Perspective means a lot. There are nearly 1000 comments in this story, not just a few of which advocate some kind of government directed wealth redistribution system to correct poorness and an even greater number expressing some haphazard disdain for people with more wealth than the poster.
Meanwhile, before this story can be bumped off the front page, we have a who knows how many word story professing some guy's love for his video gaming system, two more stories about a different video gaming system, a spirited debate about the relative merits of cutting edge cellular phones, and a story about how inconvenient it is to have your email inbox cluttered with messages we don't want.
I myself manage to get to sleep almost every night despite the fact that I have stood by and taken photos of people who were so ruthlessly poor that they walked through minefields to sift through other people's trash. I stood there and took photos with $25,000 worth of camera equipment in my bag.
This is just human nature, we think of the position we're in as some kind of baseline.
While I don't pretend to know or care what this guy or his kids deserve, or that what they deserve or don't even matters, what do you suggest be done about this particular incident?
Should we march in the streets? Organize a letter writing campaign? Print out a copy of the article and FedEx it to someone who is on trial for illegal sharing of music to use as a defense and hope that the court won't notice that the CEO admitted that his kids downloaded rather than shared music? Maybe we, or as many of us as would fit, hide in his bushes until he leaves for work in the morning and hit him with the face with a pie?
I don't know, maybe all of them.
Or maybe none.
Maybe it won't matter because it is going to be difficult to get enough people together who are fired up enough over the moral inconsistency found in the children of an RIAA company CEO downloading music while the RIAA prosecutes people who share music. I would guess that you will have a hard time getting very many people to pay attention to you long enough to even explain the situation to them, and without a large number of people getting involved neither Warner nor the RIAA nor the AP is going to care. Not while they have actual atrocities to report.
The only thing that will get attention is the thing no one seems to be able to do: Stop buying what Warner sells. Despite all the dander that geeks get up over **AA antics they do not seem to be able to prevent themselves from consuming their content, either by pirating it or by standing in line to see their movies, buy their games, consoles, music, etc.
The problem is vicarious infringement. YouTube presumably makes money because people visit their site and they may or may not be in a position to prevent copyright infringement in the first place, thus they have some responsibilities beyond your A and B.
I'm going to go ahead and believe the guys at what is probably the most well respected private firearms training facility in the world (Gunsite), and Blackwater, who's training kept me and a whole lot of other people pretty safe despite being in one of the most fucked up places on earth, over some guy on Slashdot.
But I'm happy to let you hold such infantile views on the way these things go down as long as you don't try to force me to live the same way.
I'll have to think about this a little, but your idea of criminals buying guns because store clerks might be packing might be the stupidest possible anti-gun argument I've ever read. And there have been a lot. Are you seriously thinking that it is better to rely on the good graces of the person robbing you, if you don't carry they won't carry?
Any self-defense class will teach you that once someone enters 20ft of you your firearm is pointless
I have been through Gunsite's 350 pistol course and Blackwater's pre-deployment firearms course and I don't recall either of them making that claim. It might seem like a plausible idea to you but the at least a handful of the professionals appear disagree, or maybe they orgot to mention it.
What makes society half-useable is people don't usually have the desire or intentions to carry out such actions
I would put it on constitution more than desire or intentions, which is why the previous poster's idea that one day the West will take up arms against its government won't ever happen. Most people can't bear the thought of leaving behind their big screen TVs and beige two stories even though they might really really want to kill you because you are wearing a shirt with the logo of the sports team that just beat their favorite sports team.
The 'protection' afforded by carrying a firearm comes from the idea that criminals are less likely to attempt to victimize you if they think you might be carrying. Anything short of your scenario or something similar brings with it a higher likelihood of being killed. (Like this guy) Your government can always send out Lon Horiuchi if they think you might have a gun.
This system is used for international flights. All of the international flights I've been on with US carriers offered choices like Kosher, vegetarian, sometimes vegan, etc. Kosher is the way to go on an El Al flight, they put some serious effort into it.
If you think meal service is limited on US domestic flights, travel to sunny Africa and try the world's best named airline, 1Time. More Nice, Less Price. Your plane might even have tires mounted on the wheels!
I also imagine a world where rainbow colored ponies with bows in their manes give free rides to little children. A dutiful civil servant peers from his ever clean office window and smiles at the passing ponies before returning to his task of making the world an even better place than anyone could ever have imagined by trying to outdo his office-neighbor as measured by the purity of his altruism.
Our intent is obviously to confound him with the massive scale of the Zune.
