It's people. Soylent Green is made out of people. They're making our food out of people. Next thing they'll be breeding us like cattle for food. You've gotta tell them. You've gotta tell them!
Sorry, but there was no way in hell I could keep from posting that the one time it ever will be a vaguely on-topic response.
Actually, Radio Shack is small enough that I do expect them to know everything in the store, or at least, every area in the store. If you ask them for something, they should be able to walk somewhere, and be within a step or two of where that item is, and then scan the shelf for it. Although obviously some things fit in more than one possible category.
But that's not the real problem with Radio Shack people. The problem is their lack of general knowledge about the field, like lacking knowledge that car batteries get charged. I'd understand if they said 'Hey, that's an interesting idea, a solar battery charger. If we have one, it should be...um, either in the general car electronic area here, or possibly over there in the battery charging area. Let's see if we can find one.'. Not 'Uh...what? A car cell phone charger?'
I had the same problem when trying to find a electrical S/PDIF plug panel for my computer. I couldn't seem to convey the concept that I didn't need a S/PDIF cable, which is just a fricking RCA cable and I'm fairly certain I could locate that myself if I needed to add to the dozen or so I have. (1) Instead, I needed something that would either go in a card slot or a 5.25 or 3.5 front panel slot that I could plug a cable into, with wires that run to my motherboard. They kept offering me both optical and electrical S/PDIF cables, although eventually they seemed to somewhat understand and offered me...a sound card with optical digital out. Gah.
General knowledge of the subject matter is where Radio Shack employees fall down. And that is something you can't 'train', you have to hire people who are already knowledgable about 'how things work'. Other stores I ask employees for help. Radio Shack I don't except as a last resort.
1) Okay, what the fuck is going on with 'gold-plated, high quality' 6- and 12-feet long digital audio cables? Someone is really missing the point here, and I susect it's not me. If you're losing any digital signal over six feet, even on the crappiest cable, you're running the fucking cable through an unshielded nuclear reactor or something. Are people really this stupid?
The company has a hate/hate relationship with electronic parts. Radio Shack soooo desperately wants to be Best Buy or Circuit City, but with their lousy prices on high-end stuff, they just can't pull it off. The electronic parts section that the company despises is the only thing that keeps them afloat.
That, right there, is their fucking problem. Especially with people now purchasing TVs and DVD players at Walmart. They cannot compete in that business.
They need to get back to hobbiests, and get to the hobbyists they've been completely ignoring, the computer ones. I don't build things out of transistors, but I would be thrilled to have a place with videocards and motherboards and computer cases and memory. It would be great to have a place I could say 'Dear God, this computer has 128 megs of ram and is running XP! I'll run to Radio Shack and pick up a 256 or 512 more megs'. Instead there's a larger selection in, yup, Walmart! (And Walmart has almost nothing at all.)
Radio Shack is directly competing with about a dozen different stores, all of whom have a larger selection and lower prices. And it's competing with Walmart. If they would take the 'hobbyist' reputation and expand that beyond 'electronic wiring', they might actually get somewhere. (Yeah, yeah, they'd be competing with Compusa, but those are fairly rare, and a hell of a lot better than competing with Walmart.)
And while I don't know much about it, there's a whole car electronic hobbyist thingy. Yes, there are stores for that, but they are pretty rare, too. Yeah, you can get wiring, but not things like car fuse holders.
Hell, there are probably other hobbyists out there too. Radio controlled airplanes? People building their own wireless speakers? Home automation people? DJs? I don't know what groups exist, but I do know the people sitting around soldiering things to circuit boards is nowhere near where it was it the 80s. Nowadays, they buy ICs and program them...and good luck finding those at Radio Shack.(1)
Seriously, Radio Shack is stuck in the 80s with their hobbyist stuff, and can't make a profit on anything else. For a while they sold TVs, and then cellphones, but those are idiotic markets to be in now.
1) Hey, there's an idea, right there. Sell programmable ICs, and provide a free kiosk that you can plug them into to program them, for people who want one or two ICs, but don't want to buy a IC flasher thingy.
So, Radio Shack would rather have people who can politely tell you they have no idea what you're talking about and can't help you at all, vs. someone who knows what you're talking about, and has suggestions to solve the problem that you might not even thought of but doesn't say 'sir', slouches, and doesn't look you firmly in the eye?
That explains a lot.
And, no, that's not really Radio Shack's fault. It's society's fault for valuing stupid things, where the appearance of being helpful is more important than actually being fucking helpful.
I hate it when I go into stores, and people ask me if they can help me, and then, when they try, the only response on my part should be 'Well, we've determined that you cannot, in fact, help me, because you have much less knowledge about this than I do, despite you working in a damn store selling the things'.
Seriously, that's excusable when you stop some random employee walking by the door area in Home Depot. Maybe the guy works in paint and is a paint guru, but knows nothing about sizing a door. Fair enough. But Radio Shack is small enough that I could explain the basic concepts behind everything there in a day, explaining that this is an RCA connector and how a typical wireless router is used.
FYI, it looks more and more like the terrorists in London were no real threat to anyone at all, and were arrested as a PR move.
