Criminals love those kinds of messages. "Yay, guaranteed no one at home for so long - time for some burglary!"
Yeah, come to my work and rob my cube. Take all my work away. I'll weep, I promise.
I don't ever change my home message. I still have the generic robot voice saying something generic, like: HELLO. WE ARE NOT AVAILABLE TO TAKE YOUR CALL RIGHT NOW. PLEASE LEAVE A MESSAGE AFTER THE BEEP. *BEEP*.
Lately I've been leaving a message like this on my voicemail:
Hi, this is John. I'll be out of the office until <date>. If you need to get in touch with me before then, please reconsider your options.
But my all-time favorite was the one I recorded before leaving on a family trip. "Hi. I'm on vacation for three weeks until <date>. If you need to get hold of me, please dial Scotland and ask for John."
Mr. Lo is not smart enough to teach at MIT
on
Stock-Picking Computers
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I hate to be so mean, but anyone who turns down a job from a fund with $20 billion dollars is just not smart. He could have milked that for 20 years! He could be pouring grant money over his breakfast cereal right now, but "oh, no, sorry, but that's not technically feasible." Fool. ANYTHING can be made to sound technically feasible for the right amount of money.
[ Yes, I am joking. I'm quite sure Mr. Lo is brilliant -- just maybe a touch too honest.:-) ]
Absolutely, preloads were the key to Microsoft's success.
Not completely. People were lined up around the block at midnight to buy a retail copy of Windows 95. And the media covered it big time. That's a sign of how far MS has slipped - when people lined up around the block to buy a Zune the press refused to cover it. To this day you won't see a video of it on the news. Talk about media manipulation!
I think you missed my point. The battle was over long before either Warp or Windows 95 was shipped. The fanbois didn't line up for Windows 95 because they had chosen between Warp and Windows 95 -- they lined up because they were already sold on Windows. They were pre-sold by the same Windows that had come preloaded on their computers for the previous four years.
That was kind of evident in some of the IBM Warp presentations we got. While in my earlier post I said that IBM believed they had won with their technical superiority, not every single IBMer toed that same line. Some of them actually sounded desperate for us to believe that OS/2 Warp was the right decision. I miss those days when we could always count on IBM to pick up the bar tab!:-)
[ For us, it was always a choice between OS/2 or NT. Windows 95 was never even under consideration. We were interested only in the non-DOS-based operating systems, as we knew we needed the stability. And since our code was going to be all new development anyway, none of the Windows 3.1 compatibility issues mattered to us. ]
The weirdest thing about all of that was the promise that Windows 95 "fixed" things that Microsoft had already proven they sucked at. Crashing, hanging, installers, INI files, the registry, Microsoft had made a mess of all of this in 3.1 and it didn't improve very much with Windows 95. It wasn't until Windows 98 second edition that they were finally delivering a fairly stable DOS based OS to the home market. And even that sucked rather a lot.
XP was really the pinnacle of Microsoft's home OSes. NT-based, protected memory, all the stuff that UNIX has had ever since the 1980s, they finally got a lot of it right. And they made it pretty, despite the default Fischer-Price theme. But from here on out, it's all downhill. Vista is going to be a kick in the teeth for most home users -- DRM-this, PMP-that, and Trusted Computing making sure you're not pirating a copy of Office (not that WGA isn't trying to make XP suck.) No usable HDTV media access; onerous restrictions on hardware upgrades; and it requires an upgrade equivalent to a Cray XMP just on the video card alone. The alleged promises of stability and security are not going to be enough to justify what they're taking away. I've already decided I will not be installing or supporting Vista for friends or family.
Absolutely, preloads were the key to Microsoft's success. Yes, the IBM clone competition had a large part to play in preloading Windows, especially since IBM was threatening them with the PS/2 line and its patented, locked-down architecture. But there were other IBM "stupidity" factors that helped kill OS/2, also.
I remember back then when IBM trotted their dog'n'pony show through our conference rooms trying to convince us that since Presentation Manager was 32-bit and the Microsoft stuff was a half-assed combination of 16-bit thunks running inside 32-bit windowing that the only intelligent decision was to pick OS/2 for our new development.
Back at this time, IBM still proudly wore the crown of the Kings of FUD, and we techies didn't respect them for it. Anyone with an IQ of 80+ could see that new development would be only on 32-bit systems anyway, and the whole thunking argument was just bullshit for salesmen to shovel to ignorant VPs.
