms, but on the PC platform, anyone with a system able to run our game is savvy enough to be a pirate, while anyone who owns an xbox can run our game, and most of them aren't savvy enough to be a pirate.
Note also that he doesn't say that everyone on the PC able to run the game IS a pirate, although clearly thinks that a much higher percent of his potential market on the PC are pirates.
Till the invocation of Goodwin's law. Not a record, but my hats off for the valiant try sir!
I'm pretty sure to set a record at this point, Godwin would have to be invoked before the story even hit the firehose, perhaps before TFA was itself written.
Everyone seems to keep forgetting why we moved from paper ballots to electronic voting machines in the first place. It's not about speed - it's about avoiding spoiled ballots.
1) It better not be about speed, Canada has paper ballots and the elections are finished within a few hours of closing. Close races of course have to be recounted, but so what? Granted we have a 10th the pop... but we also have 10th the manpower doing the counting that you would so it evens out.
2) The issue with spoiled ballots isn't THAT hard. Its when people start getting pedantic about it. If the ballot is supposed to have an X in the box, and someone draws a checkmark, that shouldn't EVER spoil the ballot. Ditto if they fill the box in, draw a happy face, a heart, or initial it. If one box is unequivocally 'marked' and the other one isn't, then its fine. If BOTH or NEITHER box is marked then it might be a spoiled ballot. The idiocy arrives when they defined a valid ballot as having an x, and then looked at the checkmarks under a glass to see if they crossed or not, rejecting those that didn't.
Voters aren't trained, and they aren't given any feedback afterwards either. So they pretty much have NO idea what they are doing. And as easy as it is to put an X in the box, and as clear as the instructions on the wall might say "Put in an X in the box", its simply not going to sink in that "Hey, we REALLY mean an X, and if you put in a V instead that just doesn't cut it."
The general public doesn't live in a world where that sort of subtlety actually matters. When the bank says 'initial here' and they write out their name instead it doesn't invalidate their mortage application... when their doctor says check off any pre-existing conditions on this form, and they fill in the circles instead of using check marks no one makes them do it over. Or if they underline "No" instead instead of circling it, or they cross off items that don't apply while putting checkmarks next to those that do... no-one ever calls them on this stuff.
So when it comes to election day they simply aren't mentally prepared for the idea that when they are told to put an 'X' in the box that if they put something other than an 'X' in the box, it won't be counted. You might explicitly say "Put an 'X' in a box" but they understand that to mean "Mark a box".
And since ballots are private, nobody ever checks them afterwards and says, hey, you put in an S, IT HAS TO BE AN 'X'. Since we can't effectively train beforehand and we can't effectively provide feedback afterward, we should simply accept the 'S'.
Thus the solution to most inadvertently spoiled ballots is to simply rewrite the law so that we accept ballots that are unambiguously marks a single candidate and leave it at that. And then accept it if someone draws a circle around a box, or in a box, or initials a box, or initials beside the box, or circles the canditates name...
Of course there will still be ways to mark the ballot ambiguously but so be it. The vast majority of spoiled ballots AREN'T marked ambiguously. They are unambiguously marked but marked 'incorrectly'.
The only real documented fraud going on now is ACORN. I guess there had to be a diversion generated to make it look like the other side was being just as bad.
I've been hearing about ACORN for a while, and I'm curious how ACORN represents a threat to the integrity of the election.
Yes, I get that there was fraud, in the sense that they were submitting fake voter registrations in order to collect a commission on those registrations. But unless "Donald Duck" and "Mickey Mouse" show up to vote there is no "election fraud" happening.
So, how does Barack even theoretically benefit from funding ACORN to create fraudulent voter registrations? The only real 'victim' I see of this fraud is Barack who paid them to get out and register voters, (and there is nothing wrong with that, even if he's funding registration drives specifically in 'democrat heavy' areas).
At $3 battle chess is an impulse buy with some other game, at $6 I'm going to take fall out before I take battle chess.
-shrug-
meh, 3$ 6$, whatever. Either is an impulse buy price for me. And I like the single price point model for classic games.
