Your next major home OS upgrade will cost you a bit per installation.... $80 for what amounts to service packs is irritating to me.
You do know that Apple sells family packs of the OS, right? For $120 or so you can load 5 computers with the latest and greatest.
And, no offense, calling each release of OS X a service pack is just... wow. Maybe you don't care about a system getting faster, being more stable, and having lots more features, but the typical computer user considers those things to be, well, the whole purpose of upgrading.
I have acctually been looking for a home fountain solution, do you like the Sodaclub stuff? Seems like it will take a couple months of heavy use to break even on the price, but if the drinks are good quality that's fine.
I poked around the site, and it seems that the "license" for their CO2 canisters is specific to each state -- I suspect what's happening is more of an environmental regulation/disposal issue that they have to be responsible for than any specific desire of the company to try and screw you (but of course they're happy to charge you 5 times as much as they should for a refill). I believe propane tanks also have similar requirements attached to them, but of course it's easy to find a place that swaps/refills propane anywhere in the country, even the ones with proprietary connections. I assume you're going to hobby or hardware shops to refill the CO2?
I understand what you're saying, but again I think most people can readily comprehend that there is a spectrum of good to bad. I doubt there is anyone in the country who believes that ANY president followed every law to the letter -- even parking in a no-parking zone or buying the wrong thing with the wrong account and then just glossing it over in the budget rather than filling out 500 pages of paperwork. That's the sort of stuff that happens to everybody in every organization, and the world would come to a screeching halt if everybody followed every rule to the letter.
So ultimately it comes down to a value judgment -- is what he did really, really, really morally wrong and horrible, or simply something that we should disapprove of and then go about our lives? If a congressman is using his franking privileges and sending out personal mail at taxpayers expense, that's certainly illegal and wrong and even abuse of their official position, but I doubt many people think it's worth getting thrown out of office for. If he has a freezer full of cash bribes, that's something worth throwing him out for!
Sending out franked mail is breaking the law, but it doesn't bring into question whether or not he was properly performing his duties as a congressman. Taking bribes directly bears on the essential legislative duties of the post. Now you have to go back and see if anything he did was legitimate or if it was all a bought and paid for.
Or to put it another way, if I'm hiring a guy to clean my gutters, I don't care if he's got a conviction for embezzlement. But if I'm hiring an accountant, I certainly do.
If you read your initial reply slowly (I'll try to question your reading comprehension here since I can only assume you are smarter than I, you use the tactic, and I want to seem smart!) you'll see that you replied to the notion "we left Vietnam too early" with statements about conventional military forces. Indeed, that's what president Bush talked about as well when explaining why conventional forces should not be drawn down from Iraq.
Except that nobody is claiming there was a failure of conventional military forces in Vietnam. Nobody is claiming the military was the failure point in Vietnam or Iraq. That was your (and President Bush's) non sequitur. You continue to focus myopically on military aspects of events in which the military aspects are, essentially, the "easy" part.
I'm sorry if this is too advanced for you to follow, perhaps ask a grown-up to explain. Or better yet, buy a plane ticket and ask the Vietnamese -- I can't wait to return in the Spring and ask them about Bush's speech, no doubt it will be quite entertaining but I'd rather be there now while it's still fresh conversation in the bars.
Yes, yes, "Bush lied people died" indeed. I'm sure every time the coffins come off the C-130 you tell yourself that everyone calling for something different simply doesn't comprehend the "real" problem. Just ignore the fact that your actual opponents -- you know, the ones with the guns and IEDs, not the ones with the (D) by their name on a ballot -- seem to have learned the lessons of the past quite well. And they had nothing to do with conventional military forces, spare parts, or congressional oversight.
Well your reply was a non sequiter, so I figured I'd reply in suit.
Saying that we were militarily successful in Vietnam, and therefore should not have ever, ever, ever left no matter what non-military things were happening, is like saying a doctor performing a heart transplant was doing a great job because he scrubbed in correctly -- we certainly shouldn't interrupt his important work just because he has the wrong patient or the donor heart is not here yet or any other trivial matters like that!
