You really have no idea about the history of personal computing. MS became the dominant player in Personal Computers because they owned the OS that ran on IBM compatible PCs. Before MS DOS, every computer manufacturer used a different OS (slight oversimplification) and a propietary hardware design. This meant that software vendors had to either pick one to develop for or port their ap to every new player that entered the field. Businesses wanted computers that they could count on. IBM was viewed as being that, so software vendors developed aps for the IBM PC. Since IBM made their PC using an open architecture, off the shelf components and the licensing terms allowed MS to sell other PC manufacturers the same OS as they sold IBM (or near enough as made no difference), this meant that other manufacturers could build "IBM compatible" PCs.
When MS started selling Word it was a poor imitation of Wordperfect (which was an improved imitation of Wordstar). The other key element of what is now MS Office, Excel was a poor imitation of Lotus 1-2-3. Excel was able to gain market share since every new version of DOS would break some of 1-2-3s functionality. MS failed to make as much progress penetrating Wordperfect's dominance until Windows 3.1 came out.
Wordperfect was unable to easily develop a GUI based version that maintained backwards compatibility. MS did not have such a problem since they had developed Word for Windows in conjunction with developing Windows 3.1.
Sorry for such a long response but Word took over because of Windows (and the fact that MS was the only major player who had both an established word processor and an established spreadsheet when Windows came out) not Windows because of Word. When Windows came out MS already owned the PC OS market.
Or you can make a tidy profit by buying 200 of them and selling them for cash anonymously at the local gun show.
You would make more money selling them at the places that criminals buy guns. While I am sure that many of the people who go to gun shows would have an interest in buying prepaid cellphones that the government can't track to them, I am also sure that criminals will pay a higher premium for them than the people who go to gun shows.
One thing to take note of Charles Schumer is the third ranked Democrat in the Senate, which means that to a degree his position on laws represents the Democratic Party on those laws. John Cornyn is not part of the Republican Senate leadership in any way, which means that his position on laws for the most part represents only his constituents (and with the way things have been going lately, not necessarily even them).
This is not to say that the Republican Party bosses would not support this bill, but the support of Republican Senator John Cornyn is not equivalent of the support of Democratic Senator Charles Schumer.
Of course the purpose of this law is to allow the government to identify people who have said things they don't like, not to catch criminals (catching criminals is just the cover story).
Very good point, my sister had her identity stolen. She put a fraud alert on with the credit reporting agencies. She, also, regularly obtained her credit report. On one of her reports, she saw that a major Department store chain had requested her credit report. She contacted their credit processing headquarters for our region to tell them that she had not requested credt from them and told them not to issue her any. Several months later she got a bill for around $2,000. It turns out that the person who stole her ID, lived in a different region and the people she talked to just blew my sister off because the application wasn't in their database. The chain ended up out that money and it didn't cause my sister more than the minor inconvenience of informing the chain that she had never asked for nor used the credit card in question.
True news sites that try to obey journalistic integrity get pushed to the side, and mainstream news becomes run by the political pundits.
And the outcome you are talking about will be different than the current situation in what way? I guess the problem is that you don't seem to realize that "journalistic integrity" is an oxymoron.
I like your idea, but I would suggest a slight modification, not line item but page by page. I would also allow 25 pages 250 words each. The second would just be my personal suggestion, the page by page part I think is important because it is more practical than line by line and any law that page by page is impractical for is too long.
I actually have a much simpler solution. Instead of what most voters do, if all voters would default to voting against the incumbent except in those cases where the incumbent has done something exceptional during the last term or the challenger is at least David Duke (or Louis Farrakhan) crazy.
Some of the bulk is in the nature of bills. A bill may state that "Section 201, subsection 1, is amended to read," followed by the entire 20 pages of subsection 1 with the intended modifications indicated. The bulk of the actual changes may be small — a sentence removed here, three words added there — but clarity and accuracy require including the current statute as well as the changes.
Instead of amending a law as part of another law, replace the original law with a new law that includes the amendments (there are times when amending a law as part of a new law is acceptable, but most of the time it is a kludge that should result in the new bill being voted down).
Splitting a bill into multiple smaller parts is dangerous, in the sense that some parts may pass and others fail. The result can be statute that is incomplete or even worse, contradictory.
In which case it probably shouldn't have been passed in the first place.
I did not address your other points because they require a lengthier answer than this setting is suited to.
Overall, the main reason that bills have gotten too long is that the government does more than it ought.
