If you don't have time to create sufficient separation when approaching an intersection then just assume it's red and start to stop until you can verify that the light is actually green.
Unfortunately there are cars behind you, and if their drivers can see the [green] light (because they are farther and their view is not obstructed) they'd have no reason to think that you will be slowing down, and so they might slam right into you.
So you never spend money? Nor talk to anyone else about any product, ever?
I don't quite see how it relates to allowing hordes of salesmen into your house and listening to their endless pitches (if we equate your desktop with your house.) I personally spend money, of course, and talk about products, but I do that when I want it, not when someone else decides that for me.
I suspect you really have no idea how many times a day some brand is imprinting itself on you.
I suspect the GP does have an idea, and that's why he blocks everything that deserves it. My mind belongs to me, not to advertisers, and I decide what I allow to imprint on it. In my browsers everything ad-related is blocked by default; it's a favor to advertisers too because my browsers don't download stuff that is useless to me.
Besides, "brand imprinting" is harmful to your purchasing choices because you often decide not because the product is good but because it is made by a company that you recognize. This is unreasonable. Compare technical specs, read reviews - that's what you need to do, not to look for a brand name.
Most codebases are ancient, and people who wrote them already retired. That's the sad truth of many industry workhorses (Mentor Graphics is one example.) Another sad truth is that many people own and use older releases of major software packages. Modern AutoCAD 2009 will run on Vista perfectly, but can you afford $4,500 per seat to upgrade your old AutoCAD 2007 which still does the job on XP?
For example, in Russia, it is NOT illegal to pirate software unless it is in the Russian language. They have not signed the Berne Convention [...]
Russia had joined the Berne Convention in 1995, as Google gladly reports in the first result and Wikipedia confirms. You also probably haven't heard about a number of people put on trial for pirating foreign software.
people buy a house in California that looks like a monkey shit all over it for like $800,000, when I could buy a small mansion here (or in most areas) for that amount.
But in California you don't need to shovel snow from your driveway, and you can enjoy the nature practically all year round. That's why houses in CA cost that much - nobody wants to spend $N,000 per winter on heating fuel, deal with snow and ice, and experience power outages in the middle of a snowstorm. If you remove winter from your life you may find yourself essentially living longer, since you don't need to stay at home that much or waste energy on fighting snow, rain and mud. Good weather matters a lot if you only live once.
That "it's someone else's problem" attitude utterly stinks. My guess is that the guy actually *cares* about the reputation of his company and takes pride in its work, which might be a novel concept to some people.
Let me comment on this from devil's advocate position: "caring about the reputation" is not necessarily advantageous to the company. Rambus did really well, all lies and omissions considered, though in the human society they'd be riding a rail, with free tar and feathers provided. Mortgage industry did a good job (for themselves) by causing the housing bubble, even though it destroys the country as we speak. Companies just have no morals.
In an unconstrained situation a company would be better off if it steals every piece of software that it can get away with. The constraint here is a legal threat of ruin if this is discovered. Many smaller companies, especially in Asia, run their business on pirated software because they can - and savings can be immense if they forget to pay their dues to expensive software's owners, like Autodesk and Dassault Systèmes and Ansys and Mentor Graphics (if they are into engineering.)
In the situation that the poster describes, chances of MS or Adobe auditing a small office somewhere in China are vanishingly small. So it can be understood why nobody in the company (except the poster) really cares - they are not likely to be caught for this kind of theft; in worst case the Chinese manager will be punished locally. The trouble begins when an eager IT manager starts digging, sending emails and ultimately posting on/. - that creates so much evidence against the officers of the company that they have no convenient cover story any more. Now they will have to act, and they may be not pleased with that. The IT manager can be pushed out, one way or another, over this - just for doing his job honestly.
Businesses are often like that - concepts of pride, trust, honor that people maintain are not really applicable to them. Businesses exist only to make money, and the employees are supposed to only do what they are told. This IT manager should understand very well that he is raising a political wave within the company, and he needs to see if this wave is positively accepted by People Who Matter. Because if not he will be out of there real quick, even if he is 100% right (as he seems to be.)
My response (CC'd to our CFO) was to ask for copies of all receipts and serial numbers for the software they're using. and see what happens.
