I think the difference in all of these cases is that your example products are all being sold by the same overall company, while Cryptozoic is different company from Blizzard, so the competition, to the extent that there is any, can and will hurt them.
But I don't actually know anything about Cryptozoic. I'm just basing this entirely on a careful reading of what grandparent post said.
I think one of the big culprits here is generated documentation.
Imagine writing some code... you get through a couple hundred lines of code detailing what Wangles are and what you can do with them.
No matter how on-the-ball you are, you're still going to be writing comments and documentation from the position of someone who can see the whole tamale. You know what Throbbing does, and you know why you would want to do it, because you just have to hit page up and *duh*.
Then the doc generator passes through, slurps up the comments (but obviously not the code) and plops it in to some template that was designed to fit the lowest common denominator, and all of a sudden it's completely out of context.
Maybe this isn't how MSDN actually generates its docs, so maybe I'm way off base here, I don't know. But it sure looks that way to me.
TL;DR: closed-source bad, open source good. Come on, mod points!
I'm a surveyor, and I use GPS to locate points to within a few hundredths of a foot (a couple centimeters, if you will). So, I don't know if my interpretation is exactly what the article intended, but I saw "tens of meters" and immediately thought "really really bad" and didn't even consider the possibility that the range of variation in "tens of meters" would be significant...
It's interesting how our minds immediately write things off like that... In most other circumstances I think I would have went exactly where you did and asked about the precision.
Something like... if you or I heard that it would cost "several billion dollars" to buy out a particular company, we'd just go "whoa, that's a lot"... but there's a select subset of people who would perk up their ears and say "umm, how much is 'several'?"
Yeah, I'm getting that vibe too... He asks "what would you use this bandwidth for?" then when people answer, he says "well that wouldn't be useful to me" in a way that implies it would be *wrong* for it to be useful for anyone else.
To continue your car analogy, he's like those assholes who go 45 in a 55, then speed up to 70 when you try to pass them, because he thinks the world would be a better, safer place if we all drove 45 or under.
Are alcoholics not "alcohol abusers?" It seems to me that they are defining "abuse" as falling outside of medically approved use, not legal standards.
And again, I don't think that "use and abuse" were being used as lexical replacements for "legal and illegal," but rather "healthy and unhealthy." (In the sense that the current medical establishment has fiat to determine what is and isn't healthy.)
Your connection of the evils of the U.S. legislature to the use of the phrase " drug abuse" by a British science publication is tenuous at best.
My same arguments apply here - the Bell Atlantic decision is a very bad thing, and using it to dismiss Limewire's suit proves the exact point I raised back then.
Not only that, but post-employment non-compete terms are also generally unenforceable in California and a few other states. Legislators generally don't notice or care about such fine points as this, and most of the states that make non-competes unenforceable did so simply because, way back when the laws were being put on the books, the guy writing that particular law didn't like the idea of non-competes, and the legislature just goes along out of ignorance rather than understanding. Michigan actually changed, back in the 80s, from having unenforceable non-competes to having non-competes be enforceable without any restrictions. Turns out they made that change completely by accident, making an amendment that wiped out a section they wanted to get rid of - and inadvertently getting rid of the "no non-competes" section. A year or two later they figured out what they had done and put some sane restrictions on non-competes, but didn't make them completely unenforceable like it had been.
Some business/econ academics are trying to sift through the data from the patent office to see if it has had any effect on Michigan's innovation output. They hypothesize that one of the reasons for the Silicon Valley boom was that unenforceable non-competes made it very easy to talented people to move from company to company as their products remained interesting or profitable, and that Michigan is a perfect guinea pig to test this. I heard a lecture about it a couple of months ago, at which point their analysis of the Michigan data was inconclusive. Apparently patent office records don't give you a whole lot to go on.
Funny you should bring that point up: Bell Atlantic was a class action suit brought up against a big corporation by the little guy, who couldn't even get to discovery because the Supreme Court decided to add a plausibility requirement to complaints.