Sure I might buy twice as many games at 3$ than I would at $6... but so what? That doesn't make THEM any more money... and indeed will cost them more in overhead... transaction fees, bandwidth etc. $5.99 is a pretty solid price.
When I went to the site, although I was quite impressed and pleased with the selection I was really actually hoping for some OLDER stuff. Ogre, X-Com, 2400AD, Gunship 2000, Wing commander I/II, MechWarrior, in particular. I'd pay $5 for each of those, for a version that run smoothly without issues under Windows XP/Vista (with usb joystick support in relevant titles)
Forget about legal shootings during card games, did we? Even if money wasn't involved, cheating = get shot. That was back in the Wild West. I'm sure putting a knife to a kid to force him to give up his game winnings is just as illegal NOW as it was THEN.
People need a real grip of history, it seems.
You don't need to allocate 'real property rights' to 'WoW gold' to recognize that putting a knife to a kid to force him to do -anything- is illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
You need to rethink the concept of means tests for voting. Just because it was applied as thinly veiled racism decades ago doesn't mean we can't get it right this time around.
But there is no way to be sure we're getting it right. And just like its better to let the guilty go free than to lock up the innocent, it is better to let the incompetent vote than to prevent the competent from voting.
Did I say voter fraud? No, I don't believe I did. I guess this kind of fraud is okay with you though, as long as it serves your purposes.
Its not that the fraud is ok, but that it doesn't serve Obamama or anyone elses purposes. All it accomplished was to siphon money from Obama into the pockets of dishonest acorn employees. The voters aren't affected. The election isn't affected. Who exactly is the victim of this fraud?
I'd say it was, of all people, Obama, and that's even if it wasn't splattered all over the news.
The same person always has the same IP? The same IP always belongs the same person?
The same IP has registered every word in the dictionary starting with F?
Seriously, its bloody obvious there isn't a 1:1:1 mapping from IP to user to twitter account, and its true there is no way to separate a little bit of squatting from 'a family of twitter users', but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that that batch of 150,000 twitter accounts created from a particular ID, all linked to single gmail address, aren't a "family"... and if you wanted to be really sure, you dig a little deeper and find out that hey, that IP is assigned to Verizon's pool of 'dynamically allocated residential ip addresses'... hmmmm?
LOL, my sister-in-law is a teachers assistance. Every single year she gets back more money than she put into taxes. I guess this is the benefit of having two kids without a father in the picture. Why should she get my tax dollars if she did not pay them in?
She probably did pay them in. You just aren't looking in the right places.
Would you be happier if they gave her a card that said she didn't have to pay sales taxes, fuel taxes, etc, so that she could KEEP a few more of HER dollars? Of course then the state etc would need some assistance funding its programs so they'd ask for your dollars for that. Would that make you happier? Since now your dollars were going towards police stations instead of HER paying for those and you paying into a fund that returns money to HER?
I realize that state, local, and federal taxation systems are all theoretically separate but its smoke and mirrors; its all intertwined through various federal assistance and transfer programs. I'm sure if we looked hard enough we could find a way to allocate more of your dollars to a federally assisted education program and thus reduce the dollars she pays in local taxes by the same amount.
Ultimately the net result could be the same.
The real point is, we have a lot of people at the poverty line who pay a lot more tax than you give them credit for.
The ideal solution would be to scrap the ENTIRE tax system and rebuild it from scratch, but that's not going to happen anytime soon.
Saying the software is no better or worse because the package as a whole is no better or worse is a pointless argument. The weakest link in that set is the infrastructure (depending on how the SLA defines it) followed by the hardware.
Which is why you have redundant infrastructure and redundant hardware. Pretty much by definition you can't achieve 5 9's on a single box, because the box itself can't achieve 5 9's. (A mainframe doesn't count as a single box here, because its got all the redundancy built in.)
So at the end of the day, your OS should be a negligible factor in your SLA. In terms of availability, it shouldn't even come up in the discussion.
Your OS is what enables you to effectively use that redundancy, it's what allows clustering, replication, load balancing, automatic failover, etc. This is -how- the average shop achieves 5 9's.
