"Are they? They have got a lot of headlines, but do suicide bombings actually achieve anything other than convince the target that the terrorists cannot be negotiated with, only eliminated?"
It seemed to have worked in Algeria.
The difference in Algeria was twofold. Firstly the terrorists attacked real military targets rather than futzing around blowing up malls like the losers in Hamas. Second they raised an actual army to fight the French militarily.
Likewise in the Israeli war for independence civilian targets were avoided.
There is no record of terrorism against civilian targets ever making a revolution successful. Even Che Gueverra and Fidel Castro knew you have to get the people on your side to be successful in guerrilla warfare, which terrorism as practiced by Hamas is not and does not do.
Face it, the "Palestinian" movement is a farce. Arafat is not even from the region. He is Egyptian. Even if he gets everything he wants, the Palestinians will be enslaved. Why would anyone who truly wants these people's rights respected support his cause? If Israel governed the whole, they would be better off because they would be part of a secular democratic republic and would have the right to vote. Arafat wants to be a dictator.
Then there is the fact that there is no such thing as the "Palestinian people" in the sense of a shared distinct ethnic, linguistic, or cultural heritage. These are Arabs who happen to have lived in the area for a few generations who come from a variety of backgrounds, specifically those of the neighbouring Arab nations. Every one of those nations is in a horrible state, ruled by a dictator who tortures his own people. But when Americans try to point this out the dictators try to claim that all of the region's problems are the fault of the Israelis. Whatever.
"Not all terrorists are drooling fanatics in funny clothes. Most have a sense of self preservation."
Interestingly enough, the drooling fanatics are the most successful. Regardless of how you say it, the "drooling fanatics" are brave. They do believe in something, and it is very difficult to stop someone who is willing to die for his cause.
Especially when his foes are stupid Americans (or Israelis) who are unwilling to think about what they themselves have, what they themselves do not have, and what they themselves are fighting for.
That's alright, then. As Patton said, nobody ever won a war by dying for his country. The idea is to get the other poor dumb bastard to die for his country. So, blow yourselves up, terrorists! I hope you all do and save us the trouble!
You know what is even more odd is that 144000 is one of those special numbers. In the book of Revelation there are 144,000 people sealed with the mark of God:
7:4 And I heard the number of them which were sealed: and there were sealed an hundred and forty and four thousand of all the tribes of the children of Israel.
Apprently some apocalyptic cults and the Jehovah's Witnesses take this to men that onlt 144,000 people will be allowed into paradise. At any rate, it is odd that they came to that particular number. Is this perhaps a sign of the apocolypse or an obscure programmer's joke?
Heck in Chicago we even pay our voters, assuming they pick the right candidate!;) Besides, with computer voting how are we going to get our dead to vote?
Who do you think those 144,000 people were, anyway?:)
You'd have to be loonie to work for $20cdn/hour...
Well they do have looneydollars in Canada (so called because they have a loon depicted on them) or, optionally, Queen Elizabeth, which is equally looney IMHO:).
Now, electronic voting has something in common with slashdot polls!
And I quote...
# Don't complain about lack of options. You've got to pick a few when you do multiple choice. Those are the breaks. # Feel free to suggest poll ideas if you're feeling creative. I'd strongly suggest reading the past polls first. # This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
Good to see the legal system is getting some ideas from the fine folks of slashdot!
That explains why 65% of those 144,000 votes were for CowboyNeal!
The names themselves yes, the fact that they appear to be the field names for 3 different hashmaps on an invocation object that happens to be identical to how it is done on another project with a conflicting license seems stretching it.
So it appears there's a combination of the same data type, the same field name, the same class name and the same interface usage is unlikely to happen unless you've been staring at someone else's codebase a bit too long.
If you stare individual field names or method signatures everything already exists out there somewhere, it is the combination of all of these that makes the difference. Just like we all share the same vocabulary but it is how a book author puts these words together what makes it his unique creation.
This looks like a copy to me.
I have to admit I haven't looked at the code too closely, but aren't these implementations of the same thing, in fact extensions of the same class (from a common open source ancestor), accessing the same data and using the same published interfaces? How different can they be and still be accurate?
This was even mentioned in several of the rebuttals. Also, again, there is the fact that many of the developers work on both projects and of course reserve the right to contribute their code under however many licenses they wish to however meny projects they wish.
They are OK with you listening to the CD, you just have to make sure that nobody else can hear it unless they have paid for a copy as well.
