Not precisely. When you buy from Dell, it's not a purchase it's a "sales contract". The laws you mention govern implicit contracts, eg posting a sign, money for product, etc. Dell explicitely states in the contract you sign at purcahse that they have the right to cancel it if it was found to be in error.
And you pay for what you get. All my dells (all laptops, all inspirons, all 3 of them) have died within a year of my buying them, and every month or so after that. To be fair, i always got the warranty so for medium-low reliability it works great: every time it breaks, Dell fixes it in a few days.
Eventually I got sick of a few days downtime very month or so on my primary system and just forked over the cash for a thinkpad.
It was a wise decision. I still see TPs around from six or seven years ago, still in working condition.
Then again, my usage profile is...nontypical. I don't drop it but I do carry it from place to place a lot. I wouldn't say I abuse it, but I do use it quite a bit. Inspiron is consumer grade, thinkpad is corporate grade.
Dell desktops, on the other hand, I've never been disappointed by.
I disagree with you. I could understand them not letting the people profit, but I do believe that recording public acts in public spaces* should always be allowed.
* This was private property. I assume that it could be observed from public property however.
"Then they realize it was just a publicity stunt and attempt to delete the pictures of the people apparently filming it."
And that's when they go too far. No. matter. what. happened. Who cares if it's a publicity stunt? The policy should just bring their own cameras. Sure people like me would bitch about the Orwellian state, but it would help solve the problem.
If you're a kid, it may be a usable computer, but I'd advise against getting one for personal use. The sun screen is incredibly awesome and the hand crank is neat. If I could just pay $600 for an eee that could take variable power source and had the OLPC's sun viewable I'd totally do it (yes overpaying, but it would have incredible utility to me).
Thing is, it's a cheap computer (for obvious reasons), big, heavy, and has terrible battery life*
A steal at $200. Not so much at $400. This of course ignores the social impact. Getting one for a kid is not a terrible idea, my cousins seem to get sugar quite intuitively:-)
* Tested last spring. Software improvements may have changed this. Also no suspend to RAM at that time.
Not when progressives need a strawman (facism) or conservatives need one (tax-and-spend liberals). It's harder to blindly hate if you take time to understand complex situations. Far easier to "cast" the opponent into a pre-defined hate-worthy role. That's why we see all this copy-pasta blaming something in a way that makes no sense at all.
At my school, a good rule of thumb is that CS profs hate patents as much as a/.er but EE profs love them and most others see them as good but irritating.
But just like with climate change, it's easy for the gvmt to hire "professors" that profess just about anything, for the right price.
Don't be so sure. Far more people in [usually software] industry hate software patents than you think. It's kind of a collective action problem, in that each company has to grab as many (quantity is really all that matters) patents in the hope it can protect itself against frivolous lawsuits and trade use of its own patents for that of others.
It's often seen as a defensive measure. If you could just eliminate software patents once and for all I agree some industry people would be against it, but it wouldn't be the pile-of-lead consensus among them you have for DRM/etc.
Yep. Turns out that they don't have the right to modify your computer to protect their interests. This is why free demos usually are limited by something other than time, such as featureset.
Cryptographically, there is no way to do what they want. I can just modify the DRM.
I was actually being quite serious, aside from the obvious joke. Often if I open a doc that's much more complicated than headers, fonts, etc things are messed up, tables are half out of the lines, etc. I know my way around a computer so it's less of an issue but I can see people being turned off to switching because it's not a drop in replacement. OOo's saving to.doc is even more problematic, but generally I can get away with just printing to.pdf for that.
Still, it has (partial? not enough data to know, all of those I tried worked perfectly) docx support. I thought that was patented, or are those just the proprietary extensions?
I agree. Unfortunately, this would require our government/not/ granting monopolies to large corporations, which sadly is not an American specialty these days.
This would increase competition, and we have a strange system where the companies will collude to prevent competition (think carving out their own little domains).
I tunnelled all my traffic when I was on Comcast for privacy to a point I trust. I found my browsing significantly faster than that of my parents forwarded. Not to mention my savings with the rate limit:-)
Of course I was forwarding somewhere with a nearly unlimited pipe so that might have something to do with it.