Basically, either way is going to leave open avenues for litigious bullying. However, with the new requirement, when the little guy brings a lawsuit against the big guy, and the court decides that the little guy hasn't stated a plausible claim, that's it - there is no legal recourse to prove that there was a violation, because the lawsuit has been dismissed. That's what discovery is supposed to be. Under the old system, with no plausibility requirement, the little guy got bullied, but if he grew a backbone (and money for attorney's fees, admittedly), he could still prove that the big guy was just bullying him. Sure, we're able to dismiss these cases more easily now, but in a few months the lawsuits are going to start being just specific enough to be plausible, because the RIAA has the resources to do a little bit more research.
Basically, under the old system, lawsuits would end at the bullied party's discretion - maybe monetary considerations made it a decision based on more than just the legal merits of their case, but they were the ones who decided to settle. Now, as in Bell Atlantic, there is no way the plaintiffs can do anything more about their claims - the lawsuit was ended at the discretion of the bully (alleged bully - there was never any plausible claim for relief under the Sherman Antitrust Act against Bell Atlantic - but we'll never know if there was evidence that may have made it plausible, will we?).
If (completely hypothetical here, just using the same parties as the actual discussion for convenience) a music downloader brought a suit against the RIAA claiming that they were using lawsuits to scare people or whatever, it would be dismissed because the music companies won't just surrender internal emails or memos discussing this tactic, so there is no plausible claim. If Bell Atlantic hadn't happened, an enterprising plaintiff could bring such a suit, and use discovery rules to compel the companies to divulge such evidence, if it existed.
Like I said, in this particular instance, I'm happy that the lawsuit didn't end with the defendant having to pay either a settlement or damages. However, I think that the law used to achieve this outcome is bad, and will in the long run be a huge detriment to "little guys" everywhere.
No no no no no! Plaintiffs should not have a "plausibility" requirement based on facts presented in the complaint. They are required to present a plausible case if they wish to win, of course, but the facts of the case should be presented after the discovery phase of the lawsuit, during which time they are able to use certain legal tools to aid them in finding the exact facts and natures of the violations.
Requiring the specific facts that make a "plausible" claim upon which relief may be granted to be present in a pleading has NEVER been required until Bell Atlantic v. Twombly was decided by the Supreme Court a few months ago. While the outcome in this particular situation (stopping the RIAA from making a likely frivolous claim) may been seen as a good thing, it is relying on a decision that overthrew decades of legal precedent designed to make sure everyone has their day in court, and had a fair shot at proving their claim.
The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure specifically state that boilerplate complaints are valid. They even PROVIDE THE FORMS for crying out loud. If the RIAA has no case, it should be determined by summary judgment, AFTER DISCOVERY, not by dismissal because plaintiff hasn't presented a plausible case. That is what discovery is supposed to be for, especially in this type of case, where defendant has control of the evidence that may prove their violation, and certainly wouldn't surrender it without a court order.
The Bell Atlantic decision is a broken abortion of justice, and this case is relying on its bad law.
OK, that was a bit melodramatic. But you get the gist.
You're right, I never have watched a full season of Survivor. I may try to give it a shot some time, you do make it sound interesting. Thanks for the reply, I had misinterpreted what you were saying a bit.
I had a lengthy conversation with an 8-year-old about A Midsummer Night's Dream after we saw a performance of it. Later, I had a lengthy conversation about the play with my professor who did his doctoral thesis on Shakespeare. The age or intelligence of the people who are capable of discussing a work of art is not the measure of how genius it is. James Joyce's Ulysses isn't brilliant because of the fact that few people can understand it. Battlestar Galactica isn't un-intelligent just because an 8-year-old can talk about it. I can understand saying that it's not genius, but saying that it's not genius because an 8-year old understands some of the issues it presents is specious.
Also, I dislike reality TV because they claim to be "real" but they are often scripted or at least contrived. As sociological tools, they are about as useful as a scripted show, and often less fun to watch. I don't know a lot about game theory, so I can't comment there.
