Do I understand correctly that each county in Florida is responsible for the federal voting in their county, and they can conduct the voting however the heck they want to?
Yes. Every county in every state can have its own method of voting for the president. Some states may have state wide rules so that within that state all counties are the same, but I don't know which ones those are, if any.
We do some damn stupid things here. The electoral college is one of them as well, which is why it is possible for 51% of the population to want candidate A to be president, therefore candidate B is in office. That didn't happen in 2000, but it is possible. [For the nitpickers, in 2000 no one candidate received more than 51% of the votes. Gore won the popular vote, something like 47.5% to 46.5%, with the other 6 percent going to 3rd party candidates.]
What I'd like to see is a voting method that is a) does away with the electoral college and b) allows people to mark second and third choices.
Imagine 5 friends want to go out to lunch:
A wants Chinese, but will eat pizza B wants Mexican, but will eat pizza C wants Chinese, but will eat Mexican D wants Mexican, but will eat burgers E wants burgers, but will eat Mexican.
There's no clear winner here. No one food got a majority of the vote. So you take the lowest percentage choice and throw it out. BUT, and this is important, you then use the second place votes for those individuals who are clearly in the minority. In this case, we eliminate burgers, because only one person really wanted burgers. Which then makes the votes C-2, M-3. Mexican food is now the clear winner. That was the food that the majority of people put as either their first or second choice.
Under the current American system, the votes for C may have more power than the votes for M, depending on the electoral college. So it is possible under our system for C, which only 2 people out of 5 really wanted, to be the choice for lunch.
This method would also encourage 3rd party candidates since people could vote for them without hurting their second choice. If we had had this system in 1992, Bush would probably have been elected since I seem to remember that the majority of Perot supporters preferred Bush. The Perot votes would have gone to their second choice, which probably would have been Bush. In 2000, Gore would have won, since almost all of the Nader votes would have gone to him. Plus, without the electoral college, pure numbers win.
Actually all presidents have used the power of the Executive Order. It bypasses congress and allows the president to a law. For example, Bill Clinton executed an executive order lowering the allowed level of arsenic in drinking water. Bush changed that order. President Bush issued an executive order that contradicted the 1978 Presidential Records Act, a law passed by congress. The law would have required records of the Reagan White House to be released 12 years after that president left office. Bush also used an executive order to establish the office of homeland security. So parts of Bush's "anti-terrorism" package were enacted through what amounts to presidential fiat, the executive order. The next president will obviously be able to undo any and all presidential orders, just each congress can repeal the laws passed by the previous congress. I believe executive orders can also be ruled unconsitutional.
I am sure Clinton signed some executive orders I disagree with and I'm sure Bush must have signed some I agree with, but these examples were both in the news at the time and they are the ones I remember.
For more information about the checks and balances of the American government, check out your local library or go on-line and visit:
Now MS tries to address subjects YOU WANT THEM TO ADDRESS, and the linux community is in an uproar.
No. The main gist of the responses is not that they are upset that MS has addressed the issue, but the way they have addressed the issue.
If I said, "Killing little girls is a bad thing, it should be stopped," and you responded by saying, "You are right, it is bad. I know, we'll stop it by using sex selection to make sure that only male embryos are brought to term." I would get mad at you not for addressing the issue, but for the idiotic solution. That's what is happening here.
Right. There are a lot of flaws with this article, starting with the numbers. First of all, they don't define what they consider an "attack" to be. That's a big gaping hole you could drive a truck through (note lack of a link here).
They also don't define what constitutes a "box" in this context. Even if it were servers only, the numbers are incredibly low. My little development web server got several thousand code red attacks last fall. Luckily, I was running Apache on Linux, so all it did was fill up my logs.
If they are talking about pure number of attacks, as they appear to be, this is actually pretty good news. Apache webservers outnumber IIS webservers approximately 2 to 1 according to Netcraft (and by the way, has anyone noticed that Apache has been gaining the past couple of months). Assuming on a small percentage of people run Apache on Windows, we could assume that the attacks on Linux servers should be twice that of attacks on Windows servers, but the numbers are not that far apart.
So this article appears to be pretty fluff piece with no real meaning. Like most news stories.
I bet AT&T would just love to get their hands on the person that posted this. AT&T did a very responsible thing: they saw a potential threat to the security of their customers, i.e., a lot of people who are reading this (and even if you don't pay AT&T directly, you might use their lines if you have a cable modem), and sent out a warning to remind their people. They included reminders of proper secure behavior. And what is the first thing an employee do? Leak the number and protocols to an outlet read by the people who are most likely to try and breach security. If you were my employee you'd get in some serious trouble.
