You totally forgot to mention that Hitler was backed by corporations and some aristocracy before he took over, and in bed with Corporate Germany during/after the war. You think that just because he called his party the "National Socialist" Party that he really meant it? Have you forgotten he was the greatest propagandist of his era?
He didn't nationalize large industries in Germany, he printed piles of money to pay the corporations for their work on his war, and made their owners filthy rich (until the currency collapsed, of course, doesn't this sound familiar to you?). A lot of those corporations still exist, in some form or other, but they keep that part of their corporate history quiet, you can be sure. This is totally opposite to Stalin and the Communists, who simply took over the corporations and executed the owners.
Fascism =/= Socialism, sorry, you need to go get some education in that regard. Fascism == Authoritarianism, and Communism == Authoritarianism, but guess what, socialism doesn't automatically equal authoritarianism (unless you've been brainwashed by the current champion propagandists in the US, that is). As hard as it is to believe, you can have a socialist, liberal government. Of course, in these troubled times, when all nations are leaning hard to the authoritarian side, thanks to Mr. Bush and his advisors, Tony Blair, John Howard, etc, examples are hard to come by.
Of course I'm sorry. Everyone who's convicted of a crime in the US is of course guilty of that crime, and mentally ill people never get sent to jail when they should be sent to a hospital. I'm glad you cleared that up for me.
I think maybe, given his long record of frivolous and bizarre claims, that maybe there's some question as to whether he's competent enough to commit fraud, regardless of what a court has ruled on the matter.
Now having said that, I don't know the man or his case, and won't commit one way or the other to what, if anything may be wrong with him, but I will suggest that maybe some meds would help this guy out a lot, and might at the very least eliminate these bizarre lawsuits. Certainly he deserves better than to be locked up for life, or executed, as some here have suggested.
Of course, he's probably just a guy with a mental illness who got railroaded into the prison system instead of getting the treatment he needs, but don't let complications like that stop you from making enormous generalizations.
Follow the link to Michael Geist's site, there's discussion of this on his blog. It's the US and Japan who are submitting drafts of the treaty to the other countries. The EU isn't forcing this on anyone, they just got there first.
It's as if you could only run IE on Windows or Safari on OS X.
So in other words it's business as usual. As far as I know, you cannot run any recent versions of IE without using a virtual machine or bootcamp, neither of which is supported by Microsoft. And up until recently Safari was only available for the Macs.
What Apple is doing to Opera is pretty shabby, and may dissuade me from buying an iPhone in the future, but as far as I know, there's nothing illegal about it (unless Apple ever does get a monopoly in the smartphone market, in which case Anti-trust would probably apply). As long as a customer can go out and buy a phone and install Opera on it, Apple's butt is covered in the legal sense.
Except none of this is true (except maybe the handwriting bit). Other countries, particularly your neighbour to the north,manage just fine with paper/pencil ballots, and guess what, you can even use them for measures, you just have to write out the whole measure on a ballot and give the voter yes and no boxes to check. If the ballot gets too big, make more than one ballot for each voter. If there are too many people at one station, set up another station. It should be fairly easy to determine in advance how many voters there are in a given area and plan accordingly. The system here scales from rural areas where your nearest neighbour is a mile away to urban centres with high population density. All you need are sufficient volunteers to supervise the counting, with representatives from all parties looking on. Leave it up to the parties to get their own scrutineers out.
Users aren't asked to do what the assembly instructions do, they're expected to understand how the world that's presented to them works. It can be simple or complex to a large degree independently of how much code is spent to built it. By and large, developers tell computers to do what the users of the application tell it to do (except for DRM).
This is my point in a nutshell, but you don't seem to see the problems that this presents for the user. The designers at every level of abstraction have made choices that are either arbitrary or are logical from the perspective of the designer, and not necessarily from the perspective of the user. Any typical user cannot be expected to know what makes sense to a developer in every case, and cannot be expected to tailor their inputs to suit the decisions made by the designers. Should a typical user know that if they input "255" or "11" into a field and the program crashes, that someone somewhere has likely made a fencepost error? This is an extreme example, but logically it's no different from the file organization example under discussion. Why should the user have to care? Why can't software be designed to handle this automatically, in a way that makes sense to users, and not to designers?
