Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: There's a reason and it's simple
You're ignoring the issue of cost and using precisely the same arguments that all commercial spammers make: why shouldn't someone else be forced to pay for me to make money?
Craigslist is paying for the bandwidth to serve up the ads. Craigslist gets to decide who they give access to. It's that simple. If someone doesn't respect their wishes then what are they supposed to do, just roll over and say "Oh gee, it's just our bad luck that we have to pay an extra $10,000 a month for the bandwidth so that all these leeches can make money from our site"?
I've never heard of a case where cl sued someone without first sending them a letter telling them to stop doing what they're doing. If the idiots didn't stop then there isn't any bullying going on. It's a defensive action and not an offensive one.
Honestly I don't understand why people consider it their "right" to try to convert every website and every source of data on the planet into yet another commercial shithole for businesses to use/abuse in any way they feel.
Re: Re: Craigslist is for local communities, face to face transactions and moderated by the local community. It is not intended to be a nationwide or worldwide shopping site.
Why is it against the law to prove that you're using the gas in your car wrong? Should anyone who thinks they know better than you come and siphon the gas out of your car to use it properly?
Craigslist is paying for the bandwidth. They shouldn't have to pay for serving up more than a million pages per day for free so that someone else can make money from it.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Craigslist is for local communities, face to face transactions and moderated by the local community. It is not intended to be a nationwide or worldwide shopping site.
That would be because people who don't have an intent to buy don't try to re-sell the information for a profit.
Surely you're not claiming that a spider reading 50 million ads per month is equivalent to someone window shopping?
That isn't a problem with craigslist, it's a problem you encountered because you tried to use the wrong tool. A phillips head screwdriver isn't a problem when trying to put in slotted screws, it's just the wrong tool.
Craigslist just isn't a good solution for everyone. It's great for people looking to buy/sell face to face with their neighbors and who take an active part in managing their online community.
cl does provide nearby results BTW. For example.search bozeman.craigslist.org for "husqvarna" You get 2 local items and "Few LOCAL results found. Here are some from NEARBY areas..." with 21 matches from as far away as Kalispell (300 miles away)
How would that make their service better? Their service works just fine for what it was intended to do: serve local communities.
If a religious website sues porn sites who post on their site, would you say that they "litigate rather than innovate"? Porn postings run counter to the purpose of a religious website (well, some religions anyway)
Craigslist objects to aggregators because those things turn the site into something that goes against their published goals.
Item #1 on the cl 'about' page:
Q: What is craigslist?
A: Local classifieds and forums - community moderated, and largely free.
That's their goal. Litigating to stop others from thwarting their efforts towards those goals doesn't stop any innovation, and "innovation" does not apply to writing an aggregator anyway.
Why don't the aggregators simply build their own national classifieds site instead of capitalizing on craigslist? Because they aren't innovating, they're simply greedy middlemen eager to insert themselves into the process so they can skim a percentage off the top of the massive traffic that craigslist generates.
Again, if the craigslist features and policies don't suit your needs, why not just walk away? You paid nothing to use it. It's not like you're going to have to pay an early termination fee for giving it up.
It doesn't do what you need it to do. So walk away and find a service that does. Ebay is free for buyers to use and you can even set it up to get notifications when a Norton comes up for sale there - or get notified even if it's just some Amal carbs or Lucas rectifiers being parted out (yeah, I go that far back with bikes)
Google "nationwide classified ads". 944,000 hits on those words in that order. "free nationwide classified ads" gets 31,300 hits. I'm certain there are other sites out there that do what you want. Why not use them instead?
Re: Re: Craigslist is for local communities, face to face transactions and moderated by the local community. It is not intended to be a nationwide or worldwide shopping site.
Looks like you read the first line and not the last line.
"Craigslist also has to pay for the resources to deliver the ad content whether that deliver is to individuals or a spider. So an aggregator not only violates the spirit and intent of cl, it costs them money."
Why is against the law for people to siphon the gas from your car? They're not stealing your car, are they? They're simply costing you extra money every month.
Stopping aggregators is no different then you putting a locking gas cap on your car. You're paying for the fuel, it's your decision when and how you use it. Craigslist is paying for the bandwidth, it's their decision when and how it gets used.
You do realize that people have been suggesting that craigslist without state-wide, nation-wide and word-wide searches is "worthless" since craigslist was created, don't you?
