I still have yet to purchase anything from Amazon since the one-click patent. Everything since then has been through Barnes & Noble. In fact B&N got a loyal brick and mortar customer that day, too. I rarely go into any other bookstore.
So no effect? That's hyperbole. Negligable effect from Amazon's point of view? That would be spot on.
Here's Greg's rant. Personally I dropped Google's ads from the one site I had been running them on. They kept getting hung up on calendar ads because in my layout the word calendar appears on every page (as a link to, y'know, a calendar!). If it wasn't calendars it was computer/PHP security stuff because I had a link to, ya know, phpbb. And if it wasn't that it was, get this, the good ol' "free ipod" scams. All of that for a City of Heroes supergroup site. You'd think if these ads were targetted it would be pointing to something comic book related? Maybe? Nope. Pah!
You're right, filters don't catch everything. That's why there is the in game petition tool which many people use to report copyrighted characters.
There is a simple test to see if NCSoft/Cryptic are enforcing this rule.
Go stand in Atlas Park/Galaxy City (newbie areas) near the trainer and see how many clones you can spot. Lots! Trust me, won't take long.
Now go to Talos Island or Independance Port (mid-level areas) near the trams or trainers and see if you can spot a clone. You'd be lucky to see 1-2 in any given week.
Then pop up to Founder's Falls, Brickstown or Peregrine Isle (high level areas) and see how many close you could spot. In months of play I have yet to see a clone in those areas who wasn't a lowbie looking around.
Simple facts are it takes time to catch these clones but they are caught. If they weren't we'd have lots of high level clones running around. We don't. The lucky ones might make it to their mid-20s (about 2 weeks of semi-heavy game play) but that's the highest I've ever seen.
Marvel here is suing not because NCSoft/Cryptic aren't taking action. They're suing because the mere possibility exists.
Wrong. You are perpetuating the system. You're giving silent consent to whatever the majority (of the minorty as evidenced by the last election) decides to vote. You want to effect change you WILL get your lazy butt out on election night and vote for a third party candidate that closely resembles your views. Why?
Because in the American 2-party system there are more than 2 parties. But in the American 2-party system only parties that get x% of the vote get into the national debates. And in the American 2-party system only parties that get x% of the vote get their name on the ballots in all 50 states automatically. The rest have to, every election cycle, petition to get their names added to the ballots.
If you want some form of change you have to start voicing dissent NOW so the third party of your choice can get a by no those hurdles later. Not voting is NOT voicing dissent. It is lazy, pure and simple.
And for the record, I voted Brown last election and will be voting Badnarik this election. Why? Because in 10-20 years I want that party to have to avoid those roadblocks and have a serious chance of winning.
Strongly disagree with you there. I work for a hosting company that offers catch-all addresses. Any time that people complain about spam the first thing I check is if they have a catch all address enabled. In every case they do. I tell them to turn it off explaining about dictionary attacks and the like. That one change reduces the spam load for all customers by a noticable amount. For some it has meant a near 90-95% reduction in mail heading into the box their catch-all address forwards to. The worst part is that so far I've met one customer that needed it. The rest could do fine without it.
I believe it is simply irresponsible to give spammers such an open door and have been lobbying hard to get that feature removed. It simply is not worth the hassle for us, for the customers, for anyone other than the spammers.
If a person can't figure out they fat-fingered an account when they get a bounce that says, "account mispleled@wrnog.dmoain.com" then that is their problem. The error was correctly identified and conveyed to them. Furthermore those errors should be generated at SMTP time by the sending MTA and not at delivery time by the receiving MTA.
Nice try but, uh, here's the original. You're trying to out-Yoda Yoda? What next, going to bounce around like Kermit the Frog on crack *and* Mt. Dew?;P
Yes, a Jedi's strength flows from the Force. But beware of the dark side. Anger, fear, aggression; the dark side of the Force are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will, as it did Obi-Wan's apprentice.
apt-cache to search for programs packaged up that I might not otherwise know about.
aptitude to install them and any needed dependancies with those dependancies marked as automatically installed. If it doesn't do what I when I remove the package that installed them they, too, are removed unless needed elsewhere.
I've learned of more new software with apt-cache than any other tool. I've kept my systems clean with aptitude.