I'm a big FOSS fanboi but OOo does not have mature doc support. It doesn't support any complicated documents, or most of the important embedded attachemtns being sent to me from rich businessmen in Nigeria...if you catch my drift.
Good point, no real world use for ivory tower concepts like encryption, programming language design, machine learning, AI, network flow analysis, compression, etc. What have those damn latte-sipping elitists ever done for the real world?
You should realize that what is developed in industry, FOSS, etc has its roots in the work of theorists. Ever looked through the kernel source tree? You'll find quite a few citations to journal publications and the like.
Last summer I did research on predicting corn yield using satellite imagery months in advance of harvest. It works better than USDA estimates. No use for that, not like you could optimize crops, predict supply and demand to optimally distribute wealth (by whcih I mean play wall street), or anything like that. It was a waste of a summer, and I was overpaid at minimum wage. Damn kids getting paid to do nothing.
Even the people who work on pure theory are producing work that is used by others in CS, who produce work that is useful to engineers. I'm so sick of hearing this kind of elitism from people like you. Just because I don't write web 2.0 apps in Java or RoR or whatever the PHB buzzword is today doesn't mean I'm not contributing to the field.
CS != computer programming. If I were interested in the latter I'd be making a lot more right now. I'm going into CS because I want to do research and am willing to make less to do it.
That said, everyone wants to make some mone yon the side.... (not an offer personally, but there's probably someone like me who'd do it)
Slashdot Mirror
Not precisely. When you buy from Dell, it's not a purchase it's a "sales contract". The laws you mention govern implicit contracts, eg posting a sign, money for product, etc. Dell explicitely states in the contract you sign at purcahse that they have the right to cancel it if it was found to be in error.
And you pay for what you get. All my dells (all laptops, all inspirons, all 3 of them) have died within a year of my buying them, and every month or so after that. To be fair, i always got the warranty so for medium-low reliability it works great: every time it breaks, Dell fixes it in a few days.
Eventually I got sick of a few days downtime very month or so on my primary system and just forked over the cash for a thinkpad.
It was a wise decision. I still see TPs around from six or seven years ago, still in working condition.
Then again, my usage profile is...nontypical. I don't drop it but I do carry it from place to place a lot. I wouldn't say I abuse it, but I do use it quite a bit. Inspiron is consumer grade, thinkpad is corporate grade.
Dell desktops, on the other hand, I've never been disappointed by.
I disagree with you. I could understand them not letting the people profit, but I do believe that recording public acts in public spaces* should always be allowed.
* This was private property. I assume that it could be observed from public property however.
"Then they realize it was just a publicity stunt and attempt to delete the pictures of the people apparently filming it."
And that's when they go too far. No. matter. what. happened. Who cares if it's a publicity stunt? The policy should just bring their own cameras. Sure people like me would bitch about the Orwellian state, but it would help solve the problem.
And you're locked in to the kindle forever, until they stop supporting it at least:/
Not to be a ra-ra anti-DRM fanboi at every story, but it's somewhat relevant here.
They're also more valuble as prominent members, whether brainwashed or cynical.
If you're a kid, it may be a usable computer, but I'd advise against getting one for personal use. The sun screen is incredibly awesome and the hand crank is neat. If I could just pay $600 for an eee that could take variable power source and had the OLPC's sun viewable I'd totally do it (yes overpaying, but it would have incredible utility to me).
Thing is, it's a cheap computer (for obvious reasons), big, heavy, and has terrible battery life*
A steal at $200. Not so much at $400. This of course ignores the social impact. Getting one for a kid is not a terrible idea, my cousins seem to get sugar quite intuitively:-)
* Tested last spring. Software improvements may have changed this. Also no suspend to RAM at that time.
Not when progressives need a strawman (facism) or conservatives need one (tax-and-spend liberals). It's harder to blindly hate if you take time to understand complex situations. Far easier to "cast" the opponent into a pre-defined hate-worthy role. That's why we see all this copy-pasta blaming something in a way that makes no sense at all.
