Surely you do not completely discount civil disobedience as a tactic with no redeeming social value, even if you are not specifically a proponent of Uber.
It seems like a lot of people use the argument that a person (or in this case, company) shouldn't be punished for their act of civil disobedience. That argument is ridiculous. 50 years ago, activists committed acts of civil disobedience knowing full well that they would be punished for them. The whole point of civil disobedience was to use the punishment to draw attention to their cause.
Claiming that your actions are civil disobedience and then trying to escape punishment doesn't make you a hero. It makes you a coward.
Parachuting a container full of IT gear into a war zone is challenging enough
Silly me, I thought it would only require attaching a parachute and gravity.
The part that you're missing is "and have it land where you want it to." I know someone that use to work on parachuting supply containers, so I've heard about how difficult it is.
How about I come by your home and leave a brick on the floor, is it really so hard to just put it in the trash if you don't want it? The point is, it is a theft of your time and effort.
And if you aren't allowed into their home, you can just toss it through a window.
If you operate a movie theatre, you can't check passports on the door and only allow citizens of a specific country to enter.
True, but you can be pretty certain that someone coming in to your movie theater is physically located in your country. It's also a reasonable assumption that it's legal for them to be there.
You can't stop someone sending physical media across borders, although the north koreans keep trying.
Maybe you can't achieve perfect enforcement, but I would guess that every country in the world has laws about what physical items can be brought into or sent out from that country.
Refusing to sell content to someone based on their location or nationality should be illegal as it's discrimination. Similarly, trying to carve the world up into arbitrary areas so you can enforce exclusive distributors in each area is anti-competitive and should also be illegal.
I agree that that's a great ideal. The problem is, under who's jurisdiction? For example, the United States has very little control over what companies do in other countries (openly, anyway; I'm sure there's plenty of military and economic threats being passed around back channels), nor can the United States force companies from other countries to sell in the United States. You would need either an international treaty, which the media companies would never allow, or a world government with this kind of authority, which the UN is unlikely to get any time soon.
Ubuntu hacked a Motorola Atrix so it ran Android when you used it like a phone, but plug it into a dock and suddenly it became a full blown Linux desktop.
Ubuntu hacked...? I seem to recall that being a feature that was implemented by Motorola.
I certainly wasn't trying to argue that the prices 20 years ago or the relative decrease in price since then was in any way connected to copyright infringement. I only meant to point out that the relative price for a new game has gone down. Exactly why that has happened, I don't really know.
Isn't the price of a new game typically $50-60? That's the same as 20 years ago, so in inflation-adjusted dollars, the prices have dropped quite a bit.
I do agree with you about the extra downloadable content issue, but I don't usually buy games like those.
Exactly. Assuming that Sprint is a rational actor in the market, there are two possibilities*:
1. Sprint makes a profit from offering things like extra warranties, either directly, by selling the accessories for a higher price, or indirectly, by gaining customers that they otherwise wouldn't gain. If Sprint is making a profit, then they would continue offering these benefits and continue making a profit.
2. Sprint is losing money from offering these benefits. In this case, it would be a net gain in profit to stop offering these benefits.
Note that Net Neutrality regulations and false advertising laws do not appear anywhere in the math.
* I'll ignore the possibility that Sprint is breaking exactly even on it.
Would be fun to observe people waving their hands in complex patterns detected by a built-in watch motion sensor to unlock things.
Wow, I think you just implemented wizard spells with a somatic component. Add in voice recognition and the need to have your phone with you, and you've got verbal and material components too.
When I do a Google search for "Pacifist Enlistment Options" I get nothing back. Please help me out and point me to where I can enlist but specify that I don't want to be subject to orders that will help kill people.
If by "enlist" you mean becoming an enlisted soldier, then you probably don't have much choice in the matter. If you just mean joining the military, then if you have a college degree in some science or engineering field, you can become an officer and work at someplace like a Navy research lab. There probably isn't much need for computer scientists or physicists in Afghanistan, so you most likely won't be deployed to a combat zone.
If you don't use a Monster watch band, you won't get true time fidelity. Monster watch bands give you perfectly clear seconds, while all those cheap watch bands will only give you ugly, degraded seconds.
As an aside, I'd rather work with someone who was a complete asshole, but often right, than a person who was always nice, but often incorrect.
I wouldn't. When the asshole is incorrect, they'll still be an asshole. They'll probably be an even bigger asshole because you dared challenge their wisdom.