It's kind of stunning that our enemies have 20/20 hindsight and seem to learn most of the proper lessons of how to fight us, yet guys like you are more than happy to continue expanding the acreage at Arlington because your notions of how success *must* be achieved simply will not be dissuaded by mere repeated failure of those tactics in reality. Reality just has a liberal bias, I'm sure.
Even with "20/20 hindsight" you continue to equate military success with policy success. No wonder we're doing so great in Iraq. The good news is you're completely qualified for a post in the Bush administration!
It really exemplified that there was two set of rules, One for us that would get us thrown in jail and one for the important people that gives them a pass.
Except that nobody goes to jail for sexual harassment and people rarely die from it. It's just a question of how big a check you have to write to get it over with.
I'm not trying to be blase about the case, I know it was important to the people directly involved and their lives, but I think it's pretty clear to most adults that many, many people lie about sex. We lie about having it, not having it, wanting it, thinking about it, everything about it. We consider it a big deal to steal something, not such a big deal to say you had sex with a girl you met at a bar when really you just talked to her for a couple minutes and went home alone. We consider it a big deal to steal a million dollars, not as big a deal to steal a pack of gum.
I'm sorry there isn't a clear line in the sand to make the world black and white and get rid of all the gray, but really most people do understand that there is a spectrum of what is important and what is not. Something can be morally and legally wrong and yet still not really important.
But I think everyone, no matter their political affiliation, can agree that upholding the Constitution, fighting war, and enforcing the laws of the land are core responsibilities of the President. Those things are the very reason we elect a president in the first place, not simply interesting things the person in office happens to be doing. If he's doing those things wrong, or illegally, then it's a matter that is quite literally life and death.
It may be possible that the reason for the "secrecy" is that Comcast works using neighborhood caps not individual user caps. So if a single neighborhood's internet is being badly affected by high bandwidth usage they "cap" the largest user(s) in that neighborhood and remove the largest users until the problem goes away. So if you are in a large neighborhood with lots of medium to heavy users, the heavy users get penalized. If you are in a small neighborhood with heavy users no one gets penalized.
Ultimately I'm sure this is why they don't want to publish a fixed figure saying what the limit is. Some neighborhoods have bandwidth issues, but some simply don't. They don't want to have to explain why they're shutting off Bob for downloading 200 gigs when his friend Bill lives across town and can download 400 gigs without anyone caring.
Not only does that create customer support and PR confusion, we'd all have a much clearer picture of where the good and bad infrastructure is, and could more accurately tell people "don't get cable if you live in this particular neighborhood, get DSL" or vice versa.
However, I see many of the same people claiming one president was above the law while being outraged that the other acts like it too. I don't know how to parse this double standard outside political advantage.
It probably has something to do with the fact that lying about personal matters, while despicable, has no affect on anyone who isn't involved in that matter. Lying about professional duties -- matters of war, issues that directly impact the Constitutional rights of every American -- are slightly more significant in effect.
So your saying that I can say what ever I want to a Grand Jury as long I believe its not relevant? RIIIIIIGGHT!!!!
No, he's saying that you can lie to a grand jury about anything the *judge* determines is not a material fact in the case. And he's 100% correct. If you want to tell a grand jury investigating a murder that the Sun revolves around the Earth, even though you know it for a fact to be untrue, you haven't committed perjury because it has nothing to do with the case.
The point of defining perjury in this way was specifically BECAUSE you are required to answer all questions put to you before the grand jury or in a deposition, and objections on the basis of relevance are only dealt with afterwards, when he damage is already done. So grand juries and depositions can be used as free-for-all fishing expeditions by an unscrupulous attorney, and in return you are allowed to lie to his face without breaking the law if he's asking you about things he isn't authorized to compel your testimony on.
Of course, you take the risk that the judge will disagree with your assessment of what is or is not a material fact in the case.
Problem with iWork is the same AppleWorks has, it is not entirely exportable or cross platform. I really like AppleWorks but now it's discontinued and no avenue to convert DBs and drawings (two of the best parts of AW BTW)
With the slight difference that iWork's file formats are specified, openly available, and all the component files are stored in open, native formats rather than locked up in mysterious BLOBs.
iWork is perfectly safe to store things in, at least in the sense of being able to get things back out in the future.