IBM fervently believed that if they could sell OS/2 4.0 to Corporate America (TM) then OS/2 was the winner. Most people reading this won't appreciate just how much they believed this, but that was the truth. IBM was exactly like a rich poker player who bets his entire bankroll on one good hand and figures he has bought the pot. They had true TCP/IP networking (not that shitty Trumpet Winsock.) They had true multitasking, (not the idle-time-sharing kludge that was Windows 3.1.) They had their WoW layer (the original precursor to WINE) that would run Windows 3.1 apps right inside OS/2 (although back then virtually every useful Windows app violated the Windows API for performance or hardware reasons.) And they had performed huge amounts of quality control testing. OS/2 4.0 was, for its day, a solid operating system. It absolutely kicked ass over Windows 3.1, and was far superior to Windows 95. They had every technical reason to believe they had a superior product.
Finally for the "cool rollout factor" to appeal to geeks everywhere, they had Leonard Nimoy as their pitchman. What geek wouldn't automatically trust Spock to make the logical choice of operating systems?
But to IBM, home computers were almost irrelevant. Microsoft, on the other hand, aggressively made sure that Windows 3.1 (and 3.11 and WfW) came preinstalled on every computer sold. And while they wanted to get into big corporations, they realized they were making their money one sale at a time, and one small workgroup at a time. By sliding in the back door, they became dominant before IBM sold a single copy of Warp. People running WfW migrated to NT 3.1, and then to NT 3.5. People running Windows 3.1 believed Microsoft, upgraded to Windows 95, and then bought new computers that could actually handle the added CPU and disk loads. And with Windows 95's native reliance on DOS, most of those broken Windows 3.1 apps were able to continue to function (unlike WoW on OS/2.)
IBM was shattered. Our account reps walked around looking like dogs that had been beaten for crapping on the carpet. They seriously and honestly thought that their better product and their sales to every Fortune 100 company was how you played hardball and won these games. After all, that's how they ruthlessly and utterly dominated the mainframe market for over a generation. But in the end, it turned out to be a popularity contest, and they had actually been beaten before they knew the game was on.
[ Warning: I am not a lawyer. That should be obvious after the first paragraph. ]
I'm not sure that his use of "fair use" is that far off. For example, "fair use" means you can quote a few words from a textbook, but cannot repeat the whole book. "Fair use" also means you can play a few seconds of a song, or a few seconds of a movie without permission or penalty.
Fair use does not mean they have to make it easy for you to make a copy of those few seconds.
The real dissembling comes from him saying nothing about the doctrine of "first sale." That's the one that gives you the right to do whatever you want with a product once you've purchased it. For example, if you purchase a Spalding baseball the Spalding company cannot limit you to catching it only with a genuine Spalding glove. They can advertise the balls as "best caught with a Genuine Spalding Glove", they can print "WARNING: catch this ball only with a Genuine Spalding Glove or hand damage may result", and they can even print "Never sell your glove to anyone else" on your glove. But what they print on it has no legal bearing on what you are legally permitted to do with it.
There are exceptions for certain materials, such as pesticides and herbicides, that prevent you from using them in a manner harmful to the environment. But unless a Brittany Spears disc is capable of producing an ecological disaster, I doubt strongly that they apply.
Its also got bluetooth which should slightly offset the lack of a headphone socket (except for playing MP3's which you seem to be interested in).
What do you mean, lack of headphones? a2dp over Bluetooth 2.0, baby. I bought a set of Motorola HT-820 headphones for $50. They can connect to an audio source AND work with a cell phone simultaneously (they send a 'pause' command to the music player, and/or mute the audio if it's not pausable,) play the ring tone, and you pick up by pressing the button on the side. When you hang up the call, the music resumes.
The only complaint I have with them is they inject a slight digital delay into the audio path, which makes them poorly suited for watching television. (Oh, that and the stupid glowing blue lights. WTF is up with that?) Otherwise, they work really well. Battery life is pretty good, and Motorola now equips all their rechargeable consumer goods with a nice standard mini-USB jack-based charger.
One more plus in favor of Minnesota voting: we are one of five states in the nation to have passed a law requiring paper ballots. I thank BlackBoxVoting for raising awareness of the problems with nonverifiable solutions.