If they were okay with you hearing the CD, they would quit making cds that cannot be played and that break your player when you try. Face it, the RIAA way is to listen to songs only on the radio (but NOT internet radio!) and buy a cd you cannot play which you never listen to.
Whoa, for future reference, do you think it was the aussie comment or the RMS comment that got me troll-modded? Apparently mods can't grasp irony here.
It was slashbot stupidity. I would have modded you +1 funny, and was kind of aiming for a cross between funny and informative myself;P.
actually, spelt is a perfectly acceptable spelling.
Not only is spelt acceptable, but it is in fact the proper spelling. Spelled is a spelling mistake which has been allowed to creep into common usage and is now allowed.
The similarities are too high to be considered a design pattern. The variable names and even choices for captialization are the same. for example, "ThreadNDCConverter" So are optional argument strings. like "CELLPADDING" which if two different people did might have come out as "CELL_PADDING" or "CELLPAD" or "PADCELL" etc...
The best they can hope for is it was copied from a common source or contributed by the same copyright holder.
No, these again are all just normal programming stylistic conventions. True different people do follow different styles from time to time, (witness the great arguments over whitespace, for instance, as well as the capitalization and punctuation you mention). But generally within a given project the same style is obeyed if good programmers are involved. Remember that all of this starts with the Apache codebase, so it is not surprising both projects use the same stylistic conventions as evident in that codebase. Besides the style conventions you mention are pretty common as well.
I had a CS teacher who seemed to be in love with the underscore. He trued to put an underscore in every variable name he could. But lots of people hate underscores and do not use them for variable names or macros, especially since there are situations in which underscores have special meaning. By the way, why are any of the alternatives you suggest better than CELLPADDING to describe cell padding? I mean, hell, I don't develop in this space (or at all professionally) and it was immediately and intuitively obvious to me what that was. The others seemed far less clear.
However, some of the similarities pointed out (like the fact that the Invocation object structure looks exactly the same, "asis", "marshall" and "transient" payloads -- things like this don't occur by accident.
I have no idea how a developer can make such a mistake as to think these things are copied. Transient, AsIs, and Marshalled are generic, well known, and publicly defined terms in reference to data which are used in code for databases, among other things. Invocation is a likewise generic term. This is, like, CS101 stuff. So, yes, it makes perfect sense that these names were used, especially if the goal is self-documenting code (also CS101 stuff).
Wanted to reply to the guy on "theserverside" who brought up the same thing but it appears to be too much of a pain to do it and I reply to enough fools on the internet as it is:P.
Nothing that we know about, just like we didn't know about Echelon (which isn't a conspiracy theorist pipe dream). I think its a stupid idea to let the UN run it. Most everything done by committee or a bureaucracy satisfies no-one. I do think it would make much more sense to distribute the servers geographically. And by geographically i mean, lets put one in Australia or India or...
Its like giving a nuclear sub commander both missle keys. He isn't actively excercising his powers, but should he fancy launching a few missles, the power is at his fingertips. Isn't everything these days about pre-empting a threat? In this case the threat would be one country having the ability to severly curtial access to the domain name servers.
this is a little scenario for your post over here:
Imagine Party C = CIA, Party B = You, Party A = The Federal Government. Now according to your theory, you have the right to STFU when requesting information from the CIA. Congress disagrees with you, as do I, thats why the Freedom of Information Act was created. The idea behind freedom of speech isn't that you have the right to STFU, its the opposite. If someone says something you don't like, you can bitch, moan, complain, and create public pressure to change that thing... because its your right.
Another scenario: A = Media Execs, B = You, C = News Outlets & D = Federal Government Same as above, except (as they often do) D asks A not to break a story for a few days. A agrees, passes that to C and B is the loser. Is that censorship?
But you are on the wrong side. If you read the article, the whole reason the UN wants control over the Internet is to censor its content. They do not like what people are publishing here. I was surprised, honestly, that the US was against the idea. Do you really wnat to be censored by UN committees?
Slashdotters, do you see the negativity, hate, anger and disrespect in pretty much all the posts above? Don't let it affect your style of writing. Take back slashdot with good debate, don't engage these forces of evil!
Yes, padwan! Fear leads to hate, hate leads to anger, anger leads to suffering, hrmmm?!
Your source paints the WHISC as something that was merely renamed under Clinton. Let's not be unnecessarily partisan.
