Am I certain that nuclear weapons are delicate and require a lot of maintenance? Yes. I know enough about how they work to know that a bomb which has been involved in a plane crash and then sat in ice for decades will no longer function, and will require an enormous amount of work to make functional again.
Am I certain that it's Orwellian to assume anything with the "nuclear" label is deathly serious? Well, that's just an opinion.
The relevant population is those people who are capable of purchasing and installing new hardware on their own, but who aren't capable or willing to do any research beforehand. My experience, yours may be different, is that this population is really small. Most computer users are either so incapable that they cannot install it at all, and therefore the "easier" path provided by Windows does not help them, or they are capable enough that they will look for Linux-compatible printers if they have a Linux machine. It's possible that this middle segment is actually really huge and so this is a big deal, but basically every computer user I've ever encountered falls into one of the two outer categories that I describe.
No granny I have ever met has been capable of installing any hardware or software on her own, whether on Windows or anything else. Either you have an exceptional grandma or you don't know what you're doing when you're trying to rig this test.
Bingo. The main problem with proclaiming that Linux isn't ready for the desktop is that it misses the fact that Windows isn't ready for the desktop either. The technically literate can use both, and the technically illiterate can't use either.
Could perhaps be used for prosecuting people who take photographs in "forbidden" areas, such as evil people who dare to take pictures in the DC Amtrak station, on the Pentagon reservation, and other such areas. I can't quite figure out how this would play into it though.... And of course as far as I know nobody has (yet!) been prosecuted after the fact for such photographs.
I said nothing about all FOSS being boring and stifling, merely that all internal corporate software is boring and stifling. This may not be 100% true, but even if it's only 90% true, what are my chances of landing within the good 10% if I have to switch jobs away from writing software that gets sold to people?
And those of us who do write code for sale outside our organization... what? We're just supposed to go get bent and take stifling corporate jobs like everybody else who writes ridiculous, boring "internal software" instead of building awesome things that people love?
The reason for these rules were to prevent UNLICENCED operators from running a bus or taxi service.
Oh my god! You mean people might have been ferrying other people to their destinations without official permission from The Man? Clearly this travesty must be stopped!
Seriously, calm down. Did they say that this was an iPhone exclusive anywhere? Why are you assuming that this will be only for the iPhone, instead of merely first for the iPhone? Unless they very carefully synchronize development on all target platforms, something which simply isn't worth the effort, then some platform must be first. Why not the one which is getting all the press and hype at the moment?
In many countries yes there is a right to a full-service pharmacy within convenient driving distance, mandated by law even.
So what happens if I'm in one of those countries and I move out into the middle of nowhere, with no civilization within whatever the law defines as "convenient driving distance"? Does The Man force a chain to open a new store just for me? Do they force me to move back to civilization?
Snopes disagrees with you, at least in the case of a cashier's check. The key point is that funds will be made available to you, and therefore the check appears to clear, before the money is actually guaranteed to be yours.
When your obsession causes you to do very stupid things then what makes it not stupid? There are a lot of ways to be stupid, and "IQ of 75 on a standardized test" is only one of them.
Except that superrationality is only the rational strategy when all the other players are superrational too. Since most of my fellow human beings tend to have a difficult time even with regular boring rationality, thinking superrationally on my part is foolish.
He was the really good kind. I only discovered it missing when I went to pay for breakfast and discovered that I no longer had the means to pay for anything. In fact, I can only suppose that it was a pickpocket. Conceivably I could have simply lost it or something, although since I had it with me just before I got on a crowded subway and discovered it missing at breakfast right after I got off, the conclusion seems fairly obvious. Other than that it must have been on the subway, I have no idea who it was or when it happened.
To provide basic ground rules to place people on a more equal footing in their dealings with each other. Or if you want the cynical version, to enforce social order and maintain the powerful.
Sometimes the law exists to enforce morality, but it generally does a bad job of it, partly because it gets corrupted by those in power, and partly because people can't agree on which morality it should enforce.
Anyone whose mental age has surpassed twelve years or so should be able to take ten seconds to come up with an example of something which is morally good but illegal, and of something which is legal but morally wrong.
The theory is that the threat of eventual punishment deters crime. You may disagree with this theory, but essentially all of modern law enforcement is built on it. Considering the costs just for prison, the cost of catching and imprisoning someone almost always far outweighs the cost of the actual crime committed. But we still believe it to be a worthwhile thing to do.
Even if it were illegal, the rules for dealing with wanted criminals are different than the rules for common citizens. For one thing, the police are allowed to arrest and lock up wanted criminals with no further provocation.
There's always the classic police scam where they mail a prize notice ("You have won a new boat!") to suspects' last known address. Then they arrest everyone who comes through the front door. Nabs a lot of criminals. This was even parodied on The Simpsons, but has a basis in reality.
