and frankly, suspicion of the crimes you listed simply because you're carrying some sort of manuscript is unlikely to be recognized reasonable
And that is where I think you are being naive.
You would have to prove that the TSA agent was deliberately trying to set you up, and not merely an idiotic bureaucrat. And that is an insanely difficult thing to prove (unless you happen to have a recording of him in the airport lounge joking about how he likes to screw with people for the fun of it. )
Next time, maybe a better approach would be (disclaimer, IANAL): "Am I being detained?"
TSA: Yes. Duh.
followed by "I'd like you to tell me what laws you are accusing me of breaking"
Conspiracy to commit murder, conspiracy to destroy buildings and property, conspiracy to commit jaywalking, conspiracy to....
"I won't make any statements until I have spoken to a lawyer"
TSA: Cool with us.
(long wait) (optional: arrest on above charges, booking, transfer to jail)
(Lawyer arrives)
TSA: Okay, having conferred with your lawyer, we're dropping the charges. Have a nice day.
Lawyer (to dude): Okay, where do I send my bill? ----
Seriously, what would that have accomplished? Not that he accomplished anything anyway. The point is, justice and due process of law are slow and inconvenient.
No policy is likely to be changed as a result of this incident; law-abiding citizens are still going to be stopped in airports for carrying 'strange' books, scripts, magazines, etc. All this shows is that TSA agents can act in an arbitrary manner with repercussions.
And here we have an example: An American thinks his local usage is just "the default" for everyone. Light switches, for instance in Australia, are up for off and down for on.
Where did the AC assert that? Up-on/down-off is certainly the default in the US, and slashdot is a US-centric website by its own admission. I see nowhere where the AC expressed the opinion that this applied "for everyone" outside the US.
Your rant about English is also unwarranted. Did an English-speaker kick your puppy recently?
tienanmen tienanmen tienanmen tienanmen tienanmen
here, they may look at it no more, talk freely
Oh, everybody in China knows what Tiananmen Square is. It's a beautiful plaza in Beijing, not secret or forbidden at all. Nice tourist spot. Mao's mausoleum is right next door. You should go there sometime.
And in Tiananmen Square, in 1989, nothing at all happened. Why do you Westerners use that name as if it's some sort of forbidden thing?
What does installing parts have to do with licensing?
The OS X EULA doesn't say anything to forbid replacing parts or upgrading. You can replace, upgrade, or swap out anything you can get your hands on inside that case. In the towers, that's usually a no-screwdriver task, too.
Unfortunately, many people probably follow the Winston Zeddemore philosophy of self-selection:
When someone asks you if you are a god, you say yes.
If you ask someone whether they're an expert or not, many of them will say yes. More importantly, most people will just follow the person in front of them blindly, or go to the shortest line.
Last time I was out of the US I paid $65 for a doctors visit and two prescriptions TOTAL. Open system. No govt price fixing. No government subsidies. My friend had a tooth extracted there, cost $150.
Please, AC, give us the name of this healthcare utopia. Inquiring minds want to know.
Did you notice, for example, that it took a computer company -- that had never had anything to do with cellular -- entering the market to finally get a smartphone that didn't suck into the US market?
While I take your meaning, I wouldn't say that Blackberries "sucked." True, they were boring business tools and not the sexy web-browsing media players that the iPhone and its successors are, but there were a few decent data-capable phones in the US before it.
Ok, so is there any reason why a proper native OpenJDK port (that works in all the browsers and doesn't use X11) wouldnt be possible? Is it just a case of "patches wanted" or are there undocumented/hidden/internal parts of OSX that only Apple can use that are needed for a full JVM?
I don't see why there would be any special legal or technical impediments over and above porting any other major codebase to the Mac. But, given the difficulty Apple has had doing the exact same thing with its official releases, it would not be a trivial set of patches. My understanding is that Apple creates an extensive mapping between Java GUI toolkits and its own, and also exposes a subset of OS X native APIs through custom com.apple packages. You could probably skip the latter without too much complaint, but the former would be an undertaking.
Getting a browser plugin working probably be much easier, since there wouldn't be as much widget toolkit mapping to write.
This is just my armchair analysis, so I may be wildly off base.
...Its not like Sun needs Apple in order to produce Java for the Mac.
Sun did a JVM for the Classic Mac OS, and by all accounts it sucked. As in, it was barely usable. This is why Apple (contractually) locked Sun out of delivering Java on OS X. At the time, Apple was bullish on Java, and invested some considerable resources making OS X's JVM integrated into the rest of the OS.
Unfortunately, Apple no longer gives a shit about Java, and it shows. But Sun is still locked out, as far as I know.
