You can certainly, as slashdotters assuredly will, endlessly debate copyright law and trademarks and the DMCA and how close to using someone else's ideas you can get before triggering legal action, but I maintain that the simplest method of completely avoiding the issue is to make a game that isn't anything like what someone else has already done. Instead of trying to just barely skirt the law, make your mark as an originalist, as a creator. It's/much/ more difficult to do - you might even respect copyrights and trademarks a little more afterward, although you also may not - but it's still much easier than lawyers' fees and court dates and trying to squeak your imitations past the DMCA. You'll also almost certainly find that it's much more deeply satisfying to create something entirely new, entirely your own, than to clone someone else's work.
Making a Pac-Man clone should be a requirement for anyone learning about game coding, there's no doubt, but you don't/distribute/ it. If Namco Bandai wants to put Pac-Man on the Android Market, that's their decision: you should come up with your own thing, and put/that/ on the Android Market. Besides, does the world/really/ need another Pac-Man clone?
This is a scientific restatement of Pascal's Wager, and the same logic can be applied to any action: if the chances of me blowing up the universe by turning on my blender are not provably zero, I shouldn't use the blender, because the risks [destruction of everything] are so high.
It's mathematically and logically sound, but ultimately immaterial: at some point, one has to weigh the evidence with which one is presented against the degree of certainty with which we can determine the risk. Or stop using the blender altogether, and then it's no more frozen daiquiris for any of us.
Seconded. [It's called "Hyperspace," in the US, "Space" in the UK, as I recall.] My daughter and I watch it about once a year, as a reminder of those pesky origin questions.
Also incredibly powerful as a teaching tool is Cosmic Voyage, which teaches cosmology and/scale./
Last year, I did a demonstration for my daughter's class where we all went outside and built a scale model of the solar system. Even moreso than video presentations, this kind of "hands on and moving around" education keep the attention of children of all ages, and, even if they are incapable of fully grasping its ramifications/today,/ I assure you they don't forget such experiences, which serve them well as they age and learn.
Actually, I own a copy of Windows XP Lite; it's called Windows 2000, and it does everything I'd want to do with a EEE, and then some, and does it reasonably quickly. I run Windows 2000 on my Pentium 200 laptop, and find it quite salubrious; if I bought a EEE today, it's likely what I'd [try to] install.
I'm going to build something similar: a device which will allow you to load a smaller, faster operating system, or a larger, more full-featured one. Except mine will feature removable operating systems, on small devices known as "diskettes," [like "little disks," see?] so that you can swap different diskettes and boot different smaller operating systems! I have a beta of the first version operating system right here: I'm going to call it a "DOS boot disk."
No, seriously, how is this news, or new, or anything other than a dual-boot system just like you'd get installing a tiny version of Linux and Windows XP on the same box, or a Live CD Linux install? Ridiculous.
Speaking of amusing add-ons, did you know it wasn't originally part-and-parcel of SR? FASA half-finished ED before thinking, "Hey, we could just make this the 4th World, yeah?" Unfortunately, by then it was too late to dispose with ED's step system [and magic and race differences] which seemed to mostly make everyone bleed from the ears, although I found after a few sessions it burned its way into your brain.
When it comes to Earthdawn, I'm un-out-geekable.;) Well, with the exception of Ancient History, perhaps, whose list of links between SR and ED is as close to canonical as it gets, which almost makes up for his grievous personality faults. [Hello, Annie!]
Battletech always seemed a more interesting universe...
A competition of "interestingness" between Shadowrun and Battletech would be difficult, even for players of both games, so I'll avoid the issue and simply declare that by far the most interesting roleplaying universe ever is that of Earthdawn.
"Earth-what?" everyone says. *sigh* Nevermind. Another FASA-failed fragment of brilliance.
Because the most recent abomination has very, very little to do with Shadowrun, for reasons which simply are not justifiable from a gameplay perspective. If you're going to change an IP as much as this one got changed, don't use the IP's name: "Shadowrun" doesn't have enough cachet to draw massive numbers of non-dedicated fans, and completely altering the game universe is going to do nothing but infuriate the dedicated ones.