That's not to say they weren't bad people, and actually 'planning' what they were planning, but their plan was idiotic and a good way to kill only themselves in the plane restroom, required quite a few materials they had no access, required things they had access to, but hadn't bothered getting yet, like passports, and they were being watched by the British.
The British were pressured into arresting them by the US before anyone was ready, and, at this point, have already had to let a few of them go, because, while they've discovered various tools and supplies in their neighborhood-wide search...they can't actually link them to the terrorists, thanks to the utter stupidity of just randomly arresting them with no planning. And, of course, we can't track down who was supporting them, and who knows how many people got away.
Oh, and almost all the evidence against them is either the vague plans the British picked up via legal wiretaps, or the testimony gained by the Pakistans torturing some guy. And guess which one of those is admissable in British court? (Of course, they were still mostly at the point of vague plans anyway.)
Thank you, George W. Bush, for fucking something else up. Now I'm expecting someone to point out the released-for-lack-of-evidence terrorists and say 'See, this is why we need Gitmo'. Because suddenly, after hundreds of years, we've suddenly gotten too damn incompetant to actually build legal cases against bad guys.
Incidentally, if someone was going to blow up a plane with something iPod sized...wouldn't it make more sense to carry it into the bathroom (Or wheverever) and set it off manually? Why on earth would you go there, turn on a timer, and walk away?
To be fair to glibc, a lot of 'threadsafe' functions are just references in the standard headers that map them to the 'non-threadsafe' version. There might have been two versions at one time, but there aren't anymore.
And it's not really i18n, it's Unicode versions of string handlers that are causing all the headaches. i18n is usually done via wrappers around strings, like instead of "blah", you put in T("blah") and the magic internationalization headers turn that into an indexed lookup, like '59298', and create a file the program looks up '59298' in and gets 'blah'. And it's smart enough to give the same number to every 'blah'. It cleverly doesn't require anything except putting T() around the string, which also lets you disable i18n support via a header.
There are already perfectly good game portals out there, run by actual gaming communities that don't have any sort of incentive to promote crap games.
What's more, they're focused on specific genres, and even like different things within each genre. So you just find one or two that roughly lines up to what you find interesting, read the reviews (The big sites can get prerelease reviews, but sometimes the big sites aren't the best.), check out screen shots, read the forums, and you'll soon have a good idea what games you might like.
Why on earth would we trust a place selling the game to tell use it's certainly a good game and we certainly should buy it? It's not like, after we find an interesting game, we're too damn lazy to google it and buy it online from the publisher. Hell, the existing portals have links to their webpages.
This whole concept is idiotic. If you want a game portal, google the type of game you like, and 'forum', like 'adventure game forum' or 'fps forum'. See what review sites they're talking about, check them out.
And most of those places have specific 'indie' areas.
What kind of nonsense are you talking about? Seriously, that doesn't even make any sense, and it's not any sort of response to what I said.
I started on an actual reply, but realized all I was doing was repeating the exact same thing I'd just said. If you actually want to address the point I made that general 'counterfeiting', aka, copying things, isn't illegal, I'll respond. Like I said, it's always the fraud that's illegal.
Now, if you go to iTunes and purchase a Metallica song and it's actually a sound-alike band covering them that iTunes is (legally) selling because it's cheaper, yeah, you can call that 'counterfeiting' or 'forgery' if you want.(1)
But that doesn't really have a lot to do with copyright law.
1) It's legally just fraud, by fakery, because both 'counterfeiting' and 'forgery' are both limited to specific types of fakes being misrepresented as the original, but whatever, I don't care enough to worry about that misnaming.
No. Just because you aren't under the moral obligation to follow the laws probiting murder, doesn't mean you aren't under a moral obligation not to kill people.
To rephrase in a way that makes a bit more sense:
If someone random person on the street demands I do something, I am under no moral obligation to do that thing just because they say so. Right? I think everyone would agree that people don't have to do things just because people asked.
If the random person is an old lady, and she's asking for help to fight off an attacker, I'm still under no moral obligation to do that thing because she says so.
I am, however, under a moral obligation to help a defenseless old woman being attacked.
We can be under no moral obligation to listen to what the government, or anyone, says to do, and yet be under an moral obligation to do certain things. Even if they government says otherwise, or even the same thing!
Notice I'm not taking a stand on copyright infringement here. I'm just pointing out that no one, ever, us under a moral obligation to follow the law, unless, perhaps, they were the ones who created it, but that doesn't mean that the law can't match our preexisting moral obligations.
And people don't even always agree with the laws about murder, especially WRT self defense.
You morons talking about it do realize that the crime in counterfeiting isn't duplicating the thing, right? It's legal to duplicate deeds and watches and blue jeans and paintings and pretty much everything. You want a fake Rolex? You want a hand-painted copy of the Mona Lisa? I can buy them, unlike the universe you apparently live in where it's magically illegal to buy copies of things that aren't under copyright.
