I always delete my credit card information just after I've given it to _any_ merchant online.
Seems excessively paranoid, and not verye effective to boot.
I just have a card I use for all and only online and phone transactions, and I made sure it is one which has a zero-pounds liability for fraudulant use. If there was fraud and the card issuer couldn't sort it out quickly, at worst I'd lose that card and have to get another.
Since pushing a delete button on a web page doesn't actually mean the information will be deleted (eg who knows how some random online shop does their database backups), I'd have to operate this way anyway.
My AMEX card number was obtained by someone, somehow [...] Six months of this
Er, surely after they accepted it was not a valid charge, but failed to stop it, a quick letter cancelling the card and noting that the charges to date were now their problem was in order.
As for `AOL is hard to deal with', this is clearly bogus. They don't have to deal with AOL, cancel the accounts etc as you would, they just have to stop giving AOL money. Then it becomes AOL's problem.
Infact I havent had the problems people say they have period, I use Java all the time and the only java that seems broken is shmucks using the bastardize windows java.
Liveconnect didn't work at all until 10.3. That is a slight issue. Indeed there was no Mac browser more recent than NS 4 that did liveconnect until the recent safari update.
Now it works with just a `few' bizzare features (such as nulls passed from Java to JS causing the world to end). The Java VM has repaint issues. Oh, and the JS interpreter optimises away operations which are not no-ops, presumably because some programmer at Apple was desperate to shave a microsecond from some benchmark. Sometimes frames don't update until they get the keyboard focus. That's my current list, it will no doubt grow if I do a real in depth test.
It's really no more than one would expect from a relatively young browser. The problem isn't that they have bugs, but that they decided to make everyone buy a new OS to get the bugs fixed. Even M$ doesn't do that. (indeed, M$ is very persistant in trying to give me IE6 every day, no matter how often I say no:-)).
As for `they were under threat', it's called competition. SCO are under threat too, does that make what they are doing acceptable? The sane responsie to competition is to do something cool and better, not claim that anyone using an image of a trash can is peeing in your sandpit.
(just to correct a braino, it is, of course, copyright, not patents, which Apple abused and SCO have taken to abusing)
um no, they are charging for added usability[,] patches and addons have always been free
Is that why we had to move from 10.2 to 10.3 (and hence pay money) to get a half way working Safari?
Yes, the upgraded Safari was free, they just made sure it would not run on 10.2.
Safari is still buggy as hell when it comes to Java and Liveconnect. No doubt they will fix some of this in the next version to `encourage' us to pay for 10.4.
This is Apple we are talking about here. They started the `trivial patents and lots of lawyers' model of IT business currently being applied by SCO. They are masters of the closed-box and proprietary protocol model of trapping users. Nice kit, and pretty graphics, but don't trust the bastards as far as you could spit an iMac.
There is a movie of Beowulf (albeit a very bad one)[...]
`A sci-fi update...' no wonder I have never heard of it, presumably my brain blocked out any information about such an abomination to save my sanity. And they didn't even do the dragon.
I presume that will have poisoned the idea for a decade. Sigh.
I bet they could animate a kick-posterior Grendel.
Then install an extra data centre to do mother?
I have wondered for ages why no one has done a movie of Beowolf. Three huge monster battles and a death scene which would have all the Hollywood action heroes scratching each other's eyes out for the chance to show they are serious actors, really. honest. It's short enough that you wouldn't have to cut it to shreds or make 3 bladder busters. And you could give Seamus Heaney a writing credit and score masses of culture-points.
I know one Tokamac person and he said in order to break even, they had to damage the Tokamac. It was an old one being shut down. He just scoffed at the news.
JET was 14 years old in 1997, It is still operational, so it was long in the tooth, but hardly at the end of it;s life.
I beleive it's now basicly a testbed for technology for the proposed ITER project. ITER, if it ever gets built, is supposed to be big enough to run noticably over breakeven for sustained periods.
I mean our artificial nuclear fusion experiments [...] Nothing comes of them.
The Tokamac people got to break even in 97(IIRC). So something, at least came of it.