I've been playing Shadowrun since a few weeks after the first edition was released, and am heavily involved on various Shadowrun forums, and you wouldn't/believe/ the backlash this game caused, and for good reason: everyone knows you have to take some liberties when transferring a tabletop RPG to a computer game, but the Shadowrun video game played like someone had made an average multiplayer FPS and then slapped a Shadowrun sticker on it as an afterthought.
I good Shadowrun game doesn't/have/ to be an MMORPG or an NWN-style game, but it would certainly help. An FPS - even a multiplayer FPS - could make a decent Shadowrun game, but only if there's some respect for the property will there be support from the fans, and only if it's exceptionally good is there going to be support for the non-fans [and why slap the sticker on in the first place when, like, eight people have heard of Shadowrun?].
Ironically, SR has been one of the most influential RPG properties of the last few decades. "The Matrix" was based on a Shadowrun short story [which was the back half of Virtual Realities, for those who played that long ago and still have memory of those days]. And yet these funny FASA fellows never did seem to be able to make a buck - or a decent video game [the FPS not being the first try] - out of it. Finally, they just sold off and closed doors, and the property has suffered - in my opinion - ever since. But I thought it started declining with the death of Findlay and the departure of Dowd, which really just means I'm old.
I sure do wish people would stop submitting their own blog postings to Slashdot. What is this, Digg? I guess next time I want some serious traffic to my message forum, I'll post about some technical issue and pump it into the Firehose.
More to the point, how is anyone going to say "Goodbye, Microsoft," when the goodbye-microsoft.com homepage - and a good portion of the rest of the site - is completely and utterly inexplicable in terms of function for anyone not already in the know? This is, please don't kill me, quite typically Linux.
...there is another option, though it be inferior and probably fairly unfamiliar to most of us: do not do or say anything over the internet that you would not want being completely public, i.e. known by everyone in the world. I'm not advancing it as a reason this tech doesn't matter: it does, and I pray we can all embrace workarounds [as there is no putting these genies back in the bottle]. I advance it only as the pragmatic solution I have found to an increasingly transparent internet. It can be impractical, particularly for those conversations with far-distant associates, but unless and until you have a completely secure solution, the practical reaction is to avoid the technology altogether for sensitive materials.
Yes. Yes yes yes yes yes. The average American doesn't/need/ a touchscreen phone that can play movies. [Well, no one/needs/ such a ludicrous thing.] And "want" will only push the market so far. I've seen a lot of increased clamoring for phones like the Motorola F3 ["MotoFone"], at least partially because only in the last few months have rural residents been outnumbered by urban residents in this country. Add to that the enormous number of people who don't want or need cell phones period - yes,/. readers, some people don't;) - and you have a recipe for not pointlessly pushing technology into the next century/just because it's shiny./
I'd love to have an iPhone. But honestly? An F3 would serve me better. And I am not alone.
So does that impress the ladies? Dude, you're posting on/. I'm pretty sure you don't get to talk about "impress[ing] the ladies" while maintaining any kind of smug self-righteousness.
It would appear from the abstract that the same machines were used to test both versions of Windows, which is amusing: if you were to perform this test on a 486DX4-100, we could say things like, "The user interface was 4000 percent slower in Windows XP than Windows 3.1." There's some validity to the method inasmuch as, if you were choosing between the two OSes on any given computer, they should be compared equally, but it says nothing about the responsiveness of the operating system itself, much as the [many, many] recreational Microsoft bashers would have it be so.
Which isn't to say I don't think the new interface is less efficient than the old one: as an almost purely keyboard Windows user who keeps the Classic interface running on XP, I can say with confidence that the new eye candy in Vista is wasted on me, and that it only slows me down. Again, I'm not saying it isn't less efficient, but it's not exactly less efficient for the reasons given in the abstract.
It's also worth noting that this study was/specifically/ for creative professionals, and that the results will be different for users of a differing aspect. Not that the abstract bothered to point that out, either because it assumed people would get it, or because they didn't want people to.
