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User: NMerriam

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  1. Re:Yet another "not liable by technicality" on Rochester Judge Holds RIAA Evidence Insufficient · · Score: 1

    Uhmmm, did you just say that the jury doesn't have the last word? You're wrong.


    No, the jury does not have the last word in convictions. They have the last word in acquittals -- if a jury finds someone not guilty, nobody anywhere can overturn them. But if a jury convicts, and the judge believes the prosecution didn't meet the burden of the law, they can overturn the jury's conviction.

    That's what I meant when I said it was the best of both worlds -- you can be acquitted based purely on jury emotions, but you can never be convicted on them.
  2. Re:The freakin' Dock on Ars Technica Reviews OS X 10.5 · · Score: 1

    Seriously, does ANYONE think the Dock is good?


    Sure. It combines launching, switching, monitoring and viewing of applications all in one piece of real estate. No, it doesn't cure cancer or give you a blowjob, but it's good for what it is meant to do -- be the easily accessible one-stop shop for 95% of the application needs of 95% of the users out there. I agree with many of the UI criticisms leveled against it over the years, particularly when they seem to change something or sex it up just for the sake of change, but I don't think for most people those flaws outweigh the usefulness. The essential functionality is still pretty much the same as it was way back in the days of NeXT, because it works.

    I mean, for all the criticism the dock gets, I don't see anything better out there either conceptually or in practice for solving those particular problems in a newbie-friendly way. Windows manages to spread the same information contained in the dock across several screen regions and multiple menus. Both Gnome and KDE interfaces generally copy the Windows design with cosmetic changes.
  3. Re:Man, I love my Mac... on Ars Technica Reviews OS X 10.5 · · Score: 1

    What the hell are you doing to trigger so many UAC prompts ?


    Are you kidding? I can't get at anything in the control panel without at least 2 or 3 prompts, and that's if I know where I'm going and don't have to open up a few other things on the way!

    I think my favorite was when I get a confirmation message, then the gray approval security screen, then another confirmation message, all for one mouse click.
  4. Re:You're allowed, you just have to do it here: on Colbert's Run For President May Be Criminal · · Score: 1

    Also, as pointed out, you don't have a "right" to disrupt others who are also exercising their rights to assemble, nor insist that you gain entrance if those who are organizing an event don't want you to be there. Yet that is precisely what you seem to be advocating, NMerriam.


    I don't know how you can possibly continue to so grossly and willfully misunderstand what people are talking about. You continually keep accusing anyone in favor of free speech as being in favor of illegal behavior (disagreeing with someone == murder!!?? are you mentally unstable?).

    You really need to take a step back and figure out why you have such an irrational prejudice that you literally seem unable to comprehend the notion that someone peacefully holding a sign should be allowed on a public street, regardless of what political message the sign contains.

    The NAACP does not have the right to dictate who is allowed to hold a sign outside of an MLK celebration. The KKK doesn't have the right to dictate who is allowed to yell along their route as they march through town. If you really think there's something wrong with that, you have graver problems than reading comprehension.
  5. Re:Quit looking for body snatchers on GNOME Foundation Helping OOXML? · · Score: 1

    Miguel's stated that, as a standard, OOXML is alright, but also shuddered at dealing with the way Microsoft abused binary segments in the format.


    Really? The last time the subject came up here on slashdot (on the article about OOXML being denied fast track approval), Miguel was like a freaking cheerleader, posting for hours about how great OOXML was and no criticism of it was valid because it would all be worked out and people were just being unfair and impatient. He really seems to fetishize MS or something, it's kind of disturbing.
  6. Re:No. on A Look At Free Reviewer Swag · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I see it every year in the Jeep reviews, they get dinged for the rough ride. But they should. I've never understood why people criticize Consumer Reports for doing what they're supposed to be doing -- criticizing things from the point of view of an average American suburban family and then spelling out the reasons why things do well or poorly in a review, so that you can decide if those reasons are important to you.

    I've owned a Jeep Wrangler for a decade, and certainly wouldn't recommend it to someone with 2 kids as a replacement for their Honda Accord. It DOES have a rough ride, it lacks amenities, it has no storage space, etc etc. If you don't really want a convertible 4x4 that it easy to tinker with, there's no reason to buy one. Yet every year Jeep groups get up in arms over Consumer Reports giving it a low score because it has a lot of negatives that Jeep owners tend not to care about.

    If you're buying a sports car, you might not care about trunk space or back seat leg room, but that doesn't mean Consumer Reports should just ignore those factors in their review. if you want a review from the point of view of a sports car writer, buy a sports car magazine.

    Consumer reports does a great job, I think the people who complain about it just don't understand what job Consumer Reports is doing.

  7. Re:Yet another "not liable by technicality" on Rochester Judge Holds RIAA Evidence Insufficient · · Score: 4, Insightful

    But juries are more likely to rule on "feeling" than on the basis of what is said in a statute


    That's why judges still run the courtroom, even in a jury trial. We count on juries to refuse to convict based on "feelings", which is the whole purpose of having 12 random Joes rather than a professional jury class. But we also count on judges to both regulate what evidence is presented to the jury and overturn convictions where "what is said in a statute" is not met. It's basically the best of both worlds, assuming you believe it is better to err on the side of allowing guilty men to go free rather than imprisoning the innocent (not that both don't happen regardless).
  8. Re:Oh, irony... on Leopard Upgraders Getting "Blue Screen of Death" · · Score: 1

    It still shows that Apple's maturity level is that of a 12-year old. Sad, that.


