When politicians seek power to take away our freedom, people like you would willfully vote that right away. Just like you freely voted your right away to purchase apps from other appstores on your phone from any *vendor* other than Apple.
When I purchased a Playstation I voted away my right to run XBox apps on it. When I purchased a Nokia phone I voted away my right to buy iOS apps for it. HOLY CRAP! I'm just like the Germans who voted for Hitler! Someone call Glenn Beck quick!
Some of us like the fact that instead of trying to stuff the entirety of the Lord of the Rings into a single movie, or two movies, or even three short movies, Jackson went all the way and immersed us in Middle Earth for several hours. I dislike that Saruman's demise was altered, and the departure at the end of RotK went on too long, but I am happy that Jackson gave us a full, meaty interpretation of the books.
The Hobbit is a shorter work, but it's easy to envision it as a two-part film. An awful lot happens to Bilbo & Co. on the way to Lake Town. The time in Mirkwood alone could be fertile ground for some great visual storytelling. The second part of the book would work nicely as a second film. Lake Town gets torched, Smaug needs to be dealt with, and everyone wants in on the game.
I voted for Obama based on my belief that he would make better decisions than McCain. We tend to forget that the election was not a yea or nay vote for Obama. It was a contest between two contenders.
Has Obama done everything I want him to do? No. Has he made decisions (like this one) that I disagree with? Yes. Am I still happy that I voted for him rather than McCain, the guy who wanted to put the freak from Alaska a heartbeat away from the Presidency? Abso-freakin-lutely.
As for being worse than the old boss, your memory must be failing. Bush was the most corporate-friendly President we've seen. Undoing the damage he did to civil liberties and the environment alone will take years.
just to get the ball rolling, how would life in a planet inhabited only by lawyers be?
For one thing, disputes would get resolved in a non-violent fashion. Say what you want about lawyers, but they don't bomb you, machinegun you, or knife you. Hyperbole aside, a system run by those detested critters would probably be a much better system than one run by fine, upstanding do-gooders with guns.
I like that one. If you're not a lawyer, you should be one. This is exactly how you route around bad law. Mitigate it's negative effects by creatively analogizing from another field. The argument would be an uphill slope, but I wonder if any public advocacy groups have thought of taking this approch.
The employees *inside* the corporation have the right to vote, speak, hire lobbyists, et cetera but the corporation itself has no more rights than a building.
The participants in a corporation are shielded for the most part from personal liability. That's the secret sauce that makes corporations so desirable; the people who form a company can pool their money and the entity is held responsible for the activities they collectively engage in, rather than the individuals involved. This is a great incentive for generating entrepreneurial activity, but it also means that the corporation has a legal life of its own, separate from even the founding individuals, much less people who were brought aboard long after the founders died.
The people inside the corporation spend money on lobbyists, PR campaigns, PACs, and so on, but they are merely the servants of the corporation. When Altria spends millions on local, state, and federal elections every year, it's not because J. Worthington Snipe, the guy who runs their Dirty Tricks Division, is exercising his rights as an individual. It's because Altria is taking advantage of its legal right to free speech, as defined by a series of Supreme Court decisions that completely ignore the fact that voting rights only matter if they are not completely overpowered by the 1st Amendment rights of goliath corporations.
The fact that corporations are legal fictions in no way diminishes the fact that they have been given many rights we would otherwise associate only with human beings.
There are these things called cycle computers. They've been around for a long time. Lots of cyclists use them. They keep track of speed and distance. You look down at it while you're riding. Sometimes you even touch a button to change the display. If you're smart, you use your eyes to look ahead and determine if there are any obstacles within range. You then look down and use the device. In a car this would be called looking at the speedometer, or perhaps adjusting the odometer.
For some companies, media interest is irrelevant, because they're entrenched in their market.
That would be awesome for Microsoft if the computer market remained unchanged. If IT departments continue to purchase most of the computers in use, if office software remains a barrier to entry, if smartphones remain a sideshow, and if customers continue to think of overall user experience as secondary in importance, Microsoft can sit fat and happy from here until the sun engulfs the earth.
The "mature market" you're talking about is fast becoming a dried-up market, as IT wields less influence and the definition of computing changes. We're living in a consumer-driven tech economy, and Microsoft is struggling to find its place in it.
Legislators create laws, which require interpretation by judges. It is virtually impossible to create a statute that doesn't require some degree of interpretation. To create one that addressed every possible situation would place us in a society so rule-bound that we'd all have to consult the statute book before crossing the street.