For every case of a police officer abusing his power, there are literally millions of cases of police officers simply doing their jobs. I don't think you understand that the point isn't this specific officer, it's a government in which this kind of abuse is generally permissible. Except that it isn't. For one thing, it's not abuse: they broke the local statues regarding stalking, period. For another, abuse of power is not "generally permissible."
Should this cop get a ticket? Well, no, because the radar gun isn't a permissible one. Should someone at the department have a long conversation with him about speeding? Hell, yes, from a human and a professional perspective. Should other cops be keeping an eye out for him on the road? Yeah, like you would anyone who commonly speeds. Will they? I pessimistically suspect not, and that would indeed be abuse of power, and I wish it didn't happen. I wish cops weren't flawed humans like the rest of us, that they were mindless engines of justice. I wish they were a world apart, true heroes. I wish I lived in a world where every single cop could be like that. Hell, I'd settle for just one more cop like that. But we live in the world in which we live. Want it to be better? Make it so.
If Wal*Mart serves me badly, against what I consider a profitable exchange, I stop shopping there. Eventually, we see stores fail -- even big ones, often. If Burger King serves me badly, against what I consider a profitable exchange, I stop eating there. Eventually, we see restaurants fail -- even big ones, often. If the police serve me badly, what can I do? You move. You cease to exist within the physical location which is their jurisdiction. Government is a choice. I prefer to repair the government I have than avoid them entirely, but it remains perfectly true that I choose which government's jurisdiction I live in, and indeed choose to live in situations in which governments play a role at all. I could avoid civilization entirely, but I would also lose the benefits civilization - which is ultimately what you mean by "tyranny" - grants me.
Your solution sounds great, but how often would any of us take the risk to tattle on them? For proof, see original article. The original article is proof that people do take the risk of "tattling" on them. The follow-up is proof that it works.
> The problem with public officials is that they have the right to use excessive force in order to protect their position. The average citizen has no right to call out any public official on any illegal actions since the average citizen has no real power against non-elected public officials.
This is simply untrue. One might say that, in execution, public officials sometimes have greater power than the average citizen - and one would be quite right in saying that - but by the law, with the exception of those acts which must be allowed in order for public servants to do their jobs, every citizen of the United States has the same rights. Your expression of dismay is righteous, as far as it objects to those cases where public officials abuse their authority, but beyond that, you're simply painting all government employees with a tremendously wide brush, overgeneralizing to the point of uselessness.
And it's worth noting that this officer has withdrawn his application for a warrant. My instinct says that he shouldn't have applied for one in the first place, but, like you, I know vastly too little about the actual circumstances to make any judgement against the officer.
For every case of a police officer abusing his power, there are literally millions of cases of police officers simply doing their jobs. Broad statements like yours distort the problem, actually making it/more/ difficult to solve.
> There is a lot they can do, off the public record, that can harm you more than they harm you in their lawbreaking.
As can anyone else. Government employees have no monopoly on abusive actions taken off public record.
> Remember, cops are not here to protect you, there are there to protect their jobs -- and many of them love the power they wield over the average citizen. Why else do we have cop unions?
False dilemma. You give two choices - unions exist, therefore either police are here to protect their jobs, or to protect you. The third option is that like anyone else in any other job, they're there to do both. I suggest you spend some time with actual police officers before you start throwing around statements like, "cops are not here to protect you." Ignorance always sounds foolish.
> If someone's light-rays that bounce off their body enter your property, they are now YOUR property.
It's amusing, because I'm quite anti-government - anti-restriction-of-individual-liberty, actually - but even I wouldn't go so far as to say that any light rays which enter my property now belong to me. Is this true of air, as well? I cannot/imagine/ the possibilities for abuse - by individuals, that is - should such a property law be passed. "You stepped on my grass, so it's legal for me to eat you!"
> When will people learn that it isn't left or right, it is pro-tyranny and against-tyranny -- liberals and conservatives are on the "pro-tyranny" side of the coin. The opposite side of the coin is not a libertarian, as some might think, but an anarcho-capitalist.
Oh, gods. Yes, we'll all certainly have more pleasant lives under anarcho-capitalism.
I don't want to criticize you, as a person, and I apologize if I appear to have done so, but your views are worth of ridicule, as is the lack of reasoning behind them, even if you, personally, are not.