If you meant "Hillary" why didn't you say "Hillary?" Like the GP I have no issue with your original post, but please do realize how easy it is for people to misinterpret what you say even without using a word like "leader" and expecting people to get "Hillary Clinton" out of it when she's only a Senator. Also, the "monkey see, monkey do" subject line (even though this refers to the RIAA, not Bush) draws immediate connections to the president because a lot of the fun poked at him on the internet involves likening him to a monkey or chimp.
People can't read your mind; they have to make due with your words.
I'm curious: everyone is talking about the RIAA withdrawing the case almost immediately, but the letter was sent to a law firm hired by the RIAA, not the RIAA itself. Would the firm have withdrawn the case on its own, or would they have talked to their clients first?
I have this mental image of a corporate bigwig at Sony sitting down in his office with his morning coffee and paper, when suddenly a red phone on his desk starts to flash. He moves his paper with a grunt to see what is disturbing his read, but when he sees which phone it is, his eyes go wide and the color drains from his face. Slowly he picks it up, and a timid voice on the other end says, "Sir? It's Tom Kerr. It's finally happened..." Cut to a slow-motion high-angle shot of the coffee mug falling out of his hand and shattering on the ground...
Can you integrate sleep and work? Or sleep and pleasure? Not very well. Same with work and pleasure. You need down time to throw everything away and see to your higher-order needs, or they will come up wanted (read: affect your work).
Clock out time, that's it. Turn the machine off, leave the building, and forget about it until 9am. If your business can't handle that, they obviously need more staff. That's a fallacious argument. "Ability to integrate with" is a non-transitive relationship, and sleep is a particularly good example of why this is so. Here's your reasoning applied to another example: Sleep can't be integrated with baking cookies, and sleep can't be integrated with talking on the phone, therefore baking cookies can't be integrated with talking on the phone.
Also, it's not impossible for your higher order needs to be fulfilled by work. In fact, I would say it is the most likely place where self-actualization will occur. Compartmentalizing your life and writing off work as dead time (as far as high order needs is concerned) seems extremely unhealthy. Maybe you need a better job.
Right, hence the other point of the article: they also bought it to become number one in the internet video market. First and foremost, they were paying for market dominance; the chance to get favorable rulings was secondary.
I think that the GP was talking about the state of the government's treatment of civil rights, not any of its economic policies that may or may not have caused the things you mentioned.
Based on this post, and others of yours previously in the thread, this is what I have gathered about how you assign political leanings:
1. Most of those whom people call "liberals" are not, in fact, liberals, because they don't act as a true liberal acts.
2. Those whom people call "conservatives" are conservatives because everyone calls them conservatives.
Someone earlier raised the point that most "conservatives" these days don't actually act according to the classic definition of conservatism, and you called this spin. In this post, you just said that most "liberals" these days don't act according to the classic definition of liberalism, and thus are not liberals. So, how do you (I mean you personally) determine what someone's political leanings are? By what most people think they are, or by what they do? Or have I mis-read you?
I suppose in the grand scheme of things this really doesn't matter, because obviously you and I both care enough to actually research the candidates and vote for the person rather than for the letter after their name or any labels assigned to them, but I still find this question interesting from a linguistic and a sociological perspective.
I won't argue that there is a market for radio with a liberal viewpoint, but do remember that voting against Republicans is not the same thing as being a liberal.
No no, the market will cause standardization on its own, it doesn't require a non-business body (unless you call the consumers as a whole the "superceding, non-business body"). Look at Betamax/VHS, or mobile phone formats in the U.S. Do you honestly think that Blu-Ray and and HD-DVD will both live on forever until a committee makes a choice?
The real difference between standards in a regulated and an unregulated market: the unregulated market will choose the best format, while a regulated market will choose a standard faster. I would rather wait for enthusiasts and early adopters to find the best format than be forced into a standard that may not be the best. You would rather avoid the uncertainty, which is certainly understandable. I don't think that particular debate can be resolved very easily. What I'm trying to say is that, contrary to what you seem to be arguing, there are definite benefits to an unregulated market.
