The problem is that they want to have their cake and eat it too. If a site is easy to use, then anyone can use it in any way, including ways that you might not like. If you make it harder, you can enforce a particular usage pattern at the expense of ease-of-use. You can't lock something up and have it open at the same time.
Using your logic, if I put up a billboard, you don't have the right to look at it unless you agree to my terms and conditions.
This is bullshit.
If you publish something in a public forum, you are, by definition, giving up some control over it.
You can't set out a stack of free catalogs and then try to dictate how people can use them. If you give me a catelog, I don't have to use it to auy your crap -- I'm perfectly within my rights to shred it and use it for kitty litter if I so desire.
More appropos to deep linking, I'm within my rights to tell other people that item X is on page Y of your catalog, allowing them to go directly to the thing they want rather than having to read through it page by page.
The grandparent post wasn't about "wannabes", it was about SEASONED PROFESSIONALS (career US Navy Officers) who managed to run a fully-equipped and functional warship aground due to an over-reliance on fancy tech instead of using their eyes and practicing good old-fashioned seamanship.
GPS is a navigational AIDE. It should augment, not replace, traditional methods. Redundancy is a Good Thing when lives are on the line.
A letter is more than words on a page. It's a physical thing. Sometimes, just having the words is enough; other times, you need the actual physical item (EG, a signed contract or a Christmas card, to give two examples).
Even with GPS, lighthouses are still vital to maritime safety. Your GPS reciever can go tits-up, but as long as someone on the boat has one good eye, you can see the lighthouse.
Yes, maintaining a lighthouse network is expensive, but it's cheaper than cleaning up the mess you'd get if a supertanker ran aground.
If you want to troll for misogyny in corporate america, look for a thread about treatment of Martha Stewart Living vs Enron execs...
Actually, I think that Martha Stewart's treatment compared to Ken Lay and crew has far less to do with gender than politics. Martha is a vocal democratic supporter, but she's not really connected with anyone in power. Kenny is in tight with the Republican bigwigs.
Their old (Pre-Carly) printers were good -- the old LaserJet IIIs and similar vintage were built like tanks and are virtually unkillable. The past few years the quality has dropped noticably on even their high-end printers, and their low-end consumer crap is so shoddy that they rarely last a year. When the ink costs almost as much as a new printer, you know something's very wrong.
Nothing Owellian or particuarly revisionistic about it... it's just standard PR spin doctoring. What would be Orwellian revisionism is if they tried to say that she was never CEO.
The whole thing smells like a palace coup. Of course the PR droids will spin it to make it sound nice.
I mean, really -- how hard a problem is this to actually solve in a final and complete manner?
Managing a true peer-to-peer network with no master node is, worst case, O(N^2) complexity, assuming every node has to talk to every other node. In other words, the overhead of managing the network increases exponentially as the number of nodes increases. You can probably get it down to something more reasonable like O(N log(N)) with some clever algorithms, but it's still a pretty ugly problem. There's a good reason we use heirarchical networks.
The lawyers bring the cases to the court but ultimately it's the jury that ends up awarding the money.
And who selects the jury? That's right, the lawyers.
Face it, most people are credulous fools who can't tell when they're being bamboozled. During jury selection, the lawyer's job is to identify and exclude any potential juror who'll be immune to his con job; that way, all he has to worry about is putting on a better performance than the opposing council. A juror who actually thinks is a liability to both sides.
If the sheep go where they're lead, is it their fault or the shepherds?
I always think it is a shame that this county (US) doesn't have a party that thinks like the Economist.
We used to, until the fundies took over the Republican party. Perot's vision of the Reform Party would have been pretty close to this, IMHO.
The fiscal conservitives are sticking with the Republican party out of inertia. They should either kick the bible-thumpers out, or jump ship themselves and start a new party under the banner of fiscal responsibility. Shrub and his borrow-and-spend killed whatever lingering illusion that the Republican party represents fiscal conservitives and smaller government.
So all Google has to do is change a couple lines of code so that the search term "louis vuiton" is ignored, just like it ignores "as", "the", etc.
Google could easily make it a policy that if you sue them, they blacklist you. They have NO obligation (other than to their shareholders) to index your site. It's their servers and their software, so they can do whatever they want with it. Actully, you could even make a strong argument that they have a fiduciary obligation to their shareholders to avoid lawsuits, so blacklisting the trademarks of hostile companies is just good business practice.
If it were me, I'd say something like: You're not happy that your trademarked words can result in your competitors' pages coming back in the search results or adsense? No problem, well make it so that someone entering your trademark as a search term brings up a message that says "The following words are protected trademarks and were not included in your search: $TRADEMARK". Hope you're happy now, asshat.