    Oh, please, it's a joke. If MS had some similarly subtle way of poking at Apple for the single-button mouse it would be equally funny -- the sort of thing that only a computer nerd would even notice.
  9. Re:still Apple's fault on Leopard Upgraders Getting "Blue Screen of Death" · · Score: 1

    That is the same thing in this case.

    No OS on Earth provides APIs for doing anything you want anywhere you want with any piece of software and guaranteeing nothing will ever break. That's like saying Toyota has lousy engineering practices because you can't easily replace the engine in your Camry with a ramjet you bought off eBay.

    No, it's not; both Apple and Microsoft suffer from the same problem.

    And your auditing of Apple and MS code is based on the years of experience you have working on the Finder and Explorer teams, right?

    I'm sure every time MS or Apple want to add a menu option anywhere, every piece of software that runs on the OS has to be rewritten from scratch in assembly, because it never occurred to anyone to do any abstraction whatsoever.
  10. Re:When posting replies to this article on Leopard Upgraders Getting "Blue Screen of Death" · · Score: 1

    There is too much favoritism based upon whether the moderator/follow-up posters like the subject being discussed.


    Yeah, and I continue to think that this statement of "groupthink" as a given is overblown and always has been. I see lots of ridiculous things get modded up and down, and it usually has more to do with when it was posted or how authoritative it *seems* than the specific content of the post.

    I think a lot of critics are ascribing to bias and groupthink are much more easily explained by convenience and persuasive ability. There are also a lot of critics who like to bitch because for 15 minutes a specific obviously trollish post was modded up, and ignore the fact that it was modded right back down 15 minutes later and their bitching had nothing to do with it. I rarely see truly insightful posts get ignored. I see lots of people bitching about truly insightful posts being ignored, usually attached to said post which is at +5, not because of their bitching but because it takes more than 30 seconds after a post is made for moderation to take meaningful effect.

    Pretty much every bias/groupthink that has been "unquestionably" proven to exist on slashdot, the opposite has been proven at some other time. It's a big group of people doing their own thing, it rarely flies in a tight formation.
  11. Re:yeah but... on Colbert's Run For President May Be Criminal · · Score: 1

    While I agree with most of your post, I wanted to point out something. Maybe you've TiVo'd or BitTorrent'd them out, but there are these things called commercials...

    Granted, I don't know whether Doritos is buying ad space on TCR, but they well could be.


    Yeah, but those aren't campaign contributions, they're buying air time from Comedy Central for the same rate as any other company could buy the exact same amount of air time. They aren't giving any money to Stephen Colbert or the Colbert Report when they buy commercials from Comedy Central (except very indirectly -- it would be like saying buying a commercial on A&E was donating to Fred Thompson because he gets royalties for all the Law & Order reruns A&E shows).

    It would certainly be a great marketing move for Doritos to hop on this joke and buy some airtime "endorsing" Colbert. But THEY would be the ones having to worry about South Carolina campaign laws, and stop showing those commercials 30 days before the primary or whatever is required.
  12. Re:still Apple's fault on Leopard Upgraders Getting "Blue Screen of Death" · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The fact that on OS X, utilities like APE have to do this is indicative of bad underlying software design.


    no, it's reflective of the fact that Apple doesn't provide any APIs for accomplishing those tasks. It's no different than patching explorer.exe while it's running so that the File menu suddenly does something completely different -- basically guaranteed to cause problems with something, because you're not supposed to do it and no programmer expects it to happen. But I'm sure the code that MS programmers work on is reasonably modular and accepting of changes to the File menu without breaking anything else.
  13. Re:Oh, irony... on Leopard Upgraders Getting "Blue Screen of Death" · · Score: 1

    The old BSOD was more aesthetically pleasing and recognizable (small, centered text area) than the current ones, which just dump a screen full of text down the left. A current BSOD reduced to icon size would just look like a text document being edited in vi.

  14. Re:We are lucky...... on Colbert's Run For President May Be Criminal · · Score: 1

    So you think that even known false advertising should be protected speech? That's quite a statement, but I applaud your idealistic purity.

  15. Re:When posting replies to this article on Leopard Upgraders Getting "Blue Screen of Death" · · Score: 4, Insightful

    you don't need to look hard to see what comments get moderated up on this site. Groupthink is strong here, whether you notice it or not.


    I've noticed that is the latest groupthink to make the rounds. it's a statement about as useful as "i know I'll get modded down for this..." which inevitably gets modded up.

    There are a lot of people on slashdot (and I guess in the world in general) who seem to enjoy being the victim of some massive conspiracy, rather than perhaps recognizing that when lots of people disagree with them it really is just a lot of people thinking they're wrong.
  16. Re:Almost. It's Apple that's put the bling in. on Leopard Upgraders Getting "Blue Screen of Death" · · Score: 1

    they don't go anywhere near the OS. That's why they're Application enhancers, not kernel enhancers. I've got a few of those, too... they're called "drivers" and "kernel extensions".