It's a free service that is "rather worthless" to you personally. What's wrong with that?
Why not go find a site that does suit your needs and frequent that site? Why insist that craigslist be turned into just another internet classifieds shithole simply because it doesn't suit your personal needs?
There are around 50 million users who find that craigslist does suit their needs. That's a fair sized niche to market to. Nothing wrong with niche marketing, is there?
Craigslist is for local communities, face to face transactions and moderated by the local community. It is not intended to be a nationwide or worldwide shopping site.
If local searches only don't work for someone then craigslist simply isn't the site for them. They can use ebay or whatever other sites are out there.
It's that simple.
Craigslist also has to pay for the resources to deliver the ad content whether that deliver is to individuals or a spider. So an aggregator not only violates the spirit and intent of cl, it costs them money.
I have no use for the plugin. I'm against pirating of films, music and video games so it's highly unlikely I'd ever visit most of those sites, but if there's one thing I hate more than anything else in the world it's a fascist.
The DHS is abusing its power in precisely the way it was intended to be abused when it was created, IMHO. It's another step towards corporate owned law enforcement.
I rarely subscribe to any sort of conspiracy theory but is there *anything* the DHS has done to actually make the country safer? I'm not the only one asking that question either:
Funny, I paid $60 for pre-order of Unreal Tournament 3 back in 2007 and it wasn't even close to "worth it". I got software that has an amazingly slow and illogical menu interface. That wouldn't be as annoying if the preceding games in the series didn't have extremely fast and very logical menus, especially its immediate predecessor, Unreal Tournament 2004. The game itself was so bug ridden that within 5 to 30 minutes of play it would lock Windows XP/Vista up hard and require a reboot - no ctrl-alt-delete to get to task manager or anything, it required powering down the machine. How long did it take their $60 per game engineers to finally issue a fix? Well, they finally came out with one this year. In their tech support forums they initially claimed the issue was "hard to reproduce" and thus the delay. I offered them free use of my computer (which could repro it in less than 10 minutes) for troubleshooting purposes. They never even responded, not to an open offer in the forums or to offers sent via private message. Not even a "no thanks", just no response at all.
So Epic says a computer killing game with agonizingly slow and stupid menu system that takes 4 or 5 years for them to patch properly is "worth it"? That must be some new use of the term that I'm not familiar with.
The Crysis series from EA is another example of stupid done well. The first Crysis was reasonably buggy at the outset but they did fix it (mostly) A really fun game with excellent replay value. I'd happily blow $60 on the sequels... or I would have except for the fact that they put some insane DRM on it that limits the number of installs you can do before it disables itself! You can only install the game a few times and then you're done.
As both a software engineer and casual gamer, I switch or upgrade PCs on a frequent basis. Is paying $60 for the same game every year a "good value"? Even when the repurchase is not due to OS changes or software or hardware obsolescence but simply the whim of the publisher? Not only no but f no.
Can I download a crack for Crysis Warhead and Crysis 2? You betcha, a quick google shows a bunch of patches and tutorials on how to do it. Am I going to spend $60 to waste my time wading through all the crap to find a crack that works only to find it broken by the next bug fix for the game? Not only no but f no.
When game developers start testing their software to the same level of quality as most other manufacturers do, they *might* be able to talk about $60 games being "worth it". When they stop the ridiculous and blatant punishment of legitimate customer without even putting a dent in the piracy of their games, then they can talk about $60 games being "worth it".
Epic and the rest are terrified of creating an open game environment. All you have to do is try to play add-on maps in any of the games. It's generally a nightmare involving manually unzipping files into specific/different directories, starting the game with specific command line options, using the developer console to type in some obscure commands and all sorts of other crap. Want to edit or create a custom map? Welcome to hell, because that's what even the best of the map creation tools are like.
It's obviously they want to keep all their customers locked in to content that they distribute. It's like Microsoft trying to lock customers in to using only 10 documents that they distribute with the program or a blogging site that only wants you to read the same 10 authors every time you visit the site.
When a gaming company finally realizes that the real value of their games is more than just what they can cobble together in a limited development time and start producing open-ended games, they can talk about the initial game purchase being worth $60.
Capps relates it to $1 apps on an iPhone. He's completely ignoring the the freaking purchase price of an iPhone! Why isn't Epic selling the game software platform equivalent to the iPhone hardware?