Almost no one really cares about getting caught illegally downloadin' music/movies/tv shows/etc from the web either.
Almost no one really cares about getting busted for smoking dope, either, because so many people (Estimated 20% of the adult population) do it at least occasionally. However, that dosn't change the fact that you can get your ass thrown in jail for doing it. Just because enforcement of a law is sporadic and arbitrary doesn't mean that it's toothless or that you're not running a risk (however small) by breaking it.
The fact that it'd be illegal to use the software would not bother anyone...
You must not have been paying attention. It'll bother a lot of people; generally the same kind of people who're bothered by "crimes" like visiting a prostitute or smoking a doobie.
Marijuana possession is illegal in most of the US. While the law is widely ignored, there are still people who are serving time in PMITA prison for violating it. How'd you like to be Tyrone's bitch for 3-5 years because you got busted for "posession of software with intent to distribute"?
The problem with the broadcast flag is that it will be illegal to sell hardware which does not honor the broadcast flag, so (in theory) any hdtv card you buy after this summer won't be able to be used in a mythTV box.
Of course, any programmer knows that if you can write the decoded video stream to the screen device, you can write it to a disk device just as easily. However, you can pretty well count on the fact that the law (DCMA and others) will be used to criminilize any software which can be used to work around the broadcast flag.
Grandparent was correct. It's impossible to give good advice without having more detailed requirements.
What's the actual budget? How much downtime is acceptable and what damage will be done when it does go down? How much traffic will the network carry, and is it bursty or steady? ETC.
Yes, it's a been standard clause in the employement agreement for just about every development job I've taken. It's also one I make them amend before I agree to take the job.
These things ARE negotiable, and you're a fool if you don't negotiate. I've only had one potential employer refuse to remove a "everything you do outside the office belongs to us" clause, and that was a BIG RED FLAG which told me I did *not* want to work there.
Job interviews work both ways: they're checking you out to see if they want you to work for them, you need to be checking them out to make sure you wan to work for them. Even if you *ARE* so desperate that you'd take the job for minimum wage and on the condition that you'll service the boss orally 3 times a week, you never let *THEM* know that. Whenever you're offered a job, you always let them think that you have another offer on the table.
A better analogy is pipes and plumbers. The pipes are what actually bring you the water and carries the shit away, but it's the skill of the plumber which keeps you from having a basement full of sewage.
Even if all the pipes are free, there's still a job for plumbers. If you don't know how to do it yourself, you need to hire plumber to put all those free pipes them together into something that's going to work for for you. When a pipe breaks and starts spraying you with a foul-smelling mess, you'll be grateful to pay someone who knows what he's doing to come in and repair the damage and clean up the mess.
There is a difference between *COLLOQUIAL* English and *FORMAL* English. In colloquial language, rules are flexible and whatever gets your point across is acceptable. In formal language there are definate rules as to what is correct and incorrect. There is a time and a place where each language form is appropriate.
When in casual conversation with your friends, using colloquial language and slang is entirely appropriate. Using colloquial language in a formal setting (written or oral) makes it appear that you are an uneducated drooling moron. When in doubt, you should generally use formal language.
Or can you really find no better use for your time than to watch TV shows that you hate?
Well, one could watch it week after week hoping that it will magically stop sucking.
Personally, I stopped watching it after the half-dozen episodes. Oh, I'd check back a couple times a year to see if it had finally stopped sucking; but it never did, at least from my random sample.
Trek died with Gene Roddenbery. The undead abomination that kept shambling along after his death needed to have a stake driven through it's heart long ago, and now it appears that has finally happened. Maybe now Gene can stop spinning in his (metaphorical) grave.
If you're going to mourn the passing of a show, save your energy for something worthwhile like Firefly, B5, or Farscape.
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My knows it's wrong to get up on the kitchen counter -- but she does it anyway, and gives me a guilty look when I bust her for being up there.
The problem is that they want to have their cake and eat it too. If a site is easy to use, then anyone can use it in any way, including ways that you might not like. If you make it harder, you can enforce a particular usage pattern at the expense of ease-of-use. You can't lock something up and have it open at the same time.
This is bullshit.
If you publish something in a public forum, you are, by definition, giving up some control over it.
You can't set out a stack of free catalogs and then try to dictate how people can use them. If you give me a catelog, I don't have to use it to auy your crap -- I'm perfectly within my rights to shred it and use it for kitty litter if I so desire.