Just like development; I'm not expected to understand the implementation of creat, open, read, write, close and so forth. I'm expected to understand how they interact. *I* am telling the computer to open a file (&c), not the kernel.
Yes, but the parallel for a user is -- a user is not expected to understand the implementation of a particular function, but just how to use that function. Unfortunately, how the function is used is directly tied to how the function was meant to be used, which is part of the implementation of that function. You're not expected to know how various unix functions work, but you do know much about how they work, and this gives you an advantage over someone who doesn't know, for example, the rule to "be liberal in what you accept as input and be strict in what you provide as output." It completely colours how you use those functions, and when you put a gui on top of those same functions, it affects how a user deals with them, but the user can't know about that rule, they're too busy knowing all about being a doctor or a lawyer or an artist.
You can master Unix without knowing anything about makefiles or kernel builds; nice straw man, though.
I guess that's true if you never expect to do anything with Unix except run a gui. When I learned Unix as a wee lad, it was pretty useless to me without knowledge of shell commands/shell scripting; some idea of how a kernel works; knowing my way around compilers/linkers/debuggers and make, etc. I had, in no way, "mastered Unix". What do you consider mastery of Unix?
What are the benefits? Automating a lot of image handling tasks, say [look at sng and pildriver]. Or building their own image tagging/searching system [http/mail-header based key-value pairs in.txt
There's no reason why these things can't be implemented in a way that avoids scripting at the shell level. Time spent mastering the shell and writing scripts could be better used out taking pictures, or refining Photoshop techniques, or taking composition classes. Learning how to batch process photos, a process that should be entirely automated and as easy as possible to set up, is a waste of time if you have better/more interesting/more lucrative things to do.
Ignorant of what? How much medicine do you know? or Law? Wouldn't it be beneficial to your health if you studied medicine for a few years so you wouldn't have to make your doctor work harder? You could even learn surgery, and take over that burden when the time comes!
Or maybe you've chosen to specialize in one area, at the expense of being ignorant of a lot of other areas, because that's more efficient? Well?
So the user decides not to pay attention to where the file was saved (I mean, you do get to choose where it goes, it does not just happen)
This isn't strictly true, as each program has a default action on saving a file. Some default to desktop, or to "My Documents" or ask for a directory by default. Others may do "smart" checking and try to sort the files depending on what file type gets detected. It's this wide variation that's the problem. Even for someone who is knowledgeable enough to handle the situation without help, it's still a pain in the ass (and waste of time) to dig out the setting and replace it with your preferred setting.
Yes, that is unpleasant, but is additional complexity in the file system really the best solution?
Probably not the best solution. Better would be for the OS developers to set a standard directory scheme and enforce other developers to comply with it. If you want to change the scheme you can dig in and do it yourself. Of course, this may not be practical, as it may prove more complex to enforce compliance (and still keep things customizable) than it would be to bolt on the same functionality in the file system.
that at some point there needs to be a minimum expectation of competence on the part of the user.
But who gets to decide what that expectation is? Don't forget, computers are not "for" hobbyists, developers, experts and geeks, they are for normal people to make their other tasks easier. The more time these people spend training and raising their minimum level of computer knowledge, the less time they spend doing their real work/play, the less value the computer has for them.
Is it really too much to ask of a user that they understand that it is a machine, an inanimate object, and it generally does only what they tell it to do (insert Windows jokes here), and that if they tell it to do something by mistake (like saving a file in an unintended location), the mistake is theirs and not the machine's?
Yes it is too much to ask, because it's not true. Computers as machines do what developers tell them to do. The amount of instructions given by the programmer vis-a-vis object code vastly outnumbers the number of instructions a typical user is going to issue to the machine. This is necessarily true since each instruction given by a user is a blind proxy for at least one instruction (and probably more like hundreds or thousands of instructions) given by a developer.
Users can't be expected to predict a) all the myriad directions that a programmer has given/is giving the computer and b) the effects of the user's instructions when interpreted in the context of the programmer's instructions and assumptions. Most users are bad at using computers effectively because they don't understand how developers think. You wanna try teaching them how you think?
If that is too much to ask, then what is a more reasonable standard? How far should we go to accommodate users who, to put it bluntly, refuse to take responsibility for their actions?