Judges look to the intent of the law as well as the the language of the law, and they incorporate precedent (the outcome of prior related cases) into their interpretation. In so doing, they create further precedent. So yes, judges shape the law, but they do not create it out of nothing.
Second, if he posits that the internet should not be a permitted avenue for propaganda, how is this suddenly a threat to information technology?
There are three different ways you can use propaganda to destabilize an opponent:
Truth: "In America, the elected leader of the country is limited to two four-year terms." This is an unequivocally untrue statement.
Fiction: "Under Putin, the life expectancy in Russia declined from an average of 70 years to 54 years." This is an unequivocally untrue statement.
A Mixture of Both: "Russian society is stagnant because of Putin's rule." Portions of this statement may be true, portions may be false.
When one country is trying to destabilize or take down another country's government, the most effective approach is to use a blend of truth, lies, and mixed statements. The government attempting to resist outside propaganda will declare that all incoming propaganda are sheer lies, but the danger there is that the public will realize that at least some of the propaganda is true, which will make them suspicious about government statements about the false information.
But consider recent comments from Iran about America's use of the death penalty. The statement that we are putting a woman to death are completely true, even though the Iranian government is making the statement in order to cast America in a poor light. It would be easy under a system of rules designed to prohibit outside subversion, to classify such a statement as subversive propaganda.
Thus facts, lies, and mixtures of facts and lies can all be considered subversive propaganda. Is there any other form of discourse left after these three are removed?
Fact checking has one single purpose: it means that the newspaper can't be sued for printing falsehoods.
There's more to it than that. As journalism became a profession in the middle of the last century, news organizations would actually compete to be seen as the most factual and least biased sources of news. I know, it sounds incredible, but there were actual market forces at work compelling news organizations to check facts before publishing them.
The impact of libel law on news organizations has remained relatively constant, even in the era of Fox News and The Random Angry Blogger. While many "news" organizations are happy to cannibalize the profession of journalism in their race for the bottom, there are still media outlets both old and new that are holding on to journalistic ethics because they know there are still readers who will pay for the privilege of reading news that has actual facts in it.
Tilting libel in favor of plaintiffs would surely create more fact-checking, but I wouldn't bet on that happening any time in the near future. The Roberts Court is very pro-First Amendment. They love it so much they'll guarantee it for entities like corporations that aren't even human.
I wouldn't be surprised, though, if in a decade we find a small, robust core of truly journalistic organizations thriving in the face of widespread devaluation of news. They'll survive not because of the law, but because there will always be people who value straightforward reporting and will pay for it (not necessarily directly, but in some fashion).
How much did I pay for it? How many hours of enjoyment did I get out of that expense?
Let's say I buy a game for $100 and only play it for a year. Let's further stipulate that I play it only 10 times, with each session lasting 10 hours (which is actually a very fast game of Civ). $100 for 100 hours. $1/hr.
Even with those very conservative numbers, if the game stopped working after a year I'd feel I'd received my money's worth. It's a far better deal than going to a movie theater or an amusement park. I've probably put in at least 400 hours with Civ 3, and even though I've only dabbled with Civ 4, it's already approaching the $1/hr. mark.
Whether I'm renting it or owning it is immaterial.
Ten years from now, when Steam no longer works or supports your game, you'll find out that you were just renting it.
You're right. The top followed people on twitter are celebrities.
I was being glib about the top 25 thing, but it doesn't really who the top 25 are anyway. Does the fact that the NY Times Bestseller list is packed with trash mean that all book readers like John Grisham? Just as I could read books until the end of time without ever reading a bestseller, I could use twitter for as long as I lived without ever following a celebrity. I actually find twitter most useful for niche interests.
Saying that a medium open to anyone and everyone is "for dumb people mindlessly following pop trash" sounds deliberately provocative. I don't own a TV, but I don't think that everyone who uses one is an idiot. I doubt you actually believe that everyone who uses twitter is stupid, either. Your dislike of the medium seems to have blinded you to the notion that there are many ways to use it, just as there are many ways to use other media.
I consider twitter to be a helpful engine for serendipitous discovery. Sometimes I want to search for information, sometimes I want information to come to me from interesting people. The first time I tried twitter I didn't get it, but I had the nagging suspicion that I wasn't using it in a way that would make it useful. So when I came back to it a few months later, I thought of it as an information stream I could dip into when I felt like discovering something new.
That was a mean feat. You managed to marry ignorance of twitter (Madonna & Hilton aren't even in the top 25 for followers) with truly offensive misogyny. I know, I know. You're too busy getting laid to care, right?