Many people who do the social engineering hack make fun of companies for having clueless employees or employees that don't follow basic guidelines. So for those few who make fun of AT&T for doing this, I'd say you can't have it both ways.
We should be applauding AT&T for reminding their people of basic security precautions.
Are you confusing him with David Brin? He wrote The Practice Effect, which actually reminded me much more of Stasheff's the Warlock In Spite of Himself than anything by Anthongy.
Re:Follow the Yellow Klez road.
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Klez: a closer look
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Um, that sort of security is just stupid and provides a false sense of security. If you were being sarcastic, I missed it. What happens when klez mutates into a slightly different size?
True story: I was helping a user send out emails to a group of students. Her subject was "Important message about your scholarship." She kept getting messages back that the mail was infected with the Melissa virus. Well, she wasn't sending any attachments, so I thought we had a variant that piggybacked on outgoing mail messages. I searched her machine. I moved her to a different machine and searched it. Same thing. I re-imaged a machine. Same thing.
I also couldn't figure out where it was being caught. The message wasn't coming from our server because the infected message wasn't the same.
I traced it back to the main university's mail servers. So I called them up and told them that their anti-virus software was catching a virus that we couldn't find and could they tell us what they were using. They said they weren't using anti-virus scanning software.
Turns out some bright bulb had written a perl script that flagged every outgoing message with a subject that contained "Important message" as being infected with the Melissa virus.
A half a day wasted trying to track down a non-existant virus. And as soon as the Melissa virus changed its subject line, the script would let it through. What a joke.
Win 95->98, or 98->2000 worked pretty well for most apps
Yes, and the same is true for kde apps. Apps written for 1 work ok in 2 and I think 3. That was mentioned in the article. The problem is that was discussed at one point in the article is that apps written for 3 don't necessarily work well in 2.
This would be true under windows as well. If you write an app that takes advantage of an api call introduced in XP, the behavior will be unpredictable under 2000, ME, 98, and 95. The app may not run at all, it may run until you try to access that api call or it may run fine and just lose a feature.
Here's the quote from the article "If a developer wants to write an application which runs on all KDE versions, then use kde1-libs. If the developer wants to write a modern application and still be KDE2 compatible, use Qt2 and KDE2 libs. Whatever the developer wants.... I had this exact issue on Solaris recently. I had an application which used -standard- Solaris -default- libraries, and it would not run on Solaris 2.6 because it was built on 2.8, using 2.8 features. I had to move back to 2.6 and then it would run on all future systems
I figured there was a gimp plugin for this available already. Should be easy enough to do to detect the white edge of the photo, then rotate. I say easy of course having never written a perl script for gimp, so it may be harder than it initially looks. But edge detect algorithms are established, all you have to do is ask the user to point to a pixel that is the scanner's background color, and look for edges that have that color on one side. Edges that are not straight can be assumed to be within the picture and ignored. I figured the gimp would be the easiest platform for this.
Can't honestly remember whether it was mp3 or wma. You are right, winamp probably would have been a solution. If part of the person's job was to listen to music all day or is she'd been a little less whiny. But when she voluntarily suggested that she'd just bring the cd's in, I let it go.
So we're updating machines at work to w2k by flashing an image on to the hard drive. Being the nice people we are, we've even backed up people's music for them. When we restored one woman's music, media player refused to run until it had been updated. So I updated it, checked that it ran the little demo it comes with and left. 10 minutes later I get a call that it won't play her music. Turns out that because the music had been ripped on what it thought was another machine, it refused to play it. Never mind that the hardware was exactly the same, except for the addition of 128 megs of ram. The hd had been formatted and a new os installed (essentially) so as far as media player was concerned, the files were now on a different pc and so it wouldn't play them.
I tried to explain to her that Bill Gates thought she was stealing music. I'm not sure it took though; I think she secretly thought we weren't letting her play it. Yeah, we'll back up a gig of music on the tape, spend the time restoring them and then not let you play them. She eventually just said she'd bring the cd's in again.
There may have been a way around all this, but for such an obvious non work related thing, wasn't going to do it. Didn't feel like installing winamp because she'd been so annoying and whiny about the whole thing.
What possible legal construct or definition fo terms could you come up with that would make gator illegal but babelfish legal?