But even the Pentagon admitted they were only changing the name, and then only to confuse people looking for information on the School of the Americas. "School of the Americas? Oh there is no such thing. Those leaked documents and training manuals you found? Well those are from the School of the Americas, whatever that is, no such school as that [anymore]..."
I'm now befuddled "Mr, Walmart Pants." I'm sure I'd be inclined to take offense if I knew what the hell that meant. Anyway, I have never seen a online-retailer that couldn't conduct transactions w/out popups.
The Walmart Guy (kind of puzzled by his insult as well.. does this mean you buy pants at Wal-Mart? And that this is bad? And Why? because they are Cheap? Does it mean you are dumb? I dunno) was referring to "off-the-shelf" shopping cart packages. In other words, let's say you take pictures of the varmints you kill and also make them into little trophies, mittens, coats, whatever. Let us suppose further that you would like to sell these things on the internet with a website that is not Ebay or Amazon.
You have a few options here. You can write teh code for your shopping cart from scratch or hire someone to do it, which is the way Wal-Mart, Ebay and Amazon did theirs, or, wonder of wonders, there exist vendors who will sell and support software packages that do shopping carts. When you buy a package alreday made, it is considered "off-the-shelf" because you buy it off the shelf much like a quart of oil or milk at Wal-Mart. Actually, to be fair, you can buy the front end and the back end seperately from completely different vendors, buy one and make the other yourself, or mix it up even more. You also have the option of purchasing a service which gives you hosting and a storefront all in one package deal.
So, to recap, the poster was trying to say that when you are shopping for shopping cart software, all of it uses pop-ups. I don't know if that is true because I never bought any of it, and haven't set up an ecommerce website yet because I am not selling squirrel trophies or moose dropping jewelry. But if I were, presumably the blocking of popups would eb a problem.
Now from the web surfer perspective, I generally use Mozilla's "block unrequested popups" feature. This means that popups don't show up when I go to a site, but if I click on, say, a store locator that generates a popup window, a popup window will still appear. I can also whitelist sites that I actually want popups for (which are surprisingly few). I am thinking the poster was worried microsoft would not give the user power over this ability and/or would turn it on by default, stopping people from shopping at his beanie baby, widget, and squirrel trophy store and being able to buy anything. Is that understandable to you?:)
And of course, I have to add this text here to get past the damn lameness filter....blah blah blah
You know what's really funny is that there are actually stories in Field and Stream and such about how dangerous these critters are, like killer Tom Turkeys and Deadly Whitetail Deer. Apparently a couple hundred people are killed by deer every year. It's odd... I am not sure if they included people who ran over the deer and died, but I am pretty sure they included hunters who were in the act of killing deer and were strangled by binoculars caught on the antlers of a deer as they were slitting the deer's throat ("It's not daed, it's just resting!") [actually a true story supposedly] or were likewise gored or kicked approaching wounded deer.
That's funny since I just bought 4 books from Amazon, a rifle scope from swfa.com, and a sling and cheekpad from cactustactical.com using Mozilla and blocking pop-ups.
And those four books were four copies of The Catcher in the Rye....
Mozilla's popup stopper also plays a bell, although you can set it to any sound you want. Maybe that got taken out of Firebird? Somehow I doubt it though Edit->Preferences->Privacy & Security->Pop-up Windows
Actually, they did apparently.
Installing some 3rd party IE binary sounds like a great way to have your computer crawling with adware, if you ask me.
I agree wholeheartedly. I think it is crazy how you have to install 5000 closed source known spyware 3rd party incompatable apps to get IE to do half of what a free open source browser can do. And you are probably violating the license, too, since all of these things are shareware, not freeware and you aren't actually paying for them. Probably would cost $5000. Why do people bother? Use Firebird or Mozilla. It works!
I changed to Mozilla Firebird as my default browser yesterday, but until then I had used IE.
My popup stopper used to give a bell when it blocked a popup, which was a reassuringly nice thing to hear while browsing.
If yours doesn't, try www.meaya.com, it just works.
Mozilla and Netscape have the option of showing an icon when popups are suppressed. This is on by default in Firebird. Mozilla and Netscape can also play the system bell or any other sound you like when a popup is suppressed, if that is your desire. This does not appear to be the case with Firebird. You could always install only the browser portion of Mozilla or Netscape to get this feature and a few others you are missing with Firebird, but it won't be quite as lean and snappy.
99% of off the shelf shopping cart systems now rely on this behaviour. This will surely alienate even more corporate customers, where the hell are Microsoft going?