But how can people survive if they don't know what Madonna, Paris Hilton, (other useless bitch) ate for breakfast?
I can see the jokes already, but folks, SCO does have customers, and technically they are around the world.
Why, just this morning Darl hopped on his Lear jet, and while flying to South America, he booted up their amazing secret new OS, OpenHole. Simultaneously, while riding a horse-drawn carriage through the streets of Magnitogorsk, the able CFO Ken also booted up OpenHole.
Listen, SCO has a track record of accurate statements, and they are living up to that reputation today, just as they have in years past. Give them a little credit, people. Just a little.
Think the telecom industry is a bastion of good ol' American competition? Think again. These guys have been running circles around the FCC for years. They've taken massive tax breaks and incentives to build out broadband, and by any reasonable standard they have failed to make good on that promise. In the early 2000s, they succeeded in getting the Supreme Court to buy into the idea that they could box out newcomers like Covad, while anticompetitive tactics ran rampant. At the very same time, they were dragging their heels rolling out DSL. The irony is that the Baby Bells only exist in the first place because the government created them by breaking up the original AT&T.
Taxpayers have been getting reamed by US telecom companies for decades, the FCC is far too close to the industry it regulates, and the courts have done a very poor job of safeguarding a level playing field. The entire industry needs an enema.
They could simply continue making featurephones and dominate that segment, and make tons of money doing so.
That's like saying Dell or HP can continue to make commodity PCs and dominate that segment. While it may be true, the statement misses the fact that as the mobile market matures, feature phones will become a smaller and smaller slice of the overall pie. Moore's Law is relentless; the feature phone is dying as smartphones become the standard. There is no way Nokia execs are sitting around a big table discussing how they can use feature phones to ensure market dominance. If Nokia doesn't find a way to take the battle to Apple and Android, they're in deep trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
When politicians seek power to take away our freedom, people like you would willfully vote that right away. Just like you freely voted your right away to purchase apps from other appstores on your phone from any *vendor* other than Apple.
When I purchased a Playstation I voted away my right to run XBox apps on it. When I purchased a Nokia phone I voted away my right to buy iOS apps for it. HOLY CRAP! I'm just like the Germans who voted for Hitler! Someone call Glenn Beck quick!
Maybe that's the version you need.
Some of us like the fact that instead of trying to stuff the entirety of the Lord of the Rings into a single movie, or two movies, or even three short movies, Jackson went all the way and immersed us in Middle Earth for several hours. I dislike that Saruman's demise was altered, and the departure at the end of RotK went on too long, but I am happy that Jackson gave us a full, meaty interpretation of the books.
The Hobbit is a shorter work, but it's easy to envision it as a two-part film. An awful lot happens to Bilbo & Co. on the way to Lake Town. The time in Mirkwood alone could be fertile ground for some great visual storytelling. The second part of the book would work nicely as a second film. Lake Town gets torched, Smaug needs to be dealt with, and everyone wants in on the game.
Meet the new boss, same (worse?) as the old boss.
I voted for Obama based on my belief that he would make better decisions than McCain. We tend to forget that the election was not a yea or nay vote for Obama. It was a contest between two contenders.
Has Obama done everything I want him to do? No. Has he made decisions (like this one) that I disagree with? Yes. Am I still happy that I voted for him rather than McCain, the guy who wanted to put the freak from Alaska a heartbeat away from the Presidency? Abso-freakin-lutely.
As for being worse than the old boss, your memory must be failing. Bush was the most corporate-friendly President we've seen. Undoing the damage he did to civil liberties and the environment alone will take years.
just to get the ball rolling, how would life in a planet inhabited only by lawyers be?
For one thing, disputes would get resolved in a non-violent fashion. Say what you want about lawyers, but they don't bomb you, machinegun you, or knife you. Hyperbole aside, a system run by those detested critters would probably be a much better system than one run by fine, upstanding do-gooders with guns.
I like that one. If you're not a lawyer, you should be one. This is exactly how you route around bad law. Mitigate it's negative effects by creatively analogizing from another field. The argument would be an uphill slope, but I wonder if any public advocacy groups have thought of taking this approch.
The employees *inside* the corporation have the right to vote, speak, hire lobbyists, et cetera but the corporation itself has no more rights than a building.
The participants in a corporation are shielded for the most part from personal liability. That's the secret sauce that makes corporations so desirable; the people who form a company can pool their money and the entity is held responsible for the activities they collectively engage in, rather than the individuals involved. This is a great incentive for generating entrepreneurial activity, but it also means that the corporation has a legal life of its own, separate from even the founding individuals, much less people who were brought aboard long after the founders died.
