except for larger screens!
For various reasons I run 2800x256o virtual (I do high-res GIS stuff, and
need that resolution for the domains I'm studying), and VMWare's performance
with large virtual screens stinks! Like 30sec mouse-click
response time.
Because it is for commercial gain, the act of introducing web advertisements
into a third party's web pages is felony copyright infringement..
Whenever you see this happening, do a screen capture and a "save
page" to preserve the evidence, and then notify the webmaster of the
page whose copyright was infringed, suggesting that this someone is
committing this felony infringement of their rights, and that they
need to do something about it before the statute of limitations on
such action expires.
I'm still limping from TSA's actions over four years ago. That's not good; it's in the same vein as "sent to a forced labour camp." As far as I'm concerned, TSA are a bunch of terrorists themselves.
What a terrorist really doesn't want is for the response to "I'm taking over this plane" to be "No you're not: BANG! You're dead." Being made ridiculous goes against the terrorist program. In line with that, a couple of suggestions the Feds are resisting:
A majority of airline pilots are ex-military, weapons-trained. The Airline Pilots Association has repeatedly recommended allowing pilots to go armed; the Feds have done all they can to prevent it.
One of the national law enforcement officer associations has recommended allowing off-duty law enforcement personnel to travel armed. The feds have resisted this, too.
For that matter, a surprising fact is that for holders of concealed-carry
licenses, the rate of use for those concealed firearms in committing crimes is zero over the last fifteen years. They've proved they know how to use their weapons properly; let them carry aboard, as well.
All too frequently, I can't see the site I want
because some damned-slow ad-server can't deliver its content in a
timely manner, and that has the effect of blocking the content
I want to see.
I believe that the law should be changed so certain provisions of fair use/fair dealing/whatever your jurisdiction calls it are given the status of consumer rights...
Actually, that is supposed to be the law right now: "fair use" arose as the result of a Supreme Court decision that said "Congress may not pass copyright protection so stringent as to abridge free speech and freedom of the press. The codification of specific "fair use" language into the Copyright Act came much later.
So the NFL [baseball, olympic,...] claim to own reporting of their events is specifically illegal in the US, according to the original Supreme Court decision.
Word documents open in Word, Open Office, Word Perfect, etc...
I have never heard a single complaint that "This is a.doc file, I don't know
what to do with it"
Right.
IANAL, but my wife is -- and she encounters problems with this all the time. It is her experience that.doc documents that have gone through
more than one version of MS Word (much less WordPerfect) are apt to get so corrupt
that MS Word can't deal with them itself. FWIW, Word97 -> Word2000 -> Word97 -> anything
is particularly bad. And Word97 is still out there!
The best fix seems to be to read it into AbiWord and re-export from there. OOo also works, almost as well.
MS is not compatible with itself!...which says something about quality, or the lack thereof.
Making this problem worse is this: They've so captured the law as to make it illegal to promote boycotts! How this passes a First-Amendment test is beyond me, but I don't have enough cash to fight it.
Try using Mickey Mouse in your advertising and see just how long you last: Thanks to the Mickey Mouse Protection Act (otherwise known as the Bono Copyright Extension Act), Disney will be on you in a heartbeat...
The same thing applies to modifying my web pages to use them for your advertising.
IANAL, but I think there are two issues, and consequently two causes for action, here:
When I put on my "web author" hat, this practice is quite clearly and blatantly a violation of my copyright (which I have, under the Berne Copyright Treaty whether or not I put a
copyright notice on the work. This is a Federal-court lawsuit issue.
When I put on my "web browser" hat, A am being served -- silently, without notice -- download content other than that which I requested. Moreover, I am having to pay extra for that extra content, in extra latency, extra download bandwidth, and extra (cache and memory) hardware resources to deal with that extra content. That is a consumer-fraud issue, and probably belongs in state court (although it might possibly qualify under the Federal wire-fraud statutes).
