.. this shows that Microsoft are not misguided/stupid enough to genuinely believe Vista is a Good Operating System.. Let's hope they learn from these mistakes before Windows 7 comes out.
Oh, Microsoft just might be misguided/stupid enough to believe it. Companies are very stupid. The people who work for companies, especially those who haven't made it to the higher echelons of management, are usually much smarter than the companies themselves.
The US "health care" system astounds those of us living in other countries. How come people put up with this?
Americans are pathologically paranoid about anything to do with government. It's in their cultural genes. That's understandable because the US was founded in order to get away from autocratic, corrupt and tyrannical European governments in power at the time. But that's also why they are willing to put up with severe dysfunctionality caused by lack of proper government.
Atheists believe that only the observable can exist.
Rubbish. Atheism = no belief in God. Any rational person would believe that unobservable things can exist, given the limitations of our observation capabilities. Atheists just don't prefer to attribute the unobservable to God.
Scientists at University College London have found the link between what we expect to see, and what our brain tells us we actually saw revealing that the context surrounding what we see is all important -- sometimes overriding the evidence gathered by our eyes and even causing us to imagine things which aren't really there. A vague background context is more influential and helps us to fill in more blanks than a bright, well-defined context.
I think this phenomenon is often referred to as religion.
The video linked to by parent is complete quackery. The autism-vaccine link has been thoroughly disproven many times now. In countries where vaccinations are not combined or where vaccines do not contain thimerosal (e.g. Denmark, Japan), autism rates rise as much as anywhere else; the obvious and correct explanation is better diagnosis and a significant loosening of diagnostic criteria. Contrary to what the "doctor" in the video claims, most autistics do not have anything like the gastroenteritis symptoms that are supposedly indicative of "vaccine poisioning". His claim that 100% of autistics have such symptoms is am intentional lie. Here is some more real information on these issues from the good folks at Quackwatch.
Doesn't have the big "Google" name behind it, and not very many articles, but for all I care, it's Wikipedia done right. Ever since the deletionism and notability nazis have taken over Wikipedia, I'm kind of disillusioned about it.
Are you saying Citizendium's deletion and notability policies are actually laxer than Wikipedia's?
Nope, all you need is remote access to a local user account via ssh or something. Many users use weak passwords. Now you won't have to guess the root password.
Yes, I just verified the exploit on Linux 2.6.17.13 (Slackware 11.0) and Linux 2.6.21.5 (Slackware 12.0) and it works as advertised.
Visiting only sites you trust will keep you away from people who want to compromise your computer 99.99999999% of the time, it really is the best thing you can do it terms of browser security.
This is mostly correct. Unfortunately this fact also, tragically, completely kills the WWW as it was envisioned. The basic idea was that anyone could publish websites and you could jump from site to site by free association just by clicking hyperlinks, and not even have to be too bothered which exact site you're on. (Does anyone even remember the term "websurfing" anymore? Does anyone remember how revolutionary it was?) Now we have to warn end users not to click on links unless they trust them, which means they can never visit a new site because you cannot trust what you don't already know. Governments and corporations admonish the people to practice "safe browsing" and websurfing has become "promiscuous" and dirty like unsafe sex. Malware has thus reduced the WWW to nothing but another set of corporate-controlled interactive television channels. RIP.
What's the last version of Windows you installed? 98?
XP. Its installer is actually worse than 98's. In fact, 98's installer was GUI based, so was 95's. The installers for Windows 2000 and XP are text-based and have extremely awkward key bindings. On them, you don't get a GUI until after the first restart, when it does a bunch of post-install configuration that takes forever and a day.
[...] to get any modern hardware to work under Windows, you have to install third-party drivers separately,
A half-lie, assuming you're talking about a relatively recent version of Windows (i.e. new enough to not have a text-based installer.)
Nope. Literally nothing worked on my gf's Shuttle bare-bones PC when she installed XP on it (with its text-based installer, yes). No video except 640x480 VGA, no sound, no network, nothing except keyboard and mouse. Everything had to be painstakingly installed from third-party driver disks.
To get any modern hardware to work with Windows, you have to follow the following steps:
1) Plug it in
That's just plain dishonest BS. There's no reason for me to bother with your nonsense any further. If this were Usenet I'd killfile you, here the enemies list will have to do.
