Ahem. Saddam Hussein's government was secular, not an Islamic theocracy. He only started pulling the religion card when Bush launched the second Gulf war. And, in case you weren't aware, the Ba'athists were supported by (possibly bankrolled by), the US, until Hussein started sabre-rattling and threatening to sell oil in Euros instead of USD. Just sayin'.
I can't speak for anyone else out there, but I can say for myself that the problem with Vista isn't that it's so much worse than XP, the problem for me is that it isn't any better. I think that's a problem for a lot of people, actually. Regular users are getting frustrated with changing OSs every five years or so, because they "have to", with no real benefits. There are normal, uninformed users now who've been through probably 4 or 5 different versions of Windows, and their new computers don't run any faster than their first computer did. In the mean time, Apple is pouring out the marketing shiny, making products with spiffy user interfaces and whispering "it doesn't have to be this way....come look at this machine here....sure it's a few more bucks, but you don't have to buy anti-virus..."
I was a computer salesman when the switch from ME to XP happened (most people I sold computers to had never used 2000), and even then people were tired of it. Now, more casual users own iPods, have seen friends with MacBooks, and may even have seen their geeky nephew's linux box, and they're wondering if switching to a different OS altogether is really any harder than switching to Vista. And when they ask me, I tell them it's not. Because that's my personal experience. The last windows OS I bought was XP Pro, and I bought it so I'd have something for Bootcamp to play with, when the time comes that my household sees the back of it's last Windows box. Not because Vista is really bad, but because Windows is bad. Comparing Vista to XP is like, to paraphrase jPod, comparing the taste of cat shit to the taste of dog shit. Do you really care which tastes worse?
The whole time I've been writing this, my wife, who was a Windows user exclusively until 3 years ago when she bought a Mac (as an accessory for her iPod), has been complaining bitterly about having to use an XP box in her new job. The experience for her is horrible, the computer crashes daily (it's brand new), settings options are non-intuitive, and the computer is slow and unresponsive compared to her 3 year old iMac (did I mention the PC was brand new? Like, last week new?). Now, tell me, given all this, why would anyone voluntarily upgrade to Vista? Why is it so surprising that businesses want the option to "downgrade" to XP? Better the shit you know, at least you know how bad it's going to taste.
I can't believe I had to scroll 2/3 down the page before someone made this point. Not only is Rhapsody a competitor, but I'm sure Time Warner is using this as leverage to get "more flexible pricing" (really, higher pricing), for Warner Music and the other record labels when they negotiate for iTunes licensing. This is exactly why net neutrality is such an important issue.
Erm, no it's not that easy, and costs more than a few hundred dollars. It's not like the RIAA lawyers are going to let you go into a courtroom and say "I'm innocent! See? No evil Kazaaware on THIS computer! They get "experts" to testify that someone at your IP address was downloading songs, and you need to hire your own experts to counter them or the judge rules for the RIAA and not for you. Here in Canada an expert witness runs about $2k for a written report and at least as much to appear in court for you for a day. I'm sure it's more in the US. so we're already over the $3k "settlement offer" the RIAA customarily makes, and we haven't even hired a lawyer yet. We have one expert (you'd be lucky to get away with one -- you need one expert for every one the other side has if you're at all serious about defending yourself), and one Defendant, representing himself or having a lawyer do the work pro bono. For one day. If you won your motion (the average joe probably couldn't afford a Trial, the lost wages alone would kill you), then you get to argue for costs, which means several more days in court, and you're not guaranteed to win. All this is assuming that the Plaintiff's lawyers aren't playing dirty, which of course is false. If one side plays a dirty game you can multiply the costs and time taken by 10, easily.
Now all this is assuming the most bare-bones defence you can get, and if you go against the music companies with bare bones, you will get beaten soundly. There's no question about that. To mount a proper defence you would need a very good lawyer (this may be the cheapest part, given that there may be lawyers looking to make a name for themselves in this area of law, possible assistance from the EFF; a growing body of legal resources helps too), a battery of expert witnesses, buckets of money, and lots of free time. And don't expect to recover all your costs. You can expect to be out thousands of dollars, maybe tens of thousands of dollars, and that's if you win.
You never mention on the home page (or anywhere else that I can find) what you're selling. Your/. sig tells me, but your website doesn't. You may want to change this.