He will think to himself, as I did while fumbling with one at B&H Photo, 'this thing must certainly be more than just a 30GB MP3/Video/Photo player given its size'. A 30GB iPod is relatively tiny, so the Zune must contain some kind of secret diabolical mechanical workings, gears and the like, that allow it to perform some task that the iPod cannot, like transform into a small motorbike or something.
I get as many days off per year as I like and I'm not living off a trust fund. I'm a freelance photographer and most of the work I do is For Hire and scheduled well out in advance. If I don't want to work in July I just don't schedule anything.
Even better, many of my assignments involve going to far flung places where my cell phone won't even work and WiFi hotspots have never been heard of. Even when I'm working I'm half on vacation. The downside is that there is a very real danger of being kidnapped and set on fire in a lot of the places, but it all balances out in the end.
It isn't in orbit and never will be unless the volcano it is bolted to erupts.
Re:Yeah yeah, you feel free to buy the £120
on
When Beige Won't Do
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· Score: 1
True, and this is acticle #1,000,000 announcing the end of beige cases stretching back over the last 10 years, so computers are not even a new front in the battle.
About a week ago I went to the hardware store to buy a new toilet. There were at least 4 dozen different models priced between $100 and $600 and from what I could tell they all did exactly the same thing in pretty much the same way. The $600 toilet was not, at least according to the salesperson who wandered by, some kind of space-toilet from the future with a built in laser docking system, it was just a fashionably shaped toilet with an elongated bowl offered in a multitude of colors other than standard toilet white. For an additional $500 you can have houseguests comment on how well your toilet's shape matches with the original Dali reprint you have hanging on your bathroom wall.
And that is just the toilets, washers and dryers are another field of fashion all to themselves.
If you think we will lapse into another Dark Ages because some fundie got a teaching job you need to calm down a little.
This is just a case of a zealous anti-Christian crossing paths with a zealous Christian and one of them happened to have a recording device. The school and the teacher are likely staying quiet on the advice of their attorneys and when it all plays out the two parties will probably settle out of court.
corporations looking for revenue in another corporation's pocket instead of mine
You do realize that if you are a customer of the latter corporation you end up paying just as if you were the target. This is similar to "corporations don't pay taxes".
There is a Wikipedia entry for it, if you trust such things to be correct.
And as far as I can tell the summary agrees with your first guess at the meaning of Net Neutrality. The idea is to pass legislation to prevent ISPs from doing something they aren't doing in any great numbers anyway in the absence of the legislation, presumably because we either suspect that they will begin doing what we don't want them to do or we just love legislation kind of in general and want more of it to be passed.
Slashdot Mirror
Meanwhile, before this story can be bumped off the front page, we have a who knows how many word story professing some guy's love for his video gaming system, two more stories about a different video gaming system, a spirited debate about the relative merits of cutting edge cellular phones, and a story about how inconvenient it is to have your email inbox cluttered with messages we don't want.
I myself manage to get to sleep almost every night despite the fact that I have stood by and taken photos of people who were so ruthlessly poor that they walked through minefields to sift through other people's trash. I stood there and took photos with $25,000 worth of camera equipment in my bag.
This is just human nature, we think of the position we're in as some kind of baseline.
Should we march in the streets? Organize a letter writing campaign? Print out a copy of the article and FedEx it to someone who is on trial for illegal sharing of music to use as a defense and hope that the court won't notice that the CEO admitted that his kids downloaded rather than shared music? Maybe we, or as many of us as would fit, hide in his bushes until he leaves for work in the morning and hit him with the face with a pie?
I don't know, maybe all of them.
Or maybe none.
Maybe it won't matter because it is going to be difficult to get enough people together who are fired up enough over the moral inconsistency found in the children of an RIAA company CEO downloading music while the RIAA prosecutes people who share music. I would guess that you will have a hard time getting very many people to pay attention to you long enough to even explain the situation to them, and without a large number of people getting involved neither Warner nor the RIAA nor the AP is going to care. Not while they have actual atrocities to report.
The only thing that will get attention is the thing no one seems to be able to do: Stop buying what Warner sells. Despite all the dander that geeks get up over **AA antics they do not seem to be able to prevent themselves from consuming their content, either by pirating it or by standing in line to see their movies, buy their games, consoles, music, etc.
You should read the Napster decision as well.
The problem is vicarious infringement. YouTube presumably makes money because people visit their site and they may or may not be in a position to prevent copyright infringement in the first place, thus they have some responsibilities beyond your A and B.
I'm going to go ahead and believe the guys at what is probably the most well respected private firearms training facility in the world (Gunsite), and Blackwater, who's training kept me and a whole lot of other people pretty safe despite being in one of the most fucked up places on earth, over some guy on Slashdot.
