The whole "if we offer better conditions than sweatshops, we will be run out of business by sweatshops" argument is bullshit. It's used by the economic elite to argue why you should slave all day for table scraps while they make millions and by "learning the rules" you mean "bend over and take it like a good boy". We can demand basic environmental conditions just like we demand worker health and safety, no child labor, minimum wage and a bunch of other conditions and a few might bugger off but you won't miss working there. If you squeeze too hard it will all go away though, it's not like grabbing water maybe more like pudding.

Besides, what you're talking about is not really capitalism it's human nature, of course we adapt how we play to the rules of the games. That's what they're trying to do, give people the right incentives. And yes, that is hard in a dynamic system and if you don't have a good enough model what you do might end up being counterproductive. Some of it is just ridiculous, like here in Norway we export gas and import coal-based power, because then the emissions didn't happen here. That makes no sense at all. But just because some things environmentalists do is facepalm-worthy, doesn't mean that it all is.

Sure, picking the right horse to begin with. But if you've made one kick ass movie and the studio is offering you $millions to do a sequel because you are that character and the audience is practically cheering you on before you even make a performance, don't you think he'd be a little bit interested in an easy gig whether or not the script sucks donkey balls? He's 72 and his glory days where in the 70s and 80s, I doubt he's looking for the next big thing just riding this one all the way home. Like the Rolling Stones touring even though they're soon senior citizens, I doubt they need the fame or the fortune either but it doesn't stop them replaying old hits.

I hear what you're saying but here in Norway we have stone age settlements that are 100-200 meters above the current sea level - glaciers depressed the whole country. Current coastal settlements may suffer, but even if you assume 100% of the ice melting it's not 2012 and we don't need a new Noah's ark. People live in temperatures from Sahara to Siberia and in weather patterns from rain forest to to desert. "Save us" makes it sound like we're heading towards some kind of extinction level event and clearly we're not.

The real threat to our environment is not our lifestyle, it's that we've been multiplying like rabbits. In 1900 the world population was 1650 million, they could all be polluting like Americans of 2014 and they'd still emit less CO2 in total than the world does today. If we double the population we need to cut the pollution in half to stay constant, it's not higher math. That's a very touch subject of personal freedom, but condoms, birth control and China's one child policy is probably the best long term action for the environment.

Since this is /. and the upstairs kitchen is probably his mom's it's more likely telling him to take a shower because even the beer is trying to flee from his man cave.

And if it's anything like a paper printer, does it have plastic jams the way we have paper jams? Clogged nozzles? Low "ink" or whatever the consumable is? Driver problems? Compatibility problems between template any my printer? To be fair purchasing is not without its problems either, but mass produced trinkets are usually done better by somebody else. And the odds of cost being lower is close to none, just like it costs way more idea to print your own book on your average home printer than buying it in the store.

The way I see it there's three potential winners: 1) Customization, some form of take your own measurements and adapt a template. 2) Availability, being able to print a part that's out of production. I guess you can add any restricted goods to this category. 3) Speed, I hear they're not speed demons but overnight "delivery" is still pretty fast. And while I might print "anything" on a printer a consumer 3D printer isn't working with metal, wood, leather or textiles it's just plastic trinkets. That's a very limited subset of the items I own.

That's how they catch people, if they're winning well... So they took down Silk Road 2.0, it's still a piss in the ocean to beating the drug industry. They take down The Pirate Bay, it's still a piss in the ocean to beating copyright infringement. From big to small, they can catch a shoplifter but shoplifting doesn't go away, they can bust a crime syndicate but organized crime doesn't go away either. And more often than not they're the mop-up crew, sure it's nice that murderers go to jail but the victim is still dead so it's a limited win. It's far from a lawless country but it's still way off from a lawful country, at least in some areas we can make an educated guess on how many criminals they don't catch because there's a victim and a crime scene but in others it's just guesswork. Particularly the kind that wears suits.

Well, if you made a list of fields TV portrays accurately it'd fit on a very small business card. We shake our heads at the use of computers and technology, doctors shake their heads at medicine and I bet cops and lawyers shake their heads at the depiction of police work and the law too. For that matter I bet drug dealers and the mafia shake their heads at Weeds and Sopranos too. I'm not saying that you're wrong but it's in the nature of television to wildly misrepresent reality for dramatic effect, even in the shows that have a superficial resemblance to actual professions. Asking for that to change is to try making water not wet, it's entertainment and it needs to be entertaining while reality is full of dreary, boring routine. It should never be confused with reality unless you're watching a documentary.

This electronics retailer wouldn't happen to be in the business of selling people expensive new 4k TV sets by any chance? There's a lot of ways you could configure a 4K and 1080p TV to get that result like contrast, color and Netflix 4K probably got as many compression artifacts as an upscaled BluRay. I have a UHD monitor for gaming and such but TVs are way ahead of the content, I've no idea why 4K TVs are actually selling.