But Adobe as EOL (End Of Lifed) Framemaker. I don't know how much longer we'll be able to use it, and certainly I don't think we'll see a Universal version (unless there is one I was not aware of)? In any case, Adobe has made it pretty clear that's not where you should start looking for a document processor to take you into the future.
I feel your pain. my sister is a tech writer and can't believe FrameMaker is EOL, I'm an artist and can't believe Freehand is dead. Adobe has a strange habit of killing products for which no really suitable replacement exists.
(for those who haven't been in the design world for 15+ years, Freehand is not just an illustration program, it was also the single finest small document design application ever made. Adobe saying it can be replaced by Illustrator + InDesign is like saying you can replace Framemaker with MS Word + InDesign)
I appreciate the religious purity of putting both the binaries and source code in every download package, but wouldn't it be a bit kinder to the internet in general, the mirrors in particular, and all the users on non-infinite-speed connections, to allow you to download ONLY the binaries?
I mean, out of 152MB for the PPC download, 20MB of that was source code that only.01% of the users will ever even glance at out of curiosity.
Maybe in theory, but every time I read about a class action lawsuit in the papers, it seems designed to generate millions in billable hours for the law firm filing the suit. It seems to be getting to the point where it's all about the billables and less about helping the consumer.
Yes, the lawyers filing the suit make a bunch of money. That's what encourages them to file the suit. Class actions are about basically using free market principles to enforce regulations -- provide a huge financial incentive to find violators and in turn you'll reduce the number of violations. Some states offer similar incentives to whistleblowers -- where you get a percentage of the fine generated if you turn in your employer for breaking some laws. Greed overcomes the desire "not to get involved" or the legitimate fear of retaliation. Make it worth people's while to do the right thing and then you don't have to rely on sheer altruism or extensive, expensive, intrusive government oversight.
The net result is that companies start caring about perpetual billing "mistakes" (always in favor of them for some reason) and other minor violations that they know are "too small" for government regulators to do anything about and too expensive for any individual to sue them for.
Again, the point is not to individually compensate millions of people for the $5 they lost -- it's to punish the company for unjustly taking $5 from a million different people. Whether the money goes to a charity or lawyers or gets rocketed into the sun makes no difference to the company's profits -- it still costs them a lot more than fixing the problem in the first place would have and they will hopefully fix such problems faster in the future.
Only among the geek crowd, who don't want Vista anyway. The "general public" doesn't care. The computers they buy new come with Vista, and that's what they will use.
Yeah, but the general public doesn't pay MS's rent. Corporate licensing and OEM deals are where the money comes from, and those are both in serious trouble right now in that nobody with more than a few hundred desktops considers Vista even remotely acceptable. Granted, by the time Vista SP2 is out in 2010, they may have fixed a lot of this stuff.
Yes, a class action lawsuit is just what is needed here. A law firm getting millions of dollars while the chumps that signed on for the lawsuit get a coupon for $5 off their next cable purchase.
My favorite tech related class action lawsuit was against Iomega where Iomega agreed to pay legal expenses of at least $650,000 while the losers that signed up for the lawsuit got product discount offers, free dedicated technical support. Oh yeah, Iomega also paid a $1,000,000 charitable donation to someone but I didn't feel like researching the recipient.
The purpose of the class-action lawsuit statutes is not to compensate millions of people for small losses, it's to make the cost to corporations high for making small but widespread violations of consumer rights, misleading marketing, etc. Making the cost to corporations higher will encourage them to fix problems rather than just see that it will cost less to stonewall than it would to do the right thing.
I think it is safe to say that if you could go to an orgy with no obligations of sexual activity with others, and you knew that it would be filled only with people both you and your partner found amazingly attractive, charming, witty and you knew were healthy, discreet and wildly attracted to you, most people would indeed have a great time.
But that's a bit harder to find than a good restaurant.
Finding porn both people think is sexy is a much more achievable sexual goal.
Porn is more like going into a restraint, smelling the food, watching people eat, looking at the menu, but not being able to eat.