In other news, Microsoft announced that the cost of Windows XP would increase due to the loss of revenue from popup advertising firms...:)
But in all seriousness, this feature has had an interesting history. Mozilla added it, and the Netscape developers wanted it in there, but AOL came down hard on the idea and declared it would not exist (likewise the cross-site blocking capabilities for scripts, frames, and images). Eventually AOL caved inapparently, but you will notice that if you download Netscape it comes with popups on by default, and even if you try to block them a list of interesting advertisers who probably pay AOL are whitelisted.
I would not doubt that Microsoft ends up whitelisting the same companies due to contributions from those companies, and it will be interesting to find out if you can manipulate the whitelist at all (or if instead the feature will be "block most popups" and just happen not to work for ads from certain companies...)
"[T]he ideas behind free software are incomprehensible to non-programmers,..."
Oh, nonsense. They're comprehensible to the average five-year-old.
When you were that age, how often did you hear adults say "Nice people share their toys with each other"?
Open and/or free software is exactly the same idea.
And software (or any kind of information) has one nice feature that physical toys don't have: With most physical toys, if I'm playing with it, you can't. But with information, you can share it with as many others as want it, and you still have it to play with yourself.
Most five-year-olds can understand this, too. Talk to a few of them, and see how they enjoy word play. This is a sort of play that is only fun if you're sharing it with others.
But most adults cannot understand this, because they were eventually taught otherwise. This is why free software is such a hard sell, as was Communism. People do not like to share, and sharing is incomprehensible to most adults in the "real world." I guess all that sharing business was just crap people told their kids to shut them up, like usual.
"This is the real world, now, son! Sharing is for sissies!"
It's too bad really, because the world would be a much better place if more mutual sharing went on.
It is according to the RIAA. And both the RIAA and MPAA seem to think even listening to the CD yourself is illegal, thus their battle against cd and dvd players.
Slashdot Mirror
"Are they? They have got a lot of headlines, but do suicide bombings actually achieve anything other than convince the target that the terrorists cannot be negotiated with, only eliminated?"
It seemed to have worked in Algeria.
The difference in Algeria was twofold. Firstly the terrorists attacked real military targets rather than futzing around blowing up malls like the losers in Hamas. Second they raised an actual army to fight the French militarily.
Likewise in the Israeli war for independence civilian targets were avoided.
There is no record of terrorism against civilian targets ever making a revolution successful. Even Che Gueverra and Fidel Castro knew you have to get the people on your side to be successful in guerrilla warfare, which terrorism as practiced by Hamas is not and does not do.
Face it, the "Palestinian" movement is a farce. Arafat is not even from the region. He is Egyptian. Even if he gets everything he wants, the Palestinians will be enslaved. Why would anyone who truly wants these people's rights respected support his cause? If Israel governed the whole, they would be better off because they would be part of a secular democratic republic and would have the right to vote. Arafat wants to be a dictator.
Then there is the fact that there is no such thing as the "Palestinian people" in the sense of a shared distinct ethnic, linguistic, or cultural heritage. These are Arabs who happen to have lived in the area for a few generations who come from a variety of backgrounds, specifically those of the neighbouring Arab nations. Every one of those nations is in a horrible state, ruled by a dictator who tortures his own people. But when Americans try to point this out the dictators try to claim that all of the region's problems are the fault of the Israelis. Whatever.
"Not all terrorists are drooling fanatics in funny clothes. Most have a sense of self preservation."
Interestingly enough, the drooling fanatics are the most successful. Regardless of how you say it, the "drooling fanatics" are brave. They do believe in something, and it is very difficult to stop someone who is willing to die for his cause.
Especially when his foes are stupid Americans (or Israelis) who are unwilling to think about what they themselves have, what they themselves do not have, and what they themselves are fighting for.
That's alright, then. As Patton said, nobody ever won a war by dying for his country. The idea is to get the other poor dumb bastard to die for his country. So, blow yourselves up, terrorists! I hope you all do and save us the trouble!
Also, the Liberty was not supposed to be there in the first place and was spying on the Israelis (which is why we did not tell them it was there).
If we dont increase spending on pilotless helicopters, THEY win...
BTW, maybe someone just hijacked the contol signals in order to take the helicopter. Taking electronic warfare to the next level...
That would be an interesting hypothesis if it wasn't for the fact this is the first pilotless helicopter not to use remote control signals...