"The former chairman and CEO of St. Louis-based KV Pharmaceutical Co. was fined $1 million after pleading guilty Thursday to misdemeanor counts related to manufacturing oversized tablets of a pain-relief drug called morphine sulfate.
Marc S. Hermelin, 69, also was sentenced to a month in prison after pleading guilty to two federal counts of misbranding drugs. He also agreed to forfeit $900,000 to the federal government."
...
"A wholly-owned subsidiary of KV, Ethex Corp., pleaded guilty in March 2010 to two felony fraud counts as part of the same investigation. Ethex was ordered to pay $27.6 million in fines and restitution."
...to say that it sets back *US based* cloud computing. It's a boost for offshore hosted cloud computing.
A Russian or Chinese company would have found it a point of pride to tell Lieberman to piss up a rope if he had called them and told them they should shut down Wikileaks. In fact, I'd be willing to bet they would have made a point of citing the US Constitution as a reason they should *not* shut it down.
Having fascist senators referred back to the Constitution on a periodic basis seems like a "good thing (tm)" in my book... since they don't seem to be able to find it on their own.
(and no, I'm not a teabagger, I'm just one of those Constitution respecting flaming progressives that Faux News warns about... and I despise Lieberman)
First I have to disagree completely with your characterization of it as "...seems to involve petty name calling and ridiculous hyperbole...". Inviting people to shoot machine guns at photos of their political opponent is not petty or ridiculous, it's a serious call to violence.
Second, the sort of extremist speech we see is an effective tool. I'm going to touch several third rails here but I believe the only solution lies well outside the realm of laws restricting free speech. Only a change of political and religious leaders will reduce the senseless violence.
Fred Singer. He gave us the whack job argument that cigarettes don't cause lung cancer because you can't link smoking a specific cigarette to a specific individual getting lung cancer. Mountains of statistical evidence notwithstanding, tobacco companies are free to sell a deadly product because they have cover of "plausible deniability".
Fred Singer. He gave us the whack job argument that because you can't trace a specific weather event to human influence on climate, there is no human influence on climate. Mountains of evidence notwithstanding, big oil companies continue to receive generous federal subsidies with full cover in the form of "plausible deniability"
For decades now we've heard the Republican party allow its members to repeatedly and openly call doctors "baby killers" and "mass murderers". Periodically one of the wild-eyed zealot followers picks up a bomb or a gun and commits murder. We get that same Fred Singer excuse - you can't link their rhetoric directly to the zealot committing the crime, even though statistically it's obvious that there are zero pro-choice activists killing people and there are dozens if not hundreds of anti-choice activists burning down clinics, killing doctors and nurses and screaming amplified versions of the same rhetoric that originated with/is endorsed by officials at the very highest levels of government.
So now we have an out of control element of American politics who thinks anyone and everyone who dares to disagree with them fair game for mock executions by machine gun, and we have political candidates who either tolerate it or endorse it. Even mainstream Republican presidential candidates had multiple incidents of people shouting out loud that their political rivals committed treason and should be killed.
Where have we heard it before? "You can't trace my machine gunning portraits of my political rivals to some specific lunatic actually gunning down the person that I was only *pretending* to kill"
There is nothing wrong (from a first amendment perspective) with allowing people to picket the funerals and say that people should die and that a god wants those people to be killed. There will always be lunatics in the world, that's a fact of life.
What's wrong is the lack of any serious, sustained response by supposedly responsible political and religious leaders to stop the hate at the source.
Try the shoe is on the other foot. How many politicians of every stripe have blamed Muslim leaders for violence specifically because those governments/leaders allow fundamentalist hate speech to go unchecked?
What would the reaction of the tea baggers and Christian religious leaders be to a Muslim pointing his AK47 at a portrait of Sarah Palin as part of his election campaign?
They would of course, endorse the man for high public office, wouldn't they?
US politicians and religious leaders have a standard response whenever they're called on their own wink-wink nod-nod version of hate speech: "We don't endorse that weed, we only planted the seeds and watered them a little bit whenever election time comes around. You can't possibly blame us for it getting out of control in a few places".
There is ample evidence that "plausible deniability" works well. It's not free speech that's the problem, it's political and religious speech (or lack thereof) that's the problem.
Make a proofreading pass by reading the text backwards.
Try it. It often uncovers word choice errors you won't spot when reading forwards, for the reason you stated. Your brain doesn't know what words to expect next when reading backwards.