I love the Freudian slip of writing "restraint" instead of "restaurant". I guess we know which kind of porn you prefer.
As to the actual content of your post:
1) Many people orgasm through some means while watching porn. So it's more like admiring someone else's dinner while waiting for the waiter to bring yours out.
2) Most people enjoy the smell of fresh baked bread, cookies, etc, even if they don't eat them. I love the sizzle of a steak even if I'm not eating it. Part of the reason people go to restaurants instead of eating at home all the time is that the experience is much more sensually stimulating -- smells, sounds, sights. You don't have to eat every plate of food in a restaurant to have your enjoyment of your own meal enhanced by their presence.
Taking pleasure in something that was not meant solely for that (sex) is not a good thing because you devalue it.
I agree. That's why I force my children to eat nothing but pureed wheat germ. They should certainly never take pleasure in eating because doing so devalues the biological importance of proper nutrition.
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You do know that Apple sells family packs of the OS, right? For $120 or so you can load 5 computers with the latest and greatest.
And, no offense, calling each release of OS X a service pack is just
I have acctually been looking for a home fountain solution, do you like the Sodaclub stuff? Seems like it will take a couple months of heavy use to break even on the price, but if the drinks are good quality that's fine.
I poked around the site, and it seems that the "license" for their CO2 canisters is specific to each state -- I suspect what's happening is more of an environmental regulation/disposal issue that they have to be responsible for than any specific desire of the company to try and screw you (but of course they're happy to charge you 5 times as much as they should for a refill). I believe propane tanks also have similar requirements attached to them, but of course it's easy to find a place that swaps/refills propane anywhere in the country, even the ones with proprietary connections. I assume you're going to hobby or hardware shops to refill the CO2?
Inigo does say that line, when the Sicilian keeps claiming it is "inconceivable" that Roberts keeps gaining on them.
That clearly hindsight is not 20/20 for all.
That was the very first message I wrote. Reading comprehension is fun!
I understand what you're saying, but again I think most people can readily comprehend that there is a spectrum of good to bad. I doubt there is anyone in the country who believes that ANY president followed every law to the letter -- even parking in a no-parking zone or buying the wrong thing with the wrong account and then just glossing it over in the budget rather than filling out 500 pages of paperwork. That's the sort of stuff that happens to everybody in every organization, and the world would come to a screeching halt if everybody followed every rule to the letter.
So ultimately it comes down to a value judgment -- is what he did really, really, really morally wrong and horrible, or simply something that we should disapprove of and then go about our lives? If a congressman is using his franking privileges and sending out personal mail at taxpayers expense, that's certainly illegal and wrong and even abuse of their official position, but I doubt many people think it's worth getting thrown out of office for. If he has a freezer full of cash bribes, that's something worth throwing him out for!
Sending out franked mail is breaking the law, but it doesn't bring into question whether or not he was properly performing his duties as a congressman. Taking bribes directly bears on the essential legislative duties of the post. Now you have to go back and see if anything he did was legitimate or if it was all a bought and paid for.
Or to put it another way, if I'm hiring a guy to clean my gutters, I don't care if he's got a conviction for embezzlement. But if I'm hiring an accountant, I certainly do.
If you read your initial reply slowly (I'll try to question your reading comprehension here since I can only assume you are smarter than I, you use the tactic, and I want to seem smart!) you'll see that you replied to the notion "we left Vietnam too early" with statements about conventional military forces. Indeed, that's what president Bush talked about as well when explaining why conventional forces should not be drawn down from Iraq.
Except that nobody is claiming there was a failure of conventional military forces in Vietnam. Nobody is claiming the military was the failure point in Vietnam or Iraq. That was your (and President Bush's) non sequitur. You continue to focus myopically on military aspects of events in which the military aspects are, essentially, the "easy" part.
I'm sorry if this is too advanced for you to follow, perhaps ask a grown-up to explain. Or better yet, buy a plane ticket and ask the Vietnamese -- I can't wait to return in the Spring and ask them about Bush's speech, no doubt it will be quite entertaining but I'd rather be there now while it's still fresh conversation in the bars.
