I am not a lawyer, but this is my advice: Take all of the stubs from the bills they've sent you with the modem rental charges along with anything you can that proves you own your modem to a lawyer and ask your legal council to have the records of your support calls to Comcast on this issue seized, then sue to have the modem charges refunded, along with any damages that their charges might have cause you (i.e., bank overdrafts you might have incurred as a result of their charges against you for a service they aren't providing; the lawyer should know of an effective way to accomplish this). During the suit, make as much 'noise' as you can about their policies and their monopoly status in your area. If you become a big enough thorn in their side, you might accomplish something. Ordinarily, I wouldn't suggest this type of action, or even take such an approach myself, since the financial damage generally isn't worth it, but Comcast has repeatedly proven itself to be "Comcastic" (a word which, in my opinion, means we're going to stiff you no matter what you try, or in the words of a good friend of mine, "We're the phone company, so f*** you").
Mind you, I didn't say QuattroPro was necessarily bad, I said Corel (or less likely Novell) screwed it up, making it unstable as hell (it crashes a lot on my VM). I'll agree with you about the Mac version, to a point; the problem I have always had with the Mac version is that it's quite limited compared to its Windows equivalent (sure reveal codes, center on margin, and right flush are there, but those features aren't as efficient as in WordPerfect for Windows. I totally agree with you about the price for MS Office, too; when I purchased WordPerfect 2000, I bought it because the price tag was far more reasonable than the MS Office tag at the time.
(FYI, and primarily unrelated, a friend of mine and I have started working on a concept for a new, better, multi-system word processor based a more on WordPerfect; it's a very simple core architecture that uses plug-ins to implement the features. We're just getting started, and neither of us is good at programming, but we'd like to get the ball rolling on the concept as soon as possible.)
What I find interesting is that the WordPerfect 2000 suite (version 9, the last version I, personally, felt was any good) has Presentations and WordPerfect, both of which are far superior to PowerPoint and Word respectively in terms of usability and power. I've used Excel, and while I totally agree that it deserves to be the defacto standard, I still find the interface clunky (many of the changes Microsoft made to spreadsheet navigation are inefficient and, in my opinion, sloppy, and I really hate doing certain things, like changing column width and row height because the options for doing so are so limited); I am not an accountant, so I can't begin to justify the expense of getting Excel for what I do.
WordPerfect (every version prior to 11, when they started trying to imitate Word) is the best word processor I've ever used and does many things that no other word processor has ever done, such as Center on Margin, Right Flush, Indent, Reveal Codes, and the Property Bar (which changes to meet the context in which you're editing); the only thing it doesn't do well is converting to HTML, and that's because there are some bugs in the software that Corel has seemed unwilling to fix. I have, for a long time, wondered why other word processor developers rely on Word as the template when they could build off of WordPerfect (which has a decent grammar checker, a far better spell checker than Word, and doesn't try to do anything for you unless you ask it to, which is the big imitation in Open Office's Writer that convinced me I would never use it for my writing). Also, you can do almost anything in WordPerfect using the keyboard without touching a single menu, and you can easily configure WordPerfect to do anything you want it to.
Presentations (which is also amazingly powerful in version 9) is also extremely powerful and reliable; you can edit bitmaps needed for projects, and do many other things with simplicity and ease. The one and only time I tried using PowerPoint for anything useful, I quickly gave up because it lacks the bitmap editor I needed for what I wanted to do. Presentations also has great flexibility for many things. When I started building my maps for my 3D game, I used Presentations because it made the creative process so simple to do; I rarely need to use dialogs for anything; there are very few presets and the only thing I've seen that I can do in Impress that I can't do in Presentations is affective transparency.
Both WordPerfect and Presentations were originally written by people who understand what the product needs to be used for. The only WordPerfect 2000 product that has major stability problems is QuattroPro, which was once a very good spreadsheet application (either Novell or Corel ruined it, probably Corel), though it is still good for certain applications that other spreadsheets can't handle (I generally use it for my macro scale, 2D video game designing because it has a much better range of graphical options than Open Office's Calc, and handles fonts better (I gave up on Calc when it futzed up all my fonts)).
I completely agree with you about Word and PowerPoint; they are cruddy products for what they're typically used for, (and besides, WordPerfect's tables truly are perfect, while Word's would be better suited to some garbage can somewhere). I guess what I'm trying to say is that I completely agree with you; MS Office is not suitable for home use, and I am giving an example of something that is.
Perhaps, then, we need a "social network" with separate fields for Friends, Acquaintances, Coworkers, and Social Contacts. That type of architecture would be far more efficient and it would seem far less insulting to be dropped from a 'coworkers' or 'social contacts' list, in my opinion.