I heartily recommend Macro Express, which does all these things in ways that are simple and intuitive. It's the simplest and most powerful hotkey/macro program I've seen. I literally couldn't do my job [accounting] without it. Between my macros and the universal hotkeys built into Windows, I almost never touch my mouse.
I always leave it on, but whenever I'm on anyone else's machine, I try to tune the "Always Hide" and "Always Show" for the workflow of the user. [My grandmother doesn't need the nVidia control panel icon...ever. But I might, so hidden it stays. She does need the Volume icon, and would be very, very confused if it disappeared, even if she saw the warning from Windows when it originally happened. So it always stays on.]
I prefer manual control of...well, pretty much everything. Letting Windows decide which icons or menus to show works for some people, but it doesn't work for me any more than I would let my car decide which gear to be in.
Sadly, it's per-application, and it's different everywhere. [Windows itself doesn't use dynamic menus. Unless that's one of the things I happen to have turned off, without noticing.] But for Office 2003, for instance, it's Tools > Customize > Options tab > Check "Always show full menus".
The objections to both complaints - dynamic menus and hidden tray icons - are many and varied, with supporters on both sides of each issue, but ultimately, the objection is moot given that both options can be manually controlled, one of the features of Windows which I think is often downplayed. I control precisely which icons are hidden, and which are shown, in my tray, which I find/tremendously/ useful. I turn off dynamic menus, because like many of us, I want the same options in the same places all the time.
What's great is that you get the choice of which option to use. I hate the Windows XP interface, the new start menu, the idiotic task panel in Explorer windows. So I turn it all off. My XP looks virtually identical to my [stripped down] Windows 2000 interface. I've been given the option to do things however I'd like to do them, and I appreciate that.
The utility of these features is debatable, but I think that either way, it's worth noting with some appreciation that they're optional.
> You are not limited by what you do to your car! You may invalidate the warranty but, as per your example, BMW can't stop it from being driven.
Certainly, they could. The technology exists, and if they so desired, they could quite well do so. The only reason such a thing is common with Windows and not common with, say, cars, is because of the technological constraints imposed when those things became common. In 20 years, I wouldn't find it surprising at all to find that BMW wouldn't allow you to operate the vehicle if you had, say, performed an engine swap.
All of which is besides the point: the point is, that Windows isn't yours when you buy it. You buy a software license, and in this case, it's a particularly disagreeable one! So don't buy the license. Use some other operating system. You are free to make that choice.
Slashdot Mirror
You can certainly, as slashdotters assuredly will, endlessly debate copyright law and trademarks and the DMCA and how close to using someone else's ideas you can get before triggering legal action, but I maintain that the simplest method of completely avoiding the issue is to make a game that isn't anything like what someone else has already done. Instead of trying to just barely skirt the law, make your mark as an originalist, as a creator. It's /much/ more difficult to do - you might even respect copyrights and trademarks a little more afterward, although you also may not - but it's still much easier than lawyers' fees and court dates and trying to squeak your imitations past the DMCA. You'll also almost certainly find that it's much more deeply satisfying to create something entirely new, entirely your own, than to clone someone else's work.
/distribute/ it. If Namco Bandai wants to put Pac-Man on the Android Market, that's their decision: you should come up with your own thing, and put /that/ on the Android Market. Besides, does the world /really/ need another Pac-Man clone?
Making a Pac-Man clone should be a requirement for anyone learning about game coding, there's no doubt, but you don't
This is a scientific restatement of Pascal's Wager, and the same logic can be applied to any action: if the chances of me blowing up the universe by turning on my blender are not provably zero, I shouldn't use the blender, because the risks [destruction of everything] are so high. It's mathematically and logically sound, but ultimately immaterial: at some point, one has to weigh the evidence with which one is presented against the degree of certainty with which we can determine the risk. Or stop using the blender altogether, and then it's no more frozen daiquiris for any of us.
Seconded. [It's called "Hyperspace," in the US, "Space" in the UK, as I recall.] My daughter and I watch it about once a year, as a reminder of those pesky origin questions.
/scale./
/today,/ I assure you they don't forget such experiences, which serve them well as they age and learn.