That's easy. An illegal program changes the content or meaning of the page. Where the user should have gotten a page about the latest kernel and an ad for Oracle, the user instead got a page about the latest kernel and an ad for a camera. The meaning of the page, derived from the meaning of the sum of its parts including the ad, is different.
And in the real word, what babelfish does would be illegal. It is illegal for you to take the latest King novel and translate it into Tagalog and publish it. Only an author of a book has the right to determine the languages in which the work will be published. With babelfish, you can make an argument that by publishing freely to the web, an author implicitly grants the right to freely translate the work, PROVIDED that the work is kept as a whole (which gator doesn't do, by overriding any ads that were a part of the work) and provided that the translating web page does not represent the work as originating on any other page than the page the author published it on. In other words, no framing it in so it appears to be coming from www.scumsite.com when it was originally published on www.goodguys.com.
Not hard at all. The law is a lot like programming. The users are all potential bugs, so you code around them. You make a law so that when users input the data {the events that occur in the real world) the correct output results {the good guys win when sued). So you just put language in for all possible eventualities and clearly define your variables. The law is even like a case statement in that it has fall through rules.
Everybody talks about how great he was, but from what I saw in the first movie, I wasn't impressed.
Yeah, dude was killed by a Balrog. And we all know how powerful they are. Why, they're so powerful they were able to kill Gandalf. And we know that he's so powerful, only a Balrog could kill him.
Apologies to John Kovalic. Trust me, the original is much funnier.
Yes, it is technically true that OO doesn't ship with a database program.
However, it has some darn nice database features. If you have existing odbc sources defined in windows, you can access them. However, unlike word, which let's you access them via the mail merge function only, OO goes one better: you can see and edit the tables as tables. You can create new queries, that are then available to all the OO components.
Let me say that again another way. You get everything MS Access gives you except for the ability to create custom forms. And they say that OO doesn't have a database.
You can also use jdbc or just link to an existing excel file. That's right, you can access an excel file as if it were a set of records and columns. I just linked to an excel spreadsheet with 17,000 rows and 30 columns, viewed it as if it were a table in a database, wrote a custom query that will now be available to all the OO components.
And they call this not having a database.
I've got users using OO to edit mysql tables that hold data for our website because MS Access couldn't work correctly with the myodbc drivers.
I really wish people would cover that aspect more in their reviews. It's a very important feature to us here. Our hidebound faculty will never move to it of course, but for some tasks like basic mysql database entry, that's what I'm going to have them use.
A written, computerless computer exam is like having somebody prove they're a chef by watching what they do in the bathroom. Even if you can meet some definition of success, it don't mean diddly.
Two things. First, a good chef should know how to create a dish without a recipe -- this means knowing what materials are needed to produce a specific effect and in what proportions. I think it would be applicable to test a chef's knowledge by asking them to write down a recipe using a specific set of ingredients. The good ones and the ones with lots of experience know the way different foods combine in the mouth to create a specific taste, so they don't need a banana and an onion in front of them to know that you won't be able to create a decent desert with those two ingredients.
Secondly, I believe you meant to write "you'll be judging them on their piddly." Or maybe not. Seemed like there should be some joke there. Judging them in bed. . . if you can meet the definition of success, it's still just diddling? Or something like that.
RTF doesn't work for everything. I don't think that RTF has linked footnotes for example. Where I work, education, every document has about 3 footnotes per page on average. If I switched them to rtf, they'd lose the autonumbering. Wine or SO/OO is the only way to go for these documents.
But you are right about the "legacy documents" problem. It exists on all platforms and is a problem for windows users as well. We have people who wrote textbooks in wordperfect 5.1 that have literally thousands of footnotes, are over a thousand pages long, use master documents, and have extensive formatting and design considerations. It is actually easier to let them continue to work in 5.1 for as long as it works than it is to switch them over.
Come to think of it, many of our users would be happy to move to linux if it meant that dosemu would let them use the wordperfect they are all familiar with. But that is just our older faculty, the ones who were early adopters of technology 10 years ago. The younger ones are more likely to use office xp.
My school has this too. The University increased the student computer fee by 15 dollars a semester specifically to pay for the licensing. That's around 150 dollars for a 5 year degree (the average here). Now consider that most of those people have computers that came with a copy of office. Now consider that the academic cost of office is around 180, the deal starts to really suck. Now consider that Word alone is more than enough for the non-tech majors and should never need to be upgraded.