Also, as for "worshiping 'market forces,' not promoting fair use" - I would argue that allowing customers to make their own decisions IS fair use.
Yes, it is as easy as all that, but unlike not practicing safe driving habits, doing stupid things on the computer will do little more to the user than slow down his or her programs. The computer will not inflict any sort of physical or emotional (despite what anti-porn lobbyists may claim;)) harm to anyone using it, regardless of what pop-ups they click of free screen-savers they download. Thus, there is little motivation to learn even that certain behavior will cause Bad Things, much less what that behavior may be and how to avoid it.
No, they're showing that shoppers are considering the loss of money - the thing they have in their hand - rather than the loss of purchasing power - something that really exists only in the abstract.
I seem to remember several months/years ago someone linked this to humanity's ancient roots as hunter-gatherers - when we were out scrounging up food, we had to think quickly and decisively and make immediate choices based only on what data were directly in front of us. Today, shopping presents enough of the right stimuli to re-activate this portion of the brain that circumnavigates costly (processing-time-wise) long-term thinking and instead makes quick, short-sighted decisions. Hence impulse buying from otherwise rational people. Does anyone remember this article? Or am I just making it up?
Well, let's look at it this way. If he is claiming that you can do whatever you want if you throw enough money around, then you are claiming that you can do whatever you want if you throw enough services around. Both of these are ridiculous, so let's tone down the rhetoric.
No one is talking about letting companies do whatever they want. We are talking about limited access to purchasing private land for the purposes of building an infrastructure. He says that the company should purchase that land with money, while you are saying that the company should purchase the land by extending the infrastructure farther. So, remuneration for your loss of land is not the fair price for that land, but access to the infrastructure by someone else.
He says that if you are forced to sell something, you should at least be paid cash for it (then you can spend that cash how you want), while you are saying that the state can not only force you to sell, but also force you to accept a specific and very narrow form of reimbursement.
I'm asking this honestly, because I want to know: do you have citations for that info about cable companies getting court orders preventing rural consumers from obtaining satellite? I haven't heard about it before, but I don't follow that particular market too closely, either. If what you say is true, I would like to read about the circumstances.
Anecdotally, I can tell you about my situation. I live in a rural area myself, where cable stops about a half a mile from my house. It sucks, but I don't feel that I'm *entitled* to cable internet. Sure, there is only one cable provider in the area, but when we got wireless a few months ago (the antenna is on top of the local grain silos, how's that for rural?) the cable company didn't complain. There is no bad blood on either part. It simply wouldn't be profitable to run cable half a mile for one customer, and we understand that. So, we go to a competitor, and they understand that. I don't see why the law should force them to run their cable out to us if it won't be profitable. It is not paid for by my taxes.
I know it sounds like I'm sacrificing my soul at the altar of profit or whatever, but think about this: if the state forced the cable company to build out to my house, or beyond, the start-up that provides wireless would probably not have come to our area (we were in close contact with the company, trying to get them to come out here). If the state forced build-out, it would have (1) lowered the profits of the cable company, (2) lowered the profits of the wireless company, and (3) probably prevented the wireless company from even coming here and providing internet to others who are quite a bit farther from the cable line than we are. As it is, we and our neighbors get our internet, the cable company doesn't have to worry about unprofitable build-out, and the wireless company is making some good money in a new area. Like I said, this is purely anecdotal, but the theory applies elsewhere: don't force companies to provide a service, let the demand from the consumers make it desirable to provide the service.
This is why I am so interested in reading more about cable companies claiming monopolies. Build-out laws would have hurt my area, but if they really are stopping competitors while still not providing the service themselves, then yes I agree with you, they should be subject to such laws.
If no one will ever be able to use its full potential, there is something wrong with the design of the system, something wrong with the developer tools, or they are overcharging us.
"No one will never be able to eat all of this 192 oz. strip steak. That's what makes it so good! Never mind the fact that the part of it you do eat won't be as good as the competition's 24 oz. You're getting a better deal because you're getting so much MORE of it!"