So I suppose our votes should count more because they're more trustworthy, right?:-)
The Bank of Ameriuca is one of the most highly respected banks in the Untied States of Ameriuca. You should trust all your money with them.. but wait just a few seconds for my sedo.com session to refresh... there you go. Happy Banking!
Does anyone really think a domain registrar has any incentive to stop phishers? "Oh, sure, you want us to cut our potential sales just because a typo-squatter might be phishing?" I wonder how much of their revenue comes from selling the actual names vs how much comes from the spelling error names?
Anyway, I wouldn't count on the registrars changing their business model just because there are stupid people out there.
If it'll make you happy, I've heard (from an officially well-placed source) that LEGO has very much reduced the number of marketing tie-in sets. Most of them had very short shelf lives -- they sold well only at the time of the movie release, but almost nothing after. That meant retailers had to "clearance them out" to make room for the next models, which doesn't make anybody in the supply chain rich. And if big retailers can't sell something, they won't buy more of them to rot on their shelves again.
The only marketing themed sets LEGO is keeping a lot of are the Star Wars sets. The rest of LEGO's focus is on producing their "normal" sets and models, with only a few other marketing tie-ins. So yes, you can still get a bucket'o'bricks.
Oh, and the new Mindstorms looks very cool. I didn't get to see anything regarding the programming environment, but it comes out of the box with some pretty sophisticated sensors as well as a Bluetooth transceiver for remote access. You can even add a compass sensor and servo motors!
Here's a link to Target's selection of LEGO sets (sorted from most coveted to least coveted, I mean by price.:-) Lots of Star Wars, but otherwise it's a lot of ordinary LEGO. And if you want a good ship, may I recommend the Star Destroyer? 3,104 pieces, weighing in at 21.5 pounds. There's a good ship!
The grandparent poster was complaining that Microsoft is ignoring the hobbyists. I was pointing out that Microsoft gives a lot more weight to the opinions of a 10,000-license customer than a single $200-per-seat user.
I'm not defending Microsoft. I'm just saying it makes sense if you look at it strictly from a business perspective. And as the grandparent implied, it also requires you to take for granted the millions of home users, and ignore the fact that thousands are going to switch to Linux and loudly tell their friends about it. It's just that they don't matter to a business focused on profits that they see coming from other sectors.
The TV show makers need to abandon this silly idea of having to broadcast their shows on a weekly basis
It's not a silly idea. The shared experience creates "buzz", aka viral marketing. Do you talk to a group of buddies at lunch? What subjects typically come up? The answers most commonly given (by Joe Sixpack, not your average slashdotter) are sports and TV shows. Today, for example, I know I'll talk about last night's episode of "Heroes" with a co-worker who also watches the show. (I sure as hell won't talk about the Vikings.:-) The net result may be that we get another co-worker interested in seeing the show.
Sure, that experience could be duplicated with a DVD amongst a small group of friends. But with broadcast, the circle of people becomes huge. As a matter of fact I chatted about it with a random guy in a waiting room last Friday. Multiply that small event by the number of waiting rooms around the country, and that's buzz. It's a phenomenon that would only rarely happen with DVDs.
Ummm... not gonna happen. Every time they make a change to frustrate the commercial-skippers, their eyeball count goes up temporarily, at least until the skippers catch up. Higher eyeballs means higher dollars.
They're not looking at this from your long-term "over time we're going to lose" point of view. They're looking at this from the "how can we increase profits this month?" point of view. Sure, some of them may unrealistically believe that with ever more sophisticated technological protection mechanisms they'll someday rid the world of automated commercial skippers. Whatever, those people are going to be disappointed. But the realists, the ones who present a moving target, are still making money in the short term. And that's what really matters to a business.
MS is looking to hurt the pc enthusiasts who... helped them create such a vast "empire"?
Sorry to disappoint, but the hobbyists are now decades removed from the empire builders. The hobbyists' desires no longer add value to the PC. The true empire builders are now the businesses who order 10,000 Dell PCs and the 10,000 Windows licenses to go with them. If you want to have an impact on the future direction of Windows, go work for one of the Fortune 500 companies and bend the ear of one of the resident Microsoft reps. Like any business, they only listen when it's money talking.
By the way, Microsoft loves the big orders. They make boatloads of money with no expense. The nice thing about business customers is those 10,000 people already have their own support structure, and only a handful of headquarters people are authorized to call MS and bitch about problems. Microsoft can afford to spend a bit of money helping them, (making them look like they have gold-plated service,) and yet doesn't have to answer to the 9,995 idiots who would otherwise be punching the f'ing monkey and installing spyware.