YODA: Code! Yes. A programmer's strength flows from code maintainability. But beware of Perl. Terse syntax... more than one way to do it...default variables. The dark side of code maintainability are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you when code you write. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will.
Hell, does KMail have that, yet? KDE's applications are far closer than most others since it implements editor-part and there is a port of vim as an editor-part.
The biggest problem with your complaint is that you're limiting yourself to stable. Stable is just that, stable. Of the many Debian boxes that I've maintained there is only one that I left on stable. That box being the gateway machine that NATs between my parents' Windows boxen and their ADSL connection. Being that it is 400+ miles away I kept it on stable for months so I wouldn't have to either try to talk my dad through fixing it nor makinga 5+ our drive to do it when we both got too frustrated to try to work through any problems over the phone I knew I could solve in 10m. Of course now it is sitting on testing.
My current Debian box is running unstable. It's been said before, I'll say it again. Debian's unstable is often far more stable than other distribution's "stable" release. I have been riding unstable for close to 5 years now and I can count on one hand the number of times it's caused me problems.... and have fingers left over for the next 5 years.
If you find Debian not "modern" enough for you. Jump up to testing to see how it feels. If you're daring (and anyone running an RPM distro is more daring enough) jump to unstable. Three rules for riding unstable:
1: Upgrade only what you need to upgrade to get the system working as you please. Leave the rest alone.
2: Use apt-changes and apt-listbugs
3: Use aptitude for most operations that start with "apt-get".
Trust me, it is no worse than any other distribution, about as modern as you can get and stable enough that I bank my main personal server on it.
Same here. I started out with the Honor series when Baen was doing almost what it is doing now. They had priced _On Basilisk Station_ at $1.99. I forget what I was looking for at the time but I saw this book and figured $2 is cheap enough for me to not care of it sucked. Turned out to be one of the best books purchases I ever made. Baen has more than made up for any loss they took on that book. I've since bought all of the Honor books (just preordered this book in hardcover and will get it in mass media later), devoured the Dahak series, bought _The Apocalypse Troll_, and am now working my way through the Starfire series.
Let's do the math. 13 Honor books (12 with one pre-order), 3 Dahak books, _Apocalypse Troll_, 2 of the 4 Starfire series with no doubts that the other 2 will be purchased in short order. For pricing that one book at $1.99 they gained a loyal fan of David Weber's work and, to date, 18 book purchases with another 2 possible.
I'm quite happy to see that they're continuing the trend. First with the web library and now with the CD-ROM. I'm really curious as to what will be on that CD and plan to keep it with me for reading material when a book isn't available. No doubt I will find some treats outside of David Weber that Baen has in store and knowing me will most likely reward them with many purchases in the future.
Re:Python is a GREAT language, but. . .
on
Think Python
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I REALLY dislike any language that depends on white space. Miranda and Haskell are two other examples of this. Its a pain to move blocks around and anyone who doesn't use an editor with auto-indent is screwed. Also, unless tabs are set to spaces, computers with differnt tab stops will see your code differently, which can be a problem if code is emailed, etc.
It isn't a pain to move blocks around. At least not more so than any other language when one is coding properly. Nor does not having auto-indent cause any more problems here than any other language when coding properly. Operative words, coding properly. The nice thing about Python is you're assure that the programmer got his blocks mostly right.
As for the space/tab problem that is simple, no tabs. Done. Tabs are bad. They are very bad. Just say no to Tabs.
As has already been mentioning, not too much one can teach about memory management and pointers with python. ..
Oddly enough it is with Python that I finally grasped the concept of pointers. The nice thing about Python is that one isn't constantly trying to do the dereference shuffle to do the right thing. This makes copying lists a little sticky but that is an acceptable trade off compared to scratching one's head over "Ok, this function requires a variable, a pointer-to-a-variable, another variable which I'm going to dereference from this pointer here...."
Sounds kinda strange as a complaint, but too much is built in. I have this complaint about java too. As an example, I would much rather have an early homework be a sorting algorithm and then have them reuse this algorithm in other homeworks than let them just type "xxx.sort()". Not that this isn't a great feature for experienced programmers, its just that begining students should have to do sorting, reversing, duplicating, etc themselves at first.
