Oh, yeah I've heard of those proposals before, but honestly the few people who get asked about it dislike the idea because they don't want prices on everything rounded up, it has nothing to do with tradition. It's one thing to take a penny and leave a penny in a dish at the checkout, it's quite another to find your grocery bill went up by several dollars because all those pennies on every product add up. The penny will have to devalue a bit more before the idea of abandoning it completely catches on.
No, --help is meaningless unless you already know both the syntax of the command and the meaning of the options. It's a great quick reference of what an option is called if you just can't remember, though!
"command [OPTIONS] [FILES]" is not an explicit definition of syntax, but that is in fact the kind of useless example frequently put in the man page. Often, the man page will list option after option with paragraphs describing what each does, but never give any information other than trial and error of how to actually use or combine options.
For example, what is the syntax for [OPTIONS]? Often, but not always with a prefix "-" for short, "--" for long, but that's not always explicitly stated, and sometimes it takes no prefix at all, it just looks for letters. And if you have multiple options, do you type "command -r -s -a -t files" or "command -rsat files"? How is [FILES] parsed, what if there are multilple files? Are they separated by commas, spaces, is it impossible to use multiple files? You'd be hard pressed to do anything but trial and error for many commands because they never say, and don't give clear examples.
Imagine the -r option takes an argument, say a file for input. Do I type "command -r inputfile -sat outfile"? Do I type "command -rsat inputfile outfile"? Do I type "command -r=inputfile -sat outfile"? I've seen every variation on these possibilities.
They didn't, because it's not possible. No version of Windows supports Autorun from anything other than a CD.
I've been developing CD-ROMs and DVDs for several years, and I assure you, based on doing it thousands of times for development and testing, that XP can happily autorun a hard drive, an optical drive, a USB drive, and a network drive. Most of those it doesn't do by default (they can be turned on in the registry), but optical drives and some USB devices can and DO autorun by default on XP systems.
The problem is that man pages are the equivalent of getting the complete manufacturing specifications of a car when all you want to know is how to change the oil.
Quite frankly, [MS|IBM|DR] DOS had much better text-based help, because if would show you the syntax, the options, and several exapmples with an explanation of what would happen in each example. Any reasonably intelligent user could figure out how to use DOS command that way and even get it right the first time.
I've read through man pages that go on and on for 20 screens and never once explicitly state what the syntax is for declaring command line options and never give you an example that matches with what the text describes. For all the detail you're still left with blind trial and error to construct a command that does what you intend for it to do.
How could the situation be better exposed: "people (without any merits) looking for problems". That's what they are. All developers would reject a mailing list "debian-techadvice" where clueless people could make binding technical decisions,
Yeah, inexperienced people bringing attention to potential problems! What a hoot.
Next thing you know Debian will let people report bugs in software without first completing a CS degree and providing a source diff that patches the problem! Imagine the nightmare such plebians would cause in software development...
As a "legal representative" -- you serve your client. While SPI may have preferred to be in the loop sooner, they can't "expect" or "demand" it. They are supposed to assist Debian. If Debian (as a body) chooses not to seek assistance / advice -- so be it!
That's somewhat akin to saying that just because an accountant works for you, he should support your embezzlement. On the contrary, an accountant has legal responsibilities that go beyond doing whatever you say, and so does legal counsel. An attorney who didn't advise their client not to take legal advice from the opposing party would be not just a bad lawyer, but possibly personally liable, and could potentially lose their license to practice law.
As you say, if Debian chooses not to be represented by the SPI, that's their choice, but until SPI is told, they have responsibilities.
There's another, even more painful side of this that developers seem to ignore (or just not care about). All of the unlockables, experience, kudos, karma, points that dictate what part of the game you're "allowed" to play, are tied to your profile or save game. If you provide no way to circumvent that, what it means is that anytime a save game is corrupted, or a hard drive crashes, you start over at nothing.
It's one thing to argue that people value a game more if they "Earn" their victory, but the flip side of that is how much we resent having todo the same menial tasks just to get back to what we've earned just because something went wrong.
Case in point, my XBox was replaced under warranty a few months ago. One of my favorite games was Project Gotham Racing 2, I had spent literally hundreds of hours enjoying it, and I was about 2/3 of the way through, earning every platinum medal before I moved up to the next level.