Personally, I suspect that people should start voting against legislators who vote for bills that are longer than 100 pages (I would be willing to consider different numbers of pages, 100 might be too long and there is a remote chance that 100 isn't quite long enough). Any bill longer than this should be more than one bill. The only reason to make a bill as long as most of the ones that Congress has been voting on lately is to hide stuff (either from some of the legislators or from the people or both).
All he showed was that a computer virus can be transmitted from an implanted computer to an external computer. The scientist did not infect himself with a computer virus, he infected a chip that he had implanted in himself. If it is news to you that a computer chip implanted in a person can be infected with a computer virus, then this is the wrong board for you.
I checked the link above yours which quoted the comment from her Facebook page that got her in trouble. That reads to me like hyperbole, not like a joke (although some context is missing, so there may be more that makes it a joke). As I read the statement from her Facebook page, if she was a model employee (or even one who kept her nose clean) this would be a clear case of over reaction. However, in light of the fact that she had been through the whole discipline process, I take it as "the straw that broke the camel's back". She has repeatedly pushed the limit of behavior on the job. The fact that she tested clean means that she had not used those substances within the time frame that the test would detect, not that she doesn't use them.
Basically, I do not know enough to tell if this firing was justified, but there is sufficient evidence to say that this shouldn't be a national story. This is definitely a local story and if you live in that area, you should follow this to see if she has gotten in trouble before because of a boss throwing their weight around or if she really is a bad apple.
The market does work. There are companies selling printers that use less expensive ink. Someone earlier mentioned Canon. Kodak also makes a printer that uses inexpensive ink. The Kodak printer doesn't have particularly good print quality (at least not yet), but they sell a full set of replacement cartridges (black and color) for $24.95.
The reason that ink prices haven't fallen sooner is patents that limit the ability of competitors to build a competing product and the low quality of early printers. The patents are starting to expire on some of the base technology and print quality has reached a point where further innovation is going to cost exponentially more to improve print quality and that improved print quality will be of less and less concern to the average consumer.
HP put print heads in the cartridge so that third party ink sellers would not be able to produce replacement ink cartridges for HP printers (the print head is patented). That is all you need to know to know that HP ink is overpriced, they had to come up with a way to make it illegal for someone else to produce replacement cartridges (they did this shortly after losing a court case against a replacement ink vendor).
but mach 3 razors last much much more longer than the cheap ones. its not a ripoff.
Check out Gillete's business model. They prefer to sell razors with replaceable blades to disposable razors. It is about $1.95/blade for mach3 blades. It is about $0.70 for a disposable razor. Are you saying that mach3 blades last almost 3 weeks (2.79 to be exact)? That is what it would take for it to be a good deal.
Considering that California, which set up a board to fund exactly that embryonic stem cell research that was not allowed under the Bush directive, had to claim the positive results from adult stem cell research in order to have any positive results from the stem cell research they funded (which, I will repeat, was supposed to be all embryonic stem cell research when they started) I think that yes it has nothing to do with it being inconvenient.
Sorry, those two always give me trouble. With most such words I can usually tell which one to use, but the difference between the meanings of these two is close enough that I always have trouble noticing when I get it wrong.
The research in question was never effected by Christian fundamentalists since it does not involve embryonic stem cells. Of course that is true of all of the promising stem cell research. Christians do not have a problem with stem cell research, Christians have a problem with embryonic stem cell research. What is nice about this is that none of the research that is showing promise for providing cures involves embryonic stem cells.
I was born in a Christian pacifist household. I was taught to not back down to the bully, but, also, not to fight back. It is amazing how much fun it is to see the expression of befuddlement on the bully's face when you don't back down the day after he punched you and you did nothing back. Now I never ran into the bullies who just beat the crap out of you, all of the one's I ran into would hit/punch/kick you and wait for you to fight back, they never knew what to do when I just kept on doing what I had been before they came up to me.
Of course it also helped that right around the time in my school that the bullies were just getting into their stride we boys discovered arm wrestling. I am just as strong left handed as right handed (and I am right handed). I learned a trick that made everybody think I was stronger than I was, I would challenge people to arm wrestle left handed. All of the other kids were significantly weaker with their left hand than with their right hand. As a result I never lost arm wrestling left handed (the only left handers in my school were in a different grouping and we never crossed paths during the school day). This made the other kids think I was much stronger than I was.
I didn't watch the show, but if they were going after the Christian market, they failed miserably. None of the people that I know are professing Christians ever talked about Lost (not that none of the people who I know who talked about Lost are professing Christians, just that if they are, I am unaware of it). However, almost all of the "mystical" stuff I heard people talking about from the show was incompatible with a Christian worldview.