When an OS vendor wants to talk about how its being used in a 5 9's shop, this is what they are talking about.
I have had personal BSD and Linux boxes that have run endlessly for more than a year, multiple times, and only rebooted due to 4+ hour power outages.
Stopping a service, updating, and starting it again isn't really that much better than rebooting. Its a bit faster, sure, and that's a good thing, but bragging about the uptime of the OS is irrelevant if the service is still down.
*nix definitely has an edge and I'm not making excuses for windows, but at the same time I know of lots of *nix admins who had a problem after an apache update that took hours to sort out, who still brag about their 'uptime' numbers, as if the fact that they didn't have to 'reboot' is somehow relevant to people trying to use the web site.
No, I've managed to have a single Linux box reach 99.999%
"Managed to have"? You are talking about 5 9's as something that you can reach. People who demand 5 9's consider that the minimum they will accept. They don't want systems that can reach 5 9's they want systems guaranteed not to be less than 5 9's. That's a HUGE difference.
So if we sign an SLA, how certain should I be that you can deliver 5 9's? ... From one box? Not very.
That fact that you might 'manage it' simply isn't good enough. What happens when a piece of hardware fails? or if an update doesn't go smoothly? With a single box you have no contingency and 5 minutes to resolve any problems and perform any updates that might be needed for the entire year.
My point stands: anyone serious about delivering 5 9's simply isn't using a single box, because you simply can't depend on it. MAYBE you'll get 5 9's out of it, but getting 5 9's from a single box is like winning a prize from a scratch and win. Its not exactly a miracle, but its hardly something you can rely on.
Hell, even promising 4 9's from a single box is taking on some heavy risk. It's not hard to envision an unexpected hour of downtime on a box over the course of a year.
If you were MS, and wanted to brag about 5 Nines uptime, wouldn't you design the patch so you didn't have to reboot production servers once a month?
5 nines is ~5.3 minutes downtime per year
You don't acheive that with a single Linux box either, unless you simply aren't keeping it up to date, even if you manage to avoid 'rebooting it' you are still going to have serious trouble reliably preventing 'unavailability of services' from reaching 5.3 minutes over a year.
It takes either a mainframe or a cluster to reach 5 9's with any reliability. Windows doesn't run on a mainframe, and if you have cluster, a few scheduled reboots now and then don't result in any downtime, since you don't have to bring the entire cluster down.
So your argument really doesn't apply.
The imbalance exists because the RIAA has loads of money and the people they've decided to sue don't. Did the judge establish that situation? No. To imply that she's at fault for even hearing the case is silly (it's her job), unless you think the case shouldn't be heard simply because one litigant has loads of money and the other doesn't. It would be an interesting precedent.
She's not at fault for 'hearing the case'.
But she had a great deal of discretion in terms of what she allowed the RIAA to do, including letting the RIAA join multiple cases together to realize economies of scale for themselves.
Remember she chastized the RIAA for not being 'mindful' that the defendants had no representation, and that this legislation was bankrupting them and/or forcing unfair settlements.
Yet, when the RIAA filed motion after motion was she herself 'mindful' that the defendants had no representation and were not objecting and/or filing appropriate counter motions of their own? Or did she simply grant the RIAA whatever they asked for without that consideration?
Is she not, as judge, ultimately responsible for seeing justice served in her courtroom? Surely she bears some responsibility, at least morally if not legally for what happens in her court. I think that's what is being suggested here.
but Marie Antoinette didn't create the situation that made the statement "let them eat cake" ridiculous either
Marie Antoinette didn't make that statement either, according to most historians. Some convincing evidence of that fact would be:
Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 12-volume autobiographical work Confessions was completed in 1769. In Book 6, which was reputedly written around 1767, he recalls: ..."At length I recollected the thoughtless saying of a great princess, who, on being informed that the country people had no bread, replied, "Then let them eat pastry!"
Marie-Antoinette arrived at Versailles from her native Austria in 1770, after Rousseau had written the above passage, and long before she could possibly have credibly made that statement.
