Saying that Microsoft (or Mozilla, or anybody else) should spend more time getting all the web standards right is like saying that Chrysler should make it their number 1 priority to make life easy for mechanics.
Uhh...no. It would be more like saying that Chrysler should use standard metric or imperial screws, bolds and nuts, standard fittings for the lights, standard tires (tyres?) and so on, and not bolds, fittings etc that only fit Chrysler cars and are only sold by Chrysler. What they build out of those is totally their own business.
Maybe, that is why I stated to take care the water stays pure. And of course, you should not take everything literally. However, a computer with no water-soluble parts could be submerged in pure water and keep working as long as you keep the water pure and (for those of you who want to start about boiling the water at a pressure of one million atmosphere or such things) at a reasonable temperature and maybe other details I can't think of right now. Sheesh, do I have to specify everything?
In fact, pure water is a pretty good isolator. What is conductive in water are the ions dissolved in it (that's what makes salt water a good conductor). But you could put your computer in a bath filled with pure water and it would do fine, as long as you take care to keep the water pure. (Not counting effects of mechanical resistance of water on fans etc.).
I would not say that driving while high is a very good idea. But when high (and not under influence of any other drug), you KNOW your reactions are slower than normal and tend to adapt your driving to it. Therefor I would rather be in a car with a stoned driver than with a drunk one. I mentioned that I am Dutch because here soft drugs (cannabis) are, though not legal, allowed for personal use and you can buy them in lots of places. A coffee shop that sells only coffee is not very common here:-) . Never ever have I heard of anyone being bothered by people who have used cannabis, as opposed to drunks. Furthermore, while indeed cannabis can be psychically addictive, it is not physically, and alcohol is both. And a 'bad trip' is possible with cannabis, but they are not common. Compare that to violent drunks. I have used cannabis in moderate amounts for years (and that is a long time ago) and had no problem at all to stop.(In fact, at one moment I had no more stash and felt not like getting more. So I decided to wait until I did, which did not happen.) Always smoked pure weed or hash because I did not want to get addicted to tobacco. The carcinogenic effect of weed or hash is indeed a point too. When you smoke it with a bong or a pipe with a long stem, most of the gunk stays out of your lungs. Believe me, cleaning a pipe stem is a pretty messy business (yuck!), but shows clearly what you did not get in your lungs. Joints are a totally different story though.
Anyhow, I get a bit off-topic here, in short most people who are too high to drive know they are and simply won't drive. If they do, they will drive safer then drunks, because they KNOW they are high. 'Potheads', as a rule, cause no trouble. Cannabis is not addictive. Drunk people get overconfident, do not know not to drive and cause trouble. Alcohol is addictive. Alcohol is legal, cannabis is not. Don't tell me it is because of their effect on society. Both have their dangers, I do not deny that, but I'd rather have ten potheads in my neighborhood then one drunk. Oh, and driving high and driving drunk both are not very good ideas, I agree with all of you there.
I don't think you have any idea what you are talking about. I am Dutch and many of my friends smok(ed) cannabis. I have seen them drive (and traveled as a passenger with them) and I'd rather be in a car with someone who had just smoked a big joint then with anyone who drank just one beer. When high, one tends to drive more careful than normal. Alcohol makes one forget their responsibilities, cannabis does not. Probably the people you saw (or claim to have seen) were what we call 'stronken' which, in English would translate to 'strunk', a combination of stoned and drunken, a very bad combination. I have never seen any of my friends seen driving when they had drunk, having smoked or not.
The fact that alcohol is legal and pot is not has nothing to do with the effects on society (which are a lot worse for alcohol as they are/would be for legal cannabis), but mostly with a paranoid stance that was initiated by the USA because some influential politicians growing wood for paper production needed an excuse to ban hemp when a method was found to make better and cheaper paper out of it that endangered their business.
Against the "I have nothing to fear because I have nothing to hide"-like arguments I always say that you don't know what you would want to have kept hidden in, say, 10 or 20 years from now.
Before WW2 the European Jews used the same argument that anyone was allowed to know they were Jewish when they allowed the registration of their religion. They were (sort of) right then, but we all know what happened in WW2, where the nazis made 'good' use of this registration.
You do not know who will use your data for what purposes. I read once that for every proposed law, before accepting it, one should imagine what his worst enemy would be able to do with it if he (the enemy) got the power. Wise words, in my opinion.
Terry Pratchett has in the Discworld-series in 'The Last Continent' a small god playing with these ideas. Leads to an unexpected result, though...