Well, you didn't post your assumptions, and I figured the guy might have been wearing a Bluetooth headset with the transmitter hanging on his belt. So I did the math, too.
I put the phone on his belt about 20cm from his pair of 30mm testes. (See, nip/tuck is good for some useful factoids -- Larry Hagman's character just had the oversized 40mm Magnum pair installed!) Those numbers yield a much more generous.0028 steradian target, for a total of 225 microwatts. That's almost four times your original 80 microwatt estimate.
Of course we should still reduce that due to a few other factors. FCC regulations limit handheld cell transceivers to 600 mW max RF output. In order to conserve battery life cell phones adjust their transmission power based on the tower's reported reception, which means they're usually transmitting at less than max power. And even if the guy is a nonstop chatterbox, he's probably not talking 100% of the time; no sane human would ever voluntarily listen to someone talk on the phone for four straight hours every single day. He's probably getting no more than an hour of radiation on any given day. On the plus side, a cell antenna may not be perfectly omnidirectional and so may emit somewhat more radiation in the direction of his junk, depending on its orientation.
I'm sure the net effect is still only to add an undetectable amount of heat to his coin-purse. But I don't think heat is the only factor governing sperm production. RF can generate electricity in a suitable conductor -- perhaps his veins or his urethra are the same length as the phone's wavelength, and so, acting as an antenna, they are generating tiny amounts of electricity that are affecting the nerves in his glands.
Radiation-wise, it's definitely greater than zero, but is still an extremely low amount of power. The effects of long-term low-power RF radiation are still not fully understood (or even recognizable.) But it's useful to do the math anyway.:-)
I can't answer how they handle it in Linux, as I use Firefox under Windows XP. In Firefox, middle clicking on a link will open it in a new tab, middle clicking on the tab closes the tab, and middle clicking on a text window will bring up the scrolling tool (which I hate.) It's not particularly intuitive on this platform, but then again other than the scrolling tool, Microsoft hasn't really defined a default behavior for the middle mouse button.
If you don't like your current platform's behavior, there are many Firefox extensions that let you redefine keyboard and mouse actions. I'm sure you could find one that you could customize into behaving exactly the way you want.
Actually, I would argue against this. I have had great success in simply allowing the installer to upgrade. All my bookmarks, stored passwords, and cookies all ported just fine. While I'd recommend a good backup first, I doubt you'll have problems serious enough to actually have to use it.
Also I have 33 extensions installed (yes, I'm a junkie.) Of those, only six were not 2.0 compatible. And all of the operating ones seem to have retained their options.
Overall, I'm amazed by the smoothness of the switch to 2.0. The only thing missing was the Pinball theme, and I fixed that myself by patching the install.rdf to believe me that 2.0 was OK (also worked for patching Cookie Button 0.8.5 extension into working under 2.0)
My point was this "study" was so incomplete as to be laughable. It was a questionaire, with people self-reporting phone habits. It could be anything from raised arms (which was a joke, virtually everyone who is on the phone 4+ hours per day has a handsfree setup) or that men who use the phone 4+ hours per day are statistically more likely to be 50-year-old travelling salesmen who have had vasectomies.
This story should have been placed in the category of "It's pathetic, laugh."
Do you suppose it could have something to do with keeping your arm elevated for four hours per day holding up the phone? That's hardly healthy, and would certainly have circulatory impact.
A couple of points. First, I'm only one web surfer. I realize that, as in politics, my opinion counts for one iota more than nada -- my surfing patterns are most likely a part of a statistical anomaly, and don't model the behavior or the mainstream surfers. If you are the sort of web designer who analyzes behavior, you'd probably overlook my navigational choices as deviations anyway. And I'm fine with that -- I realize that I navigate quite differently than the rest of the horde. Should you code to my tastes? Probably not. So design your site for "the computers of the rest of them" -- they're the ones who are likely to give your advertisers eyeballs anyway.
Mostly, I block google analytics because I'd prefer to remain anonymous to google. I still haven't made up my mind about them, but I find their hoovering up of all possible data to be really creepy. Since I block both google ads as well as google analytics, I also am trying to mask the true number of people who block ads. Now that internet advertising has become a War For The Eyeballs, if they start to think 25% of the meat popsicles are blocking ads, they'll come out with new ways to defeat the ad-blocking filters. I have no desire for them to believe the number of people who block ads is growing, because as they retaliate I'll have to find new tools to block their new ads. I hope I'm delaying the arms race.