I always do it on important stuff like resumes, letters of resignation and desperate pleas for affection that I scrawl on the walls of bathroom stalls. Er... uh... wait I meant... uh... hotel menus, that's it, hotel menus.
Ask IGT. They hold the patent for "virtual reels" in a slot machine. It's exactly what it sounds like, basically "unwrapping" a mechanical slot machine's reels into arrays of numbers in memory with many more numbers (i.e. reel symbols) than the 22 or so on a standard mechanical slot. It's one of the very first things *any* programmer would think of for implementing a slot machine in software and IGT not only holds the patent but has successfully defended it. Every gaming device manufacturer has to license it from them or else come up with a more complicated variant.
Would you pay $500 for an x-ray at a hospital if it might detect a potentially life threatening problem? It's not just another "fun to have" consumer device, it's a diagnostic tool.
How many people do you know that fly frequently for months/years at a time that couldn't afford a $500 device? People that have to travel a lot are generally making pretty decent money and $500 is not an excessive expenditure. When I traveled frequently I blew better than $500 just on mini disc players and discs. Money is generally not an issue for the folks most at risk.
I didn't suggest that everyone buy one. It would only take a half dozen or dozen people showing concrete evidence that they had experienced unsafe levels of exposure from airport scanners to shut down the process.
The device isn't worthless after it has been used for 6 months or a year. I'm sure it has some resale value. Unlike a used laptop, I'd bet someone would snap one up on craigslist if it was listed at half retail.
$400 is about what my physician charges for very thorough annual physical exam, and two pair of decent eyeglasses run close to $600, so I don't see $500 as a ridiculous expense (though I acknowledge that medical insurance probably won't cover any of the cost of the monitor)
The average cable TV bill in the US is around $71/month. If the average family can afford $850 a year to watch reality TV and some football games then a one-time expense of $500 doesn't seem too insane, especially considering what it might prevent.
Back in the 80's when I was serving on a ballistic missile submarine, we all were required to wear a TLD at all times.
So why aren't the (presumably) well off and educated frequent fliers buying personal TLDs or other sorts of dosimeters and finding out what kind and level of zoomies they're getting?
In a quick google I see some personal units that run a AA batteries in the $500 range.
It's easily the fastest way to resolve the issue. If a handful of frequent fliers come forward with direct evidence that the cumulative dose they're getting is dangerous then the government can be told to sod off.
The TSA goons (sorry, they may not have created the TSA but if they're going to suck at that teat then they *are* its children) can pool their fast food lunch funds and buy one and take turns wearing it for a month at a time to see what's really happening to them.
I could not handle the "infomercials" where such obvious sleight of hand is used to make products look "miraculous" and where obvious scams are peddled to idiots as "valuable services" (e.g. "refinance your house now for 250% of its value...")
I've never regretted pulling the plug... never really even noticed it. I got remarried a while back and I had made plans to finally get satellite TV for the wife because she enjoyed watching TV, but she said no, she'd try "the lifestyle" (got to love an adventurous woman!)
Coming up on two years now and she's a convert with no effort or pressure on my part. She reads more (and enjoys that immensely) and if there is a good TV series she likes she just buys the whole season on DVD when it becomes available.
If cable/satellite companies offered a la carte service at a reasonable price, I'd consider it.
In the meantime, the $900 to $1,000 a year that I've saved on cable bills over the last 17 years has built a pretty good DVD collection. Even blowing half the cost of cable on DVDs every month gets a lot of good quality entertainment, particularly if you simply wait a couple of months for the big boxed sets to show up online in used but perfectly usable condition for 1/4 the price of new.
Let's see, I can pay a high price monthly to watch sleazy and in some cases outright fraudulent ads and get 20 channels of unwanted shit just to get one decent channel that has one or two decent programs a week, or I can sit down at my computer with a fresh cup of tea and surf the net for something I like and then click on 'buy' but only if I feel the price is right. Tough choice.
If only they'd sell me a downloadable, non-DRM'ed version of the content I'd probably buy 4x as many programs as I do. I really dislike the idea of pissing away oil to make and ship the DVDs, so I tend to only buy the ones I know for sure I'll want to keep for a lifetime*
(*lifetime means until I croak. It does not mean "until they take their DRM servers down" or "until they figure out how to make it not play on my existing DVD drive" or "until they stop supporting that particular format on the next version of Windows")
On the post: Craigslist Continues To Be A Legal Bully When It Comes To Aggregators
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: There's a reason and it's simple
Craigslist is paying for the bandwidth to serve up the ads. Craigslist gets to decide who they give access to. It's that simple. If someone doesn't respect their wishes then what are they supposed to do, just roll over and say "Oh gee, it's just our bad luck that we have to pay an extra $10,000 a month for the bandwidth so that all these leeches can make money from our site"?