Why in the hell do people keep using ease of installation as a measure of how "ready" Linux is for the desktop? That's such an incredibly dumb argument. Windows is far harder to install than a user-friendly distribution such a Ubuntu, let alone something like Knoppix. Windows has a really sucky text-based installer, and contrary to popular belief, Windows lacks far more drivers than Linux does -- to get any modern hardware to work under Windows, you have to install third-party drivers separately, where Linux would often just recognize them automatically.
But of course, nobody who is not a geek or at least a "power user" ever installs Windows or any other operating system. Windows comes preinstalled on computers, complete with any necessary third-party drivers. As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, there is no significant difference in ease of use once installation is complete. Linux will be "ready for the desktop" when manufacturers commonly start preinstalling it on their computers like they do Windows. Not before.
The best solution is to dump hotmail and move to a better free email client like Gmail or Yahoo.
No, the best solution is to not use a so-called "free email client" at all, and get a real email account with a real ISP. There is no such thing as a free lunch, you always end up paying for it in one way or another. The difference is that with a so-called "free" email account, you have no control over the way you pay, and you might -- no: will -- eventually end up being fucked over.
From the WoW EULA. Emphasis mine. And don't say you've never heard of Blizzard or that their 10 million subscribers don't count. I can go through and find tons of others like that if I look. While the MS windows/office EULAs may not contain this clause many other EULAs do contain such clauses.
Yes, and again those aren't EULAs for desktop software but service agreements for online services. In service agreements for free services, that clause is normal, so by extension the EULA for software supporting these online services might also contain that clause. But no one has been able to show a single EULA for normal, offline use desktop software yet that contains such a clause. And this is what the original post claimed.
Runtime on this particular google search: 20 seconds.
Well, I bow to your 1337 Google skillz. But I have never heard of CapstoneBlack so that doesn't exactly support HumanEmulator's original assertion that it's common for EULA's to be revocable for any reason. It also seems that CapstoneBlack is an online service provider, and that its software exists simply to facilitate access to its online services. In that context it makes much more sense for the software license to be unilaterally revocable because online services (in contrast with common desktop software, i.e. products) are often subject to a termination-for-any-reason-or-none-at-all clause. That doesn't mean this is anything else than exceedingly rare for regular desktop productivity software such as Microsoft Office.
Again, all I'm saying is that it is a thing that happens. Not everyone does it, but EULAs are commonly abused to provide unreasonable control over a buyer's use and management of software.
All EULAs do that, that's what they're for. But they don't usually do that in this particular way. The original assertion was that EULAs commonly contain a clause that would allow the copyright holder to revoke the license at any time, for any reason and without justification, and that this specifically includes the EULAs for Microsoft Windows and Office. And I still say that's made up.
Corporations are a privilege created by the people, for the benefit of the people. If it isn't working out that way, we need to kill them.
What are you, a dirty commie hippie or something? We all know that corporations have a Constitutionally guaranteed inalienable right to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of... oh, wait...
Does the phrase "This license can at any time be changed (or revoked by the issuer in any manner deemed fit" ring a bell?
Because I have to say, as a former purchaser of software and hardware computer products, it sounds pretty damned familiar to me.
Nope, it does not ring any bell, and I am one of those obsessive types and actually read the software licenses to anything I use. Here are some Microsoft EULAs and I cannot find such a clause in any of them. All the termination clauses in them are only applicable if you break the EULA. For example, the WinXP license says: "6. TERMINATION. Without prejudice to any other rights, Microsoft
may cancel this EULA if you do not abide by the terms and
conditions of this EULA, in which case you must destroy all
copies of the Product and all of its component parts." If I'm missing something, pleae do point it out.
Granted, this is from most of the consumer EULAs I've seen, but I believe the Enterprise ones for Word contain much the same flavor, and I KNOW that all Windows OS EULAs since at least 98 contain revocation clauses, albeit limited in allowable cause (# By exceedingly vague wording).
Nothing vague about the wording that I can see. This is clearly not a clause that says "we can revoke this license at any time and for any reason or none at all".
Of course, I live in America, where businesses have long since ceased to be sane.
I live in the Netherlands, but the EULAs here are generally copied/translated verbatim from the originals.
Which is why most EULAs specifically state that the license is revokable. (Usually for any reason the licensor feels like.)