Also incredibly powerful as a teaching tool is Cosmic Voyage, which teaches cosmology and
Last year, I did a demonstration for my daughter's class where we all went outside and built a scale model of the solar system. Even moreso than video presentations, this kind of "hands on and moving around" education keep the attention of children of all ages, and, even if they are incapable of fully grasping its ramifications
Actually, I own a copy of Windows XP Lite; it's called Windows 2000, and it does everything I'd want to do with a EEE, and then some, and does it reasonably quickly. I run Windows 2000 on my Pentium 200 laptop, and find it quite salubrious; if I bought a EEE today, it's likely what I'd [try to] install.
I'm going to build something similar: a device which will allow you to load a smaller, faster operating system, or a larger, more full-featured one. Except mine will feature removable operating systems, on small devices known as "diskettes," [like "little disks," see?] so that you can swap different diskettes and boot different smaller operating systems! I have a beta of the first version operating system right here: I'm going to call it a "DOS boot disk."
No, seriously, how is this news, or new, or anything other than a dual-boot system just like you'd get installing a tiny version of Linux and Windows XP on the same box, or a Live CD Linux install? Ridiculous.
Speaking of amusing add-ons, did you know it wasn't originally part-and-parcel of SR? FASA half-finished ED before thinking, "Hey, we could just make this the 4th World, yeah?" Unfortunately, by then it was too late to dispose with ED's step system [and magic and race differences] which seemed to mostly make everyone bleed from the ears, although I found after a few sessions it burned its way into your brain.
;) Well, with the exception of Ancient History, perhaps, whose list of links between SR and ED is as close to canonical as it gets, which almost makes up for his grievous personality faults. [Hello, Annie!]
When it comes to Earthdawn, I'm un-out-geekable.
Battletech always seemed a more interesting universe...
A competition of "interestingness" between Shadowrun and Battletech would be difficult, even for players of both games, so I'll avoid the issue and simply declare that by far the most interesting roleplaying universe ever is that of Earthdawn.
"Earth-what?" everyone says. *sigh* Nevermind. Another FASA-failed fragment of brilliance.
Because the most recent abomination has very, very little to do with Shadowrun, for reasons which simply are not justifiable from a gameplay perspective. If you're going to change an IP as much as this one got changed, don't use the IP's name: "Shadowrun" doesn't have enough cachet to draw massive numbers of non-dedicated fans, and completely altering the game universe is going to do nothing but infuriate the dedicated ones.
/believe/ the backlash this game caused, and for good reason: everyone knows you have to take some liberties when transferring a tabletop RPG to a computer game, but the Shadowrun video game played like someone had made an average multiplayer FPS and then slapped a Shadowrun sticker on it as an afterthought.
/have/ to be an MMORPG or an NWN-style game, but it would certainly help. An FPS - even a multiplayer FPS - could make a decent Shadowrun game, but only if there's some respect for the property will there be support from the fans, and only if it's exceptionally good is there going to be support for the non-fans [and why slap the sticker on in the first place when, like, eight people have heard of Shadowrun?].
I've been playing Shadowrun since a few weeks after the first edition was released, and am heavily involved on various Shadowrun forums, and you wouldn't
I good Shadowrun game doesn't
Ironically, SR has been one of the most influential RPG properties of the last few decades. "The Matrix" was based on a Shadowrun short story [which was the back half of Virtual Realities, for those who played that long ago and still have memory of those days]. And yet these funny FASA fellows never did seem to be able to make a buck - or a decent video game [the FPS not being the first try] - out of it. Finally, they just sold off and closed doors, and the property has suffered - in my opinion - ever since. But I thought it started declining with the death of Findlay and the departure of Dowd, which really just means I'm old.
I sure do wish people would stop submitting their own blog postings to Slashdot. What is this, Digg? I guess next time I want some serious traffic to my message forum, I'll post about some technical issue and pump it into the Firehose.
More to the point, how is anyone going to say "Goodbye, Microsoft," when the goodbye-microsoft.com homepage - and a good portion of the rest of the site - is completely and utterly inexplicable in terms of function for anyone not already in the know? This is, please don't kill me, quite typically Linux.