My history with spam in GMail is a little worse; about one a week, but since I first reported them as spam, they've reliably ended up in the spam folder. All I've bothered to check the spam folder for is stuff that should have ended up in my inbox, but in my experience, GMail almost never mistakes good mail for spam. Most of the time, my spam folder has four or five messages, and that's it.
I misinterpreted the word specific when I first read the comment. I still wonder, however, if the network issue in playing MP3 files has been resolved; unfortunately, the article failed to mention any tests made on that issue, so the article could very possibly have been a straw man.
In addition to previously released updates, SP1 will contain changes focused on addressing specific reliability and performance issues, supporting new types of hardware, and adding support for several emerging standards.
Therefore, this article cannot be, by any stretch of the imagination, considered a straw man argument.
I agree with this to a point; Metroid Prime had a few serious crash issues (the game would just lock up on me, often for no other reason than memory management issues or disk read errors; this gets me a little paranoid in certain areas where I've experienced frequent crashes due to this flaw). On the other hand, Metroid Prime 2: Echos seemed to have resolved this issue while allowing for much bigger areas. Both games use the logic of "load the room the player is nearest to", probably based on triggers within the room, which can cause brief (and occasionally long) delays when entering a new room. Another strategy that they used (which really bothered me in the first game) was an alternating large room/small room layout.
I've been designing a concept for a 3D game that uses a completely different philosophy; load as much of the current area map as possible (the one the game uses to determine where to put things), then load only the graphics and sound effects that are necessary for the player's current surroundings, and for what they are near (the area maps are divided into rooms, which are subdivided into smaller parts that can be of any size and strung together in any fashion to make such a philosophy much easier to deal with). I also feel that modern systems, with as much more memory as they have, will be better suited for larger, more imaginative games, and I've also been working on other ideas to help simplify the way graphics are stored (like using a palette based system, similar to those used on older consoles, that has been updated for use on modern technologies; process intensive, but with modern, multicore layouts and by relying more on the video processor, such ideas should be easier to deal with).
Anyway, good point. I just wanted to point out a few things I've thought of for helping to resolve the current issues.
I can't speak for Flash, because I have no personal experience with Flash programming, but I have disassembled computer software in the past (taking raw machine language and translating it into assembly, which is similar, though certainly not identical, to what a decompiler does). Generally the problem with such tactics is you have no comments to rely on to determine what any part of the code does, so you have to analyze the code line by line to determine what it's doing, often forcing you to make guesses. Requiring the source code gives a company a means to analyze the code they're looking at without worrying as much about guesswork, unless the comments are bad (or worse, nonexistent), at which point the ad provider could reject the ad for insufficient documentation.
1) It's not the standard US crap that's all pointed at the lowest common denominator. Most US shows are so blatantly dumbed down that it's absolutely pathetic. Anything that strikes of being intelligent (and isn't a medical or criminal drama) usually ends up taken off the air in a season.
I very much agree; the only TV series that, to me, at least, has managed to get away with being blatantly dumbed down is Simpsons, and while I still enjoy the episodes, I feel they've lost much of their original quality in the past five years or so. As a result, I've virtually given up on television; almost everything I watch now days is on DVD.
That's nothing; I used Open Office for about six months before I got Virtual Box installed on my system and installed my Office suite of choice (WordPerfect); I'd rate most of the office tools meh (they did the job, but were rather clunky), but the one thing that pushed me the hardest in abandoning Open Office altogether was Impress (the presentation unit). Sure the files were fairly small (usually between 200 and 300 kb for a 50+ page document), but they took forever (regularly 1 minute or more, though it seemed to be much longer) to load, and when the automatic save came through, they interrupted my work for at least 1 minute (which again seemed to take forever). Files in the WordPerfect Suite's Presentations can be twice as large for the same size document (in terms of pages), but they load instantly, and I am never even aware that the regular backups (which do happen) even occur because they don't disturb my work. Of course, the main thing that holds me with WordPerfect is that WordPerfect itself is just so damn efficient (i.e., always does what I need and want it to, doesn't assume anything, and has features that I cannot live without).