When you take all of that into account, the deal really starts to suck.
For the non-engineers/cs people, a copy of openoffice distributed by the University ITS department is plenty.
Assuming that none of the bootleg cd's are identical to the released cd, it would be nice if gracenote gave every request a unique identifier. Then we could see that A used a bootleg before the cd came out, but when the real cd came out, A bought that and had to re-download the songlist.
I don't like unique identifiers either, but in this case it certainly would be nice if they were able to give us the data that says either "Yes, people who pirated the cd before it came out did purchase the cd within 6 months of release" or "No, people who pirate don't buy the cd within the first 6 months."
A oneway hash of the computer's mac address + ip address as encapsulated in the packet would be easy enough to do so that Gracenote could track instances of contacts without tracking who is at the other end or giving any agency a method to quickly and easily determine who was at the other end.
Forget recording yourself, the desire to put my av collection right on the hard drive is what's driving me to coninually purchase more drives. I just finished filling up a 50 gig drive with a part of my cd collection. The next step would be to put my dvds on a hard drive as well. I could easily use up 1,000 gigs of data that way, and I don't have nearly as extensive a cd/dvd collection as many people.
I'm just waiting for someone to pick a feckin' standard for dvd recordable and get the price to closer to 200 dollars, then I'll be able to do away with approximately 6/7ths of my back up cds.
Equally so, if I only drive 100 miles per month, I should pay a pro-rated insurance fee
Our insurance company asks how far we live from work for exactly that reason. Our rates would be slightly higher if we lived 20 miles from work instead of 2.
As far as the internet usage goes, the same thing. The isp that I use for my email account has a 5 dollar a month e-mail only account, which I've used for years. You get something like 5 hours of dialup service a month with that. Or I could pay 10 for 40 hours and some web space or 20 for unlimited. I believe AOL has a similar 5 hour a month plan as well as a bring-your-own-connnection plan for people with cable modems. Most ISP's have low end, low hour accounts.
You are absolutely right, the artists' time is worth something.
But. Cassettes sell for far less than a cd, even though they aren't that much different in price. I don't know the exact numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that a cd actually costs less to produce than a cassette tape.
How many people here are old enough to remember when it was "18.99 cd/12.99 cassette" for all of those time-life or rhino music compilations. This means that you pay a premium for getting the same "thing" on cd. And as either the article or another poster pointed out, when cd's first came out, the record companies said that the price would drop over time as people bought more of them.
I'm curious to know what percentage of a computer game sale goes to the people who actually produced the game: programmers, artists, musicians, etc.
And who pays 50 bucks for a computer game? I wait 2 years and let the price drop to 10-15 bucks. If I'm lucky, I have a new computer and the game plays really nicely. Imagine the frame rates you'd get playing the original Doom or Duke Nukem on your PIV 2.2 gig with 512 megs of memory and a 65 meg video card.
Shoot, I'm old enough to remember when you had to get software to slow your clock speed down when playing the older games. But now I'm starting to get OT.
Yes, but oncce you have the 100,000 watt antennas, the cost of adding more users is shifted to the listener. It doesn't cost the radio station any more money to broadcast to 1,000 listeners, to 1,000,000 listeners, to 1,000,000,000 listeners, provided they all buy radios and can squeeze into the broadcast range.
Here's an interesting question though: what is the theoretical limit on the number of receivers that can receive a tv or radio broadcast? I suppose part of it would have to do with the number, size and density of the antennas closest to the tower. The density of antennas would have to be so dense that all transmissions would be absorbed.
the beauty of credit cards
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Disconnecting
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You know, the first thing I would do after this is call my credit card company and tell them that you've canceled these accounts and that there should be 1 final payment to them and no more after that.
You complained about having them on auto-bill, but that actually makes it easier to protect yourself.
It depends on what you are looking for. If you are looking for British humor of a "wacky" vein, try Robert Rankin. For a little less wacky and a little less style, there's Tom Holt. Of the two, I prefer Rankin. I would say that if you like the non sequiter, bizarre happenings style of Adams, then go with Rankin. The characters aren't as three dimensional, they appear to be along for the ride and there just to be funny.
There's always Pratchett of course if you like British humor. His books are a mix of humor and character development. If you want something with just a lot of jokes and not much characterization, get one of the Discworld books with Rincewind in it.
Slashdot Mirror
Do I understand correctly that each county in Florida is responsible for the federal voting in their county, and they can conduct the voting however the heck they want to?