The crimes is passing them off as originals. Some stuff just because of general trademark law. Some stuff that wouldn't be protected under trademark law has had specific laws passed because of their high value (like paintings and other works of art). But all of them can be exactly duplicated, although sometimes you have to alter a trademark or two, as long as they are presented as copies. There is almost nothing it is flatly illegal to duplicate.
Even stuff that it's actual illegal to duplicate at all, and the only example I can think of currency, is because of the incredibly high likelyhood that it was duplicated to pass off as the real thing, not because there's some sort of societial problem in letting people have things that look like currency, beyond them using it as currency. (There's a guy out there that hand-paints one side of fake Euros, sometimes modifying them with his picture, sometimes using the real picture, and trades them for good and services. He's getting away with it because he doesn't pretend they're real Euros, and other people couldn't use them anyway as they're one-sided.)
I.e., it's not anything to do with the right 'not to have things duplicated'. It's entirely fraud. Someone says it's X, when it's really a copy of X.
As absolutely no one here has even vaguly mentioned their intention to duplicate music CD, print up labels, and sell or give them away as if they were the real thing, 'counterfeiting' is entirely out of place in a copyright discussion. Just because you can commit fraud and copyright infringement at the same time doesn't make them relevant to each other.
The only place 'counterfeiting' is really relevant when discussing copyright is software, usually Windows, that comes with computers, that is an illegal copy. (And that is almost entirely fucking Microsoft's fault because they got OEMs to stop handing out Windows CDs, or replace them with 'restore' CDs. If when you got a computer you expected a holographic Windows CD to come with it, almost no one could get away with selling illegal copies with computers.)
All copies of downloaded software and music and movies and whatnot, or purchased in open air markets on CD-Rs, even ones with fancy custom labels, are pretty much known to be illegal, so 'fraud' and 'counterfeiting' don't enter into it. (And the downloaded ones are free anyway.)
And I can't even imagine how you think it's illegal to duplicate expensive jewelry. What kind of crazy-ass law would that be? You think it's illegal to see a nice piece of jewelry you like, be it on someone or in a jewelry store, take a picture of it, and take that picture to a jewelry and say 'Make me this'? You honestly believe that's illegal? What universe do you live in?
We stopped having an obligation to follow the law the moment they made it illegal to tell juries, if they do not agree with the law, about their right to find people innocent even if they had clearly broken the law.
Or, rather, we've always had the option to break the law, and turn ourselves in, and have that law be judged by society whether or not it was just. When the legal system stops lying to juries, I'll turn myself in and see if society honestly thinks copying music is worth that much punishment.
I dunno, I kinda like this 'house' of his where you can literally run though exterior walls if you hit them hard enough and missed a stud. I mean, with only one layer of drywall, it would be easier to get through than an interior wall, although you'd end up wrapped in siding. It would be great in case of fire.
Although I have no idea how you'd actually attach the siding in the first place.
But, yeah, seriously, going through the walls are a good way to get out of a locked room. It's a damn stupid way of trying to get into a house. It's harder than both picking the lock and breaking a window combined.
Hell, it's easier to just hit a door with a sledge hammer at the doorknob until it cracks open, or grab a jigsaw or sawzall and cut the doorknob out of the door, while we're thinking of absurd ways to get into houses. Even if it's slightly slower going, you're talking about cutting two feet instead of, at minimum, eight feet. (To make a rectangle one foot across and three feet tall to climb through.)
If you have the right kind of saw, you could just cut all the bolts by running it down the edge of the door. But anything that can cut wood can cut the lock out. (And, for those few places with metal-reinforced doors...just cut the doorframe instead.)
The idea of cutting in through a wall is insane. Even if you happen to be packing cutting tools, you'd be cutting your way, in essense, through doors, not random walls. Which also works on brick houses, and you won't hit wires or plumbing.
And what would be really funny if you cut a tiny hole to crawl into, and found yourself looking at the back of a bookcase or refridgerator, or the inside of a jammed-full closet, and had to figure out how to get past that.
There wasn't any sign of breaking and entering so the police refused to file a report, and that meant I couldn't get the loss covered by my insurance.
What. The. Fuck?
First of all, breaking and entering applies to real estate, not property. It is not actually illegal to enter someone else's car, oddly enough. (Although they will assume you're trying to steal it and lock you up for that.) And damaging someone's car is illegal, obviously.
But people don't get charged with 'breaking and entering' if they break a car window and steal something from the seat, period. They get charged with destruction of property and theft.
However, running off with someone else's property is theft regardless of whether or not it's in a house, a locked car, an unlocked car, on top of a car, or laying on a park bench(1). And a laptop is well over the amount that makes it a felony, which I think is somewhere between 20 and 100 dollars. (It's still illegal below that, it's just a misdemeanor.)
If the police refused to file a report, you need to sue their ass off, especially as said refusal actually cost you money. (In addition to making it very unlikely you'd recover the laptop.)
It sounds like you have a police department that's just decided they can do whatever they want to do, but police departments, while not required to prevent crime, or even solve crime, are usually required by state and local government to take reports of crime. Otherwise they could just sit on their ass all day and report there's no crime at all.