(quote)...'And the flaming cows?' said Ridcully. 'The what?' said the god, sunk in misery. 'The more inflammable cow,' said Ponder. 'Oh yes. Another good idea that didn't work. I just thought, you know, that if you could find the bit in, say, an oak tree which says "Be inflammable" and glue it into the bit of the cow which says "Be soggy" it'd save a lot of trouble. Unfortunately, that produced a sort of bush that made distressing noises and squirted milk, but I could see the principle was sound...' (end quote)
First time I read it I just could not stop laughing! Sorry for the spoiler to future readers, but this quote came up so strong that I wonder why noone else has posted it.
I would be very disturbed if the standards element of the lawsuit (assuming the summary given is accurate) gets anywhere. That would imply that the recommendation of a group of unelected people in a self-appointed standards body can legally compel an organisation with 80+% market share to change anything about how its wildly successful product works to benefit inferior (according to the market) competitors. What legal or ethical basis is there for such compulsion?
If the 80% marketshare of a totally inferior product is made by screwing up open standards to closed, one-'browser'-only-usable ones, thus pushing other browsers out of the market by including this inferior product in a monopolised OS, I think I can see the unethical part of this.
If Microsoft would have kept to standards and then got an 80% marketshare, in a honest competition with the rest of the market, it would be a totally different story. It is not as if MS had a big marketshare and someone came up with altered standards to thwart them, but the standards were there before MS decided to alter them for their own purposes and made it impossible for others to use their (MS's) 'standards'.
Disclaimer: I am not a web-developer, and don't even play one on tv.
China in the first place, but if what I think to know about your U.S. minimum wages is true (I'm a European), it might as well be both, sadly enough. But America still has some kind of a welfare/social security system, and China has, as far as I know not.
Biggest problem is that the Big Corporations are playing workers worldwide out against each other: "You don't want to work harder for less money? What a pity, I know somewhere where lots of people will be glad to do it for even less..."
...between starving to death or working too many hours under bad circumstances for a too-little-to-live-from-but-just-too-much-to-die salary. Free choice all over!
An open and standard document format was agreed upon AND supported by all manufacturers. But as long as something like MS is in the way, I'm afraid that will not happen soon.
As I said, it was way back in 2004, so it's quite well possible everything works well now. But the filters you are talking about (don't know if you mean the/.-filters or those in prox) apparently gave trouble. One day I was peacefully browsing/. , the next day I found my IP banned. After asking I was told I had managed to hit the site 8000 times in one houre time. A very good reason for banning, I can't (and didn't) blame them for it. The question was what could have caused this. After the ban had been lifted it occurred to me that, when I changed the order of the sidepanels on the homepage, very heavy continuous network-traffic occured and held on even when I did nothing like changing pages or reloading stuff. I had seen that before the bannning, but hadn't thought anything of it. However, after some experimenting, I found out that everything went back to normal when I bypassed/disabled Proxomitron, so that HAD to be the cause of the trouble. I have removed Proxomitron from my system (and did not like to have to do that!) and have informed Robert Roozeboom, whith whom I had contact about all this) to save others for this predicament.
Long story short: It WAS Proxomitron, in combination with filters that DID interact in an unexpected way with Slashdot's scripts. I reckon Proxomitron to be a good program, but when I used it it proved to have its quirks too in certain circumstances. As I said in my first post, I haven't used it since 2004, but it is very well possible newer versions are better then the one I used (don't ask which one that was, I could't tell if my life depended on it).
Proxomitron got me in trouble with /.
on
A Talk With Opera CEO
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· Score: 2, Informative
I used Proxomitron back in 2004 and somehow it managed to create 8000 hits in one hour to/. when I rearranged the panels on the main page. This resulted in me getting banned from Slashdot. Not funny, I can assure you! This came to light after an e-mail exchange with Robert Rozeboom from/. (if you're still working there: thanks Robert!). I found out it was Proxomitron because when I had it active my firewall indicated very heavy network traffic, which did not occur when proxomitron was bypassed. Of course this was years ago and maybe it's improved now, but I have not used it ever since.
From TFA: The disc diameter was changed from 115m to 120mm to allow for 74 minutes of playback...
Maybe they thought it might be hard to get consumers to put a 115 meter playback device in their room. And of course they would get complaints from record stores who should have to get bigger doors to get the disks through, not to mention storage space.
M$ seems to have VICE-ta made in a way that makes it very hard to install a real OS besides it.