...there is another option, though it be inferior and probably fairly unfamiliar to most of us: do not do or say anything over the internet that you would not want being completely public, i.e. known by everyone in the world. I'm not advancing it as a reason this tech doesn't matter: it does, and I pray we can all embrace workarounds [as there is no putting these genies back in the bottle]. I advance it only as the pragmatic solution I have found to an increasingly transparent internet. It can be impractical, particularly for those conversations with far-distant associates, but unless and until you have a completely secure solution, the practical reaction is to avoid the technology altogether for sensitive materials.
Yes. Yes yes yes yes yes. The average American doesn't /need/ a touchscreen phone that can play movies. [Well, no one /needs/ such a ludicrous thing.] And "want" will only push the market so far. I've seen a lot of increased clamoring for phones like the Motorola F3 ["MotoFone"], at least partially because only in the last few months have rural residents been outnumbered by urban residents in this country. Add to that the enormous number of people who don't want or need cell phones period - yes, /. readers, some people don't ;) - and you have a recipe for not pointlessly pushing technology into the next century /just because it's shiny./
I'd love to have an iPhone. But honestly? An F3 would serve me better. And I am not alone.
Whatever was wrong with the vastly less unpleasant term "compartmentalization," which is already, you know, a word?
Firefly reference.
I was composing a post in my mind when I came across yours, which said everything I wanted to. Bravo. Mod him up!
So does that impress the ladies?
Dude, you're posting on
It would appear from the abstract that the same machines were used to test both versions of Windows, which is amusing: if you were to perform this test on a 486DX4-100, we could say things like, "The user interface was 4000 percent slower in Windows XP than Windows 3.1." There's some validity to the method inasmuch as, if you were choosing between the two OSes on any given computer, they should be compared equally, but it says nothing about the responsiveness of the operating system itself, much as the [many, many] recreational Microsoft bashers would have it be so.
/specifically/ for creative professionals, and that the results will be different for users of a differing aspect. Not that the abstract bothered to point that out, either because it assumed people would get it, or because they didn't want people to.
Which isn't to say I don't think the new interface is less efficient than the old one: as an almost purely keyboard Windows user who keeps the Classic interface running on XP, I can say with confidence that the new eye candy in Vista is wasted on me, and that it only slows me down. Again, I'm not saying it isn't less efficient, but it's not exactly less efficient for the reasons given in the abstract.
It's also worth noting that this study was
I don't think you understand that the point isn't this specific officer, it's a government in which this kind of abuse is generally permissible. Except that it isn't. For one thing, it's not abuse: they broke the local statues regarding stalking, period. For another, abuse of power is not "generally permissible."
Should this cop get a ticket? Well, no, because the radar gun isn't a permissible one. Should someone at the department have a long conversation with him about speeding? Hell, yes, from a human and a professional perspective. Should other cops be keeping an eye out for him on the road? Yeah, like you would anyone who commonly speeds. Will they? I pessimistically suspect not, and that would indeed be abuse of power, and I wish it didn't happen. I wish cops weren't flawed humans like the rest of us, that they were mindless engines of justice. I wish they were a world apart, true heroes. I wish I lived in a world where every single cop could be like that. Hell, I'd settle for just one more cop like that. But we live in the world in which we live. Want it to be better? Make it so.
> The problem with public officials is that they have the right to use excessive force in order to protect their position. The average citizen has no right to call out any public official on any illegal actions since the average citizen has no real power against non-elected public officials.
/more/ difficult to solve.
/imagine/ the possibilities for abuse - by individuals, that is - should such a property law be passed. "You stepped on my grass, so it's legal for me to eat you!"
This is simply untrue. One might say that, in execution, public officials sometimes have greater power than the average citizen - and one would be quite right in saying that - but by the law, with the exception of those acts which must be allowed in order for public servants to do their jobs, every citizen of the United States has the same rights. Your expression of dismay is righteous, as far as it objects to those cases where public officials abuse their authority, but beyond that, you're simply painting all government employees with a tremendously wide brush, overgeneralizing to the point of uselessness.