Or is this like the graphics drivers where only Apple has access to the "secret bits" necessary for a JVM to do all the things that the current Mac JVM does? How hard would it be to just port OpenJDK/IceTea/whatever to Mac and be done with it?
There already is. It's the only way to get Java 6 on PowerPC and 32-bit Intel Macs, or on 10.4.x
Unfortunately, it relies on X11 for its GUI, which is generally a big non-starter on the Mac. Also, I don't believe it's possible to use it as the JVM for Java applets in a browser, probably for the same reason.
How does the zoom feature work when you have different sized documents (e.g., multiple tabs in your browser, or different sized images being edited)? If the window changes size everytime you switch between the documents, that could be disconcerting, and especially a problem if it caused the position of GUI elements to change (a big no no in UI design).
It only resizes when you click the Zoom button (Actually, you'd have to click it twice, since the first click would restore the pre-zoomed size.)
In applications that support tabbed browsing or editing, this does lead to content being redrawn and re-laid-out when you switch tabs. Just as if ou'd resized the frame manually before switching tabs.
In practice, with browsers, people usually settle on a default window size that suits their browsing habits after a time. The Zoom button is typically only called upon when the default size is too small.
I'm talking foot deep steel reinforced concrete baby....Of course we didn't have the freeze/thaw cycles people do farther north so I could be talking out of my backside, but these things appeared well-nigh indestructible.
In my experience, there is a problem with concrete roads and freeze/thaw cycles. Concrete doesn't "flow" with temperature changes the way asphalt does, so it needs expansion joints cut into it at intervals. Water gets into these, freezes, and starts cracking the concrete. The result is, after a decade or so, a rhythmic kathunk-kathunk-kathunk sound as you drive over the joints.
Notice that I said "after a decade or so." I'm pretty sure they still last at least as long as asphalt, if not longer, before becoming rough.
You've never done image editing, programming, websurfing, watching video, or maybe just wanted to maximize a system status window fullscreen?
You've never used a Mac, I take it.
The Mac OS has a zoom button, marked with a + icon, next to the close and minimize buttons. It's normally green (unless you turn the colors off.)
This button serves to resize the window to fit its contents, up to the limit of the physical screen size. Often, this does actually fill the screen (whenever the window's contents are as large as, or larger than, the physical screen's resolution.) At other times, it will maximize only in one direction (usually vertically, as with a long text document or web page.)
A good portion of the time, though, it just makes the window large enough to show the contents without scroll bars.
So if you're doing (as you said) image editing, and the image you're editing is a low-res 640x480 image, it will NOT fill the screen. The window will jump to exactly 640x480 pixels (plus space for the title bar, toolbars, and other adornments.) Unless you're zoomed in at, say, 2x resolution, in which case it would size itself to 1280x960, and so on, until you run out of pixels on your monitor.
This is incredibly useful when you have a big widescreen monitor (the kind Apple loves to sell and tends to bundle) Most web pages, for example, are designed (poorly) to fill a 1024-pixel-wide screen, and they end up with a lot of empty white space off to the right when maximized on a widescreen display.
On the other hand, some applications on the Mac make their own rules. iTunes, for example. But that's a problem with the implementation (Apple's, in this case) not with the concept, which normally works pretty well.
And as you would expect, the Zoom button in Safari resizes the window to the limit of the scren, minus the menu bar (and Dock if shown.) That page looks great on a widescreen display, by the way.
On the other hand, here's a website that looks awful when maximized on a widescren display: http://www.cnn.com/
Safari on a Mac, if you let it do its thing, will zoom the page vertically, but leave half of your horizontal space available for other things.
Having to press a key on the keyboard and click has got to be the most entertaining solution I have seen as 'good' in a long time.
Almost as bad as having essential commands hidden in an invisible menu whose contents are constantly changing, instead of a global menu bar in a fixed position.
So google breaks the law every time they spider private pages where the owner has neglected to use htaccess ?
Well, what exactly is a "private page" when the owner has neglected to use.htaccess? Seems to me that would be a public page.
Look at the real world: When am I trespassing when I go onto Wal-Mart's private property? If I'm there to buy beer, I'm fine. If I go there with no intent to transact business, and just hang out in the parking lot, it's loitering. If I go past the "Employees Only" sign and start poking around in the stockroom, even if it's unlocked, even if I don't steal anything, it's trespassing.
Printing a Word doc at Kinkos is like hiring chef Emeril Lagasse to serve you McDonalds food on a silver platter.
If you're going all the way to Kinkos to print something professionally, you probably want some control over what the output is going to look like. Word gives you none. A Word document can look different on two computers running the same version of Windows and the same version of Word with the same fonts, just because your default printer is different.