I've never heard of a case where cl sued someone without first sending them a letter telling them to stop doing what they're doing. If the idiots didn't stop then there isn't any bullying going on. It's a defensive action and not an offensive one.
Honestly I don't understand why people consider it their "right" to try to convert every website and every source of data on the planet into yet another commercial shithole for businesses to use/abuse in any way they feel.
On the post: Craigslist Continues To Be A Legal Bully When It Comes To Aggregators
Re: Re: Craigslist is for local communities, face to face transactions and moderated by the local community. It is not intended to be a nationwide or worldwide shopping site.
Craigslist is paying for the bandwidth. They shouldn't have to pay for serving up more than a million pages per day for free so that someone else can make money from it.
On the post: Craigslist Continues To Be A Legal Bully When It Comes To Aggregators
Re: Re: Re: Re: Craigslist is for local communities, face to face transactions and moderated by the local community. It is not intended to be a nationwide or worldwide shopping site.
Surely you're not claiming that a spider reading 50 million ads per month is equivalent to someone window shopping?
On the post: Craigslist Continues To Be A Legal Bully When It Comes To Aggregators
Re: Re: Re: Re: There's a reason and it's simple
Can you not see that the issue is that your goals are not the same as craigslist's goals?
It's the people who want aggregators and more irrelevant spam on craigslist who have the issue, that's what the article is about. cl doesn't want it.
Do companies not have a right to operate the way they choose to if their choice conflicts with your goals?
On the post: Craigslist Continues To Be A Legal Bully When It Comes To Aggregators
Re: Re: There's a reason and it's simple
Craigslist just isn't a good solution for everyone. It's great for people looking to buy/sell face to face with their neighbors and who take an active part in managing their online community.
cl does provide nearby results BTW. For example.search bozeman.craigslist.org for "husqvarna" You get 2 local items and "Few LOCAL results found. Here are some from NEARBY areas..." with 21 matches from as far away as Kalispell (300 miles away)
On the post: Craigslist Continues To Be A Legal Bully When It Comes To Aggregators
Re:
How would that make their service better? Their service works just fine for what it was intended to do: serve local communities.
If a religious website sues porn sites who post on their site, would you say that they "litigate rather than innovate"? Porn postings run counter to the purpose of a religious website (well, some religions anyway)
Craigslist objects to aggregators because those things turn the site into something that goes against their published goals.
Item #1 on the cl 'about' page:
Q: What is craigslist?
A: Local classifieds and forums - community moderated, and largely free.
That's their goal. Litigating to stop others from thwarting their efforts towards those goals doesn't stop any innovation, and "innovation" does not apply to writing an aggregator anyway.
Why don't the aggregators simply build their own national classifieds site instead of capitalizing on craigslist? Because they aren't innovating, they're simply greedy middlemen eager to insert themselves into the process so they can skim a percentage off the top of the massive traffic that craigslist generates.
That's opportunism, not innovation.
On the post: Craigslist Continues To Be A Legal Bully When It Comes To Aggregators
Re: Re: Security Silly!
It doesn't do what you need it to do. So walk away and find a service that does. Ebay is free for buyers to use and you can even set it up to get notifications when a Norton comes up for sale there - or get notified even if it's just some Amal carbs or Lucas rectifiers being parted out (yeah, I go that far back with bikes)
Google "nationwide classified ads". 944,000 hits on those words in that order. "free nationwide classified ads" gets 31,300 hits. I'm certain there are other sites out there that do what you want. Why not use them instead?
On the post: Craigslist Continues To Be A Legal Bully When It Comes To Aggregators
Re: Re: Craigslist is for local communities, face to face transactions and moderated by the local community. It is not intended to be a nationwide or worldwide shopping site.
"Craigslist also has to pay for the resources to deliver the ad content whether that deliver is to individuals or a spider. So an aggregator not only violates the spirit and intent of cl, it costs them money."
Why is against the law for people to siphon the gas from your car? They're not stealing your car, are they? They're simply costing you extra money every month.