Well, one shortcoming of that chart is that it assumes 20/20 vision, that's the threshold for "normal" sight that doesn't need glasses but many people have better than that - 20/16 at least is not unusual - or can see better than that once they wear glasses/contact lenses. I think the most extreme cases are something like 20/8, meaning they can see from 20 feet what a normal person would have to be at 8 feet to see. I think it depends on source material and compression though, I've got a 28" UHD monitor (3840x2160) and done comparisons with a very high resolution, sharp image scaled down to UHD and 1080p respectively. It's noticable. It's not a huge difference, it's not like I think of 1080p as blurry. But when I watch the full resolution imagine it's more like wow, there's even more detail.

Sadly I think the SCOTUS applied the law correctly, which is not to say it's a good law. The ruling is quite clear that the test is not whether it's required by your employer, it's whether it is integral and indispensable to the performance of your work.

If you need to wear protective gear for work then putting it on - but not waiting in line to put it on - is compensatable time because wearing it is integral to safe and efficient job performance, undergoing a security screening to make sure you're not carrying anything dangerous is apparently not. That's an odd place to draw the line, it's not a convenience and it's not something you can skip out of. But as it stands the employer can force you to jump through as many compulsory hoops as they want without compensation, as long as it doesn't directly relate to your job performance. Personally I'd call it bullshit, any compulsory checkpoints of whether you're ready to enter or leave work is clearly integral to your job activity but there's 60+ years of precedent that says otherwise.

Yeah, for external mail no doubt. But for internal mail you probably wouldn't bother, then it's a pretty huge juicy target for sensitive information. Even when you're not passing the juiciest details by email like blueprints and source code there'll be tons of business information in attached presentations and so on.

Except time. Sure work provides me with a desk, computer, power and lights but 99% of what they pay for is my time. Most of /. would be living on the streets if we couldn't put a price tag on that. Even if you're self-employed and don't cut yourself a paycheck doesn't mean anyone else has the right to demand you give it away for free. How are most blogs not original content? This diatribe is original content, I mean I don't expect to get paid for it but if I wanted to I could put it up on a blog and see if people would suffer some ads to read it. It's not like you have a right to read it for free just because I wrote it for free.

When I go shopping I think paying is a real downer, it would be so much more enjoyable if I could just go into the store and grab whatever I want to. Life's tough that way sometimes, strangely it doesn't revolve around me and what I'd like the most. I don't buy into the "not watching the ads is stealing" tripe, but arguing that turning an ad-based service into an ad-free service is reasonable simply because you enjoy it more is basically pulling a Darth Vader, "I'm altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further." without any moral justification for why you should be entitled to their content for free. Ad money is real money and you're actively avoiding rewarding their work.

Let's for argument's sake say the site turns to obnoxious ads and anti-blocking measures. You either stop reading or stop fighting the ads. If they lose you as a reader they lose you as a freeloader so what exactly have they lost, the privilege of you reading their blog? Talk about hubris. Or you end up watching ads and become a customer, they make money. You talk as if they they're the ones losing by pissing you off, but how could they lose anything when they got nothing from you in the first place? Aren't you just crying for yourself and when they shove you out the door you pout like a child crying "I didn't want to visit your stupid site anyway!"

And the most common way to avoid that has been third party file lockers, which is why they're going after Megaupload and such. Basically one person uploads the file via some safe, anonymous method and publishes the link for others to download. The site offers slow/limited/captcha/ad-supported download for free users and fast download for paying users, which is how they make their money. Since they aren't the ones uploading it and respond to DMCA takedowns they're mostly getting away with it, but it's certainly under attack. Personally I'm wondering when, if ever, anyone's going to be able to make Freenet style downloads usable to most people where there is no seed as such, you just cut a file into a million little encrypted pieces that are distributed among the entire network. It pretty much does away with the concept of a seed altogether.

I have an UHD monitor (3840x2160) and without exception the only games that change view like that are terrible games that have fixed UI elements that are x pixels wide, meaning that on a high def monitor the actual action happens with tiny ants in the 800x600 center with microbuttons and a lot of scenery. I decrease the resolution to get a "normal" gaming experience. Good games on the other hand look roughly the same on my 28" UHD screen as they looked on the 24" 1080p screen, only more detailed with the zoom level a feature of the game, not implicitly set by the resolution. So great feature I suppose if you want to feel the pains of crap HiDPI support without actually having a HiDPI monitor...

And quite probably the other way around, this would create hell on all forms of international access/accounts as the Germans would find a person working for Microsoft Germany who'd be compelled to access documents on US servers in violation of US law. Let's also not forget that even if you're in your own country and relatively safe you are committing a crime abroad, which could be nasty if you ever decide to go on holidays to a country that has an extradition agreement with that country. Also, if you know people from Microsoft US are going to break the law and let them keep access then that should probably count as some kind of criminal conspiracy, like a security guard not sounding the alarm. I think the EU can shut these jokers down quite quick even if the US courts won't.