Can you request that from that branch only, and ask nothing from other branches? I'd think the manager would be seriously upset if you in such an open, unambiguous way declare him a pirate.
A better way, IMO, would be to set up a company-wide policy of keeping track of all software, all licenses and all computers. You need that anyway, just to know what you have, where, and what can be reused, and such. To implement that you, of course, need scans of receipts and licenses, serial numbers, codes or whatever is needed to install and use, along with some notes on what license governs the s/w (such as whether it can be moved from one box to another, etc.) This way when a computer is decommissioned you know what was on it and what can be salvaged. Tools like ManageSoft and HP CM do this, and there are other (free and not.) And when Boy Scouts of America kick the doors in you have all the receipts (that they insist upon!) to prove that you are not guilty, this time.
That assumes that your job makes you responsible for licensing compliance. If not, maybe you should not bother.
Apparently an employee emailed confidential engineering documents to a competitor in China, and Nokia is unable to prevent themselves from investigating in an illegal manner.
Nokia would need to spy on the entire country of Finland then (and on a couple neighboring ones) because it takes a honest but misguided person, or a stupid person, to email confidential documents to a competitor from his desk at work, using company's email services. A real spy would copy the materials on a Flash disk, and encrypt them before sending anywhere, and send from home or from an Internet cafe.
By that logic - why not just go full win32 client-server and cater to a single OS and drop the browser entirely?
And that's a very good question indeed. You do not even have to constrain yourself to Win32 - use Java, for example, delivered either over the Web through a browser or just downloaded and executed in whatever way the client wants. Then you lose nothing and gain a lot.
Basically the question is: what value does a browser add to your application? I can see two: it is already present (and so requires no download) and it contains a set of UI controls that you don't have to write. Both advantages are minimal.
Minimal advantage 1: If your app is net-based it can be safely presumed that downloading of a JAR (for example - it could be a Qt executable just as well) is not a problem. If the bandwidth is limited then you are actually far better off with a custom app because it can talk to the user on its own, and can buffer net packets. Then cost of one-time download of the app itself is dwarfed by savings on traffic and latency.
Minimal advantage 2: prepackaged UI controls. That is really laughable. There are tens of UI libraries out there, and each of them is better than those pathetic forms that HTML offers. You also will be using a real language, not JS. Your application can be highly interactive, use widgets that browsers don't have, can do tons of local processing... in other words, it would be better, and it would be the same on every computer, since the browser is out of the picture.
So why people still try to cram the application into a browser? I'd say conservatism plays a major role. Online games, for example, are not ran in the browser, though they are heavily net-based. In other cases the super-thin client makes sense; for example, maps - the client just does not have the data to display, so it has to download it from the server, so it makes programmer's job easier to just ask the server to prepare the whole image, and then the client only shows it. But Google Earth also exists, and that is a far more advanced application - and if it can be easily loaded and started just by following a Web link then there is no reason to run anything in the browser. In fact I use Google Earth more often than maps.google.com, though as I said both are good.
The best scenario I can think of when use of a browser makes sense is when your app is so simple, and your needs are so basic, that you benefit from the infrastructure that is already present in the browser. Google Mail, though, is outgrowing the browser very quickly; I could implement the whole UI in Qt within a week, easily - and how many people worked, and still work, and *will* work on hacking AJAX to make GMail work on 33 browsers? This is a good example of conservative / legacy situation, when every Web mail was a web mail, and Google had to compete in that area. But today if Google offers an equivalent of Google Earth for mail - with additional features that are available only there, like built-in PGP/GnuPG/SMIME support, or caching of messages, or automatic archival of all your mail as it comes, or HTML mail, or many more - then I'm sure there will be tons of people interested, just like tons of people use Google Earth or Picasa. Google servers will benefit too, since they don't have to cater to every user's action - they only need to serve pure data, and only that data that the client hasn't already cached. Basically, a better IMAP client, only with Google's "conversations" and UI.
Maybe on Windows or OSX? On Linux, applications expect libraries to be already in place.
They can't do that because there are thousands of builds of Qt - tens of revisions of the library itself, then all permutations of./configure switches (--with-package=this and --without-package=that) then several compilers, and so on. If an app was compiled with library headers of one revision and then executed with runtime libraries of some other revision then you have a good chance to see it crash. This is one of reasons why sometimes apps are just statically linked. Xilinx, on the other hand, ships Qt libraries in its own/bin directory.