Wow, someone who gets it. If I still had mod points, one would be yours. This is the biggest fallacy of the free-market boosters when it comes to health care; the primary assumption is false, the market isn't free because the buyer places an essentially infinite value on his own life, and the seller of course takes advantage of that.
As a Canadian, what I find interesting is how much less expensive health care is here for those who do have to pay. A couple we know had a baby some time ago, and she is American, with no health care coverage here in Canada at all. In other words, she had to pay for the hospital stay, the delivery, and the doctors to attend at her c-section. Having her baby cost her $3000 here in Canada, total. Having the same services in the US would have cost her $30,000. Now, tell me again that the "free-market", American system is more efficient than our socialized system here. Canada's health care system is by no means the most efficient, probably not even close, but it manages to be more efficient than the American system by a factor of ten, at least for this procedure.
Basically, if you are operating a Wi-Fi service, and find out that one of your users is downloading or uploading child porn, you are responsible for reporting it. What part of that is controversial?
Aren't there already laws that cover this sort of thing? If you knew that child porn was being created in your home, wouldn't you be obliged to report it? Why do you need a brand new law specifically mentioning Wi-Fi? Doesn't your government have anything better to do? Oh, right. Nevermind.
Keep in mind that in Pakistan, it's the lawyers who have been leading the protests against a military strongman. Of course, most of them are in jail by now. Just because your lawyers suck, doesn't mean all lawyers suck.
Since when is upholding basic human rights only "superficially" morally correct? People need to get their priorities straight. Upholding human rights is more important than making money, more important than bringing search capability to the Chinese people (what good is Yahoo or Google when all the really important stuff is censored by the Chinese government? No good at all). Bad shit is coming down, in the US, in China, everywhere, and you are going to have to decide which team you're on.
(having said all that, the poster you refer to isn't a troll...just morally vacant.)
Because most home users weren't using Win2000 when XP came out, they were using WinME or Win98SE. XP was a significant upgrade from both of them, and well worth the money.
thank you. That's pretty much the way I thought it worked, and I would have researched a more thorough answer, but we have a newborn as of two days ago, and I am whipped.
In audio systems, balanced equipment uses three wires, which form two circuits. The microphone (or whatever) sends the sound information down both circuits, and the mixer or processor then checks the sound info from both circuits. If interference occurs on the line, the mixer will filter this out, using both circuits as reference. I think this is done via a phase shift at the source, but I'm too tired to go look it up.
But why would Creative Commons hold any liability? They basically host many different versions of a license, and the content creator goes to their site, browses the licenses there, and picks the one he likes. It's still the photographer, not Creative Commons, who licenses the picture.
I think that Creative Commons should be let out of this one, I just can't see where they have any liability.
Reveal codes is great, I use it every day. I work in a law office, and our whole firm is still using Wordperfect 10. And the auto backup has saved my ass more than once, I can tell you. WP10 is starting to show its age a bit (generates Adobe 4.0 pdfs, which is painful sometimes) and doesn't always play nice with Windows XP (which only a few computers in our office have anyway), but nobody seems all that eager to switch to Word.
Pay as you go service in Canada is very low-margin, and they've set up their phone systems so that you never, ever, talk to a human. I used to sell Rogers phones when I worked at Radio Shack a few years ago, and even when the dealer called to activate a Paygo phone, we never, ever, talked to a human. Only customers with contracts get human customer service.
Actually, you need a bit more information. The prices GP quoted are probably for roaming on Partner networks only. If you roam to a network that isn't partnered up with your Canadian carrier, the roaming charges go waaaaaay up. Pay as you go is the worst, because they will often demand a credit card number before you can connect and roam. Turn the phone off within 25 miles of the border, and save yourself the hassle and money.
He entered a store with a well-publicized policy of checking receipts, then refused to oblige the store's policy. If I were a judge, I'd consider that probable cause. We're not talking about police search and seizure here. Actually, what's funny about that is that because they have a policy of checking receipts, the store has probably given up any claim to having reasonable cause to detain a customer. They didn't ask for his receipt because they thought he might be shoplifting, they asked for it because some drone has to check a certain percentage of receipts or lose his job. Just stopping a customer to check a receipt could be considered detaining him (my lawyer would argue that, anyway), and the employee who did that would not be covered under the merchant's privilege, because that employee would have no reason to believe a crime had been committed. There goes the ball game.