    Yeah, and they use documented, official, supported methods of extending the OS, specifically so that crazy unpredictable behavior is avoided even when the OS is updated. APE works by replacing Apple code with "something else" in a completely unsupported way, and pretty much guarantees that any significant OS updates can cause massive problems.

    I don't know how you define "OS", but to most people it isn't a synonym to kernel.
  17. Re:You're allowed, you just have to do it here: on Colbert's Run For President May Be Criminal · · Score: 1

    I'm not sure why you keep equating protesting with interfering.

    If I, as an individual citizen, show up on the motorcade route and have a sign that say "Out of Iraq", I'll be taken to a "free speech zone" where the President won't have to risk seeing that someone disagrees with him. Meanwhile, other individual citizens show up with "Bush Rules" signs and are brought to the front of the crowd.

    There's no difference in our behavior or disruptiveness, and contrary to your belief there is nothing about holding a parade that gives an organization the right to dictate the opinions of the spectators who peacefully watch it.

  18. Shocked! on Leopard Upgraders Getting "Blue Screen of Death" · · Score: 1

    OMG, hacks that aren't even supported on the old version of the OS can cause problems on the new versions of the OS? This is a rather disturbing turn of events. Next thing you know you won't be able to randomly yank out pieces of hardware while the system is booting!

    Unsanity is a company that basically does nothing but make products guaranteed to cause crashes and instability by doing crazy things to system-level components, all for the sake of bling. If you're running their "haxies" (gag, whoever came up with that word needs to be kicked in the groin repeatedly) you're asking for trouble on any version of Mac OS. This is not news, this is the status quo.

  19. Re:The supermajority of Americans belive in religi on Paranormal Investigations and Belief in Ghosts · · Score: 1

    I never said one would automatically believe in anything, just that there's no logical difference between believing one and the other other than culture.

  20. Re:yeah but... on Colbert's Run For President May Be Criminal · · Score: 1

    But what if they are not actually doing anything except "playing along" and agreeing to let him "pretend" to have a corporate sponsor?


    Honestly, I assumed that was the case. Both his show and the Daily Show have had fake "sponsors" before, and I doubt they ever wanted to waste their time and energy actually going out and getting money from people and dealing with whatever legal issues arise just for the sake of the joke.

    Doritos is the stereotypical pothead snack, so it's the obvious fake sponsor. Doritos isn't going to complain about it -- they've been picked on before on both shows, and it's free advertising as far as they're concerned.

    I think way too many people are just getting suckered into being the butt of the very joke Colbert is making. Why would he want to get tied up in finance laws when he can make fun of them just as well without any risk? it's not like the show needs contributions to stay on the air, this isn't PBS.
  21. Re:Steven Colbert's for the win on Colbert's Run For President May Be Criminal · · Score: 1

    That's bogus though. You can tell someone's beliefs very well by what they laugh at.


    Only someone with a very limited sense of humor can't see universal absurdity even when it's pointed out to them.
  22. Re:We are lucky...... on Colbert's Run For President May Be Criminal · · Score: 1

    There is nothing wrong with a human speaking for their company. It's still a human speaking, one with protections of the first amendment.


    So you favor making the spokesperson personally, legally liable for any mistakes about a product's features or safety, rather than holding the corporation they work for responsible? You don't get to have it both way -- if someone wants to speak out as an individual, they certainly have all the same rights as any other, but they also are equally liable as any other. When they speak on an official basis for their employer, then the company is the one liable for what they say.
  23. Re:You're allowed, you just have to do it here: on Colbert's Run For President May Be Criminal · · Score: 1

    You seem to have completely misunderstood the issue of Free Speech Zones. It isn't about people interfering with lawful assemblies in any way. But "Free Speech" doesn't mean much if you're only allowed to protest 12 blocks away from the President, locked in a cage (literally), while his supporters are allowed to line his motorcade route.

  24. Re:The supermajority of Americans belive in religi on Paranormal Investigations and Belief in Ghosts · · Score: 1

    That's the equivalent of saying that proving Nessie's existence means one should believe in Bigfoot as well.


    No, if you proved the existence of one, it wouldn't be a matter of belief.

    If, however, you believe in Nessie with no evidence, then there's no reason not to consider the existence of Bigfoot equally likely.
  25. Re:Misconceptions running rampant on Valve Locking Out Gamers Who Buy Orange Box Internationally · · Score: 1

    Do we really need an analogy to understand this?


    No, there's no need for analogies to understand gray market goods, they've been around a long time. Neither morality nor law compels people to buy a product only where the producer "allows". It's great that you and I both love Valve's games, it doesn't mean that customers are ripping them off when they do something totally normal, acceptable, common and legal, such as buying a product where Valve would prefer they didn't. It's not unfortunate for me in any way, I haven't bought the game and don't plan on it. I just think it's silly for people to lose all common sense just because they like a particular company. We hate DVD region encoding, yet seem to embrace video game region encoding? Silly.