WTF? What is that all about to someone who just wants to run an application that uses Qt?
If you want only to run a Qt-based app then you do not need to do anything except to install the application. It should install the Qt runtime libraries for you.
Why the hell am I even looking at this when I just want to run an application?
A good question indeed:-)
If you want Qt widely used you need to make it easy to get and install.
If you are a developer then installation of Qt is the least of your worries. If you are an end user then, as I said, you should not install Qt at all.
The hemmoraging will stop when people start forgetting that they've been told (by someone else, usually the media) that the economy is "bad" and go back to buying and selling things at higher levels than they are right now.
It's not just emotional: people really have less cash to burn. The housing bubble ended the happy days when homeowners could get huge loans, or when flipping houses was a major business activity (not that it produced any real value, of course.) Today you can borrow money only if you can prove that you do not need it.
Salaries also took a hit. Many are unemployed already; more will be; and often those who are still allowed to go to work every day are told that their salaries are reduced. What can they do? Business wise, sales of stuff (of all kinds) are dropping. People have less money to spend, so the industry has to reduce the manufacturing, so previously employed workers become unemployed. They don't need the media to tell them anything about the economy - if they have no job they already know themselves.
Add to that the news that many states are approaching bankruptcy and trying to increase taxes to cover the deficit. Or they can send state workers packing, that will save money but unions won't allow that. So everyone may need to pay higher [property] taxes using their reduced income. That leaves no money for toys and non-essentials.
Finally, people who had their money invested into the stock market lost big - as much as 40%. If they were investing into specific stocks, they can be wiped out completely. Look at how much value of banks' stock was destroyed - and banks were thought to be safe, long term investments. People holding bonds are not immune - now and then a bond issuer defaults, and then you have nothing. So one way or another, people have less money today, even though yesterday a lot of their money was of imaginary, speculative nature.
I can't go to some Japanese website and buy from a store that doesn't ship to the US. Should I steal those good instead? I'm entitled to it, right?
Nobody argues about entitlement to steal. But you are entitled to legally buy anything you want from anyone who sells it. Walk into a Japanese shop, will they refuse to service you because you are from, say, Spain? Not likely, as long as your gold is golden. But the GP poster indicated that Steam refused to take his money and give him the game.
Another important difference is that there are many Japanese (and non-Japanese) shops. You can choose one that fits your needs. If you don't like one shop (or they don't like the color of your money) you can always walk into another shop. They are all next to each other on Internet. But there is only one Steam, and if Steamers refuse to sell to you... you aren't getting the game. Unless, of course, you get angry and buy it at TPB.
Stores usually reserve the right to refuse sale to anyone - such as to any random individual. However if a store refuses to sell a commonly available product to a class of customers - defined, in part, with race, religion or nationality - then that's a dangerous ground to walk upon.
Why would a customer in one country less (or more) entitled to buy a game than a customer from some other country? We aren't talking here about people who expect and demand goodies that they haven't earned. In all these cases customers want to pay money.
Now tapes get mixed up and over written all the time, someone doesn't realize what's on them and thinks it's just something that can be rotated in or someone thinks the information is in another place and the tapes are redundant or something.
Yes, competence abound. In *real* IT, though, tapes, once written, are marked and sent to an offsite storage. They are never recalled from there for "rotation" - the only reason to request your old backup is because you want to restore it.
The problem comes from backup media being expensive
I can understand if a liquor store owner can be too cheap to write once and archive the tape. However I think the US government can afford a few tapes, and if not it is negligent in its duty.
Almost all magnetic media starts losing it's luster after about 5 years and needs refreshed from time to time
It's always nice when people point out a problem and then immediately offer a good solution:-) How many employees will it take to copy tapes? Probably one tech will be too many: insert tape A, insert tape B, press the button. If you use LTO or T10000 WORM tapes then they can't be erased accidentally. Also, LTO tapes are rated for 15 to 30 years, plenty of time to copy them on our future X-Ray 100 PB storage crystals.