Well, in my opinion, I think we're pretty close to the reasonable standard right now. People can decide for themselves how much they want to learn, how much pain they want to suffer for their ignorance versus how much time they want to spend reducing their ignorance, and vote with their wallet. You're basically saying that you want users to learn more, to make developers' lives easier, but in fact developers get paid to make users' lives easier. Maybe the developers should do their jobs better.
It's like that Unix saying, (paraphrase) "Unix doesn't try to stop you from doing something stupid, because that would also stop you from doing something clever". I like that, not because I think it's witty but because in my opinion, it reveals a design philosophy that assumes that maybe this is new to you and you don't und
where I live, "Construction" is synomymous with "Mosquito Season", and the temperature range looks awful familiar (though we usually bottom out at about -40 C). tornadoes, not so much, but I do recall the year where it snowed real actual snow at least one day per month for every month of the year. There was 3 inches of snow on the ground on June 21. Now get off my lawn!
However if you read your fine print, you'll see that you can't buy flood insurance in the US from your insurance company unless you are in a flood plain (this is what I was told when I asked about it awhile back). If you want to get flood insurance, you need to get it through a federal program. Again, re-read the original post.
Have you verified that this is true? Who told you this? My experience with insurance companies is that they are happy to insure you for stuff if you're willing to pay extra. If you were misled, you may want to talk to a lawyer about that.
Oh, and to the Anon: if you paid $3500 for a surround sound decoder for your home theater, you got ripped off.
Your parents probably could have sued the insurance company for coverage and won. If they told the agent they wanted everything, he should have put in everything. If he was a broker, the insurance company would have claimed against the brokerage.
I encourage everybody who thinks they got screwed over by an idiot broker to consult a good lawyer.
Slashdot Mirror
You totally forgot to mention that Hitler was backed by corporations and some aristocracy before he took over, and in bed with Corporate Germany during/after the war. You think that just because he called his party the "National Socialist" Party that he really meant it? Have you forgotten he was the greatest propagandist of his era?
He didn't nationalize large industries in Germany, he printed piles of money to pay the corporations for their work on his war, and made their owners filthy rich (until the currency collapsed, of course, doesn't this sound familiar to you?). A lot of those corporations still exist, in some form or other, but they keep that part of their corporate history quiet, you can be sure. This is totally opposite to Stalin and the Communists, who simply took over the corporations and executed the owners.
Fascism =/= Socialism, sorry, you need to go get some education in that regard. Fascism == Authoritarianism, and Communism == Authoritarianism, but guess what, socialism doesn't automatically equal authoritarianism (unless you've been brainwashed by the current champion propagandists in the US, that is). As hard as it is to believe, you can have a socialist, liberal government. Of course, in these troubled times, when all nations are leaning hard to the authoritarian side, thanks to Mr. Bush and his advisors, Tony Blair, John Howard, etc, examples are hard to come by.
Of course I'm sorry. Everyone who's convicted of a crime in the US is of course guilty of that crime, and mentally ill people never get sent to jail when they should be sent to a hospital. I'm glad you cleared that up for me.
I think maybe, given his long record of frivolous and bizarre claims, that maybe there's some question as to whether he's competent enough to commit fraud, regardless of what a court has ruled on the matter.
Now having said that, I don't know the man or his case, and won't commit one way or the other to what, if anything may be wrong with him, but I will suggest that maybe some meds would help this guy out a lot, and might at the very least eliminate these bizarre lawsuits. Certainly he deserves better than to be locked up for life, or executed, as some here have suggested.
Of course, he's probably just a guy with a mental illness who got railroaded into the prison system instead of getting the treatment he needs, but don't let complications like that stop you from making enormous generalizations.
I wish I had a mod point to throw your way, I laughed.
Follow the link to Michael Geist's site, there's discussion of this on his blog. It's the US and Japan who are submitting drafts of the treaty to the other countries. The EU isn't forcing this on anyone, they just got there first.
Ah, that might explain it. My apologies.
It's as if you could only run IE on Windows or Safari on OS X.
So in other words it's business as usual. As far as I know, you cannot run any recent versions of IE without using a virtual machine or bootcamp, neither of which is supported by Microsoft. And up until recently Safari was only available for the Macs.