It would be illegal, or at the very least a tort, to do this sort of thing to a normal citizen. But if there's a warrant out for your arrest, you're supposed to go to jail. If you don't turn yourself in then you are essentially fair game for the police \.
Funny how physical location doesn't matter on the internet right up until a "hacker" does something "heroic", and then suddenly it's all "nyah nyah, jurisdiction".
He committed a crime against a US entity. He was then foolish enough to put himself within US law enforcement. He's now suffering the consequences of his crime and his stupidity.
If they pay by check, refuse to cash the excessively large check and insist that they give you one for the exact amount. If they pay electronically, refund their payment and insist that they pay you the exact amount. (PayPal and any other reasonable payment system will allow you to refund a payment in such a way that if the payment ends up being fraudulent, you still lose nothing, like not cashing a bogus check.)
Of course you're still vulnerable to losing merchandise to an exact bogus payment, but the thing that really hurts with the charge back scam is that you lose not only the merchandise but also the change. Protection from regular old bad payments is another more difficult topic.
It's whiny and pointless to complain about contract terms in an open market where you can negotiate.
Alas, the US cell phone market is not such a market. There are a grand total of four nationwide companies, and a small handful of smaller ones. They have largely identical policies and pricing in nearly every respect. If I want to buy my own unlocked phone separately so I can avoid paying the "phone subsidy" fee written into every carrier's subscription plans... nope! There is basically no choice in the market. It's an oligopoly which means that we, the customers, lose out.
Most likely they're in cahoots with Joe Smith. They send you a bad check that's created in such a way as to not reveal its badness for a few weeks. You cash it, wait a week, it hasn't bounced so you assume that it's good. You then send your work along with a good check to Joe Smith. Now he has your money, and you lose their money when their bad check finally bounces.
It's a more complicated variant on the common scam where somebody offers to buy something from you, but they overpay you and ask for change. To make sure that you're safe, ensure that the money only flows in one direction. You might still get ripped off for your work or your merchandise, but at least you won't lose money too.
You're right indeed. I wasn't thinking her role through when I wrote the above.
She thought she was involved in stealing twenty million dollars of someone else's money. She was actually involved in stealing $400,000 of her own money. She may have been tricked but she wasn't at all in the right.
Slashdot Mirror
What "that" are you referring to?
Am I certain that nuclear weapons are delicate and require a lot of maintenance? Yes. I know enough about how they work to know that a bomb which has been involved in a plane crash and then sat in ice for decades will no longer function, and will require an enormous amount of work to make functional again.
Am I certain that it's Orwellian to assume anything with the "nuclear" label is deathly serious? Well, that's just an opinion.
The relevant population is those people who are capable of purchasing and installing new hardware on their own, but who aren't capable or willing to do any research beforehand. My experience, yours may be different, is that this population is really small. Most computer users are either so incapable that they cannot install it at all, and therefore the "easier" path provided by Windows does not help them, or they are capable enough that they will look for Linux-compatible printers if they have a Linux machine. It's possible that this middle segment is actually really huge and so this is a big deal, but basically every computer user I've ever encountered falls into one of the two outer categories that I describe.
No granny I have ever met has been capable of installing any hardware or software on her own, whether on Windows or anything else. Either you have an exceptional grandma or you don't know what you're doing when you're trying to rig this test.
Bingo. The main problem with proclaiming that Linux isn't ready for the desktop is that it misses the fact that Windows isn't ready for the desktop either. The technically literate can use both, and the technically illiterate can't use either.
Could perhaps be used for prosecuting people who take photographs in "forbidden" areas, such as evil people who dare to take pictures in the DC Amtrak station, on the Pentagon reservation, and other such areas. I can't quite figure out how this would play into it though.... And of course as far as I know nobody has (yet!) been prosecuted after the fact for such photographs.
I said nothing about all FOSS being boring and stifling, merely that all internal corporate software is boring and stifling. This may not be 100% true, but even if it's only 90% true, what are my chances of landing within the good 10% if I have to switch jobs away from writing software that gets sold to people?
And those of us who do write code for sale outside our organization... what? We're just supposed to go get bent and take stifling corporate jobs like everybody else who writes ridiculous, boring "internal software" instead of building awesome things that people love?
Yeah, no thanks.
The reason for these rules were to prevent UNLICENCED operators from running a bus or taxi service.
Oh my god! You mean people might have been ferrying other people to their destinations without official permission from The Man? Clearly this travesty must be stopped!
Seriously, calm down. Did they say that this was an iPhone exclusive anywhere? Why are you assuming that this will be only for the iPhone, instead of merely first for the iPhone? Unless they very carefully synchronize development on all target platforms, something which simply isn't worth the effort, then some platform must be first. Why not the one which is getting all the press and hype at the moment?
In many countries yes there is a right to a full-service pharmacy within convenient driving distance, mandated by law even.