My observations have been that many web masters design their sites to please their own egos without listening to other people tell them what's really bad. "Gosh, look at my brilliant use of JavaScript to pop up these navigational aids whenever the mouse moves in the direction of the close button! I'm the cleverest web designer you'll ever hire!" No matter how awful the experience may really be for the end users, these people are convinced of their own creative skills and they sincerely don't care about people too stupid to figure out their site. They don't need my feedback because they won't use it anyway.
I'm not trying to argue that designing your site for your users is a bad thing. But what I'm saying is that I doubt most web masters are using those nebulous statistics from Google to improve their sites: they're most likely using them to increase their ad clickthrough rates, and little else. If you want unbiased valuable input, you'll be much better off running your software through a usability lab, watching struggling humans, rather than making faulty assumptions based on faceless data.
Allowing google analytics to track your anonymous movement through a site ultimately leads to a more fulfilling user experience.
I hate to burst your bubble, but I'm not looking for an "experience" on most sites. I'm looking for whatever it was that the referring link told me the site had. If it's a search, I probably used Google or Ask to do the heavy lifting. (I don't even use Microsoft's search link on MSDN because Google does a much better job indexing their site.)
Unfortunately, google analytics can't return my level of satisfaction. If I get to a site and it has what I came for, I'll read it, be done with it, and close the tab. If the site doesn't immediately deliver what I came for, that causes frustration, and the tab gets closed. I'm not going to hunt through links and home-made search boxes to find what I want, I'm just gone. But either way I'm done with that site, and google analytics can't tell anyone the reason why.
There are only a handful of sites in my bookmark list that offer content that keeps me coming back -- Slashdot being the biggest. And even here, there's a lot of crap. I find the entire left-hand column to be a waste of screen real-estate -- I don't click on any of those links even once a month. That's not "user experience", that's crap that should be hidden away until I'm ready to go looking for it. Google analytics may tell you that I'm not using those links, but how much does anyone pay attention to what the users *don't* click on?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, come to my work and rob my cube. Take all my work away. I'll weep, I promise.
I don't ever change my home message. I still have the generic robot voice saying something generic, like: HELLO. WE ARE NOT AVAILABLE TO TAKE YOUR CALL RIGHT NOW. PLEASE LEAVE A MESSAGE AFTER THE BEEP. *BEEP*.
Hi, this is John. I'll be out of the office until <date>. If you need to get in touch with me before then, please reconsider your options.
But my all-time favorite was the one I recorded before leaving on a family trip. "Hi. I'm on vacation for three weeks until <date>. If you need to get hold of me, please dial Scotland and ask for John."
[ Yes, I am joking. I'm quite sure Mr. Lo is brilliant -- just maybe a touch too honest. :-) ]
I think you missed my point. The battle was over long before either Warp or Windows 95 was shipped. The fanbois didn't line up for Windows 95 because they had chosen between Warp and Windows 95 -- they lined up because they were already sold on Windows. They were pre-sold by the same Windows that had come preloaded on their computers for the previous four years.
That was kind of evident in some of the IBM Warp presentations we got. While in my earlier post I said that IBM believed they had won with their technical superiority, not every single IBMer toed that same line. Some of them actually sounded desperate for us to believe that OS/2 Warp was the right decision. I miss those days when we could always count on IBM to pick up the bar tab! :-)
[ For us, it was always a choice between OS/2 or NT. Windows 95 was never even under consideration. We were interested only in the non-DOS-based operating systems, as we knew we needed the stability. And since our code was going to be all new development anyway, none of the Windows 3.1 compatibility issues mattered to us. ]
The weirdest thing about all of that was the promise that Windows 95 "fixed" things that Microsoft had already proven they sucked at. Crashing, hanging, installers, INI files, the registry, Microsoft had made a mess of all of this in 3.1 and it didn't improve very much with Windows 95. It wasn't until Windows 98 second edition that they were finally delivering a fairly stable DOS based OS to the home market. And even that sucked rather a lot.