Yes. Every county in every state can have its own method of voting for the president. Some states may have state wide rules so that within that state all counties are the same, but I don't know which ones those are, if any.
We do some damn stupid things here. The electoral college is one of them as well, which is why it is possible for 51% of the population to want candidate A to be president, therefore candidate B is in office. That didn't happen in 2000, but it is possible. [For the nitpickers, in 2000 no one candidate received more than 51% of the votes. Gore won the popular vote, something like 47.5% to 46.5%, with the other 6 percent going to 3rd party candidates.]
What I'd like to see is a voting method that is a) does away with the electoral college and b) allows people to mark second and third choices.
Imagine 5 friends want to go out to lunch:
A wants Chinese, but will eat pizza
B wants Mexican, but will eat pizza
C wants Chinese, but will eat Mexican
D wants Mexican, but will eat burgers
E wants burgers, but will eat Mexican.
There's no clear winner here. No one food got a majority of the vote. So you take the lowest percentage choice and throw it out. BUT, and this is important, you then use the second place votes for those individuals who are clearly in the minority. In this case, we eliminate burgers, because only one person really wanted burgers. Which then makes the votes C-2, M-3. Mexican food is now the clear winner. That was the food that the majority of people put as either their first or second choice.
Under the current American system, the votes for C may have more power than the votes for M, depending on the electoral college. So it is possible under our system for C, which only 2 people out of 5 really wanted, to be the choice for lunch.
This method would also encourage 3rd party candidates since people could vote for them without hurting their second choice. If we had had this system in 1992, Bush would probably have been elected since I seem to remember that the majority of Perot supporters preferred Bush. The Perot votes would have gone to their second choice, which probably would have been Bush. In 2000, Gore would have won, since almost all of the Nader votes would have gone to him. Plus, without the electoral college, pure numbers win.
Actually all presidents have used the power of the Executive Order. It bypasses congress and allows the president to a law. For example, Bill Clinton executed an executive order lowering the allowed level of arsenic in drinking water. Bush changed that order. President Bush issued an executive order that contradicted the 1978 Presidential Records Act, a law passed by congress. The law would have required records of the Reagan White House to be released 12 years after that president left office. Bush also used an executive order to establish the office of homeland security. So parts of Bush's "anti-terrorism" package were enacted through what amounts to presidential fiat, the executive order. The next president will obviously be able to undo any and all presidential orders, just each congress can repeal the laws passed by the previous congress. I believe executive orders can also be ruled unconsitutional.
I am sure Clinton signed some executive orders I disagree with and I'm sure Bush must have signed some I agree with, but these examples were both in the news at the time and they are the ones I remember.
For more information about the checks and balances of the American government, check out your local library or go on-line and visit:
And that's One to Grow On.
Learn how to interpret what you read.
Now MS tries to address subjects YOU WANT THEM TO ADDRESS, and the linux community is in an uproar.
No. The main gist of the responses is not that they are upset that MS has addressed the issue, but the way they have addressed the issue.
If I said, "Killing little girls is a bad thing, it should be stopped," and you responded by saying, "You are right, it is bad. I know, we'll stop it by using sex selection to make sure that only male embryos are brought to term." I would get mad at you not for addressing the issue, but for the idiotic solution. That's what is happening here.
Right. There are a lot of flaws with this article, starting with the numbers. First of all, they don't define what they consider an "attack" to be. That's a big gaping hole you could drive a truck through (note lack of a link here).
They also don't define what constitutes a "box" in this context. Even if it were servers only, the numbers are incredibly low. My little development web server got several thousand code red attacks last fall. Luckily, I was running Apache on Linux, so all it did was fill up my logs.
If they are talking about pure number of attacks, as they appear to be, this is actually pretty good news. Apache webservers outnumber IIS webservers approximately 2 to 1 according to Netcraft (and by the way, has anyone noticed that Apache has been gaining the past couple of months). Assuming on a small percentage of people run Apache on Windows, we could assume that the attacks on Linux servers should be twice that of attacks on Windows servers, but the numbers are not that far apart.
So this article appears to be pretty fluff piece with no real meaning. Like most news stories.
I bet AT&T would just love to get their hands on the person that posted this. AT&T did a very responsible thing: they saw a potential threat to the security of their customers, i.e., a lot of people who are reading this (and even if you don't pay AT&T directly, you might use their lines if you have a cable modem), and sent out a warning to remind their people. They included reminders of proper secure behavior. And what is the first thing an employee do? Leak the number and protocols to an outlet read by the people who are most likely to try and breach security. If you were my employee you'd get in some serious trouble.