Not only is this an odd complaint it is also a non-issue. There is nothing that precludes you from requiring a home-brew sort to be used in your assignments. It begins something like this, "Yes, Python is nice in that it has a sort function. However, knowing how a sort function works really helps one understand computers and programming. So, today's class we're going to program our own sort function which we'll later use in a larger program." The nice thing is then you can say thisn, "Then we'll compare what we've written with the default sort function..." It is an unimaginative teache who cannot figure that one out. It has been pretty common practice in all of the programming classes I've taken over the years. High school, college and vocational all did it while I was learning BASIC, Turbo Pascal and C.
Yeah, the prebuilt manufacturers get builk discounts. You're presuming they pass that on to the consumer. They don't. That's what's called the margin on the sale for profit.
Every time I've built a machine I've built it better than what I could get prebuilt, cheaper than they were selling and I didn't have to worry about upgrade issues because of proprietary parts.
I see no reason for anyone who can build a machine to buy prebuilt except for two exceptions.
But we do have something to work with when pointing out that it would be nice if iD would make a game out of the engine.
Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3.
Three "games" from iD which were nothing more than tech demos for their game engine. How many people played Quake? Quake 2? Nono, I'm talking base game here, not mods. Exactly, most people would raise their hand and then drop it back down when you mentioned "Not mods, the base game."
The best Quake/Quake 2 game? Half-Life. iD made the engine, Valve took that engine and made a game out of it. From that begat Counter-Strike and a slew of other mods. All of those took the engine and made games out of it. iD didn't make those games, other people did.
Quake 3? Urban Terror, RtCW and MoHAA. Quake 3 is the engine, those are the games based on the engine.
If, and I stress IF, iD comes through with what they are claiming with Doom III then I will say that yes, the first time since Doom, they have created a game for the engine instead of creating an engine and letting their fans pay for the privledge of writing the games to play on it.
However, given iD's past history on what was going to go into their games I won't give them credit until Doom III is released and I've seen the final product. Remember, Quake was originally going to be a fantasy game with realistic physics in which the players were gods, would tumble when they fell and the screen would shake when they were hit (GCW interview with Romero, '94). Where do you think the name Quake came from? I do recall other things being said about Quake over the years leading up to its release and most didn't make it into the final product. Only the core basics of what Carmack could deliver in the engine made it. True 3-d, programmable. That's it.
Never mind that I've downloaded qutie a few MP3s and as a result my purchases of music went from maybe 10 a year to over 40-50 in the past several months. Why? Far easier to buy a CD and rip it for my portable MP3 player than to try to find all the tracks at a decent bit rate. I download samples and buy the ablums of those I like to rip at my leasure.
Do I buy all? No. Do I buy far more than I did before? Yes. Are these things that one would hear on the radio? Doubtful.
For the money you'd spend on one of these things, you could get one of those hundred-CD units that goes into your trunk, and never worry about the company going belly-up.
When you can tell me how I can listen to NPR, PRI and the BBC with a 100-CD changer I consider this statement valid. There is more to radio than just music. Hell, no music station holds a candle to my Personal Jukebox or Archos. They're far cheaper than even a CD changer and I have no worries about them being pinched from my car when I'm away.
For my money, just jumping into this discussion late, Sirius would get my money in a heart beat if I had the desite to go with sattelite radio. 107, 109, 112 is all I'd listen to. NPR Now, PRI, BBC. Problem is figuring out how to get that installed on my Honda ST-1100.
That would be "New". A new window has nothing in the URL bar. One could also double-click on the workspace of Opera itself to open a new window within it. If you're using the non-MDI style there is always the new tab button.
When you're cutting and pasting a URL in, you can't then highlight the current URL and delete, because then you have to go back and RESELECT what you wanted to paste.
Funny, I don't have that problem. But then I do recall that this is unix and under unix one can hit CNTL-U to delete any entry field. So what I do is highlight, click in the URL bar (not highlight) and hit CNTL-U. Clean bar ready for entry. Don't blame the editor for your ignorance of the environment in which you're operating.
Dare we even mention the proliferation of used books being sold? Will those get tracked? Do used records get tracked? I'd say that about 1:20th of my book collection are from the used books store. I generally take chances with new authors that way.
Slashdot Mirror
Free over $25. Where've I seen that before? Oh, right, on the order I just placed at the end of last week. ;)
I still have yet to purchase anything from Amazon since the one-click patent. Everything since then has been through Barnes & Noble. In fact B&N got a loyal brick and mortar customer that day, too. I rarely go into any other bookstore.