1) Assuming it's not 'abandoned property', but something has to sit there for a day or two to be that, and many places have requirement that you post notices of recovered property that you don't know the owner of over a certain dollar value for a certain period of time.
Windows doesn't offer anything. (I don't know why you emphasized Windows 'as a platform'. What the hell other way could we be talking about? What other ways is it even vaguely possible to use Windows?)
By your logic, a car in Atlanta offers the availablity of an Atlanta radio station, while a car in Detroit doesn't. Um, no. Both of them offer a radio tuner, and both of them receive the stations in range. Both Windows and Linux both offer a platform for application software, and interfaces to USB drives and sound cards and hard drives and TCP/IP.
Nothing in Windows supports an iPod. No part of Windows results in iPods more or less supported than Linux. Apple is just broadcasting near the Windows car.
There is a program that is required to use an iPod fully, or at least the music store, and that program is supported on Windows. (and Mac OS.) Not by Windows. It is supported by Apple.
But, hey, let's enter your crazy logic universe, because you're still wrong.
You said, and I quote 'Windows can offer this compatability, Linux, regardless of what kludge you add to it, cannot.'
There is no way to parse your statement that makes it true, even according to your rules. If we take your rather nonsensical meaning of 'supported by' to mean 'supported on', Linux, can, indeed, support the iPod. Using your weird logic, it doesn't, but 'it could' if Apple chose to make it do so. Considering that iTunes is an OSX application, it would actually be rather trivial to 'get Linux to support' it, by merely recompiling it. (Recompiling iTunes, that is, not Linux.) This recompling of a third party app would magically make Linux now support a piece of hardware, in your universe, so it certainly 'can' support the iPod.
Incidentally, I like how the actual iPod support in Linux is a 'kludge'. Tell me, what's more of a kludge:
1) You have to use a specific application to copy music back and forth, and if you put it in a computer without that application loaded, it shows up as a USB drive, and you can't see your music easily (and it's randomly named), and if you copy music to it, you can't play it via the device.
2. It shows up as a drive on your computer and, in addition to letting (many) music players load it exactly like iTunes, you can just copy music into and out of it via your file manager, and the music will play via the device. Oh, and you can use the same apps for loading all your mp3 players, not just iPods.
Well, worse than the governments that immediately followed them.
Later on, the inherit contradiction of the ideology tends to lead to institutional insanity. Except, oddly enough, with China, I don't know how they managed to avoid that.
But, yeah, communism is what happens when governments ignore the big flashing warning signs, when they are completely out of touch with the people. Actually, that's every revolution. Communism is just the result when the government is operated by businesses when they ignore the big flashing warning signs.
No, that's not quite right either. Communism is a cause when the government is operated by businesses. It might, or might not be the result, when it was a cause. And sometimes it's the result when it's not really the cause!
Of course, if it was a cause, the new government, communistic or not, either must fix the problem, or they're risking a new revolution.
Cuba's not going to have a revolution, because the people who would be revolutionaries just swim for America. It's actually kinda sad. However, I have to point out there have, indeed, been repeated failed revolutions. I never said the revolution succeeds.
As for North Korea, I suspect they'll have one pretty soon. However, a free society is always going to note the imbalance more than a dictatorship. (People in dictatorships have other things to worry around.) Peasants vs. citizens.
It's the free societies that notice that their law is skewed towards the rich. The unfree ones notice only their law is skewed towards the government and whatever the hell it wants to happen.
And the general level of education and tradition of freedom comes into play there, too. So while North Korea, in absolute terms, is closer to the tipping point, and possibly has already reached it, they can hold it back for longer, whereas in the US, we're a lot farther away, but moving much faster.
Did you actually think I was cheering for the dictatorships that result when violent revolution to communism happens? That somehow Cuba and North Korea disprove my point? (Hell, North Korea couldn't disprove my point, as it didn't have a fucking communist revolution in the first place...China gave it one.)
I was pointing out that Marx is right, communism, or at least socialism, happens when workers are exploited, either happening within the government, or, when the people doing the exploiting have such a stranglehold on the government that it can't happen, happens in a bloody revolution. But either way, it happens. It's not some moral debate, it is a fact. You can like it or dislike it, I don't care.
The branch either bends, or it breaks.
And, just in case you think I'm full of crap, this has already happened in the US. It was called 'The progressive movement', and instead of socialism we got child labor laws, minimum wage, workplace safety stuff, product safety standards, labeling requirements, all sorts of government restrictions on businesses, to curb their abuses. If this had not happened, if the businesses had had the grasp of the government then than they have now and held their ground, we would have had a communism revolution in the 1920s and 30s. (Hell, we almost had one anyway, with the unions.)
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Why do one or the other?
Send out the fake to everyone. When the correction gets sent out, send that to everyone, including the actually fired people.
Instant mass confusion.
It's people. Soylent Green is made out of people. They're making our food out of people. Next thing they'll be breeding us like cattle for food. You've gotta tell them. You've gotta tell them!
Sorry, but there was no way in hell I could keep from posting that the one time it ever will be a vaguely on-topic response.