You know what is even more odd is that 144000 is one of those special numbers. In the book of Revelation there are 144,000 people sealed with the mark of God:
7:4 And I heard the number of them which were sealed: and there were
sealed an hundred and forty and four thousand of all the tribes of the
children of Israel.
Apprently some apocalyptic cults and the Jehovah's Witnesses take this to men that onlt 144,000 people will be allowed into paradise. At any rate, it is odd that they came to that particular number. Is this perhaps a sign of the apocolypse or an obscure programmer's joke?
Heck in Chicago we even pay our voters, assuming they pick the right candidate! ;)
Besides, with computer voting how are we going to get our dead to vote?
Who do you think those 144,000 people were, anyway? :)
You'd have to be loonie to work for $20cdn/hour...
Well they do have looneydollars in Canada (so called because they have a loon depicted on them) or, optionally, Queen Elizabeth, which is equally looney IMHO :).
Now, electronic voting has something in common with slashdot polls!
And I quote...
# Don't complain about lack of options. You've got to pick a few when you do multiple choice. Those are the breaks.
# Feel free to suggest poll ideas if you're feeling creative. I'd strongly suggest reading the past polls first.
# This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
Good to see the legal system is getting some ideas from the fine folks of slashdot!
That explains why 65% of those 144,000 votes were for CowboyNeal!
The names themselves yes, the fact that they appear to be the field names for 3 different hashmaps on an invocation object that happens to be identical to how it is done on another project with a conflicting license seems stretching it.
So it appears there's a combination of the same data type, the same field name, the same class name and the same interface usage is unlikely to happen unless you've been staring at someone else's codebase a bit too long.
If you stare individual field names or method signatures everything already exists out there somewhere, it is the combination of all of these that makes the difference. Just like we all share the same vocabulary but it is how a book author puts these words together what makes it his unique creation.
This looks like a copy to me.
I have to admit I haven't looked at the code too closely, but aren't these implementations of the same thing, in fact extensions of the same class (from a common open source ancestor), accessing the same data and using the same published interfaces? How different can they be and still be accurate?
This was even mentioned in several of the rebuttals. Also, again, there is the fact that many of the developers work on both projects and of course reserve the right to contribute their code under however many licenses they wish to however meny projects they wish.
They are OK with you listening to the CD, you just have to make sure that nobody else can hear it unless they have paid for a copy as well.
If they were okay with you hearing the CD, they would quit making cds that cannot be played and that break your player when you try. Face it, the RIAA way is to listen to songs only on the radio (but NOT internet radio!) and buy a cd you cannot play which you never listen to.
Whoa, for future reference, do you think it was the aussie comment or the RMS comment that got me troll-modded? Apparently mods can't grasp irony here.
It was slashbot stupidity. I would have modded you +1 funny, and was kind of aiming for a cross between funny and informative myself ;P.
actually, spelt is a perfectly acceptable spelling.
Not only is spelt acceptable, but it is in fact the proper spelling. Spelled is a spelling mistake which has been allowed to creep into common usage and is now allowed.
The similarities are too high to be considered a design pattern. The variable names and even choices for captialization are the same. for example, "ThreadNDCConverter" So are optional argument strings. like "CELLPADDING" which if two different people did might have come out as "CELL_PADDING" or "CELLPAD" or "PADCELL" etc...
The best they can hope for is it was copied from a common source or contributed by the same copyright holder.
No, these again are all just normal programming stylistic conventions. True different people do follow different styles from time to time, (witness the great arguments over whitespace, for instance, as well as the capitalization and punctuation you mention). But generally within a given project the same style is obeyed if good programmers are involved. Remember that all of this starts with the Apache codebase, so it is not surprising both projects use the same stylistic conventions as evident in that codebase. Besides the style conventions you mention are pretty common as well.
I had a CS teacher who seemed to be in love with the underscore. He trued to put an underscore in every variable name he could. But lots of people hate underscores and do not use them for variable names or macros, especially since there are situations in which underscores have special meaning. By the way, why are any of the alternatives you suggest better than CELLPADDING to describe cell padding? I mean, hell, I don't develop in this space (or at all professionally) and it was immediately and intuitively obvious to me what that was. The others seemed far less clear.
However, some of the similarities pointed out (like the fact that the Invocation object structure looks exactly the same, "asis", "marshall" and "transient" payloads -- things like this don't occur by accident.