So what happens if I'm in one of those countries and I move out into the middle of nowhere, with no civilization within whatever the law defines as "convenient driving distance"? Does The Man force a chain to open a new store just for me? Do they force me to move back to civilization?
Why would I be proud? It's just an insignificant bit of text on a silly albeit entertaining discussion site.
Snopes disagrees with you, at least in the case of a cashier's check. The key point is that funds will be made available to you, and therefore the check appears to clear, before the money is actually guaranteed to be yours.
My previous sig was "fuck y'all", do you rate that as better or worse?
Honestly I could not possibly care less who I offend or scare away with my Slashdot signature.
I lot of women would if there were a lot of women here. But remember what site you're posting to.
When your obsession causes you to do very stupid things then what makes it not stupid? There are a lot of ways to be stupid, and "IQ of 75 on a standardized test" is only one of them.
Except that superrationality is only the rational strategy when all the other players are superrational too. Since most of my fellow human beings tend to have a difficult time even with regular boring rationality, thinking superrationally on my part is foolish.
He was the really good kind. I only discovered it missing when I went to pay for breakfast and discovered that I no longer had the means to pay for anything. In fact, I can only suppose that it was a pickpocket. Conceivably I could have simply lost it or something, although since I had it with me just before I got on a crowded subway and discovered it missing at breakfast right after I got off, the conclusion seems fairly obvious. Other than that it must have been on the subway, I have no idea who it was or when it happened.
To provide basic ground rules to place people on a more equal footing in their dealings with each other. Or if you want the cynical version, to enforce social order and maintain the powerful.
Sometimes the law exists to enforce morality, but it generally does a bad job of it, partly because it gets corrupted by those in power, and partly because people can't agree on which morality it should enforce.
Anyone whose mental age has surpassed twelve years or so should be able to take ten seconds to come up with an example of something which is morally good but illegal, and of something which is legal but morally wrong.
The theory is that the threat of eventual punishment deters crime. You may disagree with this theory, but essentially all of modern law enforcement is built on it. Considering the costs just for prison, the cost of catching and imprisoning someone almost always far outweighs the cost of the actual crime committed. But we still believe it to be a worthwhile thing to do.
Even if it were illegal, the rules for dealing with wanted criminals are different than the rules for common citizens. For one thing, the police are allowed to arrest and lock up wanted criminals with no further provocation.
There's always the classic police scam where they mail a prize notice ("You have won a new boat!") to suspects' last known address. Then they arrest everyone who comes through the front door. Nabs a lot of criminals. This was even parodied on The Simpsons, but has a basis in reality.
It would be illegal, or at the very least a tort, to do this sort of thing to a normal citizen. But if there's a warrant out for your arrest, you're supposed to go to jail. If you don't turn yourself in then you are essentially fair game for the police \.
Funny how physical location doesn't matter on the internet right up until a "hacker" does something "heroic", and then suddenly it's all "nyah nyah, jurisdiction".
He committed a crime against a US entity. He was then foolish enough to put himself within US law enforcement. He's now suffering the consequences of his crime and his stupidity.
If they pay by check, refuse to cash the excessively large check and insist that they give you one for the exact amount. If they pay electronically, refund their payment and insist that they pay you the exact amount. (PayPal and any other reasonable payment system will allow you to refund a payment in such a way that if the payment ends up being fraudulent, you still lose nothing, like not cashing a bogus check.)
Of course you're still vulnerable to losing merchandise to an exact bogus payment, but the thing that really hurts with the charge back scam is that you lose not only the merchandise but also the change. Protection from regular old bad payments is another more difficult topic.
It's whiny and pointless to complain about contract terms in an open market where you can negotiate.
Alas, the US cell phone market is not such a market. There are a grand total of four nationwide companies, and a small handful of smaller ones. They have largely identical policies and pricing in nearly every respect. If I want to buy my own unlocked phone separately so I can avoid paying the "phone subsidy" fee written into every carrier's subscription plans... nope! There is basically no choice in the market. It's an oligopoly which means that we, the customers, lose out.
Most likely they're in cahoots with Joe Smith. They send you a bad check that's created in such a way as to not reveal its badness for a few weeks. You cash it, wait a week, it hasn't bounced so you assume that it's good. You then send your work along with a good check to Joe Smith. Now he has your money, and you lose their money when their bad check finally bounces.
It's a more complicated variant on the common scam where somebody offers to buy something from you, but they overpay you and ask for change. To make sure that you're safe, ensure that the money only flows in one direction. You might still get ripped off for your work or your merchandise, but at least you won't lose money too.
You're right indeed. I wasn't thinking her role through when I wrote the above.
She thought she was involved in stealing twenty million dollars of someone else's money. She was actually involved in stealing $400,000 of her own money. She may have been tricked but she wasn't at all in the right.