You could have also tried to look it up on the Internet Center computer present in every store which runs what is at RadioShack.com.
No it's not. I know of at least one that doesn't have one, at least as of six days ago.
Actually, Radio Shack is small enough that I do expect them to know everything in the store, or at least, every area in the store. If you ask them for something, they should be able to walk somewhere, and be within a step or two of where that item is, and then scan the shelf for it. Although obviously some things fit in more than one possible category.
But that's not the real problem with Radio Shack people. The problem is their lack of general knowledge about the field, like lacking knowledge that car batteries get charged. I'd understand if they said 'Hey, that's an interesting idea, a solar battery charger. If we have one, it should be...um, either in the general car electronic area here, or possibly over there in the battery charging area. Let's see if we can find one.'. Not 'Uh...what? A car cell phone charger?'
I had the same problem when trying to find a electrical S/PDIF plug panel for my computer. I couldn't seem to convey the concept that I didn't need a S/PDIF cable, which is just a fricking RCA cable and I'm fairly certain I could locate that myself if I needed to add to the dozen or so I have. (1) Instead, I needed something that would either go in a card slot or a 5.25 or 3.5 front panel slot that I could plug a cable into, with wires that run to my motherboard. They kept offering me both optical and electrical S/PDIF cables, although eventually they seemed to somewhat understand and offered me...a sound card with optical digital out. Gah.
General knowledge of the subject matter is where Radio Shack employees fall down. And that is something you can't 'train', you have to hire people who are already knowledgable about 'how things work'. Other stores I ask employees for help. Radio Shack I don't except as a last resort.
1) Okay, what the fuck is going on with 'gold-plated, high quality' 6- and 12-feet long digital audio cables? Someone is really missing the point here, and I susect it's not me. If you're losing any digital signal over six feet, even on the crappiest cable, you're running the fucking cable through an unshielded nuclear reactor or something. Are people really this stupid?
The company has a hate/hate relationship with electronic parts. Radio Shack soooo desperately wants to be Best Buy or Circuit City, but with their lousy prices on high-end stuff, they just can't pull it off. The electronic parts section that the company despises is the only thing that keeps them afloat.
That, right there, is their fucking problem. Especially with people now purchasing TVs and DVD players at Walmart. They cannot compete in that business.
They need to get back to hobbiests, and get to the hobbyists they've been completely ignoring, the computer ones. I don't build things out of transistors, but I would be thrilled to have a place with videocards and motherboards and computer cases and memory. It would be great to have a place I could say 'Dear God, this computer has 128 megs of ram and is running XP! I'll run to Radio Shack and pick up a 256 or 512 more megs'. Instead there's a larger selection in, yup, Walmart! (And Walmart has almost nothing at all.)
Radio Shack is directly competing with about a dozen different stores, all of whom have a larger selection and lower prices. And it's competing with Walmart. If they would take the 'hobbyist' reputation and expand that beyond 'electronic wiring', they might actually get somewhere. (Yeah, yeah, they'd be competing with Compusa, but those are fairly rare, and a hell of a lot better than competing with Walmart.)
And while I don't know much about it, there's a whole car electronic hobbyist thingy. Yes, there are stores for that, but they are pretty rare, too. Yeah, you can get wiring, but not things like car fuse holders.
Hell, there are probably other hobbyists out there too. Radio controlled airplanes? People building their own wireless speakers? Home automation people? DJs? I don't know what groups exist, but I do know the people sitting around soldiering things to circuit boards is nowhere near where it was it the 80s. Nowadays, they buy ICs and program them...and good luck finding those at Radio Shack.(1)
Seriously, Radio Shack is stuck in the 80s with their hobbyist stuff, and can't make a profit on anything else. For a while they sold TVs, and then cellphones, but those are idiotic markets to be in now.
1) Hey, there's an idea, right there. Sell programmable ICs, and provide a free kiosk that you can plug them into to program them, for people who want one or two ICs, but don't want to buy a IC flasher thingy.
So, Radio Shack would rather have people who can politely tell you they have no idea what you're talking about and can't help you at all, vs. someone who knows what you're talking about, and has suggestions to solve the problem that you might not even thought of but doesn't say 'sir', slouches, and doesn't look you firmly in the eye?
That explains a lot.
And, no, that's not really Radio Shack's fault. It's society's fault for valuing stupid things, where the appearance of being helpful is more important than actually being fucking helpful.
I hate it when I go into stores, and people ask me if they can help me, and then, when they try, the only response on my part should be 'Well, we've determined that you cannot, in fact, help me, because you have much less knowledge about this than I do, despite you working in a damn store selling the things'.
Seriously, that's excusable when you stop some random employee walking by the door area in Home Depot. Maybe the guy works in paint and is a paint guru, but knows nothing about sizing a door. Fair enough. But Radio Shack is small enough that I could explain the basic concepts behind everything there in a day, explaining that this is an RCA connector and how a typical wireless router is used.
Why? You can't fire them twice.
FYI, it looks more and more like the terrorists in London were no real threat to anyone at all, and were arrested as a PR move.