First of all, the universe does not revolve around the Sun any more than in revolves around the Earth. So, Galileo was not "simply stating the TRUTH"
Galileo said nothing about the universe; we still do not quite know what it is, let alone what it rotates around, and in what dimensions. Galileo supported the idea that Earth rotates around the Sun, and that is amazingly close to the truth.
Add to your list of conditions this one: the receiving [solar] panel must have no reflections regardless of how it is positioned. Those reflections will circumvent your safety.
Worse still, in UK after you are arrested you will be requested to provide a key to decrypt hundreds of KB of those random numbers that you sent, and you will be in prison until the key is working. Do you think they will believe that your emails were just random numbers? "That's what every crypto-terrorist is claiming!" they will tell you.
As it stands, you'd be better off if every 32-bit word that you sent is a sequential group of 4 bytes from your favorite book (or its ciphertext, if you wish, made with a known key.) At least when they put your feet over hot coals you will be able to save yourself. If that doesn't happen the numbers remain pretty random and your experiment will be unaffected.
In all likelihood, him learning what he did about driving from the game(s) probably prevented him from getting in an accident sooner.
Before we jump to that conclusion please consider that in GTA you run red lights all the time if you want to finish the game before you die from old age.
Imagine, you're driving in the city, and your car automatically points out all the most highly rated hotels, restaurants, bars, and shops.
Living in that city for last 30 years, one probably knows all such places far better than any machine. Announcements of the sort would be annoying as hell.
it can make sure to point them out when you're in new cities
Two problems. First, statistically hardly anyone drives his Lexus to another city. People fly and then get a rental car. The second problem is that this has to report the location of the car to some central location, and that violates privacy. People who buy Lexus are often very concerned in this department - they didn't get rich by trusting everyone; more like the opposite.
A GPS device is under your complete control and does not report anything to anyone (except you, if you want a track.) I have GPS software on my PDA and it has all the points of interest, and if I want to hear about them I can enable those announcements. But I keep them off by default because they mix with navigation messages and only cause pointless distraction when, in an unfamiliar place, I need concentration to get to where I want to be.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't have time to create sufficient separation when approaching an intersection then just assume it's red and start to stop until you can verify that the light is actually green.
Unfortunately there are cars behind you, and if their drivers can see the [green] light (because they are farther and their view is not obstructed) they'd have no reason to think that you will be slowing down, and so they might slam right into you.
So you never spend money? Nor talk to anyone else about any product, ever?
I don't quite see how it relates to allowing hordes of salesmen into your house and listening to their endless pitches (if we equate your desktop with your house.) I personally spend money, of course, and talk about products, but I do that when I want it, not when someone else decides that for me.
I suspect you really have no idea how many times a day some brand is imprinting itself on you.
I suspect the GP does have an idea, and that's why he blocks everything that deserves it. My mind belongs to me, not to advertisers, and I decide what I allow to imprint on it. In my browsers everything ad-related is blocked by default; it's a favor to advertisers too because my browsers don't download stuff that is useless to me.
Besides, "brand imprinting" is harmful to your purchasing choices because you often decide not because the product is good but because it is made by a company that you recognize. This is unreasonable. Compare technical specs, read reviews - that's what you need to do, not to look for a brand name.
Most software developers are freakin' lazy.
Most codebases are ancient, and people who wrote them already retired. That's the sad truth of many industry workhorses (Mentor Graphics is one example.) Another sad truth is that many people own and use older releases of major software packages. Modern AutoCAD 2009 will run on Vista perfectly, but can you afford $4,500 per seat to upgrade your old AutoCAD 2007 which still does the job on XP?
How about hurricanes?
For example, in Russia, it is NOT illegal to pirate software unless it is in the Russian language. They have not signed the Berne Convention [...]
Russia had joined the Berne Convention in 1995, as Google gladly reports in the first result and Wikipedia confirms. You also probably haven't heard about a number of people put on trial for pirating foreign software.
people buy a house in California that looks like a monkey shit all over it for like $800,000, when I could buy a small mansion here (or in most areas) for that amount.
But in California you don't need to shovel snow from your driveway, and you can enjoy the nature practically all year round. That's why houses in CA cost that much - nobody wants to spend $N,000 per winter on heating fuel, deal with snow and ice, and experience power outages in the middle of a snowstorm. If you remove winter from your life you may find yourself essentially living longer, since you don't need to stay at home that much or waste energy on fighting snow, rain and mud. Good weather matters a lot if you only live once.