So no effect? That's hyperbole. Negligable effect from Amazon's point of view? That would be spot on.
Here's Greg's rant. Personally I dropped Google's ads from the one site I had been running them on. They kept getting hung up on calendar ads because in my layout the word calendar appears on every page (as a link to, y'know, a calendar!). If it wasn't calendars it was computer/PHP security stuff because I had a link to, ya know, phpbb. And if it wasn't that it was, get this, the good ol' "free ipod" scams. All of that for a City of Heroes supergroup site. You'd think if these ads were targetted it would be pointing to something comic book related? Maybe? Nope. Pah!
For the record adzapper blocks google ads by default.
Doh, though of one other reason a split second after I hit submit.
If you're cynical about large corporations the reason Marvel's suing is actually quite clear.
Marvel's own MMORPG would be in direct competition with City of Heroes. What better way to help their baby along than to get rid of CoH?
You're right, filters don't catch everything. That's why there is the in game petition tool which many people use to report copyrighted characters.
There is a simple test to see if NCSoft/Cryptic are enforcing this rule.
Go stand in Atlas Park/Galaxy City (newbie areas) near the trainer and see how many clones you can spot. Lots! Trust me, won't take long.
Now go to Talos Island or Independance Port (mid-level areas) near the trams or trainers and see if you can spot a clone. You'd be lucky to see 1-2 in any given week.
Then pop up to Founder's Falls, Brickstown or Peregrine Isle (high level areas) and see how many close you could spot. In months of play I have yet to see a clone in those areas who wasn't a lowbie looking around.
Simple facts are it takes time to catch these clones but they are caught. If they weren't we'd have lots of high level clones running around. We don't. The lucky ones might make it to their mid-20s (about 2 weeks of semi-heavy game play) but that's the highest I've ever seen.
Marvel here is suing not because NCSoft/Cryptic aren't taking action. They're suing because the mere possibility exists.
Wrong. You are perpetuating the system. You're giving silent consent to whatever the majority (of the minorty as evidenced by the last election) decides to vote. You want to effect change you WILL get your lazy butt out on election night and vote for a third party candidate that closely resembles your views. Why?
Because in the American 2-party system there are more than 2 parties.
But in the American 2-party system only parties that get x% of the vote get into the national debates.
And in the American 2-party system only parties that get x% of the vote get their name on the ballots in all 50 states automatically. The rest have to, every election cycle, petition to get their names added to the ballots.
If you want some form of change you have to start voicing dissent NOW so the third party of your choice can get a by no those hurdles later. Not voting is NOT voicing dissent. It is lazy, pure and simple.
And for the record, I voted Brown last election and will be voting Badnarik this election. Why? Because in 10-20 years I want that party to have to avoid those roadblocks and have a serious chance of winning.
Strongly disagree with you there. I work for a hosting company that offers catch-all addresses. Any time that people complain about spam the first thing I check is if they have a catch all address enabled. In every case they do. I tell them to turn it off explaining about dictionary attacks and the like. That one change reduces the spam load for all customers by a noticable amount. For some it has meant a near 90-95% reduction in mail heading into the box their catch-all address forwards to. The worst part is that so far I've met one customer that needed it. The rest could do fine without it.
I believe it is simply irresponsible to give spammers such an open door and have been lobbying hard to get that feature removed. It simply is not worth the hassle for us, for the customers, for anyone other than the spammers.
If a person can't figure out they fat-fingered an account when they get a bounce that says, "account mispleled@wrnog.dmoain.com" then that is their problem. The error was correctly identified and conveyed to them. Furthermore those errors should be generated at SMTP time by the sending MTA and not at delivery time by the receiving MTA.
Nice try but, uh, here's the original. You're trying to out-Yoda Yoda? What next, going to bounce around like Kermit the Frog on crack *and* Mt. Dew? ;P
Yes, a Jedi's strength flows from the Force. But beware of the dark side. Anger, fear, aggression; the dark side of the Force are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will, as it did Obi-Wan's apprentice.
apt-cache
aptitude
apt-cache to search for programs packaged up that I might not otherwise know about.
aptitude to install them and any needed dependancies with those dependancies marked as automatically installed. If it doesn't do what I when I remove the package that installed them they, too, are removed unless needed elsewhere.