Stopping aggregators is no different then you putting a locking gas cap on your car. You're paying for the fuel, it's your decision when and how you use it. Craigslist is paying for the bandwidth, it's their decision when and how it gets used.
On the post: Craigslist Continues To Be A Legal Bully When It Comes To Aggregators
Re: Re: There's a reason and it's simple
It's a free service that is "rather worthless" to you personally. What's wrong with that?
Why not go find a site that does suit your needs and frequent that site? Why insist that craigslist be turned into just another internet classifieds shithole simply because it doesn't suit your personal needs?
There are around 50 million users who find that craigslist does suit their needs. That's a fair sized niche to market to. Nothing wrong with niche marketing, is there?
On the post: Craigslist Continues To Be A Legal Bully When It Comes To Aggregators
There's a reason and it's simple
If local searches only don't work for someone then craigslist simply isn't the site for them. They can use ebay or whatever other sites are out there.
It's that simple.
Craigslist also has to pay for the resources to deliver the ad content whether that deliver is to individuals or a spider. So an aggregator not only violates the spirit and intent of cl, it costs them money.
On the post: Homeland Security Demands Mozilla Remove Firefox Extension That Redirects Seized Domains
I just added it to my browser
The DHS is abusing its power in precisely the way it was intended to be abused when it was created, IMHO. It's another step towards corporate owned law enforcement.
I rarely subscribe to any sort of conspiracy theory but is there *anything* the DHS has done to actually make the country safer? I'm not the only one asking that question either:
http://www.customsandinternationaltradelaw.com/2011/02/articles/department-of-homeland-securit-1/d oes-the-us-department-of-homeland-security-make-us-safer/
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2 011/01/02/unconventional_wisdom?page=0,2
On the post: More Video Game Makers Fear The Free Market And Don't Know How To Compete
Epic has a $60 game that's "worth it"?
So Epic says a computer killing game with agonizingly slow and stupid menu system that takes 4 or 5 years for them to patch properly is "worth it"? That must be some new use of the term that I'm not familiar with.
The Crysis series from EA is another example of stupid done well. The first Crysis was reasonably buggy at the outset but they did fix it (mostly) A really fun game with excellent replay value. I'd happily blow $60 on the sequels... or I would have except for the fact that they put some insane DRM on it that limits the number of installs you can do before it disables itself! You can only install the game a few times and then you're done.
As both a software engineer and casual gamer, I switch or upgrade PCs on a frequent basis. Is paying $60 for the same game every year a "good value"? Even when the repurchase is not due to OS changes or software or hardware obsolescence but simply the whim of the publisher? Not only no but f no.
Can I download a crack for Crysis Warhead and Crysis 2? You betcha, a quick google shows a bunch of patches and tutorials on how to do it. Am I going to spend $60 to waste my time wading through all the crap to find a crack that works only to find it broken by the next bug fix for the game? Not only no but f no.
When game developers start testing their software to the same level of quality as most other manufacturers do, they *might* be able to talk about $60 games being "worth it". When they stop the ridiculous and blatant punishment of legitimate customer without even putting a dent in the piracy of their games, then they can talk about $60 games being "worth it".
Epic and the rest are terrified of creating an open game environment. All you have to do is try to play add-on maps in any of the games. It's generally a nightmare involving manually unzipping files into specific/different directories, starting the game with specific command line options, using the developer console to type in some obscure commands and all sorts of other crap. Want to edit or create a custom map? Welcome to hell, because that's what even the best of the map creation tools are like.
It's obviously they want to keep all their customers locked in to content that they distribute. It's like Microsoft trying to lock customers in to using only 10 documents that they distribute with the program or a blogging site that only wants you to read the same 10 authors every time you visit the site.
When a gaming company finally realizes that the real value of their games is more than just what they can cobble together in a limited development time and start producing open-ended games, they can talk about the initial game purchase being worth $60.
Capps relates it to $1 apps on an iPhone. He's completely ignoring the the freaking purchase price of an iPhone! Why isn't Epic selling the game software platform equivalent to the iPhone hardware?
On the post: Retroactive Drug Monopoly Raises Rates From $10... To $1,500
Wow, these KV guys sound like real humanitarians
"The former chairman and CEO of St. Louis-based KV Pharmaceutical Co. was fined $1 million after pleading guilty Thursday to misdemeanor counts related to manufacturing oversized tablets of a pain-relief drug called morphine sulfate.