See here
That "it's someone else's problem" attitude utterly stinks. My guess is that the guy actually *cares* about the reputation of his company and takes pride in its work, which might be a novel concept to some people.
Let me comment on this from devil's advocate position: "caring about the reputation" is not necessarily advantageous to the company. Rambus did really well, all lies and omissions considered, though in the human society they'd be riding a rail, with free tar and feathers provided. Mortgage industry did a good job (for themselves) by causing the housing bubble, even though it destroys the country as we speak. Companies just have no morals.
In an unconstrained situation a company would be better off if it steals every piece of software that it can get away with. The constraint here is a legal threat of ruin if this is discovered. Many smaller companies, especially in Asia, run their business on pirated software because they can - and savings can be immense if they forget to pay their dues to expensive software's owners, like Autodesk and Dassault Systèmes and Ansys and Mentor Graphics (if they are into engineering.)
In the situation that the poster describes, chances of MS or Adobe auditing a small office somewhere in China are vanishingly small. So it can be understood why nobody in the company (except the poster) really cares - they are not likely to be caught for this kind of theft; in worst case the Chinese manager will be punished locally. The trouble begins when an eager IT manager starts digging, sending emails and ultimately posting on /. - that creates so much evidence against the officers of the company that they have no convenient cover story any more. Now they will have to act, and they may be not pleased with that. The IT manager can be pushed out, one way or another, over this - just for doing his job honestly.
Businesses are often like that - concepts of pride, trust, honor that people maintain are not really applicable to them. Businesses exist only to make money, and the employees are supposed to only do what they are told. This IT manager should understand very well that he is raising a political wave within the company, and he needs to see if this wave is positively accepted by People Who Matter. Because if not he will be out of there real quick, even if he is 100% right (as he seems to be.)
My response (CC'd to our CFO) was to ask for copies of all receipts and serial numbers for the software they're using. and see what happens.
Can you request that from that branch only, and ask nothing from other branches? I'd think the manager would be seriously upset if you in such an open, unambiguous way declare him a pirate.
A better way, IMO, would be to set up a company-wide policy of keeping track of all software, all licenses and all computers. You need that anyway, just to know what you have, where, and what can be reused, and such. To implement that you, of course, need scans of receipts and licenses, serial numbers, codes or whatever is needed to install and use, along with some notes on what license governs the s/w (such as whether it can be moved from one box to another, etc.) This way when a computer is decommissioned you know what was on it and what can be salvaged. Tools like ManageSoft and HP CM do this, and there are other (free and not.) And when Boy Scouts of America kick the doors in you have all the receipts (that they insist upon!) to prove that you are not guilty, this time.
That assumes that your job makes you responsible for licensing compliance. If not, maybe you should not bother.
Apparently an employee emailed confidential engineering documents to a competitor in China, and Nokia is unable to prevent themselves from investigating in an illegal manner.
Nokia would need to spy on the entire country of Finland then (and on a couple neighboring ones) because it takes a honest but misguided person, or a stupid person, to email confidential documents to a competitor from his desk at work, using company's email services. A real spy would copy the materials on a Flash disk, and encrypt them before sending anywhere, and send from home or from an Internet cafe.
By that logic - why not just go full win32 client-server and cater to a single OS and drop the browser entirely?
And that's a very good question indeed. You do not even have to constrain yourself to Win32 - use Java, for example, delivered either over the Web through a browser or just downloaded and executed in whatever way the client wants. Then you lose nothing and gain a lot.
Basically the question is: what value does a browser add to your application? I can see two: it is already present (and so requires no download) and it contains a set of UI controls that you don't have to write. Both advantages are minimal.
Minimal advantage 1: If your app is net-based it can be safely presumed that downloading of a JAR (for example - it could be a Qt executable just as well) is not a problem. If the bandwidth is limited then you are actually far better off with a custom app because it can talk to the user on its own, and can buffer net packets. Then cost of one-time download of the app itself is dwarfed by savings on traffic and latency.
Minimal advantage 2: prepackaged UI controls. That is really laughable. There are tens of UI libraries out there, and each of them is better than those pathetic forms that HTML offers. You also will be using a real language, not JS. Your application can be highly interactive, use widgets that browsers don't have, can do tons of local processing... in other words, it would be better, and it would be the same on every computer, since the browser is out of the picture.