Actually, we aren't supposed to be a democracy (and our Presidential Election process is as far from democratic as you can get). In words attributed to Benjamin Franklin, we have "a Republic, if you can keep it" (http://www.bartleby.com/73/1593.html). By definition, a democracy is "a government by the people" (The New American Webster Handy College Dictionary Third Edition 1995 p186). A republic is "a nation whose government is wholly elected, having no king" (The New American Webster Handy College Dictionary Third Edition 1995 p570). A democratic government requires that officials be elected only by popular vote; our constitution explicitly forbids us from electing the president in that manner. The present system we use is a farce of what we are supposed to have; the winner takes all method we use is not proscribed by the constitution. A better implementation, more in keeping with the requirements of the constitution, would be to have the one vote for each house district, which is given to the candidate that wins that district, and two votes that are given to the candidate that clearly wins the states votes, or is split between the candidates if there is no clear winner. Aside from my one disagreement with the assertion that we live in a democracy, I agree with the rest of what you had to say. Admittedly, I'm not the best at remembering to vote, but I do my very best to be involved in the process.
Actually, the first definition of sun is "the central body of a solar system" (The New American Websters Handy College Dictionary Third Edition, 1995, p657). Therefore, there is more than one sun. We call it "the sun" however, because it is ours.
What if there are two extensions, like a file named "stupidscreensaver.scr.exe"? (Yes, this truly is one of the worst jokes ever made, but I thought I'd make it anyway).
Actually, one of my biggest beefs with Windows has always been the idiocy of hiding file extensions by default, which makes the above appear as "stupidscreensaver.scr", thus increasing the likelihood of an uninformed user clicking on the icon and getting something they weren't expecting (and also makes it easier to hide malware). Since switching to Ubuntu, most of my core frustrations with file system management have gone away.
Sort of like what the Bill Gates character did to Homer in the Simpsons' episode "Das Bus" (except, of course, that Homer's company didn't actually do anything, so he didn't really lose all that much, and the method you're describing is quite a bit more vicious than what they depicted in Simpsons).
Try this page out:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/07607T.shtml
I'll admit that it's possible that weren't thinking specifically about some type of national identity system, but from what I've read about the founding fathers, and what I've read of their statements, I find that line of thinking highly improbable.
That is unquestionably true, but if we decided to analyze the smartness of the major Red Dwarf characters, I would rank them as follows:
1. Kryton (simply because he's an android, and therefore capable of remembering anything that's stored in his memory banks)
2. Kristine Kochanski and/or Captain Hollister (Kochanski's a little more practical, but Hollister is more cunning)
3. Dave Lister (he helped Kryton break his programming twice; need I say more?)
4. Arnold Rimmer (anyone who can fool himself into believing in Quagaars deserves at least a little credit)
5. Cat (while it's true that he's able to identify any key moment to embarrass Rimmer, greed is still his primary motive; remember "Fish!")
Of course, if it came to rating the actors, I'd be hesitant to rank any one of them above any of the others; they're all brilliant, and the show was wonderful. I really wish they'd try getting funding for more seasons.
The very definition of papers (as referenced to by the link describing papers provided in your first link) includes those of identification papers, and my personal dictionary definition includes that as well. There are many different interpretations of the amendments; I haven't yet found a specific reference to the founding fathers and their use of the term papers, but I do know that the founding fathers were concerned about the use of a national identity system. I'll keep searching, but I would suggest you concentrate more on referencing identity papers and founding fathers, which I believe will shed more light on the subject. Don't have time right now, but I will be looking that up as well.
Isn't that a little bit of a rash judgment? The town/city may be corrupt now, it is still possible that the OP's efforts to improve the situation may turn out to be beneficial in the end.
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I am not a lawyer, but this is my advice: Take all of the stubs from the bills they've sent you with the modem rental charges along with anything you can that proves you own your modem to a lawyer and ask your legal council to have the records of your support calls to Comcast on this issue seized, then sue to have the modem charges refunded, along with any damages that their charges might have cause you (i.e., bank overdrafts you might have incurred as a result of their charges against you for a service they aren't providing; the lawyer should know of an effective way to accomplish this). During the suit, make as much 'noise' as you can about their policies and their monopoly status in your area. If you become a big enough thorn in their side, you might accomplish something. Ordinarily, I wouldn't suggest this type of action, or even take such an approach myself, since the financial damage generally isn't worth it, but Comcast has repeatedly proven itself to be "Comcastic" (a word which, in my opinion, means we're going to stiff you no matter what you try, or in the words of a good friend of mine, "We're the phone company, so f*** you").
(FYI, and primarily unrelated, a friend of mine and I have started working on a concept for a new, better, multi-system word processor based a more on WordPerfect; it's a very simple core architecture that uses plug-ins to implement the features. We're just getting started, and neither of us is good at programming, but we'd like to get the ball rolling on the concept as soon as possible.)