Actually, I suspect the problem was that they wanted to stick to some generic "mysticism"** that didn't offend anyone. If you didn't expect the show to have some kind of "mysticism" in the conclusion about what was going on, then you weren't paying attention to what the shows writers and producers were saying about the show. I think the show would have been better if they had picked some worldview that would have offended some of their audience. If they had picked a specific religious view or a explicitly materialistic view, while those people who disagreed with the worldview would not have liked the show's answers, most people would have found the ending more satisfying.
** I used the word mysticism in quotes because it is not quite the right word for what I am talking about, but the other words I can think of at the moment are all worse ("religion" implies a specific belief set of one kind or another and this show was going for a "there's more going on than can be explained by strict materialism, but we can't understand what it is" sort of mysticism).
I am not much of a TV watcher either. When Lost first came out I was interested, but I missed the first couple of episodes because I forgot it was coming on. Then the trailers for the show looked pretty dark and maybe a little freaky, my wife doesn't deal well with that sort of stuff (she gets nightmares if she watches shows like that (even when the show isn't particularly scary). Then when the show started to take off and I heard my co-workers talking about it, it reminded me of a show from a few years back that I really liked, "The Pretender". The Pretender had a mysterious plot running through it and the main character uncovered a little bit more in each episode. It was really interesting trying to put the clues together to see what the main conspiracy was. Then the final episode came where they explained what these mega powerful conpsirators were doing and it was a complete let down.
I decided that I was going to wait until Lost was completed to see if its ending was a disappointing to its fans as Pretender's was or if it was as well down as Lost's fans thought it would be. Based on what I overheard from my co-workers this morning (and the comments on this thread) I'm glad I did.
How do you test a plan to deal with this sort of catastrophe without risking this very catastrophe? The next time something like this happens they will have a tested plan to fix it, the one they use to fix this one.
I am done with this discussion, all of your posts are long and rambling. They are impossible to reply to in a concise manner because you make statements and then go off and make long arguments derived from faulty assumptions. If I ever meet you in person I will consider further discussion if you are actually interested in understanding what I believe rather than just wanting to call me evil.
I will repeat, in my experience, an atheist's moral code is just a rationalization for doing what he wanted to do any way. Nothing that you have posted gives me any reason to believe that you are any different.
Slashdot Mirror
You really have no idea about the history of personal computing. MS became the dominant player in Personal Computers because they owned the OS that ran on IBM compatible PCs. Before MS DOS, every computer manufacturer used a different OS (slight oversimplification) and a propietary hardware design. This meant that software vendors had to either pick one to develop for or port their ap to every new player that entered the field. Businesses wanted computers that they could count on. IBM was viewed as being that, so software vendors developed aps for the IBM PC. Since IBM made their PC using an open architecture, off the shelf components and the licensing terms allowed MS to sell other PC manufacturers the same OS as they sold IBM (or near enough as made no difference), this meant that other manufacturers could build "IBM compatible" PCs.
When MS started selling Word it was a poor imitation of Wordperfect (which was an improved imitation of Wordstar). The other key element of what is now MS Office, Excel was a poor imitation of Lotus 1-2-3. Excel was able to gain market share since every new version of DOS would break some of 1-2-3s functionality. MS failed to make as much progress penetrating Wordperfect's dominance until Windows 3.1 came out.
Wordperfect was unable to easily develop a GUI based version that maintained backwards compatibility. MS did not have such a problem since they had developed Word for Windows in conjunction with developing Windows 3.1.
Sorry for such a long response but Word took over because of Windows (and the fact that MS was the only major player who had both an established word processor and an established spreadsheet when Windows came out) not Windows because of Word. When Windows came out MS already owned the PC OS market.
Or you can make a tidy profit by buying 200 of them and selling them for cash anonymously at the local gun show.
You would make more money selling them at the places that criminals buy guns. While I am sure that many of the people who go to gun shows would have an interest in buying prepaid cellphones that the government can't track to them, I am also sure that criminals will pay a higher premium for them than the people who go to gun shows.
One thing to take note of Charles Schumer is the third ranked Democrat in the Senate, which means that to a degree his position on laws represents the Democratic Party on those laws. John Cornyn is not part of the Republican Senate leadership in any way, which means that his position on laws for the most part represents only his constituents (and with the way things have been going lately, not necessarily even them).
This is not to say that the Republican Party bosses would not support this bill, but the support of Republican Senator John Cornyn is not equivalent of the support of Democratic Senator Charles Schumer.
Of course the purpose of this law is to allow the government to identify people who have said things they don't like, not to catch criminals (catching criminals is just the cover story).