Then my console died and was replaced. Now, I stare at PGR2, a game I paid for, and I know I'm never, ever going to see what the last third (the best!) of the game looks like, because it just sickens me to think about racing all those lower levels and crappy cars over again. I've played that, i enjoyed it, now I want to play NEW things. But it isn't an option, because I have to "earn" new things.
Screw you developers. I'm reminded now of why i like PC games so much, I can easily download a crack or trainer to get through the old levels in minutes. I'm an adult with a job and a girfriend, if I spend hundreds of hours over months to play a game, it's because I want to. You're not going to dictate to me anymore that i don't get to race the "cool" cars until I've jumped through your hoops.
Based on this statement alone, it's clear that you have dramatically misunderstood me. I do not believe that 100% free markets result in social good or even fair outcomes for producers and consumers
Well, hey, all I can go by is what you wrote. You're the one who suggested some random guy on slashdot should go out with a few buddies and build an oil refinery, and that his inability to do so was, in fact evidence that some government force is preventing major oil companies from doing the same. It sounded like Ayn Randian "the free market is infallible" talk.
The combined interests of property value, public safety, and environmental concerns (among many others) are all against new industrial development, even in areas already zoned for industry. Once those concerns are removed or made irrelevant, let's see...
Nobody is ever again going to be able to build a massive, industrial structure anywhere on this planet without having to go through red tape. That's why massive, industrial structures aren't cheap -- even if you were building a hospital you'd have to spend a significant amount of time and money getting paperwork done and overcoming objections before breaking ground. Airports take a decade or more to build because of these exact same issues, and yet we get them built.
On what day are all regulations and public concerns going to disappear or be made irrelevant? And more importantly, why hasn't every other industry in the Unites States come to a screeching halt due to those same issues? It's not like coal mines are welcomed everywhere with open arms, yet somehow the companies manage to buy out the property of opponents when it's necessary -- and they don't even have the luxury of being able to play one jurisdiction against another for financial incentives, you have to mine where the coal is.
Yes, every 5 years or so there's an explosion or leak from either a refinery or a chemical plant on the Texas Gulf Coast. It's been that way my entire life, yet chemical plants are expanding and being built over the objections, in part because the more modern ones are safer and have less environmental impact than 30+ year old plants. For some reason, while Dow Chemical can figure out how to routinely pull this paperwork and negotiation off, ExxonMobil merely shrugs its shoulders and says its impossible? Do you believe that Dow Chemical has more political and economic influence in southeast Texas than ExxonMobil, ConocoPhilips, and Chevron/Texaco combined?
Where do you live? Clearly not on the Gulf Coast, as there are plenty of places here who'd be happy to have ten oil refineries built. The problem (for us, not for the oil companies) is that it's more profitable to restrict production than it is to meet demand. See California's externally-created artificial energy crisis for proof of that. We can send you some tapes from here in Texas of Enron traders laughing at brownouts while they make $100/kWh from turning off generators during peak demand, but then that wouldn't quite fit in with your idyllic notion of how the free market works -- after all, if it was really a problem, me and a few friends could go and build ourselves a power station in a week to cash in on those huge artifical profits!
First off, it's the gas refineries that are the problem, since there are so few. Yes, it is. (though you wouldn't know it from all the oil execs lying and blaming ethonol producers, the US Congress and OPEC a few months ago).
Considering that the Democrats have prevented new gasoline refineries from being built in the last 10 or 15 years and that the oil companies profits on one gallon of gas are around 9 cents, I find your arguments (and all those links you provide), completely unconvincing.
Nobody is preventing new refineries from being built other than the oil companies. Hi, put down your GOP playbook and come on down to visit us here on the gulf coast where we do the vast majority of refining and local governments have been trying to get refineries built for decades. We've got entire cities whose citizens do nothing but running oil refineries and they'd all love to have new ones built. I can take you on a tour of Pasadena and Beaumont if you like, and introduce you to a few thousand of my close personal friends in industry and government who'd love the tax base and the overtime.