You are simply making that up. Most EULAs don't say anything of the sort. Which is a good thing because no sane business would rely on software with such a license.
I am sure someone at Slashdot will know how Opera got its name. I kind of guessed that some geek way back bought the domain name thinking it would be worth millions, then in the end used it for a company cause it was cool to have a generic domain.
I don't think so, as Opera started out at opera.nta.no and got the opera.com domain only later. The Wayback Machine says the domain was owned by someone else in 1998.
Fisher really sounds like a paranoid schizophrenic.
Yeah, he really does, a cursory glance at his own homepage should be enough to confirm that.
I mean, holy crap -- this is not your regular hatemonger. Even the Icelandic government, which gave him Icelandic nationality to get him out of detention in Japan, is "filthy dirty CIA-controlled" because the prime minister refused to personally intervene in his personal banking conflict.
Poor man, he knew not what he did. The pressure clearly got to him. Let's remember him for his greatness and consider his mental decline a symptom of his show and tragic process of dying. RIP.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, Microsoft just might be misguided/stupid enough to believe it. Companies are very stupid. The people who work for companies, especially those who haven't made it to the higher echelons of management, are usually much smarter than the companies themselves.
Americans are pathologically paranoid about anything to do with government. It's in their cultural genes. That's understandable because the US was founded in order to get away from autocratic, corrupt and tyrannical European governments in power at the time. But that's also why they are willing to put up with severe dysfunctionality caused by lack of proper government.
Rubbish. Atheism = no belief in God. Any rational person would believe that unobservable things can exist, given the limitations of our observation capabilities. Atheists just don't prefer to attribute the unobservable to God.
No, I don't think anyone is immune, including me. Whomever you were addressing, that person sure doesn't resemble me.
I think this phenomenon is often referred to as religion.
The video linked to by parent is complete quackery. The autism-vaccine link has been thoroughly disproven many times now. In countries where vaccinations are not combined or where vaccines do not contain thimerosal (e.g. Denmark, Japan), autism rates rise as much as anywhere else; the obvious and correct explanation is better diagnosis and a significant loosening of diagnostic criteria. Contrary to what the "doctor" in the video claims, most autistics do not have anything like the gastroenteritis symptoms that are supposedly indicative of "vaccine poisioning". His claim that 100% of autistics have such symptoms is am intentional lie. Here is some more real information on these issues from the good folks at Quackwatch.
Are you saying Citizendium's deletion and notability policies are actually laxer than Wikipedia's?
Obligatory RMS link: The Right to Read. In many situations, reading is already a crime. Thank you for your attention. Carry on :)
Nope, all you need is remote access to a local user account via ssh or something. Many users use weak passwords. Now you won't have to guess the root password.
Yes, I just verified the exploit on Linux 2.6.17.13 (Slackware 11.0) and Linux 2.6.21.5 (Slackware 12.0) and it works as advertised.
This is mostly correct. Unfortunately this fact also, tragically, completely kills the WWW as it was envisioned. The basic idea was that anyone could publish websites and you could jump from site to site by free association just by clicking hyperlinks, and not even have to be too bothered which exact site you're on. (Does anyone even remember the term "websurfing" anymore? Does anyone remember how revolutionary it was?) Now we have to warn end users not to click on links unless they trust them, which means they can never visit a new site because you cannot trust what you don't already know. Governments and corporations admonish the people to practice "safe browsing" and websurfing has become "promiscuous" and dirty like unsafe sex. Malware has thus reduced the WWW to nothing but another set of corporate-controlled interactive television channels. RIP.
I know you were kidding, but it's still worth pointing out that Lynx is not necessarily safer than any other app.
Funny, I must be emailing with lots of imaginary people then.
Do you really want to change email addresses each time you change free email providers?
Besides, have you ever heard of something called a 'domain name'? They're dirt cheap these days, I hear...
XP. Its installer is actually worse than 98's. In fact, 98's installer was GUI based, so was 95's. The installers for Windows 2000 and XP are text-based and have extremely awkward key bindings. On them, you don't get a GUI until after the first restart, when it does a bunch of post-install configuration that takes forever and a day.