WordPerfect (every version prior to 11, when they started trying to imitate Word) is the best word processor I've ever used and does many things that no other word processor has ever done, such as Center on Margin, Right Flush, Indent, Reveal Codes, and the Property Bar (which changes to meet the context in which you're editing); the only thing it doesn't do well is converting to HTML, and that's because there are some bugs in the software that Corel has seemed unwilling to fix. I have, for a long time, wondered why other word processor developers rely on Word as the template when they could build off of WordPerfect (which has a decent grammar checker, a far better spell checker than Word, and doesn't try to do anything for you unless you ask it to, which is the big imitation in Open Office's Writer that convinced me I would never use it for my writing). Also, you can do almost anything in WordPerfect using the keyboard without touching a single menu, and you can easily configure WordPerfect to do anything you want it to.
Presentations (which is also amazingly powerful in version 9) is also extremely powerful and reliable; you can edit bitmaps needed for projects, and do many other things with simplicity and ease. The one and only time I tried using PowerPoint for anything useful, I quickly gave up because it lacks the bitmap editor I needed for what I wanted to do. Presentations also has great flexibility for many things. When I started building my maps for my 3D game, I used Presentations because it made the creative process so simple to do; I rarely need to use dialogs for anything; there are very few presets and the only thing I've seen that I can do in Impress that I can't do in Presentations is affective transparency.
Both WordPerfect and Presentations were originally written by people who understand what the product needs to be used for. The only WordPerfect 2000 product that has major stability problems is QuattroPro, which was once a very good spreadsheet application (either Novell or Corel ruined it, probably Corel), though it is still good for certain applications that other spreadsheets can't handle (I generally use it for my macro scale, 2D video game designing because it has a much better range of graphical options than Open Office's Calc, and handles fonts better (I gave up on Calc when it futzed up all my fonts)).
I completely agree with you about Word and PowerPoint; they are cruddy products for what they're typically used for, (and besides, WordPerfect's tables truly are perfect, while Word's would be better suited to some garbage can somewhere). I guess what I'm trying to say is that I completely agree with you; MS Office is not suitable for home use, and I am giving an example of something that is.
Perhaps, then, we need a "social network" with separate fields for Friends, Acquaintances, Coworkers, and Social Contacts. That type of architecture would be far more efficient and it would seem far less insulting to be dropped from a 'coworkers' or 'social contacts' list, in my opinion.
My history with spam in GMail is a little worse; about one a week, but since I first reported them as spam, they've reliably ended up in the spam folder. All I've bothered to check the spam folder for is stuff that should have ended up in my inbox, but in my experience, GMail almost never mistakes good mail for spam. Most of the time, my spam folder has four or five messages, and that's it.
I misinterpreted the word specific when I first read the comment. I still wonder, however, if the network issue in playing MP3 files has been resolved; unfortunately, the article failed to mention any tests made on that issue, so the article could very possibly have been a straw man.
Therefore, this article cannot be, by any stretch of the imagination, considered a straw man argument.
I've been designing a concept for a 3D game that uses a completely different philosophy; load as much of the current area map as possible (the one the game uses to determine where to put things), then load only the graphics and sound effects that are necessary for the player's current surroundings, and for what they are near (the area maps are divided into rooms, which are subdivided into smaller parts that can be of any size and strung together in any fashion to make such a philosophy much easier to deal with). I also feel that modern systems, with as much more memory as they have, will be better suited for larger, more imaginative games, and I've also been working on other ideas to help simplify the way graphics are stored (like using a palette based system, similar to those used on older consoles, that has been updated for use on modern technologies; process intensive, but with modern, multicore layouts and by relying more on the video processor, such ideas should be easier to deal with).
Anyway, good point. I just wanted to point out a few things I've thought of for helping to resolve the current issues.
I can't speak for Flash, because I have no personal experience with Flash programming, but I have disassembled computer software in the past (taking raw machine language and translating it into assembly, which is similar, though certainly not identical, to what a decompiler does). Generally the problem with such tactics is you have no comments to rely on to determine what any part of the code does, so you have to analyze the code line by line to determine what it's doing, often forcing you to make guesses. Requiring the source code gives a company a means to analyze the code they're looking at without worrying as much about guesswork, unless the comments are bad (or worse, nonexistent), at which point the ad provider could reject the ad for insufficient documentation.
I very much agree; the only TV series that, to me, at least, has managed to get away with being blatantly dumbed down is Simpsons, and while I still enjoy the episodes, I feel they've lost much of their original quality in the past five years or so. As a result, I've virtually given up on television; almost everything I watch now days is on DVD.