The only reason we don't have refineries being built is because there is no incentive to do so -- oil companies can sell 1,000,000 barrels for $70,000,000, or they can invest billions in refineries and sell 1,000,000 barrels for $50,000,000. It's a no-brainer, it's far more profitable to operate fewer refineries and charge more for the product. And since all the companies have merged, there's no possibility of somebody upsetting the apple cart, they just silently agree to do nothing and everybody gets richer. It's not like you and I are going to get some buddies together and build a $2 billion refinery to compete with them (ExxonMobil made almost $10 billion PROFIT at the end of 2005! That's 5 refineries right there -- ask anyone in Houston how fast the companies are throwing that money at every conceivable project they can find for tax breaks, but none of those projects are refineries!)
It's no different than in California when the out of state suppliers were artifically jacking up prices by just shutting down electric generators during peak periods for "maintenance". Why go to all the hard work of maximizing production when you can make more money by minimizing it? So what if the country as a whole gets f*cked in the process? The beauty is that they can make more money for less work, and people like you who've never worked in oil and gas actually believe them when they blame it on the big, bad government!
So what if I have a big playlist ("My Top Rated 3+"), and I sort that by song name on my computer. Then on my iPod, I want that playlist to play by shuffling albums? Can't do it.
Set shuffle by album on the ipod. Select "My Top Rated 3+" under playlists and press play. Congratulations, you're shuffling your playlist by album on the iPod.
If you're talking about wanting to shuffle by album, but also play within those albums in alphabetical order by song title rather than album order, well sorry, you're SOL along with the other.00000001% of people who would consider such a feature important.
This is a portable music player with a 3" screen and limited controls, not a supercomputer -- for 90% of the people buying an MP3 player, ease of use is far more important than Random Esoteric Feature #2,736.
We should, as you say "look at iPod competitors as potential ways to make portable music more enjoyable than it already is". The problem is not that Slashdot is pro-apple, its that everyone who ever bitches about the iPod has clearly no sense of reality about what are features the mass market cares about, or how important the UI and simplicity are to the iPod's success.
Things like gapless playback and more format support (I'd love FLAC/APE/OGG) should be easy to add without changing the UI much, if at all. And we should continue to harp on apple until those arrive (probably needing hardware upgrades in the case of format support).
Better support for classical music is something that iTunes has been just lately getting upgraded for, so it will be another revision (or two) before the iPod inherits those features. It was a shame it took so long to get real attention. Unfortunately it seems a lot easier to add fields and options to iTunes than it is to get those new fields and options recognized on the iPod itself. It should be supported, but saying it would be nice to have is a far cry from most of the slashodt posts bitching about how "it doesn't sort by 14 things at once, therefore it suxxors and you are sheep for even looking at an iPod!!"
The difference is that this is a separate transaction. The bookstore has already purchased the book from the publisher, who published the rights from the author. If they choose to let you read the whole book and leave without paying, that's their decision and perhaps a failure of their business model. If you download a copy, no one in the chain has received compensation, and no one enabled you to do that.
You clearly don't know anything about the book selling business. Book stores don't pay the publisher until long after they've sold the book at retail, and if they never sell the book they simply destroy it.
So yes, it is entirely possible for you to walk into Barnes & Noble, read a book for free, and then they destroy the book and nobody ever gets paid for it. The publisher is still stuck with the expense of printing, promoting and shipping the book, though!
Modern democrats give power to the government blindly assuming that government knows best...republicans would blindly act pro-business assuming that businesses are smarter than beaucracies.
I don't know how to break it to you, but the government we've had for the last 6 years is Republican, and it's been about the most blindly pro-government era since the New Deal.
Hmmm there's no guarantee now and there won't be one in 10 years... so what are you waiting for? It's like looking at a good company's stock price and wondering if it's the right time to buy in... 2 years later and the stock that was at $13.56 is now floating around $63.56.... 2 years wasted on the sidelines. YMMV
Um, I think you missed the point that both Audio CDs and plain old MP3 files will be playable in ten years, so why buy something from the iTunes music store that doesn't have the same guarantee? It's not like the only choices are ITMS or sitting on the sidelines with no music.
It's more like debating whether to cash out one stock in order to buy another -- not a matter of whether the new one will go up, but whether it will go up more than the old one (and by a large enough margin to make the switch worthwhile).
Actually, it is federal law that dictates cell numbers come from the same pool as landline numbers. This is from back when Faxes first came out, the idea is that you didn't want an exchange that was solely fax numbers, because then people will just fax their advertisements to every number in that exchange. Now, while there are still abuse arguments, people generally don't want callers to know if they're calling a cheap prepaid cell vs a regular landline.
