Hate to say it, but this is exactly the reaction I had when I read this. Sure, you could use "a $2 cable" to hook a smartphone to a TV (though last I checked, they cost more like $30 and most smartphones don't have the right ports for it), but it would look horrible on the TV.
I was actually thinking along the same lines, except I was wondering how long before Boeing sues the NSA/the US government over this? It would be interesting to see ISDS actually do some good...
Does anyone even care about the Olympics anymore? IMO they lost all legitimacy a few years back when they held the Games--which are supposed to be a celebration of the dignity of mankind and the nobility of the human spirit--in China.
Free software was not created 30 years ago; proprietary software was created slightly more than 30 years ago. Programmers sharing code freely and building off each others' ideas has always been the default state. Stallman just took the whole thing and politicized it.
BRICS? Wow. Anyone who still thinks China is a "rising economy" is not paying attention. What they are is a (soon to be former) immense bubble economy. They've spent years building up the biggest, most ridiculous real estate bubble in history, and it's in the early stages of collapsing right now. Remember 2008? That was nothing. Just watch...
So, rather than admit that Comcast's business model has always been based on lying to consumers in telling them they bought bandwidth it never really wanted to sell them, Comcast is trying to get Netflix to rebuy the bandwidth consumers already bought in order to access those consumers.
Please don't call it lying; that lets them off the hook far too easily.
Let's call a spade a spade here. In any other context, (except airline tickets, which get away with this same trick somehow,) selling something you do not actually have available is known as fraud, not lying.
If it's defamatory, let Gurry take it to court and have it declared so. You don't just get to censor stuff based on one party's claim.
...unless the problem in question is copyright infringement and not defamation, in which case yes you do because the DMCA takedown system is a good idea that helps promote the progress of the Internet, right?
This is the same Gurry who was already involved in highly questionable scandals involving ignoring UN sanctions against both North Korea and Iran, to send them computers, which WIPO idiotically believed those countries would use to bolster their local patent systems. Because, when you think of Iran and North Korea, I'm sure you think about their patent systems.
I've always wondered what the big deal is about that. People who don't want rogue nations with nuclear programs to import computers don't understand computers, or Moore's Law.
Here's a hint as to the scope of the problem: the one single computer I'm writing this response on right now has more processing power than every computer that had ever been used to run nuclear simulations at the end of the Cold War put together. If the governments of Iran or North Korea have one modern PC, there's really no point in denying them any more.
Yeah. Thing is, talking about how something isn't a problem (or isn't a problem anymore) doesn't get you ratings, so the media is always going to harp on stupid crap like this.
I don't see any clear connection. I'm new at my current job, but at the last one, (as a programmer,) women were by no means invisible in the office. Yes, there were more men there than women, by about 2:1, but there were women all over the office, including working as developers.
And I can guarantee you that if any of us had ever found out that our boss was beating his wife or his kids, he'd have had about 20 angry employees (of both sexes) making trouble for him any way we could. "Bro culture" has no place in a programming office where almost every developer (male and female) is married with children.
Frankly from your story it sounds like her ex-husband was wealthy, powerful and connected. All recipes for making sure he'll come out the winner in the courts.
Nope, he's a guy with a horrible work ethic and an even worse temper which makes it very difficult to hold down a job long enough to become wealthy. I lost count of how many times, during those seven years, we had to move to another state entirely because he managed to screw things up so badly with his current employer that he not only lost his job but would never be able to work for anyone who would be able to contact that employer.
As for "powerful," not in the way you're thinking of. His social power comes from physical violence, bullying and intimidation. He's quite good at that. We did get a guardian ad litem appointed at one point. He came by a grand total of once and then vanished. There's more than one person and/or entire family who could greatly help our case if they weren't absolutely petrified at the thought of actually testifying against him.
Connected: no. It's hard to form a network of contacts when you're constantly alienating people.
His power comes from having no morality to restrain him from doing things we are not willing to do, and from keeping his expenses extremely low by mooching off of others and refusing to pay child support, so that he can afford to fight things out in court and still have enough left over to fund lavish gifts to corrupt the children.
As noted in the article, the "father's rights" site is hardly an unbiased source.
When my mom, after living through seven years of hell-on-earth, finally had an opportunity to take the kids and run, (the fact that it took that long to find the first opportunity should tell you something!) our experience was the exact opposite of what this guy is describing.
She had multiple years worth of documented proof of physical and emotional abuse, plus evidence that he had been cheating on her with another man. But ever since then he has used the legal system to hound her and obstruct every attempt to find some sort of justice and security for her kids: weaseling out of paying child support, disregarding both visitation plans and restraining orders, getting a visitation plan in the first place, and then later an unsupervised one, and so on. Even when we found evidence that he and the man he was living with were engaged in what psychologists refer to as "classical grooming behavior," trying to prepare my (underage) little brother as a future sexual partner, neither police nor the courts would do a thing, because no actual crime had been committed yet. A restraining order was issued against his partner, preventing him from being present at any visits, (which was, of course, entirely on the honor system because the visits are unsupervised,) but no modifications were made to the visitation plan.