Very good point, my sister had her identity stolen. She put a fraud alert on with the credit reporting agencies. She, also, regularly obtained her credit report. On one of her reports, she saw that a major Department store chain had requested her credit report. She contacted their credit processing headquarters for our region to tell them that she had not requested credt from them and told them not to issue her any. Several months later she got a bill for around $2,000. It turns out that the person who stole her ID, lived in a different region and the people she talked to just blew my sister off because the application wasn't in their database. The chain ended up out that money and it didn't cause my sister more than the minor inconvenience of informing the chain that she had never asked for nor used the credit card in question.
True news sites that try to obey journalistic integrity get pushed to the side, and mainstream news becomes run by the political pundits.
And the outcome you are talking about will be different than the current situation in what way? I guess the problem is that you don't seem to realize that "journalistic integrity" is an oxymoron.
I like your idea, but I would suggest a slight modification, not line item but page by page. I would also allow 25 pages 250 words each. The second would just be my personal suggestion, the page by page part I think is important because it is more practical than line by line and any law that page by page is impractical for is too long.
I actually have a much simpler solution. Instead of what most voters do, if all voters would default to voting against the incumbent except in those cases where the incumbent has done something exceptional during the last term or the challenger is at least David Duke (or Louis Farrakhan) crazy.
Some of the bulk is in the nature of bills. A bill may state that "Section 201, subsection 1, is amended to read," followed by the entire 20 pages of subsection 1 with the intended modifications indicated. The bulk of the actual changes may be small — a sentence removed here, three words added there — but clarity and accuracy require including the current statute as well as the changes.
Instead of amending a law as part of another law, replace the original law with a new law that includes the amendments (there are times when amending a law as part of a new law is acceptable, but most of the time it is a kludge that should result in the new bill being voted down).
Splitting a bill into multiple smaller parts is dangerous, in the sense that some parts may pass and others fail. The result can be statute that is incomplete or even worse, contradictory.
In which case it probably shouldn't have been passed in the first place.
I did not address your other points because they require a lengthier answer than this setting is suited to.
Overall, the main reason that bills have gotten too long is that the government does more than it ought.
Personally, I suspect that people should start voting against legislators who vote for bills that are longer than 100 pages (I would be willing to consider different numbers of pages, 100 might be too long and there is a remote chance that 100 isn't quite long enough). Any bill longer than this should be more than one bill. The only reason to make a bill as long as most of the ones that Congress has been voting on lately is to hide stuff (either from some of the legislators or from the people or both).
All he showed was that a computer virus can be transmitted from an implanted computer to an external computer. The scientist did not infect himself with a computer virus, he infected a chip that he had implanted in himself. If it is news to you that a computer chip implanted in a person can be infected with a computer virus, then this is the wrong board for you.
I checked the link above yours which quoted the comment from her Facebook page that got her in trouble. That reads to me like hyperbole, not like a joke (although some context is missing, so there may be more that makes it a joke). As I read the statement from her Facebook page, if she was a model employee (or even one who kept her nose clean) this would be a clear case of over reaction. However, in light of the fact that she had been through the whole discipline process, I take it as "the straw that broke the camel's back". She has repeatedly pushed the limit of behavior on the job. The fact that she tested clean means that she had not used those substances within the time frame that the test would detect, not that she doesn't use them.
Basically, I do not know enough to tell if this firing was justified, but there is sufficient evidence to say that this shouldn't be a national story. This is definitely a local story and if you live in that area, you should follow this to see if she has gotten in trouble before because of a boss throwing their weight around or if she really is a bad apple.
The market does work. There are companies selling printers that use less expensive ink. Someone earlier mentioned Canon. Kodak also makes a printer that uses inexpensive ink. The Kodak printer doesn't have particularly good print quality (at least not yet), but they sell a full set of replacement cartridges (black and color) for $24.95.
The reason that ink prices haven't fallen sooner is patents that limit the ability of competitors to build a competing product and the low quality of early printers. The patents are starting to expire on some of the base technology and print quality has reached a point where further innovation is going to cost exponentially more to improve print quality and that improved print quality will be of less and less concern to the average consumer.
HP put print heads in the cartridge so that third party ink sellers would not be able to produce replacement ink cartridges for HP printers (the print head is patented). That is all you need to know to know that HP ink is overpriced, they had to come up with a way to make it illegal for someone else to produce replacement cartridges (they did this shortly after losing a court case against a replacement ink vendor).
but mach 3 razors last much much more longer than the cheap ones. its not a ripoff.