This means that there are, quite literally, tens of thousands of people who are *perfectly capable* of being excellent software engineers - just as good as you - but who are not working in that field because they've been told, in effect "sorry, Black dudes, and girls of all colors can't do this stuff. Maybe you'd like dealing drugs or baking cakes instead?"
But that's fiction. Black kids aren't being told that at all. Instead, many deliberately avoid academic and STEM fields because their own peers disapprove of it.
Just to be pedantic, that would mean that they are being told that they can't (or at least shouldn't) do it. It doesn't necessarily have to be an adult that teaches children what jobs their gender, ethnicity, etc. can and cannot do. "Peer pressure" has been an issue at least since I was in grade school.
Suppose I said "To be fair to [a murderer], [other murderer1], [other murderer2], [other murderer3] and [other murderer4] didn't [fail to murder], either."
Suddenly it becomes (or should become) obvious that there is nothing relevant whatsoever about the other entity's actions that involves being "fair" to the entity being examined.
Google is being evil here. No slack for this should be contemplated whatsoever. It is irrelevant to our consideration of Google if/that others are being evil as well. The metric shouldn't in any way be "everyone does it", it should be "this company is doing bad things, and they should stop."
You rarely hear anyone say that Jack the Ripper was an evil person, but Charles Manson was really a nice guy that was just misunderstood.
In this case, though, you may get a large number of fanboys of other technology companies spouting about how this makes Google the most evil company in the history of the world.
1960s: "Cheap fusion power is only 40 years away."
1980s: "In 40 years we'll have cheap fusion power."
2015: "We're getting closer, at the rate we're making progress we'll have fusion power within 40 years"
And each time it was said, there was an assumption that funding would stay at the same level. Fusion power isn't X years away, it's Y dollars away. If we keep reducing the amount of money we spend on research and development, X will get larger, because Y isn't changing.
If they don't patent this, someone else will. Because we now have a "first to file" system, where prior art doesn't matter if the prior artist never patented it.
You need to stop getting your legal advice from trolls on Slashdot (and people need to stop modding this up), because this is completely wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Wars kill many, many more people each year than the flu, polio, etc.
Maybe in war-torn countries in Africa, but in the United States, influenza kills thousands every year.
Surely you do not completely discount civil disobedience as a tactic with no redeeming social value, even if you are not specifically a proponent of Uber.
It seems like a lot of people use the argument that a person (or in this case, company) shouldn't be punished for their act of civil disobedience. That argument is ridiculous. 50 years ago, activists committed acts of civil disobedience knowing full well that they would be punished for them. The whole point of civil disobedience was to use the punishment to draw attention to their cause.
Claiming that your actions are civil disobedience and then trying to escape punishment doesn't make you a hero. It makes you a coward.
Parachuting a container full of IT gear into a war zone is challenging enough
Silly me, I thought it would only require attaching a parachute and gravity.
The part that you're missing is "and have it land where you want it to." I know someone that use to work on parachuting supply containers, so I've heard about how difficult it is.
The manufacturer of the robot should be prosecuted if they didn't add the five laws to its programming.
Uh... three, sir.
Everyone can stop posting, we found today's winner of The Internet.
How about I come by your home and leave a brick on the floor, is it really so hard to just put it in the trash if you don't want it? The point is, it is a theft of your time and effort.
And if you aren't allowed into their home, you can just toss it through a window.
If you operate a movie theatre, you can't check passports on the door and only allow citizens of a specific country to enter.
True, but you can be pretty certain that someone coming in to your movie theater is physically located in your country. It's also a reasonable assumption that it's legal for them to be there.
You can't stop someone sending physical media across borders, although the north koreans keep trying.
Maybe you can't achieve perfect enforcement, but I would guess that every country in the world has laws about what physical items can be brought into or sent out from that country.
Refusing to sell content to someone based on their location or nationality should be illegal as it's discrimination. Similarly, trying to carve the world up into arbitrary areas so you can enforce exclusive distributors in each area is anti-competitive and should also be illegal.
I agree that that's a great ideal. The problem is, under who's jurisdiction? For example, the United States has very little control over what companies do in other countries (openly, anyway; I'm sure there's plenty of military and economic threats being passed around back channels), nor can the United States force companies from other countries to sell in the United States. You would need either an international treaty, which the media companies would never allow, or a world government with this kind of authority, which the UN is unlikely to get any time soon.
Ubuntu hacked a Motorola Atrix so it ran Android when you used it like a phone, but plug it into a dock and suddenly it became a full blown Linux desktop.