At my school, a good rule of thumb is that CS profs hate patents as much as a /.er but EE profs love them and most others see them as good but irritating.
But just like with climate change, it's easy for the gvmt to hire "professors" that profess just about anything, for the right price.
Where only the corporates are invited. Not to imply that the average professor would necessarily be any better.
Don't be so sure. Far more people in [usually software] industry hate software patents than you think. It's kind of a collective action problem, in that each company has to grab as many (quantity is really all that matters) patents in the hope it can protect itself against frivolous lawsuits and trade use of its own patents for that of others.
It's often seen as a defensive measure. If you could just eliminate software patents once and for all I agree some industry people would be against it, but it wouldn't be the pile-of-lead consensus among them you have for DRM/etc.
Yep. Turns out that they don't have the right to modify your computer to protect their interests. This is why free demos usually are limited by something other than time, such as featureset.
Cryptographically, there is no way to do what they want. I can just modify the DRM.
I was actually being quite serious, aside from the obvious joke. Often if I open a doc that's much more complicated than headers, fonts, etc things are messed up, tables are half out of the lines, etc. I know my way around a computer so it's less of an issue but I can see people being turned off to switching because it's not a drop in replacement. OOo's saving to .doc is even more problematic, but generally I can get away with just printing to .pdf for that.
Still, it has (partial? not enough data to know, all of those I tried worked perfectly) docx support. I thought that was patented, or are those just the proprietary extensions?
I agree. Unfortunately, this would require our government /not/ granting monopolies to large corporations, which sadly is not an American specialty these days.
This would increase competition, and we have a strange system where the companies will collude to prevent competition (think carving out their own little domains).
Some ISPs are hijacking DNS, granted not to torrenting sites. Closest thing I can think
In America, the line between business and government is very fuzzy, especially with Big Content, Big Corn, and Haliburton.
I tunnelled all my traffic when I was on Comcast for privacy to a point I trust. I found my browsing significantly faster than that of my parents forwarded. Not to mention my savings with the rate limit:-)
Of course I was forwarding somewhere with a nearly unlimited pipe so that might have something to do with it.
which everyone will think is halal because he's muslim! A dasterdly plan, surely!
Richard Stallman announces he would prefer that firms release all their code under the GPL or one of its variants.
I'm a big FOSS fanboi but OOo does not have mature doc support. It doesn't support any complicated documents, or most of the important embedded attachemtns being sent to me from rich businessmen in Nigeria...if you catch my drift.
I couldn't find any papyrus so I chisled my message on this little pyramid.
3 scott adams
Good point, no real world use for ivory tower concepts like encryption, programming language design, machine learning, AI, network flow analysis, compression, etc. What have those damn latte-sipping elitists ever done for the real world?
You should realize that what is developed in industry, FOSS, etc has its roots in the work of theorists. Ever looked through the kernel source tree? You'll find quite a few citations to journal publications and the like.
Last summer I did research on predicting corn yield using satellite imagery months in advance of harvest. It works better than USDA estimates. No use for that, not like you could optimize crops, predict supply and demand to optimally distribute wealth (by whcih I mean play wall street), or anything like that. It was a waste of a summer, and I was overpaid at minimum wage. Damn kids getting paid to do nothing.
Even the people who work on pure theory are producing work that is used by others in CS, who produce work that is useful to engineers. I'm so sick of hearing this kind of elitism from people like you. Just because I don't write web 2.0 apps in Java or RoR or whatever the PHB buzzword is today doesn't mean I'm not contributing to the field.
Not all of us are that bad, but I do have to say the average physics major is probably a better programmer, at least of the ones I've met.
CS != computer programming. If I were interested in the latter I'd be making a lot more right now. I'm going into CS because I want to do research and am willing to make less to do it.
That said, everyone wants to make some mone yon the side.... (not an offer personally, but there's probably someone like me who'd do it)
They sell girlfriends on amazon? Is that legal?
As of oct 15, it can break 8.0. (Requiem version 1.8). It is, however, mac only for now.
You can't stop the signal.