The people inside the corporation spend money on lobbyists, PR campaigns, PACs, and so on, but they are merely the servants of the corporation. When Altria spends millions on local, state, and federal elections every year, it's not because J. Worthington Snipe, the guy who runs their Dirty Tricks Division, is exercising his rights as an individual. It's because Altria is taking advantage of its legal right to free speech, as defined by a series of Supreme Court decisions that completely ignore the fact that voting rights only matter if they are not completely overpowered by the 1st Amendment rights of goliath corporations.
The fact that corporations are legal fictions in no way diminishes the fact that they have been given many rights we would otherwise associate only with human beings.
There are these things called cycle computers. They've been around for a long time. Lots of cyclists use them. They keep track of speed and distance. You look down at it while you're riding. Sometimes you even touch a button to change the display. If you're smart, you use your eyes to look ahead and determine if there are any obstacles within range. You then look down and use the device. In a car this would be called looking at the speedometer, or perhaps adjusting the odometer.
Write it out like this. One billion dollars. Then say it out loud, with the tip of your pinky finger in your mouth.
For some companies, media interest is irrelevant, because they're entrenched in their market.
That would be awesome for Microsoft if the computer market remained unchanged. If IT departments continue to purchase most of the computers in use, if office software remains a barrier to entry, if smartphones remain a sideshow, and if customers continue to think of overall user experience as secondary in importance, Microsoft can sit fat and happy from here until the sun engulfs the earth.
The "mature market" you're talking about is fast becoming a dried-up market, as IT wields less influence and the definition of computing changes. We're living in a consumer-driven tech economy, and Microsoft is struggling to find its place in it.
I'm assuming you were, like, using, like, sarcasm. In case you weren't:
2005: Year of the Blogger! Everyone is blogging!
2010: Facebook has taken over. Nobody is blogging!
Perhaps, just perhaps, fewer people are blogging than before, but the number of bloggers is still substantial.
Legislators create laws, which require interpretation by judges. It is virtually impossible to create a statute that doesn't require some degree of interpretation. To create one that addressed every possible situation would place us in a society so rule-bound that we'd all have to consult the statute book before crossing the street.
Judges look to the intent of the law as well as the the language of the law, and they incorporate precedent (the outcome of prior related cases) into their interpretation. In so doing, they create further precedent. So yes, judges shape the law, but they do not create it out of nothing.
Second, if he posits that the internet should not be a permitted avenue for propaganda, how is this suddenly a threat to information technology?
There are three different ways you can use propaganda to destabilize an opponent:
When one country is trying to destabilize or take down another country's government, the most effective approach is to use a blend of truth, lies, and mixed statements. The government attempting to resist outside propaganda will declare that all incoming propaganda are sheer lies, but the danger there is that the public will realize that at least some of the propaganda is true, which will make them suspicious about government statements about the false information.
But consider recent comments from Iran about America's use of the death penalty. The statement that we are putting a woman to death are completely true, even though the Iranian government is making the statement in order to cast America in a poor light. It would be easy under a system of rules designed to prohibit outside subversion, to classify such a statement as subversive propaganda.
Thus facts, lies, and mixtures of facts and lies can all be considered subversive propaganda. Is there any other form of discourse left after these three are removed?
Fact checking has one single purpose: it means that the newspaper can't be sued for printing falsehoods.
There's more to it than that. As journalism became a profession in the middle of the last century, news organizations would actually compete to be seen as the most factual and least biased sources of news. I know, it sounds incredible, but there were actual market forces at work compelling news organizations to check facts before publishing them.
The impact of libel law on news organizations has remained relatively constant, even in the era of Fox News and The Random Angry Blogger. While many "news" organizations are happy to cannibalize the profession of journalism in their race for the bottom, there are still media outlets both old and new that are holding on to journalistic ethics because they know there are still readers who will pay for the privilege of reading news that has actual facts in it.
Tilting libel in favor of plaintiffs would surely create more fact-checking, but I wouldn't bet on that happening any time in the near future. The Roberts Court is very pro-First Amendment. They love it so much they'll guarantee it for entities like corporations that aren't even human.
I wouldn't be surprised, though, if in a decade we find a small, robust core of truly journalistic organizations thriving in the face of widespread devaluation of news. They'll survive not because of the law, but because there will always be people who value straightforward reporting and will pay for it (not necessarily directly, but in some fashion).