I tried it on my laptop and did not get grub working. Maybe that says more about me than about Windoze, but I just kicked Vista from my machine and replaced it with Ubuntu after Vice-ta developed some quirks like denying access to my router without me having changed anything. Now I still have to get some unimportant hardware working (webcam), but it's more lazyness from me than anything else it's not yet functional. But my machine is a lot faster, does not spy on me, I'm the boss over my own machine, have lots of apps to choose from and I don't have to reboot five times for every update/install. I don't see myself going back!
Not only does it take a long time to learn a new skill set, it costs a lot of money too in most cases. Without a job, you don't have that money or (as is the case here in the Netherlands) are not even allowed to follow schooling when drawing unemployment because it renders you 'unavailable for employment'.
IF you succeed in learning a new skill set most employers will not be interested because you have no experience, are too old and they can hire someone with the same skill set on a lower wage. In the mean time you don't have current experience in your old skill set, so if an employer wants someone your age (with your old skill set) he'll hire someone who has been working in that field directly before.
For employers the market IS mostly free, they have lots of wage-slaves on every level to choose from. And a huge unemployment number is fantastic for them, it keeps wage demands low ('You want more? Let's see if we can change you for someone cheaper!') functions as a threat ('For you ten others!'), gives an excuse for keeping wages low ('Look how many unemployed we have to pay from our taxes, we can't pay our slaves ^W workers more' and provides a pool for more cheap labor.
This post has not much to do with implanting chips (I was predicting that that will happen since decades and still believe it), but all with the viewpoint of employers. You are for most employers not much more than a piece of equipment, just not so costly.
An educated guess at what the two unknown steps in de slideshow were:
I think the first step where the author did not know what happened showed a machine for applying the glue for the surface mounted devices on the pcb. This step comes before the smd's are actually placed on the board. The glue keeps the components in place until they are soldered. I believe the glue is removed afterward, but I'm not sure.
The second 'interesting looking' thing looked like a device for transferring BIOS-IC's from plastic, tube-like containers to tape-rolls for the pick-and-place machines.
It's a case of "When you build something that is more idiot-proof, nature starts building better idiots". Nature has decided itself idiot-proof, so.....
Slashdot Mirror
Saying that Microsoft (or Mozilla, or anybody else) should spend more time getting all the web standards right is like saying that Chrysler should make it their number 1 priority to make life easy for mechanics.
Uhh...no. It would be more like saying that Chrysler should use standard metric or imperial screws, bolds and nuts, standard fittings for the lights, standard tires (tyres?) and so on, and not bolds, fittings etc that only fit Chrysler cars and are only sold by Chrysler. What they build out of those is totally their own business.
Maybe, that is why I stated to take care the water stays pure. And of course, you should not take everything literally. However, a computer with no water-soluble parts could be submerged in pure water and keep working as long as you keep the water pure and (for those of you who want to start about boiling the water at a pressure of one million atmosphere or such things) at a reasonable temperature and maybe other details I can't think of right now.
Sheesh, do I have to specify everything?
Better take care it's a non-soluble computer then! :-)
In fact, pure water is a pretty good isolator. What is conductive in water are the ions dissolved in it (that's what makes salt water a good conductor). But you could put your computer in a bath filled with pure water and it would do fine, as long as you take care to keep the water pure. (Not counting effects of mechanical resistance of water on fans etc.).
I would not say that driving while high is a very good idea. But when high (and not under influence of any other drug), you KNOW your reactions are slower than normal and tend to adapt your driving to it. Therefor I would rather be in a car with a stoned driver than with a drunk one. :-) .
I mentioned that I am Dutch because here soft drugs (cannabis) are, though not legal, allowed for personal use and you can buy them in lots of places. A coffee shop that sells only coffee is not very common here
Never ever have I heard of anyone being bothered by people who have used cannabis, as opposed to drunks.
Furthermore, while indeed cannabis can be psychically addictive, it is not physically, and alcohol is both. And a 'bad trip' is possible with cannabis, but they are not common. Compare that to violent drunks.
I have used cannabis in moderate amounts for years (and that is a long time ago) and had no problem at all to stop.(In fact, at one moment I had no more stash and felt not like getting more. So I decided to wait until I did, which did not happen.) Always smoked pure weed or hash because I did not want to get addicted to tobacco.
The carcinogenic effect of weed or hash is indeed a point too. When you smoke it with a bong or a pipe with a long stem, most of the gunk stays out of your lungs. Believe me, cleaning a pipe stem is a pretty messy business (yuck!), but shows clearly what you did not get in your lungs. Joints are a totally different story though.