What Apple is doing to Opera is pretty shabby, and may dissuade me from buying an iPhone in the future, but as far as I know, there's nothing illegal about it (unless Apple ever does get a monopoly in the smartphone market, in which case Anti-trust would probably apply). As long as a customer can go out and buy a phone and install Opera on it, Apple's butt is covered in the legal sense.
Except none of this is true (except maybe the handwriting bit). Other countries, particularly your neighbour to the north,manage just fine with paper/pencil ballots, and guess what, you can even use them for measures, you just have to write out the whole measure on a ballot and give the voter yes and no boxes to check. If the ballot gets too big, make more than one ballot for each voter. If there are too many people at one station, set up another station. It should be fairly easy to determine in advance how many voters there are in a given area and plan accordingly. The system here scales from rural areas where your nearest neighbour is a mile away to urban centres with high population density. All you need are sufficient volunteers to supervise the counting, with representatives from all parties looking on. Leave it up to the parties to get their own scrutineers out.
Paper and pencil works just fine.
I didn't realise Neuromancer was the sixth book in the trilogy.
That may be the best opening line for a novel in the English language.
Users aren't asked to do what the assembly instructions do, they're expected to understand how the world that's presented to them works. It can be simple or complex to a large degree independently of how much code is spent to built it. By and large, developers tell computers to do what the users of the application tell it to do (except for DRM).
This is my point in a nutshell, but you don't seem to see the problems that this presents for the user. The designers at every level of abstraction have made choices that are either arbitrary or are logical from the perspective of the designer, and not necessarily from the perspective of the user. Any typical user cannot be expected to know what makes sense to a developer in every case, and cannot be expected to tailor their inputs to suit the decisions made by the designers. Should a typical user know that if they input "255" or "11" into a field and the program crashes, that someone somewhere has likely made a fencepost error? This is an extreme example, but logically it's no different from the file organization example under discussion. Why should the user have to care? Why can't software be designed to handle this automatically, in a way that makes sense to users, and not to designers?
Just like development; I'm not expected to understand the implementation of creat, open, read, write, close and so forth. I'm expected to understand how they interact. *I* am telling the computer to open a file (&c), not the kernel.
Yes, but the parallel for a user is -- a user is not expected to understand the implementation of a particular function, but just how to use that function. Unfortunately, how the function is used is directly tied to how the function was meant to be used, which is part of the implementation of that function. You're not expected to know how various unix functions work, but you do know much about how they work, and this gives you an advantage over someone who doesn't know, for example, the rule to "be liberal in what you accept as input and be strict in what you provide as output." It completely colours how you use those functions, and when you put a gui on top of those same functions, it affects how a user deals with them, but the user can't know about that rule, they're too busy knowing all about being a doctor or a lawyer or an artist.
You can master Unix without knowing anything about makefiles or kernel builds; nice straw man, though.
I guess that's true if you never expect to do anything with Unix except run a gui. When I learned Unix as a wee lad, it was pretty useless to me without knowledge of shell commands/shell scripting; some idea of how a kernel works; knowing my way around compilers/linkers/debuggers and make, etc. I had, in no way, "mastered Unix". What do you consider mastery of Unix?
What are the benefits? Automating a lot of image handling tasks, say [look at sng and pildriver]. Or building their own image tagging/searching system [http/mail-header based key-value pairs in .txt
There's no reason why these things can't be implemented in a way that avoids scripting at the shell level. Time spent mastering the shell and writing scripts could be better used out taking pictures, or refining Photoshop techniques, or taking composition classes. Learning how to batch process photos, a process that should be entirely automated and as easy as possible to set up, is a waste of time if you have better/more interesting/more lucrative things to do.
Ignorant of what? How much medicine do you know? or Law? Wouldn't it be beneficial to your health if you studied medicine for a few years so you wouldn't have to make your doctor work harder? You could even learn surgery, and take over that burden when the time comes!
Or maybe you've chosen to specialize in one area, at the expense of being ignorant of a lot of other areas, because that's more efficient? Well?