First of all what you are describing is not cybersquating - it's no trademark, not a domain typo - there is no bad faith....
That may be the legal definition of cybersquatting, but the popular definition is what you describe: buying domains in the hopes of flipping them for a higher price later.
For what it's worth, most of the unsolicited commercial bulk email I receive isn't legally Spam, either. That doesn't mean that the jerks who send it aren't spammers.
Firstly, I'm not a manager, middle or otherwise, but I'll play along anyway.
How am I supposed to justify the time and/or company resources to my "upper middle" managers? Maybe it'll make the company look good (that's why companies have "a way of making charitable contributions.") So if your company is in the software or consulting business, it might make sense to get your name out in the community. But if your company is, say, a bank, a restaurant chain, or a manufacturer of water pumps, how do you justify your use of company resources to help with some software project?
As far as the "All take and no give just makes you a jerk" argument...you really are new to the corporate world, aren't you? Companies don't give out of the kindness of their hearts. They do it to improve their image. And donating to the save-the-baby-whales fund improves image much better than the improve-the-free-software foundation.
Apple are really being dumb by sticking with their own hardware, imho. They could probably kill windows overnight if they invested in mainstream hardware drivers, and got quickly to the critical mass where hardware manufacturers have to develop drivers for them.
Yeah. Just like BeOS. And OS/2. (Backed by IBM, no less.)
And NEXTSTEP. Remember, Steve Jobs tried the for-profit commodity-OS approach, and he failed. I'm sure he learned his lesson.
Linux survives because it's free, and doesn't have to make a profit. Apple does, and Apple knows it can't make a profit by challenging Microsoft to a fair fight on its own turf.
Slashdot Mirror
and frankly, suspicion of the crimes you listed simply because you're carrying some sort of manuscript is unlikely to be recognized reasonable
And that is where I think you are being naive.
You would have to prove that the TSA agent was deliberately trying to set you up, and not merely an idiotic bureaucrat. And that is an insanely difficult thing to prove (unless you happen to have a recording of him in the airport lounge joking about how he likes to screw with people for the fun of it. )
Let me flesh out that scenario for you.
Next time, maybe a better approach would be (disclaimer, IANAL): "Am I being detained?"
TSA: Yes. Duh.
followed by "I'd like you to tell me what laws you are accusing me of breaking"
Conspiracy to commit murder, conspiracy to destroy buildings and property, conspiracy to commit jaywalking, conspiracy to....
"I won't make any statements until I have spoken to a lawyer"
TSA: Cool with us.
(long wait)
(optional: arrest on above charges, booking, transfer to jail)
(Lawyer arrives)
TSA: Okay, having conferred with your lawyer, we're dropping the charges. Have a nice day.
Lawyer (to dude): Okay, where do I send my bill?
----
Seriously, what would that have accomplished? Not that he accomplished anything anyway. The point is, justice and due process of law are slow and inconvenient.
No policy is likely to be changed as a result of this incident; law-abiding citizens are still going to be stopped in airports for carrying 'strange' books, scripts, magazines, etc. All this shows is that TSA agents can act in an arbitrary manner with repercussions.
Yup. We knew that already.
Ships are female. Spirit is (kind of) a spaceship. There you go.
And here we have an example: An American thinks his local usage is just "the default" for everyone. Light switches, for instance in Australia, are up for off and down for on.
Where did the AC assert that? Up-on/down-off is certainly the default in the US, and slashdot is a US-centric website by its own admission. I see nowhere where the AC expressed the opinion that this applied "for everyone" outside the US.
Your rant about English is also unwarranted. Did an English-speaker kick your puppy recently?
tienanmen
tienanmen tienanmen tienanmen tienanmen
here, they may look at it no more, talk freely
Oh, everybody in China knows what Tiananmen Square is. It's a beautiful plaza in Beijing, not secret or forbidden at all. Nice tourist spot. Mao's mausoleum is right next door. You should go there sometime.
And in Tiananmen Square, in 1989, nothing at all happened. Why do you Westerners use that name as if it's some sort of forbidden thing?
What does installing parts have to do with licensing?
The OS X EULA doesn't say anything to forbid replacing parts or upgrading. You can replace, upgrade, or swap out anything you can get your hands on inside that case. In the towers, that's usually a no-screwdriver task, too.
Unfortunately, many people probably follow the Winston Zeddemore philosophy of self-selection:
When someone asks you if you are a god, you say yes.
If you ask someone whether they're an expert or not, many of them will say yes. More importantly, most people will just follow the person in front of them blindly, or go to the shortest line.