More appropos to deep linking, I'm within my rights to tell other people that item X is on page Y of your catalog, allowing them to go directly to the thing they want rather than having to read through it page by page.
GPS is a navigational AIDE. It should augment, not replace, traditional methods. Redundancy is a Good Thing when lives are on the line.
A letter is more than words on a page. It's a physical thing. Sometimes, just having the words is enough; other times, you need the actual physical item (EG, a signed contract or a Christmas card, to give two examples).
Even with GPS, lighthouses are still vital to maritime safety. Your GPS reciever can go tits-up, but as long as someone on the boat has one good eye, you can see the lighthouse.
Yes, maintaining a lighthouse network is expensive, but it's cheaper than cleaning up the mess you'd get if a supertanker ran aground.
Their old (Pre-Carly) printers were good -- the old LaserJet IIIs and similar vintage were built like tanks and are virtually unkillable. The past few years the quality has dropped noticably on even their high-end printers, and their low-end consumer crap is so shoddy that they rarely last a year. When the ink costs almost as much as a new printer, you know something's very wrong.
The whole thing smells like a palace coup. Of course the PR droids will spin it to make it sound nice.
Face it, most people are credulous fools who can't tell when they're being bamboozled. During jury selection, the lawyer's job is to identify and exclude any potential juror who'll be immune to his con job; that way, all he has to worry about is putting on a better performance than the opposing council. A juror who actually thinks is a liability to both sides.
If the sheep go where they're lead, is it their fault or the shepherds?
The fiscal conservitives are sticking with the Republican party out of inertia. They should either kick the bible-thumpers out, or jump ship themselves and start a new party under the banner of fiscal responsibility. Shrub and his borrow-and-spend killed whatever lingering illusion that the Republican party represents fiscal conservitives and smaller government.
Google could easily make it a policy that if you sue them, they blacklist you. They have NO obligation (other than to their shareholders) to index your site. It's their servers and their software, so they can do whatever they want with it. Actully, you could even make a strong argument that they have a fiduciary obligation to their shareholders to avoid lawsuits, so blacklisting the trademarks of hostile companies is just good business practice.
If it were me, I'd say something like: You're not happy that your trademarked words can result in your competitors' pages coming back in the search results or adsense? No problem, well make it so that someone entering your trademark as a search term brings up a message that says "The following words are protected trademarks and were not included in your search: $TRADEMARK". Hope you're happy now, asshat.
Marijuana possession is illegal in most of the US. While the law is widely ignored, there are still people who are serving time in PMITA prison for violating it. How'd you like to be Tyrone's bitch for 3-5 years because you got busted for "posession of software with intent to distribute"?
That's got to be some kind of record.
Of course, any programmer knows that if you can write the decoded video stream to the screen device, you can write it to a disk device just as easily. However, you can pretty well count on the fact that the law (DCMA and others) will be used to criminilize any software which can be used to work around the broadcast flag.
What's the actual budget? How much downtime is acceptable and what damage will be done when it does go down? How much traffic will the network carry, and is it bursty or steady? ETC.
These things ARE negotiable, and you're a fool if you don't negotiate. I've only had one potential employer refuse to remove a "everything you do outside the office belongs to us" clause, and that was a BIG RED FLAG which told me I did *not* want to work there.
Job interviews work both ways: they're checking you out to see if they want you to work for them, you need to be checking them out to make sure you wan to work for them. Even if you *ARE* so desperate that you'd take the job for minimum wage and on the condition that you'll service the boss orally 3 times a week, you never let *THEM* know that. Whenever you're offered a job, you always let them think that you have another offer on the table.
Even if all the pipes are free, there's still a job for plumbers. If you don't know how to do it yourself, you need to hire plumber to put all those free pipes them together into something that's going to work for for you. When a pipe breaks and starts spraying you with a foul-smelling mess, you'll be grateful to pay someone who knows what he's doing to come in and repair the damage and clean up the mess.
When in casual conversation with your friends, using colloquial language and slang is entirely appropriate. Using colloquial language in a formal setting (written or oral) makes it appear that you are an uneducated drooling moron. When in doubt, you should generally use formal language.
Personally, I stopped watching it after the half-dozen episodes. Oh, I'd check back a couple times a year to see if it had finally stopped sucking; but it never did, at least from my random sample.
Trek died with Gene Roddenbery. The undead abomination that kept shambling along after his death needed to have a stake driven through it's heart long ago, and now it appears that has finally happened. Maybe now Gene can stop spinning in his (metaphorical) grave.
If you're going to mourn the passing of a show, save your energy for something worthwhile like Firefly, B5, or Farscape.
Trek is dead. Let it rest in peace.