I have no idea how a developer can make such a mistake as to think these things are copied. Transient, AsIs, and Marshalled are generic, well known, and publicly defined terms in reference to data which are used in code for databases, among other things. Invocation is a likewise generic term. This is, like, CS101 stuff. So, yes, it makes perfect sense that these names were used, especially if the goal is self-documenting code (also CS101 stuff).
Wanted to reply to the guy on "theserverside" who brought up the same thing but it appears to be too much of a pain to do it and I reply to enough fools on the internet as it is :P.
Nothing that we know about, just like we didn't know about Echelon (which isn't a conspiracy theorist pipe dream). I think its a stupid idea to let the UN run it. Most everything done by committee or a bureaucracy satisfies no-one. I do think it would make much more sense to distribute the servers geographically. And by geographically i mean, lets put one in Australia or India or ...
Its like giving a nuclear sub commander both missle keys. He isn't actively excercising his powers, but should he fancy launching a few missles, the power is at his fingertips. Isn't everything these days about pre-empting a threat? In this case the threat would be one country having the ability to severly curtial access to the domain name servers.
this is a little scenario for your post over here:
Imagine Party C = CIA, Party B = You, Party A = The Federal Government.
Now according to your theory, you have the right to STFU when requesting information from the CIA. Congress disagrees with you, as do I, thats why the Freedom of Information Act was created. The idea behind freedom of speech isn't that you have the right to STFU, its the opposite. If someone says something you don't like, you can bitch, moan, complain, and create public pressure to change that thing... because its your right.
Another scenario: A = Media Execs, B = You, C = News Outlets & D = Federal Government
Same as above, except (as they often do) D asks A not to break a story for a few days. A agrees, passes that to C and B is the loser. Is that censorship?
But you are on the wrong side. If you read the article, the whole reason the UN wants control over the Internet is to censor its content. They do not like what people are publishing here. I was surprised, honestly, that the US was against the idea. Do you really wnat to be censored by UN committees?
Slashdotters, do you see the negativity, hate, anger and disrespect in pretty much all the posts above? Don't let it affect your style of writing. Take back slashdot with good debate, don't engage these forces of evil!
Yes, padwan! Fear leads to hate, hate leads to anger, anger leads to suffering, hrmmm?!
Your source paints the WHISC as something that was merely renamed under Clinton. Let's not be unnecessarily partisan.
But even the Pentagon admitted they were only changing the name, and then only to confuse people looking for information on the School of the Americas. "School of the Americas? Oh there is no such thing. Those leaked documents and training manuals you found? Well those are from the School of the Americas, whatever that is, no such school as that [anymore]..."
I'm now befuddled "Mr, Walmart Pants." I'm sure I'd be inclined to take offense if I knew what the hell that meant. Anyway, I have never seen a online-retailer that couldn't conduct transactions w/out popups.
The Walmart Guy (kind of puzzled by his insult as well.. does this mean you buy pants at Wal-Mart? And that this is bad? And Why? because they are Cheap? Does it mean you are dumb? I dunno) was referring to "off-the-shelf" shopping cart packages. In other words, let's say you take pictures of the varmints you kill and also make them into little trophies, mittens, coats, whatever. Let us suppose further that you would like to sell these things on the internet with a website that is not Ebay or Amazon.
You have a few options here. You can write teh code for your shopping cart from scratch or hire someone to do it, which is the way Wal-Mart, Ebay and Amazon did theirs, or, wonder of wonders, there exist vendors who will sell and support software packages that do shopping carts. When you buy a package alreday made, it is considered "off-the-shelf" because you buy it off the shelf much like a quart of oil or milk at Wal-Mart. Actually, to be fair, you can buy the front end and the back end seperately from completely different vendors, buy one and make the other yourself, or mix it up even more. You also have the option of purchasing a service which gives you hosting and a storefront all in one package deal.
So, to recap, the poster was trying to say that when you are shopping for shopping cart software, all of it uses pop-ups. I don't know if that is true because I never bought any of it, and haven't set up an ecommerce website yet because I am not selling squirrel trophies or moose dropping jewelry. But if I were, presumably the blocking of popups would eb a problem.
Now from the web surfer perspective, I generally use Mozilla's "block unrequested popups" feature. This means that popups don't show up when I go to a site, but if I click on, say, a store locator that generates a popup window, a popup window will still appear. I can also whitelist sites that I actually want popups for (which are surprisingly few). I am thinking the poster was worried microsoft would not give the user power over this ability and/or would turn it on by default, stopping people from shopping at his beanie baby, widget, and squirrel trophy store and being able to buy anything. Is that understandable to you? :)
Who said they were innocent?