Historians believe it was in fact most likely Marie Thérèse of Spain, Queen Consort of France as wife of Louis XIV, King of France. (Marie Antoinette as an aside was married to Louis XVI.)
Additionally, it is believed that the statement is actually in DEFENSE of the poor. Relating to the fact that the price of plain bread and fancy bread (cake/pastry) were by law regulated to be sold at same price in times of shortage, to ensure bakers could not benefit from diverting supplies like butter, eggs, etc to making more expensive 'luxury items' while not offering plain bread.
So, if bakers were to mis-allocate, and run out of plain bread, the poor were entitled to buy 'cake' at the same price. And it is believed, that the 'let them eat cake' statement was a suggestion that this law should be actually be enforced, as bakers were abusing the system.
Punitive damages shouldn't even be given to the plaintiff. Their intent is to punish, not compensate, so the money should just go to help fix that fourteen digit debt we've been racking up.
I agree with this in principle. But at the same time, if the plaintiff is only allowed to recover the $4 in actual damages, what is his incentive in pursuing the case in the first place?
Now perhaps this is precisely what you intend in the case of copyright infringement but this effectively legalizes petty crime in general, because its impossible to even break even. Everything from small scale Ebay fraud to the dry cleaners lose your pants leaves you with no recourse.
It would be far better to simply limit punitive damages to a single instance. After all if infringing copyright has a $500 punitive damage, making 22 songs available shouldn't expose you to 22x that amount ($11,000) After all, it doesn't cost 22x as much to ligitate the case.
A really, really crappy one...
I don't dispute that for a second. And I'll go further: even those who -can- afford an attorney are still massively disadvantaged when facing a top corporate legal team. Its long been the case that the legal system too often provides the 'justice you can afford'.
However, my original point still stands: An inadequate defense attorney is still better than none at all.
There is a damage component and a punishment component. Its reasonable for damages to scale up as actual damages go up... there is no reason to do the same for punishment.
The problem with the penalties for copyright is that they are punitively applied 'per infringement'. Getting nailed for $500 for violating copyright is actually a reasonable punishment, call it $2 damages, and $498 for punishment; that's a relatively fair outcome.
The problem is that sharing 22 songs SHOULDN'T be counted as 22 separate acts of infringement; the damages might be at most $2 x 22 = $44, plus the SAME $498 for punishment. So the final award for 22 songs ought to be around $542, not $11,000, and certainly not $222,000.
Why should someone accused of copyright infringement have it any easier (cheaper), than someone accused of running a red light, or breaking a contract, or committing a felony (tort, civil, and criminal examples mixed here deliberately)?
With respect to commiting a felony, this might sound familiar:
"You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford one, an attorney will be appointed to you."
So if copyright infringement were actually criminal, we'd be providing her with an attorney.
The real question is "why should someone accused of 'copyright infringement' have it so much HARDER, than someone accused of a felony"? Given that the legislated MINIMUM penalties for casual non-commericial infringement make the penalties for 'wire fraud' seem like a slap on the wrist by comparison.
A normal analog TV channel uses 6 MHz of bandwidth, in that same space DOCSIS 2 can send 28 Mbps up and 38 Mbps down. That's more than enough to feed all of the televisions in your house with with its own HD signal (which is about 6 Mbps). DOCSIS 3 can bond up to 10 channels, offering about 500 Mbps. If analog is completely turned off, 1 Gbps are a very real possibility.
So the problem here is bandwidth allocation, not theoretical performance. If the cable carriers would be willing -- and they aren't -- you could have multi-Gbps feeds into your house right now.
er... critical logic error in progress...
That would only be true if you were the cable companies only customer in the area.
Right now, you and everyone else all receive that analog channel. If they switched it to internet data, only one person at a time (on any given loop to to the head end) could use it. They absolutely cannot turn off a single analog channel and then offer everyone full utilisation of 38down/28up Mbps connections.
Turning off analog completely would free up multi-gbps of bandwidth, but it will still be divided up amongst everyone on the loop.
Nope. You're just making them work without pay for their creations.
I didn't 'make' them do anything.