XP was really the pinnacle of Microsoft's home OSes. NT-based, protected memory, all the stuff that UNIX has had ever since the 1980s, they finally got a lot of it right. And they made it pretty, despite the default Fischer-Price theme. But from here on out, it's all downhill. Vista is going to be a kick in the teeth for most home users -- DRM-this, PMP-that, and Trusted Computing making sure you're not pirating a copy of Office (not that WGA isn't trying to make XP suck.) No usable HDTV media access; onerous restrictions on hardware upgrades; and it requires an upgrade equivalent to a Cray XMP just on the video card alone. The alleged promises of stability and security are not going to be enough to justify what they're taking away. I've already decided I will not be installing or supporting Vista for friends or family.
I remember back then when IBM trotted their dog'n'pony show through our conference rooms trying to convince us that since Presentation Manager was 32-bit and the Microsoft stuff was a half-assed combination of 16-bit thunks running inside 32-bit windowing that the only intelligent decision was to pick OS/2 for our new development.
Back at this time, IBM still proudly wore the crown of the Kings of FUD, and we techies didn't respect them for it. Anyone with an IQ of 80+ could see that new development would be only on 32-bit systems anyway, and the whole thunking argument was just bullshit for salesmen to shovel to ignorant VPs.
IBM fervently believed that if they could sell OS/2 4.0 to Corporate America (TM) then OS/2 was the winner. Most people reading this won't appreciate just how much they believed this, but that was the truth. IBM was exactly like a rich poker player who bets his entire bankroll on one good hand and figures he has bought the pot. They had true TCP/IP networking (not that shitty Trumpet Winsock.) They had true multitasking, (not the idle-time-sharing kludge that was Windows 3.1.) They had their WoW layer (the original precursor to WINE) that would run Windows 3.1 apps right inside OS/2 (although back then virtually every useful Windows app violated the Windows API for performance or hardware reasons.) And they had performed huge amounts of quality control testing. OS/2 4.0 was, for its day, a solid operating system. It absolutely kicked ass over Windows 3.1, and was far superior to Windows 95. They had every technical reason to believe they had a superior product.
Finally for the "cool rollout factor" to appeal to geeks everywhere, they had Leonard Nimoy as their pitchman. What geek wouldn't automatically trust Spock to make the logical choice of operating systems?
But to IBM, home computers were almost irrelevant. Microsoft, on the other hand, aggressively made sure that Windows 3.1 (and 3.11 and WfW) came preinstalled on every computer sold. And while they wanted to get into big corporations, they realized they were making their money one sale at a time, and one small workgroup at a time. By sliding in the back door, they became dominant before IBM sold a single copy of Warp. People running WfW migrated to NT 3.1, and then to NT 3.5. People running Windows 3.1 believed Microsoft, upgraded to Windows 95, and then bought new computers that could actually handle the added CPU and disk loads. And with Windows 95's native reliance on DOS, most of those broken Windows 3.1 apps were able to continue to function (unlike WoW on OS/2.)
IBM was shattered. Our account reps walked around looking like dogs that had been beaten for crapping on the carpet. They seriously and honestly thought that their better product and their sales to every Fortune 100 company was how you played hardball and won these games. After all, that's how they ruthlessly and utterly dominated the mainframe market for over a generation. But in the end, it turned out to be a popularity contest, and they had actually been beaten before they knew the game was on.
Thanks for the correction.
I'm not sure that his use of "fair use" is that far off. For example, "fair use" means you can quote a few words from a textbook, but cannot repeat the whole book. "Fair use" also means you can play a few seconds of a song, or a few seconds of a movie without permission or penalty.
Fair use does not mean they have to make it easy for you to make a copy of those few seconds.
The real dissembling comes from him saying nothing about the doctrine of "first sale." That's the one that gives you the right to do whatever you want with a product once you've purchased it. For example, if you purchase a Spalding baseball the Spalding company cannot limit you to catching it only with a genuine Spalding glove. They can advertise the balls as "best caught with a Genuine Spalding Glove", they can print "WARNING: catch this ball only with a Genuine Spalding Glove or hand damage may result", and they can even print "Never sell your glove to anyone else" on your glove. But what they print on it has no legal bearing on what you are legally permitted to do with it.
There are exceptions for certain materials, such as pesticides and herbicides, that prevent you from using them in a manner harmful to the environment. But unless a Brittany Spears disc is capable of producing an ecological disaster, I doubt strongly that they apply.
How much thrust could a rocket thruster thrust if a rocket thruster could thrust rockets?