Yes, true, though I think the general principle still holds. The impetus for revolution has to come from within, you can't try to force democracy on a country whose people aren't ready to fight and die for it. Your characterization of the situation in Iraq is more accurate than my own though.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahem. Saddam Hussein's government was secular, not an Islamic theocracy. He only started pulling the religion card when Bush launched the second Gulf war. And, in case you weren't aware, the Ba'athists were supported by (possibly bankrolled by), the US, until Hussein started sabre-rattling and threatening to sell oil in Euros instead of USD. Just sayin'.
I can't speak for anyone else out there, but I can say for myself that the problem with Vista isn't that it's so much worse than XP, the problem for me is that it isn't any better. I think that's a problem for a lot of people, actually. Regular users are getting frustrated with changing OSs every five years or so, because they "have to", with no real benefits. There are normal, uninformed users now who've been through probably 4 or 5 different versions of Windows, and their new computers don't run any faster than their first computer did. In the mean time, Apple is pouring out the marketing shiny, making products with spiffy user interfaces and whispering "it doesn't have to be this way....come look at this machine here....sure it's a few more bucks, but you don't have to buy anti-virus..."
I was a computer salesman when the switch from ME to XP happened (most people I sold computers to had never used 2000), and even then people were tired of it. Now, more casual users own iPods, have seen friends with MacBooks, and may even have seen their geeky nephew's linux box, and they're wondering if switching to a different OS altogether is really any harder than switching to Vista. And when they ask me, I tell them it's not. Because that's my personal experience. The last windows OS I bought was XP Pro, and I bought it so I'd have something for Bootcamp to play with, when the time comes that my household sees the back of it's last Windows box. Not because Vista is really bad, but because Windows is bad. Comparing Vista to XP is like, to paraphrase jPod, comparing the taste of cat shit to the taste of dog shit. Do you really care which tastes worse?
The whole time I've been writing this, my wife, who was a Windows user exclusively until 3 years ago when she bought a Mac (as an accessory for her iPod), has been complaining bitterly about having to use an XP box in her new job. The experience for her is horrible, the computer crashes daily (it's brand new), settings options are non-intuitive, and the computer is slow and unresponsive compared to her 3 year old iMac (did I mention the PC was brand new? Like, last week new?). Now, tell me, given all this, why would anyone voluntarily upgrade to Vista? Why is it so surprising that businesses want the option to "downgrade" to XP? Better the shit you know, at least you know how bad it's going to taste.
I tried it, this is what I got: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=qqqqq+ Unintended consequences?
I can't believe I had to scroll 2/3 down the page before someone made this point. Not only is Rhapsody a competitor, but I'm sure Time Warner is using this as leverage to get "more flexible pricing" (really, higher pricing), for Warner Music and the other record labels when they negotiate for iTunes licensing. This is exactly why net neutrality is such an important issue.
Erm, no it's not that easy, and costs more than a few hundred dollars. It's not like the RIAA lawyers are going to let you go into a courtroom and say "I'm innocent! See? No evil Kazaaware on THIS computer! They get "experts" to testify that someone at your IP address was downloading songs, and you need to hire your own experts to counter them or the judge rules for the RIAA and not for you. Here in Canada an expert witness runs about $2k for a written report and at least as much to appear in court for you for a day. I'm sure it's more in the US. so we're already over the $3k "settlement offer" the RIAA customarily makes, and we haven't even hired a lawyer yet. We have one expert (you'd be lucky to get away with one -- you need one expert for every one the other side has if you're at all serious about defending yourself), and one Defendant, representing himself or having a lawyer do the work pro bono. For one day. If you won your motion (the average joe probably couldn't afford a Trial, the lost wages alone would kill you), then you get to argue for costs, which means several more days in court, and you're not guaranteed to win. All this is assuming that the Plaintiff's lawyers aren't playing dirty, which of course is false. If one side plays a dirty game you can multiply the costs and time taken by 10, easily. Now all this is assuming the most bare-bones defence you can get, and if you go against the music companies with bare bones, you will get beaten soundly. There's no question about that. To mount a proper defence you would need a very good lawyer (this may be the cheapest part, given that there may be lawyers looking to make a name for themselves in this area of law, possible assistance from the EFF; a growing body of legal resources helps too), a battery of expert witnesses, buckets of money, and lots of free time. And don't expect to recover all your costs. You can expect to be out thousands of dollars, maybe tens of thousands of dollars, and that's if you win.