So why people still try to cram the application into a browser? I'd say conservatism plays a major role. Online games, for example, are not ran in the browser, though they are heavily net-based. In other cases the super-thin client makes sense; for example, maps - the client just does not have the data to display, so it has to download it from the server, so it makes programmer's job easier to just ask the server to prepare the whole image, and then the client only shows it. But Google Earth also exists, and that is a far more advanced application - and if it can be easily loaded and started just by following a Web link then there is no reason to run anything in the browser. In fact I use Google Earth more often than maps.google.com, though as I said both are good.
The best scenario I can think of when use of a browser makes sense is when your app is so simple, and your needs are so basic, that you benefit from the infrastructure that is already present in the browser. Google Mail, though, is outgrowing the browser very quickly; I could implement the whole UI in Qt within a week, easily - and how many people worked, and still work, and *will* work on hacking AJAX to make GMail work on 33 browsers? This is a good example of conservative / legacy situation, when every Web mail was a web mail, and Google had to compete in that area. But today if Google offers an equivalent of Google Earth for mail - with additional features that are available only there, like built-in PGP/GnuPG/SMIME support, or caching of messages, or automatic archival of all your mail as it comes, or HTML mail, or many more - then I'm sure there will be tons of people interested, just like tons of people use Google Earth or Picasa. Google servers will benefit too, since they don't have to cater to every user's action - they only need to serve pure data, and only that data that the client hasn't already cached. Basically, a better IMAP client, only with Google's "conversations" and UI.
Maybe on Windows or OSX? On Linux, applications expect libraries to be already in place.
They can't do that because there are thousands of builds of Qt - tens of revisions of the library itself, then all permutations of ./configure switches (--with-package=this and --without-package=that) then several compilers, and so on. If an app was compiled with library headers of one revision and then executed with runtime libraries of some other revision then you have a good chance to see it crash. This is one of reasons why sometimes apps are just statically linked. Xilinx, on the other hand, ships Qt libraries in its own /bin directory.
WTF? What is that all about to someone who just wants to run an application that uses Qt?
If you want only to run a Qt-based app then you do not need to do anything except to install the application. It should install the Qt runtime libraries for you.
Why the hell am I even looking at this when I just want to run an application?
A good question indeed :-)
If you want Qt widely used you need to make it easy to get and install.
If you are a developer then installation of Qt is the least of your worries. If you are an end user then, as I said, you should not install Qt at all.
The hemmoraging will stop when people start forgetting that they've been told (by someone else, usually the media) that the economy is "bad" and go back to buying and selling things at higher levels than they are right now.
It's not just emotional: people really have less cash to burn. The housing bubble ended the happy days when homeowners could get huge loans, or when flipping houses was a major business activity (not that it produced any real value, of course.) Today you can borrow money only if you can prove that you do not need it.
Salaries also took a hit. Many are unemployed already; more will be; and often those who are still allowed to go to work every day are told that their salaries are reduced. What can they do? Business wise, sales of stuff (of all kinds) are dropping. People have less money to spend, so the industry has to reduce the manufacturing, so previously employed workers become unemployed. They don't need the media to tell them anything about the economy - if they have no job they already know themselves.
Add to that the news that many states are approaching bankruptcy and trying to increase taxes to cover the deficit. Or they can send state workers packing, that will save money but unions won't allow that. So everyone may need to pay higher [property] taxes using their reduced income. That leaves no money for toys and non-essentials.
Finally, people who had their money invested into the stock market lost big - as much as 40%. If they were investing into specific stocks, they can be wiped out completely. Look at how much value of banks' stock was destroyed - and banks were thought to be safe, long term investments. People holding bonds are not immune - now and then a bond issuer defaults, and then you have nothing. So one way or another, people have less money today, even though yesterday a lot of their money was of imaginary, speculative nature.
I can't go to some Japanese website and buy from a store that doesn't ship to the US. Should I steal those good instead? I'm entitled to it, right?
Nobody argues about entitlement to steal. But you are entitled to legally buy anything you want from anyone who sells it. Walk into a Japanese shop, will they refuse to service you because you are from, say, Spain? Not likely, as long as your gold is golden. But the GP poster indicated that Steam refused to take his money and give him the game.