Many people who do the social engineering hack make fun of companies for having clueless employees or employees that don't follow basic guidelines. So for those few who make fun of AT&T for doing this, I'd say you can't have it both ways.
We should be applauding AT&T for reminding their people of basic security precautions.
Are you confusing him with David Brin? He wrote The Practice Effect, which actually reminded me much more of Stasheff's the Warlock In Spite of Himself than anything by Anthongy.
Um, that sort of security is just stupid and provides a false sense of security. If you were being sarcastic, I missed it. What happens when klez mutates into a slightly different size?
True story: I was helping a user send out emails to a group of students. Her subject was "Important message about your scholarship." She kept getting messages back that the mail was infected with the Melissa virus. Well, she wasn't sending any attachments, so I thought we had a variant that piggybacked on outgoing mail messages. I searched her machine. I moved her to a different machine and searched it. Same thing. I re-imaged a machine. Same thing.
I also couldn't figure out where it was being caught. The message wasn't coming from our server because the infected message wasn't the same.
I traced it back to the main university's mail servers. So I called them up and told them that their anti-virus software was catching a virus that we couldn't find and could they tell us what they were using. They said they weren't using anti-virus scanning software.
Turns out some bright bulb had written a perl script that flagged every outgoing message with a subject that contained "Important message" as being infected with the Melissa virus.
A half a day wasted trying to track down a non-existant virus. And as soon as the Melissa virus changed its subject line, the script would let it through. What a joke.
Win 95->98, or 98->2000 worked pretty well for most apps
Yes, and the same is true for kde apps. Apps written for 1 work ok in 2 and I think 3. That was mentioned in the article. The problem is that was discussed at one point in the article is that apps written for 3 don't necessarily work well in 2.
This would be true under windows as well. If you write an app that takes advantage of an api call introduced in XP, the behavior will be unpredictable under 2000, ME, 98, and 95. The app may not run at all, it may run until you try to access that api call or it may run fine and just lose a feature.
Here's the quote from the article "If a developer wants to write an application which runs on all KDE versions, then use kde1-libs. If the developer wants to write a modern application and still be KDE2 compatible, use Qt2 and KDE2 libs. Whatever the developer wants.... I had this exact issue on Solaris recently. I had an application which used -standard- Solaris -default- libraries, and it would not run on Solaris 2.6 because it was built on 2.8, using 2.8 features. I had to move back to 2.6 and then it would run on all future systems
Yes, finally the return of Dr Who and a sequal to Paradise Towers! Maybe this one will have Felicity Kendell in it.
I figured there was a gimp plugin for this available already. Should be easy enough to do to detect the white edge of the photo, then rotate. I say easy of course having never written a perl script for gimp, so it may be harder than it initially looks. But edge detect algorithms are established, all you have to do is ask the user to point to a pixel that is the scanner's background color, and look for edges that have that color on one side. Edges that are not straight can be assumed to be within the picture and ignored. I figured the gimp would be the easiest platform for this.
Can't honestly remember whether it was mp3 or wma. You are right, winamp probably would have been a solution. If part of the person's job was to listen to music all day or is she'd been a little less whiny. But when she voluntarily suggested that she'd just bring the cd's in, I let it go.
So we're updating machines at work to w2k by flashing an image on to the hard drive. Being the nice people we are, we've even backed up people's music for them. When we restored one woman's music, media player refused to run until it had been updated. So I updated it, checked that it ran the little demo it comes with and left. 10 minutes later I get a call that it won't play her music. Turns out that because the music had been ripped on what it thought was another machine, it refused to play it. Never mind that the hardware was exactly the same, except for the addition of 128 megs of ram. The hd had been formatted and a new os installed (essentially) so as far as media player was concerned, the files were now on a different pc and so it wouldn't play them.
I tried to explain to her that Bill Gates thought she was stealing music. I'm not sure it took though; I think she secretly thought we weren't letting her play it. Yeah, we'll back up a gig of music on the tape, spend the time restoring them and then not let you play them. She eventually just said she'd bring the cd's in again.
There may have been a way around all this, but for such an obvious non work related thing, wasn't going to do it. Didn't feel like installing winamp because she'd been so annoying and whiny about the whole thing.