And now that number portability is law, there is no chance we'll ever go to a segregated system. For all the Europeans who claim our cell-owner-pays system is messed up, number portability is the one major choice they'll never have -- here in the USA if you get mad at your phone company, you can buy a cell phone and take your phone number. If you get mad at your cell phone company, you can take the number to a landline. And none of your friends or customers have to be inconvenienced with new numbers or figuring out what they'll have to pay for the phone call.
You must be young, an idealist, or both...The military never overthrows a government, even if the commands given it might be illegal or immoral (the rule usually is: obey or be shot). Just go read a history book on that one.
Indeed, you should pick up a book, too. Obviously enough, it is young idealist army officers who usually instigate a coup.
Look at Turkey -- the military has overthrown the government at least 3 times in the last 50 years, always to restore the ideals the current nation was founded on. Anytime the government comes too directly under the sway of religious zealots, the military steps in and restores secular democracy, to widespread popular support. The Army is in fact the most trusted arm of government, and as such it attracts many of the best and brightest idealists who are proud of their responsibility.
What is particularly amusing is that you chastize the original poster for being such a silly young idealist, then go on to declare governments are filled only with conniving assholes, but nowhere do you seem to recognize that it is only by pointlessly shitting on idealism and hope that people become conniving assholes. Physician, heal thyself.
What if, due to some mutation, some animal gave birth to a chicken (not via egg)? Then that chicken gave birth to an egg, etc....
You'd be pretty much disproving evolution if it were to happen, so at that point the chicken and egg answer would be the least interesting result of the birth:)
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, yeah I've heard of those proposals before, but honestly the few people who get asked about it dislike the idea because they don't want prices on everything rounded up, it has nothing to do with tradition. It's one thing to take a penny and leave a penny in a dish at the checkout, it's quite another to find your grocery bill went up by several dollars because all those pennies on every product add up. The penny will have to devalue a bit more before the idea of abandoning it completely catches on.
Yes, there are many ways, and the button is least expensive and most reliable. Plus, it makes the user feel in control.
Um, the button might be helpful for telling the elevator there is someone inside wanting to go to the other floor. Just throwing out ideas here.
Like --help?
No, --help is meaningless unless you already know both the syntax of the command and the meaning of the options. It's a great quick reference of what an option is called if you just can't remember, though!
Same reason why American's will always keep the penny. Ego and historical pride.
Huh? Our currency is one of the only decimal systems we use, why would someone want to replace it?
"command [OPTIONS] [FILES]" is not an explicit definition of syntax, but that is in fact the kind of useless example frequently put in the man page. Often, the man page will list option after option with paragraphs describing what each does, but never give any information other than trial and error of how to actually use or combine options.
For example, what is the syntax for [OPTIONS]? Often, but not always with a prefix "-" for short, "--" for long, but that's not always explicitly stated, and sometimes it takes no prefix at all, it just looks for letters. And if you have multiple options, do you type "command -r -s -a -t files" or "command -rsat files"? How is [FILES] parsed, what if there are multilple files? Are they separated by commas, spaces, is it impossible to use multiple files? You'd be hard pressed to do anything but trial and error for many commands because they never say, and don't give clear examples.
Imagine the -r option takes an argument, say a file for input. Do I type "command -r inputfile -sat outfile"? Do I type "command -rsat inputfile outfile"? Do I type "command -r=inputfile -sat outfile"? I've seen every variation on these possibilities.
They didn't, because it's not possible. No version of Windows supports Autorun from anything other than a CD.
I've been developing CD-ROMs and DVDs for several years, and I assure you, based on doing it thousands of times for development and testing, that XP can happily autorun a hard drive, an optical drive, a USB drive, and a network drive. Most of those it doesn't do by default (they can be turned on in the registry), but optical drives and some USB devices can and DO autorun by default on XP systems.
I've said it before: there's no use building a wall, firing up the boiling oil, and digging a moat and filling it with sharks...
Wow, that you've said that even once is an indication you need to find a better architect!
The problem is that man pages are the equivalent of getting the complete manufacturing specifications of a car when all you want to know is how to change the oil.