Another important difference is that there are many Japanese (and non-Japanese) shops. You can choose one that fits your needs. If you don't like one shop (or they don't like the color of your money) you can always walk into another shop. They are all next to each other on Internet. But there is only one Steam, and if Steamers refuse to sell to you ... you aren't getting the game. Unless, of course, you get angry and buy it at TPB.
Stores usually reserve the right to refuse sale to anyone - such as to any random individual. However if a store refuses to sell a commonly available product to a class of customers - defined, in part, with race, religion or nationality - then that's a dangerous ground to walk upon.
Why would a customer in one country less (or more) entitled to buy a game than a customer from some other country? We aren't talking here about people who expect and demand goodies that they haven't earned. In all these cases customers want to pay money.
It's a current principle of capitalism - the lowest bidder wins as long as his warez work as well as a legitimate CD.
Now tapes get mixed up and over written all the time, someone doesn't realize what's on them and thinks it's just something that can be rotated in or someone thinks the information is in another place and the tapes are redundant or something.
Yes, competence abound. In *real* IT, though, tapes, once written, are marked and sent to an offsite storage. They are never recalled from there for "rotation" - the only reason to request your old backup is because you want to restore it.
The problem comes from backup media being expensive
I can understand if a liquor store owner can be too cheap to write once and archive the tape. However I think the US government can afford a few tapes, and if not it is negligent in its duty.
Almost all magnetic media starts losing it's luster after about 5 years and needs refreshed from time to time
It's always nice when people point out a problem and then immediately offer a good solution :-) How many employees will it take to copy tapes? Probably one tech will be too many: insert tape A, insert tape B, press the button. If you use LTO or T10000 WORM tapes then they can't be erased accidentally. Also, LTO tapes are rated for 15 to 30 years, plenty of time to copy them on our future X-Ray 100 PB storage crystals.
First of all, the universe does not revolve around the Sun any more than in revolves around the Earth. So, Galileo was not "simply stating the TRUTH"
Galileo said nothing about the universe; we still do not quite know what it is, let alone what it rotates around, and in what dimensions. Galileo supported the idea that Earth rotates around the Sun, and that is amazingly close to the truth.
Add to your list of conditions this one: the receiving [solar] panel must have no reflections regardless of how it is positioned. Those reflections will circumvent your safety.
Worse still, in UK after you are arrested you will be requested to provide a key to decrypt hundreds of KB of those random numbers that you sent, and you will be in prison until the key is working. Do you think they will believe that your emails were just random numbers? "That's what every crypto-terrorist is claiming!" they will tell you.
As it stands, you'd be better off if every 32-bit word that you sent is a sequential group of 4 bytes from your favorite book (or its ciphertext, if you wish, made with a known key.) At least when they put your feet over hot coals you will be able to save yourself. If that doesn't happen the numbers remain pretty random and your experiment will be unaffected.
In all likelihood, him learning what he did about driving from the game(s) probably prevented him from getting in an accident sooner.
Before we jump to that conclusion please consider that in GTA you run red lights all the time if you want to finish the game before you die from old age.
Unless the brat was using a full wheel/pedals/transmission peripheral (where the hell do I buy these from?
GTA does not support Logitech steering wheel anyway. Many other driving games do.
Imagine, you're driving in the city, and your car automatically points out all the most highly rated hotels, restaurants, bars, and shops.
Living in that city for last 30 years, one probably knows all such places far better than any machine. Announcements of the sort would be annoying as hell.
it can make sure to point them out when you're in new cities
Two problems. First, statistically hardly anyone drives his Lexus to another city. People fly and then get a rental car. The second problem is that this has to report the location of the car to some central location, and that violates privacy. People who buy Lexus are often very concerned in this department - they didn't get rich by trusting everyone; more like the opposite.
A GPS device is under your complete control and does not report anything to anyone (except you, if you want a track.) I have GPS software on my PDA and it has all the points of interest, and if I want to hear about them I can enable those announcements. But I keep them off by default because they mix with navigation messages and only cause pointless distraction when, in an unfamiliar place, I need concentration to get to where I want to be.
A lot of people used to buy a brand new car every 2 or 3 years.