So the user decides not to pay attention to where the file was saved (I mean, you do get to choose where it goes, it does not just happen)
This isn't strictly true, as each program has a default action on saving a file. Some default to desktop, or to "My Documents" or ask for a directory by default. Others may do "smart" checking and try to sort the files depending on what file type gets detected. It's this wide variation that's the problem. Even for someone who is knowledgeable enough to handle the situation without help, it's still a pain in the ass (and waste of time) to dig out the setting and replace it with your preferred setting.
Yes, that is unpleasant, but is additional complexity in the file system really the best solution?
Probably not the best solution. Better would be for the OS developers to set a standard directory scheme and enforce other developers to comply with it. If you want to change the scheme you can dig in and do it yourself. Of course, this may not be practical, as it may prove more complex to enforce compliance (and still keep things customizable) than it would be to bolt on the same functionality in the file system.
that at some point there needs to be a minimum expectation of competence on the part of the user.
But who gets to decide what that expectation is? Don't forget, computers are not "for" hobbyists, developers, experts and geeks, they are for normal people to make their other tasks easier. The more time these people spend training and raising their minimum level of computer knowledge, the less time they spend doing their real work/play, the less value the computer has for them.
Is it really too much to ask of a user that they understand that it is a machine, an inanimate object, and it generally does only what they tell it to do (insert Windows jokes here), and that if they tell it to do something by mistake (like saving a file in an unintended location), the mistake is theirs and not the machine's?
Yes it is too much to ask, because it's not true. Computers as machines do what developers tell them to do. The amount of instructions given by the programmer vis-a-vis object code vastly outnumbers the number of instructions a typical user is going to issue to the machine. This is necessarily true since each instruction given by a user is a blind proxy for at least one instruction (and probably more like hundreds or thousands of instructions) given by a developer.
Users can't be expected to predict a) all the myriad directions that a programmer has given/is giving the computer and b) the effects of the user's instructions when interpreted in the context of the programmer's instructions and assumptions. Most users are bad at using computers effectively because they don't understand how developers think. You wanna try teaching them how you think?
If that is too much to ask, then what is a more reasonable standard? How far should we go to accommodate users who, to put it bluntly, refuse to take responsibility for their actions?
Well, in my opinion, I think we're pretty close to the reasonable standard right now. People can decide for themselves how much they want to learn, how much pain they want to suffer for their ignorance versus how much time they want to spend reducing their ignorance, and vote with their wallet. You're basically saying that you want users to learn more, to make developers' lives easier, but in fact developers get paid to make users' lives easier. Maybe the developers should do their jobs better.
It's like that Unix saying, (paraphrase) "Unix doesn't try to stop you from doing something stupid, because that would also stop you from doing something clever". I like that, not because I think it's witty but because in my opinion, it reveals a design philosophy that assumes that maybe this is new to you and you don't und
The article does indeed mention Bard's Tale.
Given that the article did mention Counter-Strike in the intro -- along with some others -- you are surely right.
the amount of food in the cupboards.
will they bolt SecuROM onto it? If so, I'm not buyin.
And generally can afford to hire very good lawyers.
There's something ironically satisfying in that.
what is an Everest pile in, oh say Libraries of Congress?
Not old enough to use that meme in any sense other than the ironic, of course.
where I live, "Construction" is synomymous with "Mosquito Season", and the temperature range looks awful familiar (though we usually bottom out at about -40 C). tornadoes, not so much, but I do recall the year where it snowed real actual snow at least one day per month for every month of the year. There was 3 inches of snow on the ground on June 21. Now get off my lawn!
However if you read your fine print, you'll see that you can't buy flood insurance in the US from your insurance company unless you are in a flood plain (this is what I was told when I asked about it awhile back). If you want to get flood insurance, you need to get it through a federal program. Again, re-read the original post.
Have you verified that this is true? Who told you this? My experience with insurance companies is that they are happy to insure you for stuff if you're willing to pay extra. If you were misled, you may want to talk to a lawyer about that.
Oh, and to the Anon: if you paid $3500 for a surround sound decoder for your home theater, you got ripped off.
Your parents probably could have sued the insurance company for coverage and won. If they told the agent they wanted everything, he should have put in everything. If he was a broker, the insurance company would have claimed against the brokerage.
I encourage everybody who thinks they got screwed over by an idiot broker to consult a good lawyer.