Yes, yes, "Bush lied people died" indeed. I'm sure every time the coffins come off the C-130 you tell yourself that everyone calling for something different simply doesn't comprehend the "real" problem. Just ignore the fact that your actual opponents -- you know, the ones with the guns and IEDs, not the ones with the (D) by their name on a ballot -- seem to have learned the lessons of the past quite well. And they had nothing to do with conventional military forces, spare parts, or congressional oversight.
Well your reply was a non sequiter, so I figured I'd reply in suit.
Saying that we were militarily successful in Vietnam, and therefore should not have ever, ever, ever left no matter what non-military things were happening, is like saying a doctor performing a heart transplant was doing a great job because he scrubbed in correctly -- we certainly shouldn't interrupt his important work just because he has the wrong patient or the donor heart is not here yet or any other trivial matters like that!
It's kind of stunning that our enemies have 20/20 hindsight and seem to learn most of the proper lessons of how to fight us, yet guys like you are more than happy to continue expanding the acreage at Arlington because your notions of how success *must* be achieved simply will not be dissuaded by mere repeated failure of those tactics in reality. Reality just has a liberal bias, I'm sure.
Even with "20/20 hindsight" you continue to equate military success with policy success. No wonder we're doing so great in Iraq. The good news is you're completely qualified for a post in the Bush administration!
Except that nobody goes to jail for sexual harassment and people rarely die from it. It's just a question of how big a check you have to write to get it over with.
I'm not trying to be blase about the case, I know it was important to the people directly involved and their lives, but I think it's pretty clear to most adults that many, many people lie about sex. We lie about having it, not having it, wanting it, thinking about it, everything about it. We consider it a big deal to steal something, not such a big deal to say you had sex with a girl you met at a bar when really you just talked to her for a couple minutes and went home alone. We consider it a big deal to steal a million dollars, not as big a deal to steal a pack of gum.
I'm sorry there isn't a clear line in the sand to make the world black and white and get rid of all the gray, but really most people do understand that there is a spectrum of what is important and what is not. Something can be morally and legally wrong and yet still not really important.
But I think everyone, no matter their political affiliation, can agree that upholding the Constitution, fighting war, and enforcing the laws of the land are core responsibilities of the President. Those things are the very reason we elect a president in the first place, not simply interesting things the person in office happens to be doing. If he's doing those things wrong, or illegally, then it's a matter that is quite literally life and death.
Ultimately I'm sure this is why they don't want to publish a fixed figure saying what the limit is. Some neighborhoods have bandwidth issues, but some simply don't. They don't want to have to explain why they're shutting off Bob for downloading 200 gigs when his friend Bill lives across town and can download 400 gigs without anyone caring.
Not only does that create customer support and PR confusion, we'd all have a much clearer picture of where the good and bad infrastructure is, and could more accurately tell people "don't get cable if you live in this particular neighborhood, get DSL" or vice versa.
Apparently not. Now we're being told the only thing we did wrong in Vietnam is leave too early.
It probably has something to do with the fact that lying about personal matters, while despicable, has no affect on anyone who isn't involved in that matter. Lying about professional duties -- matters of war, issues that directly impact the Constitutional rights of every American -- are slightly more significant in effect.
No, he's saying that you can lie to a grand jury about anything the *judge* determines is not a material fact in the case. And he's 100% correct. If you want to tell a grand jury investigating a murder that the Sun revolves around the Earth, even though you know it for a fact to be untrue, you haven't committed perjury because it has nothing to do with the case.
The point of defining perjury in this way was specifically BECAUSE you are required to answer all questions put to you before the grand jury or in a deposition, and objections on the basis of relevance are only dealt with afterwards, when he damage is already done. So grand juries and depositions can be used as free-for-all fishing expeditions by an unscrupulous attorney, and in return you are allowed to lie to his face without breaking the law if he's asking you about things he isn't authorized to compel your testimony on.
Of course, you take the risk that the judge will disagree with your assessment of what is or is not a material fact in the case.