Any attempt to seek legal relief from his monstrous behavior, or to even attempt to enforce any decision that's already been handed down, (such as child support obligations,) gets stonewalled with a bunch of shystering about how my mom is "persecuting him" because she disapproves of his present homosexual lifestyle and attempting to interfere with his rights as a father. And the courts eat the whole thing up!
And all that money that he doesn't pay out in child support, he spends it directly on the younger kids, lavishly. Buying them clothes, toys, even cars as they get old enough. Taking them to Disneyland, and so on, while our family could barely afford to raise them, and all the while whispering poison in their ears, to the point where he's got the two youngest convinced that he's the good parent, the one who loves them. When I try to tell them about how, when they were just babies, he would beat me and psychologically torture me on a regular basis, they think I am lying to them.
So no. As long as a man who belongs six feet under, or at the very least in a jail cell, is running around free to corrupt my family, with the courts and justice system fully complicit in his acts, I will never believe that "fathers' rights" are somehow unfairly under-represented, any more than I will believe someone telling me that the sun is blue, and for the same reason: I have seen that this is not true with my own eyes.
This. It's essentially deciding that "instead of trying to deal with my problems in some way--any way--I will run away from them in the most definitive way possible." How does that not constitute cowardice?
The very fact that former USTR Ron Kirk admitted that they won't reveal the details of these agreements because the public might not like them explains exactly why this kind of secrecy is undemocratic.
Why has that quote from Ron Kirk not been turned into a soundbite/rallying cry and spread around the entire Internet by now?
Well, even if you don't see anything wrong with his blasphemy, the whole "I'm the biggest, toughest guy around and if I beat your champion, we get to enslave your nation" thing really ought to rub you the wrong way. IMO anyone with an attitude like that deserves a stone in the forehead.
There wasn't really a villain; just a guy smart enough to fight effectively and a less-smart guy who didn't realize that he stood exactly as good a chance of winning as that poor mook who pulled a sword on Indiana Jones, and for the same basic reason.
David and Goliath has to be one of the most misunderstood stories in the history of storytelling.
On this side, we have a big guy with a spear and heavy armor, who is going to move slowly. On the other side, standing well out of spear range, we have a trained slinger who is able to launch stones hard enough and accurate enough to kill bears and lions. Who's the favorite to win? This really should be obvious, and yet everyone gets it wrong.
The only surprising thing about the story is that at no point did the big guy ever seem to realize just how screwed he was!
On the post: Jeffrey Katzenberg: The New Pricing Model For Movies Will Be Based On The Viewer's Screen Size
Re: You're wrong!
On the post: DailyDirt: Useful Diamonds
On the post: Brazil Passed On Boeing For $4.5 Billion Fighter Jet Deal Because Of Concerns Over NSA Surveillance
Re: How Long...
On the post: NBC Insists Twitter Is Useless Because Not Enough People Tweeted During The Olympics... Which NBC Made Difficult To Watch Online
On the post: Open Source Seed Initiative: 'Free The Seed!'
On the post: Meet TISA: Another Major Treaty Negotiated In Secret Alongside TPP And TTIP
On the post: Netflix Exploring Peer-To-Peer Delivery Just As Spotify Gets Ready To Kill Its Peer-To-Peer Streaming
Please don't call it lying; that lets them off the hook far too easily.
Let's call a spade a spade here. In any other context, (except airline tickets, which get away with this same trick somehow,) selling something you do not actually have available is known as fraud, not lying.
On the post: Shameful: WIPO Threatens Blogger With Criminal Charges For Accurately Reporting On WIPO Director's Alleged Misconduct
...unless the problem in question is copyright infringement and not defamation, in which case yes you do because the DMCA takedown system is a good idea that helps promote the progress of the Internet, right?
On the post: Shameful: WIPO Threatens Blogger With Criminal Charges For Accurately Reporting On WIPO Director's Alleged Misconduct
I've always wondered what the big deal is about that. People who don't want rogue nations with nuclear programs to import computers don't understand computers, or Moore's Law.
Here's a hint as to the scope of the problem: the one single computer I'm writing this response on right now has more processing power than every computer that had ever been used to run nuclear simulations at the end of the Cold War put together. If the governments of Iran or North Korea have one modern PC, there's really no point in denying them any more.
On the post: Disgrace: RadiumOne Allowing CEO To Remain After Beating His Girlfriend
Re: Re: Re: Re: Blank 3:39pm comment
See also: racism in the USA.