That's not to say they weren't bad people, and actually 'planning' what they were planning, but their plan was idiotic and a good way to kill only themselves in the plane restroom, required quite a few materials they had no access, required things they had access to, but hadn't bothered getting yet, like passports, and they were being watched by the British.
The British were pressured into arresting them by the US before anyone was ready, and, at this point, have already had to let a few of them go, because, while they've discovered various tools and supplies in their neighborhood-wide search...they can't actually link them to the terrorists, thanks to the utter stupidity of just randomly arresting them with no planning. And, of course, we can't track down who was supporting them, and who knows how many people got away.
Oh, and almost all the evidence against them is either the vague plans the British picked up via legal wiretaps, or the testimony gained by the Pakistans torturing some guy. And guess which one of those is admissable in British court? (Of course, they were still mostly at the point of vague plans anyway.)
Thank you, George W. Bush, for fucking something else up. Now I'm expecting someone to point out the released-for-lack-of-evidence terrorists and say 'See, this is why we need Gitmo'. Because suddenly, after hundreds of years, we've suddenly gotten too damn incompetant to actually build legal cases against bad guys.
Incidentally, if someone was going to blow up a plane with something iPod sized...wouldn't it make more sense to carry it into the bathroom (Or wheverever) and set it off manually? Why on earth would you go there, turn on a timer, and walk away?
The version is Pre-RC1? What kind of stupid versioning is that?
Jesus Christ, did you people just reinvent microkernels really badly?
To be fair to glibc, a lot of 'threadsafe' functions are just references in the standard headers that map them to the 'non-threadsafe' version. There might have been two versions at one time, but there aren't anymore.
And it's not really i18n, it's Unicode versions of string handlers that are causing all the headaches. i18n is usually done via wrappers around strings, like instead of "blah", you put in T("blah") and the magic internationalization headers turn that into an indexed lookup, like '59298', and create a file the program looks up '59298' in and gets 'blah'. And it's smart enough to give the same number to every 'blah'. It cleverly doesn't require anything except putting T() around the string, which also lets you disable i18n support via a header.
Unicode, OTOH, is a complete mess.
There are already perfectly good game portals out there, run by actual gaming communities that don't have any sort of incentive to promote crap games.
What's more, they're focused on specific genres, and even like different things within each genre. So you just find one or two that roughly lines up to what you find interesting, read the reviews (The big sites can get prerelease reviews, but sometimes the big sites aren't the best.), check out screen shots, read the forums, and you'll soon have a good idea what games you might like.
Why on earth would we trust a place selling the game to tell use it's certainly a good game and we certainly should buy it? It's not like, after we find an interesting game, we're too damn lazy to google it and buy it online from the publisher. Hell, the existing portals have links to their webpages.
This whole concept is idiotic. If you want a game portal, google the type of game you like, and 'forum', like 'adventure game forum' or 'fps forum'. See what review sites they're talking about, check them out.
And most of those places have specific 'indie' areas.
What kind of nonsense are you talking about? Seriously, that doesn't even make any sense, and it's not any sort of response to what I said.
I started on an actual reply, but realized all I was doing was repeating the exact same thing I'd just said. If you actually want to address the point I made that general 'counterfeiting', aka, copying things, isn't illegal, I'll respond. Like I said, it's always the fraud that's illegal.
Now, if you go to iTunes and purchase a Metallica song and it's actually a sound-alike band covering them that iTunes is (legally) selling because it's cheaper, yeah, you can call that 'counterfeiting' or 'forgery' if you want.(1)
But that doesn't really have a lot to do with copyright law.
1) It's legally just fraud, by fakery, because both 'counterfeiting' and 'forgery' are both limited to specific types of fakes being misrepresented as the original, but whatever, I don't care enough to worry about that misnaming.
That's not only cannibalism, that's incest!
Yeah, now we're using ground up people.
It's not destruction of evidence unless you do it after the police tell you they're investigating and not to destroy any evidence.
No. Just because you aren't under the moral obligation to follow the laws probiting murder, doesn't mean you aren't under a moral obligation not to kill people.
To rephrase in a way that makes a bit more sense:
If someone random person on the street demands I do something, I am under no moral obligation to do that thing just because they say so. Right? I think everyone would agree that people don't have to do things just because people asked.
If the random person is an old lady, and she's asking for help to fight off an attacker, I'm still under no moral obligation to do that thing because she says so.
I am, however, under a moral obligation to help a defenseless old woman being attacked.
We can be under no moral obligation to listen to what the government, or anyone, says to do, and yet be under an moral obligation to do certain things. Even if they government says otherwise, or even the same thing!
Notice I'm not taking a stand on copyright infringement here. I'm just pointing out that no one, ever, us under a moral obligation to follow the law, unless, perhaps, they were the ones who created it, but that doesn't mean that the law can't match our preexisting moral obligations.
And people don't even always agree with the laws about murder, especially WRT self defense.
How the fuck did counterfieting get in here?
You morons talking about it do realize that the crime in counterfeiting isn't duplicating the thing, right? It's legal to duplicate deeds and watches and blue jeans and paintings and pretty much everything. You want a fake Rolex? You want a hand-painted copy of the Mona Lisa? I can buy them, unlike the universe you apparently live in where it's magically illegal to buy copies of things that aren't under copyright.