Quite frankly, [MS|IBM|DR] DOS had much better text-based help, because if would show you the syntax, the options, and several exapmples with an explanation of what would happen in each example. Any reasonably intelligent user could figure out how to use DOS command that way and even get it right the first time.
I've read through man pages that go on and on for 20 screens and never once explicitly state what the syntax is for declaring command line options and never give you an example that matches with what the text describes. For all the detail you're still left with blind trial and error to construct a command that does what you intend for it to do.
How could the situation be better exposed: "people (without any merits) looking for problems". That's what they are. All developers would reject a mailing list "debian-techadvice" where clueless people could make binding technical decisions,
Yeah, inexperienced people bringing attention to potential problems! What a hoot.
Next thing you know Debian will let people report bugs in software without first completing a CS degree and providing a source diff that patches the problem! Imagine the nightmare such plebians would cause in software development...
As a "legal representative" -- you serve your client. While SPI may have preferred to be in the loop sooner, they can't "expect" or "demand" it. They are supposed to assist Debian. If Debian (as a body) chooses not to seek assistance / advice -- so be it!
That's somewhat akin to saying that just because an accountant works for you, he should support your embezzlement. On the contrary, an accountant has legal responsibilities that go beyond doing whatever you say, and so does legal counsel. An attorney who didn't advise their client not to take legal advice from the opposing party would be not just a bad lawyer, but possibly personally liable, and could potentially lose their license to practice law.
As you say, if Debian chooses not to be represented by the SPI, that's their choice, but until SPI is told, they have responsibilities.
There's another, even more painful side of this that developers seem to ignore (or just not care about). All of the unlockables, experience, kudos, karma, points that dictate what part of the game you're "allowed" to play, are tied to your profile or save game. If you provide no way to circumvent that, what it means is that anytime a save game is corrupted, or a hard drive crashes, you start over at nothing.
It's one thing to argue that people value a game more if they "Earn" their victory, but the flip side of that is how much we resent having todo the same menial tasks just to get back to what we've earned just because something went wrong.
Case in point, my XBox was replaced under warranty a few months ago. One of my favorite games was Project Gotham Racing 2, I had spent literally hundreds of hours enjoying it, and I was about 2/3 of the way through, earning every platinum medal before I moved up to the next level.
Then my console died and was replaced. Now, I stare at PGR2, a game I paid for, and I know I'm never, ever going to see what the last third (the best!) of the game looks like, because it just sickens me to think about racing all those lower levels and crappy cars over again. I've played that, i enjoyed it, now I want to play NEW things. But it isn't an option, because I have to "earn" new things.
Screw you developers. I'm reminded now of why i like PC games so much, I can easily download a crack or trainer to get through the old levels in minutes. I'm an adult with a job and a girfriend, if I spend hundreds of hours over months to play a game, it's because I want to. You're not going to dictate to me anymore that i don't get to race the "cool" cars until I've jumped through your hoops.
Based on this statement alone, it's clear that you have dramatically misunderstood me. I do not believe that 100% free markets result in social good or even fair outcomes for producers and consumers
Well, hey, all I can go by is what you wrote. You're the one who suggested some random guy on slashdot should go out with a few buddies and build an oil refinery, and that his inability to do so was, in fact evidence that some government force is preventing major oil companies from doing the same. It sounded like Ayn Randian "the free market is infallible" talk.
The combined interests of property value, public safety, and environmental concerns (among many others) are all against new industrial development, even in areas already zoned for industry. Once those concerns are removed or made irrelevant, let's see...
Nobody is ever again going to be able to build a massive, industrial structure anywhere on this planet without having to go through red tape. That's why massive, industrial structures aren't cheap -- even if you were building a hospital you'd have to spend a significant amount of time and money getting paperwork done and overcoming objections before breaking ground. Airports take a decade or more to build because of these exact same issues, and yet we get them built.
On what day are all regulations and public concerns going to disappear or be made irrelevant? And more importantly, why hasn't every other industry in the Unites States come to a screeching halt due to those same issues? It's not like coal mines are welcomed everywhere with open arms, yet somehow the companies manage to buy out the property of opponents when it's necessary -- and they don't even have the luxury of being able to play one jurisdiction against another for financial incentives, you have to mine where the coal is.