The problem I see with this bubble stuff is that they detect it by the emission of neutrons. Anything which gives out lots of neutrons is going to have many of the problems of fission - any plant big enough tobe useful will need shielding and will produce nasty waste makeing decomissioning expensive.
I know of several parents who had to deal with five and six year olds asking "what was that?" and "what did he do to her?" questions.
Kids are complete bastards aren't they.
Any parent who has let their kid know there is fun to be had in asking questions on certain subjects and watching mummy or daddy squirm is asking for this kind of trouble.
It's not as if those questions are hard to answer. ``It's a nipple, like the two you have but older''. ``He grabbed her too roughly and tore her dress''. Any kid not satisfied with those answers already knows what they are asking about and is playing ``tease the parent''.
I like the idea of the censor chips because then broadcasters will be free of the censors
Actually, I think a better idea woul be a law that every programme break on every channel must include a 20 second shot chosen at random from a library of films of naked people perfoming every common bodily function from eating to picking their nose to masturbating to having a shit to... taken from every angle and from every distance from 2 inches to 10 feet. Then everyone will have the choice of either getting rid of their TV or learning to cope with the human body. The resulting appolplexy among those who can't cope will do wonders to improve the species. Of course it will destroy the only profitable segment of the online economy.
You're missing the point, you can edit or watch your copy of a movie however you like.
And all this player is is a way for me to do that (assuming I was one of those insane Americans who was completely freaked out by the sight of a nipple a few weeks ago).
agnosticism is a cop-out, a type of atheism for cowards. either you believe, or you don't, and if you don't believe you're a type of atheist.
If you believe `atheism' covers not knowing, then `agnosticism' can not be `a cop-out', it simply describes the non-religious form of atheism. If you truely believed what you claim, you would be calling youself an atheist and an agnistic (just as someone could be a theist and a christian).
However, from your reaction it is clear that you want to claim to be an atheist but not an agnostic. Under either model of the meaning of `atheist' and `agnostic' this would make you a believer, a religious atheist.
With the exception of labelling Christ a "Bloody do-gooder", there is nothing againt him at all.
It amazed me at the time that there were so many supposed christians campagning against the most christian film I had ever seen. LoB manages to be very humane and also very positive towards christianity, not an easy combination to pull off.
The big biblical epics took more liberties with christianity than LoB did (compressing events and so on). Things I have read about Gibson's film indicates he does too.
I presume we are in for a good summer of weirdoes and loonies complaining about LoB and praising Gibson. I do home sometime I see one of these people pinned down and asked to name where exactly the pythons clash with scripture.
Just because the gospels don't mention the space battle, that doesn't mean it didn't happen!
Oh, and I seriously doubt that there has ever been a person, nor will there ever be one, whose dying words are "make sure all of my creative works...(gasp)...become public...domain (gasp, death)"
This is what wills are for. One could sign over ones work to a record company for your lifetime, and write a will which frees the work.
The maximum safe speed is dependent on the driver, the vehicle, traffic, weather, lighting, a dozen other variables.
No, actually the maximum safe speed is a constant. Ie 0mph. Actually it is arguable that is not safe since your car might catch fire. Every increase certainly increases the energy in the system and reduces the time available to correct for errors and suprises, and so makes things less safe.
If the speed limit in some area/conditions is wrong, then get it changed. If you just ignore it you run the risk that you are ignorant of some important piece of information teh person who chose the speed limit of that piece of road took into account. If your local political system doesn't allow you to get together and change such limits, well, you have bigger problems and should sdrive slower to give yourself time to think through the plan for the revolution.
But my original point was that if the reason for going faster is `becasue I can get away with it' then that is clearly a sign that the driver needs to be banned from going near anything which moves under it's own power ever again.
There is actually evidence that suggests that driving over the speed limit is actually safer, because it forces the driver to devote more attention to actually watching the road
The number of drivers caught speeding who then claim they didn't realise they were speeding argues against their attention being heightened:-).
I think you're confusing "artists" with "owners". I don't think Jimi Hendrix minds if you share his work.
Well, he didn't put it in the public domain, either immediatly or at his death.
So, it looks to me like he minds, or at least he did. I don't see any reason to ignore his decisions just because he was stupid enough to gargle vomit.
so are they giving all the money they've received to the authors/performers of the music?