It seems to me that the RIAA's attorneys are guilty of many gross ethics violations. Why should concerned parties not go after the RIAA attorneys -- seeking their disbarment?
If there were a fund for financing such, I would contribute.
Clearly, Rhino has attempted to sell him a defective product. He should force them to refund his money; if they refuse, he should exercise his legal rights for the credit card he used to pay for the music: he has the legal right to refuse payment for the defective
product, and get his credit card refunded the amount of the purchase.
It will cost Rhino far more to deal with the credit card company's fees for his refusing payment than he paid originally for the music.
This is a civil liberties/constitutional rights issue: Given that it is quite reasonable to believe that Microsoft is a wicked corporation (and it certainly has been convicted of monopolistic practices, and accused of much more), it is grossly improper to require you as a student at a governmental university to support Microsoft by buying and running its software. Arguably, this is a Fourteenth-Amendment issue: you are being required to submit to economic slavery to Bill Gates. You should get both the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) involved. The university ought to be required as a matter of law to back down from this decision.
As others have suggested: Can you run what you need under Crossover or VMWare?
Studies indicate that the traffic cameras in fact make the roads more dangerous.
It is in fact well established in the civil engineering literature how to set speed limits so as to make the roads as safe as possible. However, it is also clear that speed limit setting is a matter of politics, not engineering.
I think it should be actionable for speed limits to be set this way (i.e., I think politicians should be liable in court for putting politics above engineering
in matters of public safety. "Sovreign immunity" -- the doctrine that politicians have no legal responsibility for their actions -- is a vicious and pernicious
doctrine.
The officer is wrong on one point: this is a matter for Federal law. (The very same issue is why Novell was able to move SCO vs. Novell from Utah court to Federal Court.)
Federal law controls on copyight matters, overiding both state law and whatever contract he was (forced to) sign. And Federal law says that the program is his, and not the State of Wisconsin's, unless either (a) it was produced during the normal course of his working day; or (b) it was specifically commissioned in writing; or else (c) there is a signed
written specific instrument of conveyance (US Code Title 17, Chapter 1 Section 101 and
Chapter 2 Section 204).
The whole point of advertising is to scream "OOH! OOH! BUY ME!" louder than the other guy.
And a major effect is to delay the rendering of the pages I'm trying to read. When I started
blocking the slowest ad sites at the DNS level, my page rendering speed tripled!Much more pleasant.
Two sides to this. First, yes if a business wants to reach people... On the other hand, if your browser isn't worth supporting from a dollars and cents point of view that is your problem, not theirs...
You piss me off.
Government should not be allowed to make that kind of decision. In fact, in the US the Fourteenth Amendment forbids them to: it is illegal (whatever the government itself may
say) for fealty to Bill Gates or anyone else to be a precondition of interaction with the government. And when anyone in government tries, he/she should be prosecuted and/or sued for
extortion under color of office.
IANAL, but my wife is -- with a practice often concerned with antitrust issues. She says that this sort of arbitrary refusal to install on Windows2000 is a clear open-and-shut violation
of the Sherman Act.
I've tried it and I don't like it: their page is a piece of pure-Javascript shit that isn't readable (fonts don't fit into the table fields -- for both Firefox/Windows
and Mozilla(SeaMonkey)/Linux) and doesn't follow any of the user-interface stuff I expect (mouse
wheel doesn't work, nor do CONTROL-PLUS nor CONTROL-MINUS to try to fix the font size).
TV Guide's listing do OK for SeaMonkey/Linux but just hang and don't deliver anything
on my wife's Firefox/Windows machine.
Sorry. At this point, the New York Times listings are leading my list, but they're still less than ideal. There's altogether too much Flash blaring at me, and I don't like the
only-20-stations-at-a-time format; it feels like it takes five minutes to see the seventy-odd stations my cable provider supplies.
Sun claims complete upward compatibility, but in my experience they don't deliver: I have never seen a Sun compiler upgrade that didn't cause link-compatibility problems.