What do you mean, lack of headphones? a2dp over Bluetooth 2.0, baby. I bought a set of Motorola HT-820 headphones for $50. They can connect to an audio source AND work with a cell phone simultaneously (they send a 'pause' command to the music player, and/or mute the audio if it's not pausable,) play the ring tone, and you pick up by pressing the button on the side. When you hang up the call, the music resumes.
The only complaint I have with them is they inject a slight digital delay into the audio path, which makes them poorly suited for watching television. (Oh, that and the stupid glowing blue lights. WTF is up with that?) Otherwise, they work really well. Battery life is pretty good, and Motorola now equips all their rechargeable consumer goods with a nice standard mini-USB jack-based charger.
So I suppose our votes should count more because they're more trustworthy, right? :-)
The Bank of Ameriuca is one of the most highly respected banks in the Untied States of Ameriuca. You should trust all your money with them .. but wait just a few seconds for my sedo.com session to refresh ... there you go. Happy Banking!
Anyway, I wouldn't count on the registrars changing their business model just because there are stupid people out there.
The only marketing themed sets LEGO is keeping a lot of are the Star Wars sets. The rest of LEGO's focus is on producing their "normal" sets and models, with only a few other marketing tie-ins. So yes, you can still get a bucket'o'bricks.
Oh, and the new Mindstorms looks very cool. I didn't get to see anything regarding the programming environment, but it comes out of the box with some pretty sophisticated sensors as well as a Bluetooth transceiver for remote access. You can even add a compass sensor and servo motors!
Here's a link to Target's selection of LEGO sets (sorted from most coveted to least coveted, I mean by price. :-) Lots of Star Wars, but otherwise it's a lot of ordinary LEGO. And if you want a good ship, may I recommend the Star Destroyer? 3,104 pieces, weighing in at 21.5 pounds. There's a good ship!
I'm not defending Microsoft. I'm just saying it makes sense if you look at it strictly from a business perspective. And as the grandparent implied, it also requires you to take for granted the millions of home users, and ignore the fact that thousands are going to switch to Linux and loudly tell their friends about it. It's just that they don't matter to a business focused on profits that they see coming from other sectors.
It's not a silly idea. The shared experience creates "buzz", aka viral marketing. Do you talk to a group of buddies at lunch? What subjects typically come up? The answers most commonly given (by Joe Sixpack, not your average slashdotter) are sports and TV shows. Today, for example, I know I'll talk about last night's episode of "Heroes" with a co-worker who also watches the show. (I sure as hell won't talk about the Vikings. :-) The net result may be that we get another co-worker interested in seeing the show.
Sure, that experience could be duplicated with a DVD amongst a small group of friends. But with broadcast, the circle of people becomes huge. As a matter of fact I chatted about it with a random guy in a waiting room last Friday. Multiply that small event by the number of waiting rooms around the country, and that's buzz. It's a phenomenon that would only rarely happen with DVDs.
They're not looking at this from your long-term "over time we're going to lose" point of view. They're looking at this from the "how can we increase profits this month?" point of view. Sure, some of them may unrealistically believe that with ever more sophisticated technological protection mechanisms they'll someday rid the world of automated commercial skippers. Whatever, those people are going to be disappointed. But the realists, the ones who present a moving target, are still making money in the short term. And that's what really matters to a business.
Sorry to disappoint, but the hobbyists are now decades removed from the empire builders. The hobbyists' desires no longer add value to the PC. The true empire builders are now the businesses who order 10,000 Dell PCs and the 10,000 Windows licenses to go with them. If you want to have an impact on the future direction of Windows, go work for one of the Fortune 500 companies and bend the ear of one of the resident Microsoft reps. Like any business, they only listen when it's money talking.
By the way, Microsoft loves the big orders. They make boatloads of money with no expense. The nice thing about business customers is those 10,000 people already have their own support structure, and only a handful of headquarters people are authorized to call MS and bitch about problems. Microsoft can afford to spend a bit of money helping them, (making them look like they have gold-plated service,) and yet doesn't have to answer to the 9,995 idiots who would otherwise be punching the f'ing monkey and installing spyware.
I put the phone on his belt about 20cm from his pair of 30mm testes. (See, nip/tuck is good for some useful factoids -- Larry Hagman's character just had the oversized 40mm Magnum pair installed!) Those numbers yield a much more generous .0028 steradian target, for a total of 225 microwatts. That's almost four times your original 80 microwatt estimate.