With the slight difference that iWork's file formats are specified, openly available, and all the component files are stored in open, native formats rather than locked up in mysterious BLOBs.
iWork is perfectly safe to store things in, at least in the sense of being able to get things back out in the future.
I feel your pain. my sister is a tech writer and can't believe FrameMaker is EOL, I'm an artist and can't believe Freehand is dead. Adobe has a strange habit of killing products for which no really suitable replacement exists.
(for those who haven't been in the design world for 15+ years, Freehand is not just an illustration program, it was also the single finest small document design application ever made. Adobe saying it can be replaced by Illustrator + InDesign is like saying you can replace Framemaker with MS Word + InDesign)
I appreciate the religious purity of putting both the binaries and source code in every download package, but wouldn't it be a bit kinder to the internet in general, the mirrors in particular, and all the users on non-infinite-speed connections, to allow you to download ONLY the binaries?
I mean, out of 152MB for the PPC download, 20MB of that was source code that only.01% of the users will ever even glance at out of curiosity.
Yes, the lawyers filing the suit make a bunch of money. That's what encourages them to file the suit. Class actions are about basically using free market principles to enforce regulations -- provide a huge financial incentive to find violators and in turn you'll reduce the number of violations. Some states offer similar incentives to whistleblowers -- where you get a percentage of the fine generated if you turn in your employer for breaking some laws. Greed overcomes the desire "not to get involved" or the legitimate fear of retaliation. Make it worth people's while to do the right thing and then you don't have to rely on sheer altruism or extensive, expensive, intrusive government oversight.
The net result is that companies start caring about perpetual billing "mistakes" (always in favor of them for some reason) and other minor violations that they know are "too small" for government regulators to do anything about and too expensive for any individual to sue them for.
Again, the point is not to individually compensate millions of people for the $5 they lost -- it's to punish the company for unjustly taking $5 from a million different people. Whether the money goes to a charity or lawyers or gets rocketed into the sun makes no difference to the company's profits -- it still costs them a lot more than fixing the problem in the first place would have and they will hopefully fix such problems faster in the future.
Yeah, but the general public doesn't pay MS's rent. Corporate licensing and OEM deals are where the money comes from, and those are both in serious trouble right now in that nobody with more than a few hundred desktops considers Vista even remotely acceptable. Granted, by the time Vista SP2 is out in 2010, they may have fixed a lot of this stuff.
The purpose of the class-action lawsuit statutes is not to compensate millions of people for small losses, it's to make the cost to corporations high for making small but widespread violations of consumer rights, misleading marketing, etc. Making the cost to corporations higher will encourage them to fix problems rather than just see that it will cost less to stonewall than it would to do the right thing.
Welcome to 21st Century Journalism in America, where integrity is found only on Comedy Central and in the funny papers.
Oh come on, this is slashdot, can't anyone come up with a car analogy? :P
I think it is safe to say that if you could go to an orgy with no obligations of sexual activity with others, and you knew that it would be filled only with people both you and your partner found amazingly attractive, charming, witty and you knew were healthy, discreet and wildly attracted to you, most people would indeed have a great time.
But that's a bit harder to find than a good restaurant.
Finding porn both people think is sexy is a much more achievable sexual goal.
Where has anyone ever disagreed with that? It's exactly what we've all been saying.
You're the only one who has labeled porn as inherently bad and destructive, due apparently to your religious beliefs.
I love the Freudian slip of writing "restraint" instead of "restaurant". I guess we know which kind of porn you prefer.
As to the actual content of your post:
1) Many people orgasm through some means while watching porn. So it's more like admiring someone else's dinner while waiting for the waiter to bring yours out.
2) Most people enjoy the smell of fresh baked bread, cookies, etc, even if they don't eat them. I love the sizzle of a steak even if I'm not eating it. Part of the reason people go to restaurants instead of eating at home all the time is that the experience is much more sensually stimulating -- smells, sounds, sights. You don't have to eat every plate of food in a restaurant to have your enjoyment of your own meal enhanced by their presence.
I agree. That's why I force my children to eat nothing but pureed wheat germ. They should certainly never take pleasure in eating because doing so devalues the biological importance of proper nutrition.