They are giving as much as the artists said they wanted when they signed up.
What? They didn't? Tough luck.
OTOH, hopefully every settlement discourages a few people from nicking some artist's work, which is presumably what the artists want (again, they signed up to an agreement about what would and would not be allowed).
I speed because i can get away with it. I know the activity is illegal, but the goverment doesnt take away my car for a lifetime and label me a felon if i get caught.
But perhaps they should. If you endanger others `because you can get away with it', you are in a different league to music pirates.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems excessively paranoid, and not verye effective to boot.
I just have a card I use for all and only online and phone transactions, and I made sure it is one which has a zero-pounds liability for fraudulant use. If there was fraud and the card issuer couldn't sort it out quickly, at worst I'd lose that card and have to get another.
Since pushing a delete button on a web page doesn't actually mean the information will be deleted (eg who knows how some random online shop does their database backups), I'd have to operate this way anyway.
Er, surely after they accepted it was not a valid charge, but failed to stop it, a quick letter cancelling the card and noting that the charges to date were now their problem was in order.
As for `AOL is hard to deal with', this is clearly bogus. They don't have to deal with AOL, cancel the accounts etc as you would, they just have to stop giving AOL money. Then it becomes AOL's problem.
Liveconnect didn't work at all until 10.3. That is a slight issue. Indeed there was no Mac browser more recent than NS 4 that did liveconnect until the recent safari update.
Now it works with just a `few' bizzare features (such as nulls passed from Java to JS causing the world to end). The Java VM has repaint issues. Oh, and the JS interpreter optimises away operations which are not no-ops, presumably because some programmer at Apple was desperate to shave a microsecond from some benchmark. Sometimes frames don't update until they get the keyboard focus. That's my current list, it will no doubt grow if I do a real in depth test.
It's really no more than one would expect from a relatively young browser. The problem isn't that they have bugs, but that they decided to make everyone buy a new OS to get the bugs fixed. Even M$ doesn't do that. (indeed, M$ is very persistant in trying to give me IE6 every day, no matter how often I say no:-)).
As for `they were under threat', it's called competition. SCO are under threat too, does that make what they are doing acceptable? The sane responsie to competition is to do something cool and better, not claim that anyone using an image of a trash can is peeing in your sandpit.
(just to correct a braino, it is, of course, copyright, not patents, which Apple abused and SCO have taken to abusing)
Is that why we had to move from 10.2 to 10.3 (and hence pay money) to get a half way working Safari?
Yes, the upgraded Safari was free, they just made sure it would not run on 10.2.
Safari is still buggy as hell when it comes to Java and Liveconnect. No doubt they will fix some of this in the next version to `encourage' us to pay for 10.4.
This is Apple we are talking about here. They started the `trivial patents and lots of lawyers' model of IT business currently being applied by SCO. They are masters of the closed-box and proprietary protocol model of trapping users. Nice kit, and pretty graphics, but don't trust the bastards as far as you could spit an iMac.
Mmmmmm. Gyro kebab.
`A sci-fi update...' no wonder I have never heard of it, presumably my brain blocked out any information about such an abomination to save my sanity. And they didn't even do the dragon.
I presume that will have poisoned the idea for a decade. Sigh.
Then install an extra data centre to do mother?
I have wondered for ages why no one has done a movie of Beowolf. Three huge monster battles and a death scene which would have all the Hollywood action heroes scratching each other's eyes out for the chance to show they are serious actors, really. honest. It's short enough that you wouldn't have to cut it to shreds or make 3 bladder busters. And you could give Seamus Heaney a writing credit and score masses of culture-points.
When he could do beowolf and bring down /. under a rush of nerds posting the same joke?
JET was 14 years old in 1997, It is still operational, so it was long in the tooth, but hardly at the end of it;s life.
I beleive it's now basicly a testbed for technology for the proposed ITER project. ITER, if it ever gets built, is supposed to be big enough to run noticably over breakeven for sustained periods.
The Tokamac people got to break even in 97(IIRC). So something, at least came of it.