"LOOK OUT NED, HE'S COMING RIGHT FOR US!"
And of course, I have to add this text here to get past the damn lameness filter....blah blah blah
You know what's really funny is that there are actually stories in Field and Stream and such about how dangerous these critters are, like killer Tom Turkeys and Deadly Whitetail Deer. Apparently a couple hundred people are killed by deer every year. It's odd... I am not sure if they included people who ran over the deer and died, but I am pretty sure they included hunters who were in the act of killing deer and were strangled by binoculars caught on the antlers of a deer as they were slitting the deer's throat ("It's not daed, it's just resting!") [actually a true story supposedly] or were likewise gored or kicked approaching wounded deer.
That's funny since I just bought 4 books from Amazon, a rifle scope from swfa.com, and a sling and cheekpad from cactustactical.com using Mozilla and blocking pop-ups.
And those four books were four copies of The Catcher in the Rye....
Mozilla's popup stopper also plays a bell, although you can set it to any sound you want.
Maybe that got taken out of Firebird?
Somehow I doubt it though
Edit->Preferences->Privacy & Security->Pop-up Windows
Actually, they did apparently.
Installing some 3rd party IE binary sounds like a great way to have your computer crawling with adware, if you ask me.
I agree wholeheartedly. I think it is crazy how you have to install 5000 closed source known spyware 3rd party incompatable apps to get IE to do half of what a free open source browser can do. And you are probably violating the license, too, since all of these things are shareware, not freeware and you aren't actually paying for them. Probably would cost $5000. Why do people bother? Use Firebird or Mozilla. It works!
I changed to Mozilla Firebird as my default browser yesterday, but until then I had used IE.
My popup stopper used to give a bell when it blocked a popup, which was a reassuringly nice thing to hear while browsing.
If yours doesn't, try www.meaya.com, it just works.
Mozilla and Netscape have the option of showing an icon when popups are suppressed. This is on by default in Firebird. Mozilla and Netscape can also play the system bell or any other sound you like when a popup is suppressed, if that is your desire. This does not appear to be the case with Firebird. You could always install only the browser portion of Mozilla or Netscape to get this feature and a few others you are missing with Firebird, but it won't be quite as lean and snappy.
99% of off the shelf shopping cart systems now rely on this behaviour. This will surely alienate even more corporate customers, where the hell are Microsoft going?
In other news, Microsoft announced that the cost of Windows XP would increase due to the loss of revenue from popup advertising firms... :)
But in all seriousness, this feature has had an interesting history. Mozilla added it, and the Netscape developers wanted it in there, but AOL came down hard on the idea and declared it would not exist (likewise the cross-site blocking capabilities for scripts, frames, and images). Eventually AOL caved inapparently, but you will notice that if you download Netscape it comes with popups on by default, and even if you try to block them a list of interesting advertisers who probably pay AOL are whitelisted.
I would not doubt that Microsoft ends up whitelisting the same companies due to contributions from those companies, and it will be interesting to find out if you can manipulate the whitelist at all (or if instead the feature will be "block most popups" and just happen not to work for ads from certain companies...)
"[T]he ideas behind free software are incomprehensible to non-programmers, ..."
Oh, nonsense. They're comprehensible to the average five-year-old.
When you were that age, how often did you hear adults say "Nice people share their toys with each other"?
Open and/or free software is exactly the same idea.
And software (or any kind of information) has one nice feature that physical toys don't have: With most physical toys, if I'm playing with it, you can't. But with information, you can share it with as many others as want it, and you still have it to play with yourself.
Most five-year-olds can understand this, too. Talk to a few of them, and see how they enjoy word play. This is a sort of play that is only fun if you're sharing it with others.
But most adults cannot understand this, because they were eventually taught otherwise. This is why free software is such a hard sell, as was Communism. People do not like to share, and sharing is incomprehensible to most adults in the "real world." I guess all that sharing business was just crap people told their kids to shut them up, like usual.
"This is the real world, now, son! Sharing is for sissies!"
It's too bad really, because the world would be a much better place if more mutual sharing went on.
Loaning a CD to your friend is not illegal.
It is according to the RIAA. And both the RIAA and MPAA seem to think even listening to the CD yourself is illegal, thus their battle against cd and dvd players.