But I'm happy to let you hold such infantile views on the way these things go down as long as you don't try to force me to live the same way.
Any self-defense class will teach you that once someone enters 20ft of you your firearm is pointlessI have been through Gunsite's 350 pistol course and Blackwater's pre-deployment firearms course and I don't recall either of them making that claim. It might seem like a plausible idea to you but the at least a handful of the professionals appear disagree, or maybe they orgot to mention it.
I would put it on constitution more than desire or intentions, which is why the previous poster's idea that one day the West will take up arms against its government won't ever happen. Most people can't bear the thought of leaving behind their big screen TVs and beige two stories even though they might really really want to kill you because you are wearing a shirt with the logo of the sports team that just beat their favorite sports team.
The 'protection' afforded by carrying a firearm comes from the idea that criminals are less likely to attempt to victimize you if they think you might be carrying. Anything short of your scenario or something similar brings with it a higher likelihood of being killed. (Like this guy) Your government can always send out Lon Horiuchi if they think you might have a gun.
Only if convicted, and its Bill gates we're discussing here, so that isn't likely.
If you think meal service is limited on US domestic flights, travel to sunny Africa and try the world's best named airline, 1Time. More Nice, Less Price. Your plane might even have tires mounted on the wheels!
Scripophilists?
No, and neither have you.
I don't have a Treo 650 but if I did it would probably be happening to me too.
Make sure you save some laughs for this idiot too.
You know, you have helped me see the light here.
I'm going to melt down all the small arms I own and donate the funds I receive from selling the scrap to the VPC.
Can you recommend any other inanimate objects over which I can get hysterical?
Which is why you should be against gun control. The problem is that not everyone has one.
I also imagine a world where rainbow colored ponies with bows in their manes give free rides to little children. A dutiful civil servant peers from his ever clean office window and smiles at the passing ponies before returning to his task of making the world an even better place than anyone could ever have imagined by trying to outdo his office-neighbor as measured by the purity of his altruism.
Our intent is obviously to confound him with the massive scale of the Zune.
He will think to himself, as I did while fumbling with one at B&H Photo, 'this thing must certainly be more than just a 30GB MP3/Video/Photo player given its size'. A 30GB iPod is relatively tiny, so the Zune must contain some kind of secret diabolical mechanical workings, gears and the like, that allow it to perform some task that the iPod cannot, like transform into a small motorbike or something.
Because rahter than watch you they a) Tase you; b) Tase you; c) Tase you; d) Tase you; e) Tase you?
I get as many days off per year as I like and I'm not living off a trust fund. I'm a freelance photographer and most of the work I do is For Hire and scheduled well out in advance. If I don't want to work in July I just don't schedule anything.
Even better, many of my assignments involve going to far flung places where my cell phone won't even work and WiFi hotspots have never been heard of. Even when I'm working I'm half on vacation. The downside is that there is a very real danger of being kidnapped and set on fire in a lot of the places, but it all balances out in the end.
It isn't in orbit and never will be unless the volcano it is bolted to erupts.
True, and this is acticle #1,000,000 announcing the end of beige cases stretching back over the last 10 years, so computers are not even a new front in the battle.
About a week ago I went to the hardware store to buy a new toilet. There were at least 4 dozen different models priced between $100 and $600 and from what I could tell they all did exactly the same thing in pretty much the same way. The $600 toilet was not, at least according to the salesperson who wandered by, some kind of space-toilet from the future with a built in laser docking system, it was just a fashionably shaped toilet with an elongated bowl offered in a multitude of colors other than standard toilet white. For an additional $500 you can have houseguests comment on how well your toilet's shape matches with the original Dali reprint you have hanging on your bathroom wall.
And that is just the toilets, washers and dryers are another field of fashion all to themselves.
Patch Tuesday?
If you think we will lapse into another Dark Ages because some fundie got a teaching job you need to calm down a little.
This is just a case of a zealous anti-Christian crossing paths with a zealous Christian and one of them happened to have a recording device. The school and the teacher are likely staying quiet on the advice of their attorneys and when it all plays out the two parties will probably settle out of court.
You do realize that if you are a customer of the latter corporation you end up paying just as if you were the target. This is similar to "corporations don't pay taxes".
There is a Wikipedia entry for it, if you trust such things to be correct.
And as far as I can tell the summary agrees with your first guess at the meaning of Net Neutrality. The idea is to pass legislation to prevent ISPs from doing something they aren't doing in any great numbers anyway in the absence of the legislation, presumably because we either suspect that they will begin doing what we don't want them to do or we just love legislation kind of in general and want more of it to be passed.
Clear?