I've learned of more new software with apt-cache than any other tool. I've kept my systems clean with aptitude.
What good is your shell without commands? :P
YODA: Code! Yes. A programmer's strength flows from code maintainability. But beware of Perl. Terse syntax... more than one way to do it...default variables. The dark side of code maintainability are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you when code you write. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will.
Hell, does KMail have that, yet? KDE's applications are far closer than most others since it implements editor-part and there is a port of vim as an editor-part.
The biggest problem with your complaint is that you're limiting yourself to stable. Stable is just that, stable. Of the many Debian boxes that I've maintained there is only one that I left on stable. That box being the gateway machine that NATs between my parents' Windows boxen and their ADSL connection. Being that it is 400+ miles away I kept it on stable for months so I wouldn't have to either try to talk my dad through fixing it nor makinga 5+ our drive to do it when we both got too frustrated to try to work through any problems over the phone I knew I could solve in 10m. Of course now it is sitting on testing.
My current Debian box is running unstable. It's been said before, I'll say it again. Debian's unstable is often far more stable than other distribution's "stable" release. I have been riding unstable for close to 5 years now and I can count on one hand the number of times it's caused me problems.... and have fingers left over for the next 5 years.
If you find Debian not "modern" enough for you. Jump up to testing to see how it feels. If you're daring (and anyone running an RPM distro is more daring enough) jump to unstable. Three rules for riding unstable:
1: Upgrade only what you need to upgrade to get the system working as you please. Leave the rest alone.
2: Use apt-changes and apt-listbugs
3: Use aptitude for most operations that start with "apt-get".
Trust me, it is no worse than any other distribution, about as modern as you can get and stable enough that I bank my main personal server on it.
Already done:i ew.php? pid=3517
http://www.intimidated.f2s.com/sharelive/v
Same here. I started out with the Honor series when Baen was doing almost what it is doing now. They had priced _On Basilisk Station_ at $1.99. I forget what I was looking for at the time but I saw this book and figured $2 is cheap enough for me to not care of it sucked. Turned out to be one of the best books purchases I ever made. Baen has more than made up for any loss they took on that book. I've since bought all of the Honor books (just preordered this book in hardcover and will get it in mass media later), devoured the Dahak series, bought _The Apocalypse Troll_, and am now working my way through the Starfire series.
Let's do the math. 13 Honor books (12 with one pre-order), 3 Dahak books, _Apocalypse Troll_, 2 of the 4 Starfire series with no doubts that the other 2 will be purchased in short order. For pricing that one book at $1.99 they gained a loyal fan of David Weber's work and, to date, 18 book purchases with another 2 possible.
I'm quite happy to see that they're continuing the trend. First with the web library and now with the CD-ROM. I'm really curious as to what will be on that CD and plan to keep it with me for reading material when a book isn't available. No doubt I will find some treats outside of David Weber that Baen has in store and knowing me will most likely reward them with many purchases in the future.
I REALLY dislike any language that depends on white space. Miranda and Haskell are two other examples of this. Its a pain to move blocks around and anyone who doesn't use an editor with auto-indent is screwed. Also, unless tabs are set to spaces, computers with differnt tab stops will see your code differently, which can be a problem if code is emailed, etc.
It isn't a pain to move blocks around. At least not more so than any other language when one is coding properly. Nor does not having auto-indent cause any more problems here than any other language when coding properly. Operative words, coding properly. The nice thing about Python is you're assure that the programmer got his blocks mostly right.
As for the space/tab problem that is simple, no tabs. Done. Tabs are bad. They are very bad. Just say no to Tabs.
As has already been mentioning, not too much one can teach about memory management and pointers with python. . .
Oddly enough it is with Python that I finally grasped the concept of pointers. The nice thing about Python is that one isn't constantly trying to do the dereference shuffle to do the right thing. This makes copying lists a little sticky but that is an acceptable trade off compared to scratching one's head over "Ok, this function requires a variable, a pointer-to-a-variable, another variable which I'm going to dereference from this pointer here...."
Sounds kinda strange as a complaint, but too much is built in. I have this complaint about java too. As an example, I would much rather have an early homework be a sorting algorithm and then have them reuse this algorithm in other homeworks than let them just type "xxx.sort()". Not that this isn't a great feature for experienced programmers, its just that begining students should have to do sorting, reversing, duplicating, etc themselves at first.