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I think the difference in all of these cases is that your example products are all being sold by the same overall company, while Cryptozoic is different company from Blizzard, so the competition, to the extent that there is any, can and will hurt them.
But I don't actually know anything about Cryptozoic. I'm just basing this entirely on a careful reading of what grandparent post said.
I think one of the big culprits here is generated documentation.
Imagine writing some code... you get through a couple hundred lines of code detailing what Wangles are and what you can do with them.
No matter how on-the-ball you are, you're still going to be writing comments and documentation from the position of someone who can see the whole tamale. You know what Throbbing does, and you know why you would want to do it, because you just have to hit page up and *duh*.
Then the doc generator passes through, slurps up the comments (but obviously not the code) and plops it in to some template that was designed to fit the lowest common denominator, and all of a sudden it's completely out of context.
Maybe this isn't how MSDN actually generates its docs, so maybe I'm way off base here, I don't know. But it sure looks that way to me.
TL;DR: closed-source bad, open source good. Come on, mod points!
"I have altered the details of our arrangement, pray I do not alter it any further."
Hmm, now who said that?
I'm a surveyor, and I use GPS to locate points to within a few hundredths of a foot (a couple centimeters, if you will). So, I don't know if my interpretation is exactly what the article intended, but I saw "tens of meters" and immediately thought "really really bad" and didn't even consider the possibility that the range of variation in "tens of meters" would be significant...
It's interesting how our minds immediately write things off like that... In most other circumstances I think I would have went exactly where you did and asked about the precision.
Something like... if you or I heard that it would cost "several billion dollars" to buy out a particular company, we'd just go "whoa, that's a lot"... but there's a select subset of people who would perk up their ears and say "umm, how much is 'several'?"
Yeah, I'm getting that vibe too... He asks "what would you use this bandwidth for?" then when people answer, he says "well that wouldn't be useful to me" in a way that implies it would be *wrong* for it to be useful for anyone else.
To continue your car analogy, he's like those assholes who go 45 in a 55, then speed up to 70 when you try to pass them, because he thinks the world would be a better, safer place if we all drove 45 or under.
Are alcoholics not "alcohol abusers?" It seems to me that they are defining "abuse" as falling outside of medically approved use, not legal standards.
And again, I don't think that "use and abuse" were being used as lexical replacements for "legal and illegal," but rather "healthy and unhealthy." (In the sense that the current medical establishment has fiat to determine what is and isn't healthy.)
Your connection of the evils of the U.S. legislature to the use of the phrase " drug abuse" by a British science publication is tenuous at best.
If you'll recall, I brought this up when the RIAA's boilerplate complaints were dismissed: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=297303&cid=20597841
My same arguments apply here - the Bell Atlantic decision is a very bad thing, and using it to dismiss Limewire's suit proves the exact point I raised back then.
Not only that, but post-employment non-compete terms are also generally unenforceable in California and a few other states. Legislators generally don't notice or care about such fine points as this, and most of the states that make non-competes unenforceable did so simply because, way back when the laws were being put on the books, the guy writing that particular law didn't like the idea of non-competes, and the legislature just goes along out of ignorance rather than understanding. Michigan actually changed, back in the 80s, from having unenforceable non-competes to having non-competes be enforceable without any restrictions. Turns out they made that change completely by accident, making an amendment that wiped out a section they wanted to get rid of - and inadvertently getting rid of the "no non-competes" section. A year or two later they figured out what they had done and put some sane restrictions on non-competes, but didn't make them completely unenforceable like it had been.
Some business/econ academics are trying to sift through the data from the patent office to see if it has had any effect on Michigan's innovation output. They hypothesize that one of the reasons for the Silicon Valley boom was that unenforceable non-competes made it very easy to talented people to move from company to company as their products remained interesting or profitable, and that Michigan is a perfect guinea pig to test this. I heard a lecture about it a couple of months ago, at which point their analysis of the Michigan data was inconclusive. Apparently patent office records don't give you a whole lot to go on.