How would you like to spend time creating a beautiful piece of programming & your employer just says "thanks" and takes it w/o paying you?
Your right that would suck. Fortunately I neatly avoid this by requiring that I be paid in regular chunks throughout development, and if the payments were to cease I would cease handing over code. It works quite nicely.
Your statistical analysis doesn't hold-up, because the PS2 sold its first 100 million in just four years time.
If by "four years time" you mean "5 years 9 months".
The Wii has sold "only" 30 million in two years; which would be 60 million in four years.... far short of what the PS2 did.
These things happen on a curve. A linear approximation is pretty weak. And the Wii curve is still on an upswing. And Nintendo is still ramping production -up-.
by which point its SD-quality graphics will start looking rather aged
And by then DVDs will dead too? What with that awful 'SD-quality' image? I doubt it.
Hell, world wide penetration of HD ready sets is at 11%. Its going to be a long time before SD is dead.
I predict the Wii will...
I think I can safely write off most of your predictions as being more what you 'wish to see' than what any sort of real analysis supports.
Given you were off by how long it took sony to reach 100M by almost 2 years, you have fantasy level faith in HD penetration, and you make ridiculous linear approximations.
Granted North America is well ahead of the WW 11% HD penetration rate, up around the 50% mark, but Western Europe is down around 10% as is most of asia. Even Japan isn't expected to crack 50% until 2012.
Plus, with the recent economic turmoil, if anything, it wouldn't surprise me to see sales slow down and hd adoption take longer than previously estimated. SD is going to be with us for a while yet.
Yeah, but you are talking about Nintendo after the Gamecube (LEAST successful previous gen console, by far)
"by far"? Are you serious? Xbox sold 24 million. Gamecube sold 22 million. I'd hardly call that 'least successful by far'. I'd call that pretty much tied for 2nd place. Especially as the Cube made Nintendo decent money while the Xbox lost Microsoft money hand over fist.
Saying the cube was least successful 'by far' is clearly overstating things 'by far'.
I imagine there would be some trepidation about building factories to handle 2.4M units/month. Sure, its selling that well now, but hindsight is always 20/20.
This would be true of all consoles ever made.
Sorry buddy, parent poster is needlessly blunt but essentially right.
There is nothing really wrong with them; they aren't really "crap". Its just that they aren't particularly special. Yet they are marketed (and usually priced) as if they were. The simple reality is that many other brands of speaker perform equally well at a considerably reduced price.
To put it into slashdot terms, Bose speakers are like Dell's line of gaming PCs. Nothing wrong with them per se; they are certainly functional enough, but they aren't particularly special, and nobody who is serious about gaming and knows hardware is going to be remotely impressed. Meanwhile, compared to a custom rig ordered at newegg or ncix etc the Dell gaming unit cost more and does less.
Like Bose.
Wow... guess he doesn't realize that console games can be pirated too. Especially since GoW2 was leaked to the tubes more than two weeks early.
Not at all, he clearly realizes that.
He's saying, essentially, there are pirates on both platforms, but on the PC platform, anyone with a system able to run our game is savvy enough to be a pirate, while anyone who owns an xbox can run our game, and most of them aren't savvy enough to be a pirate.
Note also that he doesn't say that everyone on the PC able to run the game IS a pirate, although clearly thinks that a much higher percent of his potential market on the PC are pirates.
Till the invocation of Goodwin's law. Not a record, but my hats off for the valiant try sir!
I'm pretty sure to set a record at this point, Godwin would have to be invoked before the story even hit the firehose, perhaps before TFA was itself written.
Everyone seems to keep forgetting why we moved from paper ballots to electronic voting machines in the first place. It's not about speed - it's about avoiding spoiled ballots.
1) It better not be about speed, Canada has paper ballots and the elections are finished within a few hours of closing. Close races of course have to be recounted, but so what? Granted we have a 10th the pop... but we also have 10th the manpower doing the counting that you would so it evens out.