What possible legal construct or definition fo terms could you come up with that would make gator illegal but babelfish legal?
That's easy. An illegal program changes the content or meaning of the page. Where the user should have gotten a page about the latest kernel and an ad for Oracle, the user instead got a page about the latest kernel and an ad for a camera. The meaning of the page, derived from the meaning of the sum of its parts including the ad, is different.
And in the real word, what babelfish does would be illegal. It is illegal for you to take the latest King novel and translate it into Tagalog and publish it. Only an author of a book has the right to determine the languages in which the work will be published. With babelfish, you can make an argument that by publishing freely to the web, an author implicitly grants the right to freely translate the work, PROVIDED that the work is kept as a whole (which gator doesn't do, by overriding any ads that were a part of the work) and provided that the translating web page does not represent the work as originating on any other page than the page the author published it on. In other words, no framing it in so it appears to be coming from www.scumsite.com when it was originally published on www.goodguys.com.
Not hard at all. The law is a lot like programming. The users are all potential bugs, so you code around them. You make a law so that when users input the data {the events that occur in the real world) the correct output results {the good guys win when sued). So you just put language in for all possible eventualities and clearly define your variables. The law is even like a case statement in that it has fall through rules.
Everybody talks about how great he was, but from what I saw in the first movie, I wasn't impressed.
Yeah, dude was killed by a Balrog. And we all know how powerful they are. Why, they're so powerful they were able to kill Gandalf. And we know that he's so powerful, only a Balrog could kill him.
Apologies to John Kovalic. Trust me, the original is much funnier.
Yes, it is technically true that OO doesn't ship with a database program.
However, it has some darn nice database features. If you have existing odbc sources defined in windows, you can access them. However, unlike word, which let's you access them via the mail merge function only, OO goes one better: you can see and edit the tables as tables. You can create new queries, that are then available to all the OO components.
Let me say that again another way. You get everything MS Access gives you except for the ability to create custom forms. And they say that OO doesn't have a database.
You can also use jdbc or just link to an existing excel file. That's right, you can access an excel file as if it were a set of records and columns. I just linked to an excel spreadsheet with 17,000 rows and 30 columns, viewed it as if it were a table in a database, wrote a custom query that will now be available to all the OO components.
And they call this not having a database.
I've got users using OO to edit mysql tables that hold data for our website because MS Access couldn't work correctly with the myodbc drivers.
I really wish people would cover that aspect more in their reviews. It's a very important feature to us here. Our hidebound faculty will never move to it of course, but for some tasks like basic mysql database entry, that's what I'm going to have them use.
A written, computerless computer exam is like having somebody prove they're a chef by watching what they do in the bathroom. Even if you can meet some definition of success, it don't mean diddly.
Two things. First, a good chef should know how to create a dish without a recipe -- this means knowing what materials are needed to produce a specific effect and in what proportions. I think it would be applicable to test a chef's knowledge by asking them to write down a recipe using a specific set of ingredients. The good ones and the ones with lots of experience know the way different foods combine in the mouth to create a specific taste, so they don't need a banana and an onion in front of them to know that you won't be able to create a decent desert with those two ingredients.
Secondly, I believe you meant to write "you'll be judging them on their piddly." Or maybe not. Seemed like there should be some joke there. Judging them in bed. . . if you can meet the definition of success, it's still just diddling? Or something like that.
RTF doesn't work for everything. I don't think that RTF has linked footnotes for example. Where I work, education, every document has about 3 footnotes per page on average. If I switched them to rtf, they'd lose the autonumbering. Wine or SO/OO is the only way to go for these documents.
But you are right about the "legacy documents" problem. It exists on all platforms and is a problem for windows users as well. We have people who wrote textbooks in wordperfect 5.1 that have literally thousands of footnotes, are over a thousand pages long, use master documents, and have extensive formatting and design considerations. It is actually easier to let them continue to work in 5.1 for as long as it works than it is to switch them over.
Come to think of it, many of our users would be happy to move to linux if it meant that dosemu would let them use the wordperfect they are all familiar with. But that is just our older faculty, the ones who were early adopters of technology 10 years ago. The younger ones are more likely to use office xp.
My school has this too. The University increased the student computer fee by 15 dollars a semester specifically to pay for the licensing. That's around 150 dollars for a 5 year degree (the average here). Now consider that most of those people have computers that came with a copy of office. Now consider that the academic cost of office is around 180, the deal starts to really suck. Now consider that Word alone is more than enough for the non-tech majors and should never need to be upgraded.