Marc S. Hermelin, 69, also was sentenced to a month in prison after pleading guilty to two federal counts of misbranding drugs. He also agreed to forfeit $900,000 to the federal government."
...
"A wholly-owned subsidiary of KV, Ethex Corp., pleaded guilty in March 2010 to two felony fraud counts as part of the same investigation. Ethex was ordered to pay $27.6 million in fines and restitution."
On the post: Daniel Ellsberg And Others Discuss The Serious Implications Of Wikileaks
Re: Re: Re: Re:
A Russian or Chinese company would have found it a point of pride to tell Lieberman to piss up a rope if he had called them and told them they should shut down Wikileaks. In fact, I'd be willing to bet they would have made a point of citing the US Constitution as a reason they should *not* shut it down.
Having fascist senators referred back to the Constitution on a periodic basis seems like a "good thing (tm)" in my book... since they don't seem to be able to find it on their own.
(and no, I'm not a teabagger, I'm just one of those Constitution respecting flaming progressives that Faux News warns about... and I despise Lieberman)
On the post: One Mentally Deranged Shooter Is No Reason To Throw Out The First Amendment
Rant and ramble
Second, the sort of extremist speech we see is an effective tool. I'm going to touch several third rails here but I believe the only solution lies well outside the realm of laws restricting free speech. Only a change of political and religious leaders will reduce the senseless violence.
Fred Singer. He gave us the whack job argument that cigarettes don't cause lung cancer because you can't link smoking a specific cigarette to a specific individual getting lung cancer. Mountains of statistical evidence notwithstanding, tobacco companies are free to sell a deadly product because they have cover of "plausible deniability".
Fred Singer. He gave us the whack job argument that because you can't trace a specific weather event to human influence on climate, there is no human influence on climate. Mountains of evidence notwithstanding, big oil companies continue to receive generous federal subsidies with full cover in the form of "plausible deniability"
For decades now we've heard the Republican party allow its members to repeatedly and openly call doctors "baby killers" and "mass murderers". Periodically one of the wild-eyed zealot followers picks up a bomb or a gun and commits murder. We get that same Fred Singer excuse - you can't link their rhetoric directly to the zealot committing the crime, even though statistically it's obvious that there are zero pro-choice activists killing people and there are dozens if not hundreds of anti-choice activists burning down clinics, killing doctors and nurses and screaming amplified versions of the same rhetoric that originated with/is endorsed by officials at the very highest levels of government.
So now we have an out of control element of American politics who thinks anyone and everyone who dares to disagree with them fair game for mock executions by machine gun, and we have political candidates who either tolerate it or endorse it. Even mainstream Republican presidential candidates had multiple incidents of people shouting out loud that their political rivals committed treason and should be killed.
Where have we heard it before? "You can't trace my machine gunning portraits of my political rivals to some specific lunatic actually gunning down the person that I was only *pretending* to kill"
There is nothing wrong (from a first amendment perspective) with allowing people to picket the funerals and say that people should die and that a god wants those people to be killed. There will always be lunatics in the world, that's a fact of life.
What's wrong is the lack of any serious, sustained response by supposedly responsible political and religious leaders to stop the hate at the source.
Try the shoe is on the other foot. How many politicians of every stripe have blamed Muslim leaders for violence specifically because those governments/leaders allow fundamentalist hate speech to go unchecked?
What would the reaction of the tea baggers and Christian religious leaders be to a Muslim pointing his AK47 at a portrait of Sarah Palin as part of his election campaign?
They would of course, endorse the man for high public office, wouldn't they?
US politicians and religious leaders have a standard response whenever they're called on their own wink-wink nod-nod version of hate speech: "We don't endorse that weed, we only planted the seeds and watered them a little bit whenever election time comes around. You can't possibly blame us for it getting out of control in a few places".
There is ample evidence that "plausible deniability" works well. It's not free speech that's the problem, it's political and religious speech (or lack thereof) that's the problem.
On the post: Congresswoman Threatens To Sue Newspaper For 'Liable' Over Critical Column
Re: Spell checker
Make a proofreading pass by reading the text backwards.
Try it. It often uncovers word choice errors you won't spot when reading forwards, for the reason you stated. Your brain doesn't know what words to expect next when reading backwards.