That's nothing; I used Open Office for about six months before I got Virtual Box installed on my system and installed my Office suite of choice (WordPerfect); I'd rate most of the office tools meh (they did the job, but were rather clunky), but the one thing that pushed me the hardest in abandoning Open Office altogether was Impress (the presentation unit). Sure the files were fairly small (usually between 200 and 300 kb for a 50+ page document), but they took forever (regularly 1 minute or more, though it seemed to be much longer) to load, and when the automatic save came through, they interrupted my work for at least 1 minute (which again seemed to take forever). Files in the WordPerfect Suite's Presentations can be twice as large for the same size document (in terms of pages), but they load instantly, and I am never even aware that the regular backups (which do happen) even occur because they don't disturb my work. Of course, the main thing that holds me with WordPerfect is that WordPerfect itself is just so damn efficient (i.e., always does what I need and want it to, doesn't assume anything, and has features that I cannot live without).
Actually, we aren't supposed to be a democracy (and our Presidential Election process is as far from democratic as you can get). In words attributed to Benjamin Franklin, we have "a Republic, if you can keep it" (http://www.bartleby.com/73/1593.html). By definition, a democracy is "a government by the people" (The New American Webster Handy College Dictionary Third Edition 1995 p186). A republic is "a nation whose government is wholly elected, having no king" (The New American Webster Handy College Dictionary Third Edition 1995 p570). A democratic government requires that officials be elected only by popular vote; our constitution explicitly forbids us from electing the president in that manner. The present system we use is a farce of what we are supposed to have; the winner takes all method we use is not proscribed by the constitution. A better implementation, more in keeping with the requirements of the constitution, would be to have the one vote for each house district, which is given to the candidate that wins that district, and two votes that are given to the candidate that clearly wins the states votes, or is split between the candidates if there is no clear winner. Aside from my one disagreement with the assertion that we live in a democracy, I agree with the rest of what you had to say. Admittedly, I'm not the best at remembering to vote, but I do my very best to be involved in the process.
From the Red Green show: Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati.
When all else fails, play dead.
Actually, the first definition of sun is "the central body of a solar system" (The New American Websters Handy College Dictionary Third Edition, 1995, p657). Therefore, there is more than one sun. We call it "the sun" however, because it is ours.
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=359507&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=21343485#21346697
My apologies for not being more careful.
Damn. I made my last post (on the previous child thread) on that same subject. Boy, do I feel redundant.
What if there are two extensions, like a file named "stupidscreensaver.scr.exe"? (Yes, this truly is one of the worst jokes ever made, but I thought I'd make it anyway). Actually, one of my biggest beefs with Windows has always been the idiocy of hiding file extensions by default, which makes the above appear as "stupidscreensaver.scr", thus increasing the likelihood of an uninformed user clicking on the icon and getting something they weren't expecting (and also makes it easier to hide malware). Since switching to Ubuntu, most of my core frustrations with file system management have gone away.
Me th@#$%&^*%#$$%^&%%^&**%^%$
I would feel very fortunate that people who had the points appropriately moderated this.
Sort of like what the Bill Gates character did to Homer in the Simpsons' episode "Das Bus" (except, of course, that Homer's company didn't actually do anything, so he didn't really lose all that much, and the method you're describing is quite a bit more vicious than what they depicted in Simpsons).
What if he was in a situation like Office Space, where he had at least five bosses, and not one of them knew what the others were doing.
Try this page out: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/07607T.shtml I'll admit that it's possible that weren't thinking specifically about some type of national identity system, but from what I've read about the founding fathers, and what I've read of their statements, I find that line of thinking highly improbable.
1. Kryton (simply because he's an android, and therefore capable of remembering anything that's stored in his memory banks)
2. Kristine Kochanski and/or Captain Hollister (Kochanski's a little more practical, but Hollister is more cunning)
3. Dave Lister (he helped Kryton break his programming twice; need I say more?)
4. Arnold Rimmer (anyone who can fool himself into believing in Quagaars deserves at least a little credit)
5. Cat (while it's true that he's able to identify any key moment to embarrass Rimmer, greed is still his primary motive; remember "Fish!")
Of course, if it came to rating the actors, I'd be hesitant to rank any one of them above any of the others; they're all brilliant, and the show was wonderful. I really wish they'd try getting funding for more seasons.
The very definition of papers (as referenced to by the link describing papers provided in your first link) includes those of identification papers, and my personal dictionary definition includes that as well. There are many different interpretations of the amendments; I haven't yet found a specific reference to the founding fathers and their use of the term papers, but I do know that the founding fathers were concerned about the use of a national identity system. I'll keep searching, but I would suggest you concentrate more on referencing identity papers and founding fathers, which I believe will shed more light on the subject. Don't have time right now, but I will be looking that up as well.
Isn't that a little bit of a rash judgment? The town/city may be corrupt now, it is still possible that the OP's efforts to improve the situation may turn out to be beneficial in the end.