Yes, every 5 years or so there's an explosion or leak from either a refinery or a chemical plant on the Texas Gulf Coast. It's been that way my entire life, yet chemical plants are expanding and being built over the objections, in part because the more modern ones are safer and have less environmental impact than 30+ year old plants. For some reason, while Dow Chemical can figure out how to routinely pull this paperwork and negotiation off, ExxonMobil merely shrugs its shoulders and says its impossible? Do you believe that Dow Chemical has more political and economic influence in southeast Texas than ExxonMobil, ConocoPhilips, and Chevron/Texaco combined?
Where do you live? Clearly not on the Gulf Coast, as there are plenty of places here who'd be happy to have ten oil refineries built. The problem (for us, not for the oil companies) is that it's more profitable to restrict production than it is to meet demand. See California's externally-created artificial energy crisis for proof of that. We can send you some tapes from here in Texas of Enron traders laughing at brownouts while they make $100/kWh from turning off generators during peak demand, but then that wouldn't quite fit in with your idyllic notion of how the free market works -- after all, if it was really a problem, me and a few friends could go and build ourselves a power station in a week to cash in on those huge artifical profits!
First off, it's the gas refineries that are the problem, since there are so few.
Yes, it is. (though you wouldn't know it from all the oil execs lying and blaming ethonol producers, the US Congress and OPEC a few months ago).
Considering that the Democrats have prevented new gasoline refineries from being built in the last 10 or 15 years and that the oil companies profits on one gallon of gas are around 9 cents, I find your arguments (and all those links you provide), completely unconvincing.
Nobody is preventing new refineries from being built other than the oil companies. Hi, put down your GOP playbook and come on down to visit us here on the gulf coast where we do the vast majority of refining and local governments have been trying to get refineries built for decades. We've got entire cities whose citizens do nothing but running oil refineries and they'd all love to have new ones built. I can take you on a tour of Pasadena and Beaumont if you like, and introduce you to a few thousand of my close personal friends in industry and government who'd love the tax base and the overtime.
The only reason we don't have refineries being built is because there is no incentive to do so -- oil companies can sell 1,000,000 barrels for $70,000,000, or they can invest billions in refineries and sell 1,000,000 barrels for $50,000,000. It's a no-brainer, it's far more profitable to operate fewer refineries and charge more for the product. And since all the companies have merged, there's no possibility of somebody upsetting the apple cart, they just silently agree to do nothing and everybody gets richer. It's not like you and I are going to get some buddies together and build a $2 billion refinery to compete with them (ExxonMobil made almost $10 billion PROFIT at the end of 2005! That's 5 refineries right there -- ask anyone in Houston how fast the companies are throwing that money at every conceivable project they can find for tax breaks, but none of those projects are refineries!)
It's no different than in California when the out of state suppliers were artifically jacking up prices by just shutting down electric generators during peak periods for "maintenance". Why go to all the hard work of maximizing production when you can make more money by minimizing it? So what if the country as a whole gets f*cked in the process? The beauty is that they can make more money for less work, and people like you who've never worked in oil and gas actually believe them when they blame it on the big, bad government!
I am so glad that tax dollars extorted from me are being spent on such important projects. Thanks Uncle Sam!
Yeah, WTF? When has learning anything about organic chemistry prove useful?
So what if I have a big playlist ("My Top Rated 3+"), and I sort that by song name on my computer. Then on my iPod, I want that playlist to play by shuffling albums? Can't do it.
.00000001% of people who would consider such a feature important.
Set shuffle by album on the ipod. Select "My Top Rated 3+" under playlists and press play. Congratulations, you're shuffling your playlist by album on the iPod.
If you're talking about wanting to shuffle by album, but also play within those albums in alphabetical order by song title rather than album order, well sorry, you're SOL along with the other
This is a portable music player with a 3" screen and limited controls, not a supercomputer -- for 90% of the people buying an MP3 player, ease of use is far more important than Random Esoteric Feature #2,736.
We should, as you say "look at iPod competitors as potential ways to make portable music more enjoyable than it already is". The problem is not that Slashdot is pro-apple, its that everyone who ever bitches about the iPod has clearly no sense of reality about what are features the mass market cares about, or how important the UI and simplicity are to the iPod's success.