I always do it on important stuff like resumes, letters of resignation and desperate pleas for affection that I scrawl on the walls of bathroom stalls. Er... uh... wait I meant... uh... hotel menus, that's it, hotel menus.
On the post: Priceline Founder Jay Walker Becoming Full On Patent Troll: Sues Facebook For Friending And The Powerball Lottery For Lotteries
The lottery patent may stick
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slot_machine#Reels
So it wouldn't surprise me if something as obvious as lottery multipliers would stand up.
On the post: Molecular Biologist Highlights Serious Safety Concerns Over TSA Scanners
Re: Re: Why not TLDs?
Would you pay $500 for an x-ray at a hospital if it might detect a potentially life threatening problem? It's not just another "fun to have" consumer device, it's a diagnostic tool.
How many people do you know that fly frequently for months/years at a time that couldn't afford a $500 device? People that have to travel a lot are generally making pretty decent money and $500 is not an excessive expenditure. When I traveled frequently I blew better than $500 just on mini disc players and discs. Money is generally not an issue for the folks most at risk.
I didn't suggest that everyone buy one. It would only take a half dozen or dozen people showing concrete evidence that they had experienced unsafe levels of exposure from airport scanners to shut down the process.
The device isn't worthless after it has been used for 6 months or a year. I'm sure it has some resale value. Unlike a used laptop, I'd bet someone would snap one up on craigslist if it was listed at half retail.
$400 is about what my physician charges for very thorough annual physical exam, and two pair of decent eyeglasses run close to $600, so I don't see $500 as a ridiculous expense (though I acknowledge that medical insurance probably won't cover any of the cost of the monitor)
The average cable TV bill in the US is around $71/month. If the average family can afford $850 a year to watch reality TV and some football games then a one-time expense of $500 doesn't seem too insane, especially considering what it might prevent.
On the post: Molecular Biologist Highlights Serious Safety Concerns Over TSA Scanners
Why not TLDs?
So why aren't the (presumably) well off and educated frequent fliers buying personal TLDs or other sorts of dosimeters and finding out what kind and level of zoomies they're getting?
In a quick google I see some personal units that run a AA batteries in the $500 range.
It's easily the fastest way to resolve the issue. If a handful of frequent fliers come forward with direct evidence that the cumulative dose they're getting is dangerous then the government can be told to sod off.
The TSA goons (sorry, they may not have created the TSA but if they're going to suck at that teat then they *are* its children) can pool their fast food lunch funds and buy one and take turns wearing it for a month at a time to see what's really happening to them.
Evidence talks.
On the post: Turns Out TV Cord Cutters Are, In Fact, Young, Educated And Employed
I claim weirdest
I could not handle the "infomercials" where such obvious sleight of hand is used to make products look "miraculous" and where obvious scams are peddled to idiots as "valuable services" (e.g. "refinance your house now for 250% of its value...")
I've never regretted pulling the plug... never really even noticed it. I got remarried a while back and I had made plans to finally get satellite TV for the wife because she enjoyed watching TV, but she said no, she'd try "the lifestyle" (got to love an adventurous woman!)
Coming up on two years now and she's a convert with no effort or pressure on my part. She reads more (and enjoys that immensely) and if there is a good TV series she likes she just buys the whole season on DVD when it becomes available.
If cable/satellite companies offered a la carte service at a reasonable price, I'd consider it.
In the meantime, the $900 to $1,000 a year that I've saved on cable bills over the last 17 years has built a pretty good DVD collection. Even blowing half the cost of cable on DVDs every month gets a lot of good quality entertainment, particularly if you simply wait a couple of months for the big boxed sets to show up online in used but perfectly usable condition for 1/4 the price of new.
Let's see, I can pay a high price monthly to watch sleazy and in some cases outright fraudulent ads and get 20 channels of unwanted shit just to get one decent channel that has one or two decent programs a week, or I can sit down at my computer with a fresh cup of tea and surf the net for something I like and then click on 'buy' but only if I feel the price is right. Tough choice.
If only they'd sell me a downloadable, non-DRM'ed version of the content I'd probably buy 4x as many programs as I do. I really dislike the idea of pissing away oil to make and ship the DVDs, so I tend to only buy the ones I know for sure I'll want to keep for a lifetime*
(*lifetime means until I croak. It does not mean "until they take their DRM servers down" or "until they figure out how to make it not play on my existing DVD drive" or "until they stop supporting that particular format on the next version of Windows")
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