Funny you should bring that point up: Bell Atlantic was a class action suit brought up against a big corporation by the little guy, who couldn't even get to discovery because the Supreme Court decided to add a plausibility requirement to complaints.
Basically, either way is going to leave open avenues for litigious bullying. However, with the new requirement, when the little guy brings a lawsuit against the big guy, and the court decides that the little guy hasn't stated a plausible claim, that's it - there is no legal recourse to prove that there was a violation, because the lawsuit has been dismissed. That's what discovery is supposed to be. Under the old system, with no plausibility requirement, the little guy got bullied, but if he grew a backbone (and money for attorney's fees, admittedly), he could still prove that the big guy was just bullying him. Sure, we're able to dismiss these cases more easily now, but in a few months the lawsuits are going to start being just specific enough to be plausible, because the RIAA has the resources to do a little bit more research.
Basically, under the old system, lawsuits would end at the bullied party's discretion - maybe monetary considerations made it a decision based on more than just the legal merits of their case, but they were the ones who decided to settle. Now, as in Bell Atlantic, there is no way the plaintiffs can do anything more about their claims - the lawsuit was ended at the discretion of the bully (alleged bully - there was never any plausible claim for relief under the Sherman Antitrust Act against Bell Atlantic - but we'll never know if there was evidence that may have made it plausible, will we?).
If (completely hypothetical here, just using the same parties as the actual discussion for convenience) a music downloader brought a suit against the RIAA claiming that they were using lawsuits to scare people or whatever, it would be dismissed because the music companies won't just surrender internal emails or memos discussing this tactic, so there is no plausible claim. If Bell Atlantic hadn't happened, an enterprising plaintiff could bring such a suit, and use discovery rules to compel the companies to divulge such evidence, if it existed.
Like I said, in this particular instance, I'm happy that the lawsuit didn't end with the defendant having to pay either a settlement or damages. However, I think that the law used to achieve this outcome is bad, and will in the long run be a huge detriment to "little guys" everywhere.
No no no no no! Plaintiffs should not have a "plausibility" requirement based on facts presented in the complaint. They are required to present a plausible case if they wish to win, of course, but the facts of the case should be presented after the discovery phase of the lawsuit, during which time they are able to use certain legal tools to aid them in finding the exact facts and natures of the violations.
Requiring the specific facts that make a "plausible" claim upon which relief may be granted to be present in a pleading has NEVER been required until Bell Atlantic v. Twombly was decided by the Supreme Court a few months ago. While the outcome in this particular situation (stopping the RIAA from making a likely frivolous claim) may been seen as a good thing, it is relying on a decision that overthrew decades of legal precedent designed to make sure everyone has their day in court, and had a fair shot at proving their claim.
The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure specifically state that boilerplate complaints are valid. They even PROVIDE THE FORMS for crying out loud. If the RIAA has no case, it should be determined by summary judgment, AFTER DISCOVERY, not by dismissal because plaintiff hasn't presented a plausible case. That is what discovery is supposed to be for, especially in this type of case, where defendant has control of the evidence that may prove their violation, and certainly wouldn't surrender it without a court order.
The Bell Atlantic decision is a broken abortion of justice, and this case is relying on its bad law.
OK, that was a bit melodramatic. But you get the gist.
You're right, I never have watched a full season of Survivor. I may try to give it a shot some time, you do make it sound interesting. Thanks for the reply, I had misinterpreted what you were saying a bit.
I had a lengthy conversation with an 8-year-old about A Midsummer Night's Dream after we saw a performance of it. Later, I had a lengthy conversation about the play with my professor who did his doctoral thesis on Shakespeare. The age or intelligence of the people who are capable of discussing a work of art is not the measure of how genius it is. James Joyce's Ulysses isn't brilliant because of the fact that few people can understand it. Battlestar Galactica isn't un-intelligent just because an 8-year-old can talk about it. I can understand saying that it's not genius, but saying that it's not genius because an 8-year old understands some of the issues it presents is specious.