No cape!
You never mention on the home page (or anywhere else that I can find) what you're selling. Your /. sig tells me, but your website doesn't. You may want to change this.
I always wondered what that weird looking dongle was hanging out of the USB port....
That must be a record or something.
Wow, someone who gets it. If I still had mod points, one would be yours. This is the biggest fallacy of the free-market boosters when it comes to health care; the primary assumption is false, the market isn't free because the buyer places an essentially infinite value on his own life, and the seller of course takes advantage of that. As a Canadian, what I find interesting is how much less expensive health care is here for those who do have to pay. A couple we know had a baby some time ago, and she is American, with no health care coverage here in Canada at all. In other words, she had to pay for the hospital stay, the delivery, and the doctors to attend at her c-section. Having her baby cost her $3000 here in Canada, total. Having the same services in the US would have cost her $30,000. Now, tell me again that the "free-market", American system is more efficient than our socialized system here. Canada's health care system is by no means the most efficient, probably not even close, but it manages to be more efficient than the American system by a factor of ten, at least for this procedure.
dr;tl
Basically, if you are operating a Wi-Fi service, and find out that one of your users is downloading or uploading child porn, you are responsible for reporting it. What part of that is controversial?
Aren't there already laws that cover this sort of thing? If you knew that child porn was being created in your home, wouldn't you be obliged to report it? Why do you need a brand new law specifically mentioning Wi-Fi? Doesn't your government have anything better to do? Oh, right. Nevermind.
captcha: Screen
Keep in mind that in Pakistan, it's the lawyers who have been leading the protests against a military strongman. Of course, most of them are in jail by now. Just because your lawyers suck, doesn't mean all lawyers suck.
Since when is upholding basic human rights only "superficially" morally correct? People need to get their priorities straight. Upholding human rights is more important than making money, more important than bringing search capability to the Chinese people (what good is Yahoo or Google when all the really important stuff is censored by the Chinese government? No good at all). Bad shit is coming down, in the US, in China, everywhere, and you are going to have to decide which team you're on. (having said all that, the poster you refer to isn't a troll...just morally vacant.)
Since when are advertisements of any kind protected speech?
Because most home users weren't using Win2000 when XP came out, they were using WinME or Win98SE. XP was a significant upgrade from both of them, and well worth the money.
Google announces the "One Datacenter Per Child" project.
thank you. That's pretty much the way I thought it worked, and I would have researched a more thorough answer, but we have a newborn as of two days ago, and I am whipped.
In audio systems, balanced equipment uses three wires, which form two circuits. The microphone (or whatever) sends the sound information down both circuits, and the mixer or processor then checks the sound info from both circuits. If interference occurs on the line, the mixer will filter this out, using both circuits as reference. I think this is done via a phase shift at the source, but I'm too tired to go look it up.
But why would Creative Commons hold any liability? They basically host many different versions of a license, and the content creator goes to their site, browses the licenses there, and picks the one he likes. It's still the photographer, not Creative Commons, who licenses the picture. I think that Creative Commons should be let out of this one, I just can't see where they have any liability.
Reveal codes is great, I use it every day. I work in a law office, and our whole firm is still using Wordperfect 10. And the auto backup has saved my ass more than once, I can tell you. WP10 is starting to show its age a bit (generates Adobe 4.0 pdfs, which is painful sometimes) and doesn't always play nice with Windows XP (which only a few computers in our office have anyway), but nobody seems all that eager to switch to Word.
Pay as you go service in Canada is very low-margin, and they've set up their phone systems so that you never, ever, talk to a human. I used to sell Rogers phones when I worked at Radio Shack a few years ago, and even when the dealer called to activate a Paygo phone, we never, ever, talked to a human. Only customers with contracts get human customer service.
Actually, you need a bit more information. The prices GP quoted are probably for roaming on Partner networks only. If you roam to a network that isn't partnered up with your Canadian carrier, the roaming charges go waaaaaay up. Pay as you go is the worst, because they will often demand a credit card number before you can connect and roam. Turn the phone off within 25 miles of the border, and save yourself the hassle and money.
Yes, true, though I think the general principle still holds. The impetus for revolution has to come from within, you can't try to force democracy on a country whose people aren't ready to fight and die for it. Your characterization of the situation in Iraq is more accurate than my own though.