And that with fifteen years' experience developing environmental models on Solaris, IRIX, AIX, HPUX, Linux...
Slashdot Mirror
How many of you remember the fact that Microsoft was sued for stealing a patented ergonomic mouse?
fwiw
Whenever you see this happening, do a screen capture and a "save page" to preserve the evidence, and then notify the webmaster of the page whose copyright was infringed, suggesting that this someone is committing this felony infringement of their rights, and that they need to do something about it before the statute of limitations on such action expires.
I'm still limping from TSA's actions over four years ago. That's not good; it's in the same vein as "sent to a forced labour camp." As far as I'm concerned, TSA are a bunch of terrorists themselves.
And I'm saying this as myself, not some AC.
PLONK! goes that ad-server's IP!
So the NFL [baseball, olympic, ...] claim to own reporting of their events is specifically illegal in the US, according to the original Supreme Court decision.
The RIAA's investigators and attorneys ought to be doing jail time over this one.
fwiw. (
IANAL, but my wife is -- and she encounters problems with this all the time. It is her experience that .doc documents that have gone through
more than one version of MS Word (much less WordPerfect) are apt to get so corrupt
that MS Word can't deal with them itself. FWIW, Word97 -> Word2000 -> Word97 -> anything
is particularly bad. And Word97 is still out there!
The best fix seems to be to read it into AbiWord and re-export from there. OOo also works, almost as well.
MS is not compatible with itself! ...which says something about quality, or the lack thereof.
fwiw.
The same thing applies to modifying my web pages to use them for your advertising.
- When I put on my "web author" hat, this practice is quite clearly and blatantly a violation of my copyright (which I have, under the Berne Copyright Treaty whether or not I put a
copyright notice on the work. This is a Federal-court lawsuit issue.
- When I put on my "web browser" hat, A am being served -- silently, without notice -- download content other than that which I requested. Moreover, I am having to pay extra for that extra content, in extra latency, extra download bandwidth, and extra (cache and memory) hardware resources to deal with that extra content. That is a consumer-fraud issue, and probably belongs in state court (although it might possibly qualify under the Federal wire-fraud statutes).
Both sender and receiver have cause to sue.fwiw
It seems to me that the RIAA's attorneys are guilty of many gross ethics violations. Why should concerned parties not go after the RIAA attorneys -- seeking their disbarment?
If there were a fund for financing such, I would contribute.
fwiw
It will cost Rhino far more to deal with the credit card company's fees for his refusing payment than he paid originally for the music.
It is in fact well established in the civil engineering literature how to set speed limits so as to make the roads as safe as possible. However, it is also clear that speed limit setting is a matter of politics, not engineering.
I think it should be actionable for speed limits to be set this way (i.e., I think politicians should be liable in court for putting politics above engineering in matters of public safety. "Sovreign immunity" -- the doctrine that politicians have no legal responsibility for their actions -- is a vicious and pernicious doctrine.
The officer is wrong on one point: this is a matter for Federal law. (The very same issue is why Novell was able to move SCO vs. Novell from Utah court to Federal Court.)
Federal law controls on copyight matters, overiding both state law and whatever contract he was (forced to) sign. And Federal law says that the program is his, and not the State of Wisconsin's, unless either (a) it was produced during the normal course of his working day; or (b) it was specifically commissioned in writing; or else (c) there is a signed written specific instrument of conveyance (US Code Title 17, Chapter 1 Section 101 and Chapter 2 Section 204).
fwiw.
Microsoft should be destroyed!
TV Guide's listing do OK for SeaMonkey/Linux but just hang and don't deliver anything on my wife's Firefox/Windows machine.
Sorry. At this point, the New York Times listings are leading my list, but they're still less than ideal. There's altogether too much Flash blaring at me, and I don't like the only-20-stations-at-a-time format; it feels like it takes five minutes to see the seventy-odd stations my cable provider supplies.
And that with fifteen years' experience developing environmental models on Solaris, IRIX, AIX, HPUX, Linux...
fwiw