And it's worth noting that this officer has withdrawn his application for a warrant. My instinct says that he shouldn't have applied for one in the first place, but, like you, I know vastly too little about the actual circumstances to make any judgement against the officer.
For every case of a police officer abusing his power, there are literally millions of cases of police officers simply doing their jobs. Broad statements like yours distort the problem, actually making it
> There is a lot they can do, off the public record, that can harm you more than they harm you in their lawbreaking.
As can anyone else. Government employees have no monopoly on abusive actions taken off public record.
> Remember, cops are not here to protect you, there are there to protect their jobs -- and many of them love the power they wield over the average citizen. Why else do we have cop unions?
False dilemma. You give two choices - unions exist, therefore either police are here to protect their jobs, or to protect you. The third option is that like anyone else in any other job, they're there to do both. I suggest you spend some time with actual police officers before you start throwing around statements like, "cops are not here to protect you." Ignorance always sounds foolish.
> If someone's light-rays that bounce off their body enter your property, they are now YOUR property.
It's amusing, because I'm quite anti-government - anti-restriction-of-individual-liberty, actually - but even I wouldn't go so far as to say that any light rays which enter my property now belong to me. Is this true of air, as well? I cannot
> When will people learn that it isn't left or right, it is pro-tyranny and against-tyranny -- liberals and conservatives are on the "pro-tyranny" side of the coin. The opposite side of the coin is not a libertarian, as some might think, but an anarcho-capitalist.
Oh, gods. Yes, we'll all certainly have more pleasant lives under anarcho-capitalism.
I don't want to criticize you, as a person, and I apologize if I appear to have done so, but your views are worth of ridicule, as is the lack of reasoning behind them, even if you, personally, are not.
I heartily recommend Macro Express, which does all these things in ways that are simple and intuitive. It's the simplest and most powerful hotkey/macro program I've seen. I literally couldn't do my job [accounting] without it. Between my macros and the universal hotkeys built into Windows, I almost never touch my mouse.
I always leave it on, but whenever I'm on anyone else's machine, I try to tune the "Always Hide" and "Always Show" for the workflow of the user. [My grandmother doesn't need the nVidia control panel icon...ever. But I might, so hidden it stays. She does need the Volume icon, and would be very, very confused if it disappeared, even if she saw the warning from Windows when it originally happened. So it always stays on.]
I prefer manual control of...well, pretty much everything. Letting Windows decide which icons or menus to show works for some people, but it doesn't work for me any more than I would let my car decide which gear to be in.
Sadly, it's per-application, and it's different everywhere. [Windows itself doesn't use dynamic menus. Unless that's one of the things I happen to have turned off, without noticing.] But for Office 2003, for instance, it's Tools > Customize > Options tab > Check "Always show full menus".
The objections to both complaints - dynamic menus and hidden tray icons - are many and varied, with supporters on both sides of each issue, but ultimately, the objection is moot given that both options can be manually controlled, one of the features of Windows which I think is often downplayed. I control precisely which icons are hidden, and which are shown, in my tray, which I find /tremendously/ useful. I turn off dynamic menus, because like many of us, I want the same options in the same places all the time.
What's great is that you get the choice of which option to use. I hate the Windows XP interface, the new start menu, the idiotic task panel in Explorer windows. So I turn it all off. My XP looks virtually identical to my [stripped down] Windows 2000 interface. I've been given the option to do things however I'd like to do them, and I appreciate that.
The utility of these features is debatable, but I think that either way, it's worth noting with some appreciation that they're optional.
> You are not limited by what you do to your car! You may invalidate the warranty but, as per your example, BMW can't stop it from being driven.
Certainly, they could. The technology exists, and if they so desired, they could quite well do so. The only reason such a thing is common with Windows and not common with, say, cars, is because of the technological constraints imposed when those things became common. In 20 years, I wouldn't find it surprising at all to find that BMW wouldn't allow you to operate the vehicle if you had, say, performed an engine swap.
All of which is besides the point: the point is, that Windows isn't yours when you buy it. You buy a software license, and in this case, it's a particularly disagreeable one! So don't buy the license. Use some other operating system. You are free to make that choice.