The Chinese and Europeans are the folks I move to the top of the interview list.
This gets modded interesting? I guess because there's no "-1, Illegal" mod.
Still, I appreciate your honesty.
If you RTFA, you will find that Manomio contacted Apple Europe before developing the app and they "seemed really excited".
Which could mean anything down to "I went to an Apple reseller and blathered about my idea to a salesdroid, and he seemed to like the idea."
Last time I was out of the US I paid $65 for a doctors visit and two prescriptions TOTAL. Open system. No govt price fixing. No government subsidies. My friend had a tooth extracted there, cost $150.
Please, AC, give us the name of this healthcare utopia. Inquiring minds want to know.
Did you notice, for example, that it took a computer company -- that had never had anything to do with cellular -- entering the market to finally get a smartphone that didn't suck into the US market?
While I take your meaning, I wouldn't say that Blackberries "sucked." True, they were boring business tools and not the sexy web-browsing media players that the iPhone and its successors are, but there were a few decent data-capable phones in the US before it.
Ok, so is there any reason why a proper native OpenJDK port (that works in all the browsers and doesn't use X11) wouldnt be possible? Is it just a case of "patches wanted" or are there undocumented/hidden/internal parts of OSX that only Apple can use that are needed for a full JVM?
I don't see why there would be any special legal or technical impediments over and above porting any other major codebase to the Mac. But, given the difficulty Apple has had doing the exact same thing with its official releases, it would not be a trivial set of patches. My understanding is that Apple creates an extensive mapping between Java GUI toolkits and its own, and also exposes a subset of OS X native APIs through custom com.apple packages. You could probably skip the latter without too much complaint, but the former would be an undertaking.
Getting a browser plugin working probably be much easier, since there wouldn't be as much widget toolkit mapping to write.
This is just my armchair analysis, so I may be wildly off base.
...Its not like Sun needs Apple in order to produce Java for the Mac.
Sun did a JVM for the Classic Mac OS, and by all accounts it sucked. As in, it was barely usable. This is why Apple (contractually) locked Sun out of delivering Java on OS X. At the time, Apple was bullish on Java, and invested some considerable resources making OS X's JVM integrated into the rest of the OS.
Unfortunately, Apple no longer gives a shit about Java, and it shows. But Sun is still locked out, as far as I know.
Or is this like the graphics drivers where only Apple has access to the "secret bits" necessary for a JVM to do all the things that the current Mac JVM does?
How hard would it be to just port OpenJDK/IceTea/whatever to Mac and be done with it?
There already is. It's the only way to get Java 6 on PowerPC and 32-bit Intel Macs, or on 10.4.x
Unfortunately, it relies on X11 for its GUI, which is generally a big non-starter on the Mac. Also, I don't believe it's possible to use it as the JVM for Java applets in a browser, probably for the same reason.
How does the zoom feature work when you have different sized documents (e.g., multiple tabs in your browser, or different sized images being edited)? If the window changes size everytime you switch between the documents, that could be disconcerting, and especially a problem if it caused the position of GUI elements to change (a big no no in UI design).
It only resizes when you click the Zoom button (Actually, you'd have to click it twice, since the first click would restore the pre-zoomed size.)
In applications that support tabbed browsing or editing, this does lead to content being redrawn and re-laid-out when you switch tabs. Just as if ou'd resized the frame manually before switching tabs.
In practice, with browsers, people usually settle on a default window size that suits their browsing habits after a time. The Zoom button is typically only called upon when the default size is too small.
I'm talking foot deep steel reinforced concrete baby....Of course we didn't have the freeze/thaw cycles people do farther north so I could be talking out of my backside, but these things appeared well-nigh indestructible.
In my experience, there is a problem with concrete roads and freeze/thaw cycles. Concrete doesn't "flow" with temperature changes the way asphalt does, so it needs expansion joints cut into it at intervals. Water gets into these, freezes, and starts cracking the concrete. The result is, after a decade or so, a rhythmic kathunk-kathunk-kathunk sound as you drive over the joints.
Notice that I said "after a decade or so." I'm pretty sure they still last at least as long as asphalt, if not longer, before becoming rough.
1. Fake own death
Well, it worked for Elvis.
Sure it did. His house is open for public tours!
And what is "maximize" good for.
You've never done image editing, programming, websurfing, watching video, or maybe just wanted to maximize a system status window fullscreen?
You've never used a Mac, I take it.
The Mac OS has a zoom button, marked with a + icon, next to the close and minimize buttons. It's normally green (unless you turn the colors off.)