2) The issue with spoiled ballots isn't THAT hard. Its when people start getting pedantic about it. If the ballot is supposed to have an X in the box, and someone draws a checkmark, that shouldn't EVER spoil the ballot. Ditto if they fill the box in, draw a happy face, a heart, or initial it. If one box is unequivocally 'marked' and the other one isn't, then its fine. If BOTH or NEITHER box is marked then it might be a spoiled ballot. The idiocy arrives when they defined a valid ballot as having an x, and then looked at the checkmarks under a glass to see if they crossed or not, rejecting those that didn't.
Voters aren't trained, and they aren't given any feedback afterwards either. So they pretty much have NO idea what they are doing. And as easy as it is to put an X in the box, and as clear as the instructions on the wall might say "Put in an X in the box", its simply not going to sink in that "Hey, we REALLY mean an X, and if you put in a V instead that just doesn't cut it."
The general public doesn't live in a world where that sort of subtlety actually matters. When the bank says 'initial here' and they write out their name instead it doesn't invalidate their mortage application... when their doctor says check off any pre-existing conditions on this form, and they fill in the circles instead of using check marks no one makes them do it over. Or if they underline "No" instead instead of circling it, or they cross off items that don't apply while putting checkmarks next to those that do... no-one ever calls them on this stuff.
So when it comes to election day they simply aren't mentally prepared for the idea that when they are told to put an 'X' in the box that if they put something other than an 'X' in the box, it won't be counted. You might explicitly say "Put an 'X' in a box" but they understand that to mean "Mark a box".
And since ballots are private, nobody ever checks them afterwards and says, hey, you put in an S, IT HAS TO BE AN 'X'. Since we can't effectively train beforehand and we can't effectively provide feedback afterward, we should simply accept the 'S'.
Thus the solution to most inadvertently spoiled ballots is to simply rewrite the law so that we accept ballots that are unambiguously marks a single candidate and leave it at that. And then accept it if someone draws a circle around a box, or in a box, or initials a box, or initials beside the box, or circles the canditates name...
Of course there will still be ways to mark the ballot ambiguously but so be it. The vast majority of spoiled ballots AREN'T marked ambiguously. They are unambiguously marked but marked 'incorrectly'.
The only real documented fraud going on now is ACORN. I guess there had to be a diversion generated to make it look like the other side was being just as bad.
I've been hearing about ACORN for a while, and I'm curious how ACORN represents a threat to the integrity of the election.
Yes, I get that there was fraud, in the sense that they were submitting fake voter registrations in order to collect a commission on those registrations. But unless "Donald Duck" and "Mickey Mouse" show up to vote there is no "election fraud" happening.
So, how does Barack even theoretically benefit from funding ACORN to create fraudulent voter registrations? The only real 'victim' I see of this fraud is Barack who paid them to get out and register voters, (and there is nothing wrong with that, even if he's funding registration drives specifically in 'democrat heavy' areas).
At $3 battle chess is an impulse buy with some other game, at $6 I'm going to take fall out before I take battle chess.
-shrug-
meh, 3$ 6$, whatever. Either is an impulse buy price for me. And I like the single price point model for classic games.
Sure I might buy twice as many games at 3$ than I would at $6... but so what? That doesn't make THEM any more money... and indeed will cost them more in overhead... transaction fees, bandwidth etc. $5.99 is a pretty solid price.
When I went to the site, although I was quite impressed and pleased with the selection I was really actually hoping for some OLDER stuff. Ogre, X-Com, 2400AD, Gunship 2000, Wing commander I/II, MechWarrior, in particular. I'd pay $5 for each of those, for a version that run smoothly without issues under Windows XP/Vista (with usb joystick support in relevant titles)
What language can I write my user-interface mods in? How much of the UI can I re-write using that language? ...
That first one is really the show-stopper for most games.
You and the 3 other people who care more about what language they write UI mods in than actually playing the game.
Forget about legal shootings during card games, did we? Even if money wasn't involved, cheating = get shot. That was back in the Wild West. I'm sure putting a knife to a kid to force him to give up his game winnings is just as illegal NOW as it was THEN.
People need a real grip of history, it seems.
You don't need to allocate 'real property rights' to 'WoW gold' to recognize that putting a knife to a kid to force him to do -anything- is illegal.