Things like gapless playback and more format support (I'd love FLAC/APE/OGG) should be easy to add without changing the UI much, if at all. And we should continue to harp on apple until those arrive (probably needing hardware upgrades in the case of format support).
Better support for classical music is something that iTunes has been just lately getting upgraded for, so it will be another revision (or two) before the iPod inherits those features. It was a shame it took so long to get real attention. Unfortunately it seems a lot easier to add fields and options to iTunes than it is to get those new fields and options recognized on the iPod itself. It should be supported, but saying it would be nice to have is a far cry from most of the slashodt posts bitching about how "it doesn't sort by 14 things at once, therefore it suxxors and you are sheep for even looking at an iPod!!"
If it was the size and shape of a cinderblock, it would be called the Archos Jukebox.
The difference is that this is a separate transaction. The bookstore has already purchased the book from the publisher, who published the rights from the author. If they choose to let you read the whole book and leave without paying, that's their decision and perhaps a failure of their business model. If you download a copy, no one in the chain has received compensation, and no one enabled you to do that.
You clearly don't know anything about the book selling business. Book stores don't pay the publisher until long after they've sold the book at retail, and if they never sell the book they simply destroy it.
So yes, it is entirely possible for you to walk into Barnes & Noble, read a book for free, and then they destroy the book and nobody ever gets paid for it. The publisher is still stuck with the expense of printing, promoting and shipping the book, though!
Modern democrats give power to the government blindly assuming that government knows best...republicans would blindly act pro-business assuming that businesses are smarter than beaucracies.
I don't know how to break it to you, but the government we've had for the last 6 years is Republican, and it's been about the most blindly pro-government era since the New Deal.
Hmmm there's no guarantee now and there won't be one in 10 years... so what are you waiting for? It's like looking at a good company's stock price and wondering if it's the right time to buy in... 2 years later and the stock that was at $13.56 is now floating around $63.56.... 2 years wasted on the sidelines. YMMV
Um, I think you missed the point that both Audio CDs and plain old MP3 files will be playable in ten years, so why buy something from the iTunes music store that doesn't have the same guarantee? It's not like the only choices are ITMS or sitting on the sidelines with no music.
It's more like debating whether to cash out one stock in order to buy another -- not a matter of whether the new one will go up, but whether it will go up more than the old one (and by a large enough margin to make the switch worthwhile).
Actually, it is federal law that dictates cell numbers come from the same pool as landline numbers. This is from back when Faxes first came out, the idea is that you didn't want an exchange that was solely fax numbers, because then people will just fax their advertisements to every number in that exchange. Now, while there are still abuse arguments, people generally don't want callers to know if they're calling a cheap prepaid cell vs a regular landline.
And now that number portability is law, there is no chance we'll ever go to a segregated system. For all the Europeans who claim our cell-owner-pays system is messed up, number portability is the one major choice they'll never have -- here in the USA if you get mad at your phone company, you can buy a cell phone and take your phone number. If you get mad at your cell phone company, you can take the number to a landline. And none of your friends or customers have to be inconvenienced with new numbers or figuring out what they'll have to pay for the phone call.
Yes, I meant that 100% literally, every human being is a perfect, selfless flower until they are criticized or picked last for dodgeball.
You must be young, an idealist, or both...The military never overthrows a government, even if the commands given it might be illegal or immoral (the rule usually is: obey or be shot). Just go read a history book on that one.
Indeed, you should pick up a book, too. Obviously enough, it is young idealist army officers who usually instigate a coup.
Look at Turkey -- the military has overthrown the government at least 3 times in the last 50 years, always to restore the ideals the current nation was founded on. Anytime the government comes too directly under the sway of religious zealots, the military steps in and restores secular democracy, to widespread popular support. The Army is in fact the most trusted arm of government, and as such it attracts many of the best and brightest idealists who are proud of their responsibility.
What is particularly amusing is that you chastize the original poster for being such a silly young idealist, then go on to declare governments are filled only with conniving assholes, but nowhere do you seem to recognize that it is only by pointlessly shitting on idealism and hope that people become conniving assholes. Physician, heal thyself.
What if, due to some mutation, some animal gave birth to a chicken (not via egg)? Then that chicken gave birth to an egg, etc....
:)
You'd be pretty much disproving evolution if it were to happen, so at that point the chicken and egg answer would be the least interesting result of the birth