This button serves to resize the window to fit its contents, up to the limit of the physical screen size. Often, this does actually fill the screen (whenever the window's contents are as large as, or larger than, the physical screen's resolution.) At other times, it will maximize only in one direction (usually vertically, as with a long text document or web page.)
A good portion of the time, though, it just makes the window large enough to show the contents without scroll bars.
So if you're doing (as you said) image editing, and the image you're editing is a low-res 640x480 image, it will NOT fill the screen. The window will jump to exactly 640x480 pixels (plus space for the title bar, toolbars, and other adornments.) Unless you're zoomed in at, say, 2x resolution, in which case it would size itself to 1280x960, and so on, until you run out of pixels on your monitor.
This is incredibly useful when you have a big widescreen monitor (the kind Apple loves to sell and tends to bundle) Most web pages, for example, are designed (poorly) to fill a 1024-pixel-wide screen, and they end up with a lot of empty white space off to the right when maximized on a widescreen display.
On the other hand, some applications on the Mac make their own rules. iTunes, for example. But that's a problem with the implementation (Apple's, in this case) not with the concept, which normally works pretty well.
Here's a website I like to have fullscreen regularly (warning, it's a biiig animated gif): http://radar.weather.gov/Conus/full_loop.php
And as you would expect, the Zoom button in Safari resizes the window to the limit of the scren, minus the menu bar (and Dock if shown.) That page looks great on a widescreen display, by the way.
On the other hand, here's a website that looks awful when maximized on a widescren display:
http://www.cnn.com/
Safari on a Mac, if you let it do its thing, will zoom the page vertically, but leave half of your horizontal space available for other things.
Having to press a key on the keyboard and click has got to be the most entertaining solution I have seen as 'good' in a long time.
Almost as bad as having essential commands hidden in an invisible menu whose contents are constantly changing, instead of a global menu bar in a fixed position.
So google breaks the law every time they spider private pages where the owner has neglected to use htaccess ?
Well, what exactly is a "private page" when the owner has neglected to use .htaccess? Seems to me that would be a public page.
Look at the real world: When am I trespassing when I go onto Wal-Mart's private property? If I'm there to buy beer, I'm fine. If I go there with no intent to transact business, and just hang out in the parking lot, it's loitering. If I go past the "Employees Only" sign and start poking around in the stockroom, even if it's unlocked, even if I don't steal anything, it's trespassing.
kinkos can print word docs
Printing a Word doc at Kinkos is like hiring chef Emeril Lagasse to serve you McDonalds food on a silver platter.
If you're going all the way to Kinkos to print something professionally, you probably want some control over what the output is going to look like. Word gives you none. A Word document can look different on two computers running the same version of Windows and the same version of Word with the same fonts, just because your default printer is different.
In all honesty, I agree with you. Always give the human an out. Let the computer guide, but let the human decide.
But... tell me if you will, what is most common cause of aviation accidents? Is it, by any chance, human error?
Thought so.
Because kids choosing a school based on Playboy's party ranking are the kind of kids that get into MIT.
That was the joke, yes. Congratulations, you got it!
First of all what you are describing is not cybersquating - it's no trademark, not a domain typo - there is no bad faith. ...
That may be the legal definition of cybersquatting, but the popular definition is what you describe: buying domains in the hopes of flipping them for a higher price later.
For what it's worth, most of the unsolicited commercial bulk email I receive isn't legally Spam, either. That doesn't mean that the jerks who send it aren't spammers.
Firstly, I'm not a manager, middle or otherwise, but I'll play along anyway.
How am I supposed to justify the time and/or company resources to my "upper middle" managers? Maybe it'll make the company look good (that's why companies have "a way of making charitable contributions.") So if your company is in the software or consulting business, it might make sense to get your name out in the community. But if your company is, say, a bank, a restaurant chain, or a manufacturer of water pumps, how do you justify your use of company resources to help with some software project?
As far as the "All take and no give just makes you a jerk" argument...you really are new to the corporate world, aren't you? Companies don't give out of the kindness of their hearts. They do it to improve their image. And donating to the save-the-baby-whales fund improves image much better than the improve-the-free-software foundation.
Apple are really being dumb by sticking with their own hardware, imho. They could probably kill windows overnight if they invested in mainstream hardware drivers, and got quickly to the critical mass where hardware manufacturers have to develop drivers for them.
Yeah. Just like BeOS. And OS/2. (Backed by IBM, no less.)
And NEXTSTEP. Remember, Steve Jobs tried the for-profit commodity-OS approach, and he failed. I'm sure he learned his lesson.
Linux survives because it's free, and doesn't have to make a profit. Apple does, and Apple knows it can't make a profit by challenging Microsoft to a fair fight on its own turf.