Also, I dislike reality TV because they claim to be "real" but they are often scripted or at least contrived. As sociological tools, they are about as useful as a scripted show, and often less fun to watch. I don't know a lot about game theory, so I can't comment there.
If you meant "Hillary" why didn't you say "Hillary?" Like the GP I have no issue with your original post, but please do realize how easy it is for people to misinterpret what you say even without using a word like "leader" and expecting people to get "Hillary Clinton" out of it when she's only a Senator. Also, the "monkey see, monkey do" subject line (even though this refers to the RIAA, not Bush) draws immediate connections to the president because a lot of the fun poked at him on the internet involves likening him to a monkey or chimp.
People can't read your mind; they have to make due with your words.
I'm curious: everyone is talking about the RIAA withdrawing the case almost immediately, but the letter was sent to a law firm hired by the RIAA, not the RIAA itself. Would the firm have withdrawn the case on its own, or would they have talked to their clients first?
I have this mental image of a corporate bigwig at Sony sitting down in his office with his morning coffee and paper, when suddenly a red phone on his desk starts to flash. He moves his paper with a grunt to see what is disturbing his read, but when he sees which phone it is, his eyes go wide and the color drains from his face. Slowly he picks it up, and a timid voice on the other end says, "Sir? It's Tom Kerr. It's finally happened..." Cut to a slow-motion high-angle shot of the coffee mug falling out of his hand and shattering on the ground...
Clock out time, that's it. Turn the machine off, leave the building, and forget about it until 9am. If your business can't handle that, they obviously need more staff. That's a fallacious argument. "Ability to integrate with" is a non-transitive relationship, and sleep is a particularly good example of why this is so. Here's your reasoning applied to another example: Sleep can't be integrated with baking cookies, and sleep can't be integrated with talking on the phone, therefore baking cookies can't be integrated with talking on the phone.
Also, it's not impossible for your higher order needs to be fulfilled by work. In fact, I would say it is the most likely place where self-actualization will occur. Compartmentalizing your life and writing off work as dead time (as far as high order needs is concerned) seems extremely unhealthy. Maybe you need a better job.
Right, hence the other point of the article: they also bought it to become number one in the internet video market. First and foremost, they were paying for market dominance; the chance to get favorable rulings was secondary.
I think that the GP was talking about the state of the government's treatment of civil rights, not any of its economic policies that may or may not have caused the things you mentioned.
Based on this post, and others of yours previously in the thread, this is what I have gathered about how you assign political leanings:
1. Most of those whom people call "liberals" are not, in fact, liberals, because they don't act as a true liberal acts.
2. Those whom people call "conservatives" are conservatives because everyone calls them conservatives.
Someone earlier raised the point that most "conservatives" these days don't actually act according to the classic definition of conservatism, and you called this spin. In this post, you just said that most "liberals" these days don't act according to the classic definition of liberalism, and thus are not liberals. So, how do you (I mean you personally) determine what someone's political leanings are? By what most people think they are, or by what they do? Or have I mis-read you?
I suppose in the grand scheme of things this really doesn't matter, because obviously you and I both care enough to actually research the candidates and vote for the person rather than for the letter after their name or any labels assigned to them, but I still find this question interesting from a linguistic and a sociological perspective.
I won't argue that there is a market for radio with a liberal viewpoint, but do remember that voting against Republicans is not the same thing as being a liberal.
No no, the market will cause standardization on its own, it doesn't require a non-business body (unless you call the consumers as a whole the "superceding, non-business body"). Look at Betamax/VHS, or mobile phone formats in the U.S. Do you honestly think that Blu-Ray and and HD-DVD will both live on forever until a committee makes a choice? The real difference between standards in a regulated and an unregulated market: the unregulated market will choose the best format, while a regulated market will choose a standard faster. I would rather wait for enthusiasts and early adopters to find the best format than be forced into a standard that may not be the best. You would rather avoid the uncertainty, which is certainly understandable. I don't think that particular debate can be resolved very easily. What I'm trying to say is that, contrary to what you seem to be arguing, there are definite benefits to an unregulated market. Also, as for "worshiping 'market forces,' not promoting fair use" - I would argue that allowing customers to make their own decisions IS fair use.