The problem I see with this bubble stuff is that they detect it by the emission of neutrons. Anything which gives out lots of neutrons is going to have many of the problems of fission - any plant big enough tobe useful will need shielding and will produce nasty waste makeing decomissioning expensive.
In this case "stupidity".
(The other three are greed, lust and self-riteousness)
Kids are complete bastards aren't they.
Any parent who has let their kid know there is fun to be had in asking questions on certain subjects and watching mummy or daddy squirm is asking for this kind of trouble.
It's not as if those questions are hard to answer. ``It's a nipple, like the two you have but older''. ``He grabbed her too roughly and tore her dress''. Any kid not satisfied with those answers already knows what they are asking about and is playing ``tease the parent''.
In this case it was about what btis of the human body people want to pretend don't exist.
All kids are different.
Well, yes some are more screwed up by their parents than others. (Insert Philip Larkin poem here).
Actually, I think a better idea woul be a law that every programme break on every channel must include a 20 second shot chosen at random from a library of films of naked people perfoming every common bodily function from eating to picking their nose to masturbating to having a shit to ... taken from every angle and from every distance from 2 inches to 10 feet. Then everyone will have the choice of either getting rid of their TV or learning to cope with the human body. The resulting appolplexy among those who can't cope will do wonders to improve the species. Of course it will destroy the only profitable segment of the online economy.
And all this player is is a way for me to do that (assuming I was one of those insane Americans who was completely freaked out by the sight of a nipple a few weeks ago).
They must be really pissed off when I skip the boring bits then.
Not to mention all those bastards who blink during viewing!
If you believe `atheism' covers not knowing, then `agnosticism' can not be `a cop-out', it simply describes the non-religious form of atheism. If you truely believed what you claim, you would be calling youself an atheist and an agnistic (just as someone could be a theist and a christian).
However, from your reaction it is clear that you want to claim to be an atheist but not an agnostic. Under either model of the meaning of `atheist' and `agnostic' this would make you a believer, a religious atheist.
It amazed me at the time that there were so many supposed christians campagning against the most christian film I had ever seen. LoB manages to be very humane and also very positive towards christianity, not an easy combination to pull off.
The big biblical epics took more liberties with christianity than LoB did (compressing events and so on). Things I have read about Gibson's film indicates he does too.
I presume we are in for a good summer of weirdoes and loonies complaining about LoB and praising Gibson. I do home sometime I see one of these people pinned down and asked to name where exactly the pythons clash with scripture.
Just because the gospels don't mention the space battle, that doesn't mean it didn't happen!
Also knowna as `UNG'.
This is what wills are for. One could sign over ones work to a record company for your lifetime, and write a will which frees the work.
No, actually the maximum safe speed is a constant. Ie 0mph. Actually it is arguable that is not safe since your car might catch fire. Every increase certainly increases the energy in the system and reduces the time available to correct for errors and suprises, and so makes things less safe.
If the speed limit in some area/conditions is wrong, then get it changed. If you just ignore it you run the risk that you are ignorant of some important piece of information teh person who chose the speed limit of that piece of road took into account. If your local political system doesn't allow you to get together and change such limits, well, you have bigger problems and should sdrive slower to give yourself time to think through the plan for the revolution.
But my original point was that if the reason for going faster is `becasue I can get away with it' then that is clearly a sign that the driver needs to be banned from going near anything which moves under it's own power ever again.
There is actually evidence that suggests that driving over the speed limit is actually safer, because it forces the driver to devote more attention to actually watching the road
The number of drivers caught speeding who then claim they didn't realise they were speeding argues against their attention being heightened:-).
Well, he didn't put it in the public domain, either immediatly or at his death.
So, it looks to me like he minds, or at least he did. I don't see any reason to ignore his decisions just because he was stupid enough to gargle vomit.
Of course not, your reactions are infinitely fast. However, you may want to consider the possibility that not everyone is so godlike.
They are giving as much as the artists said they wanted when they signed up.
What? They didn't? Tough luck.
OTOH, hopefully every settlement discourages a few people from nicking some artist's work, which is presumably what the artists want (again, they signed up to an agreement about what would and would not be allowed).
But perhaps they should. If you endanger others `because you can get away with it', you are in a different league to music pirates.