Not only is this an odd complaint it is also a non-issue. There is nothing that precludes you from requiring a home-brew sort to be used in your assignments. It begins something like this, "Yes, Python is nice in that it has a sort function. However, knowing how a sort function works really helps one understand computers and programming. So, today's class we're going to program our own sort function which we'll later use in a larger program." The nice thing is then you can say thisn, "Then we'll compare what we've written with the default sort function..." It is an unimaginative teache who cannot figure that one out. It has been pretty common practice in all of the programming classes I've taken over the years. High school, college and vocational all did it while I was learning BASIC, Turbo Pascal and C.
Yeah, the prebuilt manufacturers get builk discounts. You're presuming they pass that on to the consumer. They don't. That's what's called the margin on the sale for profit.
Every time I've built a machine I've built it better than what I could get prebuilt, cheaper than they were selling and I didn't have to worry about upgrade issues because of proprietary parts.
I see no reason for anyone who can build a machine to buy prebuilt except for two exceptions.
1: Laptops.
2: Macs.
But we do have something to work with when pointing out that it would be nice if iD would make a game out of the engine.
Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3.
Three "games" from iD which were nothing more than tech demos for their game engine. How many people played Quake? Quake 2? Nono, I'm talking base game here, not mods. Exactly, most people would raise their hand and then drop it back down when you mentioned "Not mods, the base game."
The best Quake/Quake 2 game? Half-Life. iD made the engine, Valve took that engine and made a game out of it. From that begat Counter-Strike and a slew of other mods. All of those took the engine and made games out of it. iD didn't make those games, other people did.
Quake 3? Urban Terror, RtCW and MoHAA. Quake 3 is the engine, those are the games based on the engine.
If, and I stress IF, iD comes through with what they are claiming with Doom III then I will say that yes, the first time since Doom, they have created a game for the engine instead of creating an engine and letting their fans pay for the privledge of writing the games to play on it.
However, given iD's past history on what was going to go into their games I won't give them credit until Doom III is released and I've seen the final product. Remember, Quake was originally going to be a fantasy game with realistic physics in which the players were gods, would tumble when they fell and the screen would shake when they were hit (GCW interview with Romero, '94). Where do you think the name Quake came from? I do recall other things being said about Quake over the years leading up to its release and most didn't make it into the final product. Only the core basics of what Carmack could deliver in the engine made it. True 3-d, programmable. That's it.
Never mind that I've downloaded qutie a few MP3s and as a result my purchases of music went from maybe 10 a year to over 40-50 in the past several months. Why? Far easier to buy a CD and rip it for my portable MP3 player than to try to find all the tracks at a decent bit rate. I download samples and buy the ablums of those I like to rip at my leasure.
Do I buy all? No. Do I buy far more than I did before? Yes. Are these things that one would hear on the radio? Doubtful.
For the money you'd spend on one of these things, you could get one of those hundred-CD units that goes into your trunk, and never worry about the company going belly-up.
When you can tell me how I can listen to NPR, PRI and the BBC with a 100-CD changer I consider this statement valid. There is more to radio than just music. Hell, no music station holds a candle to my Personal Jukebox or Archos. They're far cheaper than even a CD changer and I have no worries about them being pinched from my car when I'm away.
For my money, just jumping into this discussion late, Sirius would get my money in a heart beat if I had the desite to go with sattelite radio. 107, 109, 112 is all I'd listen to. NPR Now, PRI, BBC. Problem is figuring out how to get that installed on my Honda ST-1100.
That would be "New". A new window has nothing in the URL bar. One could also double-click on the workspace of Opera itself to open a new window within it. If you're using the non-MDI style there is always the new tab button.
When you're cutting and pasting a URL in, you can't then highlight the current URL and delete, because then you have to go back and RESELECT what you wanted to paste.
Funny, I don't have that problem. But then I do recall that this is unix and under unix one can hit CNTL-U to delete any entry field. So what I do is highlight, click in the URL bar (not highlight) and hit CNTL-U. Clean bar ready for entry. Don't blame the editor for your ignorance of the environment in which you're operating.
Dare we even mention the proliferation of used books being sold? Will those get tracked? Do used records get tracked? I'd say that about 1:20th of my book collection are from the used books store. I generally take chances with new authors that way.
News flash, until OS X the MacOS wasn't a sophisticated OS.