If you're the mayor of El Paso, your hardware vendor is Colt's Manufacturing Company, manufacturer of the M-4 carbine.
I look at entertainment expenses this way:
How much did I pay for it? How many hours of enjoyment did I get out of that expense?
Let's say I buy a game for $100 and only play it for a year. Let's further stipulate that I play it only 10 times, with each session lasting 10 hours (which is actually a very fast game of Civ). $100 for 100 hours. $1/hr.
Even with those very conservative numbers, if the game stopped working after a year I'd feel I'd received my money's worth. It's a far better deal than going to a movie theater or an amusement park. I've probably put in at least 400 hours with Civ 3, and even though I've only dabbled with Civ 4, it's already approaching the $1/hr. mark.
Whether I'm renting it or owning it is immaterial.
Ten years from now, when Steam no longer works or supports your game, you'll find out that you were just renting it.
You're right. The top followed people on twitter are celebrities.
I was being glib about the top 25 thing, but it doesn't really who the top 25 are anyway. Does the fact that the NY Times Bestseller list is packed with trash mean that all book readers like John Grisham? Just as I could read books until the end of time without ever reading a bestseller, I could use twitter for as long as I lived without ever following a celebrity. I actually find twitter most useful for niche interests.
Saying that a medium open to anyone and everyone is "for dumb people mindlessly following pop trash" sounds deliberately provocative. I don't own a TV, but I don't think that everyone who uses one is an idiot. I doubt you actually believe that everyone who uses twitter is stupid, either. Your dislike of the medium seems to have blinded you to the notion that there are many ways to use it, just as there are many ways to use other media.
Nice. Wish I had mod points. Now where did I put all of my oxen?
I consider twitter to be a helpful engine for serendipitous discovery. Sometimes I want to search for information, sometimes I want information to come to me from interesting people. The first time I tried twitter I didn't get it, but I had the nagging suspicion that I wasn't using it in a way that would make it useful. So when I came back to it a few months later, I thought of it as an information stream I could dip into when I felt like discovering something new.
That was a mean feat. You managed to marry ignorance of twitter (Madonna & Hilton aren't even in the top 25 for followers) with truly offensive misogyny. I know, I know. You're too busy getting laid to care, right?
But how can people survive if they don't know what Madonna, Paris Hilton, (other useless bitch) ate for breakfast?
I'm expecting a big hue and cry from the small government, fiscally conservative, ideologically-pure Tea Party folks.
Oh, wait, this is a military expenditure. Never mind.
Where "unAmerican" is shorthand for "unLatinAmerican". ;-)
If you ever want to get into an argument with someone from South America, use the word "America" when you mean "the United States".
I can see the jokes already, but folks, SCO does have customers, and technically they are around the world.
Why, just this morning Darl hopped on his Lear jet, and while flying to South America, he booted up their amazing secret new OS, OpenHole. Simultaneously, while riding a horse-drawn carriage through the streets of Magnitogorsk, the able CFO Ken also booted up OpenHole.
Listen, SCO has a track record of accurate statements, and they are living up to that reputation today, just as they have in years past. Give them a little credit, people. Just a little.
Think the telecom industry is a bastion of good ol' American competition? Think again. These guys have been running circles around the FCC for years. They've taken massive tax breaks and incentives to build out broadband, and by any reasonable standard they have failed to make good on that promise. In the early 2000s, they succeeded in getting the Supreme Court to buy into the idea that they could box out newcomers like Covad, while anticompetitive tactics ran rampant. At the very same time, they were dragging their heels rolling out DSL. The irony is that the Baby Bells only exist in the first place because the government created them by breaking up the original AT&T.
Taxpayers have been getting reamed by US telecom companies for decades, the FCC is far too close to the industry it regulates, and the courts have done a very poor job of safeguarding a level playing field. The entire industry needs an enema.
Yay for unrestricted, vigorous competition between telecom companies in the good ol' U.S. of A.! We're number one, we're number one!
Wait... what does "city-owned utility" mean?
They could simply continue making featurephones and dominate that segment, and make tons of money doing so.
That's like saying Dell or HP can continue to make commodity PCs and dominate that segment. While it may be true, the statement misses the fact that as the mobile market matures, feature phones will become a smaller and smaller slice of the overall pie. Moore's Law is relentless; the feature phone is dying as smartphones become the standard. There is no way Nokia execs are sitting around a big table discussing how they can use feature phones to ensure market dominance. If Nokia doesn't find a way to take the battle to Apple and Android, they're in deep trouble.