Check out Gillete's business model. They prefer to sell razors with replaceable blades to disposable razors. It is about $1.95/blade for mach3 blades. It is about $0.70 for a disposable razor. Are you saying that mach3 blades last almost 3 weeks (2.79 to be exact)? That is what it would take for it to be a good deal.
Considering that California, which set up a board to fund exactly that embryonic stem cell research that was not allowed under the Bush directive, had to claim the positive results from adult stem cell research in order to have any positive results from the stem cell research they funded (which, I will repeat, was supposed to be all embryonic stem cell research when they started) I think that yes it has nothing to do with it being inconvenient.
Sorry, those two always give me trouble. With most such words I can usually tell which one to use, but the difference between the meanings of these two is close enough that I always have trouble noticing when I get it wrong.
The research in question was never effected by Christian fundamentalists since it does not involve embryonic stem cells. Of course that is true of all of the promising stem cell research. Christians do not have a problem with stem cell research, Christians have a problem with embryonic stem cell research. What is nice about this is that none of the research that is showing promise for providing cures involves embryonic stem cells.
I was born in a Christian pacifist household. I was taught to not back down to the bully, but, also, not to fight back. It is amazing how much fun it is to see the expression of befuddlement on the bully's face when you don't back down the day after he punched you and you did nothing back. Now I never ran into the bullies who just beat the crap out of you, all of the one's I ran into would hit/punch/kick you and wait for you to fight back, they never knew what to do when I just kept on doing what I had been before they came up to me.
Of course it also helped that right around the time in my school that the bullies were just getting into their stride we boys discovered arm wrestling. I am just as strong left handed as right handed (and I am right handed). I learned a trick that made everybody think I was stronger than I was, I would challenge people to arm wrestle left handed. All of the other kids were significantly weaker with their left hand than with their right hand. As a result I never lost arm wrestling left handed (the only left handers in my school were in a different grouping and we never crossed paths during the school day). This made the other kids think I was much stronger than I was.
I didn't watch the show, but if they were going after the Christian market, they failed miserably. None of the people that I know are professing Christians ever talked about Lost (not that none of the people who I know who talked about Lost are professing Christians, just that if they are, I am unaware of it). However, almost all of the "mystical" stuff I heard people talking about from the show was incompatible with a Christian worldview.
Actually, I suspect the problem was that they wanted to stick to some generic "mysticism"** that didn't offend anyone. If you didn't expect the show to have some kind of "mysticism" in the conclusion about what was going on, then you weren't paying attention to what the shows writers and producers were saying about the show. I think the show would have been better if they had picked some worldview that would have offended some of their audience. If they had picked a specific religious view or a explicitly materialistic view, while those people who disagreed with the worldview would not have liked the show's answers, most people would have found the ending more satisfying.
** I used the word mysticism in quotes because it is not quite the right word for what I am talking about, but the other words I can think of at the moment are all worse ("religion" implies a specific belief set of one kind or another and this show was going for a "there's more going on than can be explained by strict materialism, but we can't understand what it is" sort of mysticism).
I am not much of a TV watcher either. When Lost first came out I was interested, but I missed the first couple of episodes because I forgot it was coming on. Then the trailers for the show looked pretty dark and maybe a little freaky, my wife doesn't deal well with that sort of stuff (she gets nightmares if she watches shows like that (even when the show isn't particularly scary). Then when the show started to take off and I heard my co-workers talking about it, it reminded me of a show from a few years back that I really liked, "The Pretender". The Pretender had a mysterious plot running through it and the main character uncovered a little bit more in each episode. It was really interesting trying to put the clues together to see what the main conspiracy was. Then the final episode came where they explained what these mega powerful conpsirators were doing and it was a complete let down.
I decided that I was going to wait until Lost was completed to see if its ending was a disappointing to its fans as Pretender's was or if it was as well down as Lost's fans thought it would be. Based on what I overheard from my co-workers this morning (and the comments on this thread) I'm glad I did.
How do you test a plan to deal with this sort of catastrophe without risking this very catastrophe? The next time something like this happens they will have a tested plan to fix it, the one they use to fix this one.
Once again you ramble on and on.
I am done with this discussion, all of your posts are long and rambling. They are impossible to reply to in a concise manner because you make statements and then go off and make long arguments derived from faulty assumptions. If I ever meet you in person I will consider further discussion if you are actually interested in understanding what I believe rather than just wanting to call me evil.
I will repeat, in my experience, an atheist's moral code is just a rationalization for doing what he wanted to do any way. Nothing that you have posted gives me any reason to believe that you are any different.