Anyhow, I get a bit off-topic here, in short most people who are too high to drive know they are and simply won't drive. If they do, they will drive safer then drunks, because they KNOW they are high. 'Potheads', as a rule, cause no trouble. Cannabis is not addictive.
Drunk people get overconfident, do not know not to drive and cause trouble. Alcohol is addictive.
Alcohol is legal, cannabis is not. Don't tell me it is because of their effect on society.
Both have their dangers, I do not deny that, but I'd rather have ten potheads in my neighborhood then one drunk.
Oh, and driving high and driving drunk both are not very good ideas, I agree with all of you there.
I don't think you have any idea what you are talking about. I am Dutch and many of my friends smok(ed) cannabis. I have seen them drive (and traveled as a passenger with them) and I'd rather be in a car with someone who had just smoked a big joint then with anyone who drank just one beer. When high, one tends to drive more careful than normal. Alcohol makes one forget their responsibilities, cannabis does not. Probably the people you saw (or claim to have seen) were what we call 'stronken' which, in English would translate to 'strunk', a combination of stoned and drunken, a very bad combination. I have never seen any of my friends seen driving when they had drunk, having smoked or not.
The fact that alcohol is legal and pot is not has nothing to do with the effects on society (which are a lot worse for alcohol as they are/would be for legal cannabis), but mostly with a paranoid stance that was initiated by the USA because some influential politicians growing wood for paper production needed an excuse to ban hemp when a method was found to make better and cheaper paper out of it that endangered their business.
Crap! You just beat me on that one!
No, there are too many nuts on top.
Against the "I have nothing to fear because I have nothing to hide"-like arguments I always say that you don't know what you would want to have kept hidden in, say, 10 or 20 years from now.
Before WW2 the European Jews used the same argument that anyone was allowed to know they were Jewish when they allowed the registration of their religion. They were (sort of) right then, but we all know what happened in WW2, where the nazis made 'good' use of this registration.
You do not know who will use your data for what purposes. I read once that for every proposed law, before accepting it, one should imagine what his worst enemy would be able to do with it if he (the enemy) got the power. Wise words, in my opinion.
Terry Pratchett has in the Discworld-series in 'The Last Continent' a small god playing with these ideas. Leads to an unexpected result, though...
...'And the flaming cows?' said Ridcully.
(quote)
'The what?' said the god, sunk in misery.
'The more inflammable cow,' said Ponder.
'Oh yes. Another good idea that didn't work. I just thought, you know, that if you could find the bit in, say, an oak tree which says "Be inflammable" and glue it into the bit of the cow which says "Be soggy" it'd save a lot of trouble. Unfortunately, that produced a sort of bush that made distressing noises and squirted milk, but I could see the principle was sound...'
(end quote)
First time I read it I just could not stop laughing! Sorry for the spoiler to future readers, but this quote came up so strong that I wonder why noone else has posted it.
If the 80% marketshare of a totally inferior product is made by screwing up open standards to closed, one-'browser'-only-usable ones, thus pushing other browsers out of the market by including this inferior product in a monopolised OS, I think I can see the unethical part of this.
If Microsoft would have kept to standards and then got an 80% marketshare, in a honest competition with the rest of the market, it would be a totally different story. It is not as if MS had a big marketshare and someone came up with altered standards to thwart them, but the standards were there before MS decided to alter them for their own purposes and made it impossible for others to use their (MS's) 'standards'.
Disclaimer: I am not a web-developer, and don't even play one on tv.
Almost in the same way as giving a blowjob to a guy holding a gun pointed at your head saves you from being shot, yes.
China in the first place, but if what I think to know about your U.S. minimum wages is true (I'm a European), it might as well be both, sadly enough. But America still has some kind of a welfare/social security system, and China has, as far as I know not.
Biggest problem is that the Big Corporations are playing workers worldwide out against each other: "You don't want to work harder for less money? What a pity, I know somewhere where lots of people will be glad to do it for even less..."
...between starving to death or working too many hours under bad circumstances for a too-little-to-live-from-but-just-too-much-to-die salary. Free choice all over!
An open and standard document format was agreed upon AND supported by all manufacturers. But as long as something like MS is in the way, I'm afraid that will not happen soon.
..if they have people in LAB-COATS on every page on their site? WHITE labcoats! Everybody knows you can trust someone in a labcoat!
...I wouldn't ever take a shower if I were you, you might slip and hit your head against the tub...