The crimes is passing them off as originals. Some stuff just because of general trademark law. Some stuff that wouldn't be protected under trademark law has had specific laws passed because of their high value (like paintings and other works of art). But all of them can be exactly duplicated, although sometimes you have to alter a trademark or two, as long as they are presented as copies. There is almost nothing it is flatly illegal to duplicate.
Even stuff that it's actual illegal to duplicate at all, and the only example I can think of currency, is because of the incredibly high likelyhood that it was duplicated to pass off as the real thing, not because there's some sort of societial problem in letting people have things that look like currency, beyond them using it as currency. (There's a guy out there that hand-paints one side of fake Euros, sometimes modifying them with his picture, sometimes using the real picture, and trades them for good and services. He's getting away with it because he doesn't pretend they're real Euros, and other people couldn't use them anyway as they're one-sided.)
I.e., it's not anything to do with the right 'not to have things duplicated'. It's entirely fraud. Someone says it's X, when it's really a copy of X.
As absolutely no one here has even vaguly mentioned their intention to duplicate music CD, print up labels, and sell or give them away as if they were the real thing, 'counterfeiting' is entirely out of place in a copyright discussion. Just because you can commit fraud and copyright infringement at the same time doesn't make them relevant to each other.
The only place 'counterfeiting' is really relevant when discussing copyright is software, usually Windows, that comes with computers, that is an illegal copy. (And that is almost entirely fucking Microsoft's fault because they got OEMs to stop handing out Windows CDs, or replace them with 'restore' CDs. If when you got a computer you expected a holographic Windows CD to come with it, almost no one could get away with selling illegal copies with computers.)
All copies of downloaded software and music and movies and whatnot, or purchased in open air markets on CD-Rs, even ones with fancy custom labels, are pretty much known to be illegal, so 'fraud' and 'counterfeiting' don't enter into it. (And the downloaded ones are free anyway.)
And I can't even imagine how you think it's illegal to duplicate expensive jewelry. What kind of crazy-ass law would that be? You think it's illegal to see a nice piece of jewelry you like, be it on someone or in a jewelry store, take a picture of it, and take that picture to a jewelry and say 'Make me this'? You honestly believe that's illegal? What universe do you live in?
We stopped having an obligation to follow the law the moment they made it illegal to tell juries, if they do not agree with the law, about their right to find people innocent even if they had clearly broken the law.
Or, rather, we've always had the option to break the law, and turn ourselves in, and have that law be judged by society whether or not it was just. When the legal system stops lying to juries, I'll turn myself in and see if society honestly thinks copying music is worth that much punishment.
I'm dead certain it doesn't.
Why the fuck would you want to do that? That just renders the electronics unusable without touching the data!
I dunno, I kinda like this 'house' of his where you can literally run though exterior walls if you hit them hard enough and missed a stud. I mean, with only one layer of drywall, it would be easier to get through than an interior wall, although you'd end up wrapped in siding. It would be great in case of fire.
Although I have no idea how you'd actually attach the siding in the first place.
But, yeah, seriously, going through the walls are a good way to get out of a locked room. It's a damn stupid way of trying to get into a house. It's harder than both picking the lock and breaking a window combined.
Hell, it's easier to just hit a door with a sledge hammer at the doorknob until it cracks open, or grab a jigsaw or sawzall and cut the doorknob out of the door, while we're thinking of absurd ways to get into houses. Even if it's slightly slower going, you're talking about cutting two feet instead of, at minimum, eight feet. (To make a rectangle one foot across and three feet tall to climb through.)
If you have the right kind of saw, you could just cut all the bolts by running it down the edge of the door. But anything that can cut wood can cut the lock out. (And, for those few places with metal-reinforced doors...just cut the doorframe instead.)
The idea of cutting in through a wall is insane. Even if you happen to be packing cutting tools, you'd be cutting your way, in essense, through doors, not random walls. Which also works on brick houses, and you won't hit wires or plumbing.
And what would be really funny if you cut a tiny hole to crawl into, and found yourself looking at the back of a bookcase or refridgerator, or the inside of a jammed-full closet, and had to figure out how to get past that.
There wasn't any sign of breaking and entering so the police refused to file a report, and that meant I couldn't get the loss covered by my insurance.
What. The. Fuck?
First of all, breaking and entering applies to real estate, not property. It is not actually illegal to enter someone else's car, oddly enough. (Although they will assume you're trying to steal it and lock you up for that.) And damaging someone's car is illegal, obviously.
But people don't get charged with 'breaking and entering' if they break a car window and steal something from the seat, period. They get charged with destruction of property and theft.
However, running off with someone else's property is theft regardless of whether or not it's in a house, a locked car, an unlocked car, on top of a car, or laying on a park bench(1). And a laptop is well over the amount that makes it a felony, which I think is somewhere between 20 and 100 dollars. (It's still illegal below that, it's just a misdemeanor.)