When you take all of that into account, the deal really starts to suck.
For the non-engineers/cs people, a copy of openoffice distributed by the University ITS department is plenty.
Assuming that none of the bootleg cd's are identical to the released cd, it would be nice if gracenote gave every request a unique identifier. Then we could see that A used a bootleg before the cd came out, but when the real cd came out, A bought that and had to re-download the songlist.
I don't like unique identifiers either, but in this case it certainly would be nice if they were able to give us the data that says either "Yes, people who pirated the cd before it came out did purchase the cd within 6 months of release" or "No, people who pirate don't buy the cd within the first 6 months."
A oneway hash of the computer's mac address + ip address as encapsulated in the packet would be easy enough to do so that Gracenote could track instances of contacts without tracking who is at the other end or giving any agency a method to quickly and easily determine who was at the other end.
Forget recording yourself, the desire to put my av collection right on the hard drive is what's driving me to coninually purchase more drives. I just finished filling up a 50 gig drive with a part of my cd collection. The next step would be to put my dvds on a hard drive as well. I could easily use up 1,000 gigs of data that way, and I don't have nearly as extensive a cd/dvd collection as many people.
I'm just waiting for someone to pick a feckin' standard for dvd recordable and get the price to closer to 200 dollars, then I'll be able to do away with approximately 6/7ths of my back up cds.
Equally so, if I only drive 100 miles per month, I should pay a pro-rated insurance fee
Our insurance company asks how far we live from work for exactly that reason. Our rates would be slightly higher if we lived 20 miles from work instead of 2.
As far as the internet usage goes, the same thing. The isp that I use for my email account has a 5 dollar a month e-mail only account, which I've used for years. You get something like 5 hours of dialup service a month with that. Or I could pay 10 for 40 hours and some web space or 20 for unlimited. I believe AOL has a similar 5 hour a month plan as well as a bring-your-own-connnection plan for people with cable modems. Most ISP's have low end, low hour accounts.
Ting!! Your wish has been granted.
You are absolutely right, the artists' time is worth something.
But. Cassettes sell for far less than a cd, even though they aren't that much different in price. I don't know the exact numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that a cd actually costs less to produce than a cassette tape.
How many people here are old enough to remember when it was "18.99 cd/12.99 cassette" for all of those time-life or rhino music compilations. This means that you pay a premium for getting the same "thing" on cd. And as either the article or another poster pointed out, when cd's first came out, the record companies said that the price would drop over time as people bought more of them.
I'm curious to know what percentage of a computer game sale goes to the people who actually produced the game: programmers, artists, musicians, etc.
And who pays 50 bucks for a computer game? I wait 2 years and let the price drop to 10-15 bucks. If I'm lucky, I have a new computer and the game plays really nicely. Imagine the frame rates you'd get playing the original Doom or Duke Nukem on your PIV 2.2 gig with 512 megs of memory and a 65 meg video card.
Shoot, I'm old enough to remember when you had to get software to slow your clock speed down when playing the older games. But now I'm starting to get OT.
Yes, but oncce you have the 100,000 watt antennas, the cost of adding more users is shifted to the listener. It doesn't cost the radio station any more money to broadcast to 1,000 listeners, to 1,000,000 listeners, to 1,000,000,000 listeners, provided they all buy radios and can squeeze into the broadcast range.
Here's an interesting question though: what is the theoretical limit on the number of receivers that can receive a tv or radio broadcast? I suppose part of it would have to do with the number, size and density of the antennas closest to the tower. The density of antennas would have to be so dense that all transmissions would be absorbed.
You know, the first thing I would do after this is call my credit card company and tell them that you've canceled these accounts and that there should be 1 final payment to them and no more after that.
You complained about having them on auto-bill, but that actually makes it easier to protect yourself.
It depends on what you are looking for. If you are looking for British humor of a "wacky" vein, try Robert Rankin. For a little less wacky and a little less style, there's Tom Holt. Of the two, I prefer Rankin. I would say that if you like the non sequiter, bizarre happenings style of Adams, then go with Rankin. The characters aren't as three dimensional, they appear to be along for the ride and there just to be funny.
There's always Pratchett of course if you like British humor. His books are a mix of humor and character development. If you want something with just a lot of jokes and not much characterization, get one of the Discworld books with Rincewind in it.
For pure lunacy, there's always Wodehouse.