On the post: Disgrace: RadiumOne Allowing CEO To Remain After Beating His Girlfriend
Re: Re: Blank 3:39pm comment
And I can guarantee you that if any of us had ever found out that our boss was beating his wife or his kids, he'd have had about 20 angry employees (of both sexes) making trouble for him any way we could. "Bro culture" has no place in a programming office where almost every developer (male and female) is married with children.
On the post: Disgrace: RadiumOne Allowing CEO To Remain After Beating His Girlfriend
Re:
Yeah, let's wait until there's another victim to bust the guy, because one just isn't enough...
On the post: Ex-Wife Allegedly Using Copyright To Take Down Husband's Suicide Note
Re: Re:
Nope, he's a guy with a horrible work ethic and an even worse temper which makes it very difficult to hold down a job long enough to become wealthy. I lost count of how many times, during those seven years, we had to move to another state entirely because he managed to screw things up so badly with his current employer that he not only lost his job but would never be able to work for anyone who would be able to contact that employer.
As for "powerful," not in the way you're thinking of. His social power comes from physical violence, bullying and intimidation. He's quite good at that. We did get a guardian ad litem appointed at one point. He came by a grand total of once and then vanished. There's more than one person and/or entire family who could greatly help our case if they weren't absolutely petrified at the thought of actually testifying against him.
Connected: no. It's hard to form a network of contacts when you're constantly alienating people.
His power comes from having no morality to restrain him from doing things we are not willing to do, and from keeping his expenses extremely low by mooching off of others and refusing to pay child support, so that he can afford to fight things out in court and still have enough left over to fund lavish gifts to corrupt the children.
On the post: Ex-Wife Allegedly Using Copyright To Take Down Husband's Suicide Note
When my mom, after living through seven years of hell-on-earth, finally had an opportunity to take the kids and run, (the fact that it took that long to find the first opportunity should tell you something!) our experience was the exact opposite of what this guy is describing.
She had multiple years worth of documented proof of physical and emotional abuse, plus evidence that he had been cheating on her with another man. But ever since then he has used the legal system to hound her and obstruct every attempt to find some sort of justice and security for her kids: weaseling out of paying child support, disregarding both visitation plans and restraining orders, getting a visitation plan in the first place, and then later an unsupervised one, and so on. Even when we found evidence that he and the man he was living with were engaged in what psychologists refer to as "classical grooming behavior," trying to prepare my (underage) little brother as a future sexual partner, neither police nor the courts would do a thing, because no actual crime had been committed yet. A restraining order was issued against his partner, preventing him from being present at any visits, (which was, of course, entirely on the honor system because the visits are unsupervised,) but no modifications were made to the visitation plan.
Any attempt to seek legal relief from his monstrous behavior, or to even attempt to enforce any decision that's already been handed down, (such as child support obligations,) gets stonewalled with a bunch of shystering about how my mom is "persecuting him" because she disapproves of his present homosexual lifestyle and attempting to interfere with his rights as a father. And the courts eat the whole thing up!
And all that money that he doesn't pay out in child support, he spends it directly on the younger kids, lavishly. Buying them clothes, toys, even cars as they get old enough. Taking them to Disneyland, and so on, while our family could barely afford to raise them, and all the while whispering poison in their ears, to the point where he's got the two youngest convinced that he's the good parent, the one who loves them. When I try to tell them about how, when they were just babies, he would beat me and psychologically torture me on a regular basis, they think I am lying to them.
So no. As long as a man who belongs six feet under, or at the very least in a jail cell, is running around free to corrupt my family, with the courts and justice system fully complicit in his acts, I will never believe that "fathers' rights" are somehow unfairly under-represented, any more than I will believe someone telling me that the sun is blue, and for the same reason: I have seen that this is not true with my own eyes.
On the post: Ex-Wife Allegedly Using Copyright To Take Down Husband's Suicide Note
Re: Re: Re: Sad as it is...
On the post: 'Radical' Publisher Claims Copyright On Free Collection Of Marx And Engels Works; Orders Them Taken Down
Confusing quote
I think someone accidentally a few words there...
On the post: Sending A Message: It's Time To Stop Secret Trade Agreements That Undermine Democracy
Why has that quote from Ron Kirk not been turned into a soundbite/rallying cry and spread around the entire Internet by now?
On the post: Backlash Aftermath: King Suddenly Turns Amicable In Trademark Disputes
Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Backlash Aftermath: King Suddenly Turns Amicable In Trademark Disputes
Re: Re:
On the post: Backlash Aftermath: King Suddenly Turns Amicable In Trademark Disputes
On this side, we have a big guy with a spear and heavy armor, who is going to move slowly. On the other side, standing well out of spear range, we have a trained slinger who is able to launch stones hard enough and accurate enough to kill bears and lions. Who's the favorite to win? This really should be obvious, and yet everyone gets it wrong.
The only surprising thing about the story is that at no point did the big guy ever seem to realize just how screwed he was!
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