If the police refused to file a report, you need to sue their ass off, especially as said refusal actually cost you money. (In addition to making it very unlikely you'd recover the laptop.)
It sounds like you have a police department that's just decided they can do whatever they want to do, but police departments, while not required to prevent crime, or even solve crime, are usually required by state and local government to take reports of crime. Otherwise they could just sit on their ass all day and report there's no crime at all.
1) Assuming it's not 'abandoned property', but something has to sit there for a day or two to be that, and many places have requirement that you post notices of recovered property that you don't know the owner of over a certain dollar value for a certain period of time.
Windows doesn't offer anything. (I don't know why you emphasized Windows 'as a platform'. What the hell other way could we be talking about? What other ways is it even vaguely possible to use Windows?)
By your logic, a car in Atlanta offers the availablity of an Atlanta radio station, while a car in Detroit doesn't. Um, no. Both of them offer a radio tuner, and both of them receive the stations in range. Both Windows and Linux both offer a platform for application software, and interfaces to USB drives and sound cards and hard drives and TCP/IP.
Nothing in Windows supports an iPod. No part of Windows results in iPods more or less supported than Linux. Apple is just broadcasting near the Windows car.
There is a program that is required to use an iPod fully, or at least the music store, and that program is supported on Windows. (and Mac OS.) Not by Windows. It is supported by Apple.
But, hey, let's enter your crazy logic universe, because you're still wrong. You said, and I quote 'Windows can offer this compatability, Linux, regardless of what kludge you add to it, cannot.'
There is no way to parse your statement that makes it true, even according to your rules. If we take your rather nonsensical meaning of 'supported by' to mean 'supported on', Linux, can, indeed, support the iPod. Using your weird logic, it doesn't, but 'it could' if Apple chose to make it do so. Considering that iTunes is an OSX application, it would actually be rather trivial to 'get Linux to support' it, by merely recompiling it. (Recompiling iTunes, that is, not Linux.) This recompling of a third party app would magically make Linux now support a piece of hardware, in your universe, so it certainly 'can' support the iPod.
Incidentally, I like how the actual iPod support in Linux is a 'kludge'. Tell me, what's more of a kludge:
1) You have to use a specific application to copy music back and forth, and if you put it in a computer without that application loaded, it shows up as a USB drive, and you can't see your music easily (and it's randomly named), and if you copy music to it, you can't play it via the device.
2. It shows up as a drive on your computer and, in addition to letting (many) music players load it exactly like iTunes, you can just copy music into and out of it via your file manager, and the music will play via the device. Oh, and you can use the same apps for loading all your mp3 players, not just iPods.
Yeah, boy, Linux support sure is a kludge.
Well, worse than the governments that immediately followed them.
Later on, the inherit contradiction of the ideology tends to lead to institutional insanity. Except, oddly enough, with China, I don't know how they managed to avoid that.
But, yeah, communism is what happens when governments ignore the big flashing warning signs, when they are completely out of touch with the people. Actually, that's every revolution. Communism is just the result when the government is operated by businesses when they ignore the big flashing warning signs.
No, that's not quite right either. Communism is a cause when the government is operated by businesses. It might, or might not be the result, when it was a cause. And sometimes it's the result when it's not really the cause!
Of course, if it was a cause, the new government, communistic or not, either must fix the problem, or they're risking a new revolution.
Cuba's not going to have a revolution, because the people who would be revolutionaries just swim for America. It's actually kinda sad. However, I have to point out there have, indeed, been repeated failed revolutions. I never said the revolution succeeds.
As for North Korea, I suspect they'll have one pretty soon. However, a free society is always going to note the imbalance more than a dictatorship. (People in dictatorships have other things to worry around.) Peasants vs. citizens.
It's the free societies that notice that their law is skewed towards the rich. The unfree ones notice only their law is skewed towards the government and whatever the hell it wants to happen.
And the general level of education and tradition of freedom comes into play there, too. So while North Korea, in absolute terms, is closer to the tipping point, and possibly has already reached it, they can hold it back for longer, whereas in the US, we're a lot farther away, but moving much faster.
Did you actually think I was cheering for the dictatorships that result when violent revolution to communism happens? That somehow Cuba and North Korea disprove my point? (Hell, North Korea couldn't disprove my point, as it didn't have a fucking communist revolution in the first place...China gave it one.)
I was pointing out that Marx is right, communism, or at least socialism, happens when workers are exploited, either happening within the government, or, when the people doing the exploiting have such a stranglehold on the government that it can't happen, happens in a bloody revolution. But either way, it happens. It's not some moral debate, it is a fact. You can like it or dislike it, I don't care.
The branch either bends, or it breaks.
And, just in case you think I'm full of crap, this has already happened in the US. It was called 'The progressive movement', and instead of socialism we got child labor laws, minimum wage, workplace safety stuff, product safety standards, labeling requirements, all sorts of government restrictions on businesses, to curb their abuses. If this had not happened, if the businesses had had the grasp of the government then than they have now and held their ground, we would have had a communism revolution in the 1920s and 30s. (Hell, we almost had one anyway, with the unions.)