Yes, it is as easy as all that, but unlike not practicing safe driving habits, doing stupid things on the computer will do little more to the user than slow down his or her programs. The computer will not inflict any sort of physical or emotional (despite what anti-porn lobbyists may claim ;)) harm to anyone using it, regardless of what pop-ups they click of free screen-savers they download. Thus, there is little motivation to learn even that certain behavior will cause Bad Things, much less what that behavior may be and how to avoid it.
No, they're showing that shoppers are considering the loss of money - the thing they have in their hand - rather than the loss of purchasing power - something that really exists only in the abstract.
I seem to remember several months/years ago someone linked this to humanity's ancient roots as hunter-gatherers - when we were out scrounging up food, we had to think quickly and decisively and make immediate choices based only on what data were directly in front of us. Today, shopping presents enough of the right stimuli to re-activate this portion of the brain that circumnavigates costly (processing-time-wise) long-term thinking and instead makes quick, short-sighted decisions. Hence impulse buying from otherwise rational people. Does anyone remember this article? Or am I just making it up?
Well, let's look at it this way. If he is claiming that you can do whatever you want if you throw enough money around, then you are claiming that you can do whatever you want if you throw enough services around. Both of these are ridiculous, so let's tone down the rhetoric.
No one is talking about letting companies do whatever they want. We are talking about limited access to purchasing private land for the purposes of building an infrastructure. He says that the company should purchase that land with money, while you are saying that the company should purchase the land by extending the infrastructure farther. So, remuneration for your loss of land is not the fair price for that land, but access to the infrastructure by someone else.
He says that if you are forced to sell something, you should at least be paid cash for it (then you can spend that cash how you want), while you are saying that the state can not only force you to sell, but also force you to accept a specific and very narrow form of reimbursement.
I like his idea better.
I'm asking this honestly, because I want to know: do you have citations for that info about cable companies getting court orders preventing rural consumers from obtaining satellite? I haven't heard about it before, but I don't follow that particular market too closely, either. If what you say is true, I would like to read about the circumstances.
Anecdotally, I can tell you about my situation. I live in a rural area myself, where cable stops about a half a mile from my house. It sucks, but I don't feel that I'm *entitled* to cable internet. Sure, there is only one cable provider in the area, but when we got wireless a few months ago (the antenna is on top of the local grain silos, how's that for rural?) the cable company didn't complain. There is no bad blood on either part. It simply wouldn't be profitable to run cable half a mile for one customer, and we understand that. So, we go to a competitor, and they understand that. I don't see why the law should force them to run their cable out to us if it won't be profitable. It is not paid for by my taxes.
I know it sounds like I'm sacrificing my soul at the altar of profit or whatever, but think about this: if the state forced the cable company to build out to my house, or beyond, the start-up that provides wireless would probably not have come to our area (we were in close contact with the company, trying to get them to come out here). If the state forced build-out, it would have (1) lowered the profits of the cable company, (2) lowered the profits of the wireless company, and (3) probably prevented the wireless company from even coming here and providing internet to others who are quite a bit farther from the cable line than we are. As it is, we and our neighbors get our internet, the cable company doesn't have to worry about unprofitable build-out, and the wireless company is making some good money in a new area. Like I said, this is purely anecdotal, but the theory applies elsewhere: don't force companies to provide a service, let the demand from the consumers make it desirable to provide the service.
This is why I am so interested in reading more about cable companies claiming monopolies. Build-out laws would have hurt my area, but if they really are stopping competitors while still not providing the service themselves, then yes I agree with you, they should be subject to such laws.
If no one will ever be able to use its full potential, there is something wrong with the design of the system, something wrong with the developer tools, or they are overcharging us.
"No one will never be able to eat all of this 192 oz. strip steak. That's what makes it so good! Never mind the fact that the part of it you do eat won't be as good as the competition's 24 oz. You're getting a better deal because you're getting so much MORE of it!"