Nope. Literally nothing worked on my gf's Shuttle bare-bones PC when she installed XP on it (with its text-based installer, yes). No video except 640x480 VGA, no sound, no network, nothing except keyboard and mouse. Everything had to be painstakingly installed from third-party driver disks.
That's just plain dishonest BS. There's no reason for me to bother with your nonsense any further. If this were Usenet I'd killfile you, here the enemies list will have to do.
Why in the hell do people keep using ease of installation as a measure of how "ready" Linux is for the desktop? That's such an incredibly dumb argument. Windows is far harder to install than a user-friendly distribution such a Ubuntu, let alone something like Knoppix. Windows has a really sucky text-based installer, and contrary to popular belief, Windows lacks far more drivers than Linux does -- to get any modern hardware to work under Windows, you have to install third-party drivers separately, where Linux would often just recognize them automatically.
But of course, nobody who is not a geek or at least a "power user" ever installs Windows or any other operating system. Windows comes preinstalled on computers, complete with any necessary third-party drivers. As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, there is no significant difference in ease of use once installation is complete. Linux will be "ready for the desktop" when manufacturers commonly start preinstalling it on their computers like they do Windows. Not before.
No, the best solution is to not use a so-called "free email client" at all, and get a real email account with a real ISP. There is no such thing as a free lunch, you always end up paying for it in one way or another. The difference is that with a so-called "free" email account, you have no control over the way you pay, and you might -- no: will -- eventually end up being fucked over.
Thanks, that clarifies. Appreciated.
I'm clearly missing something that should be obvious (seriously, no sarcasm intended). I thought Wikis were shared by definition.
How does Wikipedia manage to run on MySQL, then?
Yes, and again those aren't EULAs for desktop software but service agreements for online services. In service agreements for free services, that clause is normal, so by extension the EULA for software supporting these online services might also contain that clause. But no one has been able to show a single EULA for normal, offline use desktop software yet that contains such a clause. And this is what the original post claimed.
Well, I bow to your 1337 Google skillz. But I have never heard of CapstoneBlack so that doesn't exactly support HumanEmulator's original assertion that it's common for EULA's to be revocable for any reason. It also seems that CapstoneBlack is an online service provider, and that its software exists simply to facilitate access to its online services. In that context it makes much more sense for the software license to be unilaterally revocable because online services (in contrast with common desktop software, i.e. products) are often subject to a termination-for-any-reason-or-none-at-all clause. That doesn't mean this is anything else than exceedingly rare for regular desktop productivity software such as Microsoft Office.
All EULAs do that, that's what they're for. But they don't usually do that in this particular way. The original assertion was that EULAs commonly contain a clause that would allow the copyright holder to revoke the license at any time, for any reason and without justification, and that this specifically includes the EULAs for Microsoft Windows and Office. And I still say that's made up.
What are you, a dirty commie hippie or something? We all know that corporations have a Constitutionally guaranteed inalienable right to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of... oh, wait...
Nope, it does not ring any bell, and I am one of those obsessive types and actually read the software licenses to anything I use. Here are some Microsoft EULAs and I cannot find such a clause in any of them. All the termination clauses in them are only applicable if you break the EULA. For example, the WinXP license says: "6. TERMINATION. Without prejudice to any other rights, Microsoft may cancel this EULA if you do not abide by the terms and conditions of this EULA, in which case you must destroy all copies of the Product and all of its component parts." If I'm missing something, pleae do point it out.
Nothing vague about the wording that I can see. This is clearly not a clause that says "we can revoke this license at any time and for any reason or none at all".
I live in the Netherlands, but the EULAs here are generally copied/translated verbatim from the originals.
You are simply making that up. Most EULAs don't say anything of the sort. Which is a good thing because no sane business would rely on software with such a license.
I don't think so, as Opera started out at opera.nta.no and got the opera.com domain only later. The Wayback Machine says the domain was owned by someone else in 1998.
Yeah, he really does, a cursory glance at his own homepage should be enough to confirm that.
I mean, holy crap -- this is not your regular hatemonger. Even the Icelandic government, which gave him Icelandic nationality to get him out of detention in Japan, is "filthy dirty CIA-controlled" because the prime minister refused to personally intervene in his personal banking conflict.
Poor man, he knew not what he did. The pressure clearly got to him. Let's remember him for his greatness and consider his mental decline a symptom of his show and tragic process of dying. RIP.