Ubuntu hacked...? I seem to recall that being a feature that was implemented by Motorola.
Cell reception, at least with T-Mobile, works quite well in Boston's subways.
I certainly wasn't trying to argue that the prices 20 years ago or the relative decrease in price since then was in any way connected to copyright infringement. I only meant to point out that the relative price for a new game has gone down. Exactly why that has happened, I don't really know.
Isn't the price of a new game typically $50-60? That's the same as 20 years ago, so in inflation-adjusted dollars, the prices have dropped quite a bit.
I do agree with you about the extra downloadable content issue, but I don't usually buy games like those.
Exactly. Assuming that Sprint is a rational actor in the market, there are two possibilities*:
1. Sprint makes a profit from offering things like extra warranties, either directly, by selling the accessories for a higher price, or indirectly, by gaining customers that they otherwise wouldn't gain. If Sprint is making a profit, then they would continue offering these benefits and continue making a profit.
2. Sprint is losing money from offering these benefits. In this case, it would be a net gain in profit to stop offering these benefits.
Note that Net Neutrality regulations and false advertising laws do not appear anywhere in the math.
* I'll ignore the possibility that Sprint is breaking exactly even on it.
Would be fun to observe people waving their hands in complex patterns detected by a built-in watch motion sensor to unlock things.
Wow, I think you just implemented wizard spells with a somatic component. Add in voice recognition and the need to have your phone with you, and you've got verbal and material components too.
Admit it, you just want real life to be more like a video game.
HP? They seem to like to hire complete failures.
When I do a Google search for "Pacifist Enlistment Options" I get nothing back. Please help me out and point me to where I can enlist but specify that I don't want to be subject to orders that will help kill people.
If by "enlist" you mean becoming an enlisted soldier, then you probably don't have much choice in the matter. If you just mean joining the military, then if you have a college degree in some science or engineering field, you can become an officer and work at someplace like a Navy research lab. There probably isn't much need for computer scientists or physicists in Afghanistan, so you most likely won't be deployed to a combat zone.
If you don't use a Monster watch band, you won't get true time fidelity. Monster watch bands give you perfectly clear seconds, while all those cheap watch bands will only give you ugly, degraded seconds.
It's not like he has to produce a new build or approve a new patch every 47 seconds to keep the world from exploding.
Is this the next season of 24?
If you're an engineer and you can't break something, obviously you aren't trying.
As an aside, I'd rather work with someone who was a complete asshole, but often right, than a person who was always nice, but often incorrect.
I wouldn't. When the asshole is incorrect, they'll still be an asshole. They'll probably be an even bigger asshole because you dared challenge their wisdom.
But that's fiction. Black kids aren't being told that at all. Instead, many deliberately avoid academic and STEM fields because their own peers disapprove of it.
Just to be pedantic, that would mean that they are being told that they can't (or at least shouldn't) do it. It doesn't necessarily have to be an adult that teaches children what jobs their gender, ethnicity, etc. can and cannot do. "Peer pressure" has been an issue at least since I was in grade school.
Suppose I said "To be fair to [a murderer], [other murderer1], [other murderer2], [other murderer3] and [other murderer4] didn't [fail to murder], either."
Suddenly it becomes (or should become) obvious that there is nothing relevant whatsoever about the other entity's actions that involves being "fair" to the entity being examined.
Google is being evil here. No slack for this should be contemplated whatsoever. It is irrelevant to our consideration of Google if/that others are being evil as well. The metric shouldn't in any way be "everyone does it", it should be "this company is doing bad things, and they should stop."
You rarely hear anyone say that Jack the Ripper was an evil person, but Charles Manson was really a nice guy that was just misunderstood.
In this case, though, you may get a large number of fanboys of other technology companies spouting about how this makes Google the most evil company in the history of the world.
1960s: "Cheap fusion power is only 40 years away." 1980s: "In 40 years we'll have cheap fusion power." 2015: "We're getting closer, at the rate we're making progress we'll have fusion power within 40 years"
And each time it was said, there was an assumption that funding would stay at the same level. Fusion power isn't X years away, it's Y dollars away. If we keep reducing the amount of money we spend on research and development, X will get larger, because Y isn't changing.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.
The professors I had in college must have been truly outstanding at doing, because they sure didn't bother teaching.
If they don't patent this, someone else will. Because we now have a "first to file" system, where prior art doesn't matter if the prior artist never patented it.
You need to stop getting your legal advice from trolls on Slashdot (and people need to stop modding this up), because this is completely wrong.