Of course we should still reduce that due to a few other factors. FCC regulations limit handheld cell transceivers to 600 mW max RF output. In order to conserve battery life cell phones adjust their transmission power based on the tower's reported reception, which means they're usually transmitting at less than max power. And even if the guy is a nonstop chatterbox, he's probably not talking 100% of the time; no sane human would ever voluntarily listen to someone talk on the phone for four straight hours every single day. He's probably getting no more than an hour of radiation on any given day. On the plus side, a cell antenna may not be perfectly omnidirectional and so may emit somewhat more radiation in the direction of his junk, depending on its orientation.
I'm sure the net effect is still only to add an undetectable amount of heat to his coin-purse. But I don't think heat is the only factor governing sperm production. RF can generate electricity in a suitable conductor -- perhaps his veins or his urethra are the same length as the phone's wavelength, and so, acting as an antenna, they are generating tiny amounts of electricity that are affecting the nerves in his glands.
Radiation-wise, it's definitely greater than zero, but is still an extremely low amount of power. The effects of long-term low-power RF radiation are still not fully understood (or even recognizable.) But it's useful to do the math anyway. :-)
If you don't like your current platform's behavior, there are many Firefox extensions that let you redefine keyboard and mouse actions. I'm sure you could find one that you could customize into behaving exactly the way you want.
Also I have 33 extensions installed (yes, I'm a junkie.) Of those, only six were not 2.0 compatible. And all of the operating ones seem to have retained their options.
Overall, I'm amazed by the smoothness of the switch to 2.0. The only thing missing was the Pinball theme, and I fixed that myself by patching the install.rdf to believe me that 2.0 was OK (also worked for patching Cookie Button 0.8.5 extension into working under 2.0)
Middle clicking on a tab will also close the tab without your having to nail the [X] with the pointer.
This story should have been placed in the category of "It's pathetic, laugh."
Do you suppose it could have something to do with keeping your arm elevated for four hours per day holding up the phone? That's hardly healthy, and would certainly have circulatory impact.
Mostly, I block google analytics because I'd prefer to remain anonymous to google. I still haven't made up my mind about them, but I find their hoovering up of all possible data to be really creepy. Since I block both google ads as well as google analytics, I also am trying to mask the true number of people who block ads. Now that internet advertising has become a War For The Eyeballs, if they start to think 25% of the meat popsicles are blocking ads, they'll come out with new ways to defeat the ad-blocking filters. I have no desire for them to believe the number of people who block ads is growing, because as they retaliate I'll have to find new tools to block their new ads. I hope I'm delaying the arms race.
My observations have been that many web masters design their sites to please their own egos without listening to other people tell them what's really bad. "Gosh, look at my brilliant use of JavaScript to pop up these navigational aids whenever the mouse moves in the direction of the close button! I'm the cleverest web designer you'll ever hire!" No matter how awful the experience may really be for the end users, these people are convinced of their own creative skills and they sincerely don't care about people too stupid to figure out their site. They don't need my feedback because they won't use it anyway.
I'm not trying to argue that designing your site for your users is a bad thing. But what I'm saying is that I doubt most web masters are using those nebulous statistics from Google to improve their sites: they're most likely using them to increase their ad clickthrough rates, and little else. If you want unbiased valuable input, you'll be much better off running your software through a usability lab, watching struggling humans, rather than making faulty assumptions based on faceless data.
I hate to burst your bubble, but I'm not looking for an "experience" on most sites. I'm looking for whatever it was that the referring link told me the site had. If it's a search, I probably used Google or Ask to do the heavy lifting. (I don't even use Microsoft's search link on MSDN because Google does a much better job indexing their site.)
Unfortunately, google analytics can't return my level of satisfaction. If I get to a site and it has what I came for, I'll read it, be done with it, and close the tab. If the site doesn't immediately deliver what I came for, that causes frustration, and the tab gets closed. I'm not going to hunt through links and home-made search boxes to find what I want, I'm just gone. But either way I'm done with that site, and google analytics can't tell anyone the reason why.
There are only a handful of sites in my bookmark list that offer content that keeps me coming back -- Slashdot being the biggest. And even here, there's a lot of crap. I find the entire left-hand column to be a waste of screen real-estate -- I don't click on any of those links even once a month. That's not "user experience", that's crap that should be hidden away until I'm ready to go looking for it. Google analytics may tell you that I'm not using those links, but how much does anyone pay attention to what the users *don't* click on?