I just died that way!
As I said, it was way back in 2004, so it's quite well possible everything works well now. But the filters you are talking about (don't know if you mean the /.-filters or those in prox) apparently gave trouble. One day I was peacefully browsing /. , the next day I found my IP banned. After asking I was told I had managed to hit the site 8000 times in one houre time. A very good reason for banning, I can't (and didn't) blame them for it. The question was what could have caused this.
After the ban had been lifted it occurred to me that, when I changed the order of the sidepanels on the homepage, very heavy continuous network-traffic occured and held on even when I did nothing like changing pages or reloading stuff. I had seen that before the bannning, but hadn't thought anything of it.
However, after some experimenting, I found out that everything went back to normal when I bypassed/disabled Proxomitron, so that HAD to be the cause of the trouble.
I have removed Proxomitron from my system (and did not like to have to do that!) and have informed Robert Roozeboom, whith whom I had contact about all this) to save others for this predicament.
Long story short: It WAS Proxomitron, in combination with filters that DID interact in an unexpected way with Slashdot's scripts. I reckon Proxomitron to be a good program, but when I used it it proved to have its quirks too in certain circumstances. As I said in my first post, I haven't used it since 2004, but it is very well possible newer versions are better then the one I used (don't ask which one that was, I could't tell if my life depended on it).
I used Proxomitron back in 2004 and somehow it managed to create 8000 hits in one hour to /. when I rearranged the panels on the main page. This resulted in me getting banned from Slashdot. Not funny, I can assure you! This came to light after an e-mail exchange with Robert Rozeboom from /. (if you're still working there: thanks Robert!). I found out it was Proxomitron because when I had it active my firewall indicated very heavy network traffic, which did not occur when proxomitron was bypassed.
Of course this was years ago and maybe it's improved now, but I have not used it ever since.
"Most sites that "require" a certain browser will work in Safari." should be:
"Most sites that require a certain "browser" will work in Safari."
From TFA: The disc diameter was changed from 115m to 120mm to allow for 74 minutes of playback...
Maybe they thought it might be hard to get consumers to put a 115 meter playback device in their room. And of course they would get complaints from record stores who should have to get bigger doors to get the disks through, not to mention storage space.
M$ seems to have VICE-ta made in a way that makes it very hard to install a real OS besides it.
I tried it on my laptop and did not get grub working. Maybe that says more about me than about Windoze, but I just kicked Vista from my machine and replaced it with Ubuntu after Vice-ta developed some quirks like denying access to my router without me having changed anything.
Now I still have to get some unimportant hardware working (webcam), but it's more lazyness from me than anything else it's not yet functional. But my machine is a lot faster, does not spy on me, I'm the boss over my own machine, have lots of apps to choose from and I don't have to reboot five times for every update/install. I don't see myself going back!
Not only does it take a long time to learn a new skill set, it costs a lot of money too in most cases. Without a job, you don't have that money or (as is the case here in the Netherlands) are not even allowed to follow schooling when drawing unemployment because it renders you 'unavailable for employment'.
IF you succeed in learning a new skill set most employers will not be interested because you have no experience, are too old and they can hire someone with the same skill set on a lower wage. In the mean time you don't have current experience in your old skill set, so if an employer wants someone your age (with your old skill set) he'll hire someone who has been working in that field directly before.
For employers the market IS mostly free, they have lots of wage-slaves on every level to choose from. And a huge unemployment number is fantastic for them, it keeps wage demands low ('You want more? Let's see if we can change you for someone cheaper!') functions as a threat ('For you ten others!'), gives an excuse for keeping wages low ('Look how many unemployed we have to pay from our taxes, we can't pay our slaves ^W workers more' and provides a pool for more cheap labor.
This post has not much to do with implanting chips (I was predicting that that will happen since decades and still believe it), but all with the viewpoint of employers. You are for most employers not much more than a piece of equipment, just not so costly.
An educated guess at what the two unknown steps in de slideshow were:
I think the first step where the author did not know what happened showed a machine for applying the glue for the surface mounted devices on the pcb. This step comes before the smd's are actually placed on the board. The glue keeps the components in place until they are soldered. I believe the glue is removed afterward, but I'm not sure.
The second 'interesting looking' thing looked like a device for transferring BIOS-IC's from plastic, tube-like containers to tape-rolls for the pick-and-place machines.
It's a case of "When you build something that is more idiot-proof, nature starts building better idiots". Nature has decided itself idiot-proof, so.....